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Don’t Look Back
Laura Lippman
Eliza Benedict’s past returns to haunt her when the serial killer she escaped from as a young girl walks back into her life. The nail-shredding novel from New York Times bestseller, Laura Lippman.25 years ago, he stole her innocence. Now he wants to get in touch.Eliza Benedict cherishes her quiet existence with her successful husband and children in the leafy suburbs of suburban Washington. But her tranquillity is shattered when she receives a letter from the last person she ever expects – or wants – to hear from: Walter Bowman.In the summer of 1985 when she was fifteen-years-old, Eliza was kidnapped by serial killer Walter Bowman, who targeted young girls like Eliza in a sexually motivated killing spree. Now facing lethal injection on death row, Walter is keen to make contact with Eliza, seemingly motivated by a desire to atone for his sins before he finally meets his maker.Carefully, with some reluctance, she lets Walter enter her life, first by letter, then in person. Walter is keen to convince Eliza that he has changed but it becomes clear that Walter has more of an agenda than he first revealed. Cunning and manipulative, Walter is never more dangerous than when he can't get what he wants, and he wants something very badly. Disturbingly, he seems to have an ally working in the outside, one who seems to know everything about Eliza's life – including where she lives.As Walter once again manages to exert his malign influence, Eliza must draw on all of her reserves of wisdom and strength as the battle of predator and prey once more plays out and she must face the past head on if she is to survive.A taut and mesmerizing novel by the highly-acclaimed author of Life Sentences and Every Secret Thing.
LAURA LIPPMAN
Don’t Look Back
Copyright
Copyright В© Laura Lippman 2010
Laura Lippman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9781847560940
Ebook edition В© 2011 ISBN: 9780007432486
Version: 2016-02-17
For Dorothy and Bernie
Contents
Cover (#u378e1c09-9361-54d6-8575-a730fec1bb1f)
Title Page (#udc453615-2a61-523a-ba45-27d131ac0070)
Copyright (#u32bccce9-4333-57dc-84a1-f2d117247ac4)
PART ONE: I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
PART TWO: CARELESS WHISPER
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
PART THREE: IN MY HOUSE
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
PART FOUR: WHO’S ZOOMIN’ WHO?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
PART FIVE: HOLIDAY
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
PART SIX: CRAZY FOR YOU
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
PART SEVEN: EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
PART EIGHT: VOICES CARRY
Chapter Forty-Five
PART NINE: EVERY DAY
Chapter Forty-Six
Excerpt from The Innocents
GO-GO
US
Chapter One
READ ON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE SHORT STORY FROM LAURA LIPPMAN
Honour Bar
Femme Fatale
About the Author
Author’s Note
About the Publisher (#uc05c7887-953e-52b1-80af-db734ec84469)
PART ONE
I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE
Chapter One
�Iso, time for—’
Eliza Benedict paused at the foot of the stairs. Time for what, exactly? All summer long – it was now August – Eliza had been having trouble finding the right words. Not complicated ones, the things required to express strong emotions or abstract concepts, make difficult confessions to loved ones. She groped for the simplest words imaginable, everyday nouns. She was only thirty-eight. What would her mind be like at fifty, at seventy? Yet her own mother was sharp as a tack at the age of seventy-seven.
No, this was clearly a temporary, transitional problem, a consequence of the family’s return to the States after six years in England. Ironic, because Eliza had scrupulously avoided Briticisms while living there; she thought Americans who availed themselves of local slang were pretentious. Yet home again, she couldn’t get such words – lift, lorry, quid, loo – out of her head, her mouth. The result was that she was often tongue-tied, as she was now. Not at a loss for words, as the saying would have it, but overwhelmed with words, weighed down with words, drowning in them.
She started over, projecting her voice up the stairs without actually yelling, a technique in which she took great pride. �Iso, time for football camp.’
�Soccer,’ her daughter replied in a muffled, yet clearly scornful voice, her default tone since turning thirteen seven months ago. There was a series of slamming and banging noises, drawers and doors, and when she spoke again, Iso’s voice was clearer. (Where had her head been just moments ago, in the laundry hamper, inside her jersey, in the toilet? Eliza had a lot of fears, so far unfounded, about eating disorders.) �Why is it that you called it soccer when everyone else said football, and now you say football when you know it’s supposed to be soccer?’
At least I remembered to call you Iso.
�It’s your camp and you’re the one who hates to be late.’
�Football is better,’ said Albie, hovering at Eliza’s elbow. Just turned eight, he was still young enough to enjoy being by – and on – Eliza’s side.
�Better as a word, or better as a sport?’
�As a word, for soccer,’ he said. �It’s closer to being right. Because it’s mainly feet, and sometimes heads. And hands, for the goalie. While American football is more hands than feet – they don’t kick it so much. They throw and carry it.’
�Which do you like better, as a sport?’
�Soccer for playing, American football for watching.’ Albie, to Eliza’s knowledge, had never seen a single minute of American football. But he believed that affection should be apportioned evenly. At dinner, Albie tried to eat so that he finished all his food at about the same time, lest his peas suspect that he preferred his chicken.
Isobel – Iso – clattered down the stairs, defiant in her spikes, which she wasn’t supposed to wear in the house. At least she was ready, in full uniform, her hair in a French braid, which she had somehow managed to do herself. Eliza couldn’t help raising a hand to her own head of messy red curls, wondering anew how she had given birth to this leggy creature with her sleek hair and sleek limbs and sleek social instincts. Isobel had her father’s coloring – the olive skin and dark hair – but otherwise could have been a lanky changeling.
�Are we snack family today?’ she asked, imperious as a duchess.
�No—’
�Are you sure?’
�Yes—’
�It would be horrible to forget,’ Iso said.
�Horrible?’ Eliza echoed, trying not to smile.
�Almost as bad as the first time we were snack family and you brought that disgusting jerky.’
�Biltong from Daddy’s trip to South Africa,’ Albie said, dreamy with remembering. �I liked it.’
�You would,’ his sister said.
�Don’t squabble,’ Eliza said.
�I don’t.’ Albie was not only keen to be fair, but accurate. His sister was the instigator in almost all their disagreements. Iso rolled her eyes.
They never used to fight, even in this one-sided fashion. They had been close, if only because Albie worshipped Iso, and Iso enjoyed being worshipped. But when they left London, Iso decided she had no use for Albie’s adulation. To Eliza’s dismay, she appeared to have conducted a ruthless inventory of her life, jettisoning everything that threatened her newly invented self, from her little brother to the last syllable of her name, that innocuous and lovely �bel.’ (�Iso?’ Peter had said. �People will think it’s short for Isotope. Shouldn’t it be Izzo?’ Iso had rolled her eyes.) A freckled, redheaded little brother – prone to nightmares and odd pronouncements, not English, but not quite American again, not yet – did not fit Iso’s new image. Nor did her mother, but Eliza expected no less. It was the slights against Albie that she found unbearable.
�Did you remember our chairs?’ Albie asked his mother.
�They’re in the—’ She stopped herself from saying boot. �Trunk.’
Iso was not appeased. �It’s not a trunk. It’s a luggage compartment.’
Eliza hustled the children into the car, a Subaru Forester in which she already spent much of her days, and would probably spend even more hours once school started.
At 8:30 A.M., the day was already hot; Eliza wondered if the camp would cancel, after all. There was some sort of formula, involving temperature, humidity, and air quality, that mandated the suspension of outdoor activities. Other mothers probably checked the Internet, or had an alert programmed into their mobiles – cell phones – but Eliza had long ago accepted that she was never going to be that kind of a mother.
Besides, this was a private camp, and a very macho one, with serious aspirations and a pronounced Anglophilia. Iso’s six years in London provided her great cachet, and she pretended to a much grander knowledge of UK soccer than she had acquired while living there. Eliza had marveled at how she did it: a few sessions at the computer, reading the UK newspapers and Wikipedia, and Iso could pass herself off as quite the expert, chatting about Manchester United and Arsenal, professing to be a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, which she breezily called the Spurs. Eliza was torn between admiration and disapproval for her daughter’s social ambitions, not to mention her ability to execute them. She tried to tell herself that Iso’s adaptability would keep her safe in this world, yet she worried far more about calculating Iso than she did about trusting Albie. Cynics fooled themselves into thinking they had sussed out the worst-case scenarios and were invariably surprised by how life trumped them. Dreamers were often disappointed – but seldom in themselves. Eliza had installed spyware on the computer and monitored Iso’s IM sessions, which appeared benign enough. Now Iso was pushing for her own phone, but Eliza wasn’t sure if she could track text messages. She would have to seek the advice of other mothers – assuming she eventually made friends with any.
On the shade-deprived field, she set up the portable camp chairs, casting a covetous glance at the in-the-know mothers who had umbrellas attached to their chairs or, in the case of one superprepared type, a portable canopy. Eliza wished she had known, back in June, that such things existed, but she probably wouldn’t have availed herself of them anyway. She had felt decadent enough purchasing chairs with little mesh cup holders. She and Albie settled in under the unforgiving sun, Albie reading, with no sense of self-consciousness, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Eliza pretending to follow Iso’s progress through the drills. She was actually eavesdropping. Although the other mothers – and it was all mothers, with the exception of one laid-off father who inhabited his Mr Mom role with a little too much gusto for Eliza’s taste – were kind, they had quickly ascertained that Eliza’s children were not attending the same schools as theirs, which apparently meant there was no reason to befriend her.
�– on the sex offenders list.’
What? Eliza willed the other ambient noises to fall away and honed in on this one conversation.
�Really?’
�I signed up for telephone notification with the county. The guy lives five doors down from us.’
�Child sex offender or just regular sex offender?’
�Child, third degree. I looked him up on the state’s site.’
�What does that mean, third degree?’
�I don’t know. But any degree has to be bad news.’
�And he’s in Chevy Chase?’
Long pause. �Well, we do have a Chevy Chase mailing address.’
Eliza smiled to herself. She knew from her family’s own real estate search how people fudged certain addresses, that even within this very desirable county, one of the richest in the United States, there were hierarchies upon hierarchies. Which was worse: having a child sex offender on your block, or admitting you didn’t live in Chevy Chase proper? The Benedicts lived in Bethesda, and Peter had made sure there wasn’t a sex offender, child or adult, within a six-block radius, although one of their neighbors, a sixty-year-old civil service employee, had been picked up for soliciting in a bathroom at the Smithsonian.
The game done – Iso won it for her team on a penalty kick, a victory she carried lightly, gracefully – the Benedicts got back into the car and headed into the long, endless summer day. The heat was pronounced now; it would reach into the upper nineties for the third day in a row, and the lack of trees in this raw, new development made it feel even hotter. That was one thing Eliza loved unreservedly about their new house, the greenness of the neighborhood. Full of mature shade trees, it felt five to ten degrees cooler than the business district along nearby Wisconsin Avenue. It reminded Eliza of Roaring Springs, the revitalized Baltimore mill village where she had grown up, which backed up to a state park. Her family didn’t even have air-conditioning, only a series of window fans, yet it was always cool enough to sleep back then. Then again, her memory might be exaggerating. Roaring Springs had taken on a slightly mythic air in the Lerner folklore. It was to them what Moscow had been to Chekhov’s three sisters. No, Moscow was a place where the sisters were always intending to go, whereas Roaring Springs was the place that the Lerners were forced to leave, through no fault of their own.
Eliza stopped at Trader Joe’s, which the children considered a treat in the way the �real’ grocery store was not. She let them pick out one snack each while she roamed the aisles, bemused by the store’s arbitrary offerings, the way things came and went without explanation. At summer’s beginning, she and Albie had discovered the loveliest ginger cookies, large and soft, but they had never appeared again, and it seemed wrong, somehow, to inquire after them. �It must be a relief,’ the wives of Peter’s new coworkers had said upon meeting her, �to have real grocery stores again.’ American attitudes about England seemed to have gelled circa 1974, at least among those who hadn’t traveled there. The wives assumed her life abroad had been one of cold deprivation, huddling next to an inadequate space heater while being force-fed kidney pie and black puddings.
Yet the same Americans who believed that England was a land of material deprivation gave the UK too much credit for culture, assuming it was nothing but Shakespeare and the BBC. Eliza had found it even more celebrity-obsessed than the US. Germaine Greer had appeared on Big Brother during their time there, and it had depressed Eliza beyond reason. But then all television, the omnipresence of screens in modern life, depressed her. She hated the way her children, and even her husband, froze in their tracks, instantly hypnotized by a television or a computer.
�Some people,’ Albie announced from the backseat, �have DVD players in their cars.’ He had an eerie knack for picking up Eliza’s wavelength at times, as if her brain were a radio whose dial he could spin and tune. His voice was sweet, wondering, sharing a fun fact, nothing more. Yet he had made the same point once or twice every week since they had bought the new car.
�You’d throw up,’ Iso said. �You get motion sick reading.’ Said as if the very act of reading was suspect.
�I don’t think I will here,’ he said. �That was just in England.’ For Albie, England was synonymous with being a little boy, and he had decided that whatever troubled him there had been left behind, that it was all past. No more nightmares, he had decreed, and just like that, they were over, or else he was doing a good job of white-knuckling his way to morning. A picky eater, he also had decided to reinvent himself as an adventurous one. Today, he had chosen chili-pepper cashews as his treat. Eliza had a hunch he wouldn’t like them much, but the rule was that the children could select whatever they wanted, no recriminations, even if the food went to waste. What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson? When Albie picked a snack that was, for him, inedible, Eliza sympathized and offered to substitute something from the nearby convenience store. Iso, meanwhile, stuck to the tried-and-true, almost babyish snacks like cheese puffs and frogurt. Iso was a thirty-five-year-old divorcée in her head, a three-year-old in her stomach.
Yet – mirabile dictu – Albie liked the cashews. After lunch, he put them in a bowl and carried them out to the family room with his �cocktail,’ a mix of Hawaiian Punch and seltzer. Peter had entertained a lot in his former job, and Eliza worried that London’s more liquid culture had made too vivid an impression on her son. But it was clearly the ceremony, the visuals, that excited him – the bright colors of the drinks, the tiny dishes of finger food. Eliza could stomach very little alcohol. It was one of those changes that had arrived during pregnancy and never went away. Pregnancy had also changed her body, but for the better. Bony and waistless into her twenties, she had developed a flattering lushness after Iso’s birth, at once curvy and compact.
The only person who disapproved of Eliza’s body was Iso, who modeled herself on, well, models. Specifically, the wannabe models on a dreadful television show, an American one that had been inexplicably popular in England. Iso’s sole complaint about the relocation to the States was that the show was a year ahead here and therefore a season had been �spoiled’ for her. �They give away the winner in the opening credits!’ she wailed. Yet she watched the reruns, which appeared to be on virtually every day, indifferent to the fact that she knew the outcome. She was watching an episode now while Albie stealthily tried to close the distance between them, advancing inch by inch along the carpet.
�Stop breathing so loud,’ Iso said.
�Loudly,’ Eliza corrected.
The afternoon stretched before them, inert yet somehow demanding, like a guest who had shown up with a suitcase full of dirty laundry. Eliza felt they should do something constructive, but Iso refused the offer of shopping for school clothes, and Peter had asked that they hold off the annual trip to Staples until this weekend. Peter loved shopping for school supplies, if only because it allowed him to perform his own version of the commercial, the one in which the parent danced ecstatically to �The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.’ (Peter could get away with things that Iso would never permit Eliza to do.) The Benedicts didn’t belong to the local pool, which had a cap on memberships, and it was too hot to do anything else outdoors. Eliza got out drawing supplies and asked the children to sketch ideas for their rooms, promising that they could paint the walls whatever colors they desired, pick out new furniture at Ikea. Iso pretended to be bored but eventually began using the computer to research various beds, and Eliza was impressed by her daughter’s taste, which ran toward simple things. Albie produced a gorgeous jungle forest of a room, filled with dinosaurs, his current passion. Probably not reproducible, at Ikea or any other store, but it was a striking feat of the imagination. She praised them both, gave them Popsicles, indulged in a cherry one herself. Perhaps they should save the sticks for some future project? Even before Peter had taken a job at an environmentally conscious investment firm, the Benedicts had been dutiful recyclers.
Mail clattered through the slot, a jolt of excitement on this long, stifling afternoon. �I’ll get it!’ Albie screamed, not that he had any competition. A mere six months ago, his sister had scrapped with him over an endless list of privileges, invoking primogeniture. Fetching the mail, having first choice of muffin at breakfast, answering the phone, pushing elevator buttons. She was beyond all that now.
Albie sorted the mail on the kitchen counter. �Daddy, bill, junk, catalog. Daddy, junk. Junk. Junk. Daddy. Mommy! A real letter.’
A real letter? Who would write her a real letter? Who wrote anyone real letters? Her sister, Vonnie, was given to revisiting old grudges, but those missives usually went to their parents via e-mail. Eliza studied the plain white envelope, from a PO box in Baltimore. Did she even know anyone in Baltimore anymore? The handwriting, in purple ink, was meticulous enough to be machine- created. Probably junk mail masquerading as a real letter, a sleazy trick.
But, no, this one was quite authentic, a sheaf of loose-leaf paper and a cutting from a glossy magazine, a photo of Peter and Elizabeth at a party for Peter’s work earlier this summer. The handwriting was fussy and feminine, unknown to her, yet the tone was immediately, insistently intimate.
Dear Elizabeth,
I’m sure this is a shock, although that’s not my intention, to shock you. Up until a few weeks ago, I never thought I would have any communication with you at all and accepted that as fair. That’s how it’s been for more than twenty years now. But it’s hard to ignore signs when they are right there in front of your face, and there was your photo, in Washingtonian magazine, not the usual thing I read, but you’d be surprised by my choice of reading material these days. Of course, you are older, a woman now. You’ve been a woman for a while, obviously. Still, I’d know you anywhere.
�Who’s it from, Mommy?’ Albie asked, and even Iso seemed mildly interested in this oddity, a letter to her mother, a person whose name appeared mostly on catalogs and reminders from the dentist. Could they see her hands shaking, notice the cold sweat on her brow? Eliza wanted to crumple the letter in her fist, heave it away from her, but that would only excite their curiosity.
�Someone I knew when I was growing up.’
It looks as if they’ll finally get around to completing my sentence soon. I’m not trying to avoid saying the big words – death, execution, what have you – just being very specific. It is my sentence, after all. I was sentenced to die and I am at peace with that.
I thought I was at peace across the board, but then I saw your photo. And, odd as it might seem to some, I feel it’s you that I owe the greatest apology, that you’re the person I never made amends to, the crime I was never called into account for. I’m sure others feel differently, but they’ll see me dead soon enough and then they will be happy, or so they think. I also accept that you might not be that interested in hearing from me and, in fact, I have engaged in a little subterfuge to get this letter to you, via a sympathetic third party, a person I absolutely trust. This is her handwriting, not mine, in case you care, and by sending it via her, I have avoided the problem of prying eyes, as much for your protection as for mine. But I can’t help being curious about your life, which must be pretty nice, if your husband has the kind of job that leads to being photographed at the kind of parties that end up in Washingtonian, with him in a tux and you in an evening dress. You look very different, yet the same, if that makes any sense. I’m proud of you, Elizabeth, and would love to hear from you. Sooner rather than later, ha-ha!
Yours, Walter
And then – just in case she didn’t remember the full name of the man who had kidnapped her the summer she was fifteen and held her hostage for almost six weeks, just in case she might have another acquaintance on death row, just in case she had forgotten the man who had killed at least two other girls and was suspected of killing many others, yet let her live, just in case all of this might have slipped her mind – he added helpfully:
(Walter Bowman)
Chapter Two
1984
Walter Bowman was good-looking. Anyone who said otherwise was contrary, or not to be trusted. He had dark hair and green eyes and skin that took a tan well, although it was a farmer’s tan. He wasn’t a farmer, actually, but a mechanic, working in his father’s garage. Still, the result was the same, as far as his tan went. He would have liked to work with his shirt off on warm days, but his father wouldn’t hear of it.
He was good-looking enough that his family teased him about it, as if to make sure he wouldn’t get conceited. Yes, he was a little on the short side, but so were most movie stars. Claude, at the barbershop, had explained this to him. Not that Claude compared Walter to a movie star – Claude, like his family, like everyone else in town, seemed intent on keeping Walter in his place. But Claude mentioned one day that he had seen Chuck Norris at a casino in Las Vegas.
�He’s an itty-bitty fella. But, then, all movie stars are little,’ Claude said, finishing up. Walter loved the feel of the brush on the back of his neck. �They have big heads, but small bodies.’
�How little?’ Walter had asked.
�The size of my thumb,’ Claude said.
�No, seriously.’
�Five seven, five eight. ’Bout your size.’
That was what Walter wanted to hear. If Chuck Norris was about his size, well, that was almost the same as Walter being like Chuck Norris. Still, he needed to make one small clarification for the record.
�I’m five nine. That’s average height for a man, did you know that? Five nine for a man, five four for a woman.’
�Is that the average,’ Claude asked, �or the median? There’s a difference, you know.’
Walter didn’t know the difference. He might have asked, but he suspected Claude didn’t really know either, and all he would get was Claude making fun of his ignorance.
�Average,’ he said.
�Well someone has to be average,’ said Claude, who was tall, but skinny and kind of pink all over – splotchy skin, pale, pale red hair, watery eyes that were permanently narrowed from years of staring at the hair that lay across his barber scissors. Everyone was always trying to put Walter in his place, keep him down, stop him from being what he might be. Even women, girls, seemed to be part of the conspiracy. Because, despite Walter’s good looks, he could not find a woman who wanted to go with him, not even on a single date. He couldn’t figure it out. Things would start out okay, he could get a conversation going. He read things, he knew things, he kept an interesting store of facts at his disposal. Claude’s Chuck Norris story, for example, became one of his anecdotes, although he added his own flourish, holding his thumb and forefinger out to show just how ittybitty Chuck Norris was. That usually got a laugh, or at least a smile.
But then something would happen, he could never put his finger on what, and the girl’s face would close to him. It was a small town, and it soon seemed there wasn’t a girl in it who would consider going out with Walter Bowman. And on the rare occasion when a new family moved in, one with daughters, someone must have told them something, because they didn’t want to go with him either.
Then, one day, on an errand for his father, he saw a girl walking down the road just outside Martinsburg. It was hot, and she wore shorts over a lavender bathing suit, a one-piece. He liked that she wore a one-piece. Modest. He offered her a ride.
She hesitated.
�Wherever you’re going,’ Walter added. �Door-to-door service. Truck’s air-conditioning is so cold, you’ll need a sweater.’
It was cold. He saw what it did to her breasts when she got in. They were large for such a short girl, not that he let his eyes linger. He looked only once.
�Where you going?’ he asked.
�The Rite Aid,’ she said. �I want to buy some makeup, but my mother says I can’t. It’s my money, isn’t it?’
�You don’t need makeup.’ He meant it as a compliment, yet she flushed, balled up her fists as if to fight him. �I mean, you’re lucky, you look good without it, but you’re right. It’s your money, you should be able to do with it what you want.’ He couldn’t quite stop himself. Maybe that was the problem, that he just couldn’t stop talking soon enough. �Although you shouldn’t buy anything illegal with it, drugs or whatever. Just say no.’
She rolled her eyes. She was a girl, not as old as he had thought when he first picked her up. Maybe no more than fifteen, but she clearly considered herself more sophisticated than Walter. Was that it? Was that why girls like this were forever eeling away from him? There were some girls – plain, slow witted – who didn’t mind his company, but Walter couldn’t get interested in just anybody. He was good-looking. He should be with someone as good-looking or better-looking. Everyone knew that was how it worked. A beautiful woman could go with the ugliest man on the planet, but a man had to date above himself, or be shamed. He deserved someone special.
�I smoke pot,’ this girl announced.
He didn’t believe her. �You like it?’
The question seemed to catch her off guard, as if that wasn’t the point, liking it or not liking it. �Yeah,’ she said, as if it were a guess. She probably didn’t know the difference between average or median either, although Walter did now. He had looked it up. He always looked things up when he didn’t know them. No one had to be stupid. Stupid was a choice. He was forever learning things. He knew all the US state capitals and he was working on world capitals.
�What’s it like?’ he asked.
�You don’t know?’
�No, it’s not something I’ve gotten around to.’
�You wanna find out? I got some in my purse.’
He didn’t, actually, but he wanted to stay in this girl’s company a while longer.
�What’s your name?’ he asked.
�Kelly. With a y, but I’m thinking of changing it to an i. There are three Kellys in my class at school. What’s your name?’
�Walt.’ He had never called himself that, but why not try it out, change his luck. Within the hour, they were in a little cove off the river, and she was trying to show him how to smoke pot. She said he was doing it wrong, but he was doing it wrong on purpose, wanting to keep his wits about him. He didn’t believe in drugs or alcohol, but if he needed to pretend in order to spend time with this girl, Kelly, Kelli, whatever, he would. He found himself wishing she wore a two-piece. A one-piece, that wasn’t going to come off easily, it wasn’t something you could slip a girl out of, bit by bit. He knew he had to take it slow, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. She was lying on her stomach, on a long flat rock. He blew on her neck, thinking of Claude’s brush. She wrinkled her nose, as if a bug had landed on her. He tried to give her a back rub, but she shrugged his hand off. �No,’ she said. His hand returned, not to her shoulder blades this time, but between her legs. �Hey,’ she said. �Don’t.’ But she wasn’t quite as bossy and superior now. He tried to be sweet, kiss her neck, stroke her hair. He knew from magazines that foreplay was important to girls. But things just didn’t go the way they were supposed to. It was only later, when she was crying, that his mind began to catalog the possible outcomes – she would be his girlfriend, she would tell her parents, she would tell other girls, she might even tell the police, she was never going to stop crying – that he realized he had only one option.
�How’d you get scratched up, Walter?’ his father asked at dinner that night.
�Stopped to relieve myself on the side of the road, walked right into one of those prickly bushes along the highway,’ he said. If someone had seen his truck parked out on Route 118, that would explain it.
�Sure took you a long time to find that fan belt.’
�Like I said, I had to go all the way to Hagerstown, and they didn’t have one either. I ordered it.’
�Coulda sworn Pep Boys in Martinsburg said they had what I wanted in stock.’
�Nope, wrong size. People in those places, they’re just ignorant. No work ethic, no interest in customer service.’
That was all his father needed, and he was off to the races about the death of the small businessman.
By the weekend, the local news was full of stories about the missing girl, Kelly Pratt. She’d never get a chance to change her name now, Walter realized. A week went by, a month, a season, a year. He thought of her as Kelly Brat. He had showed her who was boss. It could have been nice, she shouldn’t have taken him down to the river to smoke pot, the pot was what screwed him up, he probably wouldn’t have been her first, and her just fourteen, according to the news stories. Slut. Druggie. The very fact that they never found her, that he didn’t get caught, that the police never came to speak to him, that no one came forward to say that they had seen Walter Bowman’s pickup parked on the hill above the river that day, that they never even searched near that part of the river – all those things proved he had been right to do what he did.
He found himself taking long drives on his days off, looking for other girls who might need a ride.
Chapter Three
�Ha-ha,’ Peter marveled. �He actually wrote “ha-ha.”’
�If it were an e-mail, if he had access to a computer, he probably would have put an emoticon there, the one that uses a semicolon to wink at you.’
Peter held the letter at arm’s length, although he was not the least bit farsighted, not yet. He was actually a year younger than she was. He inspected the letter as if it were a painting, an abstract portrait of Walter Bowman, or one of those 3-D prints that had been popular for a time. Examined up close, it was words, in that furious, fastidious purple ink. At a distance, it melted into a lavender jumble, an impressionistic sketch of heather-colored hills.
Peter had arrived home at seven thirty that evening, early for him these days, but Eliza had waited until the children went upstairs to tell him about the letter. She might have been able to reference it covertly, using a familiar code: the summer I was fifteen. Over the years, this had been used to explain any number of things. Her need to leave a film that had taken an unexpected plot turn, her disinclination to wear her hair short, although the style suited her better than this not-long, not-short, not-anything haircut. Come to think of it, they hadn’t used the code for some time, not since Peter returned to the States earlier this year and began house hunting on weekends.
�The Victorian that you like, it’s near – well, one county over – from where Point of Rocks is,’ he had told her via Skype. �It’s about an hour out of the city, but on the commuter line and it’s really pretty up there. Lots of people do it. But I thought—’
�You thought it would bother me. Because of the summer I was fifteen.’ They were meeting each other’s eyes, yet not meeting each other’s eyes. She could never quite master that part of Skype.
�Yes.’
�I’m not sure it would, but if you’re willing to commute, what about Roaring Springs, where I grew up?’
�The trains on that line don’t run late enough, hon. And we’d have to have two cars, because I’d have to drive to the station.’
�Oh.’ She still wasn’t sure why Point of Rocks was in contention but Roaring Springs was not. Wouldn’t he need to drive to the train station out there, too? �Well, I’d rather you had less of a commute, so if we can afford something closer in, something near a Metro line, that would be my choice.’
They could – barely – so they did, and that was that.
�That stupid party,’ he said now, still studying the letter. �And you didn’t even want to go. It never occurred to me that we should worry about such things.’
�Or me, to be fair. I didn’t want to go to the party because, well, I didn’t want to go to the party. I never thought – he never, all these years, made any overture to me, or even my parents or Vonnie, who are much easier to find, still being Lerners. Between taking your name and moving, first to Houston, then to London . . .’
Peter poured himself a glass of white wine and Eliza, as she sometimes did, took a sip. No, even as Peter upgraded the wines he drank, she still found the taste acidic, harsh. She preferred the Albie cocktail of fruit punch and seltzer.
�So, he’s on death row, reading the party pages in Washing tonian—’
�It’s almost funny. Almost.’
�Are you going to write him back?’
They had been sitting on opposite ends of the sofa in the family room, her feet in his lap. Now she put his sweating wineglass on a coaster and curled up next to him, indifferent to how warm the room was, even with the house’s various window units droning away. She thought once again of the house in Roaring Springs, cool on the hottest summer nights with nothing more than window fans. Global warming? The fallacy of memory? Both?
�I don’t know. And the very fact that I don’t know bothers me. I should be appalled, or angry. Which I am. But mainly, I just feel exposed. As if everyone knows now, as if tomorrow when I leave the house, people will look at me differently.’
Peter glanced at the letter, now lying on the old chest they used as a coffee table. �No reference to the kids.’
�No. All he knows is that I have a prominent husband and a green dress. But it came to our address, Peter, from a Baltimore PO box. Someone did that for him. Someone else knows.’
�A woman, I’m guessing. A woman with a purple pen. Walter’s sister?’
�I doubt it. His family essentially cut all ties after his arrest. They didn’t even attend the trials.’
She pressed her face into his neck. He smelled of an aftershave that seemed particularly British to Eliza, crisp and citrusy. She wasn’t sure where it was made, only that Peter had started wearing it during their London years. Their growing-up years, as she thought of them, although two thirty-somethings with small children should have been much further along the road to being grown-ups. Peter’s jobs had always dictated their sense of themselves. When he was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, they had felt young and bohemian, right down to the funky little house in Montrose. His jump to the Wall Street Journal had dovetailed with the arrival of the children, but they remained in Montrose, although minus the wild parties for which they had been known, parties famous for benign drunkenness and unexpected couplings. At least three marriages in their circle had started at one of their parties, and two had ended. It was as if Peter, with his serious, stuffy job at the Journal – not to mention a wife and children – needed to prove he was still a young man.
London changed that. They were certifiable grown-ups within months of arriving there, and Eliza wasn’t sure if that was because of Peter’s job, as bureau chief, or the city itself. Perhaps their newfound maturity was a result of the sheer distance from everything and everyone they had known. Now, back in the States, she felt old, on the verge of dowdy. Yet her own mother didn’t even have her first child until she was thirty-six and remained exuberantly youthful in her seventies. Maybe it was their old-fashioned roles – full-time mother, full-time breadwinner – that were weighing them down, making them middle-aged, out of touch.
�I know this sounds odd, but I kind of forgot about Walter. That is, I forgot they were going to execute him. He never thought he would die that way.’
Peter shifted, redistributing her weight, moving her arm, which had left a damp stripe across the front of his shirt. �I don’t remember that in the letter.’
�Then. The summer I was fifteen. I think he thought it would end in a slow-motion hail of bullets, like a movie. As opposed to a routine traffic stop at the Maryland line.’
Peter kissed the top of her head. His skin was warm, but then, it always was. Energy poured out of him, even when he was still.
�I love you,’ he said.
�I love you, too.’
�You don’t know what love is.’
This was a joke, their own private call-and-response, so ingrained that Eliza couldn’t remember its origins, only that it always made her feel safe.
�Gross.’ It was Iso, standing on the threshold. �Get a room.’ Eliza wondered how long she had been standing there, what she had heard and whether she could make sense of any of it. The summer I was fifteen, hail of bullets, routine traffic stop.
�What do you need, baby?’ Eliza asked.
Iso made a face. Possibly because of the word baby, or possibly because the mere sound of Eliza’s voice irritated her. �I came down to remind you to wash my Spurs jersey, in case you forgot. I want to wear it tomorrow.’
�I did. Wash it, that is. Not forget. But, Jesus, Iso, that jersey is made for damp England, not ninety-degree days in Montgomery County. Can’t you wear a T-shirt like the other kids?’
�No. Did you wash my socks, too? I had to dig a pair out of the hamper this morning.’
�Socks, too.’
�You know,’ Peter put in, �if you can work an iPod and the television and the computer and TiVo, you could probably learn how to operate the washing machine, Isobel.’
Iso looked at him as if he were speaking Portuguese. Peter didn’t annoy her as much as Eliza, but she refused to acknowledge he had any power over her. She stalked off without a reply.
�I don’t want them to know,’ Eliza said to Peter. �Not yet. That’s all I care about. Albie’s just gotten over those awful nightmares, and even Iso is more impressionable than she lets on.’
�It’s your call,’ Peter said. �But there’s always the risk of someone else telling them. Especially as the execution draws closer.’
�Who? Not you, not my parents. Not even Vonnie, volatile as she can be, would go against our wishes.’
Peter shrugged noncommittally, too polite to say that he considered his sister-in-law capable of just about any kind of bad behavior. It was funny how Peter and Vonnie, who had so much in common – similar intellects and interests, even some parallels in their career paths – remained oil-and-water after all these years. You say funny, Vonnie sneered in Eliza’s head, I say Freudian. He wanted a mommy, so he married one. Peter was more diplomatic about Vonnie: She’s a feisty one. You always know what’s on her mind.
Eliza pressed him for agreement: �No one else knows.’
�Walter knows, Eliza. Walter knows, and he found you. Walter knows, and he might tell someone else. He has told someone else. The person who wrote the letter. Who clearly has our address, not that addresses are hard to find these days.’
�Well, there’s no one – oh, shit. That asshole. That alleged journalist, Garrett. But I’m sure he’s moved on to other lurid tales, assuming he’s still alive. Is it a proper use of irony to say that it would be ironic if he died in some hideous, salacious crime?’
�I don’t know if it would be irony, but it has a certain poetic justice.’
�Walter never spoke to him, though. Not during the trial, and certainly not after that book. He probably disliked that book even more than I did.’
�But his book is out there. Nothing really disappears anymore. Once, that kind of true-crime crap would be gone forever, gathering dust in a handful of secondhand bookstores, pulped by the publishers. Now, with online bookstores and eBay and POD technology, it’s a computer click away for anyone who remembers your original name. For all you know, he’s uploaded it to Kindle, sells it for ninety-nine cents a pop.’
Eliza wasn’t worried about computer clicks. But if she complained to the prison officials, that would be another set of people who knew definitively who she was and where she was. Why should she trust them? Better to ignore Walter, although she knew that Walter was most unpredictable when someone dared to ignore him. Only not where he was now, locked away. And usually not to her. The One Who Got Away, to borrow the hideous chapter heading from that nasty little book. As if she were a girl in a jazz ballad, a romantic fixation. The One Who Got Away. The one who was, as the book said repeatedly, �only raped, allegedly.’ Only. Allegedly.
Only a man who had never been raped could have written that phrase.
�Let’s wait him out,’ she told Peter. �He’ll either drop this, or he won’t. As he said, he doesn’t have long. And he’s not being put to death for what he did to me.’
That night, in bed, she surprised Peter by initiating sex, quite good sex, with those little extras that long-married couples tend to forgo. It was, by necessity, silent sex, and she had to clap her hand over Peter’s mouth at one point, fearful that the children would hear him. But it was important to remind herself tonight that her body belonged to her, that this was sex, this was love. She deserved her life. She had created it, through sheer will and not a little help from Peter and her family. She had every right to protect it.
But as she fell asleep, spooned by her husband, the other girls came to her as they sometimes did. Maude and Holly, followed by all the faceless girls, the ones that Walter was suspected of killing, although nothing had ever been proven. Two, four, six, eight – the estimates climbed into the teens. They were, all things considered, remarkably kind and forgiving little ghosts. Tonight, however, they were mournful in their insistence that she was not alone in this, that they must be factored into any decision she made about Walter. Holly, forever the spokeswoman, reminded Eliza that her life was theirs, in a sense. Polite even to her phantoms, Eliza did not argue.
Eventually the others slipped away one by one, but Holly lingered in Eliza’s thoughts, keen on some private business. �I was the last girl,’ she said. �They shouldn’t have called you that. I was the last girl, and he’s going to die for what he did to me.’
�Oh, Holly, what does it matter? Last or next-to-last? Ultimate or penultimate? They’re just words. Who cares?’
�I do,’ Holly said. �And you know why, even if you always pretend that you don’t. Ha-ha!’
Chapter Four
1985
Point of Rocks. He had always liked that name, seen it on signs for years, but somehow never managed to visit. Now that he had – well, it wasn’t that much different from any of the towns along the Potomac. From his own town, in fact, back in West Virginia. Almost heaven, the license plate said, and Walter agreed. Still, he liked to drive, wished he could see more of the world.
When he was a child, no more than four or five, his father took him to a spot in Maryland, Friendsville, where it was possible to see three states – Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. He had been disappointed that the area wasn’t marked, like a map or a quilt, that one state was indistinguishable from another. He told his father he wished they could go out west, stand in the four corners, which he had heard about from his older sister.
�If wishes were Mustangs,’ his father said. It was one of his favorite sayings. He didn’t believe in vacations. Years later, Walter felt a bit betrayed when he started working at his father’s repair shop and found out just how steady the business was. They could have taken trips, known a few more luxuries. Maybe not all the way west, but to that big amusement park in Ohio, the one with the tallest roller coaster in the world. Or his father could have sent Walter, his mother, and his sister on a vacation if he really felt he couldn’t close up for seven days, or leave the place under the care of one of his employees. The only trip Walter ever took was to Ocean City, Maryland, after high school graduation, and it felt like he spent more time on the bus than in the town itself.
Now that Walter worked for his father, he didn’t get vacations, just Sundays and Wednesdays off. What could he do with that mismatched pairing of days? Today was a Sunday, and he was thinking about turning back, going home. There was no law that a man had to do anything with his day off, no rule that said he wasn’t allowed to spend the afternoon watching television, then enjoy Sunday-night supper with his family. Lately, his mother seemed to be dropping hints that he might want to get his own place, move out and on, but he was ignoring her for now. He didn’t want to move out until it was to move in with someone, set up his own household. But, wait – maybe that was the problem? Maybe the reason he had trouble meeting women was because he didn’t have a place to take them? There were all those jokes about men who lived with their parents, but he didn’t think that applied to him. He worked in his father’s business. Why shouldn’t he stay at home until he could afford a proper house, not one of those cinder block motel rooms that people rented by the week, making do with hot plates and mini fridges. Living that way, in a single room, wasn’t living at all. He’d wait for the real thing. Real love, real house, a partnership in his father’s business. Already he had asked his father why they couldn’t change Bowman’s Garage to Bowman and Son’s Garage. His sister, now married but living on the same street, said it didn’t sound right, and his father said he didn’t want to pay to change all the signs and stationery, and when Walter had said the sign would be enough – wait, was that a girl?
It was, a tall, shapely girl brushed with gold, her hair and skin almost blending with the cornfields on either side of the road. She had a funny walk, kind of a lope, but she was otherwise lovely and her body was magnificent, like a movie star’s. He slowed down.
�You want a ride?’
She looked confused, on the verge of tears. �One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks. One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks.’
�Sure I can take you there, just tell me—’
She shook her head, kept repeating her address. She looked to be at least eighteen, but she was acting like she was six. Oh.
�Calm down, calm down, I’ll get you home. We’ll have to find someone who can tell me the way, but I’ll get you there, okay?’
She climbed into his truck. Gosh, she was pretty. Too bad she was slow, or retarded, or whatever it was called now.
�You got lost?’
She nodded, still hiccuping from her tears. Eventually she gulped out that she had been in a store with her mother and she had gotten thirsty, gone to find a water fountain in the store, but when she came back, she couldn’t find her mother, so she had decided to walk home.
�You still thirsty? You want something to drink? A soda or something?’
�Home,’ she said. �One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks.’
�I’ll take you home,’ he said. �But I have to stop anyway, to ask directions. If you want a drink or a snack, you just let me know.’
He pulled over at the next convenience store he saw, a Sheetz. His father loved to say that name, drawing out the vowel sound to the t. Sheeeeeeeeeeeet – then waiting a split second before adding the z. And his mother laughed every time, as if it were new. That’s all Walter wanted. A wife, a world of private jokes. It shouldn’t be so hard.
He parked at the far end of the parking lot, where his truck wouldn’t be in view of the cash register. Inside he bought two sodas and some candy. He did not ask directions, at least not to 103 Apple Court. Instead, he asked if there were any good fishing spots nearby.
She liked it at first, he could swear that she did. He told her it was a game, and he fed her M&Ms for each step she mastered. Fact is, she might have done it before. It happens, with retarded people. They get up to all sorts of things. That was why the girl in his grade school had to be transferred, because she was doing things with the older boys. She had a woman’s body and a little girl’s mind. That was no way to be. He was doing this girl a kindness, if you thought about it. But, in the end, it wasn’t right. He needed someone who could help a little. He wouldn’t make this mistake again.
Later, when he shouldered her body and carried it deep into the woods, trusting that no one would be looking for her here, not soon, he found himself feeling very tender toward her. She wasn’t happy in this life, couldn’t really be. Everyone was better off now.
He was home in time for supper.
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