No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  “He did?”

  “Yes. I won’t spoil it for you.”

  She looked at the cover, then back at me. “Actually, you kind of look like her.”

  After paying for the oil change, I drove to Green Apple Books on Clement. Until then, I had been determined not to read Thorpe’s book. But the woman at the service station had caught me off guard. Was it possible that Thorpe had actually done what he said he would do—that he had ultimately found something that the police had not? The book was on the shelf of new releases, front and center. A gold sticker on the cover, just above Lila’s left eye, said Autographed. It was a staff pick. A card handwritten by someone named Pate said the book was “reminiscent of In Cold Blood, a chilling account of a grisly murder that will have you on the edge of your seat.” If the sales clerk hadn’t been looking straight at me, I would have ripped the card off and moved the stack to the calendar section at the back of the store. Instead, I just picked up a copy, placed it on the counter, and paid cash for the story of my sister’s life and death. That night in my bedroom, I began reading.

  The book opened with a detailed description of the manner in which Lila’s body was found. Thorpe quoted the hiker who found her in the woods: “There I was unzipping my pants, getting ready to take a leak, when my foot caught on something and I tripped. When I caught my balance and saw that it was a body, I freaked out. I leaned against the nearest tree and puked my guts up.”

  For weeks afterward, I couldn’t shake the image of this stranger in his unzipped pants, vomiting beside my sister’s body. I would have given anything to be the one who found her, to comb her hair with my fingers and wipe the mud off her face. I would have given anything to make her look more like herself, less exposed, before the detectives arrived with their notebooks and Polaroid cameras.

  Thorpe found no detail too intimate or too gruesome to report. He described the crime scene photos as if he were describing a series of paintings: the pale bluish color of my sister’s skin, the high arch of her dark eyebrows, the way her bloodied hair fanned out around her face. Even, agonizingly, the way the police covered their noses when they approached her body, as it had been several days since she died. She was lying on her back in a straight, prim line, arms resting at her sides, a pile of leaves beneath her head like a pillow—a position which led the detectives to surmise that her murderer must have known her.

  The killer appeared to feel some compassion for his victim, Thorpe wrote. Almost as if he was putting her to bed, tucking her in for the long night.

  She had been clothed when the hiker found her, but her shirt was gaping open beneath her peacoat, the top four buttons missing. Thorpe took several sentences to describe her pale yellow bra, a full paragraph to describe a small tattoo above her left breast. She’d gotten the tattoo a few weeks before she died, and had shown it to me proudly one night before bed.

  “What is it?” I’d asked, tracing my fingers over the dark purple ink.

  “A double torus, or as good an approximation of one as I could get on Haight Street.”

  “What’s a double torus?”

  “It’s a sphere with two handles and two holes, formed by connecting two torii. Picture two doughnuts glued together, side by side.”

  “What possessed you to get a tattoo of two doughnuts?” I asked.

  “The double torus is a very elegant topological construct. It can be plotted like so—” She went to her desk, jotted something down on a scrap of paper, and handed it to me: z2 = 0.04-x4 + 2x6-x8 + 2x2y2-2x4y2-y4. A few days after her body was discovered, I came across the paper tacked to her bulletin board. I realized it was the last thing she had written down specifically for me. I never threw it away. For years it would travel with me in my wallet, like some secret code.

  Lila buttoned her pajama top to cover the tattoo. “Someone dared me.”

  “Who?”

  She smiled, a private smile, as if I wasn’t even in the room. “No one you know.”

  Standing beside Lila’s body in the morgue in Guerneville, holding hands, my parents saw the tattoo for the first time. This scene, too, was described by Thorpe, who, of course, had not been there, but who claimed in his book’s preface that a “dramatization of this and other events, though fictional, was necessary to telling the story in a truthful way.” But there were things he got right: my parents’ surprise at the tattoo, the smell of Chinese takeout coming from the mortuary office, my father’s monotone phone call to me—things Thorpe only knew because I had told him.

  For him, it was a story, pure and simple. Prior to the book, he’d been teaching part-time at various Bay Area universities for several years. He confessed to me that the only reason he ended up at USF was that it had the best views and the shortest semesters. “I used to think teaching was the perfect career,” he told me early in our friendship. “I had this idea that everyone was in it for the love of literature. But that was before I discovered how much jealousy and petty politics is involved. I love the students, but I hate the system. I have to come up with a way out.”

  The book was Thorpe’s solution. He was thirty-two years old when Murder by the Bay made him a minor celebrity. Every time I glanced at the literary events section of the Chronicle, he was there. One morning, while eating breakfast in front of the television, I saw him on the Today show, being interviewed by Bryant Gumbel. He looked completely different from the Andrew Thorpe I knew, slick and polished and decked out in beautifully tailored clothes, expensive shoes. The next week, Murder by the Bay appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. His byline began cropping up in slick magazines like Harper’s and GQ, and eventually he landed his own column for Esquire. He went on to pen three more books in the true crime genre, growing richer murder by murder. Occasionally I would see him on CNN, talking about some new unsolved case as if he were an expert in forensics. And maybe, by then, he was.

  While I despised the exploitative nature of Murder by the Bay, there was one thing I could not deny: Thorpe had done his research.

  Ultimately, evidence about the crime was scant and the police investigation was unenthusiastic. Lila’s case was never much of a priority for the San Francisco Police Department, which was caught up in a scandal involving the police chief’s son. The Guerneville police, for their part, were underfunded and short on staff. Although Lila’s death was labeled a homicide, no one was ever charged. Thorpe, however, had a theory, which he pieced together using a complex series of clues and seemingly well-reasoned conjecture. He laid out his case meticulously, convincingly, over a span of 296 pages. Added to the details about the case itself were long passages about Lila, my parents, me.

  This isn’t only the story of the murdered girl, Thorpe wrote in the preface. It is also the story of her sister, the one who was left behind. I knew her personally. It would be fair to say I knew her very well. Portions of this book are directly transcribed from conversations I had with Ellie Enderlin, who would strive, in the weeks and months following her sister’s death, to be exactly what her parents needed, to transform herself, as if by magic, into the good daughter.

  The irony was that, if there had ever been a chance of my becoming “the good daughter,” it ended with the publication of Thorpe’s book. While my mother tried valiantly to treat me exactly as she always had, my father could not hide his disappointment. I heard it in his voice when he spoke to me, saw it in his face when he looked at me. Mine was an ambitious family—my father’s successful financial consulting business, my mother’s well-regarded law practice, Lila’s burgeoning genius. Only one of us was average—a break in the genetic code, perhaps, a dilution of the Enderlin family determination to succeed. My mediocrity was a fault which my father had largely chosen to overlook when Lila was alive. With a prodigy like Lila, he could afford for me to be average. Even after her death, there was a grace period during which I suspected he was trying to give me the benefit of the doubt; for the first time in my life, he took an interest in my studies, frequently asking about my classes
, my goals. I tried to come up with worthy answers to his questions, never letting on that I skipped most of my classes or that my promises to follow in my mother’s footsteps as an attorney were meaningless. For a short time, he seemed to harbor a genuine faith in me. But after the book came out, everything changed. Our conversations became shorter and shorter, the silences between us more strained. I suspected it was an effort for him not to say what he was thinking: that the book was my fault, that, through my indiscretion, I had turned our family’s private tragedy into a public spectacle.

  Six

  THE SIXTH CHAPTER OF MURDER BY THE BAY, more than any other, shined a spotlight on our home life. Entitled “A Tale of Two Sisters,” it focused in particular on the relationship between me and Lila. As I read the book that night, three weeks after its publication, I cringed at the picture Thorpe painted of the two of us, the idea that we could be so easily summed up.

  One was tall and dark, the chapter began, the other petite and fair. One was a math prodigy, while the other was always lost in books.

  Both of these sentences were basically true, although the language implied a kind of fairy-tale dichotomy that had not existed in real life. Lila did indeed have almost three inches on me, and she shared my father’s olive complexion and brown hair, while I had inherited the pale skin, red hair, and small stature of my mother’s Scotch-Irish family. Aside from those differences, though, we looked very much like sisters—a fact that people often commented on when they saw us together. We both had dark brown eyes, dimples, and rounded faces. We shared my mother’s mild cheekbones and my father’s straight, serious nose. And both of us had lucked out when it came to our mouths, a happy accident of genetics that combined my mother’s bow-shaped lips and my father’s full pout.

  On the page facing the opening paragraph of chapter six, there was a photograph of me and Lila standing together on the day of her graduation from Berkeley. She looked academic and respectable in a cap and gown, her long hair fastened in a low ponytail. I fit the image of the carefree younger sister, with my low-cut sundress and sandals, hair falling loose around my shoulders. To further the contrast, Lila never wore more than a dab of mascara and a hint of pale lipstick, while I wore lipstick in rich shades of red. The photograph had originally been in color, so that when it was rendered in black-and-white on the cheap, porous paper, my lipstick appeared even darker. Readers might study the photograph and be utterly convinced that we were just as Thorpe had described us.

  Thorpe went on to portray Lila as painfully shy, me as wildly sociable. But to anyone who actually knew us, it would have been clear that Thorpe had grossly exaggerated our differences for dramatic effect. Anything that might disrupt the narrative as he saw it was omitted: he never said that until Lila’s death, I had always been quite studious when it came to the classes I enjoyed. He never mentioned that Lila, while basically a loner, could be quite friendly with strangers.

  I understood why. “It’s all about character,” he had said, in one of several lectures he gave on storytelling during my first class with him. Even though the class was called Contemporary American Literature, Thorpe took liberties with the syllabus, frequently requiring us to write short stories of our own. “Plot, setting, style—none of it means anything if you don’t have interesting characters, preferably in conflict with one another.” From his standpoint, I could see how the contrast of the shy, intellectual sister with the wild, artistic one might have made the book more entertaining. And that, I believed, was what he was after. It wasn’t accuracy that mattered in Thorpe’s mind, so much as the overall effect.

  From page one, there was a “lean closer and I’ll tell you a creepy story” feel to Murder by the Bay. I had read and enjoyed many such books myself over the years. While I liked my Chekhov and Flaubert, my O. Henry and Pavese, I could always get into a well-written detective novel or a riveting true crime tale. In Cold Blood was one of my favorite books of nonfiction. The fact that Truman Capote had allegedly taken liberties with the truth had never really bothered me. Years after I first read the book in high school, I still had a clear picture in my mind of sixteen-year-old Nancy Clutter, “the town darling,” pleading for her life in the upstairs bedroom. I could still see the farmhouse as Capote had drawn it, with each member of the Clutter family isolated from the others at the moment of his or her death. But the unthinkable depravity of the crime didn’t keep me from feeling a voyeuristic thrill as I turned the pages of Capote’s book.

  There are two characters in In Cold Blood who are mentioned only in passing, so that one easily forgets all about them.

  The eldest daughter, Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently…Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse.

  In the aftermath of the murders, Eveanna and Beverly must have felt the blow more deeply than anyone else. I wondered if they had ever read the book, and if so, what they thought of it. When Capote was writing the story that would make him famous, did it ever occur to him to consider how painful it would be for the surviving sisters?

  AT SOME POINT THAT NIGHT, AS I SAT ALONE IN my room, reading, I heard my mother shuffling down the hall. She tapped on my door, and I stuffed the book under the covers. “Come in.”

  She walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. “Your light was on,” she said, smiling. I’d noticed lately that she was always smiling, or trying to, but the expression never looked quite natural. I reached over and held her hand. It was soft and moist with night cream. She was a woman who believed in minor luxuries. As long as I could remember, she’d used the same expensive lotion on her hands that she used on her face, claiming that you could always tell how well a woman took care of herself by looking at her hands. It worked; despite the endless hours of gardening, hers were beautiful.

  “You don’t have to do that, Mom,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Smile. You don’t have to smile for me.”

  She looked down at the comforter, and with her free hand she rubbed at a dot of dried red nail polish that had been there for months. “Windex will take care of that.”

  “Mom?”

  Finally she looked up and said, “I’m not doing it for you, sweetie. I read somewhere that if you force yourself to smile, it will actually improve your mood.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Not yet.”

  I had an idea. “You and Dad should take a vacation.”

  She looked at me as though I’d suggested she quit her job and join a commune. “Whatever for?”

  “Maybe it would help.”

  I wondered if she entirely understood what I was saying. Over the past year and a half, my parents had become so distant with one another that I worried their marriage might end. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before Lila died—I’d never known a married couple who seemed more solid in their commitment, more certain of their love. But lately they had begun moving around the house like roommates who feared invading one another’s space. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen them touch.

  She reached up and smoothed my hair. “We could go to Timbuktu, it wouldn’t matter, I’d still miss her so much I could hardly breathe.”

  I wished, at that moment, that I could have traded places with Lila. I imagined a scenario in which my mother’s grief was smaller, more manageable, a scenario in which she had not lost her brilliant eldest daughter. Surely, if she’d only lost me, the recovery would have been quicker, the devastation less complete. Perhaps the family would have inched closer together rather than farther apart.

  She hugged me good night, got up, and closed the door behind her.

  It was four in the morning when I finished the book. I hid it under my bed and switched off the lamp.

  What I felt for Andrew Thorpe could only be described as disgust. When I read the long passages about Lila—passages in wh
ich my sister was painted as a math prodigy, a loner, something of an oddball, a late-blooming beauty—it was clear that Thorpe had used me. Stupidly, blindly, I had delivered Lila right into his hands.

  Nonetheless, in the matter of the murder itself, he was very convincing. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was compelled to believe his version of the story. The case he made wasn’t foolproof. There was no forensic evidence, for one thing, and some questions remained unanswered. In no way would Thorpe’s theory stand up to Lila’s own rigorous test—the standard of absolute proof. She would probably scoff at it, calling it what it truly was: mere conjecture. Nevertheless, Thorpe’s prime suspect—Peter McConnell—made perfect sense.

  Seven

  WE LIVE OUR LIVES BY WAY OF STORY,” Thorpe said one afternoon, a couple of months after Lila died. “Over time, we construct thousands upon thousands of small narratives by which to process and remember our days, and these mini-narratives add up to the bigger story, the way we see ourselves in the world.” He was talking to the class, in a lecture loosely based on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but I knew his words were really meant for me.

  Looking back, it was easy to see that the major story of my own life had been my sister’s death. Andrew Thorpe’s book had deeply influenced the way I constructed this story. I was twenty years old when I read Murder by the Bay, young enough to believe that the things he said about Lila’s murder, and the things he said about me, were true.

  In the world of mathematics, he wrote, Lila had found her place. When Lila was murdered, Ellie had yet to find hers. The sense of belonging and clarity of direction that simplified Lila’s short life would continue to elude Ellie.