Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  I felt dizzy. Everything I’d learned over the past six years as an investigator was clanging around inside my head. You were supposed to look at all the facts. That was where the truth could be found. Not just the facts that fit whatever theory you were trying to prove. And anyway, Ted Bundy was a vegetarian. But that wasn’t the only thing troubling me. Or even the main thing, if I was going to be honest with myself, which definitely now seemed overdue. It was the confession. Walter’s confession.

  Sunny [to audience]: In 1979, Walter Rhodes wrote the following letter to a judge.

  Rhodes: I, Walter Norman Rhodes, hereby depose and say that I am under no duress nor coercion to execute this affidavit. This statement is made freely and voluntarily, and to purge myself before my Creator. Briefly. On February 20, 1976, at approximately seven-fifteen a.m., I did, in fact, shoot to death two law-enforcement officers with a nine-millimeter Browning pistol. I state emphatically and unequivocally that my previous testimony against Jesse Tafero and Sonia Jacobs was false…I so swear.

  Of course I knew that Walter had confessed. Until seeing the play, though, I had not known what Walter’s confession had said. What his exact words had been. “Before my Creator”—that sounded just like the Walter Rhodes I interviewed in prison before the execution. He’d been all into karma and fate and destiny and souls. Walter had recanted this confession, along with all his other ones. But to me those words rang true.

  * * *

  •

  “Do you really think this is a good idea?” Peter said.

  It was shortly after our trip to New York. We were moving in together, we were engaged to be married, and now we were at the front door of our house on the verge of a serious fight.

  “It’s a very good idea,” I said, cramming a sweater into my suitcase. My plane was leaving in two hours. I wasn’t used to reporting my whereabouts to anyone. Or getting permission to go.

  After seeing The Exonerated, I decided that I needed to talk to Walter Rhodes again. I needed to ask him if he “did, in fact, shoot to death two law-enforcement officers,” like his confession in the play had said. I needed an answer, and I needed to hear it from him. In the weeks since the play, I had not been sleeping. I’d felt flashes of Q-Wing around the edges of my days. Smoke, flame. The hollow buzzing. So I’d looked Walter up on the Florida Department of Corrections website. But Walter was not in prison anymore. He was not on parole, either.

  “Walter Rhodes is a fugitive,” Peter was saying. “He is on the run from the law.”

  That did happen to be true. According to the Florida Department of Corrections website, Walter was on the lam. And had been for the past nine years, ever since he was released from prison on parole—and disappeared.

  “Walter knows me, I interviewed him,” I said, zipping up my suitcase. A fugitive. Whatever. I was a private eye. I knew how to knock on a door. “It’s going to be fine.”

  * * *

  •

  It had not been difficult to find Walter. Back in 1990, when I interviewed him at Avon Park Correctional Institution, he had told me he had a prison romance going with a woman who lived in New Mexico. Her name was Sara, and she called him Michael. A bit of computer research using Sara’s first and last name in combination with “New Mexico” and the name “Michael” turned up a pair of likely people in a remote town near the Canadian border, in the high-desert heart of Washington where it seldom rains.

  I flew up on a Saturday morning, first to Seattle and then in a small prop plane over the Cascades to Wenatchee. From there I headed north along the Columbia River gorge, a wild stretch of blue water and high dry cliffs. It was a far-flung part of the country, but I’d been along this road before—on a death penalty case, one with terrible crime scene photos of a woman bound hand and foot in a motel bathroom, violated and then beaten to death. I’d ended up driving for hours that night, unable to stop. The floodlit parking lots of the motels along the highway had seemed spectral to me. Today, though, I was on this road in daylight, and I felt okay.

  Almost okay. The closer I got, the harder I tried to work out how it might go. Confronting a fugitive about murder. Hi, Walter? So, I’m wondering, is there any chance that— No. It’s not like I could slide a question about the roadside slaying of two police officers into casual conversation. I was going to have to straight-up challenge him. Did you kill them? I definitely felt nervous about that.

  With the river behind me, I turned west across a plain, climbing steadily. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the tall grass. In dry streambeds, rocks shone like moonstones. My car was the only car on the road. I passed through a deserted town with houses of weathered wood and found the lake just beyond it, but then my sense of direction ran out just as the cellphone service did.

  On my third pass along the south end of the lake, I saw a phone booth. The old-fashioned kind, right by the side of the road, out here in the middle of nowhere.

  “I can’t find them,” I said, shouting down the line to Peter above the wind that hit me as soon as I stepped out of the car. “At this point I’m just driving around.”

  “Come home.”

  That was what I was afraid he’d say. I wanted to. I could hear voices in the background, the clink of drinks in glasses, shouts of laughter. A weekend night with our friends in San Francisco getting under way.

  “You’ve done everything you can,” Peter said. “If they don’t want to be found, maybe you should just leave them be.”

  Just that instant a car pulled out onto the road from the trees beyond the phone booth. I peered over. There was a driveway hidden in that roadside thicket.

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “What’s going on?” Peter said.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, already hanging up.

  * * *

  •

  So here I was, easing my little gray rental car down a rocky dirt road, out of cellphone range, with the trees closing in around me. I was edging toward the home of a man who had pled guilty to two murders, pled guilty to kidnapping, served nearly two decades in prison, gotten out, gone on the lam, and tried his very best to disappear. It was almost five o’clock by the time I pulled up at the end of a driveway in front of a double-wide trailer underneath a stand of pines. There was a lake behind the trailer and on the opposite shore a steep wooded slope, cast in shadow. I stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. Not a thing except for the ticking of the engine as it cooled. I remembered again the promise I’d made to myself when I began working as a private investigator. You can’t un-knock on a door, but you don’t have to let anyone know you’re out there in the first place.

  “You looking for the campground?” A woman’s voice, from behind me. I recognized it from a phone conversation I’d had with her about Walter years earlier, when I was at The Miami Herald, right after the execution.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Actually, Sara,” I said, turning around, “I’m looking for you.”

  * * *

  •

  A short, plump woman with graying hair, wearing a blue gardening shirt and khaki pants, she had appeared at the corner of the yard, standing near the house, arms folded across her chest. She did not look friendly. Not one tiny bit.

  I’d have thought that the proprietress of a doomsday collective might be a little more chatty, just for marketing purposes, but no. I happened to know that in the years since we last spoke, Sara had been channeling messages from extraterrestrial beings called the Hosts of Heaven—You are the sensory tip of a “finger” of your Oversoul, thrust into the “pudding” of your present space/time environment—who had been telling her about the mother ships that would soon arrive to lift true believers to the Fourth Density. Walter had been helping out with the prophesies, under the name Lord Michael Andronicus. They had a website and a mailing list, more than six hundred hopeful souls waiting to be Harvested. All is in
hand. All is being prepared. You have suffered enough, beloveds. Soon you will be at the banquet.

  “I used to be a reporter for The Miami Herald,” I told Sara now. “We talked on the phone a couple of times about Walter. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m hoping to talk to Walter now—is he around?”

  “Oh, he skipped a long time ago,” Sara said, super casually. She started walking across the yard toward me, and when she reached me she kept going. I could see that I was being herded back to my car.

  “I want to talk to him because I saw The Exonerated.”

  “Well, I don’t know where he is. He just ran out and I haven’t heard from him. For years.”

  She had brought me to a halt right outside the driver’s-side door to my car, and was standing now between me and the house with a distinct Okay! Bye! expression on her face.

  I was just about to get in and drive off—if he’s not here, he’s not here—when the door to the house opened and a man came out. He was heavier, his hair was longer and graying, and he had a salt-and-pepper beard, but otherwise, yes. There he was. Still very good-looking, with a wave of silver hair over chiseled features and intense dark eyes.

  “Do you recognize me?” I asked Walter Rhodes.

  “No.”

  “I talked to you in Avon Park.”

  He stared at me for what felt like a long time.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said finally.

  “The jig is up!” Sara cried out from behind us. She sounded angry. Or maybe afraid.

  * * *

  •

  Inside, the trailer was tidy, a long rectangle with an office desk at one end and a bedroom at the other, kitchen and living area in the middle, a big couch against the far wall. Next to the couch a sliding glass door opened onto a deck. There were no electric lights on, just sun filtering in through the pine woods.

  At Walter’s direction I took a seat on the couch. Sara sat down next to me and Walter pulled a dining chair over and sat in front of me, almost knee to knee. They had boxed me in. Sara was discernibly tense and Walter seemed fierce. He was not friendly at all, I realized with dismay. He was also most definitely between me and the door. I’d have to clamber right over him to get out. It occurred to me that possibly Peter had been right. Dropping in unannounced on a fugitive in the middle of the woods in Nowhere, Washington, might not have been the brightest idea anybody ever had.

  “Why are you here?” Walter asked.

  I launched into an explanation: the execution, The Exonerated.

  “But what I’m asking you is, why are you here? What are you getting at?” Walter said.

  “Well, I saw the play, and they’re pretty clear that they think you did it, and I thought I’d come here and ask you myself whether you’d changed your mind about what you told me, back in 1990. Because if you changed your mind about all that, I want to know.”

  I was about to say more, but Sara jumped in.

  “In March 1981, the Christ materialized in my bedroom and put his hands on me,” Sara began.

  Uh-oh.

  “I was a member of Christ’s inner circle,” she said, leaning toward me.

  I nodded pleasantly. As one does.

  “In 1987, Christ appeared to me again and told me to prepare my heart for ‘the greater love that comes,’ and a month later, I got a letter from this man right here. He was calling himself Walter Rhodes but I knew he was my twin soul from the higher density, and that his real name was—”

  She faltered, and Walter put his hand on her back.

  “His name was Lord Michael Andronicus,” she continued.

  “Walter Rhodes is dead to me,” said Walter Rhodes.

  I literally could not think of one single thing to say.

  “Have you had anything to eat?” Walter asked Sara.

  “No,” Sara said tearfully.

  “Well, why don’t you do that, and Ellen and I will go for a walk.”

  * * *

  •

  A short lawn covered in pine needles led down to the lake. Across the water, a mountain ridge rose to the sky. The water was blue and black, clear at the shore but darker as it deepened, and it reflected the sky as a mirror. There was an aluminum rowboat upside down on the sandy beach, and Walter and I walked down to that. Walter put his plaid overshirt on it and we sat down.

  “You know, The Exonerated pretty much says flat out that you killed those officers,” I began. “Did you?”

  “I did not murder those officers. No.”

  “I just need to know the truth,” I said.

  “That is the truth. I did not murder Trooper Black or Constable Irwin.”

  “But you confessed.”

  “I really regret that.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, after a moment.

  I dug a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and offered him one, but he didn’t smoke, just as he didn’t smoke thirteen years ago when I interviewed him in prison. I lit one and smoked in silence, thinking.

  I believed him, absolutely.

  Almost absolutely.

  I did not know. It was hard to know. I felt like I knew Walter, though. He knew about the murders, the blood monolith suddenly in the center of my life again. We could speak the language of the case—Jesse, Sunny, the rest area, Trooper Black, Constable Irwin—without having to explain or define anything. What it meant. That felt incredibly important to me.

  He was watching me.

  “See that ridge?” he asked me. “The one over across the lake?”

  I looked where he was pointing. A steep stand of spruce, stepping up from the dark water.

  “The UFOs are so beautiful when they land there.”

  But there’s never any trace of them, Walter added. He hikes over to see. Nothing.

  I just nodded.

  “Well, there’s a lot about life we don’t understand,” I said, flicking an ash off the end of my cigarette. Today, in particular, that seemed true.

  “We’re energy, talking right now,” Walter said. “I’m talking to energy and so are you.”

  * * *

  •

  Next Walter took me on a little tour of the property, which was part of a campground, an old-school 1950s roughing-it kind of place. Just outside the door to the campground office was a pay phone, and as Walter and I passed it, I said I wanted to call my boyfriend.

  I knew that if I did not call, Peter would worry, and if Peter got worried he might alert the police. He was not a sit-by-the-phone kind of person. He was a pick-up-the-phone-and-do-something guy. I liked that about him. It was just that it felt a little awkward right now, because possibly Walter suspected I was calling the cops myself.

  Peter’s phone rang just once before he picked up.

  “You’re with them right now?”

  “It’s fine,” I whispered. “I’ll call you later. I love you. Bye.”

  * * *

  •

  The sun had set by the time Walter and I got back to the house, and I told them it was time for me to go.

  “Why don’t you stay here?” Sara said.

  “It would be great,” Walter added.

  This was crazy, obviously. To think about spending the night in this isolated house with an escaped convicted murderer and a woman who had Jesus on her own personal team. But I was curious. Maybe Walter’s story was going to change, maybe he would tell me something new. Sometimes there’s more between the last question and the door, and it might be worth hanging around to find out. Also, I was afraid of the long drive back to the airport, of those bleak roadside motels.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  I went outside to the campground pay phone to call Peter again. He didn’t pick up, so I left him a message to tell him I was spending the night here with Walter and Sara.
I didn’t want to think of his reaction. It was almost dark, and as I walked back to the house the woods around me rustled, the sound of leaves and needles and branches and wind.

  * * *

  •

  Dinner was beef with pine nuts in a tomato and zucchini broth, plus toast. Walter gave me a glass with “Let Go and Let God” on it and said water tasted better in it.

  After dinner, a movie. The Shawshank Redemption. They could not believe I had never seen it.

  We sat knee to knee to knee on the couch, Sara/me/Walter, bolt upright, each with our own lap blanket and glass of water. Onscreen, prison cells, prison beatings, prison blackmail, prison rapes. A “very accurate” movie, Walter said approvingly. Their cat, Amador, was on my lap, purring, which they took as a good sign. Also good signs: I’m a Virgo, like Walter. I am from New York, like Sara. I have “good energy” and “good intuition,” like Walter. There was a house empty next door, Walter said, maybe I should think about moving up there and spending more time with them.

  After the movie, they gave me a fresh pile of blankets and pillows for the couch and switched off the lights. I went to sleep. I was dreaming about accidentally leading the cops to Walter when I was startled awake by a scream.