After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  I always asked the mothers to drop me off at our corner so they wouldn’t see our yard, with its dead grass and broken garage door. “I can walk from here,” I said. “That way I can pick up the mail.”

  Patty would be waiting for me at the house. Our mother might or might not be home, but either way, more than likely Patty would be out in the driveway dribbling a basketball, in her old shoes with the soles falling apart.

  It would have been easier in some ways if Patty had blamed me or said mean things, but she never did. Apart from asking what kind of pet Alison had, we didn’t discuss what it was like over there or what we did.

  “I would have thought her family would have a dog,” she said when I told her about the giant aquarium Alison’s family had in their living room. “Something like a poodle or an Irish setter. A purebred.”

  My sister was more of a mutt person, but the least the Kerwins could have done was have a poodle.

  Never mind. The main thing in my universe that day was the news concerning Teddy Bascom. According to Alison, I had earned his approval. At the time, the question of whether he’d earned mine never occurred to me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  By that fall, with those five unsolved murders in the paper every day, and those warning signs posted at the trailheads, hardly anyone went hiking on the mountain anymore. But there was no way to seal off the entire outdoors. Like a mutating virus, the killer seemed to be adapting his M.O. as his potential victims, and the homicide force trying to protect them, altered their approach in response to the most recent murders. Hikers seldom ventured onto our part of the mountain now. But the Sunset Strangler had expanded his range.

  The body of the sixth woman, Willa DePaul, was found at Phoenix Lake the third week of September. She was older than the others—thirty-six—but like them she had long dark hair, she was pretty, and her corpse was discovered at the end of the day.

  “I told her not to go there,” her husband said in the interview they played a few days later on the radio. “She said Buster needed some exercise.”

  The dog had shown up back at home, whimpering. That’s how the police knew to look for her.

  The newspaper did not offer many particulars concerning what the killer might have done to Willa DePaul, but the reporter did say that her body was found “in a position similar to that of his previous victims” and that “electrical tape had been employed”—a phrase my sister and I understood to mean that Willa’s eyes, like those of the women he’d killed before her, had been covered in tape, in the Sunset Strangler’s trademark style. Mention was made of “certain other details about the manner in which the victims were found.” Our father had explained to the reporter that because an ongoing investigation was under way, he could not elaborate on those. One source in the Homicide Division was quoted—anonymously—as saying that the killer appeared to take a certain item of clothing from the bodies of his victims, as some sort of souvenir. What that might be, he could not say, for reasons of protecting the investigation.

  Once again I tried to summon a vision, but the pictures that came to me were too vague to offer any clues, and I wasn’t even sure myself if they were real, or just something I made up, like the stories I told Alison and her friends. I pictured a man standing over the motionless body of a woman. Imagined I could hear his slow and labored breathing. Tried to summon a picture of the item of clothing—blouse? panties? bra?—the killer might have chosen to keep for his collection. But no picture came to me—nothing to offer to my father to help him break the case.

  KNOWING HOW BUSY HE WAS now, I didn’t call my father on the phone at work anymore—and I didn’t like to call his apartment now, in case Margaret Ann might answer, but even more so, knowing that most likely no one would. I didn’t like to think of my father at the apartment of a beautiful woman who smelled like jasmine. I hated it, that there was this other person out there who knew our father as well as Patty and I did.

  I saw him mostly on television now, times I’d be at Alison’s, or babysitting for the Pollacks. But from a couple of quick visits he made to our house, I could see that the case was getting to him.

  The vision that came to me then was of my father, not the killer. I saw him sitting on the mountain, next to the motionless body of Willa DePaul. Raking his fingers through his hair. Out of respect for the victim, he did not light a cigarette. But later he would. Many.

  I saw him in his black leather jacket, out on the mountain, pacing over the crime scene for clues. Back and forth, back and forth. As he paced, it seemed to me that I knew what he was thinking.

  All his life, he’d seen himself as a protector of women, but women kept getting killed on his watch. (Four . . . five . . . six . . .) As hard as he tried, he was no closer now to finding the killer than he’d been in June, when he’d stood over the body of that first victim. This was eating him up. I saw it on his face now, and more than that, I could feel it. Of all the visions I’d experienced so far, this one seemed clearest, but it wasn’t going to help me assist my father in capturing the Sunset Strangler. For that, I had to see the killer’s face.

  Nights in my bed, staring up at the slats of my sister’s bed above me, I tried to summon him. I tried to picture where he was right now, where he was going next. But all my brain revealed was a blank screen, like our disconnected television set. Nothing there when you turned it on but snow.

  AT HOME, AT NIGHT, THE urgency of locating the killer occupied all my thoughts. I saw my father’s face on the television set, strained and anxious. His shirt (that would have been perfectly pressed before) looked rumpled.

  At school, it was Teddy Bascom I thought about. I could look across the room in geometry and see him there, sitting in that boy way, with his legs apart—crotch to the world. I’d study the hair on the back of his neck, and as much as I studied him, I also knew: He barely looked at me. And saw me not at all.

  I still hadn’t gotten my period, and I was flat as ever, or close to it. But sex seemed to be all around me now—in the locker room at the pool, where the other girls and I put on our suits, and in Alison’s rec room, and in the bedroom of Karl and Jennifer Pollack, whose bed I sat on sometimes, babysitting nights, imagining the two of them there, trying to conceive a baby.

  The images blended then: the cheerful, wholesome animated egg and sperm drawings from our health class movie gave way to those scary but fascinating drawings in the Joy of Sex book from my parents’ long-ago bedroom. (The man with his beard. The woman, with hair in her armpits. The penis that I didn’t want to look at but did.)

  Sex was as much a part of the world as air, or air pollution. No longer as the health class movie portrayed it—as something precious and beautiful, and private. But to me, that summer, sex had become something ugly and toxic, displayed across the front page of the papers my sister delivered every afternoon. Sex was dangerous—possibly fatal. And in a terrible and twisted way, it was out there on the place I’d always loved the most—the mountain.

  AN ODD THING HAD HAPPENED over the years after my parents’ marriage ended. I couldn’t call them friends exactly, but now and then, late at night—on his way home from work, or who knows, maybe heading back there—he’d stop by our house and they’d have a cigarette together in the kitchen and talk. Despite whatever old wounds surely existed—the unspoken name of Margaret Ann still hovering over the two of them—they seemed to have arrived at some form of friendship. Maybe they were like a couple of weary soldiers who went through a war together, side by side in the trenches, and having no inclination to relive the old battles found a certain comfort in the simple knowledge that they’d been young together and present at the same terrible moments of bloodshed. Even though, in my parents’ case, the injury sustained there was my mother’s, at the hands of my father.

  There had been a time when she could barely look at him, but maybe enough other hard things had happened by this point, or enough time had passed, that this was no longer so. She didn’t have a lot of other people
to talk to for one thing—or any. And maybe specifically because she, alone among those who knew him, did not view him as a hero, there must have been a certain relief for my father—when he was with her in our old living room, and no place else—that he could speak freely for once about the terrible inadequacy he felt at not having located the killer who was terrorizing the county.

  By that fall, he was coming over more. Not in the afternoons so much, but at night, when Patty and I were in bed, for no apparent reason other than to unburden himself about the case. It might be past midnight, but this was no problem for our mother. She never went anywhere except work, and she always seemed to be up. The light was always on.

  They thought we were asleep on these occasions—and Patty was, usually, but the sound of our father’s heavy sigh would wake me. Then came the familiar ritual of the cigarettes, the drink. Ice in the glasses. Click of the lighter.

  “You look tired,” she said. She sounded like a wife when she said this. For a moment, then, I let myself pretend they were still married to each other, and that the voices I heard now came from my mother’s bedroom, where the two of them lay side by side, instead of leaning on our green Formica counter, with a couple of juice glasses of whiskey.

  “This case is getting to me,” he told her. As if any of us didn’t know.

  I’d be huddled on the floor by our door now, listening in. I’d been hoping he’d tell her more about what was going on, not so much to share with Alison and her crowd in the cafeteria the next day—because I could make those parts up. Just for myself, to know.

  “After he takes off all their clothes,” my father said, “this guy actually folds them up next to the bodies.”

  The lighter again. Another Lucky.

  “All they have on when we find them are their shoes,” he said. “Damn tape over their eyes. I shouldn’t be talking about this, but sometimes I just have to.”

  “It’s okay telling me these things,” my mother said. “I just don’t want it around the girls.”

  “We’re keeping this part quiet at the department,” he said. “But you know the one thing he takes away with him, when he’s finished?”

  He hesitated for a moment. I held my breath.

  “Their shoelaces.”

  No sound from my mother. She would know he didn’t need her to say anything. Just listen.

  “It’s like he wants a souvenir,” my father said. “A little something to remember them by. And here I am like an idiot, out looking for the one guy in the county with a goddamned shoelace collection.”

  OCTOBER CAME. WE’D TURNED THE clocks back, so it got dark early now. Through the windows of the houses on Morning Glory Court—all but the one belonging to Mr. Armitage—we could see the blue glow of the television sets now, as up and down the block families tuned in to hear the latest news about the Sunset Strangler.

  Patty was off doing her paper route. Normally I’d be over at Alison’s, but the girls had set out after school with somebody’s mother to get pedicures in the city and go out for dinner after at Pier 41. I’d told them I was busy, though the real reason I didn’t go was the money.

  I was lying on my bed flipping the pages of my Amelia Earhart biography that I’d read twice before when I heard the familiar sound of my father’s car and looked up to see the blue Alfa pulling up to the curb in front of our house. My father stepped out, looking like a guest star on Fantasy Island.

  As always on these rare occasions when our father came to see us, I felt my heart expand just at the sight of him. Nothing—not attracting the interest of Teddy Bascom, or an invitation to a sleepover at Alison’s, or having Patty say she loved one of the stories I wrote—could feel as exciting as a visit from my father, however fleeting.

  I watched as he swung the car door open, his easy, natural gait as he strode up the path to our house, the way he ran his hand through his hair.

  “Your sister home?” he said.

  “Paper route.”

  “I only have a minute,” he said. “I just thought it would be good to see you. My spirits could use a lift.”

  He sat down next to me. “You know I’ll always love you,” he said. “Nothing would ever change that. No matter what, that part’s nailed down.”

  I looked at him. For a moment I thought that maybe he was going to tell me something. He might have thought so too.

  “Whatever happens, I want to be sure you know that. You’ll always be my girls.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  “Sometimes, I mess up.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Not much.”

  “I’m never leaving you,” he said.

  Then he was gone again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A couple of weeks before Halloween, Alison had a party. In the rec room, on the yellow vinyl beanbag chair—“My Sharona” on the radio, as usual—Teddy Bascom kissed me.

  I had expected this to be a bigger deal than it turned out to be. As little as I knew of kissing, I got the impression there were better styles of doing it than Teddy’s, which featured his tongue a lot, jammed up against my gums in a way that reminded me of being at the dentist, just you didn’t spit anything out after. Sometimes it felt as if the kissing part was only something Teddy did to keep me occupied while his hand crept up under my shirt. But the truth was, what occupied me then was the simple embarrassment over how little he’d find there. I went along with what was happening, but I was looking at the wall the whole time. A poster for Grease.

  Soon I was making out with Teddy Bascom on a daily basis, mostly in Alison’s rec room, but also in back of the school when classes got out, and out by the basketball court, and pretty much anywhere else I was likely to run into him.

  At the time I made no particular differentiation between the concept of a boy being genuinely interested in me and the simple desire of that boy to get his hands on my breast, or any breast. At least three afternoons a week now I went over to Alison’s house after school, and on other occasions I would head over to the rec center and watch Teddy play basketball. Sometimes my sister accompanied me then. What she really wanted was to play, herself, but even though she could have held her own against some of those boys—tricking her defender with a pump fake, then diving past him with her amazing feet to bank it in—they would never have invited her to join them.

  Least of all Teddy. More than any of the other boys his age, Teddy possessed a kind of confidence and assurance, and obliviousness to the needs of anyone but himself. But I loved how cool he was, and even more, the way his choice of me as his girlfriend—as the girl with whom he hung out at least—conferred a certain coolness on me.

  He carried himself like a person who knew that whatever came up, he’d be able to handle it. The only other person I knew like that was our father. Though where our father’s sense of command seemed rooted in the desire to protect, Teddy’s appeared to emanate from the desire to vanquish.

  And Teddy Bascom was nothing like my father. Teddy seemed to possess no interest in making me feel special or beautiful. Or making me feel anything, actually. With Teddy you were always left with the uneasy sense that something was going on you didn’t really understand. There were secrets, and it made you want to be the one who discovered them. The fact that Teddy didn’t answer when you asked him a question made you think he must have something really important on his mind, though perhaps all it meant was that he couldn’t be bothered.

  Or maybe the fact that you wanted to hear an answer from him was sufficient reason for Teddy to withhold it. It had occurred to me that Teddy Bascom derived satisfaction out of maintaining control. The more offhandedly he treated a person (me, for instance), the more clearly he established his own power. Teddy Bascom’s calling in life, if he had one, was to please himself.

  We shared this goal, Teddy and I: the goal of making Teddy happy.

  BACK BEFORE THE MURDERS, MY seventh-grade English teacher gave us an assignment one time that actually inspired me to deliver something good for a
change. We were supposed to choose a person we admired and interview that person (him or her) about the work the individual did. In part no doubt as a way of ensuring that I’d get to spend some time with him, I chose my father.

  I had told him I wanted to discuss the field of homicide investigation. The topic being so broad, it was my father’s idea that we narrow this down to the subject of conducting an interrogation of a suspect. As the head of the Homicide Division in our county, our father had the reputation of being better than anyone at getting a suspect to admit to his crimes.

  My father took me to Marin Joe’s that day to conduct the interview. I brought a portable tape recorder with me.

  “So, Detective Torricelli,” I began. I was trying hard to sound like someone on television. Barbara Walters, maybe. “I understand you are an expert in the field of police interrogation. Can you tell me a few things about why this is such an important aspect of police work?”

  “I would be happy to do this, Miss . . . Miss . . . What did you say your name was, miss?”

  “Torricelli,” I told him. My father always made me laugh.

  “Amazing coincidence! That’s my name too. Maybe we have relatives in common, back in the old country.”

  “Very possible,” I told him. “Now, about those interrogations . . .”

  “Right, right. I know you’re a busy person, Miss Torricelli. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

  “Why they matter . . .”

  “Here’s the thing,” my father said. “You spend all these weeks and months tracking down your perpetrator. Hundreds of man-hours and woman-hours, getting those cuffs on your guy, and now you’ve pinched him. But don’t think for a minute you’re home free. Not without a crucial element in your case. This would be the confession.

  “I cannot tell you how many times, in the history of the cases I’ve studied, a guilty man or woman has gone free—let out on the streets to very likely terrorize the community again—for the simple reason that the police interrogator failed to get him to admit to his crimes.”