“I mean, I think it’s wonderful that you want to apologize to her in person,” Jeff said. “But how it ends up making you feel—well, it depends on what you expect, going in.”
I expect she’s going to keep me from going to the death chamber, buddy. “What do you mean?”
“Well, she might withhold the, I don’t know, emotional experience you expect. I mean, if you want forgiveness or absolution—I don’t think you’re going to get that. She’s nice enough—”
“She always was a nice girl.”
“But she’s pretty firm in her insistence that people not forget that she was a victim, too.”
“She was,” Walter said. “She’s entitled to feel that way.”
“Okay, that’s easy for us to discuss in the abstract. But I want you to think about what it will be like, to be face-to-face with her, through the glass, and to hear her say that she won’t forgive you, that she can’t forgive you. That might make things a lot harder.”
Things. That was Jeff’s way of saying this was real, that Walter was going to die this time. Twenty-plus years, a literal record on Virginia’s death row, if not in other states. Twenty-plus years, and he wasn’t even fifty yet. Who wouldn’t do what he was doing, in his situation? Who wouldn’t fight for his life?
The girls—the girls had fought, struggled to breathe. He had felt terrible, doing what he did to them. But if they lived, they would have told, and that seemed so unfair. It wasn’t his fault. It had taken him a long time to get to a place where he realized that it was possible to feel remorse without accepting the labels that society put on things. He was sorry that he had to kill those girls, but it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t stupid enough to say that out loud, even to Barbara, although he had confided in her a few details no one knew. To Jeff, he talked only about the remorse, his belated understanding that no one should take another person’s life.
But if he had come to that realization all on his own, why couldn’t the commonwealth of Virginia have the same epiphany? That was the true unfairness of things. He agreed: It had been wrong to kill those girls because it was wrong to kill, always. Always.
He decided to put Jeff on the defensive, make him be explicit: “So this is it, huh? No chance this time of anything stopping it.”
“There’s always a chance, and you know we’ll cover it from every angle. Appeal to the Supreme Court, ask the governor for a commutation.”
“Be straight with me.”
A pause. “It’s hard to see any other outcome at this point.”
If only you knew! It was hard not to brag to this earnest young man, a top-flight thinker, about the plan Walter had concocted. It was hard not to tell him that his discovery of Elizabeth’s picture, while a coincidence, had happened after months and months of Barbara trying to get a lead on her. (At one point, she had even called her mother and sister, claimed to be an old friend, but they had been appropriately skeptical. He liked Barbara, surely he did, but that voice! You just couldn’t imagine a girl like Elizabeth being friends with someone who had that voice.) He knew that Jeff wouldn’t approve of his tactics, but he would be pleased with the result, downright proud of him. Jeff put him in the mind of Earl, the mechanic back at his father’s place, the one person who seemed to realize that Walter had something to offer. He wondered what had happened to Earl, if he had gotten out of the Marines alive, if he had ever opened up his fix-it business. Did he know of Walter? He hated to think of Earl, reading about him in the paper all those years ago, believing he was a monster, lower than low.
“I understand,” he assured Jeff.
“It’s just—it would be awful if this meeting didn’t bring you the peace you expected.”
“I can deal with that, Jeff. It’s not about me. It’s about her.” A beat. “How did she strike you?”
A pause on Jeff’s end. “Nice.”
“You said that already. That’s one of those say-nothing words.” Nice was ice with an n butting in front of it, making it even colder and more colorless. Nice was nothing.
“Okay, kind of placid, then. Her husband has the big personality, and she seems to be used to letting him run things.”
“You mean, he’s bossy? Domineering?”
“No, just very much in charge, the fighter in the family. She doesn’t seem to have much appetite for conflict.”
Oh, I know that. I’m counting on that.
He didn’t press Jeff further on the subject of Elizabeth, feeling that was too risky, might tip his hand. Now, lying on his bunk and staring at the ceiling, the sounds of Sussex I sharp and harsh around him, he allowed himself to remember the affection he had felt for her, almost in spite of himself. Was it love? He wasn’t sure it could be called love. But they had something, all those years ago. There was a bond. He could make her do anything. Wasn’t that proof of something between them? He had granted her life. If you thought about it, he was kind of a god. And it was time to call that marker in.
36
“WHO’S TRUDY TACKETT? ISO ASKED.”
“How do you know that name?”
They had just crossed the threshold in a cranky heap, tired and worn-out from the trip, in which they had been stuck in a terrible backup on I-66. The precipitating accident was apparently quite bad, according to WTOP, which Peter had switched off after hearing that two people had been killed in the collision. By the time their car inched past the accident site, the ambulances and helicopters had long departed, leaving behind two cars so mangled that it was impossible to imagine anyone surviving the crash. If they had left Monticello earlier, as Iso had urged repeatedly, they might have been here when it happened, their car could be another one in the pileup.
Eliza couldn’t help saying that out loud, without the Iso part, hoping her daughter would make that connection. “If we had left earlier, we might have been in this very spot when it happened.”
“At least that would have been interesting,” Iso said. “Unlike the rest of the day.”
Monticello had been a bit of a bust. Iso had attempted to wear her iPod headphones the entire time, and when Peter remonstrated, she had stalked through the tour with a boredom so palpable it felt like a weapon, aimed at them all. Albie, sensitive to his sister’s moods, had found it hard to take in the old house, and his confusion about Thomas Jefferson hadn’t helped. (Midway through the tour, it became obvious that he thought they were going through George Washington’s house. Eliza and Peter really needed to help him with his American history. He could rattle off the Tudor monarchs but couldn’t even name the first three presidents.) At any rate, Eliza’s nerves were already raw when Iso casually tossed out a name that always made her flinch.
“Trudy Tackett,” Iso repeated. “She signed this note that was with the mail, although it’s not in an envelope. See? Says she wants you to call her.”
Eliza glanced at Peter, knowing the name would not necessarily resonate with him, but hoping he would step up and say something, which she could not imagine doing just now. She felt as if a piece of clay was lodged around her larynx, slowly hardening. Trudy Tackett. As Jefferson Blanding had told her a mere two days ago, she wasn’t that hard to find.
“She went to school with your mom,” Peter said. “At least, I think that’s how you know her. Right, Eliza?”
She nodded, then managed to croak: “Her daughter. It was her daughter I knew.”
“Why would she leave you a note?”
“She was probably in the neighborhood.” Again, it was Peter who spoke.
Iso had expended about as much curiosity as she could on her mother’s behalf. She went into the family room and turned on the television, and Albie joined her at the opposite end of the sofa. He would spend the next hour stealthily closing the distance between them, patiently taking territory one inch at a time. Eventually, he would get too close and Iso would scold: “Get away from me. You smell” or “You breathe too loudly. You make funny noises.” Albie would retreat, then start over again. He loved her so much. Why
couldn’t Iso see that, glory in it? Eliza had felt the same way about Vonnie when they were young, and she bet that Vonnie missed it, regretted the way she had squandered that affection. No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.
She and Peter rushed upstairs, as if unpacking their small overnight bag was an urgent, complicated matter, requiring them both. And it felt good, Eliza discovered, to have something to do with her hands, to sort the dirty clothes into piles, to get a wash going.
“I have to admit,” Peter said, “I didn’t remember who Trudy Tackett was. She’s one of the relatives, right.”
“Holly,” Eliza said. “Holly’s mother.”
“Oh.” Peter knew Holly’s significance. Or thought he did. “It could be a coincidence. She doesn’t necessarily know that Walter has been in touch with you.”
“What did Blanding say? It’s an office, like any other. People gossip. Someone at the prison could have told her.”
“About the calls. Not about the visit, because it hasn’t been arranged.”
“For all we know, they listen in on his phone calls.”
Bereft of chores, she sat on the bed.
“I would think she wouldn’t care, one way or another. Her daughter’s murder at least ended in a trial, with a death sentence. What more can she want?”
Eliza shrugged, as if in agreement. But she was thinking: So much more. She wants so much more. She wants me to be dead, and her daughter to be alive.
They had spoken only once. It was the second day of Eliza’s testimony, and she had eaten something that disagreed with her. It wasn’t nerves; her father was felled by the same waves of nausea, this odd feeling of wanting to throw up but not producing anything. About midway through the afternoon, they broke for a recess and Eliza had rushed to the nearest bathroom. She still couldn’t get anything to come up, no matter how much she retched.
When she came out of the stall, Trudy Tackett was standing there. She was a pretty woman. Of course, she seemed ancient to Eliza at the time. Funny, because Mrs. Tackett was younger than Inez. But her suit was unusually formal, even for court, and she wore very thick, unbecoming makeup.
“I’m Holly’s mother,” she said.
Eliza nodded. She was under strict instructions not to speak to any of the spectators, and she assumed that Holly’s mother knew the rules. She didn’t want to be rude, but she didn’t want to do anything wrong. That could lead to a mistrial, the last thing she wanted.
“She was younger than you,” her mother said. “A month away from her fourteenth birthday, in fact. We were going to have a lovely party.”
Eliza widened her eyes to signify that she thought this a nice idea, a lovely party. She wanted to leave, but Mrs. Tackett stood squarely in her path, and Eliza couldn’t see how to go around her without being rude.
“I mean, I know Holly looked like she was sixteen or eighteen. Don’t you think we knew that? Her father and her brothers spent most of their lives with their fists balled up, ready to hit men just for looking at her. But she was playing with dolls as recently as two years ago. She wasn’t in a hurry to grow up, like some girls. She certainly didn’t worship Madonna.”
That was one of those stray details that had become something so much larger than it was—the hair ribbon, the gloves and boots Eliza was wearing when she was kidnapped. Now she was defined by those things, and she could barely remember them.
“I didn’t worship her,” she said, feeling misunderstood. “I…liked her. I liked her style.”
Her current role models were Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, high-necked blouses and big skirts, brooches and pearls.
“You should have taken care of her,” Mrs. Tackett said. “You were older. You knew what was going on.”
“I couldn’t…I didn’t…”
“You should—”
Another woman pushed her way into the bathroom just then, and Eliza escaped. She never spoke to Mrs. Tackett again, although she felt her eyes on her, the day of closing arguments. (She had not wanted to attend, but the prosecutor had said it would look bad if she wasn’t there.)
She always felt that Mrs. Tackett had been interrupted just as she was about to say the words that Eliza feared the most: You should be dead. Everyone knows that you’re the one who should be dead and Holly should be alive. You let her die so you might live.
Part VI
CRAZY FOR YOU
Released 1985
Reached no. 1 on Billboard Hot 100
Spent 25 weeks on Billboard Hot 100
37
LIKE THE LOVELORN TEENAGER she never was, Trudy kept returning to Elizabeth Lerner’s neighborhood—the scene of the crime—over and over again. She would get in her car, intent on nothing more than buying a carton of milk or dropping off Terry’s dry cleaning and, next thing she knew, she was crossing the Potomac in a trancelike state. And once a river was crossed…well, everyone knew that saying. She did this one, two, three times, and ended up stuck in horrible traffic jams one, two, three times. On her fourth trip, she surfaced from a long blank spell just in time to apply her brakes and avoid rear-ending the car in front of her.
Then she discovered that she could walk to the local Metro stop and take the train all the way up to Bethesda, changing only once, in downtown D.C. It was a long journey, but the D.C. Metro was reliably neat and orderly, and it wasn’t dangerous to zone out on the subway; all she risked was missing her stop. But she never missed her stop. In sensible walking shoes, ones purchased for a London trip taken in dutiful honor of their thirtieth anniversary, Trudy made her way to Elizabeth Lerner’s house, hoping—for what? A glimpse of her? A confrontation? Could she really walk up to the woman and ask to know why she had not called Trudy? It had been only a week, give or take. But Trudy believed that Elizabeth would have called within the first twenty-four hours if she had intended to respond at all. Why was she ignoring her?
She had not told Terry about these trips. He wouldn’t forbid her to make them, but he wouldn’t approve, and she found that she still cared about his approval, more or less. She had gone back to hiding her cigarette smoking, for example, and continued to pretend she was taking her Lipitor. When would those subterfuges catch up with her, if ever? If Terry confronted her—difficult to imagine, but it had happened a few times during their marriage—she would say she was trying to even the actuarial odds, given their genders and the age difference. She was tired of outliving people. She felt as if she were going to outlive everyone—her husband, her sons, her grandchildren.
Everyone except Walter Bowman.
The prosecutor said there was no way he could get a stay this time. There may be some pro forma filings at the last minute, an assertion that lethal injection was cruel and unusual, but those would be token protests, lawyers earning their money. Still, it had been disturbing when that one man had been given a stay just last month and the Supreme Court had agreed to hear his petition. Third time’s the charm, Terry said grimly.
Unless Elizabeth Lerner had something up her sleeve. Why else would she be talking to Walter? Perhaps she was going to make some big show of forgiveness, issue a public statement about her opposition to the death penalty, make Terry and Trudy the bad guys.
Setting a brisk pace, Trudy began her walk around the neighborhood. She drew absolutely no attention. It had been a long time since Trudy had attracted attention, and she liked to think she had been gracious about that transition. Married young, the first three pregnancies coming so swiftly, she felt she had been on a shelf since her twenties. Interestingly, around the time that Holly entered adolescence—Trudy was in her late thirties, then—she had a second flowering. And although Holly had started drawing increasingly sexualized attention about the same time, Trudy had not felt competitive with her daughter. Quite the opposite. Like a good tennis partner, Holly elevated Trudy’s game, inspired her to take more care with her appearance. Her marriage picked up a little charge, especially as Holly began to attend sleepovers and they had t
he house to themselves for the first time since, well, the first nine months of their marriage, before the arrival of Terry III. Although she was, reflexively, a Democrat, Trudy had felt secure in Reagan’s America, secure in Middleburg. It had been a prosperous time, and the bad news—Lebanon, famine, the Unabomber, the Mexico City earthquake, Leon Klinghoffer—seemed so very far away. Or, in the case of AIDS, based on other people’s decisions. Terry’s gaze was the only one she craved.
In the wake of Holly’s death, Trudy became almost too visible, recognized—and therefore pitied—everywhere she went. In Alexandria, she settled into anonymity and was grateful for it. Granted, she couldn’t really take anyone new into her life because that would involve telling the story, which was unbearable. Better to have a child who was, in fact, the Unabomber’s victim, because that one word was all the shorthand required. Walter Bowman and his crimes fell into some muddy nether region. He wasn’t nickname famous, as Terry once observed, not like some serial killers. People in Virginia tended to remember him, but not by name. Once, after the move to Alexandria, Trudy had tried to speak of her life with a neighbor, only to have the woman blurt out: “Oh my God, you were the mother of that beautiful little blond girl.” Terry said she should take solace in Holly being remembered that way, but that wasn’t being remembered. “Beautiful little blond girl” could be one of many. In that moment, Trudy understood the world at large had lost track of her daughter. It was the crime that people remembered, not the victim. Walter’s execution would be the last chance to remind the world of a singular life lost.
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