Elizabeth’s friends thought it was weird and creepy, what her parents did. They thought the Lerners could read minds, which was silly, or see through lies more easily than “normal” parents. “They’re not witches,” she told her friends.
In some ways, her parents were easier to fool than others. This was because Elizabeth told them so much that it didn’t occur to them that she ever withheld anything. Of course, what she mainly told them about was her friends—Claudia’s decision to have sex with her boyfriend while her parents were away one weekend, Debbie trying beer and pot, Lydia getting caught shoplifting. Each time she shared one of these stories, her parents would ask, gently, if Elizabeth had been involved, and she could always say “No!” with a clear and sunny conscience. This made it easier to keep what she needed to keep to herself. Trying to make herself throw up after eating too much, for example. She knew it was bad, but she also knew it was a problem only if you couldn’t stop. Given that she never got to the point where she actually threw up, she couldn’t see how there was anything wrong with trying. Claudia said she should use a feather or a broom straw if she couldn’t force her finger far enough down, but—gross. The idea of a feather made her want to throw up, yet the fact of a feather didn’t. Was that weird? It was probably weird. Elizabeth worried a lot about being weird. Unlike Vonnie, she didn’t want to stand out, didn’t want to attract too much attention. She wanted to be normal. She wanted just one boy to look at her like, like—like that way Bruce Springsteen looked in that video, when he rolled out from under the car and he knew he shouldn’t want the woman who was standing there in front of him, but he just couldn’t help himself.
None of her friends lived close by. They lived on the other side of Frederick Road, in the kind of houses where Elizabeth’s mother would not be caught dead, to use one of her favorite expressions. I would not be caught dead living there, I would not be caught dead shopping there, I would not be caught dead going on vacation there. Finally, Vonnie had said: “Do you get much choice, about where you’re caught dead?” and it had become a family joke. They had started naming the places where they would be caught dead. Still, their mother was pretty serious in her dislike of modern things. She had wanted to stay in the city, in their town house, which was almost right downtown, on a pretty green square built around the Washington Monument. But, about the time Vonnie turned fourteen, Elizabeth’s father had seen a chance to build a practice in the suburbs, where more parents were inclined to seek help for their children. And could pay for it, too, no small consideration. Roaring Springs was a compromise, thirty minutes from her mother’s job at Patuxent Institute, not even ten minutes to her father’s office in Ellicott City. It was his daytime proximity that gave Elizabeth her freedom on these summer days. But it wasn’t much of a freedom, when one was alone, with all these rules.
She tracked back to the park and began walking along the stream known as the Sucker Branch. If she followed its banks, she would come out at Route 40, not that far from Roy Rogers, maybe a mile or so. At least, she thought she might come out there. She wasn’t allowed to walk to the Roy Rogers because it was a hangout, and her parents believed that being idle was what got most kids in trouble. But they liked the idea of her being outdoors on summer days, so if she explained that she was simply following the stream and found herself there by accident and she was terribly thirsty after the walk, that would be okay. If they asked, and they might not even ask. She would go to Roy Rogers, see if anyone was there. If no one was around, she could still get a mocha shake, maybe some fries. Then—she was resolved—she was going to throw it up, she would learn how to throw up today. Her worries over her body were secondary; she didn’t need to lose weight, only the potbelly, if she really did have one, and she still wasn’t sure. What she needed was something to tell her friends when they were reunited as high school sophomores in two weeks. She wanted to have something to show for her summer. Unlike Claudia, she didn’t have a boyfriend. Unlike Debbie and Lydia, she wasn’t daring enough to shoplift, and she had no interest in her parents’ booze. She had to do something in these final weeks of summer that counted as an achievement, and learning how to throw up was her best bet.
Following the stream, high in its banks after the weekend’s heavy rains, turned out to be much harder than she expected. Mud sucked at her boots, and when she came to the spot where she needed to cross, she couldn’t. The unusually deep water covered the rocks she had planned to hop across, and it was moving quickly. She paused, uncertain. It seemed a shame to turn back, after making it this far. She thought she could hear the traffic swooshing by on Route 40. She was close, very close.
Then she saw a man on the other side, leaning on a shovel.
“It’s not so swift you can’t wade through,” he said. “I done it.” He looked to be college age, although something told Elizabeth that he wasn’t in college. Not just his grammar, but his clothes, the trucker’s hat pulled low on his forehead. “Just go up there, to where that fallen tree is. The water won’t go above your shins, I swear.”
Elizabeth did, taking off her boots and tucking them beneath her armpits, so they were like two little wings sticking out of her back. Zebra-patterned wings with stilettos. He was right, the current was nothing to fear, although she worried that the water itself was dangerous, filled with bacteria. Luckily she’d had a tetanus shot just two years ago, when she stepped on a rusty nail. And the man was nice, waiting to help her scramble up the banks on the other side, taking hold of her wrists. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, maybe five seven to her five three, and his build, while muscled, was slight. He was almost handsome, really. He had green eyes and even features. The only real flaw was his nose, narrow and pinched. He looked as if the world smelled bad to him, although he was the one who smelled a little. B.O., probably from shoveling on such a hot day. His T-shirt showed sweat stains at the armpits and the neckline, a drop of perspiration dangled from his nose.
“Thank you,” she said.
He didn’t let go.
“Thank you. I’m fine now. I can stand just fine.”
He tightened his grip on her wrists. She tried to pull away, and her boots fell, one rolling dangerously close to the water. She began to struggle in earnest and he held her there, his face impassive, as if he were watching all of this from a great distance, as if he had no part in holding her.
“Mister, please.”
“I’ll take you where you’re going,” he said.
7
ELIZA HAD NEVER GOOGLED HERSELF What would have been the point? Eliza Benedict was not the kind of person who ended up on the Internet, and the story of Elizabeth Lerner was finite, the ending written years ago. Peter was all over the Internet—most of his work behind a pay wall, but nevertheless there—represented by almost a decade’s worth of his own words, probably more than a mil-lion when one included his Houston Chronicle days. And since taking his new job with the venture capital firm, he was even more omnipresent in this shadow world: a source, a personage, someone to be consulted and quoted on these new financial products, which Eliza didn’t understand. She didn’t even understand the term “financial product.” A product should be real, concrete, tangible, something that could be bagged or boxed.
However, Eliza knew, even before Walter had written her, that she showed up at Peter’s elbow in the occasional image, especially now that Peter had crossed over to the dark side—his term—and they had to go to functions. That was her term, but it made Peter laugh. “You couldn’t call that a party,” she said after her first foray into his new world. “And they didn’t serve dinner, only finger food, all of it impossible to eat without dribbling. No, that was truly a function.”
Sitting on their bed, Peter had laughed, but his mind wasn’t on the party, or on what to call it. “Leave your dress on,” he said. “And those shoes.” She did. But even Peter’s admiration for her that night hadn’t been enough to send her searching for her own image, despite the knowledge that they had been pho
tographed repeatedly. She hated, truly hated, seeing photographs of herself. A tiresome thing to say, banal and clichéd, but more true of her than it was of others who professed to feel the same way. Her photographic image always came as a shock. She was taller in her head, her hair less of a disordered mess. She and Peter looked terribly mismatched, like an otter and a…hedgehog. Peter was the otter, with his compact, still hard-muscled body and thick, shiny hair, while she was the hedgehog. And not just any hedgehog, but Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Even dressed up in expensive clothes, she gave the impression that she had just been divested of an apron and a bonnet, a happy little hausfrau who couldn’t wait to get home and put the kettle on.
Which, in a way, was pretty close to the truth.
The dress that had excited Peter wasn’t a sexy dress, not really, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she normally wore, and that was novelty enough. The shoes had been a London splurge, a ridiculous thing to buy there, given the exchange rate at the time. Vonnie could have picked up the same shoes in New York for almost half the price and brought them to Eliza on one of her business trips. Eliza had purchased them to save face when she was snubbed in a Knightsbridge boutique, the kind of shop where the clothes appeared to have been tailored in defiance of the female body. The shoes were not visible in the photograph in Washingtonian magazine, but the dress—emerald green, with a bateau neck—was. She studied it now. This was what Walter had seen, this was how he had found her. Did she really look that similar to her teen self? She had been almost eighteen the last time she saw him, and although she had filled out since the summer he had kidnapped her, she still looked younger than her age. Even now, ten pounds over her ideal weight, her face remained thin, her jawline sharp. Maybe that was all he needed to spot her. That, and the shortened first name, which wasn’t much of a mask when someone knew the real one.
“Mom?” Albie’s voice seemed to be coming from the kitchen. “Are we going to have lunch?”
“Soon,” she called back from the desk in the family room, still looking at her photo, trying, and not for the first time, to see herself as Walter had seen her. She looked nothing like his two known victims, tall blondes. She understood why he had taken her, but why had he let her live? He claimed he had been planning to let her go when he started driving toward Point of Rocks, but was that just a story he told after the fact? It didn’t matter. They had found Holly’s body at the bottom of a ravine; they had already dug up Maude, the Maryland girl he had attempted to bury in Patapsco State Park.
It occurred to Eliza, truly for the first time, to try her old name in an Internet search. Paging Dr. Freud, Vonnie would have said with a snort. But Eliza’s identity had been so entrenched as Eliza Benedict by the time the Internet became a part of daily life that she had never stopped to think about Elizabeth Lerner. It was a common enough name that multiple Elizabeths popped up, in family trees and press releases and blogs. The first reference she found to herself was taken from that book. Ugh. Murder on the Mountain was a disgusting quickie churned out by Jared Garrett, a bizarre cop groupie who had followed Walter’s story with what even a teenager could see was an inappropriate fascination. There was an excerpt on Google, and her name leaped out from the leaden prose.
A boyish girl who looked younger than she was, Elizabeth testified that Walter did not attempt sexual congress with her for several weeks, but that she was, ultimately, subjected to his advances. Curiously, he left her alive. Walter clearly considered Elizabeth different from his other victims, although he himself has refused to explain the relationship, other than to remark once, in an interview with state police: “She was good company.” Asked if she was a hostage, Bowman said: “I didn’t demand ransom, did I?” His answers did little to deflect curiosity about the true nature of the relationship between the two.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MOM?” Albie leaned against the doorjamb, hands in pockets. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his mother’s activities, merely bored enough with his own life to try to engage her.
“Nothing,” she said, erasing the cached history and closing the window. She wouldn’t want Iso’s prying fingers to wander into any of these Web sites. “Are you hungry? What do you want for lunch?”
“Those sandwiches that Grandmother makes?” he asked hopefully. Peter’s mother made elaborate sandwiches from deli roast beef and dark bread, chopping cornichons and putting them in brown mustard, then adding horseradish and a judicious sprinkling of salt and pepper.
“I might not have everything Nonnie has, but I think I could make a fair approximation,” she said, taking a quick mental inventory of the refrigerator’s contents, calculating that butter pickles would approximate the experience Albie craved, which was more about the chopping and mixing, making an exciting ritual out of something mundane. Albie loved productions, and with a child as easily pleased as Albie, it seemed a shame not to try to meet his expectations. Especially now, when everything and anything she did antagonized Iso. “Mom, you’re breathing too loud,” she had said the other day in Trader Joe’s. “Loudly,” Eliza had corrected, then felt awful for using grammar to one-up her daughter. Not that it had worked.
Albie put his hand in hers, as if the walk to the kitchen were a journey of miles. She wished it were, that he would stay this age for three, four years, then be nine for a decade or so, then spend another ten years being ten. But onetime graduate student of children’s literature that she was, she knew there was no spell, no magic, that could keep a child a child, or shield a child from the world at large. In fact, that was where the trouble almost always began, with a parent trying to outthink fate. Stay on the path. Don’t touch the spindle. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t pick the rose.
8
1985
HE HAD GONE TOO FAR this time. Literally, too far. He had headed out Wednesday morning, telling himself he had no plans, then driven and driven until the landscape had changed, civilization coming at him all of a sudden. He would never get back in time for dinner now. And, although there were girls everywhere, they were never alone, but traveling in groups, gaggles. He stopped at a mall and almost became dizzy at the sight of all the girls there, girls with bare midriffs and short shorts. He leaned on the railing on the second floor, watching them move in lazy circles below, flit in and out of the food court, where they would briefly interact with the boys, then plunge back into the mall proper. The boys looked baffled by these quicksilver girls. They were too immature, they couldn’t give these girls what they wanted.
But neither could he, unless he got one alone, had a chance to sweet-talk her. He would go slow this time, real slow.
He drove past a fenced swimming pool—that was a kind of water, wasn’t it?—stationed himself in the parking lot, stealing glances through the chain-link fence. The girls here seemed intertwined. Not actually touching but strung together by invisible threads, their limbs moving in lazy unison. They would flip on cue, sit up on cue, run combs through their hair at the same moment. Boys circled these girls, too, silly and deferential. They didn’t have a chance.
He caught an older woman, a leathery mom, frowning at him, decided to move on.
He had almost given up, was wondering how he would explain all the miles on the truck—he could fill the gas tank, but he couldn’t erase seventy, eighty, ninety miles from an odometer—when he saw the right girl. Tall, filled out, but walking as if her body was still new to her, as if she had borrowed it from someone else and had to give it back at day’s end, in good condition. She was on a sidewalk in a ghost town of a neighborhood, a place so empty and quiet that it felt like they were the last two people on earth. He stopped and—sudden inspiration—asked her for directions to the mall, although he knew his way back there. Her face wasn’t quite as pretty as he had hoped—Earl, the other mechanic back at his father’s place called this kind of girl a Butterface—but she had a serious expression that was very touching, as if she wanted to make sure she gave precise directions. Only she kept getting a li
ttle mixed up over the street names, trying to give him directions according to landmarks he couldn’t know—the Baileys’ house, the nursery school where her little sister went, the High’s store.
“I admit, I just can’t follow all these directions,” he said with an aw-shucks grin. “Are you going that way? Maybe you could show me.”
Oh, no, she wasn’t going that far. She just had to catch a bus to Route 40.
Maybe he could take her as far as she was going?
The sun was strong, so powerful that everything looked white, unreal. This was a pale girl, one who didn’t get to spend her afternoons at the pool. She was heading to work. He could take her to work, Walter said, and then she could draw him a map on—where did she work?
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