Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “She’s pretty enough. Not all of them were . . . or . . . are beautiful.”

  There was a pause in the line and Peggy’s heart raced.

  “You still there?”

  “I’m here. Just another snap, crackle, and pop in the electrical wires here.”

  It was a joke, but Peggy didn’t laugh. Ted’s nearly literal gallows humor was lost on her. She couldn’t imagine a world without him. He understood her so much better than anyone ever could. His letters were pure poetry. Better than Rod McKuen, she once said in a compliment that Ted ate up.

  “Rod’s good, thank you.”

  “You’re better.”

  “No, no, you are the best. You always will be.”

  Another crackle in the line.

  “Ted?”

  “Yeah, baby,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “You are the best,” she repeated.

  “There will always be others to follow in my footsteps, Peg. I’d like to brag and say that I’m the best, but I’m told over and over by the matchbook university shrinks that they know better. That I’m an aberration, a deviant.”

  “Deviant means different than the others,” she said. “And different can be a very beautiful thing. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Have to go now. Will be looking at your picture and thinking of you tonight.”

  Peggy sat in the car looking at the slow-moving Puyallup River wondering if there was anything more she could have done for Ted. That was the last time they’d spoken. A week later, she’d watched the live feeds from Florida showing the crowd gathering there to celebrate his execution. She wanted to be with his parents on the other side of Tacoma. She’d met Ted’s mother a couple of times at the grocery store. She’d pretended not to know who Louise Bundy was. Peggy was a shopper looking for a ripe watermelon. Louise was a small woman with thick lenses and quiet, shy demeanor. She barely looked up when she told Peggy to sniff the stem end of the melon.

  “That’ll give you a good idea,” she said. “Don’t bother pressing it to see if it is soft. The skin is pretty thick and it really isn’t a good indicator.”

  “You’re very kind,” Peggy said as Louise moved on down the aisle. She wanted to add that “your son is a great man, like a great misunderstood artist.” But she held it inside. She wasn’t sure if Ted’s mother would really understand, if she really knew the son that she’d once pretended was a little brother was a man of importance. Peggy thought of running after her and thanking her again, just to get a glimpse into her eyes. Ted’s eyes. But she didn’t. She held back. Way back.

  A few days after Ted’s execution, Peggy met a man at a bar on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma. She never knew his name. Never asked. Three months later, Peggy was showing. She ran into Susie’s mother, Anna Sherman, outside the Fred Meyer store on Nineteenth.

  Mrs. Sherman’s eyes landed on Peggy’s swelling abdomen.

  “Honey, I didn’t know you were expecting.”

  Peggy beamed. “I’m due in the fall.”

  “I didn’t know . . . you got married.”

  “Oh, I didn’t. I don’t need a husband to be a mother.”

  “I guess that’s very modern of you,” Anna said. “I was always glad I had a husband.”

  Peggy patted her stomach and pushed her cart toward her car. The miracle inside her was always to be hers, and hers alone. Her son was going to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  He was going to be the greatest of them all.

  Donna Howell showed up at Tacoma General Hospital the morning after her grandson was born. She came without balloons or flowers. Instead, the former grocery checker brought with her a kind of palpable bitterness that permeated every puff of her smoky breath. Indeed, Donna Howell was one of those women who’d thought she’d done everything right with the raising of her children, but she’d been repeatedly disappointed by each and every one of them. Peggy was at the top of that list, or at the bottom. The middle, too. Donna Howell considered Peggy a heartbreakingly sorry excuse for a daughter. That is, if she’d deigned to waste a piece of her heart on her.

  Which, not surprisingly to any of those who observed her, Donna Howell seldom did.

  Some women are not cut out to be mothers. They don’t have the lovey-dovey component in their personality that makes 2 AM feedings and projectile vomiting forgotten with the baby’s innocent smile, first laugh, steps.

  Donna was one of those women.

  “You’re never going to lose that weight, Peg,” she said, bursting into the hospital room where her daughter had labored for seventeen hours, alone. She looked over at the new mother in the next bed and zipped the curtain shut without even so much as an acknowledgment of her presence.

  “Hi, Mother,” Peggy said, barely looking up from her bed adjacent to the window. She never called her Mom, or Mama, or anything so cozy or familiar. It was always Mother, more a biological term than anything familial.

  “Did the baby’s father show up?” Donna asked, her voice as cold and sharp as an ice pick.

  Peggy looked out the window, searching the gray Tacoma horizon for something with eyes that brimmed with tears. Anything.

  “Figured,” Donna said, her reflection spreading over the window like an oil slick. “You are so stupid. Now, fat and stupid and with a bastard boy to boot. Your life just couldn’t get any better, could it?”

  Peggy turned to face her mother, holding her emotion as tightly as she could. “Nice to see you, too, Mother.”

  Donna unzipped her black-and-white nylon tracksuit jacket. “Well, where is he?”

  “He’s in the infant care unit, if you must know. There were complications.”

  “Life is full of complications, Peg. You’re an expert at creating them.”

  Saying the shortened version of her name brought back years of bad, awful, humiliating memories. Donna used to introduce her daughter as Piggy or Pig to strangers, and then pretend that she’d said it correctly.

  “Oh, you misheard me. I said Peggy, not Piggy!” And then she’d laugh. Except it was never funny. Not to the sad-eyed little girl who ate too much and knew she was a little overweight. Nor was it funny to the audience of her mother’s pretend non-joke.

  Peggy did what she’d always done to survive. She changed the subject.

  “Aren’t going to ask what’s wrong with your grandson?” she asked.

  Donna slithered across the room and perched on her daughter’s bedside. “I asked. He’s going to be fine.”

  Peggy brightened a little. Mother asked. She must care some. At least a little bit.

  Donna looked around and smiled. No flowers. Good. No cards. Even better.

  “What are you going to name him?” she asked.

  Peggy’s eyes met her mother’s. “I was thinking of naming him after his father, Theodore.”

  A look of exaggerated puzzlement came over the older woman. “Theodore? That’s a hifalutin name for a bastard.” Donna stopped herself for a second, the wheels turning. “That must mean you know who the father is, which I suppose is a minor miracle for a slut.”

  Peggy’s face reddened. Her mother always knew where to stick the knife.

  “Get out of here,” Peggy said.

  Donna shrugged it off. She tugged at her tracksuit jacket as if it needed straightening.

  “Aren’t you the brash little bitch, telling me to get out when I came all the way here to see you and your baby, my bastard grandson?”

  “Leave or I’ll ask the nurse to call security, Mother. I don’t need this. When you said you were coming, I don’t know, I thought just maybe you’d finally be what I wanted you to be. For once.”

  “That’s funny coming from you. I thought you’d be what I wanted you to be—a decent daughter.”

  “Decent? Now you’re almost making me laugh. You’ve had more live-in boyfriends than anyone in a trailer park, Mother—that’s right, more live-ins than anyone in a trailer park. That’s saying a lot about you, Mother.”

&n
bsp; “You disgust me,” Donna said. “You always have. Your father was no good and you carry his poisoned blood.”

  “He left you, remember that? He left you!”

  “I was glad he left. He’s dead to me. Just like you.”

  A nurse entered the room, but backed off a little before finally speaking. The atmosphere was tense, brittle.

  “Is everything all right here?” she asked.

  “We’re fine,” Peggy said, her eyes riveted to her mother’s. “My mother was just leaving.”

  “Oh . . . did she want to hold her grandson?” she asked.

  Donna looked at the nurse, a young woman with strawberry blond hair and freckles like a seabird’s egg. “I don’t want to hold him or see him. My daughter, you see, is an unmarried woman and the baby is a product of one of her many one-night stands.”

  “Good-bye, Mother,” Peggy said in her calmest tone, refusing to take the bait.

  “All right then,” the nurse said, opening the door and motioning for Donna to exit.

  Donna, her face tight with anger, did something remarkable just then: She said nothing more. No parting shot. No cruel remark to make Peggy feel lower than the bugs that crawl in the darkest depths of the forest floor. Not another word.

  “Are you all right?” the nurse said as the door closed.

  Peggy nodded. “I am. I’m fine. My mother and I have a complicated relationship.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” the nurse said, surveying the physician’s charts.

  “I guess so,” Peggy said. The door was open a crack for a little sympathy, but she didn’t seek any more of it. Her mother was her worst enemy. Her mother was her tormenter. Her mother never once gave her a drop of human kindness. Yet she didn’t hold that completely against her. Her mother was all she had.

  “Have you named your baby?” she asked.

  Peggy brightened a bit. Her baby. That was someone wonderful. He was only a few hours old, but already he was the best thing that had ever happened to her. “No. I was thinking of a name, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “What name are you thinking of now? There’s no rush, of course. I mean, it is nice to have a name before you leave the hospital. It helps with the paperwork, you know.”

  “I had thought of Theodore,” Peggy said slowly as she measured her words.

  The nurse didn’t say anything right away. The hesitation clearly bothered Peggy.

  “You don’t like it, either,” Peggy said, pushing the button to lower her head in the motorized bed. The hydraulics rumbled.

  “It isn’t that,” the nurse answered. “I dated a guy named Ted once and it wasn’t the best experience of my life. Kind of a control freak who thought he was better than anyone else. But that’s got nothing to do with your naming your little boy. Just a reaction. Sorry.”

  Peggy wondered if it was her Ted that the nurse was indicating. Her heart beat a little faster and the monitor at her bedside began to pulse more rapidly. Certainly there were plenty of Teds around Tacoma, but even so the idea of another girl being involved with her Ted was a painfully sore subject. She wanted to be the only one for him, the only one he ever needed. Indeed, the only one who ever really understood his deep, deep hurt.

  “Was that here in town?” Peggy finally asked. Her voice was soft and a little shaky. The monitor’s light quickened.

  The nurse set down the chart, looked at the monitor, and shook her head. “Oh no, back in Detroit. Just kind of funny how names carry the weight of past experiences—good and bad.”

  Peggy turned toward the window again, looking out and thinking.

  “My mother was dead set against Theodore, too.”

  The monitor slowed.

  “None of my business, but she seems like a very negative woman. She probably wouldn’t like any name you selected. I’m thinking out loud, of course. And I have no standing here. Just putting it out there. A lot of families pressure each other, you know. You’d be surprised at how many change their minds on the names they’d once thought were perfect.”

  Peggy nodded. “Understood. Thank you. When can I see my son? When can I see Jeremy?”

  The nurse smiled. “I like that name,” she said. “Let me ask the doctor if your son can come into your room.”

  “He’s better?”

  “He’s just fine. We were just keeping an eye on him. Rough delivery, but I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Peggy allowed a smile to return to the pretty blond nurse. She liked the name Jeremy. And as much as Peggy hated her mother, she didn’t want to make her a greater enemy. Jeremy might need family someday. The boy didn’t need his father’s name to prove a damn thing. Being Ted’s son was greater than a mere label.

  Outside Peggy’s room, the nurse met up with her supervisor, an African American woman of about fifty who had been working at Tacoma General for almost three decades.

  “How’s she doing?” the older woman asked.

  “Better, no thanks to her mother,” the younger nurse said.

  The supervisor ran her glasses down the bridge of her nose. “Was that the jogger?” she asked.

  The blonde looked on as a woman and her husband walked by dragging the IV unit along the gleaming floor way toward the nursery. “Sorry?”

  “The woman in the black tracksuit?” the supervisor asked.

  “Yeah. What a bitch she was. So mean to her.” The blond nurse hesitated, thinking about the tail end of the encounter she’d witnessed with the mother and the conversation she’d had with Peggy about naming her son Theodore. “Weird thing about it was that her mother reamed her and Peggy, the patient, just took it. Barely reacted. But when we started talking about my boyfriend, Ted, her heart rate escalated big time.”

  For the first time, the older woman looked half-interested. “Your boyfriend? Didn’t know you had one.”

  She shook her head. “That’s just it. I don’t. But Peggy’s vitals shot up when I mentioned his name. It was like she was jealous or something when she had no cause to be. My Ted was a doofus I dumped back in Detroit. You know, before I came out here to this lovely job.”

  The charge nurse looked down at the paperwork assigned to Peggy Howell. She ignored the younger woman’s dig about the job. As if Detroit was some prize, after all.

  “Says the father’s name is Theodore Bundy.”

  The younger woman nodded as she processed the information. “Name seems familiar,” she said.

  The supervisor pushed the paper back into the folder. “She probably made it up. She’s not wearing a ring and she isn’t married, anyway. I don’t know why these young girls bother. A few years ago they did the right thing and gave them up for adoption. Better for the kid. I mean, most of the time.”

  “Her mother was so mean to her,” the blonde said. “I mean really, really mean.”

  “Some mothers are,” she said.

  Before passwords and Internet sites, some men kept porn physically hidden away from their wives and girlfriends. Stashes were kept in private places where a man, and some women, could pleasure themselves without fear of discovery. Peggy had a stash like that. It wasn’t porn, however. It was her bundle of Ted letters. Jeremy had seen her put them under the false bottom of a dresser in the guest room upstairs.

  He read them one time, looking over his father’s words with both reverence and disgust.

  Dear Peggy,

  I don’t know the song you mentioned in the last letter, but I do like the message of it. I’m doing fine. I have been getting all of your letters, but don’t have the time to answer them. Just not enough time, I guess. The days are filled with all kinds of legal wrangling between the prison staff, the lawyers. Barbara Walters wants to come and talk to me, and I told the warden to tell her to take a hike. I don’t want to be put up on TV until I’m exonerated. If I go on TV now, they’ll just try to trip me up. A couple of authors have tried to get ahold of me to write a book about my experiences, and I might talk to them. My story isn’t what the world thinks it
is. You know the truth. You are the only one who knows the real me. My mom thinks she knows me, but she doesn’t. Not really. Anyway, I was wondering if you could send me a picture of Tricia. You’ve told me so much about her that I’d like to see a photo if you can manage one. I bet you’re a thousand times prettier than her, but I’d still like to put a face to the name. Don’t put her name on the photograph, but yours. Bye for now.

  peace, Ted

  Dear Peggy,

  I know you understand me. You understand my place in history. I know that. I know you understand that my cases are more intricate; more involved than someone like that piddly-ass Boston Strangler. Mine involved girls all over the country. Look at the TV, for God’s sake. I’m as big as the Beatles and they were bigger than Jesus Christ. I’m not a braggart. I just want some recognition, some confirmation that I am the best at something. I don’t know for certain, but it might be fair to say that Michelangelo or Leonardo were the world’s greatest artists. Is it that much of a stretch, Peggy, to acknowledge that I too have held some great place in this world? Everyone wants to talk to me. Figure me out. They want to cut out my goddamn brain to see what makes me tick. They ask me if I wet the bed when I was a little kid. They asked me if Johnnie gave me the belt. Do you think they’d pick apart some other kind of genius? No. I’ll tell you what. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare. Sometimes, Peggy, greatness just has to be accepted, appreciated, and revered for what it is.

  By then Ted had jumped onto the genius bandwagon, and although what he was writing to her would have offended most of the world, Peggy didn’t care. She loved him. She agreed with him. She understood above all others that something could be beautiful and very, very dark. If Ted Bundy was some kind of an evil genius, she was content being part of his life. She felt a charge, a thrill, at his words. She felt love.

  If Ted had been consumed by murder “twenty-four hours a day,” as the lead investigator in the Washington cases had said so pointedly as the hours ticked toward the electric chair, Peggy had found herself consumed by Ted. There was no water, no air. No food. No sleep. All that existed in her world was Ted and the hope that if the law did what it had set out to do that his legacy of greatness would live on in some very real, tangible way.