“She made a point of telling me she wasn’t one of those women. You know, the kind that fall in love with an inmate.”
“No, she’s not in love with him. But she’s grown obsessed with trying to get his execution stayed. More so than Walter, according to his lawyer. He said it’s possible she’s acting alone, without Walter’s knowledge.”
Eliza shook her head. The letter’s style, its cadences—those had been pure Walter.
“She wouldn’t have known me, by a photo. And I don’t see how she could have learned my married name. Walter wrote that he saw the photo, that he recognized me.” I’d know you anywhere. “Is this woman, Barbara, black?”
“It didn’t occur to me to ask. Why?”
“She didn’t sound black. But a Baltimore city schoolteacher and…” Her voice trailed off from embarrassment.
Peter smiled, shook a playful finger at her. “Are you racial profiling now, Eliza? Assuming a woman with an unusual name has to be black?”
“No, no,” she protested. “It was the detail about teaching in city schools—”
Peter started laughing.
“—teaching in the schools and being swayed to the issue of prisoners’ rights, despite being attacked.” But she was laughing now, too, unafraid of being exposed. She had never really understood the old saying “safe as houses,” but it described how she felt with Peter. Safe, solid, loved unconditionally. They had been a couple, an official couple, for six months before she told him about Walter. It had started with an argument about sleeping with the windows open. A reasonable request, on Peter’s part—the New England spring, late as ever, had finally delivered its first perfect night, and they lived on the third floor of a ramshackle apartment building favored by students. But she had been adamant, oddly adamant, growing angry and tearful. Awed by this obstinacy in the otherwise pliant, easygoing Eliza, Peter had yielded. The next morning, over waffles at O’Rourke’s, she had apologized. It had not been her intent to explain herself further, but she couldn’t stop. The story tumbled out, as if she had never told it before. And, in some ways, she hadn’t. Yes, she had testified. Yes, she had been deposed, interviewed repeatedly by various official sorts. Debriefed, in a sense, by her own parents, who also sent her to a gentle therapist.
But Eliza had never told the story of her own volition, and to use the parlance of Peter’s future career, she buried the lead: “When I was fifteen, a man kind of abducted me,” she began. “He thought I had seen something he had done, that I could identify him. Which was funny because when I was fifteen, all grown-ups looked alike to me, you know? I didn’t notice him, and I never could have described him. But he took me.”
Peter had not rushed in with questions. This would be his trademark as a reporter, in the years to come. Peter, Eliza had heard his colleagues say, was the master of the pause, silences that seemed designed to be filled with confidences.
“I was with him five weeks. Actually, thirty-nine days. Five weeks, four days. One day shy of the flood in the Bible. I never thought forty days and forty nights was that long, when I was in Sunday school. I’d think, ‘It’s only a little more than a month.’ But it can be a really long time.”
The waffles had a rich blueberry sauce on top. Eliza, who normally cleaned her plate, began mashing the tines of her fork into them, flattening them, eliminating their grids.
“Toward the end, he took another girl. But that sparked a huge manhunt, and the police found us. But not before she died.”
“She died,” Peter echoed. “You mean—he killed her?”
Eliza nodded. “It wasn’t the first time, although no one knows how many girls he killed. He was burying a girl when I stumbled on him, in the park that ran near our old house. Some people say he may have killed as many as a dozen girls in the years before he was caught.”
Eliza waited, almost holding her breath. Peter did not ask: “Why didn’t he kill you?” Instead, he asked: “How were you rescued?”
She almost said: “I’m not sure I was.” But she was not melodramatic that way and she had no doubt that she had, in fact, been rescued. “It was pretty anticlimactic. He ran a red light and just started babbling to the police officer. It turned out that a clerk in Piggly Wiggly had seen us in the store that morning, thought we looked odd, and called the police.”
“What did she notice that no one else had seen all that time? Were you never in public?”
She did not want to lie to Peter, or mislead him, but nor could she tell him everything. “It’s funny, what people don’t see. He had cut my hair—god, he had given me this horrible haircut, it made me cry—and while I didn’t look like a boy, which was what he intended, I certainly didn’t look like the photo of me that was circulating. And I was scared of him, I didn’t mouth off or try to do anything to draw attention to us.”
“You know what?” Peter had said.
“What?” she had asked, fearful. She honestly could not imagine what would happen next, given that she had confided in only one other person, back in high school, and that had ended badly.
“I think you need more coffee.” He didn’t signal the waitress, who was busy with another table, but got up and grabbed the thermal carafe from behind the counter, filled Eliza’s mug. She knew, at that moment, that Peter would always take care of her, if only she would let him.
That had been their pattern for almost twenty years now; they were solicitous of each other, dividing their duties between the world at large and their home. Peter fought the battles beyond the house, while Eliza tried to make sure that the windows were always closed and locked, their alarm system in working order. They were a team.
Over time, of course, she had told him more, in greater detail. Peter never wondered why she was the lucky one. He took it for granted that she was, and he was glad for it. “We don’t ponder why lightning strikes where it does,” he said once. Later, after a London-based magazine had asked him to file dispatches from New Orleans on the first anniversary of Katrina, he had written beautiful passages about the levees, human-designed and maintained systems that had failed spectacularly. He described how arbitrary water was, destroying one neighborhood while leaving another relatively intact. He never said as much, but Eliza believed he had written those words for her, that it was a sonnet of sorts, more proof that Peter understood. Walter was a natural disaster made catastrophic by human failures. She had been on one side of the levee, Holly on the other. Don’t ask why.
Now, packing up his briefcase, getting ready to go, Peter said: “The lawyer, Blanding, told me that Walter’s phone list is up to him, but his visiting list is another matter. It would be almost impossible for you to visit him. But Walter might ask for that, eventually. And if you were interested, it could happen because of who you are, your status.”
She didn’t think she was interested, she was pretty sure she wasn’t interested, but she couldn’t help wondering what Peter had said on her behalf. “What did you tell him?”
He looked surprised. “That it was up to you, of course. It is. I assume you don’t want to see him, but maybe you do. I’ll tell you this much: I’d be more comfortable with you going to see Walter, with security all around, than with you meeting up with this Barbara LaFortuny person. She’s the one who scares me.”
He kissed her temple, said, “Off to make the doughnuts,” and headed out to another one of his twelve-hour days. Eliza no longer really understood what Peter did for a living. She knew what venture capital was, and she knew that Peter had been recruited, in part, for the lucidity of his prose and his ability to explain complicated investment tools to the most unsophisticated investors. But she didn’t really know what he did, much less why it paid so well, and that was a little terrifying. Their old friends, almost all in the newspaper world, were taking buy-outs or pay cuts, getting laid off, and her family was thriving. Again: Don’t ask why.
She drifted over to the computer, entered the name “Barbara LaFortuny.” For an activist, she was suspiciously inactive,
leaving few traces of herself in the public sphere, although there was a Baltimore Beacon-Light profile available only in abstract; she would have to pay to read the entire article. She wasn’t that interested, and it was a relief to discover how low her threshold was: She wouldn’t pay $3.95 to find out more about Barbara LaFortuny. But her fingers continued to wander, plugging the name into the images file and recoiling at the one photo that showed up: a woman with three-quarters of her face swathed in bandages. Amazing, the power of an image compared with words. Peter had stood here not five minutes ago and explained that this woman, Walter’s champion, had been a victim of a knife attack. But the horror hadn’t truly registered.
This was why Eliza seldom spoke of the rape. Words could not convey what Walter had done to her, the depth of the betrayal, more brutal than the act itself. And there was no photo, no image, to show the damage he had inflicted. Eliza was not inclined to be competitive about suffering; after all, there were at least two dead girls always at the ready, eager to inform her that she was, in fact, the lucky one, and a whole cadre of possible victims behind them. But she couldn’t help feeling a little superior to Barbara LaFortuny. Just a little. A line from a poem came to her, something about the people who never got suffering wrong. Yet in Eliza’s experience, everyone, even most victims, got suffering wrong. That’s why it was better never to speak of it.
14
1985
THEY DROVE. IF THERE WAS a purpose, a destination, Elizabeth could not pinpoint it. They had dipped down into Virginia, this much was clear from the highway signs, and they sometimes crossed the Shenandoahs into West Virginia. Walter found odd jobs to make cash—chopping wood, for example, to help people with vacation homes prepare for the winter ahead, which Walter said would be a bad one, as bad as last winter, which had seen one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history. “I feel it in my bones,” he said, and he was being literal. He chopped wood, he did yard work, he fixed things. Elizabeth was surprised by the ease with which he found work, how people looked past her, never questioning why she was with Walter and, after Labor Day passed, not in school. Perhaps they thought she was simpleminded, as simple as Lennie in Of Mice and Men. She seldom spoke. Walter had made it clear that she should answer only direct questions with as few words as possible. And although Walter had purchased clothing for her—two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a sweater, all from JCPenney—she always looked a little dingy because she had to wear each outfit three to four times before they could go to a coin laundry. It was one of the few times he left her alone. He would have her strip down behind a sheet, whether at a motor court or a campsite, then hand him her clothes. He tied her hands, but not her feet, and although he gagged her the first few times, he didn’t even bother with that after a while.
She could, of course, have left the room or the tent, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. Her feet were free. She could have called for help when he stopped gagging her. But it was too embarrassing. She could not get past imagining those first few minutes, when she would be the girl in the sheet, when people would point and laugh and maybe worse. There was the very fact of the…un-loveliness of her body, the potbelly, which was more pronounced from their fast-food, on-the-go diet. She could not imagine walking around in a sheet, worrying about what might be glimpsed, or how it might come untied.
The real problem was that she couldn’t imagine escaping at all. He would kill her. Kill her family. She dreamed of rescue, hoped for it, prayed, but she believed it would have to be something that happened to her, not because of her.
SOMETIMES SHE WOULD TRY to pinpoint where she would be, back home, at a particular time of day. At, say, 10:15 A.M., she would picture the mind-numbing lull of late morning in school, those early periods when the day’s promise has already burned off, but the end still seems impossibly distant. At 4 P.M., she would see herself lying on the sofa, watching television while doing her homework, the height of her rebelliousness. Her parents always said they didn’t mind if she watched television before or after homework, only never during. But there would be no one to rat her out, since Vonnie had gone to college. Only—had Vonnie left for college, after Elizabeth disappeared? Probably. Elizabeth hoped she had. A disappointed Vonnie was a terrible, terrible thing. Vonnie seemed to believe that she should always get what she wanted, more so than other people. The drama around her college applications had been intense, affecting the entire household. They all knew better than to fetch the mail during those weeks when acceptances—and, in one memorable case, an actual rejection, from Duke—started arriving, but Elizabeth might sneak a peek into the mailbox if she got home before Vonnie. She examined the envelopes, knowing that it was all about fat versus thin, daydreamed about the day when her own letters would be waiting for her. But she didn’t dare take the mail in, and even her parents ceded that privilege to Vonnie.
In the truck, driving the mind-numbingly familiar roads, Walter said: “Tell me a story. Tell me about that man and his dog.”
She did. The problem was—she hadn’t actually read Travels with Charley. She had started it but found it dull, not at all the work she was expecting after reading Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row. But she was scared to admit that she had lied—Walter prized honesty above all other values and had made it clear that she must always tell him the truth—so she made it up as she went along, trying to figure out what kind of stories Steinbeck and his poodle would have lived on the road. She borrowed heavily from a book her father had read the summer before last, Blue Highways, which had inspired her parents to take them on back-road drives in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. God, it had been boring. Sometimes, roaming with Walter, she would glimpse a place, a town, a gas station that she thought she recognized from those day trips, but she could never be sure.
“Tell me another story,” Walter repeated. It was a gray, indeterminate day, out of season. Too cool to be summer, which it still was on the calendar, but lacking the crispness of autumn. The air was muggy, as damp and unrewarding as a sponge bath.
“Well, there’s a time when they went to…Tulsa.”
“Tulsa? After Milwaukee?”
“I’m not telling it in order, just as I remember it.”
“Where did they start again?”
“New York.”
“And where do they end up?”
“I can’t tell you that. It gives too much away.” She couldn’t tell him, in part, because she was making it up as she went along, but also because she was scared to find out what happened should Mr. Steinbeck and his poodle ever stop moving. If they didn’t reach the end, Walter wouldn’t tire of her, dig a hole in some forest and leave her there.
“Okay. What happened in Tulsa?”
“They found a necklace, lying on the sidewalk. That is, Charley found it, while they were out on their walk. It had purple stones—”
“They call those amethysts.”
“Yes, I know.” She did know, but she hadn’t thought Walter would. He surprised her, sometimes, with the facts he had at his disposal. More surprising, though, were the things he didn’t know, common bits of everyday living that even little kids understood. “Amethysts, in an old-fashioned setting, big square gold frames, clearly an antique. But there was no one around and it was a block of funny old houses. It was hard to imagine that anyone living in those houses owned such a necklace. Charley lifted it from the sidewalk with his nose—”
“Aw, he made that part up. A dog couldn’t do that.”
She felt a need to defend Steinbeck and Charley, although the story was hers. “He has poetic license.”
“What’s that?”
She wasn’t sure she could define it. “If you’re a poet—or a writer—you’re entitled to certain details, even if they’re not exactly real. Like you could say there was an eclipse of the sun on a day there wasn’t, if you needed to. I think.”
“And do they charge you for that?”
“What?”
“I mean, like a driver’s license or a hu
nting license. Is it something you go down and buy?”
She yearned to lie to him. That was the kind of thing Vonnie would do, set someone up, usually Elizabeth, to look like an idiot later. But he would punish her. “No, it’s not a license-license. It’s just a, like, way of talking.” She groped for the vocabulary of school. “A figure of speech.”
“So the license to make stuff up is made up?”
“Yes. Sort of. I guess. But that’s not the point. The point is, Charley found this necklace. And it was valuable, and they wanted to find the real owner. But how would they do that? I mean, if you go door-to-door, and show it to people, there will always be a dishonest person who says, ‘Yes, that’s mine.’”
“What you do,” Walter said, “is ask if anyone has lost a necklace, then get them to describe it. Or, better yet, they could have gone to the police station and asked if there had been a burglary in the neighborhood, then worked backward, right?”
“That’s sort of what they did. They walked a few more blocks, then found a little business district and there was an antique store. It was run by a Holocaust victim.”
“One of those people the Nazis tried to kill.”
“Yes.” Again she was surprised that he didn’t need to have the Holocaust defined. Walter had been skeptical when she told him she needed sanitary napkins, not because he didn’t know about menstruation, but because he didn’t think she was old enough. “I thought you got breasts when that happened,” he said, and even he could tell he had hurt her feelings. Later he explained that although he had a sister, she was thirteen years older and he didn’t know much about what he called girl secrets.
“The jeweler was very old, and stooped, and he wore one of those things that jewelers use to look at things closely.” She waited a beat to see if this was one of the odd things that Walter might know, but he didn’t supply the word and she didn’t have a clue what it was. “Mr. Steinbeck asked if any of his customers had recently had a necklace repaired there.”
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