by Gregg Olsen
We pull into the parking lot and I tell him that tomorrow will be the first step in getting justice for Ida Wheaton.
“It won’t be easy telling those kids their mom is dead,” he says.
Understatement, I think.
“It’ll be even harder to tell them that we think the killer is their father,” I say.
Twenty-One
After trying every Jared in Jefferson County and reaching six of the seven, I call it a day and head for home without knowing who he is. The seventh is on a cruise, so I think he’s likely another no. Who would leave a note for someone who was gone for four weeks? It has to be a Jared from outside the county.
Persistence sometimes feels like disappointment.
Tonight, Chinese takeout from Happy Dragon. I normally order Moo Shu Pork, but I don’t this time. The girl running the drive-thru tells me the pork is “not so good today.” Good to know, I think. If I weren’t in the drive-thru queue, I’d probably bolt, yet I don’t. Instead, I ask for the Walnut Shrimp.
The girl on the speaker tells me Walnut Chicken is a better choice. Not really that word, she actually said fresher. I reluctantly order and vow that, no matter how lazy I am about cooking, I’ll never go back.
Happy Dragon, not so happy, I think.
I take the food home and study it carefully before I eat. I’m not super handy with chopsticks, yet somehow I think I can avoid food poisoning if I use chopsticks instead of a fork. Like a fork would tell the Walnut Chicken that I deserved to get sick.
That might not make sense to anyone, yet it does to me.
The tapes beckon as I pour the chardonnay that I hadn’t bothered to chill in the refrigerator. It’s bad, but I drink it anyway. As I sip, I lie to myself as I eat that I don’t need the drama of my own, younger life. Since I started listening to the tapes, images of my brother, mom, father have been coming back to me.
Especially my dad. My real dad. He’s the reason that I’m somewhat screwed up when it comes to love and the trust that’s needed to make it flourish. I don’t save Dan Anderson’s number in my phone. I delete his voice message after listening to it one more time.
I push PLAY on the next tape, and I’m instantly back with my little brother, trying to keep us safe.
Dr. Albright’s soothing voice recounts the date and the time. She asks me to continue, but I don’t answer. The tape hisses for what seems like a very long time.
Dr. A: Go on Rylee, you can do this.
Her voice soothes.
Leads.
I knew she wanted to help me.
Me: What if I don’t want to?
Dr. A: There isn’t a choice. We can’t free you from the past, without acknowledging it. Go on. Tell me about what happened after you got off the boat.
Me: I needed to look like Mom in order to get into the safe deposit. I had her ID and my hair was pretty much Mom-ready. I needed clothes though. I dragged Hayden to the Lost and Found office in the ferry terminal at Seattle’s Colman Dock, where I told the attendant that our mom had lost her jacket. I grabbed a bag. I still have it. It’s black leather with a fake Chanel clasp. Oh… I managed to find a white silk scarf and a pair of vintage Foster Grant sunglasses.
The clerk, a young man with an X-Acto blade-sharp nose and unibrow, looks over my ID and compares it with the signature card that he pulls from a file cabinet behind him. It seems like a very, very long time, but it was probably only a second. His hair is blond—golden, really. I wonder if my hair looks as bad as his.
“This doesn’t look like you,” he says curtly.
“I get that a lot,” I answer in a throatier version of my voice, one that I assume sounds like my mother —or at least someone older than fifteen. I offer no excuse. Sometimes the less you say, the better the odds are of getting what you want.
“Hair looks better the way it is now,” he says.
I wonder if he’s hitting on me and if he is, he is breaking the law. I am underage, no matter what that ID card states.
He leads me to a doorway and turns to face me. “Passcode?”
“What?” I ask.
“You need to enter your passcode,” he says, his eyes riveted to mine.
I feel sweat collect on the back of my neck. Passcode? I don’t have any passcode. His nicotine-stained index finger points at a keypad.
I think hard and fast. Now my face is hot. It must be red. Great. Nothing’s coming to me and I think Unibrow knows it.
He shifts his weight. “If you don’t have the passcode, you can’t go inside.”
Think. Think.
“You only have three chances and if you don’t get it right, we’ll need to arrange for the bank manager to create you a new one. He’s a real stickler for security around here.”
I know I’ll like the bank manager even less than Unibrow, who, by the way, is now in my personal top five of all annoying people.
I punch in my brother’s birthday.
“Let’s go see the manager,” he says. A slight smile on his face indicates that he’s happy that I can’t remember the code. He must want to go on a smoke break, because he smells like an ashtray to me.
Then it comes to me. My mind flashes to the day that my mom and dad set up the router for our internet connection. The password they used was the same one they used on everything— whenever anything required some kind of security code.
“Wait!” I say. “I have it.”
My finger goes to the keypad:
LY4E1234
Love you forever, and a digit for each member of our family.
A green light flickers on the keypad display.
I pause the tape and go to my office, where I dig deep into the bottom drawer of the Goodwill desk that I bought when I first came to Port Townsend. What I’m looking for is buried in a grave of other papers and clippings. I feel my muscles tighten even after all these years. There it is. It is a letter that I’ve folded, cried over, even once thrown away—only to retrieve it moments later. I no longer have the envelope that it came in, but I remember what it said in my mother’s handwriting: “For my daughter’s eyes only. Do not read this in front of the bank employees. There is a camera in the corner of the room. Turn your back to the camera before you read any more.”
There was a second one too: “For my son’s eyes only.”
I burned that one.
I carefully unfold the letter, knowing that Hayden might have been the one to go to the safe deposit box one day. I know with certainty that my mom and my stepdad had considered I might be a casualty of their choices, their lives.
Honey,
If you are reading the letter, then I am gone. As I write this, I don’t know what exactly that might really mean. It is one of two possibilities. He has captured me, or he has killed me. I know you will want to find out where I am; if I’m alive. I know that I cannot stop you from doing so. I am sorry that there is very little here to tell you where I might be. I have put some information into some other envelopes. I want you to take those along with this when you leave. Do not show any of it to anyone. If you do, not only will I die, you probably will too. Please sit down. There is a chair on the other side of this room.
I stop reading to take a moment to remember my fifteen-year-old self. How lost I was at that time. I feel that shiver looking at that letter. It’s like I’m in a car, driving past the worst, bloodiest car accident ever.
Honey, I have lied to you. I didn’t mean for my lies to spin out of control and frame so much of our lives. You have to believe me when I say that being a liar isn’t what I set out to be. I lied because it was the only course of action to save you, save me, save Hayden. I used to think that by ignoring the truth just maybe a little of my nightmare would go away. Pay attention to my words and remember the need for forgiveness. It is real. It is the only way to salvation.
The man who we have been running from our entire lives was not a jilted boyfriend. Not a stalker. At least not the kind of stalker that you—or I—could ever imagine. I fe
lt as though you only needed to know a part of the story. You were so young when I started telling you the story, that I knew you would believe it. Two words here. Forgiveness and strength. For you to survive you must embrace both.
I set it down. I haven’t been breathing. I suck in more air as my mind races back to a conversation my mother and I had when I was around eleven. Maybe twelve. We were sitting outside on the back patio watching fireflies as they zipped through the lowest hanging branches of a big oak that spread over our entire backyard like it was protecting us. I loved that tree so much. When we moved that time, I vowed I’d live in a place again someday with a tree that had branches that functioned like caring arms. That afternoon a TV talk show did a segment about the impact of being a child star in Hollywood. It stayed on my mind well past dinner.
“Sometimes I feel like those kids on TV,” I told her.
Mom looked at me, the light from the flame of a small citronella candle playing off her beautiful, even features.
“What do you mean?”
“Those kids,” I said a little tentatively. Not because I felt tentative about what I was saying, but because I felt like I was lighting a fuse. “They are born into something. Their parents wanted to be a part of something. They didn’t have a choice.”
She looked at me with those penetrating eyes of hers, and then returned her attention to the fireflies and our beloved oak tree.
“Honey, you really feel that way?”
There was remorse in her voice, but not too much. Just a hint of regret. In some ways that was all I ever wanted from her. I wanted her to tell me that she was sorry our lives had been so screwed up. That she shouldered some of the blame. Even if she didn’t, really. “Sometimes,” I lied. I felt that way all the time. My mother’s choices had dragged me into a life that left me without any history of my own. I tried not to resent her, because I loved her so much. Yet, there were times when I just hated her for what she’d done to me, and to Hayden. As I grew older, I sometimes allowed myself to see her side of things. The reasons why she did what she did. My mother’s story was flimsy, but since she told it with such evasive conviction, I never really questioned it.
Those memories attack my brain with the ferocity of a thousand ice picks. I shake my head as if to free myself from a firestorm of nerves and questions, but I know I need to remember what happened in that bank vault: the day everything changed.
I sit in the corner of the vault with the letter in my hand. I need to face it. My heart rate is going faster. I look down on the paper and a tear drops on it. It leaves a shiny pool. I’m almost afraid to read on. I’m worried that her words will break my heart, that the betrayal she’s hinting at will be too great.
We’ve been running our whole lives from your father. It makes me ill to put those words to paper, but that’s the truth.
My father? My father is dead. He was an army enlistee who died in Iraq. I have carried his picture in my wallet for as long as I’ve had one. I have another reminder. I press my fingertips against the dog tags that hang around my neck on a silver braided chain that I’d saved up to buy from the Macy’s jewelry counter in Minneapolis.
The first tag has his name, enlistment number, and blood type.
Walters, William J.
FG123456Z
A Neg
On the second one was the next of kin:
Ginger Walters 1337 Maple Lane Tacoma, WA
For a moment anger and confusion well up as my emotions battle for some kind of strange supremacy. I have no idea where this is going, so I read on. I take in the last words in big, oxygen-free gulps.
What I have to tell you does not define who you are. Not at all. You are my beautiful daughter. I have done everything I can to spare you the reality of your conception. But you are here reading this, and you deserve to know the truth. You also can decide if you want to help me. If you don’t, I will die loving you anyway. If you don’t, please take care of your brother. Take him to my sister Ginger Rhodes’ place in Wallace, Idaho, and leave him there until after you are sure I am safe or dead. Your birth father will never harm him.
I’m reeling. We had no family. We never did. Mom said that her parents and siblings died in a car crash when she was a little girl. Seven, I think. Though now I am beginning to question everything I thought I knew. And as I do, my eyes take in a sentence that no one should have to read.
Your father is Alex Richard Rader. He is a serial killer. I was the victim who got away.
I want to scream, but I don’t. Tears stream down my face and I half-glance at the bank’s camera trained right at me. I feel scared, paranoid and very, very angry. The words feel toxic. Serial killer? Victim? Got away? Each syllable comes at me like a bullet to my temple. I almost wish they were bullets. Abruptly, my skin feels dirty and itchy. My hands are shaking. She could have told me. She should have trusted me. She made our vagabond lives utter hell. Why didn’t she just go to the police? She had always said that her stalker was an ex-boyfriend, a man who had come into her life after my father. She’d been kind to him and he just wouldn’t let up. We were living in military housing in Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, then. I was barely out of diapers. She said that the police on the base refused to do anything to help her, that her stalker hadn’t broken any laws. And yet she felt so threatened that she thought that being on the run was the only solution for our safety. I want to laugh out loud now about the absurdity of her story, but she’d been so unbelievably convincing. Every time a freak would stalk and kill someone when a restraining order had been put in place, she would point to it as an example of the world we lived in—and the danger of living life out in the open.
“No one can help a victim until it is too late. It’s a chance we’re never going to take,” she’d said on those occasions.
I bought into it. I guess the drumming of the same thing over and over ensured my complete acceptance. Like those kids we had seen on TV years ago. They had no other frame of reference for the world. They believed everything they were told. Even when the stories were stretched to breaking point, they still believed.
I know what I know, honey. So please give me that. I know that Alex has killed three girls and those cases were never truthfully solved. I also know why. I know his friends on the police force tampered with evidence. I know all of this because he told me when he held me captive when I was sixteen. I could draw you a picture about what happened during those dark days, but I don’t think I need to. You were conceived in the worst horror imaginable. But I would never want to live without you. I don’t see him when I look into your eyes. I see the face of the daughter that I will always love.
If you decide to try to find me alive—I know I can’t stop you— you will need to follow his trail. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where I am. But I do know two things: I have seven days. He killed each girl after holding them for seven days. A week. Look into the victims’ pasts to find me.
I go back to my office, to the bottom desk drawer and pull out more paper, clippings from various newspapers. Though the images have yellowed with age, any one of them could have been a ringer for my mother. Shannon Blume, sixteen; Megan Moriarty, sixteen; Leanne Delmont, sixteen. All were from the Seattle-Tacoma area. All of these murder cases were attributed to different men. All cases were closed. According to the newspaper clippings, none of the men who killed any of the girls was named Alex Rader.
I scoop it all up and return to the kitchen table and restart the tape. I hear my voice talking about my confusion, how stunned I was that one of the other items in the safe deposit box was a gun.
Me: I didn’t get it. I didn’t really get any of this. I was confused, shocked.
Dr. A: Of course, you were, Rylee. You’d been traumatized in multiple ways within a very short time. You were piecing together bits and pieces that had been your life up to that point. You were a strong girl. Incredibly so.
Me: I didn’t feel so strong. I felt sick. I kept thinking over and over that who your pare
nts are don’t need to define you and the rest of your life.
Dr. A: Yes. And look at you now. You’re in college. You’re moving forward in ways that you might have not ever imagined.
Me: (crying softly).
Dr. A: You will be fine, Rylee.
Me: I hope so.
Dr. A: I know so.
Me: Thank you.
I’d continued telling the story of how we made our way to Idaho to see our unheard-of Aunt Ginger. How I felt disoriented. So much had been crammed into my head, a mass of loose ends that felt like they’d coagulated inside my throat, that I could barely speak. I remember sitting in the back of the second car. I let Hayden have the window. He was tired, and I was hoping the monotonous beat of a rolling train would lull him to sleep. It worked. I pulled out the envelopes and papers from the safe deposit box and consumed the information on each page as if I were a human scanner. I am, sort of. I’ve always had the ability to remember things. I know that I possess a photographic memory. I never say so aloud. It sounds too conceited, but I do. While I took everything inside, while I felt the gun in its paper wrapper, I was thinking over and over about what was happening to Mom. I was so angry at her for the lies she’d told me. I felt foolish too. I imagined the father I never knew, the soldier, and how he’d fought for our country. He was a hero. When I was small, I used to pretend that I was talking to him on the phone all the way across the world. He was dodging bullets, bombs. He was facing death inside some burned-out village in the Middle East, but he stopped everything to talk to me. I saw my father as a kind of superhero worthy of respect, love, and a movie. All of that had been a figment of my imagination.
