Except in very rare instances, a thirteen-year-old girl will experience this power only for the briefest period—a few months, a few days even, maybe only once in her life ever. But at some point—between the ages of twelve and thirteen, or thirteen and fourteen, when so much is new and there are chemicals coursing through her body as powerful as drugs, a brilliant and blinding flash of wild unexplainable and unshakable insight may come to her, with greater intensity than she will ever experience again over the lifetime ahead, more than it will when this same girl has reached the age that is commonly believed to signal maturity and wisdom. (Whatever that age is, if we ever get there. At which point, nothing will be as clear or absolute as it was at age thirteen.)
Now here comes a problem: as much as this girl can see things that are there, and real, below the surface—hear words spoken only inside other people’s heads, feel what they know, and what they plan to do about it—she will also see things that are nothing more than the creations of her extraordinarily active, hyperactive, thirteen-year-old girl’s imagination.
Sometimes this insight she seizes on will be dead-on-the-money accurate. Sometimes, it’s just dead wrong. Either way, she’ll hold to her belief with the same wild and unyielding faith that never in the history of the universe was anything more true or real or important than this. She holds fast to her convictions about those moments when her instincts reveal what she believes to be the truth, and—with equal tenacity—to convictions that are wild and baseless. She cannot tell the difference.
I know these things because I was such a girl myself once, the year of the Sunset Strangler murders, and it was my being that age, at that moment, that explains for me how it was I came to hear the voice of the killer as I did, and why it is possible that I was more right than wrong about a great deal of what I imagined him to be thinking and doing.
This was how it was I came to believe, with my whole heart, that the Sunset Strangler was none other than my sister Patty’s beloved employer and friend—a gentle man with the surprising habit of liking to dress up as a woman now and then. How did I come to believe this with such ferocious conviction? I was a thirteen-year-old girl whose mind had been overtaken by thoughts of a killer, and needed, more than anything else at the time, to make him go away. Not even for my own sake, or for the women of Marin County, but because I recognized that my father’s failure to locate the killer was slowly destroying him, I had to do something.
Being thirteen, this would mean something dramatic. So when a real suspect failed to reveal himself, I designated a stand-in. I put a face onto a faceless demon, for the purpose of eradicating him. The face I chose was that of Albert Armitage.
KNOWING SHE WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT—AND that even if she did, it would make her sadder than I cared to contemplate—I did not share with my sister my revelation that Mr. Armitage was the Sunset Strangler. In our whole lives as sisters, this was the first time I ever kept a secret from Patty. She’d find out soon enough, when they arrested him. But I didn’t want to be the one to break the news.
I came up with a plan: part one, part two. The first: luring Mr. Armitage to the mountain, where I’d confront him. The second: making sure it was Detective Anthony Torricelli and no one else who took the credit for the rescue and arrest that would follow.
I needed my father to be strong and powerful again. I would create a scenario that made this possible.
RETURNING TO THESE EVENTS, MORE than thirty years later, with all the knowledge of how life works now in my grasp—or closer anyway—it is difficult to reconstruct how I could ever have supposed this plan to be feasible. The door closed, long ago, to the room I inhabited when I was thirteen. And of course I am speaking, when I say this, not of the nearly airless little place my sister and I did our sleeping, and our staying awake—the room where we played our records and tried on each other’s clothes, talked about sharks and God, fashion models and basketball players, asked our questions of the Ouija board and read out loud from my book of women’s sexual fantasies—but of the state of mind I lived in then. I simply know, it was a place in which magical thinking occurred, and the lines were not simply blurred between the feasible and the crazy, but nonexistent.
Believing as I did that the killer (this would be Mr. Armitage) must by now be feeling desperate to get back on the mountain for fresh prey (after the long rainy season), I would set a trap for him—lure him back out on the mountain, out in the open, where his true and terrible nature could be revealed, and my father could apprehend him at last.
A trap required bait. That would be me. I would arrange to be in a specified place, and arrange for Mr. Armitage to meet me. When he got there—or within minutes of his arrival (seconds, preferably)—I would have made sure my father showed up, gun drawn, ready to snap on the handcuffs.
My father would be restored then to his old identity as the hero and protector of women that we all needed him to be. Nobody needing this more than my father himself.
I recognized a problem here. The mountain—and the miles of trails that had proven to be within the range of the Sunset Strangler’s territory—was too big a place to lie in wait and hope the killer would just show up. I had to narrow down the territory. Identify a spot. Invite him there.
Some people—those over age thirteen anyway—would have pointed out an additional problem with my plan. (One problem? A million, more like it.) Assuming I was right, and that Mr. Armitage was the killer—and assuming, furthermore, that I might be successful in persuading him to depart from his usual modus operandi and come instead to a designated spot, to encounter a person he’d never laid eyes on (or supposed he hadn’t, anyway)—what did I think I was going to do when he actually turned up there? How could I believe that I, an eighty-eight-pound girl, could vanquish an adult male who’d already proven to be a ruthless killer?
I had an answer for this one—as much of an answer as my thirteen-year-old self required: I’d have my father there. My strong, all-powerful, magic father. All anyone needed to be safe in this world. Though just to be sure, I’d bring along Jennifer Pollack’s pink revolver.
I SKIPPED SCHOOL THAT DAY.
I knew when Jennifer Pollack took Karl Jr. for his walk. Ten thirty, every morning. Right after Sesame Street, and before his nap.
The Pollacks locked their front door now, but not the back. In the time it took Jennifer to push the stroller to the end of Morning Glory Court and back again, I had managed to make my way into the Pollacks’ bedroom, locate the revolver in the bedside table drawer, stick it in my pocket, and leave. I was back at my own house when Jennifer Pollack returned home, with time to spare.
UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, IT WOULD have been a twenty-minute bike ride to the mall, but with my heart pounding this way, I got there in ten. I made my purchase, pedaled home, ripped off the packaging.
I took out the Polaroid camera I hadn’t used for months now. Three exposures left on the roll, but for the picture I had in mind, I needed only one.
It had been a long time since I’d stuck anything new in our scrapbook, but this one merited its own new page. No caption necessary, just the photograph.
To be sure my father would find it, I left the scrapbook open on my bed. Now, in addition to featuring an assortment of photographs of its subject—walking his dog, collecting mail, hosing down the stones in his yard, and exchanging a greeting with the meter reader—my book documenting the Mysterious Life of Albert Armitage would highlight a new and crucial element to his story. Some people might not grasp the significance of the photograph I’d pasted in, but I knew my father would.
It was a picture of shoelaces. Multiple pairs. As many pairs, if a person cared to count, as there’d been murder victims.
DEAR ALBERT, MY NOTE BEGAN.
(Rather than risk revealing my identity through telltale handwriting, I employed the manner I’d seen kidnappers and blackmailers use in movies and TV shows that involved notes designed to conceal the author’s identity: cutting letters out of magazines
and pasting them on blank paper to spell out their message.)
I know your secret. We need to talk.
Come to the mountain Saturday.
Meet at rusty truck.
Near place where they put on the shows. You know what I’m talking about.
3 pm. If you don’t come, I’m telling.
That was about it, except for the name at the bottom. What to put there? I could use Farrah of course. He wouldn’t know that one. Or Miss X.
In the end I chose the simplest option.
Signed, Anonymous.
I PLACED THE NOTE IN an envelope and sealed it. Then I walked to the cul-de-sac at the end of Morning Glory Court. The street was empty, as it generally was these days. No one out to see.
I put the envelope in the mailbox marked “Armitage.”
Walking home, I understood: the whole world was about to change. For so long, everything had been going wrong. Now I was going to fix it.
I KNEW MY FATHER WOULD be at his office that Saturday, because he was always at his office now. He never went anywhere anymore, except when another murder happened, and he went to the crime scene. And to our house, in the middle of the night, to drink and smoke and talk with our mother. Patty was at basketball practice, and my mother was sure to be at the library all afternoon.
I was right, my father was at the office that day. The secretary who answered the phone said he was busy, but when I told her it couldn’t wait, she put me through.
“Farrah,” he said. My father knew I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important.
“I think he’s after me,” I said, in a voice that sounded as if I’d been running. “The Sunset Strangler.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He said he was coming to get me,” I said. It wasn’t all that hard, sounding scared. My heart had not stopped pounding since I’d set my plan in motion.
“Talk slow now, honey. Catch your breath. You need to tell me everything that happened.”
“He called the house,” I said. “He said he saw me with you on TV, on the news. He said he knows what I look like now. He said he’s coming to get me.”
“You’re sure about this?”
For a few seconds, I hesitated. I could not remember a time I’d lied to my father.
Later, he’d understand why. Once it was over, and he’d arrested the killer—when everyone was happy again, and saying what an amazing job he’d done—I’d tell him the truth. Just my father, no one else.
I had to get you to see it was Mr. Armitage, I’d explain to him. I knew you wouldn’t believe me, unless I got you there to see for yourself.
He couldn’t be mad then. He’d thank me. He’d say he was sorry he ever failed to believe my visions. Until then, though, I had to give him my story. Now came more:
“He said he was teaching you a lesson,” I told my father, still breathing hard. “He knows where we live. He’s coming here. He said he’ll make you sorry.
“He said he’s outside the house right now. Right now at this very moment, he’s watching me.”
There was a silence on the other end, but not for long.
“I don’t know what this is about, Rachel,” my father said. All playfulness gone from his voice. “I’ll be right over. Don’t go anywhere. I’m coming.”
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS THE one thing I hadn’t planned on. Maybe it was the excitement inside my body that did this—my heart racing and my insides clamping down into a hard, tight ball. All of a sudden, there it was, the thing that hadn’t happened all those months, the thing that I’d been waiting for. Blood coming out of me as if I was hemorrhaging.
I reached my hand under my shorts to touch the place I felt it, the warm damp spot. My fingers, when I looked at them, were red.
I stuck a wad of toilet paper in my underpants—all I had time for. I scrawled a note, in a style of handwriting I hoped would suggest that it had been written in a state of desperation: Help. Come. Truck. Then I was out the door and running—as fast as I could up the side of the mountain, with the gun in the pocket of my old red sweatshirt. No time to think about the blood on my shorts, or how the victim of a serial killer might know in advance where it was the serial killer meant to take her, or what I’d say to him when I got there. I did not consider what I’d do if the killer was there and the man I counted on to stop the killer wasn’t, or how to release the safety on Jennifer Pollack’s gun. I only knew that everything would be okay once my father got there. He’d know what to do.
IT WAS ONLY AFTER IT was over that I learned this: after he read the letter left in his mailbox, signed by Anonymous, Mr. Armitage had done something totally different from anything I would have expected. He went to the police.
To Mr. Armitage, it had not seemed out of the question that this document, with its glued-on letters cut out from old issues of magazines and flyers from newspapers had been written by the Sunset Strangler himself.
It would have been hard for anyone (the police, or Mr. Armitage) to fathom why a middle-aged man might be the recipient of such a letter from the Sunset Strangler, of course—given he did not come even close to fitting the profile of one of the killer’s victims. Maybe Mr. Armitage believed it had been during one of his late-night walks with Petra through our neighborhood in that polka-dot dress of his that he had caught the eye of the killer, who had then set his sights on meeting the mystery woman in the cherry-trimmed hat. Stranger things had happened, perhaps, though it might be hard to know when.
But other scenarios were also possible. More likely, perhaps. That morning, at the exact time I’d called my father’s office, and heard his secretary say that he was busy, my father was in fact sitting at his desk across from none other than the Mysterious Albert Armitage. Who had just finished laying out for him the story of the anonymous letter, raising his belief that this letter may also have been the handiwork of a young person. Possibly someone who knew a certain secret about his behavior and meant to use it to manipulate or even blackmail him.
Instead of giving in to this kind of intimidation, Mr. Armitage had made the decision to explain to my father in clear and straightforward terms the nature of his own secret habit of dressing up in women’s clothing now and then, and—on increasingly rare occasions—walking around the neighborhood that way.
“It doesn’t hurt anyone,” Mr. Armitage told my father, evidently. “It’s not against the law.”
My father, fair man that he was, agreed that this was so.
“Back in North Beach, when I was a kid, I knew a boy, Vinny Marzano, who liked to put on his mother’s brassieres now and then,” my father said. “You know how many kids Vinny’s got now? Seven.”
At the moment I had called his office, my father had not yet worked his way through to the conclusion that the anonymous letter lying in front of him on the desk at that very moment had been authored by his own older daughter. But he was getting there.
AFTER HIS MEETING WITH ALBERT Armitage—and his call from me—my father made the trip to Morning Glory Court of course, and he didn’t waste any time getting there. With Patty and my mother gone, he had let himself in the house. It didn’t take him long to locate the clue I’d laid out for him—the scrapbook bearing the name of the man with whom he had been talking, less than half an hour before, concerning the anonymous letter. And the message spelling out where he might find me.
It took my father even less time, after that, to understand that he was witnessing the evidence of a not very successful plan on the part of his older daughter to frame a man for murder, who had done nothing more than put on a polka-dot dress now and then.
His daughter was in trouble all right. But not because a serial killer was after her. She was in trouble with him.
IT WAS JUST BEFORE TWO o’clock when I reached the rusted-out truck body where my letter had instructed Mr. Armitage to meet me. There’d been a lot of brush sprouting up since I’d been here last on one of my adventures with Patty, but it also appeared that other people besides m
e (teenagers looking for a spot to have sex probably) had been here recently. The weeds in one spot, at least, were mashed down enough to make it easier getting in the rusted cab of the truck. The door had disappeared long before, but someone had draped an old shower curtain over the top.
How long did I sit there? Twenty minutes possibly? Two hours? To calm myself, I thought about the time I’d come here with my father and Patty all those years back, when he taught us how to use the BB gun, and other times with only my sister, when we’d huddled in the cab, reading My Secret Garden or her favorite, The Golden Treasury of Beloved Animal Stories.
There was a Coke can on the floor of the truck—what remained of the floor anyway—that seemed to have been left here not that long ago, given that there was still a little Coke in it. Also fast-food wrappers, a bunch of empty Spam tins and plastic containers that had once held chocolate pudding, a microwave cookbook, and a couple of catalogs. (Odd combination: L.L.Bean and Victoria’s Secret.) Under the seat, someone had stashed an old jacket that said Goodyear Tire, and a pair of socks, almost as if they camped out here on occasion. Patty and I always wanted to do that ourselves, but as laissez-faire as our mother was, the idea of us camping out all night on the mountain—even before the killings started—would have been a little much even for her.
Sitting there now, awaiting the arrival of the man I believed to be the Sunset Strangler—and the arrival of my father, to perform the rescue and arrest—I ran my hand over the remains of the steering wheel. In the past, Patty and I used to try and imagine how this truck had ended up here in the first place—inventing theories to answer the question. Patty’s were always hopeless. As good as she was at playing games if I made them up, she had no talent for creating fiction of any kind. She was too attached to the truth.
After Her: A Novel Page 21
