I'd Know You Anywhere

1

“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 Hotspurs, 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 super-prepared 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 Pirate’s Booty 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.

“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.”

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:

2

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 itty-bitty 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.

3

“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 Washingtonian—”

“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 after-shave 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, and their lives had a catch-as-catch-can quality, 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 bread-winner—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!”

4

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&M’s 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.

5

ELIZA’S PARENTS LIVED ONLY THIRTY minutes from the new house, another mark in its favor. (Funny, the more Eliza kept enumerating the house’s various advantages in her mind—the trees, the yard, the proximity to her parents—the more she wondered if there was something about it that she actually disliked but didn’t want to admit to herself.) She had assumed that their lives, maintained at a physical distance for so long, would braid together instantly, that she would see them all the time. But, so far, they met up no more than once a month, and it was typically a rushed restaurant meal in downtown Bethesda, at a place that offended no one and therefore disappointed everyone.

Perhaps they were all just out of practice at being an extended family; Eliza had lived a minimum of 1,500 miles away since college graduation. Besides, both her parents, now in their late seventies, continued to work, although her father had cut back his practice; her mother was an academic, teaching at the University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. They were not, nor would she want them to be, the type of settled grandparents whose lives revolved around their only grandchildren. Still, she had thought she would see more of them than she did.

This week, however, they were having dinner at her parents’ house, an old farmhouse in what had been, back in 1985, a rural enclave in Western Howard County. Their road still had a country feel to it. But all around, development was encroaching. For Inez, those new houses were like battleships in a harbor, massing, readying an attack. As for the large electrical towers visible in the distance—those made her shiver with revulsion, although she did not believe in the health claims made against them. She just found them ugly. “Imagine,” she often said, “what Don Quixote would have made of those.”

Yet the Lerners had never thought twice about relocating here, leaving their beloved house in Roaring Springs in order to enroll Eliza in a different high school. One county over, Wilde Lake High School had been far enough so a new girl, known as Eliza, would have no resonance. There was always the slight risk that someone from the old school district would transfer and that Eliza’s identity would be pierced. But as her parents explained to her repeatedly, the changes were not about shame or secrets. They moved because the old neighborhood had dark associations for all of them, because some of the things they loved most—the stream, the wooded hillsides, the sense of isolation—were tainted. They chose not to speak of what had happened in the world at large, but that was because the world at large had nothing to contribute to Eliza’s healing. If she had returned to Catonsville High School with her friends—and it was her choice, they stressed—her parents didn’t doubt that people would have been sensitive. Too sensitive. They did not want their daughter to live an eggshell existence, where others watched their words and lapsed into sudden, suspicious silences when she happened onto certain conversations. New house, new start. For all of them. A new house with an alarm system, and central air-conditioning, despite Inez’s hatred of it, because that meant they didn’t sleep with open windows.

Iso and Albie loved their grandparents’ house, which was filled with the requisite items of fascination that grandparents’ homes always harbor. But the real lure for them was the nearby Rita’s custard stand. As soon as they left with their grandfather for an after-dinner treat, Eliza told her mother about Walter’s letter.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Eliza said.

“Doing nothing,” Inez said, “is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.”

“I know.”

“I assumed you did.”

They were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the back of the house, a place where the view was still, more or less, as it had been when the Lerners purchased their home. They had bought it quickly, almost instinctively, a month after Eliza came home. It was actually larger than the eighteenth-century stone house they had known in Roaring Springs, and better appointed in almost every way—updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vonnie had come home for Christmas break, glum over her poor academic performance in her inaugural quarter at Northwestern, she had pitched a fit over her parents’ failure to consult her on this important family matter. Vonnie had always been given to histrionics, even when she had little cause for them, and her family was more or less inured to the melodrama.

But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as the Lerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: “It’s just that everything’s going to be about Elizabeth—excuse me, Eliza—from now on.”

The statement, delivered at the dinner table, was wrong on so many levels that no one in the family spoke for several seconds. It was factually wrong; the whole point was that the Lerners were trying to make a world in which things were neither about, nor not about, what had happened to Eliza. Besides, they had always been fair-minded, never favoring one daughter over the other, honoring their differences. Vonnie was their high-strung overachiever. Eliza, even when she was known as Elizabeth, was that unusual child content simply to be. Good enough grades, cheerful participation in group activities in which she neither distinguished nor embarrassed herself. Inevitably, it had been speculated—by outsiders, but also by Inez and Manny, by Vonnie, and even by Eliza—that her temperament wasn’t inborn but a subconscious and preternatural decision to opt out. Let Vonnie have the prizes and the honors, the whole world if she wanted it.

From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good-natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vonnie pinched her, which the newly minted older sister did whenever the opportunity presented itself. But once Eliza could toddle about, she followed her sister everywhere, and not even Vonnie could hold a grudge against someone who so clearly worshipped her.

But she could—apparently, amazingly—seethe with resentment over the way her sister’s misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.

“Would you rather be Eliza?” her father asked Vonnie the night of her unthinkable pronouncement.

Eliza couldn’t help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously, Vonnie had never wanted to be Eliza back when she was Elizabeth, so it would be odd to think she might want to trade places now. But what if she did? What would that signify?

“That’s not what I meant,” Vonnie said, her anger deflating. Imploding, really, from embarrassment. “I was just trying to say that, from now on, so much of what we do will be controlled, influenced, affected by…what happened.”

“Well, that’s true for Eliza, so I think it’s fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,” their father said. “This happened to all of us. Not the same thing—there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.”

Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible—experienced, not suffered, or even endured. Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza’s parents didn’t want to define her life for her. “You get to be the expert on yourself,” her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had the knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose. They probably did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they refused to claim this power. Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.

“I was willing to defer admission,” Vonnie reminded her father. This was accurate, as far as it went. She had offered to delay entering Northwestern, but not very wholeheartedly, and there was a risk that her parents would have to forfeit part of her tuition. Besides, now that Eliza was home, her parents were still keen on making distinctions between authentic issues, as they called them—her need to know that the house was locked at night, not so much as a window open, even on the fairest spring evenings—and rationalizations, or any attempt to use her past to unfair advantage.

Yet it was Vonnie who was inclined to leverage her sister to garner attention. Oh, she didn’t tell her new college friends too much. But she hinted at a terrible tragedy, an unthinkable occurrence, one that had made the national news. She was perhaps too broad in her allusions. Over the years, as Vonnie’s various college friends visited, they were clearly surprised to meet a normal-seeming high school girl with all her limbs and no obvious disfigurement. At least one had believed that Eliza was a young flautist, who lost her arm after being pushed in front of a subway train.

“Remember,” Eliza said to her mother now, “how Vonnie hated this house at first? Now she has a meltdown if you even suggest you might want to downsize.”

“I think we’re still a few years away, knock wood.” Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. “What do you call this?” he’d asked Eliza, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him. “No name,” she’d said. “Just tea and lemonade.” “We should make up a name for it,” he’d said, “sell it by the roadside.” Like most of Walter’s plans, this was all talk.

“Where will you go when you do sell this house?” she asked her mother now.

“Downtown D.C., I think, what they call the Penn Quarter neighborhood now.”

“Not Baltimore?”

Inez shook her head. “We’ve been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it’s all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can’t see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood panhandlers by name. I’m Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres.”

Eliza had to laugh at this image, her bohemian, unaffected mother as Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. The children burst in, faces smeared with the residue from Rita’s, their favorite custard stand, whose neon letters promised ICE * CUSTARD * HAPPINESS. She couldn’t have felt any safer, even if the windows had been closed and locked.

The windows were open. That’s what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live that way.

ELIZA HEADED HOME ALONG the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver’s ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: “You see that Roy Rogers? That’s where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn’t play any sports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn’t kill. Why do you think that was?”

“Mommy?” Albie said from the backseat. “You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”

“No, honey, I’m—” Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.

“What was that?” Albie asked.

“A deer,” Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.

“But it was white.”

“That was the tail.”

A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn’t sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, running for her life.

6

1985

“WANNABE,” HER SISTER SAID.

“I’m not,” Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn’t know what Vonnie meant, and Vonnie pounced on that little wriggle of doubt, the way their family cat, Barnacle, impaled garden snakes.

“It’s a term for girls like you, who think they’re Madonna.”

“I don’t think I’m Madonna.”

But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vonnie a lot of leeway—no curfew, although she had to call if she was going to stay out past midnight, and they trusted her never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking. But this summer, Elizabeth had suddenly discovered that there were all sorts of things she was forbidden to do. Dye her hair, even with a nonpermanent tint. Spend her days at the mall or the Roy Rogers on Route 40. (“Watch all the television you want, take long walks, go to the community pool, but no just hanging,” her mother had clarified.) And although she wasn’t actually prohibited from wearing the fingerless lace gloves she had purchased when a friend’s mother took them to the mall, her mother sighed at the mere sight of them.

Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vonnie left for her job at a day camp for underprivileged kids, checking herself in the mirror. She had a piece of stretchy lace, filched from her mother’s sewing basket, tied in her reddish curls, and a pink T-shirt that proclaimed WILD GIRL, which even she recognized was laughably untrue. Although it was a typical August day, hot and humid, she had layered a bouffant black skirt over a pair of leggings that stopped at her knees, and she wore black ankle boots with faux zebra inserts worked into the leather. She thought she looked wonderful. Vonnie was jealous.

Vonnie simply didn’t like Elizabeth, she was sure of it. Her mother said this wasn’t true, that sisters were never close at this age, but it was an essential stage through which they had to pass. Her mother sounded hopeful when she laid this out, as if saying it might make it true. Elizabeth was fifteen years old now to Vonnie’s soon-to-be eighteen and all her life she had carried the distinct impression that she had spoiled a really good party, that Vonnie had been miserable from the day the Lerner trio became a quartet.

And Elizabeth couldn’t figure out why. Vonnie still got most of the attention, excelling in everything she did, whereas Elizabeth was always in the middle of the pack. Vonnie was a good student, she had gone to the nationals in NFL—National Forensics League, not National Football League—and placed in extemp, short for extemporaneous, which meant she could speak off the cuff. That was no picnic, having an already combative older sister who was trained to speak quickly and authoritatively on any topic. Vonnie was going to Northwestern in the fall to study with Charlton Heston’s sister. Of course, Charlton Heston’s sister was simply another teacher there, in the drama school, and she had to take whoever signed up for her classes, but Vonnie managed to make it sound like a very big deal: I’m going to Northwestern in the fall. I’m going to study with Charlton Heston’s sister. Although barely two years older than Elizabeth, she was three years ahead in school because her September birthday had allowed her to enroll in school early, whereas Elizabeth had a January birthday. Elizabeth didn’t mind. It meant Vonnie went away all that much earlier. She was looking forward to seeing what it was like, being home alone. Maybe once Vonnie was gone, Elizabeth might discover what she did well, where her own talents lay. Her parents insisted she had some, if she would just focus. So far, all focus had brought her was the uncanny ability to ferret out dirty books in the houses where she watered plants for people lucky enough to go somewhere in this long, boring summer. Erica Jong and Henry Miller and—in one house, hidden behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica—the complete set of Ian Fleming. The Spy Who Loved Me—wow, that was nothing like the movie.

She left the house, with no particular destination in mind, but then—the only places she wanted to go were the ones that were explicitly forbidden. Her parents thought their neighborhood, Roaring Springs, was a big deal, but Elizabeth thought it was boring, boring, boring. Roaring Springs was nothing more than a bunch of old stone houses, remnants of a nineteenth-century mill village not even a mile from busy Frederick Road. But because their house backed up to a state park, thick with trees, no one could ever build near them. The isolation suited her parents, and even Vonnie never complained about living in this quirky stone house among other quirky stone houses, filled mostly with people like their parents, only childless. Everyone in Roaring Springs was proudly, determinedly eccentric, indifferent to trends and what was popular. They all professed to hate television, too. They might as well hate television: The county had yet to extend the cable system out here, which meant that Elizabeth saw MTV and VH-1 only when she went to friends’ houses after school. She wondered, in fact, how her mother even knew enough about Madonna to find her objectionable. Her father had glossy magazines in his office, for the parents who waited while he consulted with their children, but she didn’t imagine there were magazines in her mother’s office. Of course, she had never been allowed to visit there, given that it was in the state prison.

There was a small, old-fashioned family bakery on Frederick Road, and she stopped there, inspecting the various treats on display. Vonnie had said the other day that Elizabeth may be straight-up-and-down skinny, but she was prone to having a potbelly and she better watch it. The problem with Vonnie was that she said some things merely to be mean, but she said other things that were mean and true, and it was hard to sort them out. Elizabeth turned sideways, smoothing down her T-shirt, trying to assess her stomach. It looked okay to her. It would look better if she had boobs, real boobs instead of these A-cup nothings. Real boobs would balance her out. But she was okay with how she looked, today. Gazing in the bakery window, she thought about going in, but the problem was that she wanted everything: the lacy pizelles, the cunning pink-and-green cookies, the cannolis, the éclairs. Lately, she never felt satisfied, no matter what she ate. Theoretically, she could buy one of each, eat them all, then throw them up, but she had failed repeatedly at the throwing-up part, no matter how her girlfriends coached and encouraged her.

She continued up Frederick Road, trying to catch her reflection in the windows she passed along the way. Elizabeth wanted to know what she looked like when no one was looking. She wanted to stumble on herself unawares, sneak up on her image, but she had yet to master that trick. She was always a split second ahead, and the face she saw was too composed—mouth clamped in what she hoped was a shy, and therefore alluring, smile, chin tilted down to compensate for her nose, her nostrils, which she found truly horrifying. “Pig snout,” Vonnie had said, and that one had stuck, although her mother said it was a “ski jump” nose. Elizabeth had asked her mother if she could have a nose job for her sixteenth birthday, and her mother had been unable to speak for several seconds, a notable thing unto itself. She was a psychiatrist, but a really interesting one, who worked with criminals at the special prison for the insane. She could never talk about her work, though, much to Elizabeth’s disappointment. She would love to know about the men her mother met, the things they had done. Right now, she was pretty sure that her mother was working with a boy who had killed his parents, his adoptive parents, just because they asked him how he did on a test. He was actually kind of handsome; Elizabeth had seen his picture in the newspaper. But her mother was careful never to speak of her work. Her father, also a psychiatrist, didn’t speak of his work, either, but all he did was sit in an office and listen to teenagers. Elizabeth was pretty sure she already knew everything her father knew, probably more.

Elizabeth’s friends thought it was weird and creepy, what her parents did. They thought the Lerners could read minds, which was silly, or see through lies more easily than “normal” parents. “They’re not witches,” she told her friends.

In some ways, her parents were easier to fool than others. This was because Elizabeth told them so much that it didn’t occur to them that she ever withheld anything. Of course, what she mainly told them about was her friends—Claudia’s decision to have sex with her boyfriend while her parents were away one weekend, Debbie trying beer and pot, Lydia getting caught shoplifting. Each time she shared one of these stories, her parents would ask, gently, if Elizabeth had been involved, and she could always say “No!” with a clear and sunny conscience. This made it easier to keep what she needed to keep to herself. Trying to make herself throw up after eating too much, for example. She knew it was bad, but she also knew it was a problem only if you couldn’t stop. Given that she never got to the point where she actually threw up, she couldn’t see how there was anything wrong with trying. Claudia said she should use a feather or a broom straw if she couldn’t force her finger far enough down, but—gross. The idea of a feather made her want to throw up, yet the fact of a feather didn’t. Was that weird? It was probably weird. Elizabeth worried a lot about being weird. Unlike Vonnie, she didn’t want to stand out, didn’t want to attract too much attention. She wanted to be normal. She wanted just one boy to look at her like, like—like that way Bruce Springsteen looked in that video, when he rolled out from under the car and he knew he shouldn’t want the woman who was standing there in front of him, but he just couldn’t help himself.

None of her friends lived close by. They lived on the other side of Frederick Road, in the kind of houses where Elizabeth’s mother would not be caught dead, to use one of her favorite expressions. I would not be caught dead living there, I would not be caught dead shopping there, I would not be caught dead going on vacation there. Finally, Vonnie had said: “Do you get much choice, about where you’re caught dead?” and it had become a family joke. They had started naming the places where they would be caught dead. Still, their mother was pretty serious in her dislike of modern things. She had wanted to stay in the city, in their town house, which was almost right downtown, on a pretty green square built around the Washington Monument. But, about the time Vonnie turned fourteen, Elizabeth’s father had seen a chance to build a practice in the suburbs, where more parents were inclined to seek help for their children. And could pay for it, too, no small consideration. Roaring Springs was a compromise, thirty minutes from her mother’s job at Patuxent Institute, not even ten minutes to her father’s office in Ellicott City. It was his daytime proximity that gave Elizabeth her freedom on these summer days. But it wasn’t much of a freedom, when one was alone, with all these rules.

She tracked back to the park and began walking along the stream known as the Sucker Branch. If she followed its banks, she would come out at Route 40, not that far from Roy Rogers, maybe a mile or so. At least, she thought she might come out there. She wasn’t allowed to walk to the Roy Rogers because it was a hangout, and her parents believed that being idle was what got most kids in trouble. But they liked the idea of her being outdoors on summer days, so if she explained that she was simply following the stream and found herself there by accident and she was terribly thirsty after the walk, that would be okay. If they asked, and they might not even ask. She would go to Roy Rogers, see if anyone was there. If no one was around, she could still get a mocha shake, maybe some fries. Then—she was resolved—she was going to throw it up, she would learn how to throw up today. Her worries over her body were secondary; she didn’t need to lose weight, only the potbelly, if she really did have one, and she still wasn’t sure. What she needed was something to tell her friends when they were reunited as high school sophomores in two weeks. She wanted to have something to show for her summer. Unlike Claudia, she didn’t have a boyfriend. Unlike Debbie and Lydia, she wasn’t daring enough to shoplift, and she had no interest in her parents’ booze. She had to do something in these final weeks of summer that counted as an achievement, and learning how to throw up was her best bet.

Following the stream, high in its banks after the weekend’s heavy rains, turned out to be much harder than she expected. Mud sucked at her boots, and when she came to the spot where she needed to cross, she couldn’t. The unusually deep water covered the rocks she had planned to hop across, and it was moving quickly. She paused, uncertain. It seemed a shame to turn back, after making it this far. She thought she could hear the traffic swooshing by on Route 40. She was close, very close.

Then she saw a man on the other side, leaning on a shovel.

“It’s not so swift you can’t wade through,” he said. “I done it.” He looked to be college age, although something told Elizabeth that he wasn’t in college. Not just his grammar, but his clothes, the trucker’s hat pulled low on his forehead. “Just go up there, to where that fallen tree is. The water won’t go above your shins, I swear.”

Elizabeth did, taking off her boots and tucking them beneath her armpits, so they were like two little wings sticking out of her back. Zebra-patterned wings with stilettos. He was right, the current was nothing to fear, although she worried that the water itself was dangerous, filled with bacteria. Luckily she’d had a tetanus shot just two years ago, when she stepped on a rusty nail. And the man was nice, waiting to help her scramble up the banks on the other side, taking hold of her wrists. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, maybe five seven to her five three, and his build, while muscled, was slight. He was almost handsome, really. He had green eyes and even features. The only real flaw was his nose, narrow and pinched. He looked as if the world smelled bad to him, although he was the one who smelled a little. B.O., probably from shoveling on such a hot day. His T-shirt showed sweat stains at the armpits and the neckline, a drop of perspiration dangled from his nose.

“Thank you,” she said.

He didn’t let go.

“Thank you. I’m fine now. I can stand just fine.”

He tightened his grip on her wrists. She tried to pull away, and her boots fell, one rolling dangerously close to the water. She began to struggle in earnest and he held her there, his face impassive, as if he were watching all of this from a great distance, as if he had no part in holding her.

“Mister, please.”

“I’ll take you where you’re going,” he said.

7

ELIZA HAD NEVER GOOGLED HERSELF What would have been the point? Eliza Benedict was not the kind of person who ended up on the Internet, and the story of Elizabeth Lerner was finite, the ending written years ago. Peter was all over the Internet—most of his work behind a pay wall, but nevertheless there—represented by almost a decade’s worth of his own words, probably more than a mil-lion when one included his Houston Chronicle days. And since taking his new job with the venture capital firm, he was even more omnipresent in this shadow world: a source, a personage, someone to be consulted and quoted on these new financial products, which Eliza didn’t understand. She didn’t even understand the term “financial product.” A product should be real, concrete, tangible, something that could be bagged or boxed.

However, Eliza knew, even before Walter had written her, that she showed up at Peter’s elbow in the occasional image, especially now that Peter had crossed over to the dark side—his term—and they had to go to functions. That was her term, but it made Peter laugh. “You couldn’t call that a party,” she said after her first foray into his new world. “And they didn’t serve dinner, only finger food, all of it impossible to eat without dribbling. No, that was truly a function.”

Sitting on their bed, Peter had laughed, but his mind wasn’t on the party, or on what to call it. “Leave your dress on,” he said. “And those shoes.” She did. But even Peter’s admiration for her that night hadn’t been enough to send her searching for her own image, despite the knowledge that they had been photographed repeatedly. She hated, truly hated, seeing photographs of herself. A tiresome thing to say, banal and clichéd, but more true of her than it was of others who professed to feel the same way. Her photographic image always came as a shock. She was taller in her head, her hair less of a disordered mess. She and Peter looked terribly mismatched, like an otter and a…hedgehog. Peter was the otter, with his compact, still hard-muscled body and thick, shiny hair, while she was the hedgehog. And not just any hedgehog, but Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Even dressed up in expensive clothes, she gave the impression that she had just been divested of an apron and a bonnet, a happy little hausfrau who couldn’t wait to get home and put the kettle on.

Which, in a way, was pretty close to the truth.

The dress that had excited Peter wasn’t a sexy dress, not really, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she normally wore, and that was novelty enough. The shoes had been a London splurge, a ridiculous thing to buy there, given the exchange rate at the time. Vonnie could have picked up the same shoes in New York for almost half the price and brought them to Eliza on one of her business trips. Eliza had purchased them to save face when she was snubbed in a Knightsbridge boutique, the kind of shop where the clothes appeared to have been tailored in defiance of the female body. The shoes were not visible in the photograph in Washingtonian magazine, but the dress—emerald green, with a bateau neck—was. She studied it now. This was what Walter had seen, this was how he had found her. Did she really look that similar to her teen self? She had been almost eighteen the last time she saw him, and although she had filled out since the summer he had kidnapped her, she still looked younger than her age. Even now, ten pounds over her ideal weight, her face remained thin, her jawline sharp. Maybe that was all he needed to spot her. That, and the shortened first name, which wasn’t much of a mask when someone knew the real one.

“Mom?” Albie’s voice seemed to be coming from the kitchen. “Are we going to have lunch?”

“Soon,” she called back from the desk in the family room, still looking at her photo, trying, and not for the first time, to see herself as Walter had seen her. She looked nothing like his two known victims, tall blondes. She understood why he had taken her, but why had he let her live? He claimed he had been planning to let her go when he started driving toward Point of Rocks, but was that just a story he told after the fact? It didn’t matter. They had found Holly’s body at the bottom of a ravine; they had already dug up Maude, the Maryland girl he had attempted to bury in Patapsco State Park.

It occurred to Eliza, truly for the first time, to try her old name in an Internet search. Paging Dr. Freud, Vonnie would have said with a snort. But Eliza’s identity had been so entrenched as Eliza Benedict by the time the Internet became a part of daily life that she had never stopped to think about Elizabeth Lerner. It was a common enough name that multiple Elizabeths popped up, in family trees and press releases and blogs. The first reference she found to herself was taken from that book. Ugh. Murder on the Mountain was a disgusting quickie churned out by Jared Garrett, a bizarre cop groupie who had followed Walter’s story with what even a teenager could see was an inappropriate fascination. There was an excerpt on Google, and her name leaped out from the leaden prose.

A boyish girl who looked younger than she was, Elizabeth testified that Walter did not attempt sexual congress with her for several weeks, but that she was, ultimately, subjected to his advances. Curiously, he left her alive. Walter clearly considered Elizabeth different from his other victims, although he himself has refused to explain the relationship, other than to remark once, in an interview with state police: “She was good company.” Asked if she was a hostage, Bowman said: “I didn’t demand ransom, did I?” His answers did little to deflect curiosity about the true nature of the relationship between the two.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MOM?” Albie leaned against the doorjamb, hands in pockets. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his mother’s activities, merely bored enough with his own life to try to engage her.

“Nothing,” she said, erasing the cached history and closing the window. She wouldn’t want Iso’s prying fingers to wander into any of these Web sites. “Are you hungry? What do you want for lunch?”

“Those sandwiches that Grandmother makes?” he asked hopefully. Peter’s mother made elaborate sandwiches from deli roast beef and dark bread, chopping cornichons and putting them in brown mustard, then adding horseradish and a judicious sprinkling of salt and pepper.

“I might not have everything Nonnie has, but I think I could make a fair approximation,” she said, taking a quick mental inventory of the refrigerator’s contents, calculating that butter pickles would approximate the experience Albie craved, which was more about the chopping and mixing, making an exciting ritual out of something mundane. Albie loved productions, and with a child as easily pleased as Albie, it seemed a shame not to try to meet his expectations. Especially now, when everything and anything she did antagonized Iso. “Mom, you’re breathing too loud,” she had said the other day in Trader Joe’s. “Loudly,” Eliza had corrected, then felt awful for using grammar to one-up her daughter. Not that it had worked.

Albie put his hand in hers, as if the walk to the kitchen were a journey of miles. She wished it were, that he would stay this age for three, four years, then be nine for a decade or so, then spend another ten years being ten. But onetime graduate student of children’s literature that she was, she knew there was no spell, no magic, that could keep a child a child, or shield a child from the world at large. In fact, that was where the trouble almost always began, with a parent trying to outthink fate. Stay on the path. Don’t touch the spindle. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t pick the rose.

8

1985

HE HAD GONE TOO FAR this time. Literally, too far. He had headed out Wednesday morning, telling himself he had no plans, then driven and driven until the landscape had changed, civilization coming at him all of a sudden. He would never get back in time for dinner now. And, although there were girls everywhere, they were never alone, but traveling in groups, gaggles. He stopped at a mall and almost became dizzy at the sight of all the girls there, girls with bare midriffs and short shorts. He leaned on the railing on the second floor, watching them move in lazy circles below, flit in and out of the food court, where they would briefly interact with the boys, then plunge back into the mall proper. The boys looked baffled by these quicksilver girls. They were too immature, they couldn’t give these girls what they wanted.

But neither could he, unless he got one alone, had a chance to sweet-talk her. He would go slow this time, real slow.

He drove past a fenced swimming pool—that was a kind of water, wasn’t it?—stationed himself in the parking lot, stealing glances through the chain-link fence. The girls here seemed intertwined. Not actually touching but strung together by invisible threads, their limbs moving in lazy unison. They would flip on cue, sit up on cue, run combs through their hair at the same moment. Boys circled these girls, too, silly and deferential. They didn’t have a chance.

He caught an older woman, a leathery mom, frowning at him, decided to move on.

He had almost given up, was wondering how he would explain all the miles on the truck—he could fill the gas tank, but he couldn’t erase seventy, eighty, ninety miles from an odometer—when he saw the right girl. Tall, filled out, but walking as if her body was still new to her, as if she had borrowed it from someone else and had to give it back at day’s end, in good condition. She was on a sidewalk in a ghost town of a neighborhood, a place so empty and quiet that it felt like they were the last two people on earth. He stopped and—sudden inspiration—asked her for directions to the mall, although he knew his way back there. Her face wasn’t quite as pretty as he had hoped—Earl, the other mechanic back at his father’s place called this kind of girl a Butterface—but she had a serious expression that was very touching, as if she wanted to make sure she gave precise directions. Only she kept getting a little mixed up over the street names, trying to give him directions according to landmarks he couldn’t know—the Baileys’ house, the nursery school where her little sister went, the High’s store.

“I admit, I just can’t follow all these directions,” he said with an aw-shucks grin. “Are you going that way? Maybe you could show me.”

Oh, no, she wasn’t going that far. She just had to catch a bus to Route 40.

Maybe he could take her as far as she was going?

The sun was strong, so powerful that everything looked white, unreal. This was a pale girl, one who didn’t get to spend her afternoons at the pool. She was heading to work. He could take her to work, Walter said, and then she could draw him a map on—where did she work?

“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 habits 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.

“You don’t like my music?”

She weighed her answer. They had been listening to country music, which was uncool according to most people she knew. “It’s okay,” she said. “But I like other stuff, too.”

“What do you listen to?”

“C-c-c-current stuff.”

“Madonna,” he said, looking at her fingerless lace mitts. “I’m guessing Madonna.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “But also—” She racked her mind for the music she liked. “Whitney Houston. Scritti Politti. Kate Bush.”

Except for the first name, these were Vonnie’s musical choices, and Elizabeth wasn’t sure why she was appropriating them. Because they made her seem older, wiser? Or because she sensed that the man wouldn’t know most of them and that would give her some sort of power?

“She’s a bad girl,” he said.

“Kate Bush?”

“Whitney Houston. ‘Saving all my love for you,’ right? She’s having an affair with a married man. That’s wrong.”

“But she loves him. And isn’t what he’s doing more wrong?”

“Women are better than men. Most, anyway. Men are weak, so women need to be strong.” He reached in and punched a button on the radio, returning it to his station, although she had never touched it. The gas pump clicked off, and she hoped he might have to go inside to pay the attendant and then she would—she looked around. What would she do? It was surprising how quickly the landscape had turned into out-and-out country, real hicksville. If she had the chance to jump from the truck, where would she go? Later, when he pulled into a drive-through to buy her a hamburger, she had tried to announce to the attendant that she had been kidnapped, but he had placed his hand over hers, squeezing hard, and said: “Don’t make jokes about things like that, Elizabeth.” (She had given him her name at his insistence, but he had yet to share his.) The cashier, a teenager not much older than Elizabeth, had looked bored, as if she saw such things every day. She even seemed a little resentful, tired of couples playing out their dramas and private jokes in front of her. The girl had bad acne and frizzy hair, and her uniform pulled tightly across her broad torso. Elizabeth wanted to say: “He’s not my boyfriend! I’ve never had a boyfriend! I’m more like you than you think, except I’m not old enough to work or drive a car.”

He had kept squeezing her hand. It seemed to her at the time that he managed to exert just enough pressure to let her know that, in the next squeeze, he would crush every bone in her hand if she disobeyed him. Then he stroked her arm, along the inside. She remembered a game she played with her friends, where you closed your eyes and tried to guess when a trailing finger landed in the crook of your elbow. Depending on where it stopped, you were oversexed or undersexed. Everyone screamed in protest if they got oversexed, but, of course, that was the thing to be.

Elizabeth always ended up being undersexed, begging for the finger to stop well short of the elbow hollow.

The gas tank full, they drove on. An hour later, she asked if she could go to the bathroom. She expected him to scold her, as her father might have, for not asking when they were at the gas station. But he just sighed and said: “Okay, I’ll find a place where you can have some privacy.”

It took her a second to get it.

“Why can’t I just go to a gas station or a fast-food place? Or even a restaurant.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” This was his way, she was learning. He said no, but, unlike her parents, he never explained his reasons, didn’t provide enough information to allow argument.

“I’ll be good,” she said. “I don’t want to go to the bathroom outside.”

“Number one or number two?” he asked.

She thought about lying, but she didn’t think the answer would change his mind. “Number one.”

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d take my panties off. Some girls leave ’em on one leg, but if you want to stay clean, it’s better to take them all the way off, then squat. Keep your feet wide, too.”

It made her sick, hearing him say the word panties. She thought about the things he was going to do to her, later. She thought about her parents, sitting down to dinner with Vonnie, wondering where she was. They wouldn’t be worried, not just yet. They were calm people, unexcitable compared to most parents she knew. They trusted her. They would be irritated that she hadn’t called, they would be readying a lecture on consideration, how the freedom they gave her came with responsibility. But they wouldn’t worry about her until the sun set, which was still late this time of August, about eight or so.

Squatting in the dirt, her panties placed carefully on a nearby rock, she cried as she peed, then did a little dance, hoping to shake free whatever drops remained. She wasn’t going to use leaves to blot herself, despite his advice. What if she picked poison ivy by mistake?

“Why are you crying?” he asked in the truck. He didn’t retie her, though.

As darkness fell, he considered a few small motor inns, finally settling on one in a U-shaped court. “We won’t do this often,” he said. “This is a treat because we’ve both had a long day and need a real mattress. Tomorrow, we’ll get a tent, some sleeping bags.” Once in the room, after testing the bed and finding out it was bolted to the floor, he bound her hands and feet, then gagged her. She began crying again, the tears falling down into the corners of her mouth.

“Shush,” he said. “With time, when I can trust you, it won’t have to be like this. But you have to earn my trust, okay? You earn my trust and you can have all sorts of freedoms. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill you and your whole family. I’ll kill your family while you watch, then kill you. Don’t think I won’t.”

Her parents had given her similar instructions about trust—except for the killing part. She cried harder, wondering how awful it was going to be. She had read stories about rape, of course. Quite a few, given her taste in reading. And four years ago, she had watched, along with millions of others, an episode of a soap opera where a rape victim married her rapist. Of course, they had come a long way by then, Luke and Laura. They had been on the run together, evaded death, grown close. They were in love, and she had forgiven him. Vonnie had insisted, loudly and at great length, that it was all crap. But when the afternoon of the wedding came, Vonnie was there, watching as raptly as Elizabeth and her friends. They did not find the groom particularly handsome, but they understood that he was desirable because he loved his bride so much, that his love for her had driven him to commit crimes and take enormous risks. That one of those crimes had been an assault on his alleged beloved was tricky, but they understood. To be loved that way, to be desired to the point where you drove a man mad—what more could any girl want?

“Look,” the man said, “can you be brave? Can you be good?”

She nodded, although she was sure she could not.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take the gag out. But you have to be good. You know what I mean, by good? No screaming or crying. If you make a sound, I’ll put the gag in and show you the ways I know how to hurt people. I’m not a man to be messed with. Just go to sleep, and we’ll talk things out in the morning.”

Her mouth freed, she thought for a moment about screaming her head off but found she could not make the sounds come. She was too frightened, too scared. His hands lingered near her throat. She thought about the mound of dirt where she had first seen the man, working with his shovel. He had not said, explicitly, what he had done, but she knew. He was capable of killing someone. He had done it. Elizabeth decided in that moment that she would do whatever was necessary to survive. She would endure whatever plans he had for her, as long as she was allowed to live.

“What’s your name?” she whispered.

“Walter,” he said. “I think sometimes I should shorten it to Walt. What do you think?”

She was terrified that there was a right answer, and she wouldn’t give it. “Both are nice.”

He watched her for a while, hands at the ready to clamp over her mouth. His gaze was detached, curious. She snuffled and gagged a little on her tears, but was otherwise quiet as commanded. He took his hand away—and went to sleep.

Eventually, she slept, too, and they stayed that way, side by side, on top of the bedspread. He touched her only once, turning her on her side and complaining: “You snore.”

11

FOR A FEW DAYS, letter to Walter was like a pink elephant, the one in the mental exercise that instructs a person to think about anything they desired—with the exception of pink elephants. Had he gotten it? Was it enough? Would he be disappointed?

She had written him with what she hoped was polite finality. Yes, she was married and living in the area. (Funny to be vague, when he knew her exact address.) She omitted any reference, any hint, to Iso and Albie. Walter was not a pedophile, although there had always been some confusion about that, given the age of his victims, and she doubted he would escape, much less head toward Bethesda if he should. But the fact of motherhood was too intimate to share with him. She wrote that it was interesting to hear from him, yet not completely unexpected. How she had struggled over those words, weighed each one. What would Walter read into “not completely unexpected”? He had an uncanny ability to hear what he wanted, to glean meanings that no one else could see. Later, in college, when she took a course in semiotics, she couldn’t help thinking that Walter could give Derrida a run for his money. Walter took everything down to the word, then made words signify what he wanted them to, justify whatever he wanted to do. He was like a character from Alice in Wonderland, or one of the later Oz books, the one with the town where everyone spoke nonsense. Rigamarole, that was it.

Still, she also was careful not to write anything that would cause him trouble, although the letter would not be scrutinized by some official. Walter was most unpredictable, most likely to lash out, when he thought someone was trying to hurt him. She chose to send her letter via the same PO box that had been used as the return address on the letter to her, not the prison’s address. She knew this meant that Walter’s coconspirator, whoever it was—please, not Jared Garrett—might read the letter first, although she put it in a sealed envelope within the stamped and addressed one. But whoever was helping Walter already knew who and where she was. If she sent the letter in care of the prison, it would take only one gossipy correctional officer to send her life careering out of control.

Besides, she understood now why he had written via an intermediary. As an inmate, he was not allowed to write just anyone, a fact she had been able to establish by a cursory search of the official Web page maintained by Virginia’s prison system. Correctional facilities, as the official jargon had it. The word struck her as sweetly naive and utterly false. While she realized that prisons did attempt to rehabilitate inmates, she was not sure how anyone on death row could be said to be in a correctional facility, unless one considered death a correction.

She struggled most over the ending. Sincerely? Insincere. All the best? More like, All my worst. She chose to sign her name, assigning no emotion at all.

TIME, HER OLD FRIEND, exercised its subtle power. The letter dropped to the back of her mind, like a sock lost behind the dryer. Or, perhaps more accurately, a bit of perishable food behind the refrigerator, something that would eventually stink or bring pests into the house but that enjoyed a brief, carefree amnesty in the short term. Meanwhile, there had been too much to do to prepare for the beginning of school. The children would be attending two different schools, with Iso riding a bus to middle school and Albie attending the elementary school within walking distance. It would be Eliza’s responsibility to get them both off in the morning, which didn’t bother her at all. This was her job, it was what she did, and she was—she admitted privately—superb at it. Privately because it was the kind of sentiment that did not land gently, anywhere. Vonnie became almost enraged at the idea that Eliza considered being a mother a full-time job, and a satisfying one at that. Even their mother couldn’t help wondering where Eliza would find fulfillment as the children grew. Inez was forever suggesting that Eliza would want to return to school eventually, finish the graduate degree she had abandoned at Rice. The women in Peter’s world, the ones she met at those endless functions, tried hard to remember to add “outside the home” when they asked if Eliza worked, or had ever worked, but their politeness could not mask their belief that what she did was not work. Hard, perhaps, tedious without a doubt. But not work.

That was okay. Eliza didn’t consider it work, either, because she enjoyed it too much. It was the thing at which she excelled. She wasn’t one of the smarmily perfect mothers, packing ambitious lunches, never falling back on prepared treats for classroom parties. But she was more or less unflappable, rolling with things. In fact, she liked a bit of a crisis now and then—the science project left until the last minute, lost homework, lost anything. Nothing remained missing when Eliza began searching for it. She knew her children so well that it was easy for her to re-create those absentminded moments when things were put down in the wrong place. She was aware, for example, that Iso took out her retainer while watching television, so it was often found balanced on the arm of the sofa. She understood that dreamy Albie lived so far inside his own imagination that anything could become part of that world. His knapsack might be found perched on the head of the enormous stuffed dog his aunt Vonnie had given him, creating a reasonable facsimile of an archbishop, although Albie was probably aiming for a wizard.

She was on her hands and knees, looking under the bed for Albie’s missing trainer—sneaker—when the phone rang. Albie had been forced to wear his sandals to school, which he didn’t mind until Iso teased him about it, and he had walked the five blocks to school as if heading to the guillotine, sniffling and wailing the whole way. Eliza had promised she would find his shoes before day’s end, perhaps even bring them at lunchtime. She snagged the shoe, marveling at how far it had traveled from its mate, which had been discovered in the first-floor powder room, then dashed for the phone, a habit she couldn’t quite break. Even when the children were in the house, present and accounted for, the ringing phone taunted her with the possibility of an emergency. Strange, because if there were an emergency, it would be much more likely to arrive via the chirpy ringtone of her cell phone. Got that one right, she congratulated herself, picking up the phone in her bedroom.

“Is this Elizabeth?” a woman’s voice asked.

Reflexively, she almost said no.

“Elizabeth Benedict?” the woman clarified. But those two names were never paired, ever. It must be a telephone solicitor, working off some official list, perhaps one gleaned from the county property records? But, no, she used Eliza on all official documents except her driver’s license and passport, had since her registration at Wilde Lake High School in 1986. Did call centers have access to MVA records?

“Yes, but please put me on your do-not-call list. I don’t buy things over the phone, ever.”

“I’m not selling anything.” The woman’s voice was husky, her laugh a throaty rasp. “I’m the go-between.”

“Go-between?”

“The person who passed that letter to you, from Walter. He wants to add you to his call list.” Again, that raspy laugh. “Not to be confused with the federal do-not-call registry.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s allowed to make collect calls to up to fifteen people. Of course, he doesn’t have anywhere near that many. Just his lawyer and me, as far as I know. He can add you without his lawyer’s knowledge. But you have to say it’s okay. Is it?”

“Is it—”

“Okay.” The woman was clearly getting impatient. “And telling me isn’t enough. You’ll have to make an official request, via the prison. Then there’s paperwork. There’s always paperwork.”

“I don’t…no, I don’t think so. No.”

“It’s your decision,” the woman said, and then promptly negated that obvious fact. “But I think you should.”

“Excuse me, but who are you?”

“A friend of Walter’s.” She rushed on, as if forestalling a question she was asked all the time. “I’m not one of those women who moons over an inmate, one of those wackos. I’m opposed to the death penalty. In general, but Virginia is where I’ve decided to focus my interest, especially since Maryland has a de facto moratorium. I’m a compassionate friend to several inmates. But Walter’s my favorite. Do you know that Virginia is second, nationwide, in terms of the raw numbers of people executed? Texas is first, of course, but it has a much larger population. And if you knew how the appeals process was structured here—” That laugh again. She was one of those people who used laughter as punctuation, no matter how inappropriate.

“If you really know Walter—”

“I do,” she shot back, apparently offended at Eliza’s use of the conditional.

“I mean, I assume you know his story and mine. Which means you know he’s not someone I’ve been in contact with, ever.”

“Do you think he deserves to die for what he did?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. He was sentenced to die for the murder of Holly Tackett, and her parents made it clear that they approved of the death penalty. I wasn’t consulted.”

“Wasn’t your mom a Quaker?”

“Grandmother,” she said, unnerved by this piece of information. Was it something she had told Walter? They talked a lot, during the weeks they’d spent together, but she had been careful not to reveal much. Even at the age of fifteen, she had been shrewd enough not to encourage Walter’s envy and resentment, and she had recognized, if only in the wake of her capture, that her family was eminently enviable. She had avoided telling him that her parents were psychiatrists, for example, much less that her mother worked with the criminally insane. She described her home as average, an aging split-level on the south side of Frederick Road, the better to throw him off the track if he ever made good on his threats. She had no memory of discussing her gentle grandmother, who attended the Quaker meetinghouse in North Baltimore and thought the girls should attend the Friends School, despite the distance from their house. She had even offered to pay their tuition.

Later—after—that option had been raised again, sending Elizabeth-now-Eliza to Friends, perhaps having her live with her grandmother during the week. But Eliza was the one who vetoed it. She wanted to go to a larger school, not a smaller one. She needed to be someplace where being new wouldn’t attract as much attention.

“I bet your grandmother wouldn’t want Walter to be executed.”

“This conversation is…unsettling to me,” Eliza said. “I’m sure you can understand that. I’m going to need to let you go.”

It occurred to her that she was being kinder to this woman—why hadn’t she offered her name—than she would have been to a telephone solicitor.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, with a sincerity that robbed Eliza of any self-righteousness she might have felt. “I get carried away. Walter would be the first person to tell you that. He’d be mad, if he knew that I had upset you. It’s just—there’s so little I can do. For him. Putting him in touch with you, it’s one of the rare times I could do him a solid.”

Do him a solid. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that phrase.

“He would be angry at me, for pressing you. That’s not his way. He would love to talk to you. But he would be the first one to say that he doesn’t want to bother you.”

“Does he want to talk to me about something in particular?”

“No,” the woman said. “He feels bad. He knows he’s going to die. He accepts that. He’s been on death row longer than anyone in Virginia. Did you know that? He’s seen other men come and…go. I think he started to believe his turn would never come, but his case was so unusual. As you know.”

Eliza wasn’t sure that she did know the ways in which Walter’s case was unusual, but she refused to be drawn into this conversation.

“Could I have your name?” she asked the woman.

“Why?” Suspicious, skeptical. Eliza wanted to laugh. You call me, on Walter’s behalf, you make it possible for him to write to me, and you question my motives?

“Because I’m going to think about this and call you back.”

“You better not be up to anything,” the woman warned. “Don’t make trouble for us. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

This is silly, Eliza thought, thinking for the first time to look at the caller ID feature on her phone. Blocked. “This is silly,” she said. “You called me. You have asked for, well, an enormous favor and demanded an immediate reply. All I want is time to think about it.”

“I’ll get back to you,” the woman said. “Early next week. We don’t have much time, you know.”

12

1985

THE HAIR RIBBON, WALTER THOUGHT when he read the Baltimore papers two mornings later. That goddamn Madonna-inspired hair ribbon. When had it fallen off? Had she been sly enough to drop it on purpose when he pulled her into the truck? He had remembered to grab her boots, thinking she would need shoes, and those would have to do until he could get her more practical ones. No matter. Searchers had found the ribbon, and then they had found the grave. The paper, running a day behind events, said the body had not yet been exhumed, but as soon as it was uncovered, they would know it wasn’t her. The body had probably already been unearthed and identified, while he sat here with scorched coffee and runny eggs.

He was in a truck stop in western Maryland, near the fork where one had to choose whether to keep going west, toward Cumberland, or head north into Pennsylvania. East, toward Baltimore, was out of the question. Head north, head north, head north, his brain told him, then west. But his truck had West Virginia plates, and it was a funny thing, one didn’t see them much on the open road, away from his home state. And he had been looking for those blue-and-gold plates, he realized. True, they probably weren’t quite as rare on the Ohio Turnpike, but he was still reluctant to go that way, in part because he had never been that way. He wasn’t adventurous, he realized now. He thought he had yearned to travel, to see places far beyond where he grew up, but now all he wanted was to go home. Only he couldn’t. Not with her, and maybe not at all, ever again. What would he tell his parents about the time he went missing? Whatever he did with her, he would have to answer a lot of questions.

Elizabeth was flipping through the selections on the mini-jukebox set up on the table. Just thirty-six hours into their acquaintance, as he thought of it, she had already learned to speak when spoken to, not to yammer away about every little thing in her head. She had good manners, actually. This morning, she had ordered scrambled eggs and an English muffin, but accepted without complaint the fried eggs and wheat toast that came in their place. The waitress was a knockout in training, with flame-colored hair and a terrific figure, and Walter could tell she was used to not getting things right and facing no consequences. He had wanted to call her back, dress her down, but Elizabeth had said, “No, I’m fine.” It was clear from how she nibbled only the whites around the yolk that she wasn’t fine, but he admired her niceness. The waitress, all of nineteen or twenty, looked through him. Did she think Elizabeth was his girlfriend? Or that he was her father? Brother and sister, he decided. That would be the most believable play, the simplest.

The smarter move, he knew, would be to kill her. Kill her, get rid of the body—don’t even bother to dig a grave this time, just leave her somewhere inaccessible, there was still plenty of wilderness out here—and go home. Tell his folks he’d been on a fishing trip, had some car trouble, had to wait for a part, didn’t want to call collect and couldn’t afford to dial long-distance because he was saving every penny to pay the mechanic in cash. There was nothing to connect the girl back in Patapsco State Park to him, or any other girl. This girl was the only one who could hurt him.

Yet there was something about her, struggling to choke down her eggs, that reminded him of someone. She’s like me, he thought. She’s polite and nice, she does her best, and people don’t hear her, don’t pay attention.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

She was in the habit of thinking before she answered him. He realized this was partly because she was weighing everything she said, intent on pleasing him. That was good.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“Well, how old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“That’s too young for a boyfriend.” He knew that he had attempted to go with girls her age, or not much older, but there was fifteen and then there was fifteen. She was the first kind.

“There was a boy, at this camp I went to last summer, and we were kind of boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t really count at camp because you don’t make plans.”

“What do you mean?” He honestly didn’t have a clue what she meant, and he hoped her answer might shed some light on one of the many things that baffled him when it came to women.

“Well, at camp, there’s a schedule. No one can invite you to go anywhere—to a movie, or the mall, or even a McDonald’s. So you sit on the bus together, or swim together, and you hold hands”—she blushed at this. Maybe he was wrong, maybe she had done more than he realized. “It’s not a date, and it ends when camp ends. He called me, once, but we didn’t really have anything to talk about. I wrote him letters, and he never wrote back.”

“Yeah, I see your point.” He didn’t, not really, but he didn’t have anything to contribute, so he wanted to move on. “Look, what would you do, if I just got up right now, paid the check, went out to my truck, and started driving?”

Again, she did not answer right away.

“Elizabeth?”

“I guess I’d ask the people if I could use their phone, make a collect call, and I’d call my parents, tell them where I was.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Sort of. Not exactly. But the people here, they would tell me, right?”

He looked around. “Lower your voice,” he said. “I’m serious.”

She flinched. It was amazing how easily he could control her. He liked it.

“I’d call my parents collect,” she whispered, “and then I’d wait for them to come get me.”

“What’s my truck look like?”

“Red.”

“Make? Model?”

She needed a second to understand that question, then shook her head. “I haven’t noticed.”

“License plate?”

“I haven’t paid attention.”

She was a shitty liar. “Elizabeth.”

She hung her head, whispered the plate numbers.

“Look,” he said, “I have to keep you with me.”

“I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “If that’s what you need me to do, I’ll do it.”

“No, you would tell. Because you think it’s the right thing, and I can see that you’re the kind of person who tries to do the right thing. Like me. The thing is—I didn’t really do anything. It’s just that, no one’s going to believe that. This girl, she tried to get out of my truck while it was moving, she fell and hit her head.”

It sounded plausible to him, now that he had said it. It absolutely could have happened just as he said, and who would believe him? It was so unfair.

“But no one’s going to believe that, right?” He saw that Elizabeth didn’t believe it. Her face was interesting that way. Some people would call her an open book, but Walter didn’t think that expression was quite apt. An open book, glimpsed, was only words on a page, and you couldn’t make out the whole story. Her face was like…fish in an aquarium, all her thoughts and feelings on display, but moving kind of lazily, not in a rush to get anywhere.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” he tried, and this had the virtue of truth, or was at least more in the neighborhood of truth, but he could see she was still dubious. “I’ve made some mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. People just don’t listen, you know? Girls. They don’t listen. They’re in too much of a hurry, all the time.”

“We read this book, Of Mice and Men, in seventh-grade G-and-T English,” she began.

“G and T?”

“Oh, um, gifted and talented. But it’s my only G-and-T class.” She was embarrassed to be caught bragging. She hadn’t realized she was bragging at first, but now she was owning up to it. That was important. “Anyway, there’s a man in it, he doesn’t mean any harm, but he’s really strong, and when his hand gets tangled in this girl’s hair, he’s just trying to calm her down, but he breaks her neck.”

“And what happened to this guy?”

A long pause. “Well, he was simple. What people call retarded, sometimes, although my parents don’t like that word.”

“It’s just a word.”

She shot him a look, as if on the verge of contradicting him, then changed her mind. “That’s true. It’s just a word.” He liked that, the way she repeated after him. “He couldn’t understand the things he did. He never meant to harm anyone or anything. Once, he petted a puppy to death.”

“People who hurt dogs are the lowest of the low.”

“But he wasn’t trying to hurt the dog. He was just petting it. He didn’t know how strong he was. That was his problem.”

“What happened to him?”

He could see her considering a lie, then rejecting it. “His friend killed him. He was too pure for this world. That’s what my teacher said. He was forever a child, but in a man’s body, and he couldn’t live in this world.”

He was taken with that phrase. Forever a child, in a man’s body. It touched on something he felt about himself. Not being a child, of course. He was the opposite of simple. He was complicated. That was his problem, most likely. He was too complicated, too thoughtful, too full of ideas to have the life that people expected him to have. He should have been born somewhere intense, interesting, not in a little town where people didn’t have get-up-and-get. Dallas, for example, which struck him as a place that rewarded ambition and masculinity. All the men on that television show, even the wimpy ones, were men’s men, big and strong. Maybe they should go to Dallas.

And it would have to be “they,” at least for a while. He couldn’t let her go, but he also couldn’t do anything more definitive, not yet. That was the downside of spending too much time with someone, especially someone whose fears and dreams swam across her face. It was like naming the Thanksgiving turkey. Not that a name had ever kept him from petitioning for the drumstick, come the day.

“Do you know more stories?” he asked her. “Like the one you just told, only maybe happier?”

“Well, the same guy who wrote that, he drove around the country with his poodle, Charley. I mean, for real.”

“And what happened?”

“Lots of things.”

“You can tell me while I’m driving.”

He let her use the bathroom, having checked ahead of time that it was a one-seater without a window to the outside, and there was a cigarette machine in the hallway, so he didn’t look odd, waiting there, pulling on the various handles, fishing for change. Once, when he was thirteen, he had found seventy-five cents in the pay phone at his father’s gas station, and that had seemed miraculous to him. A waitress—not the redhead, but an older woman—glanced back at him, curious, and he said, just thought of it out of the blue: “Her first, um, time, you know? With her ladies’ issues? And our mama’s dead and she’s freaking out.”

“Poor thing. Should I ask her if she needs help?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. She’s shy. That would just make it worse.” The woman smiled, pleased with him. Maybe having a little sister would make him seem less threatening to women. Of course, this waitress was old, dried up, but maybe other women, women his age, would be charmed by a man taking care of his sister.

The pay phone gave him an idea, and he asked the waitress if she could change five dollars for him. He called his father’s shop and spoke to C.J., the woman who kept the books and answered the phones. He had joined the Marines, he told her. Sold the truck to a friend, cashed out his bank account, what little there was of it. (Later that day, he would hit an ATM—take whatever it would give him—or find a branch that might cash his check.) No, please don’t call his father to the phone. He would only yell. About his truck, not about his only son and coworker going off to join the Marines.

He hung up and listened to the various plumbing sounds, asking when she came out: “Did you wash your hands?” She shook her head, and he sent her back. She was a good girl. She would do whatever he told her to.

13

“THAT’S ENOUGH,” PETER SAID, when Eliza told him about the phone call the next morning as he prepared coffee for the enormous travel mug he toted to work each day. (She had been asleep when he arrived home, and although she roused when he slid into bed next to her, she hadn’t wanted to attempt a serious conversation so late. Besides, they had fallen in the habit of using Peter’s breakfast, that quiet lull after the children had left for school, to catch up.) “Who’s his lawyer? That should be easy enough to find out.”

“You’ll be late,” she said.

“This is worth being late for.”

Within five minutes on the computer and another five on the telephone, Peter was demanding to speak to Jefferson D. Blanding, an attorney with a nonprofit in Charlottesville. Eliza couldn’t help being thrilled by the way her husband came to her defense. It was one of the qualities she had admired in him, even when they were nothing more than friends. Peter took charge of everything and everyone, not just her. He didn’t have to be the boss, but when certain situations came to a head—a disagreement with someone over a bill, a contractor who refused to do what he had promised, a mix-up at an airline ticket counter—Peter took over. He was forceful without being rude, intent on finding solutions, as opposed to venting his anger in a bullying way. In England, this part of him had become a little muted, so it was particularly exciting to see it engaged again, and on her behalf.

“He was actually very nice, once he understood why I was calling,” Peter said. “I got the sense that he was even a little horrified, although he put it on the woman. He said she’s well meaning, but in over her head.”

“Who is she?”

“Barbara LaFortuny.”

“No.”

Peter laughed. “Yeah, and he swears it’s her real name. Sounds like a stage name for some exotic dancer.”

Eliza thought about the voice on the phone, the vinegary rasp. “How old a woman?”

“I didn’t ask, but I had the sense she’s in her forties or fifties. She was a schoolteacher in Baltimore city and she was attacked on the job several years ago, by a student with a knife. She won an undisclosed settlement from the system because the school had refused to remove the kid from her classroom despite repeated warnings. You think that would tilt her toward victims’ rights, but instead she became an advocate for prisoners. Got interested in conditions in state prisons, then began looking at the death penalty. Somehow came to befriend Walter.”

“She made a point of telling me she wasn’t one of those women. You know, the kind that fall in love with an inmate.”

“No, she’s not in love with him. But she’s grown obsessed with trying to get his execution stayed. More so than Walter, according to his lawyer. He said it’s possible she’s acting alone, without Walter’s knowledge.”

Eliza shook her head. The letter’s style, its cadences—those had been pure Walter.

“She wouldn’t have known me, by a photo. And I don’t see how she could have learned my married name. Walter wrote that he saw the photo, that he recognized me.” I’d know you anywhere. “Is this woman, Barbara, black?”

“It didn’t occur to me to ask. Why?”

“She didn’t sound black. But a Baltimore city schoolteacher and…” Her voice trailed off from embarrassment.

Peter smiled, shook a playful finger at her. “Are you racial profiling now, Eliza? Assuming a woman with an unusual name has to be black?”

“No, no,” she protested. “It was the detail about teaching in city schools—”

Peter started laughing.

“—teaching in the schools and being swayed to the issue of prisoners’ rights, despite being attacked.” But she was laughing now, too, unafraid of being exposed. She had never really understood the old saying “safe as houses,” but it described how she felt with Peter. Safe, solid, loved unconditionally. They had been a couple, an official couple, for six months before she told him about Walter. It had started with an argument about sleeping with the windows open. A reasonable request, on Peter’s part—the New England spring, late as ever, had finally delivered its first perfect night, and they lived on the third floor of a ramshackle apartment building favored by students. But she had been adamant, oddly adamant, growing angry and tearful. Awed by this obstinacy in the otherwise pliant, easygoing Eliza, Peter had yielded. The next morning, over waffles at O’Rourke’s, she had apologized. It had not been her intent to explain herself further, but she couldn’t stop. The story tumbled out, as if she had never told it before. And, in some ways, she hadn’t. Yes, she had testified. Yes, she had been deposed, interviewed repeatedly by various official sorts. Debriefed, in a sense, by her own parents, who also sent her to a gentle therapist.

But Eliza had never told the story of her own volition, and to use the parlance of Peter’s future career, she buried the lead: “When I was fifteen, a man kind of abducted me,” she began. “He thought I had seen something he had done, that I could identify him. Which was funny because when I was fifteen, all grown-ups looked alike to me, you know? I didn’t notice him, and I never could have described him. But he took me.”

Peter had not rushed in with questions. This would be his trademark as a reporter, in the years to come. Peter, Eliza had heard his colleagues say, was the master of the pause, silences that seemed designed to be filled with confidences.

“I was with him five weeks. Actually, thirty-nine days. Five weeks, four days. One day shy of the flood in the Bible. I never thought forty days and forty nights was that long, when I was in Sunday school. I’d think, ‘It’s only a little more than a month.’ But it can be a really long time.”

The waffles had a rich blueberry sauce on top. Eliza, who normally cleaned her plate, began mashing the tines of her fork into them, flattening them, eliminating their grids.

“Toward the end, he took another girl. But that sparked a huge manhunt, and the police found us. But not before she died.”

“She died,” Peter echoed. “You mean—he killed her?”

Eliza nodded. “It wasn’t the first time, although no one knows how many girls he killed. He was burying a girl when I stumbled on him, in the park that ran near our old house. Some people say he may have killed as many as a dozen girls in the years before he was caught.”

Eliza waited, almost holding her breath. Peter did not ask: “Why didn’t he kill you?” Instead, he asked: “How were you rescued?”

She almost said: “I’m not sure I was.” But she was not melodramatic that way and she had no doubt that she had, in fact, been rescued. “It was pretty anticlimactic. He ran a red light and just started babbling to the police officer. It turned out that a clerk in Piggly Wiggly had seen us in the store that morning, thought we looked odd, and called the police.”

“What did she notice that no one else had seen all that time? Were you never in public?”

She did not want to lie to Peter, or mislead him, but nor could she tell him everything. “It’s funny, what people don’t see. He had cut my hair—god, he had given me this horrible haircut, it made me cry—and while I didn’t look like a boy, which was what he intended, I certainly didn’t look like the photo of me that was circulating. And I was scared of him, I didn’t mouth off or try to do anything to draw attention to us.”

“You know what?” Peter had said.

“What?” she had asked, fearful. She honestly could not imagine what would happen next, given that she had confided in only one other person, back in high school, and that had ended badly.

“I think you need more coffee.” He didn’t signal the waitress, who was busy with another table, but got up and grabbed the thermal carafe from behind the counter, filled Eliza’s mug. She knew, at that moment, that Peter would always take care of her, if only she would let him.

That had been their pattern for almost twenty years now; they were solicitous of each other, dividing their duties between the world at large and their home. Peter fought the battles beyond the house, while Eliza tried to make sure that the windows were always closed and locked, their alarm system in working order. They were a team.

Over time, of course, she had told him more, in greater detail. Peter never wondered why she was the lucky one. He took it for granted that she was, and he was glad for it. “We don’t ponder why lightning strikes where it does,” he said once. Later, after a London-based magazine had asked him to file dispatches from New Orleans on the first anniversary of Katrina, he had written beautiful passages about the levees, human-designed and maintained systems that had failed spectacularly. He described how arbitrary water was, destroying one neighborhood while leaving another relatively intact. He never said as much, but Eliza believed he had written those words for her, that it was a sonnet of sorts, more proof that Peter understood. Walter was a natural disaster made catastrophic by human failures. She had been on one side of the levee, Holly on the other. Don’t ask why.

Now, packing up his briefcase, getting ready to go, Peter said: “The lawyer, Blanding, told me that Walter’s phone list is up to him, but his visiting list is another matter. It would be almost impossible for you to visit him. But Walter might ask for that, eventually. And if you were interested, it could happen because of who you are, your status.”

She didn’t think she was interested, she was pretty sure she wasn’t interested, but she couldn’t help wondering what Peter had said on her behalf. “What did you tell him?”

He looked surprised. “That it was up to you, of course. It is. I assume you don’t want to see him, but maybe you do. I’ll tell you this much: I’d be more comfortable with you going to see Walter, with security all around, than with you meeting up with this Barbara LaFortuny person. She’s the one who scares me.”

He kissed her temple, said, “Off to make the doughnuts,” and headed out to another one of his twelve-hour days. Eliza no longer really understood what Peter did for a living. She knew what venture capital was, and she knew that Peter had been recruited, in part, for the lucidity of his prose and his ability to explain complicated investment tools to the most unsophisticated investors. But she didn’t really know what he did, much less why it paid so well, and that was a little terrifying. Their old friends, almost all in the newspaper world, were taking buy-outs or pay cuts, getting laid off, and her family was thriving. Again: Don’t ask why.

She drifted over to the computer, entered the name “Barbara LaFortuny.” For an activist, she was suspiciously inactive, leaving few traces of herself in the public sphere, although there was a Baltimore Beacon-Light profile available only in abstract; she would have to pay to read the entire article. She wasn’t that interested, and it was a relief to discover how low her threshold was: She wouldn’t pay $3.95 to find out more about Barbara LaFortuny. But her fingers continued to wander, plugging the name into the images file and recoiling at the one photo that showed up: a woman with three-quarters of her face swathed in bandages. Amazing, the power of an image compared with words. Peter had stood here not five minutes ago and explained that this woman, Walter’s champion, had been a victim of a knife attack. But the horror hadn’t truly registered.

This was why Eliza seldom spoke of the rape. Words could not convey what Walter had done to her, the depth of the betrayal, more brutal than the act itself. And there was no photo, no image, to show the damage he had inflicted. Eliza was not inclined to be competitive about suffering; after all, there were at least two dead girls always at the ready, eager to inform her that she was, in fact, the lucky one, and a whole cadre of possible victims behind them. But she couldn’t help feeling a little superior to Barbara LaFortuny. Just a little. A line from a poem came to her, something about the people who never got suffering wrong. Yet in Eliza’s experience, everyone, even most victims, got suffering wrong. That’s why it was better never to speak of it.

14

1985

THEY DROVE. IF THERE WAS a purpose, a destination, Elizabeth could not pinpoint it. They had dipped down into Virginia, this much was clear from the highway signs, and they sometimes crossed the Shenandoahs into West Virginia. Walter found odd jobs to make cash—chopping wood, for example, to help people with vacation homes prepare for the winter ahead, which Walter said would be a bad one, as bad as last winter, which had seen one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history. “I feel it in my bones,” he said, and he was being literal. He chopped wood, he did yard work, he fixed things. Elizabeth was surprised by the ease with which he found work, how people looked past her, never questioning why she was with Walter and, after Labor Day passed, not in school. Perhaps they thought she was simpleminded, as simple as Lennie in Of Mice and Men. She seldom spoke. Walter had made it clear that she should answer only direct questions with as few words as possible. And although Walter had purchased clothing for her—two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a sweater, all from JCPenney—she always looked a little dingy because she had to wear each outfit three to four times before they could go to a coin laundry. It was one of the few times he left her alone. He would have her strip down behind a sheet, whether at a motor court or a campsite, then hand him her clothes. He tied her hands, but not her feet, and although he gagged her the first few times, he didn’t even bother with that after a while.

She could, of course, have left the room or the tent, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. Her feet were free. She could have called for help when he stopped gagging her. But it was too embarrassing. She could not get past imagining those first few minutes, when she would be the girl in the sheet, when people would point and laugh and maybe worse. There was the very fact of the… un-loveliness of her body, the potbelly, which was more pronounced from their fast-food, on-the-go diet. She could not imagine walking around in a sheet, worrying about what might be glimpsed, or how it might come untied.

The real problem was that she couldn’t imagine escaping at all. He would kill her. Kill her family. She dreamed of rescue, hoped for it, prayed, but she believed it would have to be something that happened to her, not because of her.

SOMETIMES SHE WOULD TRY to pinpoint where she would be, back home, at a particular time of day. At, say, 10:15 A.M., she would picture the mind-numbing lull of late morning in school, those early periods when the day’s promise has already burned off, but the end still seems impossibly distant. At 4 P.M., she would see herself lying on the sofa, watching television while doing her homework, the height of her rebelliousness. Her parents always said they didn’t mind if she watched television before or after homework, only never during. But there would be no one to rat her out, since Vonnie had gone to college. Only—had Vonnie left for college, after Elizabeth disappeared? Probably. Elizabeth hoped she had. A disappointed Vonnie was a terrible, terrible thing. Vonnie seemed to believe that she should always get what she wanted, more so than other people. The drama around her college applications had been intense, affecting the entire household. They all knew better than to fetch the mail during those weeks when acceptances—and, in one memorable case, an actual rejection, from Duke—started arriving, but Elizabeth might sneak a peek into the mailbox if she got home before Vonnie. She examined the envelopes, knowing that it was all about fat versus thin, daydreamed about the day when her own letters would be waiting for her. But she didn’t dare take the mail in, and even her parents ceded that privilege to Vonnie.

In the truck, driving the mind-numbingly familiar roads, Walter said: “Tell me a story. Tell me about that man and his dog.”

She did. The problem was—she hadn’t actually read Travels with Charley. She had started it but found it dull, not at all the work she was expecting after reading Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row. But she was scared to admit that she had lied—Walter prized honesty above all other values and had made it clear that she must always tell him the truth—so she made it up as she went along, trying to figure out what kind of stories Steinbeck and his poodle would have lived on the road. She borrowed heavily from a book her father had read the summer before last, Blue Highways, which had inspired her parents to take them on back-road drives in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. God, it had been boring. Sometimes, roaming with Walter, she would glimpse a place, a town, a gas station that she thought she recognized from those day trips, but she could never be sure.

“Tell me another story,” Walter repeated. It was a gray, indeterminate day, out of season. Too cool to be summer, which it still was on the calendar, but lacking the crispness of autumn. The air was muggy, as damp and unrewarding as a sponge bath.

“Well, there’s a time when they went to…Tulsa.”

“Tulsa? After Milwaukee?”

“I’m not telling it in order, just as I remember it.”

“Where did they start again?”

“New York.”

“And where do they end up?”

“I can’t tell you that. It gives too much away.” She couldn’t tell him, in part, because she was making it up as she went along, but also because she was scared to find out what happened should Mr. Steinbeck and his poodle ever stop moving. If they didn’t reach the end, Walter wouldn’t tire of her, dig a hole in some forest and leave her there.

“Okay. What happened in Tulsa?”

“They found a necklace, lying on the sidewalk. That is, Charley found it, while they were out on their walk. It had purple stones—”

“They call those amethysts.”

“Yes, I know.” She did know, but she hadn’t thought Walter would. He surprised her, sometimes, with the facts he had at his disposal. More surprising, though, were the things he didn’t know, common bits of everyday living that even little kids understood. “Amethysts, in an old-fashioned setting, big square gold frames, clearly an antique. But there was no one around and it was a block of funny old houses. It was hard to imagine that anyone living in those houses owned such a necklace. Charley lifted it from the sidewalk with his nose—”

“Aw, he made that part up. A dog couldn’t do that.”

She felt a need to defend Steinbeck and Charley, although the story was hers. “He has poetic license.”

“What’s that?”

She wasn’t sure she could define it. “If you’re a poet—or a writer—you’re entitled to certain details, even if they’re not exactly real. Like you could say there was an eclipse of the sun on a day there wasn’t, if you needed to. I think.”

“And do they charge you for that?”

“What?”

“I mean, like a driver’s license or a hunting license. Is it something you go down and buy?”

She yearned to lie to him. That was the kind of thing Vonnie would do, set someone up, usually Elizabeth, to look like an idiot later. But he would punish her. “No, it’s not a license-license. It’s just a, like, way of talking.” She groped for the vocabulary of school. “A figure of speech.”

“So the license to make stuff up is made up?”

“Yes. Sort of. I guess. But that’s not the point. The point is, Charley found this necklace. And it was valuable, and they wanted to find the real owner. But how would they do that? I mean, if you go door-to-door, and show it to people, there will always be a dishonest person who says, ‘Yes, that’s mine.’”

“What you do,” Walter said, “is ask if anyone has lost a necklace, then get them to describe it. Or, better yet, they could have gone to the police station and asked if there had been a burglary in the neighborhood, then worked backward, right?”

“That’s sort of what they did. They walked a few more blocks, then found a little business district and there was an antique store. It was run by a Holocaust victim.”

“One of those people the Nazis tried to kill.”

“Yes.” Again she was surprised that he didn’t need to have the Holocaust defined. Walter had been skeptical when she told him she needed sanitary napkins, not because he didn’t know about menstruation, but because he didn’t think she was old enough. “I thought you got breasts when that happened,” he said, and even he could tell he had hurt her feelings. Later he explained that although he had a sister, she was thirteen years older and he didn’t know much about what he called girl secrets.

“The jeweler was very old, and stooped, and he wore one of those things that jewelers use to look at things closely.” She waited a beat to see if this was one of the odd things that Walter might know, but he didn’t supply the word and she didn’t have a clue what it was. “Mr. Steinbeck asked if any of his customers had recently had a necklace repaired there.”

“But the customer might have been on the way in,” Walter said. He had a real argumentative side. “And the jeweler couldn’t know that.”

“Only the necklace wasn’t broken, and it was shiny, polished up. He was pretty sure someone had dropped it on the way home. And he was right. A teenage girl had brought her mother’s necklace in to get it cleaned and repaired as a surprise to her, then it had fallen out of her purse on the walk home and she was terrified to tell her mother what had happened because it was an antique, a family heirloom.”

“How did the jeweler know all that? It happened after she left.”

“He didn’t, but he told Mr. Steinbeck how to find the girl, and he learned the rest of the story.”

“Did she offer him a reward?”

“Yes, but he said he didn’t need one, that people shouldn’t get rewards for doing the right thing.”

Almost all her stories about Mr. Steinbeck and Charley ended this way. They did a good deed, then declined any reward for it. She hoped that Walter would eventually decide that doing the right thing—letting her go, turning himself in—would be a reward in and of itself. But so far the man-and-dog duo had traveled to Boston, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Crater Lake, Yellowstone Park—thank goodness her family had taken that cross-country trip when she was eight, she had lots of material on which to draw—and now Tulsa, always doing good deeds, and it didn’t seem to make any impression at all on Walter.

THAT NIGHT, IN ONE of the motor courts that Walter preferred, places where cash and men with young girls didn’t seem to excite anyone’s curiosity, he asked if her period was finished.

“Yes,” she said, her stomach suddenly queasy, drawing her knees to her chest. So far, he had not touched her, not in that way. So far. But maybe that was because he had thought she wasn’t a woman yet, and therefore off-limits.

“So I can put these back in the truck for a while?” He held up the box of sanitary pads.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“A month.” She paused, not wanting to admit the next part. “Sometimes more.”

A month. Would he really keep her for another month? Did she have a month’s worth of stories about Charley and Mr. Steinbeck? She hoped so.

15

I CAN READ YOU LIKE a book is not generally a generous expression. It is a criticism, an accusation of naïveté, a suggestion that someone is trying to manipulate another person, but failing. Similarly, I can see right through you has a sinister feel to it. Or, even: I’d know you anywhere.

Yet in a long and happy relationship, that kind of transparency and instant recognition has an endearing comfort. So when Peter arrived home one evening, actually in time for supper with the children, and announced he was ready for the family to get a dog, Eliza had no problem discerning his motives. Peter had always opposed having a dog for any number of reasons—dirt, hair, the possibility that Albie would prove to be allergic. But his primary objection had been that Eliza would become the dog’s caretaker, although she had insisted she wouldn’t care. Now, he announced at dinner, in front of the children, that he had changed his mind, which left Eliza feeling a little sandbagged. What if she no longer wanted a dog? If Peter could change his vote from no to yes, why wouldn’t he check first to see if she had changed hers?

“A real dog,” Peter said.

“What do you mean by ‘real’?” asked Iso, the young lawyer. She was waiting, Eliza realized, for the penny to drop, one of the few Briticisms she allowed herself. She preferred it to the idea of the other shoe dropping.

“Not one of those toy things, that you carry around in your arms. And not a terrier of any kind. They’re too high-strung. A Lab, or…a German shepherd.”

“I don’t like the idea of purebred dogs, when there are so many dogs in kennels waiting to be adopted,” Eliza said, even as Iso cried “German shepherd” and Albie countered with “Black Lab!”

“No, the shelter is fine, that’s a good idea,” Peter decreed. “Mixed breeds are healthier and smarter. Just as long as it’s a real dog. We’ll go Saturday.”

That was three days away, and intrepid Iso quickly learned that they could search the local kennel’s inventory online, which was providential, as Albie noted, “Because we can talk about the dogs without hurting their feelings.” As Peter pored over the children’s choices in the evening, eliminating some, approving others, Eliza began to realize what he meant by a real dog. Big. Peter wanted them to have a big dog. And she began to wonder: Had the lawyer, Blanding, told Peter something more about Walter or Barbara LaFortuny? Was that the penny that had yet to drop?

IN THE END, FOR ALL their careful study and rational discussion, they allowed a dog to choose them. Reba, a shaggy, sad-eyed mix of terrier and shepherd, had studied them with the resignation of a dog who never gets picked. She had been in the kennel, a no-kill one, for a record eighteen months. Peter demurred—she wasn’t small, but she wasn’t big or intimidating—and Iso was casually cruel about the dog’s lack of charisma. But Eliza and Albie became passionate, intense champions and—after a surprising amount of paperwork and references—Reba came to live with them a week later.

“Can we at least rename her?” Iso asked. “Everyone will think we named her after that actress on that silly sitcom.”

It took Eliza a second to sort out that Reba McEntire, forever in her head as a country singer, was apparently on a sitcom these days. Eliza wondered if Iso had any memory of the fact that, back when she was a baby in Texas, Eliza had developed a bizarre fondness for CMT, the station that played country music videos, and she had liked Reba quite a bit. There had been a whole series of videos that seemed to tell a little story, about a man and a woman who circled each other in some romance novel setting, possibly one of those islands off the coast of South Carolina. And she had been a doctor, or some such, who met the love of her life in Guatemala, or someplace, but they didn’t end up together, and somehow that was okay. Madonna in the 1980s, Reba in the 1990s—who was her musical role model now, as the first decade of the new century drew to an end? Eliza wasn’t sure she could even name a current pop star. Not on the basis of her work, at any rate. She knew, in spite of herself, which one had been beaten by her boyfriend, and the one who had been arrested for kleptomania, and the one who kept going to rehab. But don’t ask her what they sang.

“No,” Eliza told Iso, with a vehemence that caught them both off guard. “You don’t just go around changing people’s names.”

“I did,” Iso pointed out. “You did.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were Elizabeth, when you were younger, and then you decided you wanted to be Eliza.”

They were in the backyard with Albie, watching Reba adjust to her new life. She didn’t seem to trust it. She would walk a few feet away from them, then turn her head back toward them as if to ask: Is this allowed? Even her sniffs seemed tentative, halfhearted.

Eliza caught herself before blurting out: “How do you know that?” After all, there was no reason to be defensive about shortening her name. Instead she said: “I’ve been Eliza so long, I sometimes forget I was ever Elizabeth.”

“It’s right there, on your driver’s license.”

True enough. Only—“What were you doing with my driver’s license?”

Iso blushed. “I wanted a breath mint the other day, so I looked in your purse.”

“I don’t keep breath mints in my billfold, Iso.” Waiting her out, not accusing her, but not letting her think that she was getting away with anything, either.

“And I needed a dollar. A girl in my class is having a birthday and we’re all going to pitch in a dollar to buy her a gift.”

“A dollar?” Come on, Iso. Lie big or go home.

“There are twenty-five kids in my class. We’re getting her an iTunes gift certificate.”

“And will this happen every time someone has a birthday?”

Iso was caught. Her daughter, too, could be read like a book, at least for now. Eliza thought about her own parents, how much they must have known about the little secrets she carved out for herself, how indulgent they had been. They had probably thought: What’s the harm, in her dressing up like Madonna when we’re not around? What does it matter if she likes to cut through the woods to go to the fast-food places along Route 40? At least she’s getting plenty of fresh air and exercise. They had been right, yet they had been wrong, too. There was harm, everywhere.

“Oh—no. But this girl is special. She—”

It was funny, watching her daughter lie. Or would be funny, if it weren’t also terrifying.

“She has a special disease. In her nervous system. You can’t really see it.”

At least it was a smart lie. This way, Iso didn’t have to produce a classmate in a wheelchair or a leg brace. But Eliza had grown tired of their game.

“Iso, don’t take money from my purse without asking, okay? Even a dollar. You really shouldn’t go in it, ever, not without my permission. Just because I’m your mother doesn’t mean I don’t have some expectation of privacy.”

“You go in my room,” Iso said. “You’ve gone in my purse.”

“Looking for lost things. Not spying. Not”—she lowered her voice so that Albie, who was walking alongside Reba as she continued to test her new backyard—“stealing.”

“I didn’t steal!” Vehement, defiant. “I don’t steal. I needed a dollar. You wouldn’t want me to be the only one who didn’t contribute, would you?”

Her anger was so self-righteous that Eliza had to fight back a smile. That quickly, Iso had bought into her own story. But at least she had been distracted from the source of their original argument.

Except she hadn’t. “I don’t want a dog named Reba,” Iso said suddenly.

The dog lifted up her head, looking back at them with a puzzled expression. You couldn’t call it a smile, probably shouldn’t call it a smile. Anthropomorphism and all that. But Eliza saw the trace of a tentative, provisional happiness that she understood. Please love me. Don’t hurt me.

“She knows her name,” Albie crowed with pleasure.

TWO DAYS LATER, ELIZA and Reba were returning from walking Albie to school when she became aware of a green car following her. It was one of those odd cars that Albie loved, the one with the high, round shape that made Eliza think vaguely of the 1930s, gangsters and speakeasies, although there was nothing sinister about this type of car, quite the opposite. It was almost cuddly, if a car could be cuddly, attractive in its unabashed nerdiness. Kind of like Albie.

“Elizabeth,” a woman’s voice called from the car.

Eliza willed herself not to turn around, to keep walking.

“Elizabeth,” the voice persisted.

Reba had stopped to inspect something on the ground, and Eliza didn’t have the heart to deny the dog any pleasure, no matter how small. She was much too easily cowed. Eliza wanted Reba to enjoy life a little more, to stop acting so darn grateful all the time.

“Eliza, then.” Exasperated, put upon, as if Eliza were a recalcitrant child.

“Yes?” she said, turning only slightly. The woman had lowered the passenger-side window, but she was hard to see from this angle.

“Why didn’t you turn around before?” Her voice had the very tone that Eliza tried to avoid with Iso. Quarrelsome, demanding. You couldn’t help arguing with a voice like this.

“I didn’t know whom you were addressing.”

The woman in the car wore enormous sunglasses. Eliza wondered if she realized how disconcerting the effect was, if she had chosen to look intimidating or simply wasn’t thinking about how she presented herself. She had hair the color of spun sugar, and quite a lot of it, worn in what appeared to be a series of hairdos, as if she had sectioned this amazing mass of hair into six or eight discrete pieces and created a different style for each. There were curls and waves, even two kinds of bangs: a fringe across the forehead, then swooping wings to the side.

“But that’s your name, isn’t it?” It had to be Barbara LaFortuny. Please, Eliza thought, let it be Barbara LaFortuny. She didn’t want to think about the implications of a world in which more and more people began showing up, calling her by her childhood name. She imagined a phalanx of women, all in Walter’s employ, doing his bidding. That image made her mind leap to an artist she loved, Henry Darger, and his disturbing portraits of those 1950s-perfect, perky, pervy Vivian girls. The Walter girls, his own private army.

But Walter had no interest in armies. He had always been, in his own bizarre way, a one-woman man. Or, more correctly, aspired to be. He would even say that at times. I am a one-woman man. I’m just looking for that one woman.

“My name is Eliza.”

“Your legal name,” the woman said.

“My name,” she repeated, “is Eliza. Perhaps I have you confused with someone else.” She stopped, corrected her slip. “Perhaps you have me confused with someone else.”

“Perhaps,” the woman said with a chuckle, “I just have you confused.”

She took off her dark glasses then, and although this revealed the scar that started at the corner of one eye and ran southward, she looked less menacing without the Gucci glasses. Eliza remembered what Peter had told her. A teacher, attacked in her classroom, now an advocate for inmates. Put that on paper, and it sounded like someone Eliza would like.

“He needs you, Elizabeth.”

She shook her head.

“Eliza, then.”

“This isn’t about my name,” she said. “He doesn’t need me.”

“But he does.”

She tried again. “He doesn’t have a right to need me.”

The woman leaned across the front seat of her car, as if to motion Eliza to climb inside. Reba growled, and the sound seemed to surprise the dog, then please her. She growled again with more conviction. Barbara LaFortuny—who else could it be—pulled back, reached down, then held up a folded piece of paper.

“He asked me to hand deliver this one. He wanted to know, without a doubt, when you got it. Time is important to him. The clock is ticking. A date has been set.”

Eliza studied the white piece of paper in must-be-Barbara’s hand—only one sheaf, how much could it contain, how much damage could it do—and reluctantly accepted it. Evidence, she decided. She would memorize the license plate, too, when the woman drove away. She would memorize everything about this encounter. She wasn’t sure what she would do with her memories, but she would have them.

Barbara LaFortuny’s hands were beautiful—manicured, flashing with interesting, important rings—and, based on the impression of the quick moment in which their fingers touched, quite soft. The eccentricity of her hairstyle aside, this was a woman who had the time and means to tend to herself. Eliza folded the already folded piece of paper in half, then shoved it in the pocket of the fleece vest she had thrown over her T-shirt. It was the first cool morning of the fall. On the walk to Albie’s school, she had been joyous, carrying his book bag while he took Reba’s leash.

“Let’s go”—she stopped herself from saying the dog’s name. She didn’t want Barbara LaFortuny to know anything about her family. She already knew too much. Had that green little play-gangster car tracked Eliza and Albie to school that day? She considered pulling her cell phone from her pocket, snapping LaFortuny’s photo then and there, so she could show it to Albie’s school, and Iso’s, yet the car was already moving on. Chesapeake Bay plates. SAVE THE BAY. Save Walter. Barbara LaFortuny didn’t lack for causes.

Home, Eliza put on the teakettle, but then the phone rang, and in the middle of the call something arrived via FedEx, and the teakettle whistled, and the dauntingly high-tech washing machine began beeping an error code, which required getting out the manual, which required finding the manual, and before Eliza knew it, it was 3:30 P.M., time to pick up Albie and much too warm for the fleece jacket, and she was back in the maelstrom of family life. It was ten o’clock before she had the time and privacy to read the letter, eleven o’clock before she remembered that she had stashed it in her pocket.

It wasn’t there.

16

1985

ALTHOUGH HE HAD GROWN UP nearby—perhaps because he had grown up nearby—Walter had never visited Luray Caverns, and he took a notion that he and Elizabeth should spend a day there. It seemed a foolish thing to do, given that money was always tight, yet the various highway signs called to him. He really wanted to see those caverns, not to mention the classic cars, although he didn’t understand why there was a collection of classic cars at Luray Caverns. He talked himself into thinking it would be a nice treat for Elizabeth.

But Elizabeth, to his surprise, argued on the grounds that it was an extravagance. He had been picking up fewer jobs of late and they had been sleeping out more often, even as the nights got cooler here in the mountains.

“Hey, I’m just thinking of trying to do something fun for you.” Besides, who was she to argue with him over money? Who was she to argue with him about anything? She seldom talked back, and he didn’t like the fact that she was starting. This was a troubling development. She needed more discipline.

“I’ve been,” she said. “Just two years ago.”

“What was it like?”

“Okay. All I learned was how to remember the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite.”

He didn’t want to ask, but she clearly wasn’t going to volunteer the information: “And how do you remember?”

“Stalactites, which have a c, hang from the ceiling. Stalagmites come up from the ground.”

“Well, then, you could just as well remember g for ground, couldn’t you?”

That cowed her.

“Sure, I suppose you could.”

“And you may have gone, but I’ve never been. Is that fair?”

“You said it was something you wanted to do for me,” she said, correctly and infuriatingly. “If it’s my choice, I’d rather use the money we’d spend on that for something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. A meal in a restaurant, one night, instead of fast food or making do with cold things from grocery stores. Something to wear.”

“I’ve got even fewer things to wear ’n you.”

She started to say something, thought better of it, slumped back in the front seat of the car with a sigh so heavy that the exhaled breath stirred the bangs hanging in her eyes. Walter saw, in that moment, what it would be like to have a teenage daughter one day, how exasperating and tender and terrifying.

In the next instant, he realized that he would never have a daughter, or a son, or a wife. Something was coming for him, something big. Yes, because of what he had done, but also because that was his destiny. His death would be heroic, at least. A chase, a battle. He would die large, and that pleased him.

Yet what had he really done except try to have the things that others have and take for granted, things that came so easily. All around him, he saw people, couples, holding hands and enjoying each other. He saw men much less good-looking than himself, and probably less capable, with knockouts, and he could not understand how that happened. He had started out wanting nothing more than a girlfriend, and he had wanted a girlfriend because, one day, he wanted to have a wife, then kids. True, he had rushed things, he had made poor choices. But it was hard, making good choices, when you had to settle for meeting people on the fly. And once you were out of school, how did you meet people at all? Working in his father’s shop wasn’t any way to meet women. The few that came in, he never got to talk to them, and the coveralls made him look shorter than he was. Even if they could see past the coveralls, to his nice face and his green eyes, they probably thought, Oh, a grease monkey. A grease monkey! Did people know how smart you had to be to work on cars? Hell, doctors weren’t any smarter than mechanics. Doctors got to specialize. One did the heart, one did the brain, one did bones. He and his father were the kind of mechanics who did everything, domestic and foreign, and they were honest. No one who knew them had ever called them out on a single charge. One time, a stranger had been passing through and had a breakdown, and it was a newer car with an electrical ignition, always tricky, but they had gotten that guy back on the road the same day, which meant they saved him the cost of a motel, and all he wanted to do was ask why they had gone ahead and replaced his brake pads, which were thin as handed-down baby pajamas. He had been a tall man, probably only six or seven years older than Walter, who was seventeen at the time, but he carried himself as if he was important. The inside of his car smelled of cigars, and when, the repairs finally done, they had switched the car back on to check everything, the music that poured out of the radio was classical, opera. Walter didn’t believe for a minute that the man really enjoyed that music. He was on the lookout to impress someone. But Walter also realized that it probably worked, and girls were impressed. God, women were shallow.

“We’re going to the caverns,” he said to Elizabeth. “It’s educational.”

She sighed harder, went beyond sighing, stuck out her bottom lip and made a noise that was downright rude. His palm itched to slap her. He flicked her cheek, not hard, and was pleased to see her eyes go fearful.

SHE WAS ENJOYING THE TOUR, he could tell, even though they weren’t dressed quite warmly enough for the caverns. Soon they would require more clothes. Coats and sweaters and boots. He needed to figure things out, find more permanent work. But he couldn’t land a mechanic’s job if he couldn’t provide references, and opening his own shop would involve way too much capital and overhead. Besides, what he would really like to do is run his own general fix-it shop, a place that promised: “If you can break it, I can fix it.” Or: “I can fix anything from a screen door to a broken heart.” He had stolen that line from Earl, the one who had gone off to the Marines. He had been younger than Walter, but nice, one of the few people who didn’t seem to think he was a moron. Could Walter enlist? No, it wasn’t like those old movies where people joined the French foreign legion and disappeared. Or that movie that had come out just a few years earlier, about a guy who parachuted out of a plane with $200,000 in ransom. Boy, the woman in that movie had been pretty, just his type. Thin, but with really big breasts and one of those curly smiles. Could he get a ransom for Elizabeth? Not much, based on what he knew about her parents. She was always talking about how they didn’t have a lot of money. Computers could find anybody, no matter where they went. He had seen that movie War Games. What was he going to do? His mind was so busy running through his options, or lack of options, that he could barely pay attention to the tour guide.

There weren’t many people on this tour, only one school group. Younger kids, no more than ten or eleven, and loud, loving the way their voices boomed and echoed. Elizabeth looked at them curiously, as if she couldn’t remember being that young. Then he realized—it wasn’t age that made her distant. It was him, the life he had created for her. She wasn’t part of their world anymore, a world with parents and television and dinner and school. She had accepted this so readily that he found himself losing a little respect for her. True, he had made sure to scare the shit out of her at first, and showed her that he could hurt her—swiftly, searingly, with not much effort. But he had not raised a hand to her since those first few days, and still she stayed. He didn’t count today, that was just a tap, a warning. He was stuck with her, in a way. Why this one, the one who had just stumbled on him? Why couldn’t he have a girl he chose? Nothing was ever fair.

He could free her, right now. He could tap her shoulder, tell her he was going to use the restroom and she wasn’t to move, and she would do just that. Or, he could wait until she asked to use the restroom, go through his usual rules and admonitions, about how much time she could have and how she must not speak to anyone, even if spoken to, how she would come to regret it, and don’t think she wouldn’t. Then, when she came out, he would be gone. How long would she wait? He’d almost want to hide himself somewhere to watch, to see how much time elapsed before she thought to speak to anyone. She would probably sit there all day until a security guard told her it was closing time.

Or, he could slowly back away, right now, eyes fixed on those narrow shoulders in the sweatshirt she claimed to detest, quietly retreating until he was out in the sunlight, then breaking into a run, getting into his truck, and driving away, seizing a head start.

What did she know, what could she tell the police? They had already found the one body, Maude’s, but she didn’t know where the other girls were, didn’t even know there were other girls, although he had dropped hints about how far he would go when angered or challenged. Elizabeth could tell them about his truck, however. She could tell them his name, that he was from West Virginia. He had told her other things, too, the kind of things you tell people when you spend hours with them, although they weren’t the kind of details that made a man findable. Favorite foods, television shows, his one and only trip to the ocean and how disappointing it had been, particularly saltwater taffy, which wasn’t anywhere near as special as people had made it out to be.

He could let her go, let the screaming, singing ten-year-olds slowly close around her, gather her up, carry her forward before she noticed. She wasn’t that far away from being their age, no matter what she thought. She was still a pretty innocent girl, with her stories about that dog. And her tears, the ones late at night in the bathroom, when she thought he couldn’t hear her, or the ones right before sleep, which she tried to muffle with her pillow or her fist. You’re just a kid, he wanted to tell her. Go back, be like them. It’s not too late. He could—

She turned around, caught his eye, and the moment, the impulse, was gone. Who was he kidding? They were stuck with each other.

17

IT WAS TWO DAYS BEFORE Eliza found the piece of paper, tucked into the recycling bin, a drawing by Albie on the blank side. It was a sketch of Albie and Reba riding a bicycle built for two.

“Albie, why did you draw on”—she paused to think about what she wanted to call it—“Mommy’s letter?”

“I was in the TV room and I just had an idea and I didn’t want to go upstairs to get my paper and Daddy always says not to pull paper out of the tray in the computer that we should use scrap paper and I found this in his trash can—where it shouldn’t have been, anyway—and I thought it would be okay to draw on the back and then I put it in the recycling because I didn’t like it very much, the bicycle didn’t look right.”

The words came out in a rush, as if he might be punished. But, unlike Iso, there was no guile in Albie. Not yet.

“No, no, that’s okay.” She tried to think of a way to ask if he had read it, without suggesting he might have wanted to read it. “It must have seemed pretty unimportant, anyway. Just a lot of dull stuff.”

“It was in the trash,” Albie reminded her. “I thought it was a format letter.”

“A format—oh, a form letter. Yes, it is. Do you have any homework?”

“No,” Albie said with a sigh, genuinely disappointed. He wanted to be like Iso, loaded down with work in middle school, but he came home with only a few, easy assignments. “We’re working on multiplication tables and I already know my twelve times.”

“You can put a video in, then. If you like.”

Albie considered his mother’s offer, which was slightly out of the ordinary. Though Eliza didn’t limit the children’s television, she also didn’t propose it as a way to spend time. “I think I’ll play a game with Reba,” he said. He went into the long, rambling backyard. Almost too long, Eliza decided now, although the yard had been her favorite feature of the house. There were places along the back fence where Albie disappeared from her sight line. But he was with Reba, she reminded herself, and Reba was growing more confident every day, first growling at Barbara LaFortuny, now barking at the postman on his daily rounds. She had mentioned this to Peter, wondered at this clichéd verity. Why do dogs bark at postmen? “Because it works,” Peter said. “Every day, they bark, and every day, the postman retreats.”

She sat at the desk in the television room, positioning herself so she could see the yard. This letter was typed in a small, fussy font that had allowed Barbara LaFortuny to squeeze a lot of text onto the page. A form letter, Albie had thought, and he was right in a way. The writing was stilted, almost as if it had been translated from another language. Maybe Barbara LaFortuny was doing this without Walter’s knowledge. At any rate, Walter’s second letter seemed dry, airless, reminiscent of his droning recitations of what he would do to—for—certain women if they would just let him. Not sexual things, but nice things—holding open doors, sending flowers on ordinary days, remembering key anniversaries.

Hurt, in Walter’s world, must be a euphemism for killed. He couldn’t honestly believe he hadn’t harmed her. He had said in his first letter that he wanted to make amends to her.

As if they were old friends, as if she might have searched for him on Facebook, or asked a mutual acquaintance for news of him. As if there were anything to keep up with. Getting a letter from Walter was like some exiled citizen of New Orleans getting a telegram signed “Katrina.” Hey, how are you? Do you ever think of me? Those were some crazy times, huh?

Remorseful, formidable. Walter was one of those people who believed that using big words would make him sound educated. She could imagine him poring over Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Did they have Reader’s Digest in prison? Hey, they had Washingtonian.

Okay, she had to give Walter that: Dean of Death Row was kind of funny, and the one thing Walter had never shown any talent for was laughing at himself. He had changed a little if he could write a line like that.

A spark, but not a shine. She remembered his truck slowing down as he drank in the eyeful that was Holly. “Look at the shine on that girl.”

With those words, that paragraph, Walter had given something far greater than offense. Hands shaking, Eliza fed the sheaf of paper into the shredder by Peter’s desk, facedown, so the image she saw sliding into the machine’s teeth was Albie and Reba on their bicycle built for two. Walter never touched this piece of paper, she reminded herself. He had dictated these words to Barbara. Perhaps these weren’t even his words, she thought. For all she knew, Barbara LaFortuny had created this entire drama. But, no, that was Walter’s voice, odd as it sounded this time.

Her paranoia far from abated, she emptied the shredder’s canister directly into the trash and then took the trash out to the garage, although shredded paper could go into the single-stream recycling bins provided by the county. If she could, she would have driven the garbage to the local dump, or burned it in a bon-fire on her lawn, although bonfires were illegal.

But even if she could have watched Walter’s words blacken and disappear in leaping flames, she could not erase the knowledge that she should have sussed out the moment she saw Barbara LaFortuny’s sinister little car following her down the street. Walter not only had learned where she lived, and what her husband did, and what she looked like. He knew she had children. He knew she had children and—far more crucial—he wanted her to be aware that he had that knowledge.

He wanted something from her. A visit, a call. He wanted something, and if she didn’t submit, he would find a way to use Iso and Albie to get it.

18

1985

AS SEPTEMBER DRAGGED ON, Elizabeth began to petition Walter to let her attend school. He said he would take her request under advisement. That was his preferred term for anything she sought but obviously could not have—more clothes, dinners in restaurants, a call home, a friend. “I’ll take that under advisement,” he would say, and nothing would change.

“I won’t misbehave,” she said, knowing how doomed her request was, yet incapable of not trying. “I just want to go to school, study. Education matters to me. And you always say you think it’s important.”

“That’s good,” he said. “But I don’t see it working out. We’d have to settle down somewhere.”

“I’d like that,” she said, amending quickly, “I think you would like that.”

“Not in the cards, not right now. We’ve got to keep moving.”

“It’s illegal,” she said, “not to attend school if you’re under sixteen. So if someone sees you with me, they might stop, ask questions. It didn’t matter, at first, when it was summer. But now it’s fall.”

“Not quite, not by the calendar.”

But the weather was fall-like. Autumn had once been her favorite time of the year, the days full of promise, the nights cool and crisp. She always felt anything could happen in autumn. She liked the very word: autumn. She would head back to school with her new clothes—Vonnie was so hard on what she wore that Elizabeth had seldom been forced to endure hand-me-downs—her plastic pencil pouch full of reinforcements, her binder unsullied. She would be neater this year, better prepared. She would work for As instead of settling for Bs. Those dreams were usually worn down by Thanksgiving, but September and October were golden days.

“There are all sorts of reasons a fifteen-year-old girl might not be in school,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone noticing. No one ever has.”

He was right. People didn’t seem to see them, her. Their eyes swept over her, by her, around her, but never made contact with her gaze, even as she silently screamed for them to see her, take note of her. Was it because he had cut her hair short and dyed it brown, meticulously keeping up with the roots, if not the cut. (“Nice’n Easy,” Walter had scoffed. “Maybe for some faggot beautician.”)

Sometimes, though, she saw women noticing Walter with tentative approval. But it was very brief. A waitress, a store clerk, would rake her eyes up and down him, draw him into conversation. Then, just as quickly, they would pull back, retreat. Elizabeth, who had read reams about the mistakes girls make with boys, wondered what kind of mistakes boys made. Walter was too…eager. No, that wasn’t the right word. He was polite, interested. He tried to draw them out. But women, grown-up women, moved away from him as if he smelled.

Elizabeth’s request to go to school put a strange bug in Walter’s ear, and he decided that they would spend their evenings at various libraries, reading. He insisted on approving her choices, sometimes making her put back a novel and read a nonfiction book, although he never seemed to notice that the texts on history, science, and mathematics were much too simple for her. Walter usually read history or magazines about cars, but one day—Fredericksburg, Virginia, Elizabeth believed, although the places kept getting jumbled in her head—he found a pale green book called When the Beast Tames the Beauty: What Women Really Want and he began reading it with great interest.

Walter, it turned out, was not a particularly fast reader, and although they stayed in Fredericksburg for several days—he had found work with a private moving company, whose owner didn’t mind if Walter’s “little sister” tagged along—he managed to read only the first third of the book in the hours he had available.

But when they moved on at week’s end, Walter was dismayed to find that the next library didn’t have the book. And the library in the next town over had it on the noncirculating shelf, which required library patrons to sign for the book at the front desk, because it was a best seller. He made Elizabeth ask for it.

Say it’s for your mother, Walter said, and she did, only to find herself almost choking with tears. Her mother would never read such a book. Her mother would laugh at such a book.

The librarian didn’t seem to notice how emotional Elizabeth was. She gave her the book, saying only: “We’ve got a waiting list for the circulating copies. More than fifty names.”

Walter stole that copy of the book, an action he later justified at length to Elizabeth. “Taxpayers pay for those books,” he said. “And I’m a taxpayer, and I hardly ever use the library, so why shouldn’t I take just this one book?”

“But you’re not paying taxes now,” Elizabeth said. “Everyone you do jobs for pays you in cash. And you never paid tax in Virginia.”

“Sales tax,” Walter said. “Gasoline tax. I pay my share, and I’m not getting any services back. I’m not like that lady who drives her Cadillac to pick up her food stamps.”

“That’s a myth,” said Elizabeth, who remembered her father discussing the matter heatedly at the dinner table, just last year. Had it really been only a year ago? Now 1984 seemed impossibly distant. Her parents had been Mondale supporters, of course, and Elizabeth had gone to a rally in hopes of catching a glimpse of Geraldine Ferraro. Later, at school, some of the cooler boys had ridiculed her, and she had backpedaled, saying she didn’t like the Democrats, that her parents were for Mondale, but she wasn’t. She felt guilty for that now, and for all the dozens of small betrayals against them, the endless denial of their existence. True, her mom didn’t dress like the other moms and she wore her hair too long, loose, and unstyled. She hadn’t understood when Elizabeth wanted a bubble skirt. She never understood why Elizabeth wanted anything. She said she did; she was a psychiatrist, after all. But Elizabeth could see that her mother was puzzled by her, that she didn’t understand why, in a family of cheerfully loud, opinionated nonconformists, Elizabeth was determined to be like everyone else, never standing out from the crowd.

She had thought it was safer to be that way.

Walter read aloud from the stolen book to Elizabeth at night. He appeared to think it was wonderful, wise, and profound, and some of it was interesting to Elizabeth. The book counseled women to return to a more “natural” relationship with men, to celebrate their “inherent softness” while accepting that men were rough, a little wild. Meanwhile, women should realize that the best men were those who would care for them—not financially, but emotionally. They should not judge men by external things, such as clothes and looks, but learn to find men who were kind and supportive.

“This is the problem,” Walter said. “I do these very exact things and it doesn’t help at all. Not at all.”

Elizabeth was thinking about what it meant to be “natural.” Wouldn’t that mean not shaving your legs, not blow-drying your hair? Her mother might wear her hair long and loose, but she still shaved her legs. Elizabeth had not been able to shave her legs since the day that Walter took her, and they were now covered with soft fuzz. She wouldn’t want anyone to see it, but she liked the feel of it. At night, alone in her bed or sleeping bag, she stroked her legs, felt under her arms. Perhaps she was transforming into something new and formidable, an animal who could fight Walter or run away from him, swift and fleet.

Only she could never get away. Never.

Walter began to prefer his book to the stories that Elizabeth told and sometimes asked her to read from it as he drove. His favorite chapter was about a cold, driven businesswoman who thought she wanted someone exactly like herself.

“‘Maureen, twenty-nine, appears to have it all,’” Elizabeth read. “‘A willowy brunette, she works for a large department-store chain in Texas, part of the team that oversees its expansion plans. By day, she wears tailored suits, her sleek brown hair pulled back in a chignon—’”

“What is that?” Walter asked. “A shin-yon?”

“Like a bun, but fancier,” Elizabeth said. She pushed back her own short curls, which could no longer be arranged into anything. “You spell it c-h-i-g-n-o-n.” She knew that later, when Walter reread this section—and he always reread the sections she had covered during the day—he might challenge her, ask her why she had given him the incorrect word.

“Okay. Go on.”

She had lost her place in the text, needed a moment to locate it. “‘But at night, she lets it fall loose to her shoulders, as she prowls the clubs and nightspots of Dallas, looking for a man. She thinks she knows exactly what she wants—a professional, at her level or above—and she can tick her “no-nos” off on her fingers. “No mama’s boys, still living at home.”’”

“Living at home doesn’t make you a mama’s boy,” Walter put in.

“‘“No mama’s boys, still living at home. No fatties. Bald is okay, if he’s really cute and fit. In short—no losers.” Yet Maureen, for all her calculation and precise ideas about what she wants, never seems to find the right man. Oh, she finds professional men with good salaries and chiseled physiques, but they always disappoint her because Maureen has broken faith with her own femininity. She is trying to be a huntress. She has violated the natural order of things and will never find the right man until she learns to sit back, relax, and wait for him to find her.’”

Elizabeth pondered this. Her hero, Madonna, wore a belt that said BOY TOY, but it was clear that she was the one who toyed with the boys, who used them and moved on. Elizabeth had seen the movie Desperately Seeking Susan four times since it appeared last winter and yet never felt thoroughly satisfied by the ending. There was Rosanna Arquette, cute enough—cute enough that her rock star boyfriend had once even written a song about her—but it seemed strange that she was paired up with the really handsome guy, while Madonna was with the less desirable one, the one with the spiky hair. And, at the very beginning of the movie, Madonna had been in bed with someone else, so it wasn’t true-true love for her and the spiky hair guy, no matter how passionately they kissed. At the movie’s end, they seemed more companionable than lovestruck, chomping popcorn and laughing. Just last month, Madonna had gotten married to Sean Penn as helicopters circled. She was thinner now, not that she had ever been plump, her hair short and sleek. Elizabeth remembered reading about the couple’s decision to wed, how she had proposed to him because she knew it was what he wanted. She wondered what it would be like to know that a man wanted to marry you, to have the confidence to ask first. The author of this book clearly would not approve of Madonna.

“I wonder,” Walter said, “if Maureen ever found anyone?”

Elizabeth looked up, startled. “I don’t think she’s a real person.”

“Of course she is. It’s nonfiction. Says so right on the spine.” He pointed to the library label. Elizabeth wondered if they should scrape that off, if they would get in trouble if someone glimpsed it, so obviously far from home. But maybe if someone reported them for the stolen library book, the police would finally find her.

“I mean, she’s real, but they probably changed her name and some details.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know why, I only know that they do. My mom explained it to me once. She has a friend who works for one of the women’s magazines and they create these—I can’t remember the word. They find real stories, only the people are kind of fake.”

“Oh, no. Maureen is real,” Walter said. “Real as Mr. Steinbeck and Charley and the people they met.”

Elizabeth felt a small flush of panic. What would happen if Walter found out that she had been making up adventures for John Steinbeck and his poodle? What if Walter figured out Travels with Charley was in the library, decided to read it? He didn’t like deception of any kind. Yet he was allowing himself to be deceived by this book. It’s true, Elizabeth hadn’t always understood the license that such writers employed, she had once read Seventeen and Mademoiselle and believed that every word was gospel. But she was glad when her mother explained to her that the stories were not quite true, that the writers shaped real people’s stories and matched them to these glamorous, made-up people because that’s what people wanted to read about. Walter, however, would not be pleased by this information.

“I’d like to meet this Maureen,” Walter said. “I bet she’s still single. Of course, she’s older than me, and that’s probably one of her rules, too. Women are funny that way. They ought to be grateful that a younger man finds them attractive. One day they will, but then it will be too late and no one will want them. I never understood that, in high school, how the freshman girls all wanted to go out with juniors and seniors, instead of freshmen.”

Elizabeth, who was missing her sophomore year of high school, thought about the boys her age. They were so small, most of them. Not just short, but small. Even Elizabeth, who was not particularly tall or filled out, felt huge among them.

“I could show that Maureen a good time,” Walter said. “She’d be begging for it.”

If the book hadn’t been open on her lap, Elizabeth might have brought her knees to her chest, hugged herself. Walter had never touched her. Well, never touched her in that way. Sometimes, he tugged the neck of her jacket, if he thought she was walking too fast, or yanked her arm to change direction. She had lain in bed, those first nights, wrists and ankles tied, expecting he would force himself on her. He had raped the other girl, the one he buried. He must have. He never said as much, but she was sure of that. She thought about that girl often, although all she knew of her was her first name. Maude. Such an old-fashioned name. The kids at school had probably teased her, called her—Maude the Odd. Unless she was really, really, really pretty and popular. Pretty girls could survive anything. But a pretty, popular girl would never have gotten into Walter’s truck. Elizabeth wouldn’t have, given the choice, and she wasn’t that pretty or popular. Still, she knew better than to get in some strange man’s truck.

Then again, what if Walter had been driving along Route 40 and a sudden rain had come up and he had stopped and offered her a ride? She had taken a ride from a man under those circumstances, just once. He had asked her where she wanted to go and she was scared to give her home address, scared to let her parents know she had hitched a ride, so she told him she was headed to the bowling alley, the Normandy Lanes, only a mile or so away. He nodded thoughtfully, started in that direction, but then announced: “The rain’s too heavy. I’m going to wait it out. Better safe than sorry.” He had pulled into a parking lot, then reached across to where she was—and opened the glove compartment, bringing out a little cut-glass bottle of amber liquid, from which he took a long swallow.

“You shouldn’t drink and drive,” Elizabeth had said.

“And you probably shouldn’t hitchhike,” he’d said. There was surprisingly little menace in his words. He took another swallow, sat there with the motor running, listening to a radio station that played oldies. When the rain slackened, he took her to the bowling alley.

So, yes, Elizabeth had gotten into a strange man’s car, once. But would she have allowed Walter to give her a ride on a bright, warm August day? She thought not. Why had Maude agreed? Had she agreed, or had Walter grabbed her by the arm, as he had seized Elizabeth, and forced her into the cab of the truck?

Walter seldom spoke of Maude, except in passing, as a warning. He liked to talk about the girls he saw, though. “I could show her a good time,” he would say when he glimpsed a girl with a good figure. “I know what I’m doing. These girls, they sell themselves cheap, don’t realize what’s out there, waiting for them. They’re too busy thinking about movie stars.”

And now he was speaking about Maureen that way in great, horrible detail, yet so matter-of-factly that one might think he was talking about a trip to the grocery store. What he would put where first—his mouth on the hollow of her throat, his tongue in her ear, then his fingers—Oh, please stop, Elizabeth thought, desperate to block out his voice, but Walter continued his play-by-play. Not even he seemed to find it sexy. He might have been reciting a set of instructions he had memorized. It was like listening to a seduction scene from a romance novel, but one read by a robot, so it was reduced to a road map, where he would go when.

“She’d be begging, begging for it,” he said. “But still, I would make her wait. A woman like Maureen, she needs to be broken down. That’s what the book is trying to explain. Women have to wait. Their anatomy dictates that. They wait, they receive. Men pursue, men give.”

Elizabeth, who had read the book almost as many times as Walter—it was, after all, the only reading material available when they were in the car or in a motel room, except for a copy of The Godfather he had allowed her to purchase at a yard sale—did not think the book, awful as it was, meant to say all that. But she knew better than to argue.

“Look at that girl,” Walter said suddenly, slowing the truck. “Look at the shine on her.”

19

THAT EVENING, ONCE THE CHILDREN were asleep—well, Albie was asleep, Iso was probably under the covers, sending texts on the un-satisfactory cell phone they had given her—Eliza told Peter about the second letter. She wished now that she hadn’t shredded it, that he could read it himself, if only so she wouldn’t have to relive it. He listened without comment, although he raised an eyebrow at the peculiar turns of phrase she was able to re-create. Dean of Death Row. The appeals process is formidable. I won’t bore you with it. Eliza realized she had practically memorized the letter word for word.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “I feel as if this is out of my control, all of a sudden. This woman—or Walter—could go to the media anytime, tell them who I am and where I am.”

“I can’t imagine a responsible news organization that would write about you, if you weren’t interested in cooperating,” said Peter. He wasn’t arguing with her, only puzzling things out, trying to imagine every angle.

“Unfortunately, the world is full of irresponsible news organizations. What if she found Jared Garrett? Do you realize how exposed we are, how exposed everyone is?”

She showed him what happened when she plugged their address into Google maps, then clicked through to street view. There was their house. Of course, this was no revelation to Peter, whose career as a journalist had taken off, in part, because of his expertise with computer-assisted research. Still, she could tell that he found this image as arresting as she did. Looking at the photo of the white brick house—complete with the clichéd picket fence—Eliza could not help imagining the score of a scary film pulsing beneath the placid image. Barbara LaFortuny had seen this house, had driven by it, then reported back to Walter—what, exactly? Anything was too much. The woman was probably gathering a dossier on Peter, the easiest household member to track, the one who had left the largest public trail. But would she stop there? What if she showed up on the sidelines at one of Iso’s soccer games? Or followed Eliza en route to school with Albie, exciting his imagination, keying him up to ask all sorts of questions. Who is that lady? Why does she want to talk to you? Why does she have a scar on her face? What if Barbara LaFortuny tried to befriend Reba, sneaking scraps through the fence? What if she poisoned Reba, who had growled at her? Would she—

A child’s all-too-familiar scream tore through the night.

“Albie,” Eliza shouted, letting him know that she was coming.

“Albie,” Peter repeated. “I hoped this was behind us.”

I hoped a lot of things were behind us, Eliza thought as she took the stairs, two at a time.

ALBIE’S NIGHTMARES HAD STARTED shortly after they moved to London. Every pediatrician and book that Eliza consulted said it was normal for a child to have bad dreams in the wake of an enormous change, but Albie’s nightmares seemed unusual to Eliza. They were incredibly detailed, for one thing, with such intense imagery and plot twists that she almost itched to write them down. It was interesting, too, to see how his unconscious reshaped the innocent stuff of the daylight hours. A book such as, say, In the Night Kitchen, which Eliza found wildly creepy, did not affect Albie at all. But other, almost bland icons popped up. The Poky Little Puppy foamed at the mouth. (She blamed Peter for this, because he had shown the children To Kill a Mockingbird.) Madeline, the usually admirable Parisian girl, turned out to be a witch, the kind of person who pinched people and then lied about it. Peter Rabbit seldom escaped Farmer McGregor’s pitchfork. That particular dream had started after Eliza had eaten a rabbit dish in front of Albie at a London restaurant they particularly liked.

But the more striking aspect of Albie’s nightmares was that Iso usually appeared, and always in peril. Tonight, between heaving sobs and sips of water, he told a chilling story. The family had gone to a new bakery and Iso had refused to wear her glasses, not that Iso wore glasses in real life. (Eliza and Peter glanced at each other over Albie’s head; they recognized this detail from The Brady Bunch, the movie, which Albie loved beyond reason. He did not experience it as a hip, winking joke, but as an honest exhortation to live exuberantly, indifferent to what others thought was cool. Burst into song, chat up carjackers, be nice to everyone, and you will prevail.) The family could not enjoy the new bakery with Iso gone, and they searched for her frantically. They found her in a storeroom filled with bags of flour and she was flat, as if someone had rolled her into a gingerbread girl—and taken her legs.

“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 them 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, probably 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.

But this was the first time they had gone over the day in such detail. They had been talking for hours, and Elizabeth, now known as Eliza, was tired.

“Not exactly sorry. But I understood what was going on inside his head.”

“Then you must have felt even worse for Holly.” The young lawyer was nodding, encouraging her. “Because you knew exactly what she was going through.”

“Yes,” she said, wanting to please him. Then, after a quick glance to her parents, “No.”

“You didn’t feel bad for Holly.” Repeated in a flat tone, as if that would make her aware of how ridiculous she was. “You didn’t understand what was happening to her.”

“I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t know her.”

“But she started to cry. And you knew what you felt when Walter took you.”

“Yes, but—”

The prosecutor cut her off. “That’s all you have to say. That she was crying, that she seemed upset, that she realized things had taken a bad turn. You see, Elizabeth”—in court, she would still be Elizabeth—“the details that matter are the ones that show Walter kidnapped Holly and took the contents of the cash box. So let’s just focus on that. He didn’t let her go when she asked, right?”

“Right.” Holly was pretty even when she cried. Mister, mister. Please just let me go, mister. My daddy will pay you, mister.

“And he took her money?”

“He asked for it and she gave it to him.”

“But this was after she had asked to be let go, right? How much time had passed?”

“An hour? Maybe more, maybe less. The clock in the truck was broken. Walter always said the cobbler’s children went barefoot and a mechanic’s car was never as nice as the ones he worked on.”

The prosecutor showed no interest in Walter’s insights.

“So he takes Holly’s money.”

“Yes, to buy us hamburgers.”

“Right. Still, it was Holly’s money and Walter took it from her. By force.”

“Yes, I guess so. I mean, he took the box from her and she didn’t want to give it up. He didn’t have to fight her or anything, but he did have to kind of peel it out of her arms.”

The prosecutor nodded. “Right, he took the money and then—?”

“He gave it to me and sent me into the McDonald’s to buy the food because he didn’t trust Holly to behave if we went through the drive-through lane.”

The silence that filled the room reminded Eliza/Elizabeth of a verse they had sung in middle school chorus, the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” This silence, like the one in the poem, was dark and deep. Not lovely, though, definitely not lovely, anything but lovely. She heard, literally heard, her mother swallow. Heard—not saw, but heard—her father take her mother’s hand, the tiny intake of breath made by the prosecutor. She could suddenly hear everything. The hum of the fluorescent light, the water cooler gently burping out in the hallway, her own hands moving back and forth along the thighs of her black cotton pants. Brushed cotton twill, pleated, worn with a high-necked shirt fastened with a brooch, an outfit modeled after one she had seen in a movie.

“Could you repeat that, Elizabeth?”

“He gave me the money and sent me into McDonald’s to buy the food.” She was proud of how consistent she was, how she said it, word for word, almost exactly as she had said it before. That was very important in these things. But the prosecutor did not seem proud of her.

“And you—”

“I ordered three Quarter Pounders. Walter didn’t like pickles, so I had to wait for his to be made special. And I had to make sure I knew which were the Diet Cokes and which was the regular Coke. Walter drank regular Coke, but he thought girls should drink Diet Coke because soda can make you fat if you’re not careful. We just guessed that Holly would eat the same things we did, because she wouldn’t say what she wanted. And I had to make sure to get enough ketchup packages. They never give you enough, only two little measly ones, and they can be grudging if you don’t ask right.”

“Grudging?”

“That was Walter’s word, I guess. I took it back to the car and we drove a little ways until we found a place where we could eat, hoping the fries didn’t get cold. Holly didn’t want to eat hers, though, so Walter did, picking out the pickles. I don’t know why he couldn’t do that with his own sandwich to begin with.”

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes?”

“When you went into the McDonald’s—why didn’t you tell someone what was happening?”

“What do you mean?”

“That you were kidnapped, that your kidnapper had another girl in the car?”

No one had asked her this before, but then—no one had gone over this part of the day in such detail. When she was rescued, the questions had been quick, mercifully so. How was she? What had he done to her? Had he—? She was the one who told them about Holly, the scream in the night, the campsite in the mountains, the landmarks that she could remember. And for weeks, months, that had been enough. But now they were preparing for Walter’s trial and everything—everything—had to be discussed in great detail. She had to tell the story the same way, in her own words. She thought she was doing that.

She had forgotten the Quarter Pounders.

“I couldn’t. He said he would hurt me.”

“But he was in the car. With Holly.”

“Yes, because she couldn’t be trusted.”

“And you could?”

“When I was good, he was nicer to me.” She looked to her parents. Her mother nodded, encouraging her, although she looked slightly stunned. Her father looked angry, but not at her. He was glaring at the prosecutor.

“How did you earn Walter’s trust?” the prosecutor asked, and her parents could no longer contain themselves.

“Really—” her mother began. “Why must you—” her father said, trying to use what Eliza recognized was his professional voice, but not quite controlling it as he usually did.

“What do you think Walter Bowman’s lawyer is going to do with this information?” The prosecutor’s manner was bland, like one of the jocks at Eliza’s new school, the kind of boy who lets a girl know she wasn’t even worth teasing. “She had a chance to get away, to save both of them. She didn’t.”

“So don’t put her on the stand at all,” her father said. “You’ll get no argument from us.”

“I need her testimony about the cash box, and how Walter refused to let Holly go. I have to establish the kidnapping or another felony to ensure he gets the death penalty, and we can’t prove rape.”

Eliza pondered that, then realized: He meant Holly. They couldn’t prove Walter raped Holly. What he had done to her didn’t count.

“Eliza’s behavior is consistent with dozens of hostage cases,” her mother began.

“Stockholm syndrome, I know.” The prosecutor’s voice was bitter, belittling. “That worked so well for Patty Hearst.”

“No, not Stockholm syndrome, not exactly. She didn’t sympathize with her captor. But Elizabeth”—her mother had trouble remembering the new name—“is a young girl and she believed he had the power he claimed he had. He threatened her. He threatened us.”

The prosecutor looked to Eliza. She nodded, then realized he would not be satisfied with a nod. “He told me all the time that he would kill me and my family if I tried to get away from him. He said he would kill them while I watched.”

He looked down at his notes. “Back at the roadside, where you first met Holly—why did you get out of the truck and let her sit in the middle?”

“Because that’s what Walter wanted.”

“Did he say that?”

“No, but I understood. He gave me a look, and I realized that he wanted the new girl to sit next to him.”

“The new girl?”

“Holly. But she wasn’t Holly yet. I didn’t learn her name until she was in the truck.”

“You were the new girl, once.”

Eliza didn’t understand his point. “Not really. There wasn’t another girl, when he took me.”

“You saw him with a shovel, digging a grave.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that. I just saw a man digging.”

“A grave for Maude Parrish.”

“That’s who you found there, right?”

The prosecutor didn’t always answer her questions. Apparently, he owned the questions. “So you were the new girl, after Maude. And you knew that when Walter switched girls, he got rid of the old one.”

“No…” It was different, not at all the same.

“Elizabeth, why do you think Walter kept you alive? Why did he kill every girl but you?”

“I think,” she said, “it was because I always did what he told me to do.”

The prosecutor asked her to leave, so he could speak to her parents privately, but her parents refused. She was sixteen, she was going to testify in court. She should be part of every discussion.

“Okay, I’m going to lay it out for you. The prosecutor in Maryland is scared to go for the death penalty in his county, precisely because he has no evidence that Maude was kidnapped. Walter Bowman refuses to confess to any other homicides, although there are quite a few missing person cases that seem plausible. The murder of Holly Tackett is our only chance to put this guy to death, and I can’t afford to give the defense anything to play with.”

The Lerners were united in their mystification, staring at this young, pompous man in bewilderment.

“A smart defense attorney is going to go to town with this. Suggest Elizabeth wasn’t a victim at this point, but an accomplice. And once you let that idea worm its way into the courtroom, you’ve got all sorts of reasonable doubt. What if Elizabeth was the one who pushed Holly into the ravine, out of fear, or even jealousy? What if Elizabeth was really Walter’s girlfriend?”

“That is offensive beyond belief,” Inez said.

“A good attorney isn’t going to worry about giving offense. He’ll be playing for big stakes. He’s playing for Walter’s life.”

“And you’re playing,” Manny said, “for his death. That’s quite a game you’ve got going there. Some would call it playing God.”

The prosecutor studied Eliza’s parents. “You’re enlightened types, right? Don’t want to see the guy die. Don’t want to see anyone die. But then, you’ve got your daughter. Two other families, probably a lot more, weren’t so lucky.”

“As a father,” Manny said, “I want to strangle him. When I see him, I want to go over to him and pound his face off, knock him to the ground, kick him until he coughs up blood. But I know that’s not right, and I shouldn’t do it. Nor would I have the state do it for me, by proxy. So, no, I don’t believe in the death penalty, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“The Tacketts don’t feel the same way. Fact is, that’s who the commonwealth of Virginia represents in this case. Not your daughter. Holly Tackett and Virginia. I hope you haven’t let your own”—he paused for a minute, seeming not so much to search for a word, as for the spin he wanted to place on it—“altruistic ideas influence your daughter. I hope this story about McDonald’s, which I’m hearing for the first time, isn’t something you’ve cooked up to create enough confusion about events that a jury will be reluctant to consider the death penalty.”

Inez put a hand on Manny’s arm, almost as if she feared he would try to do to the prosecutor the things he said he wanted to do to Walter. But, of course, he stayed in his chair.

“The only thing we’ve instructed our daughter to do,” Inez said, “is tell the truth. Tell the truth, and not look for reasons this happened to her, because there are no reasons.”

“That’s a nice thing to tell your daughter and probably very helpful,” the prosecutor said, trying to scoot back to their side, reunite the team. Yea, Eliza! Boo, Walter! Only he had slipped, revealed his true loyalties, and Eliza knew she could never trust him again. “But jurors will want reasons. I’m trying to anticipate the worst-case scenario. I’m sure things will work out.”

Things did, at least as far as the prosecutor was concerned. Walter’s defense attorney was far from expert, and he treated Eliza with an almost bizarre politeness, as if she had a condition that should not be referenced directly. No, it was the prosecutor who asked her about the trip to McDonald’s, and made her tell, in excruciating detail, what Walter did to her the night after Holly died. It was Jared Garrett, a few months later, who devoted a large section of his book to the theory that Elizabeth Lerner might have been Walter Bowman’s girlfriend and coconspirator, whom he decided not to implicate for reasons known only to him, given that he never testified. If Elizabeth had been raped, why was Walter allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of kidnapping and assault? Garrett cited no sources for his theories, asserting only that there was a “school of thought” that Elizabeth Lerner may have evolved into something more than a hostage. “School of thought!” Vonnie had snorted. “There’s only one student in that school and he’s the village idiot.”

It didn’t matter. By the time Garrett’s book was published, the sordid imaginations attracted to his kind of journalism had moved on. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker was terrorizing Los Angeles; two dead girls in the Mid-Atlantic simply couldn’t compete. The crimes of Walter Bowman had been eclipsed even in Virginia, where a high-achieving college student had enlisted her German boyfriend in the murder of her parents. Elizabeth Lerner was Eliza Lerner, enrolled in a new high school in a new county, her hair back to its natural color and curly disorder. Nobody knew her past, nobody cared.

OR WAS IT THE OTHER WAY around: nobody cared, so nobody knew? Sitting at her kitchen table more than two decades later, Eliza found herself taunted by that question. Was it so unthinkable that Walter Bowman might have chosen her over Holly? She knew what her parents would say: Walter was mentally ill, incapable of any genuine feeling. Walter was a sociopath. Walter had not chosen anyone.

Yet he had, and only he knew why. Whatever he wanted now—and she had known from the first letter that he would not be satisfied with a one-sided contact, that his very words “I’d know you anywhere” were meant to remind her of a marker on a very old debt—she wanted something from him, too. She needed to ask: “Why me?” Was that wrong? Was it ego-driven, irrational? Did the very question desecrate the memories of the others, and if that was the case—then so what? Wasn’t she entitled to ask that question, in private, of the one person who actually could tell her if there was a reason she was alive?

But if she dared to ask Walter that question, she had to be prepared for other answers, less pleasant ones. She had to confront the fact of the girl who walked into McDonald’s, focused on nothing but ketchup and pickles. She had to think about what happened later that night. “We have to go,” he’d said, and they went, breaking camp in silence. As they drove down the long switchback in the dark, he handed her Holly’s metal box, now empty, all those well-intentioned dollars gone, some for food, the rest crammed into Walter’s pocket. “Toss it,” he said, grunting with disapproval at how ineptly she hurled the box from the truck. “You can’t throw for shit.” It was rare for him to use profanity, and the word felt like a slap.

The box was found a few days later, helping searchers pinpoint the campsite that Elizabeth had described for them, and then Holly’s broken body on the other side of the mountain. Elizabeth was praised for being cagey enough to let this potent clue fall close to the roadside.

But perhaps Walter had it right: She just couldn’t throw for shit.