“But the customer might have been on the way in,” Walter said. He had a real argumentative side. “And the jeweler couldn’t know that.”
“Only the necklace wasn’t broken, and it was shiny, polished up. He was pretty sure someone had dropped it on the way home. And he was right. A teenage girl had brought her mother’s necklace in to get it cleaned and repaired as a surprise to her, then it had fallen out of her purse on the walk home and she was terrified to tell her mother what had happened because it was an antique, a family heirloom.”
“How did the jeweler know all that? It happened after she left.”
“He didn’t, but he told Mr. Steinbeck how to find the girl, and he learned the rest of the story.”
“Did she offer him a reward?”
“Yes, but he said he didn’t need one, that people shouldn’t get rewards for doing the right thing.”
Almost all her stories about Mr. Steinbeck and Charley ended this way. They did a good deed, then declined any reward for it. She hoped that Walter would eventually decide that doing the right thing—letting her go, turning himself in—would be a reward in and of itself. But so far the man-and-dog duo had traveled to Boston, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Crater Lake, Yellowstone Park—thank goodness her family had taken that cross-country trip when she was eight, she had lots of material on which to draw—and now Tulsa, always doing good deeds, and it didn’t seem to make any impression at all on Walter.
THAT NIGHT, IN ONE of the motor courts that Walter preferred, places where cash and men with young girls didn’t seem to excite anyone’s curiosity, he asked if her period was finished.
“Yes,” she said, her stomach suddenly queasy, drawing her knees to her chest. So far, he had not touched her, not in that way. So far. But maybe that was because he had thought she wasn’t a woman yet, and therefore off-limits.
“So I can put these back in the truck for a while?” He held up the box of sanitary pads.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“A month.” She paused, not wanting to admit the next part. “Sometimes more.”
A month. Would he really keep her for another month? Did she have a month’s worth of stories about Charley and Mr. Steinbeck? She hoped so.
15
I CAN READ YOU LIKE a book is not generally a generous expression. It is a criticism, an accusation of naïveté, a suggestion that someone is trying to manipulate another person, but failing. Similarly, I can see right through you has a sinister feel to it. Or, even: I’d know you anywhere.
Yet in a long and happy relationship, that kind of transparency and instant recognition has an endearing comfort. So when Peter arrived home one evening, actually in time for supper with the children, and announced he was ready for the family to get a dog, Eliza had no problem discerning his motives. Peter had always opposed having a dog for any number of reasons—dirt, hair, the possibility that Albie would prove to be allergic. But his primary objection had been that Eliza would become the dog’s caretaker, although she had insisted she wouldn’t care. Now, he announced at dinner, in front of the children, that he had changed his mind, which left Eliza feeling a little sandbagged. What if she no longer wanted a dog? If Peter could change his vote from no to yes, why wouldn’t he check first to see if she had changed hers?
“A real dog,” Peter said.
“What do you mean by ‘real’?” asked Iso, the young lawyer. She was waiting, Eliza realized, for the penny to drop, one of the few Briticisms she allowed herself. She preferred it to the idea of the other shoe dropping.
“Not one of those toy things, that you carry around in your arms. And not a terrier of any kind. They’re too high-strung. A Lab, or…a German shepherd.”
“I don’t like the idea of purebred dogs, when there are so many dogs in kennels waiting to be adopted,” Eliza said, even as Iso cried “German shepherd” and Albie countered with “Black Lab!”
“No, the shelter is fine, that’s a good idea,” Peter decreed. “Mixed breeds are healthier and smarter. Just as long as it’s a real dog. We’ll go Saturday.”
That was three days away, and intrepid Iso quickly learned that they could search the local kennel’s inventory online, which was providential, as Albie noted, “Because we can talk about the dogs without hurting their feelings.” As Peter pored over the children’s choices in the evening, eliminating some, approving others, Eliza began to realize what he meant by a real dog. Big. Peter wanted them to have a big dog. And she began to wonder: Had the lawyer, Blanding, told Peter something more about Walter or Barbara LaFortuny? Was that the penny that had yet to drop?
IN THE END, FOR ALL their careful study and rational discussion, they allowed a dog to choose them. Reba, a shaggy, sad-eyed mix of terrier and shepherd, had studied them with the resignation of a dog who never gets picked. She had been in the kennel, a no-kill one, for a record eighteen months. Peter demurred—she wasn’t small, but she wasn’t big or intimidating—and Iso was casually cruel about the dog’s lack of charisma. But Eliza and Albie became passionate, intense champions and—after a surprising amount of paperwork and references—Reba came to live with them a week later.
“Can we at least rename her?” Iso asked. “Everyone will think we named her after that actress on that silly sitcom.”
It took Eliza a second to sort out that Reba McEntire, forever in her head as a country singer, was apparently on a sitcom these days. Eliza wondered if Iso had any memory of the fact that, back when she was a baby in Texas, Eliza had developed a bizarre fondness for CMT, the station that played country music videos, and she had liked Reba quite a bit. There had been a whole series of videos that seemed to tell a little story, about a man and a woman who circled each other in some romance novel setting, possibly one of those islands off the coast of South Carolina. And she had been a doctor, or some such, who met the love of her life in Guatemala, or someplace, but they didn’t end up together, and somehow that was okay. Madonna in the 1980s, Reba in the 1990s—who was her musical role model now, as the first decade of the new century drew to an end? Eliza wasn’t sure she could even name a current pop star. Not on the basis of her work, at any rate. She knew, in spite of herself, which one had been beaten by her boyfriend, and the one who had been arrested for kleptomania, and the one who kept going to rehab. But don’t ask her what they sang.
“No,” Eliza told Iso, with a vehemence that caught them both off guard. “You don’t just go around changing people’s names.”
“I did,” Iso pointed out. “You did.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were Elizabeth, when you were younger, and then you decided you wanted to be Eliza.”
They were in the backyard with Albie, watching Reba adjust to her new life. She didn’t seem to trust it. She would walk a few feet away from them, then turn her head back toward them as if to ask: Is this allowed? Even her sniffs seemed tentative, halfhearted.
Eliza caught herself before blurting out: “How do you know that?” After all, there was no reason to be defensive about shortening her name. Instead she said: “I’ve been Eliza so long, I sometimes forget I was ever Elizabeth.”
“It’s right there, on your driver’s license.”
True enough. Only—“What were you doing with my driver’s license?”
Iso blushed. “I wanted a breath mint the other day, so I looked in your purse.”
“I don’t keep breath mints in my billfold, Iso.” Waiting her out, not accusing her, but not letting her think that she was getting away with anything, either.
“And I needed a dollar. A girl in my class is having a birthday and we’re all going to pitch in a dollar to buy her a gift.”
“A dollar?” Come on, Iso. Lie big or go home.
“There are twenty-five kids in my class. We’re getting her an iTunes gift certificate.”
“And will this happen every time someone has a birthday?”
Iso was caught. Her daughter, too, could be read like a boo
k, at least for now. Eliza thought about her own parents, how much they must have known about the little secrets she carved out for herself, how indulgent they had been. They had probably thought: What’s the harm, in her dressing up like Madonna when we’re not around? What does it matter if she likes to cut through the woods to go to the fast-food places along Route 40? At least she’s getting plenty of fresh air and exercise. They had been right, yet they had been wrong, too. There was harm, everywhere.
“Oh—no. But this girl is special. She—”
It was funny, watching her daughter lie. Or would be funny, if it weren’t also terrifying.
“She has a special disease. In her nervous system. You can’t really see it.”
At least it was a smart lie. This way, Iso didn’t have to produce a classmate in a wheelchair or a leg brace. But Eliza had grown tired of their game.
“Iso, don’t take money from my purse without asking, okay? Even a dollar. You really shouldn’t go in it, ever, not without my permission. Just because I’m your mother doesn’t mean I don’t have some expectation of privacy.”
“You go in my room,” Iso said. “You’ve gone in my purse.”
“Looking for lost things. Not spying. Not”—she lowered her voice so that Albie, who was walking alongside Reba as she continued to test her new backyard—“stealing.”
“I didn’t steal!” Vehement, defiant. “I don’t steal. I needed a dollar. You wouldn’t want me to be the only one who didn’t contribute, would you?”
Her anger was so self-righteous that Eliza had to fight back a smile. That quickly, Iso had bought into her own story. But at least she had been distracted from the source of their original argument.
Except she hadn’t. “I don’t want a dog named Reba,” Iso said suddenly.
The dog lifted up her head, looking back at them with a puzzled expression. You couldn’t call it a smile, probably shouldn’t call it a smile. Anthropomorphism and all that. But Eliza saw the trace of a tentative, provisional happiness that she understood. Please love me. Don’t hurt me.
“She knows her name,” Albie crowed with pleasure.
TWO DAYS LATER, ELIZA and Reba were returning from walking Albie to school when she became aware of a green car following her. It was one of those odd cars that Albie loved, the one with the high, round shape that made Eliza think vaguely of the 1930s, gangsters and speakeasies, although there was nothing sinister about this type of car, quite the opposite. It was almost cuddly, if a car could be cuddly, attractive in its unabashed nerdiness. Kind of like Albie.
“Elizabeth,” a woman’s voice called from the car.
Eliza willed herself not to turn around, to keep walking.
“Elizabeth,” the voice persisted.
Reba had stopped to inspect something on the ground, and Eliza didn’t have the heart to deny the dog any pleasure, no matter how small. She was much too easily cowed. Eliza wanted Reba to enjoy life a little more, to stop acting so darn grateful all the time.
“Eliza, then.” Exasperated, put upon, as if Eliza were a recalcitrant child.
“Yes?” she said, turning only slightly. The woman had lowered the passenger-side window, but she was hard to see from this angle.
“Why didn’t you turn around before?” Her voice had the very tone that Eliza tried to avoid with Iso. Quarrelsome, demanding. You couldn’t help arguing with a voice like this.
“I didn’t know whom you were addressing.”
The woman in the car wore enormous sunglasses. Eliza wondered if she realized how disconcerting the effect was, if she had chosen to look intimidating or simply wasn’t thinking about how she presented herself. She had hair the color of spun sugar, and quite a lot of it, worn in what appeared to be a series of hairdos, as if she had sectioned this amazing mass of hair into six or eight discrete pieces and created a different style for each. There were curls and waves, even two kinds of bangs: a fringe across the forehead, then swooping wings to the side.
“But that’s your name, isn’t it?” It had to be Barbara LaFortuny. Please, Eliza thought, let it be Barbara LaFortuny. She didn’t want to think about the implications of a world in which more and more people began showing up, calling her by her childhood name. She imagined a phalanx of women, all in Walter’s employ, doing his bidding. That image made her mind leap to an artist she loved, Henry Darger, and his disturbing portraits of those 1950s-perfect, perky, pervy Vivian girls. The Walter girls, his own private army.
But Walter had no interest in armies. He had always been, in his own bizarre way, a one-woman man. Or, more correctly, aspired to be. He would even say that at times. I am a one-woman man. I’m just looking for that one woman.
“My name is Eliza.”
“Your legal name,” the woman said.
“My name,” she repeated, “is Eliza. Perhaps I have you confused with someone else.” She stopped, corrected her slip. “Perhaps you have me confused with someone else.”
“Perhaps,” the woman said with a chuckle, “I just have you confused.”
She took off her dark glasses then, and although this revealed the scar that started at the corner of one eye and ran southward, she looked less menacing without the Gucci glasses. Eliza remembered what Peter had told her. A teacher, attacked in her classroom, now an advocate for inmates. Put that on paper, and it sounded like someone Eliza would like.
“He needs you, Elizabeth.”
She shook her head.
“Eliza, then.”
“This isn’t about my name,” she said. “He doesn’t need me.”
“But he does.”
She tried again. “He doesn’t have a right to need me.”
The woman leaned across the front seat of her car, as if to motion Eliza to climb inside. Reba growled, and the sound seemed to surprise the dog, then please her. She growled again with more conviction. Barbara LaFortuny—who else could it be—pulled back, reached down, then held up a folded piece of paper.
“He asked me to hand deliver this one. He wanted to know, without a doubt, when you got it. Time is important to him. The clock is ticking. A date has been set.”
Eliza studied the white piece of paper in must-be-Barbara’s hand—only one sheaf, how much could it contain, how much damage could it do—and reluctantly accepted it. Evidence, she decided. She would memorize the license plate, too, when the woman drove away. She would memorize everything about this encounter. She wasn’t sure what she would do with her memories, but she would have them.
Barbara LaFortuny’s hands were beautiful—manicured, flashing with interesting, important rings—and, based on the impression of the quick moment in which their fingers touched, quite soft. The eccentricity of her hairstyle aside, this was a woman who had the time and means to tend to herself. Eliza folded the already folded piece of paper in half, then shoved it in the pocket of the fleece vest she had thrown over her T-shirt. It was the first cool morning of the fall. On the walk to Albie’s school, she had been joyous, carrying his book bag while he took Reba’s leash.
“Let’s go”—she stopped herself from saying the dog’s name. She didn’t want Barbara LaFortuny to know anything about her family. She already knew too much. Had that green little play-gangster car tracked Eliza and Albie to school that day? She considered pulling her cell phone from her pocket, snapping LaFortuny’s photo then and there, so she could show it to Albie’s school, and Iso’s, yet the car was already moving on. Chesapeake Bay plates. SAVE THE BAY. Save Walter. Barbara LaFortuny didn’t lack for causes.
Home, Eliza put on the teakettle, but then the phone rang, and in the middle of the call something arrived via FedEx, and the teakettle whistled, and the dauntingly high-tech washing machine began beeping an error code, which required getting out the manual, which required finding the manual, and before Eliza knew it, it was 3:30 P.M., time to pick up Albie and much too warm for the fleece jacket, and she was back in the maelstrom of family life. It was ten o’clock before she had the time and privacy to read
the letter, eleven o’clock before she remembered that she had stashed it in her pocket.
It wasn’t there.
16
1985
ALTHOUGH HE HAD GROWN UP nearby—perhaps because he had grown up nearby—Walter had never visited Luray Caverns, and he took a notion that he and Elizabeth should spend a day there. It seemed a foolish thing to do, given that money was always tight, yet the various highway signs called to him. He really wanted to see those caverns, not to mention the classic cars, although he didn’t understand why there was a collection of classic cars at Luray Caverns. He talked himself into thinking it would be a nice treat for Elizabeth.
But Elizabeth, to his surprise, argued on the grounds that it was an extravagance. He had been picking up fewer jobs of late and they had been sleeping out more often, even as the nights got cooler here in the mountains.
“Hey, I’m just thinking of trying to do something fun for you.” Besides, who was she to argue with him over money? Who was she to argue with him about anything? She seldom talked back, and he didn’t like the fact that she was starting. This was a troubling development. She needed more discipline.
“I’ve been,” she said. “Just two years ago.”
“What was it like?”
“Okay. All I learned was how to remember the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite.”
He didn’t want to ask, but she clearly wasn’t going to volunteer the information: “And how do you remember?”
“Stalactites, which have a c, hang from the ceiling. Stalagmites come up from the ground.”
“Well, then, you could just as well remember g for ground, couldn’t you?”
Laura Lippman Page 10
