After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, lighting up a cigarette. “It must have been driving those New York homicide guys crazy, having that animal at large. Women showing up dead, and them not finding anything to go on. For a copper, there’s nothing worse.”

  Once when we were little, our father took us to the neighborhood where he grew up, in North Beach. He showed us the corner where his father’s barbershop used to be, and his family’s apartment, the place where his mother used to hang the laundry out. That was in the early years, before she ran away. After that it was just him and his pop.

  He seemed different in his old neighborhood. Walking down Columbus Street, he had a kind of nervous energy to his step. People knew him in this neighborhood, and not just the women. A couple of old-timers greeted him in Italian.

  “God, I love this place,” he said. “People that knew me when I was young would never believe it, that I’d end up living in a town where you can’t buy a decent cannoli.”

  We didn’t know what that was, so we kept quiet.

  On our way home, we pulled into an observation area just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Holding his hand—one of us on each side—we walked across it. “Who would ever think of painting a bridge red?” our father said. “That’s the great thing about this city. That and a few million other things.

  “I should bring you here more often,” he said. But except for the handful of nights we spent on the hideaway bed at his apartment after the divorce, he hardly ever did.

  Back in his days as a San Francisco cop, our father had handled some scary situations, but after the divorce from our mother, he’d taken the Marin County job. Patty and I both knew he’d missed the excitement of the city.

  So I knew it was good news for him, in an odd way, that he had a real murder to work on for a change. It made him angry, knowing someone got killed—especially a woman, most of all a young one. But I could also tell from his voice on the phone when he told us there’d been a killing that he was charged up. This was the kind of moment our father lived for—what he did best—and he’d waited a long time for a case that would call on his best abilities. If there was ever a moment for my father to be a hero, this was it.

  Somewhere just beyond our house, no more than a mile away, a man had lurked in the brush, waiting for a girl not that much older than my sister and me—to have sex with her. He was willing to kill her to get that. Maybe he was out there still. Or safe at home someplace, believing he’d got away with what he’d done. Maybe he was even stretched out in some Barcalounger like Helen’s, watching the latest news reports about the murder, thinking how smart he was.

  Only now the killer had Detective Anthony Torricelli on his tail—olive skinned, smart as a fox, and lithe as a jaguar—in that black leather jacket that he always wore, even when the weather turned hot. I could see him now, cigarette in hand, poring over clues and possible leads, tracking license plates and makes of cars, interviewing the boyfriend probably, or the ex-boyfriends, interviewing gas station attendants and hitchhikers who might have been passing through the area at the time of the murder, studying plaster casts of shoe imprints found near the crime scene. But mostly, though he was never the hiking type, he’d be endlessly making his way along the trails himself, back and forth, back and forth, in search of anything—a broken twig, the fiber from a pants leg—that might lead him to the killer.

  There was no doubt in my mind my father would find him.

  TWO DAYS AFTER CHARLENE GRAY’S murder, Patty and I tromped up to a place we knew, a rock outcropping a little ways up the mountain, in the hopes of my communing with the dead girl’s spirit, and thereby uncovering information concerning her murder. Patty carried a tin can from which we’d removed both the top and the bottom. Uneasy though my sister was around fire, but ready as always to follow my instructions, she stuck it in the ground and piled dry grass inside, while I struck the match. Not having many other options to choose from, she sang a verse of “Kumbaya.”

  I folded myself into the lotus position and closed my eyes, with my fingers in a position I’d seen on a TV show Jennifer Pollack watched sometimes, Lilias, Yoga and You. I took a deep breath and held it. Slow exhale. Another breath.

  I could smell the smoke of the burning grass and hear my sister’s own more shallow breath beside me. Farther off, the sound of birds overhead, and the faint murmur of male voices higher up on the trail. (Police officers, probably. Not so far off, though beyond sight. In search of the same thing we were.)

  I sat there for a long time, waiting. In times past, pictures had sometimes come to me with a stunning clarity—pictures of things that happened or were going to happen—but this time none did. I could almost feel my brain hurting, I was trying that hard to locate anything that might offer up some clue.

  Girl ties shoelaces, fills water bottle, sets out on hike. Girl stops to apply insect repellent, adjusts strap on canteen. Man approaches. Asks the time maybe? Asks if she has bug spray he can borrow. She reaches in her pack.

  Girl sits on rock. Takes out granola bar. Takes swig from canteen. Realizes need to pee. Heads to the ranger station. Sees man.

  Maybe he was chewing gum that day. The whole time it was going on, his jaw kept working it. Maybe it took his mind off things, having that gum in his mouth.

  “You want a stick of gum?” he says. “Cinnamon. My favorite.”

  Once, long ago, in our parents’ bedroom, I’d found a book called The Joy of Sex, with drawings in it of men and women naked together. After our father moved out, the book disappeared, but now, to get my vision started, I tried to conjure images. Without the joy part. Nothing.

  That gum again. After, he’d want to get rid of it. A wad of gum always ended up tasting bad once you’d chewed it for a while. Once he was finished with the girl, he wouldn’t need it anymore. He’d have that taste in his mouth you get when you’ve had a wad in there for too long. Never mind the particular associations on this occasion.

  “We need to go to the ranger station,” I told Patty.

  It was a half hour’s hike up, and the sun was high by now, but my sister didn’t complain, though she did ask once if I had M&M’s or saltines in my pocket, which I had neglected to bring along.

  Normally we would have passed at least a few hikers on the trail, but that day, none. When we reached the ranger station, we spotted one police officer talking on a radio, but no apparent investigative activity under way.

  “When you’re finished with your gum, and you’re in a place like this where you don’t want to be a litterbug, what do you do with it?” I asked Patty.

  “Throw it down the toilet?”

  “Possibly,” I told her. “Me, I might stick it under the water fountain.”

  I bent over the spigot then, slid my fingers over the metal housing beneath. With the first one, nothing, but my sister pointed out a second fountain, next to the men’s room. (The men’s room. Of course. He would have stopped there too.)

  I watched her reach her fingers underneath the stainless steel bowl of the fountain, feeling around. I could see from her face that she’d located something. Now she handed me a wad of gum, grayish in color, which made sense. Only girls chose strawberry, or grape.

  I hadn’t thought to bring a Baggie, but I had a gum wrapper of my own in my pocket to wrap it in.

  “Good work,” I told her. Not that we knew what we’d do with our evidence. “Now wash your hands.”

  After, we started back down the mountain. The sun was getting lower in the sky now, making a golden glow on the hillside, and the California poppies were out. Partway down the trail, my sister stopped still and got down to her knees, in a way I recognized from a hundred other times with her on the mountain. She was studying an owl pellet.

  She cupped the small, dry brownish-gray lump in her palm, then held it out to me, breaking it apart to reveal the evidence of fur and tiny, twiglike fragments of bone. With two fingers, she picked out a single hair, smaller than an eyelash.

  �
��Mouse,” she said, her face a combination of interest and regret.

  “He waited till she was dead to have sex with her,” I told my sister.

  “He’s afraid of girls. That’s why he had to kill her first.”

  This time I hadn’t tried; the picture just appeared, as clear as the bits of mouse skeleton in my sister’s palm. A man’s hands—thick, chubby fingers—working her shirt over her floppy head, unzipping her pants. Burrowing in her pubic hair. I didn’t want to, but I saw the next part too.

  I could hear him breathing, in that labored way some people have, if they’re very old, or overweight, or they suffer from emphysema or asthma. Or maybe just from being out of breath.

  His fingernails were well tended, almost as if he’d had a manicure. Smooth skin, like a person unaccustomed to manual labor or spending time outdoors. Though he’d ventured here, out on the mountain. He’d passed this very spot.

  We walked home in silence—my hand in my pocket, around the wad of gum, my sister with her own treasure: those tiny precious fragments of mouse skeleton, encased in fur.

  FOR WEEKS WE’D BEEN PLANNING to spend Fourth of July weekend with our father in the city: see Alien, go out to dinner. The Thursday before the long weekend he called to tell us that it wasn’t going to work out for our visit. Some problems had come up at work, he said. He didn’t talk about the murder, but we knew that was it.

  We kept seeing him on television, and some statement by him appeared almost every day in the pages of the Marin IJ that Patty delivered on her paper route. Every day now, she’d bring home an extra copy of the paper, where we were likely to see his name, if not his photograph.

  Our father had always been like a movie star to my sister and me, but now he was a celebrity in the whole county and the Bay Area beyond it. He always looked so brave and reassuring, standing at the podium at those press conferences, fielding questions. He and his team were doing everything they could, he said, to locate the killer. If anyone had any information that could help (maybe they’d been on the mountain that day and seen someone suspicious, remembered a make of vehicle parked alongside the road?), they should call the Homicide Division hotline. He would personally see to it that every single possible lead was investigated. No stone unturned.

  Whenever he appeared in the paper, we cut out his picture and stuck it on the bulletin board in our room, alongside all the others of movie stars and rock musicians. On the transistor radio in our room—in between the endless replays of “My Sharona” and “Summer Love”—we could turn on the news and know the announcer would have some comment by Detective Torricelli concerning the murder on the mountain. Our father had become the hero of the county. Our name was famous.

  THERE WAS AN OUTDOOR POOL we sometimes went to at the rec center a couple of miles from our house. We didn’t own passes like most kids in our neighborhood, but you could usually sneak in if you waited for a bunch of people to come in a clump. We didn’t go often, knowing it was a hangout for the popular kids, and neither of us qualified. But the temperature had stayed in the nineties all that week, and they’d taped off access to the mountain behind our house, making it impossible to hang out there.

  So we rode our bikes over to the pool. We figured we’d splash around there, or more likely, work on our tans. Hot as it was, I kept a shirt on over my swimsuit, to cover up my lack of a bustline.

  We didn’t expect it that as soon as we laid out our towels Alison Kerwin would come over to our spot. She sat on the ground next to me, peeling the paper off her Creamsicle.

  “I saw your dad on TV again last night,” she said. “He’s so cool.”

  I told her thanks, though it seemed strange to me, thanking a person for something nice they said about a member of your family. As if you had anything to do with it.

  “He probably tells you all the grisly details they don’t put in the paper,” she said. She was sitting there in her sunglasses on her towel, wearing a string bikini. I hated it that all I had was a one-piece from a box of hand-me-downs given to our mother by a coworker at the insurance agency where she worked. From where I sat on the grass, I could see Alison’s toes, with their pearly silver polish. A professional job, from the looks of it. This was the second occasion she had spoken to me since the murder. Before that, the only time she’d acknowledged my existence had been to check my hall pass when she was Hall Monitor of the Week.

  “There were bite marks on her neck,” I said. “And he cut off one of her fingers.” No special psychic vision this time, just words that came out of my mouth from someplace I barely recognized. A pure invention, though it was the song with her name in it that gave me the idea. That part my sister and I never understood, where Elvis Costello sang about the fingers in the wedding cake.

  Now Patty looked at me but said nothing. I knew she would never betray me, which made me feel guilty about how I felt at the time, myself: Embarrassed to be seen with her. Wishing she was someplace else.

  “But don’t tell anyone,” I said. “They don’t want that part in the papers. It could create a panic.”

  Alison nodded. “You want to come over to my house later?” she said. “Or do you have to look after her?” She gestured in the direction of Patty, who was listening hard though she wouldn’t let on.

  The development where Alison lived was out by the golf course, in an area called Peacock Gap. To get home from the pool, Patty would need to cross the highway on her own. She was eleven, and tall for her age, but I knew getting to the other side of that highway was scary for her. Always in the past, I’d held her hand when we crossed. We pretended there were bad guys after us, and gunfire. It was one of our Angels moments. “I’ll cover you, Bree,” I’d say, and then we’d run for it.

  Alison was getting up to go now. “There could be some boys coming over,” she said. “Teddy Bascom probably. You know where I live, right?”

  “My sister’s okay on her own,” I said, though in all the years, I’d hardly ever left her. Patty, hearing this, said nothing.

  OF ALL THE BOYS IN our grade, Teddy Bascom was the coolest. He was one of the best basketball players—one of the showiest anyway—but his particular claim to fame was karate, where he’d competed at the state level and brought home a trophy that we heard about on the announcements at school. He had a deep voice before any of the other boys did, and when he raised his arms executing a jump shot, you could see the hair in his armpits.

  He’d been my lab partner one time, in sixth grade, for a fruit fly experiment. I still remembered the comments he’d made about fruit flies having sex, and the strangely stirring effect this had on me.

  “I could kill him with one kick if I wanted,” he said, speaking of our biology teacher, Mr. Long. This was during that brief period when the two of us worked on the fruit fly project together—my work mostly—and Mr. Long had accused Teddy of doing nothing but putting his name on the report, which was true, not that I’d minded.

  Apart from this, I’d never breathed the same air as he did.

  That afternoon at the rec center, I didn’t get my hair wet, knowing I’d be headed over to Alison Kerwin’s house and that Teddy Bascom would be there. Patty had wanted to play Marco Polo with me, but I said I wasn’t in the mood. I lay on my towel for a while, after Alison and the others left, with my copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn open to the same page, not wanting to look obvious about following them.

  “I guess I’ll stop by Alison’s,” I told my sister.

  “I thought we were going to go back on the mountain to look for clues,” Patty said. We had placed the wad of gum from our information-gathering expedition in a jewelry box, along with a notebook we’d started, labeled “Murder Investigation.” When we got something really good, we’d turn the whole thing over to our father.

  “Can’t you ever do anything by yourself?” I told her. Even as I said this, I knew I was being mean.

  Patty hardly ever complained about anything I did. She was like the most loyal dog, the kind who follows her
master in a snowstorm even if it means she’ll freeze to death, or goes into a burning building to lead her to safety or die at her side, whichever. Now, though, her mouth was tight in that way she had that was about more than simply concealing her overbite.

  “You’ll be fine,” I told her. “Mom should be home in a couple of hours.” As if this meant anything. I could see from Patty’s face she wasn’t happy, but she left.

  The Kerwins had one of those refrigerators with an ice dispenser on the front that gives you crushed ice, and a whole pantry filled with sodas. Alison’s bed had a canopy, and there was a vanity table next to it with all kinds of makeup and a little metal tree holding earrings. But the place we hung out that afternoon was the rec room, where there were beanbag chairs and a Ping-Pong table and a real jukebox filled with 45s. The boys mostly leaned on the jukebox, punching in songs, while the girls lay on the couch.

  “It must be so exciting having a detective for a dad,” one of them said—a girl named Sage whose father owned a company that manufactured corrugated boxes. “Like your life’s a TV show.”

  “Does he wear his gun under his clothes?” Alison said. “Even around you?”

  “Shoulder holsters are just for characters on TV shows,” I told her. “Real police officers wear their gun strapped to their ankle.”

  “At least you know you’re safe,” the girl named Soleil—Alison’s best friend—offered. “The killer’s never going to try anything with the daughter of the detective in charge of the whole thing.”

  “Not necessarily,” Alison pointed out. “He could take her hostage, to make a statement. Like, ‘I dare you to come after me. I’ve got your kid.’ ”

  I said I didn’t really worry about that. The other girls seemed focused on the killer. I was more focused on them and worried I’d do something uncool, which was pretty much inevitable.

  “Does your dad think the murderer’s still in the area?” Soleil asked. Once, back in fourth grade, when she’d first come to our school, I pronounced her name wrong, though everybody now knew it was French for sun.