“An ice-cream parlor.”
“Friendly’s? Swensen’s? Baskin-Robbins?”
“Just a local place. It’s kind of old-fashioned.”
She could draw him a map on a napkin, then, once he dropped her off. How would that be?
He waited until she was in the cab of the truck and they had driven a little ways before pointing out that she would be early for her shift. Right? She had been walking to a bus stop, and the bus would take so much longer than a direct shot in the truck. He was hungry. Was she hungry? Would she like to stop for something?
She got to eat free at work, she said.
Well, gosh, that was great, but he sure didn’t expect her to give him the same deal.
“No,” she said. “The manager is really strict, always looking out for girls who gave freebies to their…friends.”
“Boyfriends?” he asked, and she blushed. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
She considered the question, which struck him as odd. Seemed a clear yes-or-no proposition to him. Maybe she had a boyfriend who didn’t satisfy her. Maybe she was thinking about breaking up with him but was tenderhearted, didn’t want to hurt his feelings. What a nice girl she was.
“Anyway,” she said, not answering him either way, “it’s only ice cream, no burgers or hot dogs or even pizza. We had hot pretzels for a while, but no one wanted them and—”
Then maybe they could stop at this little place he knew, by a stream? There was a metal stand, kind of like an old-fashioned trailer, and it made the best steak sandwiches. There was no such place, not nearby, but Walter had heard a gentleman at the shop describe the steak sandwiches he had eaten in his youth, back in Wisconsin.
Walter got lost, looking for the steak shack that wasn’t, driving deeper and deeper into what turned out to be a state park. He made conversation, asked again if she had a boyfriend. She hemmed and hawed but finally said no. Good, he wouldn’t like a girl who would cheat on her boyfriend. She was getting nervous, her eyes skating back and forth, but he promised her that she would be on time for work. He told her he was surprised that a girl as pretty as she was didn’t have a boyfriend. He could tell she liked hearing that, yet she continued to hug the door a little. The road ran out and he parked, told her that he had screwed up, the steak place was on the other side of the creek, but they could cross it and be there in five minutes, if she would just take his hand. Once he had his hand in hers, he tickled the palm with his middle finger, a trick he had heard from Earl, before Earl ran off and joined the Marines. It was a signal and, if the girl liked you, she tickled back. Or maybe if she just didn’t jerk her hand away, he decided, that was proof enough that she was up for things.
He tried to take it slow, but she kept talking about work, fretting about being late, and then she started to cry. She cried harder when he kissed her, and he was pretty sure he was a good kisser. She cried so hard that snot ran out of her nose, which was gross, and he stopped kissing her.
“I guess you don’t want to be my girlfriend, then,” he said. She kept crying. Why were girls so contrary? Of course, he lived pretty far away. They wouldn’t be able to see each other except on his days off. But she should be flattered, this girl who no one else had claimed, that a man, a nice-looking man, wanted her. A man who would please her, if she would allow herself to be pleased.
“Are you going to tell?” he asked.
She said she wouldn’t, and he wished he could believe her. He didn’t, though. So he did what he had to do. He was tamping down the hole he dug when he saw the other girl coming. How much had she seen? Anything, everything? He thought fast, told her how to cross the stream. He held his hands out to her, and she didn’t hesitate. Her hands felt cool and smooth against his, which were burning with new calluses from the digging. If anyone should have wanted to let go, it should have been him. It hurt, holding her hands. He studied her face. He wished women didn’t lie so much, that there was a way to ask if she had seen anything without giving away that there had been something to see. It was like that old riddle, the one about the island with just two Indians, one who always lies and one who always tells the truth, but there’s one question that will set things straight. Only he could never remember what the question was. Something like: If I ask your brother, will he tell me the truth? No, that wasn’t it, because both would say no. What should he ask her? But he had taken too long, held her hands too roughly, and given himself away.
“You’re with me now,” he said, buckling her into the seat next to his, then tying her hands at the wrists with a rope from the bed of the pickup.
Then, as an afterthought: “What’s your name?”
9
SHE DECIDED TO WRITE WALTER a letter, nothing more. That’s the way she characterized her decision, when she spoke of it to Peter and her parents. “I’m going to write him a letter,” she said, “nothing more.” A letter would be private, final. (Although she supposed his mail was read by prison officials. Again, there was the worrying detail of his confidante, the person who had written the letter on his behalf, but she didn’t want to write him in care of that PO box in Baltimore.) A letter seemed the best way to go if she wanted to keep this matter contained.
Yet whenever she sat down at Peter’s home computer, trying to use those oddments of minutes at a mother’s disposal, she ended up second-guessing herself. A letter wasn’t a small thing, not these days. Even when she lived in London, she hadn’t written letters. Trans-Atlantic calls weren’t that expensive, and e-mails were always handy for rushed bulletins, or sharing the details of their visits home. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had written a letter, and Walter’s was the first real one she had received in years, probably since Vonnie switched to computers for those furious missives about how everyone in the family had disappointed her, a brief mania during her early thirties, when she was under the sway of a disreputable therapist, possibly her lover. But how else did one communicate with a man in prison?
Eliza smiled in spite of herself, thinking how this question would fit nicely on the running list she and Peter kept, “Things We Never Expected to Say.” They had been keeping this since their college days, almost since the day they met, and it was actually a list of things they had overheard: The bouillabaisse is dank. I left my poncho at the Ritz-Carlton. I have a fetish for fried chicken.
Except—How does one communicate with a man in prison was not quite that bizarre, much less unique. Not in the world at large, and certainly not in Eliza’s world in particular, given her mother’s work at the Patuxent Institute and Eliza’s peculiar history. One could even argue that it was an inevitable question, that if she had allowed herself to think about such things, she would have known that Walter would not leave this world without sending out some sort of manifesto. Not to her, necessarily. She really had come to be almost smug about how she had hidden herself in plain sight. She may not have deliberately chosen to hide herself from Walter, but between Peter’s surname and the move to London, she had felt relatively invisible.
Walter always had a grandiose streak, a concept of himself as someone much larger than he was, in every sense of the word. He had insisted he was five nine, when he was clearly no more than five six or five seven. He became about as angry as Eliza ever saw him, talking about his height, claiming those inches he didn’t have. It was one of the rare times she felt she had the upper hand with him, which had been terrifying and pleasing in equal measure. She couldn’t afford the upper hand with Walter, or so she thought. Later, when people used terms like “Stockholm syndrome”—not her parents, but people far removed from her, prosecutors, journalists, and that odious Jared Garrett—she had found it offensively glib. That experience of being labeled had left her with a lifelong distaste for gossip, a reticence so pronounced that many people thought her incurious, when her real problem was an almost pathological politeness. She hated Iso’s fascination with celebrities, the way she pored over magazine and Internet photos, passing judgment on dresses and hairdos and hab
its of people she had never met. But Eliza could never explain the virulence of her revulsion to her daughter, not unless she was willing to tell her everything. She would, one day, not today.
As she dawdled at the computer—it was late, after ten, but Peter had yet another function, one from which she was spared because the babysitter had fallen through—an icon glowed in the lower corner of her screen, announcing her sister’s arrival into this netherworld.
Hi, Vonnie, she typed.
Eliza! The exclamation mark signaled surprise, if not necessarily delight. Eliza had never before initiated an IM conversation with her sister, and had been famously taciturn when her sister tried to engage her via this mode. What’s up?
Nothing. Just trying to write something.
WHAT? Vonnie might as well have typed: Peter is a writer. I am a writer. You are not a writer. She had always been territorial that way. The funny thing was—neither one was a writer, not anymore. Peter had left journalism for the world of finance, and Vonnie was an editor at a publication so small and arcane that it was essentially unaffected by the Internet-related problems roiling the mainstream media. Something that had never made significant money could not lose significant money. Vonnie edited a foreign policy journal that charged $150 a year and was even stodgier than its subscriber list, whose average age was sixty-five. The subscribers were actually beginning to petition for some limited Web-based content, but Vonnie was fighting the change. “Life is not a timed event,” she liked to say. “I want to run a magazine that has the luxury of thought, with no shot clock on responses.”
A letter, Eliza wrote, reflexively honest with her family. But she thought before adding: To Walter Bowman.
WHAT?????????????????????????????????????
???????????????????????????????????????????
????????????????????????????
It was funny, provoking that kind of adolescent response from Vonnie. Her sister might as well have typed back: For reals? Or: R U Serious?
He wrote me.
The phone rang within seconds.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Vonnie asked.
“You know, Iso might have been the one to pick up. It’s not that late.”
“However, she didn’t. I promise I’ll be more careful in the future. Meanwhile, let me repeat: Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“No, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. His letter came”—she did a quick calculation—“about ten days ago.”
“And I’m just hearing about it now? I bet you told Mom and Dad.”
Eliza had fumbled that, and badly. But Vonnie was so exhausting, ceaselessly demanding, always pulling focus. She hadn’t told her precisely because she wanted to avoid this conversation. She decided to try and glide by that detail.
“He recognized me, in one of those society photos taken for a local magazine. Apparently, we’re pretty easy to find, once you know we’re in Bethesda. I think he used property records.” She was hedging her bets again, not telling Vonnie that Walter clearly had an accomplice in this. Jared Garrett? She couldn’t see him as the owner of that perfect purple penmanship.
“But why would you write him back?”
“Because”—she made up an answer on the spot, then realized it had the virtue of being true—“because he’ll write again, and again, until I do. I know him, Vonnie.”
“He’s a sociopath. No one knows a sociopath. He’s bored, in prison. He has every reason to reach out and poke you, see if he can get a response. That’s his problem, not yours. Ignore him.”
Vonnie had never suffered from uncertainty, about anything.
“They’ve scheduled his execution date.”
“Ah, there’s your smoking gun. He’s using the cultural mania for closure to reach out to you. The man’s a sadist. If I were you, I’d write back and ask if he’s trying to get in touch with his victims. Particularly the Tacketts.”
“Why ‘particularly’?” she asked, more sharply than she intended. Eliza had always been sensitive to this sense of hierarchy among Walter’s victims, in part because she had always been at the bottom and the top, if such a thing were possible. She was the most interesting because she lived; she was the least interesting because she lived. Holly was the prettiest, the golden girl. Holly’s death had been particularly violent.
“Well, hers is the death that will result in his death, right? That’s the one he’s going to die for.”
“Right.” Maude had been killed in Maryland, which kept capital punishment on the books but was increasingly disinclined to use it. Holly Tackett had been killed in Virginia, which apparently suffered from no such qualms. “But why would he write the Tacketts, what would he say?”
“He might confess, for once. That’s not so much to ask for, is it?”
Eliza thought, but did not say: For Walter, that’s huge. Walter never said anything that he didn’t want to say. He hated, more than anything, to be forced into saying he was wrong, no matter how small the matter. The first time he had hit Eliza was when she had corrected him on the facts of the War of 1812. It had been a strange hit—a punch, direct to the stomach, something a boy might have done to another boy, and it had knocked the wind out of her. But she never corrected him again, no matter how wrong he was, and he was often wrong. On history, on math, on picayune matters of grammar and usage. And, frequently, about people. Eliza had never known anyone who was more wrong about people, women in particular.
“Look, Eliza.” Vonnie had softened her tone. “You’re too nice for your own good. Forget Walter. Not forget—I know that’s impossible—”
“You’d be surprised. I’d barely thought of him, particularly in the past few months.”
“Hmmphf.”
Eliza knew how to change the subject with her sister. “What’s new with you?”
“Nothing. Everything. I was online at this godforsaken hour because I want to check on events in the Middle East in real time. I can’t wait for the morning paper anymore, or even CNN. I hate how swiftly the world moves now, how glib everyone has become. We need to think more, not more quickly. Someone—the secretary of state, administration officials—will be on all the news programs tomorrow, delivering up these great gobs of sound bites, and people will be blogging like mad. It’s not productive. Foreign policy is too nuanced, too steeped in centuries of history to be reduced to banal homilies. This isn’t a partisan position,” she said, almost as if rehearsing her own talking points. “It’s an intellectual one. These issues must be addressed with gravitas.”
Eliza didn’t disagree. She felt the same way, only her concerns were domestic. The world was moving too swiftly, although it was strange to hear that complaint from caffeinated Vonnie. Iso and Albie were growing up too fast, Peter’s new job gobbled up twelve, fourteen hours a day, in exchange for promises that they might be rich, truly rich, within a year or two.
Her own days, however, were molasses slow. They were full, with places to go and things to do, and she was exhausted at the end of them. But they trundled along like dinosaurs. The sauropod or the stegosaurus, which, according to Albie, were the slowest of the dinosaurs.
After listening sympathetically to her sister for another fifteen minutes, agreeing with virtually everything she said, Eliza begged off, saying she was tired. Yet she remained at the computer, writing. She was self-aware enough to realize that it was not incidental that she suddenly found the words she wanted to write to Walter. She was still at the computer when Peter returned an hour later, although she quickly closed the file, reluctant to discuss the matter again this evening, even with his sympathetic ear. She was, she decided, Waltered-out.
10
1985
SHE HAD NEVER GONE to the bathroom outside before. She knew it was an odd point on which to fixate, given what was happening to her, but it was embarrassing. She tried to persuade the man that she would behave if he would allow her to use a restroom at a gas station or fast-food place, but he wouldn’t hear of
it. He wasn’t harsh or cruel. He simply shook his head and said, “No, that won’t work.”
They had been in the truck about three hours at this point. He had stopped and gassed up, but he had pumped his own gas and told her beforehand that it would be a bad idea for her to try to get out. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, as if she were in control, as if her behavior would determine what he did. He pulled the passenger side of the truck very close to the pump; if she opened the door, there would barely be room for her to squeeze out, and even then, she would be between the door and the hose. Of course, she could go out the other way, the driver’s side. As the gas pump clicked away—it was an older pump, at a dusty, no-name place, and the dollars mounted slowly, cent by cent—she tested his reactions, leaning slowly toward the left. He was at the driver’s-side door faster than she would have thought possible.
“You need something?”
“I was going to change the radio station.”
“It isn’t on,” he pointed out. “I don’t leave the key in the ignition when I pump gas. I knew a guy, once, he left his key in the ignition and the car blew up. He was a fireball, running in circles.”
“I was going to change it for later,” she said, almost apologetically. Why did she feel guilty about switching a radio station? He had kidnapped her. But the odd thing about this man was that he didn’t act as if he were doing anything wrong. He reminded her a little of Vonnie in that way, especially when they were younger. Vonnie would do something cruel, then profess amazement at Elizabeth’s reaction, focusing on some small misdeed by Elizabeth to excuse her behavior. When Elizabeth was three, Vonnie had tied her to a tree in the backyard and left her there all afternoon. Admonished by their parents, Vonnie had said: “She was playing with my Spirograph and she wouldn’t stop putting pieces in her mouth. I just wanted to keep her from choking.” One April Fools’ Day, she had volunteered to fix Elizabeth milk with Oval-tine, then given her a vile concoction with cough syrup and cayenne pepper hidden beneath the pale brown milk. As Elizabeth had coughed and retched, Vonnie had said: “You spilled a little.” As if the stains from the drink were more damning than the devious imagination of the person who had prepared it.
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