“My mom said to never trust anyone that has those type of ears where their earlobes blend into the side of their face instead of drooping down,” another girl offered. Her name was Delia, and lately Alison had started inviting her over too, most likely because she had a twin brother Alison had a crush on. “He had those earlobes.”
“What if he was right here!” Alison said. “Standing there with the door open to my house while I looked for the pen, with those way-short pants and white socks.” This was where she suggested that maybe Delia’s brother could come over, so there’d be a boy around to protect us.
“We should tell your father about him,” Alison said to me. “He could put a trace on the guy or something. His fingerprints will be on the box.”
“What if there’s something weird he put on the pizza?” Soleil said.
“You mean like poison?”
“Worse. Like, you know, that thing boys do, while they think about sex. And he squirted it on top before he brought it in.”
“You are so gross,” Alison told her.
We finished the pizza anyway. But we locked the door, except when the boys came over—Chase, Todd, and Teddy of course. The one who came for me.
“The boys are here,” Alison would call out, when we heard them burst through the door, calling for pizza.
As if that meant we were safe.
Chapter Twenty
Patty and I were riding our bikes on an unfamiliar route a distance from where we normally went when we saw it: our father’s car, parked on the side of the road. Not the unmarked Chevy he used for police work, but the Alfa. As always, my heart lifted at the sight.
It was daylight, the middle of the afternoon. The apartment complex across the street looked different from the one he’d taken us to a few years earlier, to visit Margaret Ann, but it occurred to me that she must live here now. I pictured the glass case holding the dolls in it, the mauve love seat with the needlepoint cushions, the lemon tree, and the music box. I could still hear the Dusty Springfield album that had been playing that day we went there, that our father put on a lot in the car, with the song about the windmills, and the one Patty loved: Just a little lovin’ . . . early in the morning . . .
This apartment complex had a pool too, though it looked a lot shabbier than the other had been, if memory served. This was the kind of place a person lived on the way down from someplace better, more than on the way up.
“Let’s go see if we can find him,” Patty said. As critical as she could be of our father, Patty got as excited as I did anytime the prospect came up of seeing him.
“We could pretend we’re Girl Scouts, taking cookie orders, and knock on doors,” I said. “Or just wait till he comes out.”
Hiding was something we were good at. We did it all the time—outside Helen’s, for Ding Dong Ditch, and for Drive-In Movie. Now it seemed dangerous. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what we’d find out.
“He’s probably working on a case,” Patty said. “We wouldn’t interrupt him. We’d just say hi.”
“Remember that woman who served us the tea in the china cups, and the Kool-Aid?” I pointed out. “With the dolls?”
“Margaret Ann,” she whispered. She still remembered the name, though neither of us had spoken it in a long time.
I remembered sitting with my sister on Margaret Ann’s flowered love seat watching cartoons, sipping from our bendy straws, the smoky-voiced woman singer on the stereo, and the look on Margaret Ann’s face when she and our father emerged from that other room. As much time as I spent thinking about Teddy these days, I myself had not experienced that kind of yearning by this point, and it would be years before I did. But I recognized it in my father and Margaret Ann.
“We should go home,” I told Patty. “Maybe after he’s finished visiting over here, he’ll stop by to see us.”
But we both knew this wasn’t going to happen, and we were right.
THE NIGHT AFTER THEY FOUND the body of Paula Fernandez, I dreamed of the Sunset Strangler. I had not seen Alison at school that day so I had not yet learned what few of the particulars they would have released to the press, but at night in my bed the scene played out for me, of the victim on the trail in the final moments of her life on earth.
Not a hiker type, the victim this time had come out to Samuel P. Taylor Park in search of her cat, who had jumped out the window of her car when she was stopped at a gas station in West Marin. She had been on her way to her overnight shift at a nursing home in San Anselmo and planned to drop the cat off at a vet’s to be fixed in the morning. She was late for work, but she couldn’t leave her cat.
In my dream, Paula stood on the path, not far from the entrance to the park, wearing her pink uniform and white nurse shoes. She was carrying a large black pocketbook and she had opened a tin of cat food pulled from a bag of groceries she had in the car, in the hopes that the scent might lure her pet in from wherever he’d wandered off.
Instead, the one she lured was the Sunset Strangler.
Lying in my narrow little bed that night with the sound of my sister’s steady breathing above me, I could feel the awful sensation coming over me again. I didn’t want it to happen, but I also wanted to learn something from this. These were the moments, I had come to believe, when I had a kind of access to details of the killings that nobody on the entire Marin Homicide Division possessed. It seemed to me I had an obligation to stay with the experience, however disturbing, in case it might reveal something that might help my father capture him.
I couldn’t see his face, only his back, standing in a grove of trees near a picnic table, with eucalyptus all around, and wet moss. Frogs in the brook, making their cheeping sound, and the last rays of sunlight slanting in through the trees.
She wondered if he’d seen her cat.
Pussy, he said. Nice pussy.
I like your uniform.
I knew what was coming next of course. If I had to see this, I wanted it to be more like a movie or a TV show—something a person would watch strictly as an observer, like Patty and me, wrapped in our blanket on the hillside, looking at the TV set through Helen’s window. I wanted to change the channel. Watch something different. Just about anything but this.
The look on his face must have told her what was happening, because she cried out.
Madre mia. Santos viene.
More Spanish—probably a prayer, though I couldn’t have said what, not knowing the language.
I wanted to jump out of bed, climb up the ladder and into the top bunk with my sister, but I didn’t. Even in my half-asleep state the thought occurred to me to look for something in the man that might assist my father in locating him.
The black loafers. Fat fingers wrapped around the length of wire. Somewhere off to the side, an animal was making noises in the leaves. The cat? Or maybe a dog.
But I couldn’t see his face. Now he was walking closer to the woman in the uniform, holding the wire stretched taut between his hands. Breathing hard. My . . . my . . . my . . . M . . . M . . . M . . . M . . . My Sharona.
The only way to stop it was to wake up, but not before I saw him place the tape over her eyes, reach into her purse, and take out a lipstick and a rosary.
One, he looped around her neck. With the other, he wrote on her skin—a word I’d seen in graffiti on the 101 underpass the other day, though I didn’t know the meaning.
Puta.
Chapter Twenty-one
The week before Christmas, the Sunset Strangler struck again. The victim was Tanya Pope, age twenty-one, a student teacher. She had been collecting moss specimens to use in a holiday project with her first graders, building terrariums as presents for their parents.
Our neighbors tried to keep up the holiday spirit. All around us, at every house on our street but ours, there were glowing Santa and reindeer figures out front and music wafting through the windows, and we could see Christmas trees blinking, with presents piled up underneath. People went around wearing Santa hats or fake antlers attac
hed to their heads, calling out “Merry Christmas” and passing out candy canes before slipping swiftly behind their doors and locking them.
The Saturday before Christmas, Jennifer Pollack organized a neighborhood caroling party. We knew our mother wouldn’t attend, but Patty and I dressed up in red and green (Patty wearing her Rudolph nose) and made our way to the Pollacks’ for the festivities.
Each person was supposed to bring a gift for something called a Yankee Swap. We’d looked around the house a long time for two items that could work, finally deciding to wrap a bottle of bath salts we found in the medicine cabinet and a pink picture frame my mother had gotten from her job a few Christmases back, with a picture of Jaclyn Smith in it, though we took out the picture and replaced it with a different one, of Mick Jagger.
You could tell everyone was trying to act festive in honor of the season, but it was hard—with the memory still fresh of the discovery of the young teacher, found not far from the place on the mountain where my sister and I had seen the naked people.
Karl Pollack was dispensing a drink called wassail. For the kids there was a separate bowl, the same basic drink without the liquor in it. Jennifer Pollack, wearing a sweater with holly berries stitched on the front and bells that jingled as she moved, passed out songbooks and Santa hats for everyone.
“Now when there is so much stress in our community seemed like a great time to let our neighbors know that we’re expecting a new baby,” she said. “We didn’t want to make a big deal about it until we were past the first trimester. But we figured our neighbors could use some good news.”
“So next summer it looks like you’ll have another babysitting client, Rachel,” Karl Pollack said to me.
It was raining hard that night, but Mr. Pollack had assembled a bunch of golf umbrellas to cover us as we made our way up the street, singing. At a few of the houses, children in pajamas stood by their parents as we sang. When we got to Helen’s house, she handed out homemade cookies.
“Take some of these to your father,” she said. “Judging from how he looks on television these days, he could use some meat on his bones.”
IN YEARS PAST, OUR MOTHER had always put up a small silver artificial tree, trimmed with a motley assortment of our homemade decorations—a pinecone elf I made during my one year as a Brownie, Patty’s Popsicle-stick star, and our two Baby’s First Christmas ornaments—but that year she hadn’t gotten around to it, and our father, who in years past had always taken us to the city to see the tree in Union Square, seemed almost bent over double under the weight of the unsolved crimes.
The week before Christmas there had been another demonstration in front of the Civic Center, demanding resolution in the Sunset Strangler case. (Did anyone really believe that this was not the goal?) Some of the protesters’ signs had even named our father as the reason why women were still getting murdered on the trails, as if he were part of some antiwoman conspiracy.
Looking at him that Christmas Eve, as he knelt on the floor with us while we hung up our stockings, it seemed to me that perhaps the voices of the women picketing outside the Civic Center had created some nightmare tape loop in his brain, mixed no doubt with the wailing of the mothers as he delivered the news about their murdered daughters, the imagined screams of the dying girls themselves. I knew about tape loops myself now—my visions of murders having become a nearly nightly event, and the Cat Stevens or Crosby, Stills and Nash albums I put on my record player wouldn’t drown them out. The song I heard now, whether they were playing it on the radio or not, was “My Sharona.” The images that were coming to me of the victims had gotten more clear and terrible, though except for the presence of the little dog in that one scene, I had never caught a glimpse of anything that might have served as a clue to finding the killer.
As hard a time as I was having finding peace of mind, I knew it was worse for our father. I had difficulty making out the words he spoke to our mother on his late-night visits, but I gathered he just about never slept anymore.
I knew him so well, I could feel how it must be for him. My father was a true romantic, the most gallant man I ever met. If he had lived in medieval Europe, he would have been a knight. As it was, the closest he could come to that was to be a police officer.
For a man who’d viewed himself all his life as a heroic protector of women, the steadily mounting numbers of victims and his own apparent impotence at apprehending the murderer (impotence, an interesting word there, it occurred to me, but that thought came years later) was about as close as there came for him to a vision of hell.
IT WAS JANUARY, AND I was sitting on the bed at Alison’s house with Alison and Soleil, watching the pink television and eating grilled-cheese sandwiches. Some magazine-style news program was devoting an entire hour to the story of the murdered girls. Their faces formed a collage on the screen—Brady Bunch–style—as, one by one, a somber voice spoke their names and ages. Then came a montage of more pictures and Super 8 footage from their childhoods, birthday parties, school graduations.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a police officer show up at your door to say they’ve found your daughter murdered?” the woman on the screen was saying. This would have been my father she was talking about of course. He carried the weight of those visits wherever he went now. The lightness I could remember, when he took the stairs to Margaret Ann’s two at a time, was gone from his step.
This mother might at first glance have appeared reasonably calm as she looked out from the television, but there was a shrillness to her voice—an unnatural tightness in her neck, and a look in her eyes as if she’d just stepped out of a dark closet into scorching sunlight—that made you recognize she was also probably about ten seconds away from screaming. The camera showed her sitting next to a table arrayed with framed photographs of her—Tanya Pope, the killer’s most recent victim.
“It’s time we got some law enforcement officers who know what they’re doing,” she said. “Six months of this, and they’re no closer to finding the killer than when this monster started.”
“Your father must feel shitty,” Alison said, reaching for another sugar-free gummy bear. “Being the one in charge and all.”
“The killer never leaves any clues,” I told her. “Other than, you know, what’s inside the girls.” Meaning his semen, though that was not a word I’d ever spoken out loud.
Neither of my parents had told me about that, but I knew about the rape part from what I read in the newspaper about the murders, and what people said—and more and more, from my visions. Lately, what I saw in my visions were not only the murders, but the rapes too.
Only the year before, our gym teacher had sat us down to show us a movie called Our Changing Bodies, with animated drawings of a pair of ovaries, like a couple of bendable straws, and a woman’s uterus as it changed over the days of a menstrual cycle. Accompanied by an upbeat sound track, the movie featured sprightly cartoons of sperm and egg meeting up like two old friends in some unnamed place that could have been the hallway at school and merging into something that became a baby.
From the moment of your birth, the voice said, your body holds a treasure chest of unfertilized eggs. Your lifetime supply. Getting your period is the sign the eggs are now capable of fertilization. Your body can make a baby now.
For every other girl in my class, getting her period was old news at this point. I had been waiting so long now that I’d concluded there was something permanently wrong with my body.
“At least you’ll never be one of those teenage mothers,” Patty said, trying as always to look on the bright side. “If we were Catholic, you could sign up to be a nun.
“And anyway,” she went on, “I never saw what was so great about getting blood in your underpants. If you ask me, you’re lucky.”
I didn’t know what I was anymore, except different. The Sunset Strangler killings had begun right around the time all the other girls started talking about their periods, and in an unsettling way those two even
ts—the murders of all those young women and my own anxious anticipation of blood—were linked for me. It seemed as if fertility brought danger.
At this point in my life, I hadn’t witnessed much in the way of tender or loving relationships between men and women, or boys and girls. The Pollacks down the street seemed friendly enough with each other, but as with the Brady parents, and the parents on most of the shows my sister and I had observed through other people’s picture windows, their relationship seemed to be about taking care of their house and their yard, their son, and the baby on the way—going to work, going to the supermarket—with no visible evidence of passion. No intimation of sex happening, though Jennifer Pollack’s pregnancy was proof it did.
When Karl Pollack paid me my babysitting wages at the end of the evening, he’d walk me the three doors down Morning Glory Court to our front walk and stand on the sidewalk to watch until I was safely inside before returning to his own house. I used to think it was almost like the end of a date, or at least the way I imagined a date might be, minus the good-night kiss. One time, just before reaching my house, Mr. Pollack’s hand had flicked at a bug and grazed my chest. (Or maybe he meant to do that? Maybe there was no bug. He just wanted to touch me.) The picture came to me then, of Karl Pollack, whipping me around to face him and bending over to kiss me hard on the mouth. Not like Teddy Bascom, but deep and long, and in the picture, I was kissing him back.
After he was gone, I sometimes tried to imagine what might happen after he got back to his own house. I pictured the two of them together—Karl and Jennifer, naked. I wanted to imagine a nice picture, for a change, but my mind came up blank. All that came to me were the horses mating on the hillside and howling coyotes; the sounds Alison’s boyfriend, Chase, made, that could be heard emanating from inside Alison’s bedroom; and Teddy, splayed across the beanbag, holding on to my hair like the reins of a pony and panting. Maybe some of these people were enjoying themselves, but if you didn’t know differently, the noises could have been those of a murder victim.
After Her: A Novel Page 16
