I'd Know You Anywhere

by Laura Lippman

  “She had no legs?”

  Albie nodded guiltily, as if he knew the dream could be interpreted as evidence of conflicted feelings toward his accomplished sister, whose strong, fleet limbs had granted her effortless entrée into a new peer group, while he was still struggling to make friends here. But Eliza believed Albie wasn’t the least bit conflicted about Iso. He loved her, he wanted to be her. He would never hurt her, even in his imagination. He was genuinely worried that she might be harmed. What did Albie know, or suspect, about his sister? Did he have insights that Eliza lacked? Or was he simply mirroring the anxiety she felt?

  “Are you concerned about Iso? In life, not in your dreams.”

  Albie thought about this. “No, I never worry about Iso. And she doesn’t seem to worry about me. I wish she did, sometimes.”

  That was interesting. “In what way?”

  “I wish she would ask me about school, how my day went.”

  “Do you ask her?” Eliza asked.

  “I do. We all do. Except Iso. You ask Daddy, and Daddy asks you, and you both ask me, and you both ask Iso, but Iso never asks anyone anything anymore.”

  “She’s a—” Peter began.

  “A teenager,” Albie finished for him. “You say that all the time, but what does that mean???”

  “That’s a big question for the middle of the night,” Peter said.

  “It’s not even midnight,” Albie pointed out. Their little dreamer could be quite literal.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you this much,” Peter said. “When you’re a teenager, there is so much going on in your body that it makes you a little different, for a while.”

  Albie thought about this. “Like a Transformer?”

  “Sort of, but it’s all on the inside. It wears you out, growing so much so fast. That’s why Iso is cranky sometimes.”

  “She’s cranky all the time.”

  Eliza wanted to defend Iso, but Albie was right. She was cranky all the time. It was sad, hearing this spoken aloud, and having to admit that Iso wasn’t merely moody. She had one mood, at least at home, a snarling grouchiness.

  “Do you want to sleep in our bed tonight?” she asked instead, knowing it would make for a cramped, sleepless night for the two adults. Plus, Reba had started sneaking into their bed.

  “No, I’m too big,” Albie said. “But may I leave the real light on?” The real light meaning his bedside lamp, not the night-light that guided his way to the hallway bathroom he shared with Iso. They left him there in the glow of the real light. He was asleep by the time they crossed the threshold, but Eliza did not backtrack to turn out the light. If he awoke again, it would be important to him that the light was still on, that the promise had been kept.

  “It’s my fault,” Eliza said when they were back downstairs. “He’s so sensitive he can tell that I’m jumping out of my skin these days.”

  “Maybe. But it could also be a coincidence.”

  “He might have read the letter,” she said guiltily, as if her carelessness with the document indicated some subconscious agenda of her own.

  “What?”

  She explained how she had come to lose track of it, Albie’s drawing on the back. “Truthfully, I’m fearful that Iso is the one who threw it in the trash can by the desk, although I suppose I could have thrown it out by accident, forgotten what I had in that pocket. She’s a terrible snoop. She’s been going through my purse lately, and lord knows what else.”

  “Okay, but here’s the thing,” Peter said, pouring himself a glass of wine and putting on the teakettle for her, rummaging behind the pots and pans for a brand of high-end cookies that Eliza hoarded, one of the few things she refused to share with her children because they ate them too carelessly, too quickly. “If either one of them had read the letter, they wouldn’t be able to hide that fact from you for long. Even if they were worried about getting into trouble for snooping. Albie, especially. So put that out of your mind for now. What’s the real issue here?”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t put her worries out of her mind just by drinking a cup of tea, eating one of her beloved biscuits. She wasn’t Albie.

  “This is how I see it,” Peter said. “Walter wants to make actual contact with you. He’s not entitled to that wish, which he realizes. He says as much. Yet what he’s doing is threatening you, implicitly. He keeps circling closer, letting you know how much he’s learned about you, that he can get to our family via this LaFortuny person. If he made a direct threat, or even a demand, you could go to the prison authorities and complain. You could get him in trouble for what he’s done to date, but you haven’t because you believe that every person who knows about your past exponentially increases the possibility of the story getting out, which bothers you because you don’t want the kids to know.”

  “Or anyone, really. People change, when they find out.” She thought of the one girl from high school she had taken into her confidence just partway, and how badly that had ended when they decided they liked the same boy. The other girl, who knew Eliza had been raped, started a whisper campaign that she was a slut, a girl who would do it with anyone, and that’s why the boy had chosen her.

  “Walter wants to see you,” Peter repeated. “And the point of all this—the letters, the phone calls, his accomplice—is to let you know that if you don’t come see him, then maybe he will go public. Grant an interview. Start dropping hints again that he’ll reveal at last how many girls he’s killed. Yes, I think the Washington and Baltimore papers will protect your privacy if you decline to be interviewed on the record. But, as you said, all sorts of unsavory types won’t. I think Walter is suggesting that if you go see him, he’ll spare you that.”

  “That’s so unfair,” Eliza said.

  “It is. But you have to focus on what you want, not what’s right or principled. You don’t want to tell the kids yet what happened to you, but you don’t want the kids to find out from someone else. How do you best achieve that goal?”

  “Maybe Walter wants money, cash to purchase some privilege or item he can’t afford on his own.”

  “Maybe. But his friend Miss LaFortuny is well fixed, right? I think Walter would be offended if you offered him money.”

  “Walter has no right to be offended by anything I do.”

  “Agreed. Walter has no right to anything. And if you’re prepared to weather the consequences of ignoring him, I say go for it. If you’re ready to bring the kids down here and give them the PG-13 version of what happened to you when you were fifteen, I’ll back you up. We can even ask your parents to point us to some experts in the field, get their advice on how to talk about it. We always knew this day was going to come. We just didn’t expect Walter to be the one who forced the issue.”

  “No,” Eliza said, nibbling at her biscuit, trying to make it last. “Albie can’t handle it, and Iso won’t be able to keep the secret if we tell just her.”

  “Iso’s very good at keeping secrets. Too good, in my experience.”

  “Her own,” Eliza said, thinking about her rifled purse. “Not anyone else’s. Besides, she might tell him in order to upset him.”

  “Okay, that was one alternative. The other is to do nothing, and see what happens, which basically puts us at the mercy of Walter and the loose cannon that is Miss LaFortuny.”

  Eliza grimaced. She disliked the woman and felt guilty about disliking someone ostensibly well intentioned. But there was something creepy about her.

  “The final option is to let Walter have some sort of direct contact with you. A call, or a visit. Clearly, a letter didn’t satisfy him.”

  The teakettle sang. It had belonged to Eliza’s mother and was an anachronistically silly item, emblematic of the late 1970s, an enamel kettle that was meant to resemble a puffer fish. Inez had decided she hated it soon after buying it. Eliza hated it, too, but she hadn’t been in any position to disdain her mother’s hand-me-downs when she and Peter started living together the final year of school. Now this fish had traveled with t
hem from Wesleyan to Houston to London and back again to its home state of Maryland, earning Eliza’s affection on the basis of its sheer longevity, its staying power. Her kitchen held many of Inez’s castoffs—simple things, with no stories, no distinction—and she loved them all. Her mind cataloged them now, all those little relics of the house back in Roaring Springs—a particular mixing bowl, a bottle opener, a long spoon used to stir Sunshines. She had wept—wept—when a ceramic jar, used for holding kitchen utensils, had been misplaced during the move back to the States. Eventually it was found, unharmed, in a mislabeled box, and she had wept again with joy.

  “A call,” she said. “I can handle a call. But it has to be understood that we will talk during school hours, only.”

  “And do you think,” Peter asked, “that he’ll be satisfied, then, that you’ll have nothing to worry about?”

  She chewed her cookie with unusual care. “Probably not.”

  “Eliza—do I know everything about what happened?”

  “No,” she told her husband. “But then—I’m not sure I do, either.”

  20

  “LOOK AT THAT GIRL, the shine on her,” Walter said.

  Where were they? They were in Manassas, Virginia, on the outskirts, about as far east as they ever seemed to get. Walter’s path reminded her of the Spirograph she had owned as a little kid. They were traveling in a fixed circle, rotating according to a pattern that made sense to him, making great loops through western Virginia, western Maryland, and easternmost West Virginia. She wondered if he was circling his own hometown, if he was as homesick for his house and parents as she was. But he could go home anytime, couldn’t he? She refused to feel sorry for Walter in his home-sickness. It wasn’t the same as hers at all. He had freedom of movement. If she ever got away from him, she would make sure to—

  “Go talk to her,” Walter said.

  The girl was at a makeshift stand, filled with homemade jars of something. The sign promised that all proceeds would go to Darlene Fuchs, whoever she was.

  “What?”

  “Go talk to her. Make friends.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Sure you do.”

  But she didn’t, not anymore, and she wouldn’t.

  “I’ll do it,” Walter said angrily, downshifting into a lower gear and turning around. Elizabeth had been watching him drive, trying to figure out if she could ever take the truck, but the stick shift was baffling to her. She had sat in the backseat during Vonnie’s driving lessons and thought it looked easy, but both the family cars were automatics. And even Walter sometimes ground the gears on this old truck.

  “Excuse me, miss?”

  The girl—and Elizabeth could see instantly that she was a girl, not quite her age, although tall and shapely—had more than a shine on her. She was movie-star pretty, with hair worn long and straight, not the most current style, but becoming to her. Her eyes were sea green, a color made more vivid by the pale green oxford shirt she wore, a Ralph Lauren emblazoned with a tiny polo player. Elizabeth thought of that preppie style as played out, but it worked on this girl.

  “Yes?” she said. Her voice was southern, although not like Walter’s. Different southern. Classy southern.

  “I want to buy some clothes for my sister, but I don’t know this area very well and I just thought someone as well dressed as you might be able to help us out.”

  She looked down at her own clothes as if she had forgotten what she was wearing, as if her perfect outfit was a lucky accident. Yet the oxford cloth shirt was paired with plaid Bermudas, which held hints of the same green. The arms of a pink sweater, picking up the other theme in the Bermudas, hugged her neck. She did not look like the sort of girl who sold jams and jellies on the roadside, on a pretty Saturday afternoon. She looked like someone who should be at the football game. A cheerleader. Or if not a cheerleader, someone with a boyfriend, or a gaggle of female friends, laughing in the stands. A long driveway rose behind her, going up and over a hill, no house in sight. A sign affixed to a post read T’N’T FARM. Elizabeth somehow knew it was not a real farm, but someplace very grand, a place that concealed its grandeur behind this silly name, which was just a sneaky way of being pretentious show-offs.

  “I’m not sure I bought this around here, but if you go over to the mall—”

  “How do we get there?”

  “It’s not far. You just go up that way and make a left on—”

  “But I’m not from here. Those names mean nothing to me. Is it on your way? Could you ride part of the way with us and show us? I’ll give you five dollars for your trouble.”

  She shook her head.

  “Five for you and ten for your cause. I bet that’s more money than you’ve raised so far today.”

  Don’t, Elizabeth thought. Please don’t. But the girl had grabbed her little tin cash box and was climbing into the cab of the truck, into the space that Elizabeth made by jumping out and holding the door open for her. Elizabeth marveled at the way she left her little jars there, trusting that they would be there when she got back. Trusting that she would be back at all.

  “Did you make those jellies yourself?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Uh-huh. It’s green pepper jelly, from an old recipe in my mother’s family. My daddy told me that trying to sell green pepper jelly around here was coals to Newcastle, but I thought it was better than a car wash, or a bake sale.”

  “Who’s Darlene Fuchs?”

  “A girl in my grade, at Middleburg Middle.” So the girl was younger than she was, no more than fourteen. “She has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her family doesn’t have any insurance.”

  Elizabeth could feel the girl assessing her. Not judging her, not mean or catty in her scrutiny, merely taking in the truck, their clothes, Walter’s accent. She might raise money for them, if they were in dire straits. She would show them how to get to the mall. But she had already marked Elizabeth as Other, someone not like her. This was why, Elizabeth realized, no one ever noticed them. Walter had tainted her, made her part of his world.

  “Aren’t you worried,” Elizabeth asked her, “that someone will take your jelly?”

  “Not around here,” the girl said. “We don’t even lock our doors most nights.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Holly,” she said. Elizabeth waited, but she didn’t say: What’s yours? The girl was rude in the way that only very polite people can be, so complacent about her excellent manners that she forgot to use them sometimes.

  The truck lurched forward, eager and overanxious. There was a strong scorched smell, a hint of sweetness beneath it. Walter had leaned too hard on the clutch, trying to get up the hill. “Holly,” he said. “That’s a pretty name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “A pretty name for a pretty girl. You’re a lovely young woman, you really need someone to take care of you. You don’t buy into that woman’s libbers stuff, I bet, not really. Look at the natural world, how labors are divided. The males hunt and defend and provide, the females nurture their young, feather the nest. If a woman doesn’t want to have children, that’s one thing. But it’s unnatural for the woman to leave the home.”

  Holly shifted in her seat, looking to Elizabeth, then back to Walter. Elizabeth realized that Walter was using the knowledge gleaned from the book, although expressing it in his own words. Elizabeth had understood that he liked the book. He had stolen that library copy, after all. But she had not realized until now that Walter took the text literally, that he believed it was like the directions on cake mix, simple and foolproof. Say these things, and you’ll get a girlfriend. She wanted to tell him: She’s only a middle-schooler. She wanted to say: She doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. Instead, she looked out the window, at the green-and-gold blur that was Virginia in the first week of autumn.

  She found herself thinking about being little, five or six, and longing to order the hundred plastic dolls offered for a dollar in the back pages of some comic, probabl
y Betty and Veronica. A hundred dolls for a dollar! It seemed too good to be true. It probably was, her mother counseled her. The dolls would be tiny and cheap. But it was Elizabeth’s dollar, she could spend it as she chose. She sent away for the dolls and they arrived, even smaller and cheaper than her mother had prophesied. But her mother did not say, I told you so, or, Let this be a lesson to you. She said: Let’s make a doll tree. They tied curling ribbons around the dolls and hung them on the boughs of a potted ficus. That night, when her father came home, he had burst into laughter. Strange fruit, he spluttered, strange fruit. Then: Inez, you have clearly found your niche, working with the criminally insane.

  After a brief, baffled moment, her mother had started to laugh, too, then explained the joke to Elizabeth. They had played the song for her on her father’s stereo, pulling the record out of a thick five- or six-album set of which her father was inordinately proud, one with a watercolor of a woman with a flower in her hair. They had talked to her about the history of the South and civil rights. They were kind and thorough and respectful. But the thing was: Elizabeth had loved that tree. It was beautiful to her, and it made her sad when her father’s reaction transformed it into a morbid joke, a joke that overtook her original joy, squashed it beneath the stories of lynchings and the civil rights movement. Walter was like Elizabeth at age six, seeing what he wanted to see. True, he was a grown man, and he should have known better than to believe a silly book. Still—she felt protective of him, in that moment, sorry for him.

  YOU FELT SORRY FOR HIM?

  The Virginia prosecutor snapped those words back at her, the way an impatient parent or teacher barked in the face of an obvious lie. That was odd, because this prosecutor, as opposed to the Maryland one, had always been kind and careful with her. The Maryland one had been exasperated with her from the start.