I'd Know You Anywhere

21

THE NEW PHONE SAT in the alcove off the master bedroom on an end table rescued from her parents’ basement. Eliza had been shocked at how much resistance the local phone company had given her about adding a second, dedicated line to the house, but perhaps that was because she wanted the most basic package possible, with no extras and a limited number of outgoing calls a month. Why not get a cell phone? the helpful young woman at Verizon had queried. Or just use your call-waiting feature? Why indeed? She could get a cheap, disposable mobile, toss it when—well, whenever. She knew that what she wanted wasn’t exactly logical, but it made sense to her. She wanted to limit Walter’s access to her, her home, to one slender wire, one no-frills touch-tone telephone. It was bad enough that he was the one who called her, and collect at that. She could at least pick the instrument and set the time frame for when he was allowed to call, ten to two weekdays, when the house was empty.

The children had been curious about the new phone, drawn to it as children are drawn to any novelty, but its lack of features quickly dampened their interest. They had been told that this was an outgoing line for emergencies only. Peter had gilded the lily by claiming Homeland Security recommended Washington-area residents have old-fashioned desk phones, ones that did not require electrical outlets. Unfortunately, this inspired falsehood inflamed Albie’s imagination, and there was another round of nightmares. Eliza was exhausted in a way she had not been since Iso was a colicky infant, moving through the days under the fog of a constant headache.

Yet the telephone remained silent. There was, apparently, not a little bureaucracy involved in talking to a man on death row. For every rule that Eliza had invented—the dedicated line, the hours during which Walter was allowed to call—the Department of Corrections had far more. Or so Barbara LaFortuny informed them when she had taken the new number and forwarded it to Walter. It was a week since they had installed the phone, and it had rung exactly once, sending its full-chested sound through the house.

It was an automated service, claiming that her car warranty was about to expire.

Now the phone sat, beige and squat, utterly utilitarian. It was, in fact, almost identical to the phone that the Lerner family had installed in the “phone nook” in the Roaring Springs house, although that phone had seemed terribly sleek and modern at the time. Manny and Inez, permissive in most things, felt the telephone was an incursion on family life, and they insisted on having only two extensions, one in their bedroom and the other in the hall. The girls could speak as much as they wanted, but it would be in the hall, with no chair, only the scratchiest of rugs on which to rest.

Vonnie, undaunted by the public venue, sat cross-legged in front of the hall phone as if it were Buddha or Vishnu. She stalked, she paced, she sometimes even put it on the floor and circled it, almost as if it were a campfire around which she was dancing. Fierce Vonnie, who was happy to march under the flag of feminism, saw no irony or contradiction in boy craziness. She was a passionate person, someone who lived a big life with big emotions and ambitions, and reaped big rewards as a consequence. Germaine Greer—the early Germaine Greer, the feminine eunuch posing in her bikini—was her role model. It was hard for Eliza to say Vonnie had been mistaken in her self-image. Never married, largely by choice, she had enjoyed affairs with an impressive assortment of men. Older, younger, richer, poorer. One or two were famous, most were wildly successful, and even the slackers were interesting, creative types. Vonnie had a big life, something out of the novels that Eliza preferred, the ones that managed to be respectable while still being replete with all the lifestyle details—clothes, food, home furnishings—that were disdained in so-called sex-and-shopping novels.

But Eliza preferred her sideline view of her sister’s life. And unlike larger-than-life Vonnie, Eliza had been spared what their mother dubbed the Vikki Carr curse. Part of that was the simple good luck of meeting Peter when she was eighteen and falling into a relationship that, whatever its ups and downs, was pretty much without doubt. But even with her high school boyfriends, she had been…diffident. She almost never called them, for example. Vonnie sneered that Eliza was a throwback, that she was betraying all womanhood with her willingness to let men call the shots. Eliza didn’t think so. She just didn’t have that much to say.

But sometimes she wondered if Walter’s self-help book, the one that had urged women to embrace their “natural” roles, had left more of an imprint than she realized. While traveling with Walter—a euphemism, yet not—they had gotten into the habit of going to yard sales, and he would sometimes let her buy a book, if it was cheap enough. She had picked up a copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, of which Walter did not approve, so she had to read it during her brief moments alone, in the bath or on the toilet. She would soak in the tub—and tubs were fewer and far between, once Walter got the tent—and read until the water was tepid. She imagined what Don Corleone would do if she were his daughter, or even the daughter of a friend. He wouldn’t kill Walter, not on her behalf. That would not be justice, as he explained to the undertaker whose daughter had been raped by the two college boys. But they would do something pretty bad to him, she was sure, especially if she asked them to avenge the girl whose body had been found in Patapsco State Park.

She still had the book with her when the state police picked them up near Point of Rocks. At first the book had reminded her of the time with Walter, and she hadn’t wanted to read it. But then her high school boyfriend had said they should watch the film on his family’s VCR, and she’d decided to finish the book first. She had plunged back in, following Michael into his Sicilian exile, feeling a bizarre kinship with him—she had been exiled, too—then on to his wedding night, where he had discovered his young bride was a virgin, and a virgin was the very best thing to be, according to Mario Puzo. She had stopped reading there and forgotten about the book until Vonnie had discovered it during summer vacation, while looking for the latest copy of TV Guide. (It was an article of faith in the Lerner household that Eliza’s bed, the territory beneath it, was a kind of Bermuda Triangle where all sorts of things came to rest.) The book’s spine was broken on the page where Eliza had abandoned it, and Vonnie, emerging from beneath the bed with a few dust bunnies clinging to her hair, as unruly as Eliza’s but not as red, looked at the pages, then at her sister.

“How would he know?” she said. Vonnie was exhausting and infuriating, but also loyal. Eliza, filled with warmth at this memory of her sister, decided to call her for no good reason, although she was almost certain to be dumped straight to voice mail. She began heading downstairs to the den, the coziest spot in the house.

The other phone rang, full-throated, robust. It had no answering machine, no voice mail, another decision on which Verizon had fought with her. It would ring forever if Eliza allowed it. Phones never rang that way anymore. It was one of the interesting things about older movies, where phones might ring six, seven, eight times, or—in that one gangster movie of which Peter was so fond—something like thirty-seven times. Nowadays, phones rang maybe three or four times, then rolled over to voice mail, or got picked up by answering machines, or—

She picked up on the seventh ring, almost hoping it was news about her car warranty or mortgage or credit card. The automated voice gave her a moment of hope. But this time, the voice was asking if she would accept a collect call from Walter Bowman.

She said she would.

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes.”

There was an echoing metallic sound that seemed to go on and on. “Excuse me,” Walter said, and the noise grew louder, swelled, then fell back, ending with a few faded clangs.

“What was that?” She had intended to ask him as few questions as possible, to put the burden of conversation on him, but her curiosity got the better of her.

“Oh, one of the guys went down to Jarratt and got a stay, so we’re kicking him back in.”

“Kicking—?”

“We kick the doors, in solidarity, when a man gets a postponement. Although I have to tell you, I don’t really have much for this particular fellow. He’s managed the trick of being both the meanest and dumbest man here.”

She was nonplussed. It felt like the polite conversation a salesman makes as he settles in, getting ready to launch into his pitch. She wanted to blurt out: What do you want? Get to it, stop stalling. Before she could ask, her cell phone buzzed from her pocket. She glanced down at its screen. Iso’s school.

“Walter, can you hold on? There’s another call coming in on my cell and…”

She did not want to explain why the call could not be ignored, but nor was she happy when Walter said: “Sure, I understand. You’ve got young kids.”

“My husband told me he might need me to pick him up at the airport today,” she lied, with a promptness that made her rather proud. The old-fashioned phone could not be muted, so she walked out into the hall, determined that Walter not overhear the conversation with Iso’s middle school.

It was the principal. “Can you come in, Mrs. Benedict? We have a…situation.”

“Is Isobel hurt? Sick?” In her worry, she couldn’t help using her daughter’s full name.

“No, just something to discuss before it becomes a problem. And we know that Iso’s brother is in elementary school, so we thought it would be easier to have you come in now, rather than complicate your life with after-school detention, which means Iso would miss the bus.”

“Detention?”

“Only if it were warranted and it’s not.” A pause. “Yet.”

She walked back to the beige phone, tried to think what she could say. “Walter, I’m sorry, but this is urgent—”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “We’ll catch up later. We have a lot to talk about.”

As anxious as she was about Iso and the unspecified situation, Eliza couldn’t take Walter’s invitation to end the call. “Do we? Do we really have that much to discuss?”

“I think so,” Walter said. “And although I know you doubt this, it will be mutually beneficial, Elizabeth. Really, you have to believe that I have nothing but your best interest at heart. I’m doing this for you.”

She said good-bye, grabbed her purse and her keys, headed out to the garage, and then, almost as an afterthought, dashed back inside and threw up in the powder-room toilet.

22

TRUDY TACKETT WAS IN HER CLOSET, taking careful inventory of her clothes, a biannual ritual in which she banished the warm-weather months and welcomed the cold ones by sorting, folding, and mending, as needed. Also eliminating. As needed. She was ruthless about culling things. She had to be. Trudy had been exactly the same size since her wedding day forty-four years earlier, with the exception of her many pregnancies, and clothing had a way of mounting up. She reversed the process every April, although not with the same sense of satisfaction. She liked the arrival of the shorter, colder days, which seemed to pass more quickly than their summer counterparts. A June day required so much of a person. Enthusiasm, cheer. She didn’t doubt that seasonal affective disorder was real, but wasn’t it also possible to suffer from a surfeit of sun? Here in her closet, Trudy was glad for the lack of natural light, even if it meant missing the occasional grease spot, or navy masquerading as black.

“This alcove would make a wonderful dressing room,” the real estate agent had purred to Trudy almost two decades ago, but it was Terry who had taken those words to heart and hired a company to transform the space. Most women would envy that kind of spousal devotion, and Trudy was grateful for it in an absent, distracted way. She did remember being bemused that the closet designer had included a small bench upholstered in tufted velvet. Trudy liked clothes well enough—obviously, someone had shopped for this wardrobe—but she didn’t want to sit in her closet and commune with them, for goodness’ sakes. And she couldn’t imagine why else one would have a bench in a closet, even a clever little one such as this, with storage hidden under its bland beige seat, round and pale as a mushroom, or Miss Muffet’s tuffet.

(What’s a tuffet? Holly had asked when she was five, looking up from an ancient copy of Mother Goose, Trudy’s own. A hassock. What’s a hassock? A tuffet. Holly had laughed. Holly had been the only person who glimpsed that side of Trudy, the girly silliness that had never found a place in the hypermasculine, rough-and-tumble Tackett family. Terry and the boys joked the way they played games—fast, rough, loud, on point. Until Holly arrived, Trudy was the straight woman, the dowager. Once Holly left—well, there wasn’t much to joke about.)

But now the time had come that Trudy sometimes needed that bench, that hassock, that tuffet, to put on slacks, hose, shoes, all the things she had once slipped on while standing on one leg, nonchalant as a crane. Her balance was no longer reliable, and her lower back was prone to going out over the smallest indignities. I’m deteriorating, she told Terry cheerfully. She imagined her body covered with little Post-its, each one marking a specific area of decline—the creaking knee, the popping hip, the stiffening shoulders. She pictured a suit of Post-its, sharp yellow edges riffling in the breeze, at once stiff and pliant. She would like such a suit, an outfit that would announce her edges to the world.

She gathered the pastel clothes of spring and summer, imprisoning them into plastic garment bags, shoving them to the rear of the closet as she brought forward the darker, more somber clothes of fall and winter. She brushed the collar of a moss green suit, which still had the tags attached. She had purchased it at Saks five years ago for one express purpose and would not wear it until that day came.

The suit was for Walter Bowman’s execution. This fall. She was going to wear it this fall. November 25. The third time would be the charm.

She had planned the entire day in her mind, down to the smallest detail. Lord knows she had time enough to do it. They would drive down to Jarratt in Terry’s car. It was her understanding that they could avoid the press, watch in camera, but she wouldn’t mind if it didn’t work out that way. She could walk past the protesters with her head held high, speak briefly to the reporters with appropriate solemnity. She would not even wince at the inevitable questions about her feelings. The fact was, she wasn’t sure how she was going to feel. Exhausted, primarily, wrung out by the necessity of seeing this through. Granted, very little had been required of her over the past twenty-two years. The prosecutors—Bowman had outlasted three of them—had done their jobs well, persevering through two appeals and a retrial. It had been her choice to attend every day, to make sure that the jurors and judges knew how much Holly was missed, mourned. That was all she had done, sit and wait. Still, Trudy felt like a woman she once knew who spent every plane trip tugging at her armrest, as if to keep the plane aloft. She arrived everywhere with throbbing pain from wrist to elbow, but she arrived, didn’t she? Prove she was wrong.

After the execution—Trudy had a plan for that, too. She and Terry were going to drive straight to Richmond and check into the Jefferson Hotel. The next morning, they would visit Holly’s grave in—oh, infelicitous name—the Hollywood Cemetery. Terry had generations of family there. It was a beautiful place, almost too beautiful, with tourists forever tromping through to see the graves of presidents, including Jefferson Davis, and the statue of the black dog that stood vigil over one little girl’s grave. When Holly was first interred in the family mausoleum there, Trudy had thought it would be unbearable, sharing her annual visits with the disinterested tourists. She had found she didn’t notice them at all.

Indeed the cemetery proved to be the one place where her sadness fit, a jewel in the perfect setting. Grief was allowed there. Back in the world—first in Middleburg, now in Alexandria—people kept making the mistake of thinking she might be happy again. Trudy had tried, she really had. She was a polite person, and politeness meant making others feel better even if it made you feel like shit. But it was exhausting, impossible. No, the cemetery was the only place where she was allowed to be. Even its distance, a solid two-hour drive on the best of days, proved a blessing, a bubble of time long enough for the transition back to the world where she didn’t fit. “You have so much to celebrate,” insisted well-meaning friends, referring to her sons and their children, all healthy and happy. That is, her sons were healthy and their children, who had never known Holly, had no problem being happy. Trudy was grateful for those blessings, but they felt like coins tossed in a fountain, wishes that came true only if one believed in the magic of wishes. She wouldn’t have minded if the cemetery were another hour or two down the road. It would have given her that much more time to be unapologetically miserable.

Trudy had thought a lot about journeys, how the speed of transportation had transformed essential passages. Her ancestors had arrived in the New World in the eighteenth century, on ships that had required months to make the journey from France to Charleston. Her own parents had taken an ocean liner to their European honeymoon, a trip so leisurely that the clocks had advanced only an hour per day. If you thought about it, shouldn’t most newlyweds have a week at sea, in the unreality of a state-room, to prepare for the all-too-real reality that was marriage? Trudy and Terry Tackett—How cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute, her Sweet Briar roommate had caroled when Trudy returned from her very first date, knowing she had met the man she would marry—had only a weekend at the Waldorf-Astoria. He was an army surgeon who had to go straight back to work on Monday.

A weekend, a week, a month, a year at the Waldorf-Astoria would not have been enough to prepare Trudy for the life she was thrust into at twenty, when she dropped out of college to marry Terry. She was part of the last generation to do such things. Vietnam was on the horizon, although it wasn’t called Vietnam yet. The next thing she knew, she was in Germany, then at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and babies, sons, were arriving with alarming speed. Terrence III, Tommy, Sam. Terry had wanted to call him Travis, after one of the heroes of the Alamo, but Trudy decided that the T thing had to come to an end at some point. Too cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute. They were, as a family, constantly on the verge of being dangerously, enviably cute. She saw it in their Christmas cards, in the macho contentedness of their household, where bones broke and teeth got knocked out and digits were almost severed, yet everyone persevered, thrived even. Her sons were like something from a science fiction novel; nothing could hurt them. She came to believe that a head could get cut off and a new one would grow back in its place.

Then three miscarriages and, finally, Holly, born when Trudy was thirty-three. To say the family doted on Holly was inadequate, to say that they worshipped her would be blasphemous, and Trudy was still a good Catholic then. Holly was one of those golden children who made cranky strangers smile. Outgoing, bubbly, sweet. Her father and brothers had been overly protective, seeing molesters everywhere even when she was a pudgy grade-schooler. But Trudy had always worried that Holly’s appeal was larger, transcending sex. She was like a little puppy that everyone wanted to cuddle, hold, possess. A person who had never been tempted to break a single rule might want to steal this child. Trudy, separated from Holly, even for a moment, in a grocery store or shop, would worry that her daughter had been spirited away by someone enchanted by her company. Trudy had been—not glad for the miscarriages, never glad, but resigned to the idea that it wasn’t a bad thing, the age gap between the boys and Holly, the fact that she was the only girl. No female, no age peer, should ever have to have been in competition with Holly. Trudy was happy to be her handmaiden, the nurse to her Juliet, but a girl close to her age would have resented her.

Elizabeth Lerner almost certainly had.

Her inspection of her closet done, her bedroom reordered, Trudy trudged off dutifully to her daily walk. It was a glorious fall day, and Old Town Alexandria was its most precious self. Scarlet and gold leaves drifted to the sidewalks, almost as if the town were a theater set and someone was leaning out of the sky with a box of silken fakes, throwing them down at suitable intervals. The day, the neighborhood, shone—shop windows gleaming, delicious smells wafting from the restaurants, people strolling aimlessly, as if they had no greater responsibilities than to acknowledge the loveliness of it all.

God, how she hated it. Had loathed it from the day they had moved here, even though she was the one who had lobbied for the change, and chosen their new location. The boys were gone, disappearing as sons do into their wives’ families, and now the holiday gatherings rotated among their households, so Trudy and Terry no longer needed a big house. It was easier for Trudy and Terry to visit each son—up to Boston, out to Kansas City, down to Jacksonville. Besides, the town house was not only small, but completely lacking in…resonance. The familiar items were there—pieces of furniture with real history, paintings from Trudy’s family, the everyday dishes, the fancy china—but it felt like a set, or one of those re-created rooms in the Smithsonian. She could imagine a tour guide’s nasal spiel: This is where the Tackett family ate (without appetite), this is where they slept (fitfully). It was as much a mausoleum as the one in Hollywood Cemetery.

She checked her watch, noting she had to walk for at least fifteen more minutes to meet her doctor’s expectations, and turned down Princess Street toward Founders Park. It had been a shock when Dr. Garry had lectured her about diet and exercise at her last physical. “I weigh two pounds less than I weighed on my wedding day,” she told him. But, as Dr. Garry had sussed out, she had remained at that weight largely by eating as little as possible and smoking. She had borderline high blood pressure and frighteningly high cholesterol. That is—it frightened the doctor. Trudy wasn’t the least bit perturbed. When she noticed her hair thinning, a possible side effect of the statin he had prescribed, she simply stopped taking it. She wondered how long she was going to get away with that maneuver.

But she was walking, as advised, and doing silly little exercises with soup cans. She was not depressed, despite what her doctor thought, and she was far from apathetic or self-destructive. She happened to like smoking, something the nonsmokers of the world could never understand. She had given it up only to avoid being a hypocrite in her children’s eyes. During the trials, she had started sneaking one or two a day with one of the assistant prosecutors because it was a good time to chat, assess how things were going. Because she never bought cigarettes, only bummed them, she didn’t think of herself as smoking. By the time everything had worked through the legal system, she was a full-fledged smoker again, up to a pack a day. Now she was down to five, and she measured out her days in those slender treats. Number one was puffed in the laundry room, with a cup of tea, shortly after Terry left for work. The second was for early afternoon, after completing the prescribed walk. Number three was at 3 P.M. on the dot, with another cup of tea, but this time in the kitchen, while listening to Fresh Air and blowing her unfresh air out the window. Four was postdinner, back in the laundry room, and five was a quickie in the powder room right before bedtime. Terry knew, of course. He wasn’t stupid, and he hadn’t lost his sense of smell. He knew, and he let it go. She wondered if he would be similarly forgiving should he learn about the Lipitor she had stopped taking, the fact that her cholesterol was above 300, that her blood pressure was 138 over 90 the last time she checked it with the cuff at the local CVS.

She had reached the park. Terry had explained to her once that the marina was in Virginia, but the Potomac, at least here, was considered part of D.C. Who made such determinations? Why did they matter? She thought about the surveyors, moving carefully down the slope, the all-too-apt names on the map: Lost River, Lost City. In the end, they had prevailed, but how she hated Walter Bowman for forcing that exercise on them, for requiring them to prove on which side of the state line he had killed their daughter.

Now, at last, he was going to die. Once that was done, Trudy would decide how much she wanted to live, if she would throw away the cigarettes and reclaim the Lipitor. She had been stashing the pills in a piece of Tupperware, refilling the prescription to avoid discovery. It wasn’t that she was vain, but—She reached a hand up to her hair. It was thicker. That wasn’t her imagination.

On the way home, she varied her route and passed St. Mary’s. She had attended once or twice after they moved here, and people were generically kind. Her preferred brand of kindness, truth to tell. But the rift between her and her church remained irrevocable. Not that her priest back in Middleburg had ever been direct enough to argue against her desire to see Walter Bowman put to death. The Catholic Church may be opposed to the death penalty, but the issue wasn’t a deal breaker, like abortion or same-sex marriage. No, Trudy had been the one who had tried to persuade the priest to change his mind. She hadn’t been delusional enough to think that she could change the church, but it had seemed vital to her that at least one of its representatives should, if only in private, agree with her, endorse her decision on moral grounds. She had converted for Terry’s sake, broken faith with her Huguenot ancestors, borne out the old saying about converts being the best adherents. A little disingenuous affirmation seemed the least the Catholic Church could do for her.

At the time of Holly’s death, Father Trahearne was still in the parish, but he had retired before the trial. (Sent away, whispers had it, another problem priest, but Trudy couldn’t believe his issues went much beyond drink.) His replacement was younger, dull and earnest. Father Trahearne, at least, would have enjoyed the argument. He might have even had a chance of changing Trudy’s mind. No—no, he would not have been able to do that. But he would have understood that she needed to have the conversation, that she was confessing, in a fashion. The new priest squirmed, uncomfortable with a discussion in which he did not have the moral high ground.

Trudy didn’t miss the church, although it had been central to her adult life. She missed Father Trahearne. She missed her church, the specific space, back in Middleburg. She missed the parish activities, which had filled her days. But she didn’t miss The Church, which she felt had denied her empathy. Ah, well, it was composed of a body of single men who had never fathered children, at least not officially. How could they really understand her situation?

When she let herself back into the house, she was startled to see Terry there. Was it Friday? He often ended office hours at noon and played golf on Fridays, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t Friday. Besides, he wouldn’t come home first. He would go straight to the club.

“Is something wrong?” She could not remember the last time she had asked that question. Everything was wrong, always. Wrong was the status quo. Her life was wrong, with little slivers of okay.

“A development over at Sussex,” he said.

He took her hand. Trudy and Terry, Terry and Trudy. How cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute. They had been. They had been beautiful, with strong white teeth and broad-shouldered sons and the most gorgeous little girl anyone had ever seen. They had been invincible. That was why they called their farm T’n’T—nothing in the world was stronger than they were.

“Is he dead?” Even as she asked, she wasn’t sure how she would feel if Terry said yes, Walter Bowman had died, found a way to commit suicide, keeled over from a heart attack. But he was only in his forties. His cholesterol was probably below 180.

“Our friend at the prison called me. Bowman’s found Elizabeth Lerner, although that’s not the name she’s using now. She’s been added to his approved contact list. At his request, but she agreed.”

“Is she going to attend the execution?” Even as she asked it, she realized the question was nonsensical, a non sequitur, but she couldn’t think what else to say.

“Our friend at Sussex doesn’t know.” They had befriended a secretary over the years, earned her confidences by proving themselves discreet. And by giving her gift cards several times a year. “It’s her understanding that Bowman wants to talk to Elizabeth, and she agreed. That’s all. For now.”

“For now.”

“But you know Bowman. He’s always looking for a way to get a stay. He’s always got an angle.”

Trudy wanted to say: So does she.

Instead, she announced: “I have to take some things to the cedar closet.” She walked down the basement steps empty-handed, indifferent to whether Terry heard the snap of the match flint on the box, or smelled the heavenly tobacco that rose up and filled her lungs. She wrapped her arms around her middle, and she could swear they ached, from wrist to elbow. So close to the destination and she was still tugging, still trying to keep this plane aloft all on her own. Prove that she wasn’t.

23

THE PRINCIPAL IS YOUR PAL. The old mnemonic device sounded in Eliza’s head as she walked down the halls of North Bethesda Middle, her footsteps echoing in the classes-in-session hush. She had always struggled with homonyms, and the dominance of spell-check had not been a boon to her. She had Peter run his eyes over the rare things she wrote, and he almost always found one hear for here, or a too for two. There were also certain names she found it hard not to flip. Thomas and Thompson, Murray and Murphy, Eileen and Elaine. The principal is your pal. Maybe once, but not these days, where principals were like federal judges, saddled with mandates that allowed them little discretion.

The principal here was Roxanne Stoddard, a stylish, professional type who would not have been out of place in a K Street lobbying firm. And she had an almost rock star aura in the community. When people heard that Iso was in North Bethesda, almost everyone said, “Oh, Roxanne Stoddard. That’s wonderful.” Or even: “I saw Roxanne Stoddard at Louisiana Kitchen at eight-thirty one night and she was clearly going over work even as she ate crawfish étouffée.”

Today, she wore a pea green suit and plum suede heels, making Eliza feel at once short and dowdy. But she was also warm, carrying her authority lightly.

“Iso,” she said to the angelic figure who was masquerading as Eliza’s daughter, “I’d like to speak to your mother in private. Is that okay?” It was clear Iso had no say in this.

“Of course, Mrs. Stoddard.” Iso caught Eliza’s eye as she left the office, her face all innocence, as if to say: I have no idea what this is about. Must be some terrible misunderstanding.

“How is your family settling in?” Another round of polite preamble, only much more appropriate than Walter’s. “It must be a big change.”

“More a large assortment of small changes, if that makes sense. But, yes, I think we’re settled now. Children adjust so quickly.”

Please tell me that Iso is well adjusted. Please let this be an announcement of some prize she has won, or an amazing result on a standardized test.

“Iso is doing well here. She is popular with her classmates and, to my chagrin, a little advanced in some classes, although she has a lot of territory to cover in American history. But her math and English—it makes me wonder at the difference in educational standards. And, of course, she’s an amazing athlete.”

Eliza beamed, even as she anticipated the huge “but” that she knew was about to drop on her head, like a cartoon anvil.

“I do wonder, back in England—was there much emphasis on bullying?”

For a bewildered moment, Eliza thought the principal was asking if the UK encouraged bullying.

“Oh! I think there were the same general concerns. Mean girls and the like.”

“And the problem of subtle bullying?”

“Subtle…bullying? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Roxanne Stoddard frowned, and Eliza glimpsed her power, how awful it must feel to be one of her students or teachers and inspire her disapproval. “Not at all. It’s an important distinction. Bullying is hard enough for teachers and administrators to detect, and students are loath to report it. But at least we can see the physical transgressions. Subtle bullying is all about exclusion, making other students feel not welcome.”

“Has Iso—?”

“It’s unclear at this point. For now, we’re willing to chalk it up to cultural differences between her old school and North Bethesda Middle.” She had a way of pronouncing the school’s name as if it should be written in gold and heralded by angels with little trumpets. North. Bethesda. Middle! It was the only pretentious note in her otherwise down-to-earth demeanor.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I have some materials for you, the same ones our faculty use.” The principal passed Eliza a thick manila envelope. “As I said, we’re not certain what happened. The girl involved—she swears it’s a misunderstanding. But one of the conundrums of this type of bullying is that the victim mistakes it for hazing. The child—and they are children here, no matter how worldly they think they are—believes if she endures it with good grace, she’ll be invited into the inner circle.”

“The girl—does she have some sort of disability?” Eliza was trying to remember Iso’s story, about the girl in her class who was to receive an iTunes gift certificate for her birthday.

“What?”

“Never mind. Just thinking about a classmate that Iso described to me.”

“This girl is not disabled. She’s not as bright and athletically gifted as Iso, but that’s the point. Not everyone is going to be. The strange thing is that Iso, at heart, seems unsure of her own place within the circle of popular girls, seems more threatened, possibly because she’s a newcomer. I think that’s why she might have told the girl she wasn’t allowed to sit with them.”

“That’s…all? She told a classmate that she couldn’t sit with them?”

“That’s more than enough,” Roxanne Stoddard said with stern disappointment, as if Eliza had asked: “That’s all? Just one joint in her locker? That’s all? An oral sex party with the boys’ wrestling team?”

“Obviously, I haven’t read the material yet.” Eliza gave the envelope a friendly pat, as if it were a novel she couldn’t wait to be alone with. “But, surely, cafeteria cliques are as old as time, and not something likely to change.”

“Mrs. Benedict, we have a zero-tolerance policy on bullying. Because there is some ambiguity here, we”—a royal we? a committee? a tribunal?—“have decided not to invoke the minimum punishment. If Iso had been determined to be in violation, she would have been given after-school detention and prohibited from school activities for a month. That’s the minimum penalty. The maximum is suspension.”

Eliza was torn. She understood that the policy was humane. She knew firsthand that her daughter was capable of an imperious indifference toward others. She was appalled that Iso was one of those popular girls who derived power by excluding others. But, still—was this grounds for suspension? Children needed a little grit in their lives, environments that fell somewhere between velvet-lined egg crates and Lord of the Flies.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Stoddard. Iso’s father and I will make sure she understands the policy, and the consequences of violating it. It is subtle, as you say.”

The principal smiled, her pal again. “She is, at heart, a sweet child. And, however quickly children adjust, she has been through a big change. I wouldn’t wonder if she’s a little homesick for London, her old school. That would go a long way, I think, toward explaining her moods.”

“Her moods?” Eliza had thought that cranky Iso was a family phenomenon. She was sunny and generous with her friends, her teammates.

“She seems a little distracted at times. But, as I said, I’m sure it’s just the dislocation. She’s doing really well in her classes.” The principal looked at her watch. “Speaking of which—there are only forty-five minutes left in the day. Why don’t you take her home? If I send her back to class, it will disrupt the teacher’s lesson.”

Eliza left the principal’s office, her homework tucked under her arm. She had to stop herself from reaching for her daughter’s hand, stroking her hair, fashioned in a perfect ponytail today. “Let’s go,” she said. And then, once out of the building: “We have time to get ice cream, if you like, before we pick up Albie.”

Iso regarded her mother suspiciously. “Ice cream?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Iso thought about this. “It wouldn’t be fair to Albie.”

“Not everyone has to get the same things all the time in order for life to be fair.”

Eliza had undermined her own sales pitch, referenced too directly to what was happening at school.

“I have a lot of homework. If we go home now, I could get started and you and Reba could walk up to Albie’s school as usual.”

“How about we all go to pick up Albie, then make a Rita’s run?”

“All the way over to Grandmother’s?” It was funny how Iso and Albie unconsciously referred to the house as Inez’s, never Manny’s, but then—it was Inez’s domain. Eliza’s father would live anywhere, happily, as long as he was with Inez. He cared nothing for his physical surroundings.

“I’m sure there’s one closer. And if not, there’s always Gifford’s or Baskin-Robbins.”

Iso gave a tiny nod, conferring her favors on Eliza. It was a win-win for Iso. She got a treat, but Albie’s presence would ensure that Eliza didn’t press her. She was a shrewd girl, and Eliza couldn’t help admiring that trait, which she had conspicuously lacked at the same age.

Then again, it was Holly—golden, self-assured Holly, not even a year older than Iso was now—who had gotten into Walter Bowman’s truck for the promise of fifteen dollars, while Eliza was the one he had to drag in by the wrists. Frankly, Eliza didn’t give a shit if Iso had hurt some girl’s feelings by denying her a place at a lunch table. Her fear was that this very same confidence could lead Iso into a situation that she wouldn’t be able to control.

BUT LATER, AS THE WATCHED Iso and Albie eat dinner-spoiling double scoops at Baskin-Robbins, she realized that Walter Bowman, held within a cell and his own parentheses, was not the problem. The problem was the other Walters, all the Walters who sprung up from the soil no matter how many times you mashed them flat, like the army of skeletons that grew from dragon’s teeth in the story of the Golden Fleece. The commonwealth of Virginia was going to kill her tormentor—Eliza was startled to consider that word, to see for the first time the hidden mentor inside the sadist—but she couldn’t begin to find and punish all the people who might hurt her children.

And yet, somewhere else in their own town, perhaps at this very moment, there was a mother who was comforting a child who believed Iso was the enemy.

24

IT WAS NEVER REALLY QUIET on Sussex I. It didn’t matter how many men were here, whether it was close up to full or spindly as it was now, with fifteen men rattling around a unit built for fifty. It was a loud place. The sound was weird, too, hard to pinpoint, whipping around corners and bouncing off walls, almost like a living thing that was stalking them all. Banging someone in, ingrained tradition that it was, was almost painful for Walter, but he wouldn’t deny anyone that honor. After all, he had the distinction of being the only man here who had been welcomed back twice.

Now, lying awake at what he figured to be 1 A.M. or so, he listened to the noises that seemed to prevail at night, roaming the unit like little forest creatures. Pops, whistles, echoes. You would think a person would get used to it, after twenty-plus years, but he still found the night sounds disturbing, and although it was not the noises that wakened him, they made it that much harder to get back to sleep. He thought he might have a condition of sorts, some kind of overly sensitive hearing. His father had hated loud sounds—the television, the radio, all had to be kept at low hums. He said he needed it that way because he spent his days surrounded by clanging and banging. As a young man, Walter had thought his father crotchety. But now that Walter was forty-six, he wondered if it was a change that came with age, if the ears just got plain worn out over time.

Forty-six. His father had been almost that old when Walter was born, his mother a few years younger. He was what they called a change-of-life baby, and he knew the exact moment of his conception: Christmas Eve, or maybe an hour into Christmas Day, after his mother had had some apple brandy. It was, his sister told him once, easy enough to date. It was the only time their parents had sex that year and probably the last time, ever. Of course, his sister could have been teasing. Although she was thirteen years older and should have known better, she had been hard on Walter, jealous of her new sibling. He always thought she resented him for getting the good looks that she could have used. Ugly as a mud fence, as the saying went, and the fact that Walter had never seen a mud fence didn’t get between him and understanding that phrase. His mother said his sister was plain, but Belle—unfortunate name—was ugly, aggressively so, with a lazy eye and a big nose and a witchlike chin. She had been lucky to find a man who wanted to marry her. A decent-looking guy at that, who made a good living. Some men just didn’t respect themselves.

Belle was his only living relative, and she had cut off all contact with him shortly after his parents died, a one-two punch, within six months of each other. Lung cancer had taken his father, and his mother had died from the stew of complications that went with diabetes. They had both been in their seventies, but Belle blamed it all on him, said they had died from the shame of being his parents. Why don’t you die, then? Walter had asked. Belle said she was lucky enough to have her own name and live in a different town, that she had escaped being Walter Bowman’s sister, otherwise she might be dead, too. To which he said: bullshit. He didn’t doubt that his arrest and his trials had been hard on his parents, but—lung cancer, diabetes! The men on Sussex had nothing on God when it came to killing people in painful, prolonged ways. The hardest case here hadn’t taken more than a few hours to kill anyone. God took months, years.

Besides, it wasn’t as if his parents had dropped dead in the immediate aftermath. They had both hung on for seven, eight years. Belle had just been looking for an excuse to cut him off, and once she buried their mother, she had one. She would be almost sixty now, her own children grown and, almost certainly, the source of some heartache for her. And he would be dead short of fifty, if the commonwealth of Virginia had its way. As of this year, he had spent exactly half his life in prison. Walter supposed some would see a neatness to that, a pleasing symmetry.

Walter begged to differ.

He sighed, practiced some techniques recommended for insomnia—breathing, counting, emptying his mind, meditating with the mantra Barbara had supplied him—but he could tell that this was going to be one of those nights where he was destined to lie awake. Sometimes he wondered if a part of his mind was greedy for a few more hours of consciousness, if it was trying to grab every moment of wakefulness it could. It’s okay, buddy, he soothed his fretful subconscious. Don’t count me out yet. We might have years ahead of us, still. Funny, how hard it was to get two parts of his own mind to talk to each other.

November 25, the fretful half roared back. Less than two months. And you didn’t even get to talk to her today!

It’s okay, he said. It’s okay.

Walter was not the least bit perturbed that Elizabeth had needed to cut their conversation short. He assumed it was something serious—and definitely not a husband requiring a ride from the airport. Funny, how she still couldn’t lie for shit. Whatever it was, it was serious, but not scary-serious, not an injured child. He would have heard that in her voice. But something involving one of the children. What did children require that was serious, yet fell short of actual harm? He had no idea.

He had no doubt that Elizabeth was a good mother. But he was still disappointed that this was all Elizabeth’s life had amounted to, that this was what she had chosen to do with the great gift he had conferred on her. Ironic, he knew, because he was the one who was always advocating that women return to their natural roles. But he had never meant all women, just those women who took it too far, imagined themselves men. Fact was, he hadn’t always thought about Elizabeth as female, although he could understand why people were confused on that score.

The boy they banged in today, he had stolen an eighty-seven-year-old woman’s purse, then raped and killed her. Disgusting. Walter could never understand someone like that, nor would he ever understand those that thought he should. The outside world saw the men in Sussex I as indistinguishable from one another, a clump of monsters and savages. But the fact that their crimes fell into the same category didn’t make the men the same. Walter might not even be here if it weren’t for a stupid metal box found on the side of the road. Well, they had the kidnapping charge and the rape charge, but those could have been mitigated by a smart lawyer, not that he had a smart lawyer back then. He had one now, though, in Jefferson D. Blanding, who, he suspected, was actually named Jefferson Davis Blanding, after the president of the Confederacy, and had the bad sense to be ashamed of it. Not that Walter held Jefferson Davis in any esteem, and he would be the first to remind people that West Virginia seceded from Virginia rather than be part of the Confederacy. But no one’s responsible for his name.

One’s actions—yes. And no. He had done what they said he did. In a different system, he might have owned up to his crimes more readily. There was a part of him that would have liked to tell the whole story, although the catch was that he didn’t understand his own crimes until he’d had years to think about them. Here, in Sussex I, amid all the indignities, there was this one freedom, absent in the outside world. A man got to think. A lot. Walter had thought about what he had done, and he saw there was no way he could ever live outside prison. He belonged here. In fact, if he were scientifically inclined, he would want to find a way to extend prisoners’ lives so they could serve multiple life sentences. He owed Holly Tackett a life, he owed Maude Parrish a life. And, yes, he owed the other girls, too, but it wasn’t his fault that he had never confessed to those crimes. That was the system, refusing to make a deal, refusing to acknowledge that he had any power. Wipe out the death penalty and I’ll tell you everything, he had said more than once, but they wouldn’t even entertain the notion. Justice for the one—the rich girl, the doctor’s daughter—trumped justice for all. That wasn’t right.

The other thing that bothered him about his situation, as he chose to think of it, was that he didn’t understand what it meant, to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. He wasn’t fool enough to take it literally, to think that they had to find a dozen Walter Bowmans. Still, what was a peer? There had been women on his jury, for example, and with all due respect, he did not think women could really understand what he had decided was a temporary insanity, the bottled-up energy of a young man who knew he had something to offer, something of value, but couldn’t find anyone who understood that. Today, with the Internet, he’d have no problem finding a woman. As he understood it, based largely on advertisements he saw for dating services and articles he read in magazines, technology had brought back good old-fashioned wooing. He had been in such a rush, as a young man, anxious and urgent. Could women even understand that? Did they know what it was like to have an erection at the wrong time, or what it would be like not to have one at the right time? His hard-ons had been like a faulty check-engine light, the kind that popped up just because you didn’t screw the gas tank tight enough. Like the ladies who came into his father’s shop, all fluttery anxiety, he had worried that he would ignore them at his peril.

But even if a woman could understand such things, why did one’s peers judge a man? Shouldn’t his victims have the final say? Oh, he could imagine a prosecutor’s comeback for that. How convenient for a killer to want his victims to judge him. But there was Elizabeth. He hadn’t been lying when he said he felt the greatest guilt toward her. What he did to her—that was a betrayal. The others, he didn’t know them, they weren’t real to him. But Elizabeth had been his copilot, his running buddy. Charley to his Steinbeck.

The next time they talked, he resolved he would say “I’m sorry” first thing. No small talk, no edging into the conversation. He would say the words he had never been allowed to say to her, one on one, the words that had burned in his throat and his chest all these years. He had understood, of course, why he had never been allowed to speak to her, why even during her cross-examination he had been instructed to regard her with the blankest of faces, listening with sorrowful eyes that never quite met hers. Still, there had been a part of him that always felt it wasn’t such a strange thing to ask, a final good-bye, just the two of them, maybe in a room in the courthouse, an armed guard standing outside. He had known better than to ask, but that didn’t mean he knew not to want it. He still wanted it.

No, he had to blurt it out, straight and true: “I’m sorry.”

Then maybe she would finally say she was sorry, too.