I'd Know You Anywhere

25

“I’M SORRY.”

The words came so fast, tumbling out the moment the collect call was approved, that they were almost cut off. Eliza stared at the beige receiver in her hand, wondering if Walter had been speaking into space, if he was reaching the end of a long and breathless recitation.

It had been a week since his last call, although Eliza marked the passage of time as a week since the school had called. She hadn’t forgotten Walter; the telephone was there every morning, the first thing she saw. But it was Iso who dominated her waking hours. It had been a tiptoey time in their household, she and Peter trying to observe Iso without crowding her, attempting to judge if she was headed toward real trouble. When she made fun of Albie—was that bad, or typical sibling behavior? Should Eliza let that go, in hopes that it would satisfy whatever aggression Iso needed to express, or should she nip it in the bud?

Eliza’s parenting had always been natural and easy, largely uninformed by texts and experts. Even her parents, experts in their own right, had encouraged Eliza to find her own way as a mother. For years she had felt that her immersion in children’s literature had been better preparation than any parenting guide. There it was, all the fears and emotions and needs of childhood. When other mothers asked where she sought guidance, she often said, “Everything I know about parenting I learned from Ramona Quimby.” People thought she was being glib, but she felt those particular books, written from a child’s-eye view of the world, were indispensable. Inez once told Eliza she was a good mother because she had never forgotten what it was like to be a child. Like nursing mothers who squirt milk at the sound of any baby’s cry, Eliza could be catapulted into childhood by a tantrum or a plaintive whine. She remembered it vividly, perhaps because it was sharply fenced off in her mind. The before time, the Elizabeth time.

So while she could never forget Walter, embodied as he was by this bland, beige instrument—the phone of Damocles, Peter had taken to calling it—Iso was uppermost in her mind, Iso was the present, Iso was a situation that could be improved, changed, monitored. Walter was the past. And not her responsibility.

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry. Did you hear me say that? I’m sorry. I wanted to say it first thing, in case we get interrupted again.”

Oh lord, Eliza thought. I hope we don’t get interrupted again. She felt that her life had already reached its drama quotient for the next decade. Any more worries—a call from a neighbor that Reba had gotten out of the yard, even a rumble in the Subaru’s motor—might push her over the edge.

“I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry that I kidnapped you. I’m sorry for the way I treated you, in those early days, when I wanted to make sure you would do whatever I said, when I said all those awful things about what I would do to your family. I am sorry, most of all, for what happened the last night.”

“What happened?” She meant only to echo his words, to question the euphemism.

“When I—the sex.” He had clearly misread her tone.

“The rape.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice a somber whisper. “I am sorry that I raped you. In some ways, I am sorrier for that than for anything else I did.”

She sat on the edge of her bed, examined the quilt, the sheets, the shams, all new. Peter, who traveled widely, had wanted to fit their bed with expensive sheets, Frette or even Pratesi. Eliza had argued that their bed should continue to be hospitable to children, children who still spilled things and forgot to put the tops on their markers. She had ordered this carefully mismatched set from a catalog, mixing striped sheets with a riotous quilt. There was already a stain on the dust ruffle, if one knew where to look, and some ink on a corner of a sham, but that came from Peter working in bed. No matter how much money Peter made, no matter how mature Iso and Albie became, they were never going to be a Frette kind of family.

“Elizabeth?”

Again, that prompt, bordering on a demand. How dare he? What did he expect? That she would say it was okay? That she would offer forgiveness? This wasn’t Albie, using the guest room towels to wipe off Reba’s muddy feet, a typically dreamy, well-intentioned mistake on his part. It wasn’t even Iso, suspected of the crime of subtle bullying.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve never said that.”

“I never had a chance to speak to you.”

“I mean—in other, um, venues. You never spoke of it.”

“Other ven—oh, interviews. So you read them?”

“Sometimes.” She had, in fact, avoided them until a month ago, when she had reread everything, trying to figure out how Walter had gotten back into her life.

“I hate to say this, but I was told by my lawyer not to address any of the things where charges weren’t brought. Not even in my own defense.”

“The other girls,” she said, suddenly feeling protective of her little ghosts.

“I’ve never spoken of the other things I was accused of. Not even to you, not even when I wanted to…scare you.”

“No, no you didn’t. But the things I read made it pretty clear—”

“The things you read about yourself—were those true, Elizabeth?”

He had scored a point there, although she thought it unfair. True, Jared Garrett had speculated, with no seeming facts at his disposal, about Walter’s sexual proclivities. He had raised questions of premature ejaculation, necrophilia, pedophilia. It was, after all, impossible to libel a convicted killer.

But the standards for Eliza should have been different. Shouldn’t they?

“I can understand that you don’t want to talk about the crimes with which you were never charged.”

“There was a time,” Walter said, “when they wanted to bury me with every unsolved murder from South Carolina to Pennsylvania. They made my father vouch for my work schedule, went through his files.”

“Yes, but there are still a lot of missing girls…one was from Point of Rocks.”

“That was just a place to cross the river, Elizabeth, nothing more. Elizabeth”—she wished he would stop the repeated use of her name, which made him sound like a salesman, or someone who had just read Dale Carnegie—“I don’t want to go over all of this, I really don’t. I called to tell you that I’m sorry for what I did to you. That’s long overdue.”

And inadequate, Eliza thought. What had she expected? To her, Walter’s attempts to communicate had been a continuation of his long-ago crimes, not a refutation. He held her captive again, violated her again. Despite his letter, she had not really expected an apology, yet he had made one today, clear and unambiguous. What did he expect in return? What did he deserve?

When Iso was small, she had quickly learned to lisp “I sorry,” even as she continued to do the very thing for which she was apologizing. Albie, by contrast, was almost too remorseful, brooding over his misdeeds long after he had been forgiven. A decade or so ago, Peter had written a piece about the nature of modern apologies, stringing together a spate of real and not-so-real ones—the official government acknowledgment of the Tuskegee experiment, a baseball player’s belabored rationale for spitting at an umpire, the ongoing discussion about reparations for slavery. This would have been, in fact, about the same time that Iso was careering through their little bungalow in Houston, throwing out “I sorry” as if it were confetti, her private little parade of destruction rolling past, leaving Eliza to clean up all of the mess. They had tried hard to teach their children the importance of genuine remorse, what it was to say and mean “I’m sorry.”

They had spent less time, Eliza realized now, on the nature of forgiveness. She told her children that when someone was sincerely sorry for a misdeed, he or she must be forgiven. And in the context of a family, that was true. Family members must forgive one another. (Although—another stellar example from children’s literature—Jo did not need to forgive Amy for burning up her manuscript, and Eliza always thought Amy’s near-death experience was a bit heavy-handed on Louisa May Alcott’s part.) But then again—if one doesn’t forgive someone, doesn’t one, in a sense, lose that person forever? And what could be better than to lose Walter in that sense? She was under no obligation to forgive him. Was she?

“I appreciate that. I appreciate that you said it straight out, without any of those weasel words that politicians use.”

“Weasel words. I love that. You always did have a great way of talking.”

She did? No, Eliza wanted to say, that was Vonnie, the writer and star debater. She had been proficient with words, even tidy with them. But creative? She was not one to fish for compliments, and she would never, under any circumstances, invite Walter to praise her, yet she found herself saying wistfully, “I never saw myself that way.”

“Well, you weren’t talky. Thank god. But you used words in an interesting way. I wasn’t a big reader when I met you, but I’ve become one here and words are real to me now. They have, like, shapes. And colors. Some of them are so right for what they are. Dignity, for example. Dignity is like…an older cat on a window-sill, his paws folded beneath him.”

She wanted to disagree. She didn’t want to have any common ground with Walter. But she thought of words in this way, too, and he was onto something.

“That’s a good image,” she said. “Cats are dignified, whereas dogs—”

She stopped herself. Everything she knew about dogs had been gleaned from Reba, who was not at all typical of her species. Besides, she would no more invoke Reba with Walter than she would speak of her children, or her day-to-day life. It was Elizabeth who spoke to Walter, a grown-up version, but Elizabeth nonetheless.

“I never cared for dogs.”

“I remember.” All dogs barked at Walter.

“You know another word I like? Serendipity. I was thinking about that very word when I saw your photo. The magazine used it to describe what people might find at local farmers’ markets. But that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no serendipity in what the earth produces. There’s bad luck, sometimes—droughts and pests. But there’s no serendipity to it. Then I turned the page. Me finding you—that was serendipity.”

“And what does serendipity look like to you?” she asked, keen to change the subject, to move him away from the moment he had found her. She wasn’t sure, in fact, if he was referring to this past summer or a summer long ago.

“I…well…I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, I shouldn’t have secrets from you. I think of serendipity as a woman. A green woman, with stripes.”

“Oh.”

“I know, I sound nuts. I’m sorry. The thing about dignity—I’ve thought a lot about that. How to die with dignity.”

“Really?”

“We have a choice here. Lethal injection or the electric chair. I almost chose the electric chair. I didn’t want to…fade away. Although there are those who say even lethal injection might be cruel and unusual. It takes twenty minutes. Did you know that? Twenty minutes from the dose until they pronounce a man dead.”

“Hmmmmmm.”

“One thing I know for sure—I’m not going to let the media know what my last meal will be. I’m allowed to keep that private, and I will.” A pause. “You have some choices, too, you know.”

Another noncommittal noise, only this one ended up, to imply a question. “Hmmmmmmm?”

“You can be a witness. In private, they don’t have to let the media know.”

“I don’t think that’s of interest to me, Walter.”

“Why?”

“I don’t feel that’s something I have to explain to anyone. It’s just not what I want to do.”

“Because you’re against the death penalty.” Fishing, probing.

“It’s just not something I choose to do.”

“I am going to go with lethal injection, if that makes a difference.”

“No thank you, Walter.” He did manage to bring out one’s good manners. She remembered Holly in the pickup truck. Please, mister, please.

“Then how about coming to see me? Alive, I mean, here at Sussex I?”

“I don’t think that would be possible.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be easy. Almost no one gets on the visiting list for a death row inmate, unless it’s a lawyer, maybe a journalist. But they would make an exception for you, I’m pretty sure.”

“Maybe,” she said, meaning to say only that she might be an exception, not that she would consider it seriously. In fact, that might be the best way to go: have Peter approach prison officials and make the request, all wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we’ll understand perfectly if you have to say no. Make them the bad guys, instead of her.

She reminded herself that Walter was the bad guy.

“I would really like,” he said, “to say I’m sorry in person. I don’t think it means as much over the phone. I don’t think you believed me.”

“You did a fine job,” she assured him. “It was a great apology.”

“But you didn’t forgive me.”

“I don’t think I’m the person who can forgive you, not really.”

“You’re the only one I care about.” There was a buzz of conversation in the background, a quick exchange, and Walter came back on the line. “That’s it for today. I gotta run. I’ll call you later.”

She hung up the phone and lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. You’re the only one I care about.

Stop, she prayed to the lighting fixture, one of the old-fashioned touches in the house that had never been updated. Eliza loved it, but Peter had recently held some sort of gauge to it, discovered that it generated heat to some obscene temperature within minutes. He wanted to rewire the overhead lamp, or at least replace its regular bulb with a fluorescent one. But Eliza loved this rose-colored globe of cut glass, couldn’t bear to see it replaced or fitted with a bulb that would cast a colder light. Please stop, she prayed, remembering a book where a boy thought God had lived in the kitchen light, because his mother was always addressing it, shaking a wooden spoon. Eliza wasn’t the kind who would shake a spoon at God or demand anything. She wasn’t even sure she believed in God, but she still couldn’t resist asking him this favor. Please make him leave me alone.

26

BARBARA LAFORTUNY WAS ONE of the wonders of her twice-weekly yoga class, the kind of older woman whose effortless flexibility and strength mocked the girls with more perfect bodies and outfits. She was, in fact, a little smug about her standing as one of the best in the practice, which she realized was antithetical to the experience, but there it was. If you couldn’t face the truth about yourself, then you weren’t ready for the truth about anything, and Barbara recognized this fact about herself: She was competitive. She liked to win.

Yet, for all her skill at holding difficult poses, she failed at the most basic task of all: stilling her mind. Right now, she was in child’s pose, about as relaxed as a person could be, or should be, and her mind was racing, racing, racing, far outside this pleasantly dim studio in a converted mill.

“Be kind to your body,” cooed the instructor. “Tune into what it’s feeling.”

She tried, but all she managed to locate was the caffeinated rumble of her heart. This was a 9 A.M. class, what Barbara thought of as the ladies-of-leisure and college-students class, because who else was free at 9 A.M. every Tuesday and Thursday? Technically, she belonged to the first group, but she didn’t see herself that way. Barbara had been up since six, checking her Google alerts, eating a healthy breakfast of homemade whole-grain bread and organic almond butter, reading the Times on paper, the local paper, and the Wall Street Journal online.

Barbara had never been a patient person, and her near-death experience had not changed that aspect of her personality. She sometimes thought her impatience, her shortness with fools, had contributed to the attack. Not that she was making excuses for the boy, who was one of the rottenest kids she had met in her years of teaching. That boy had been dead inside, with flat, lightless eyes. But he might not have attacked a more good-humored, patient teacher. Barbara had humiliated him in front of his friends. And if he had lashed out then, in an impulsive fit of anger, she almost could have made sense of it. But he had waited for her by her car, in that ill-lit parking lot, springing up, knife in hand. Luckily, he was as inept as an assailant as he was in the classroom, and he had mistaken the blood gushing from her face for a mortal wound and left her there. The attack had led to many profound changes in Barbara’s life—a new purpose, an interest in healthful food and pursuits, the amazing gift of prosperity, which only led her to hold the rich in greater disdain. But it had not made her more patient.

Walter, however, had patience to burn. Too much, she sometimes thought. She wondered if prison had perverted his relationship with time, if he didn’t understand how little they had. Bureaucracies moved as nimbly as eighteen-wheelers, as Barbara knew from her years in the public school system. They needed time and space to turn this thing around, and yet Walter could not be more goddamn nonchalant.

She raised her right leg behind her, swung it down into pigeon pose, gloating a little at the openness of her hips. Some of the thinner women in the class looked absolutely constipated.

Or maybe Walter wanted the drama of everything happening at the last minute, which was truly harebrained. She had said as much, the last time they spoke: No drama, Walter. Then too much attention will be paid, and she will run away. She’s a scared little mouse.

Barbara knew from scared little mouses. Mice. She had been one, behind her cranky facade. She had skittered to her car in the morning, worried it wouldn’t start, skittered into the school, tried to teach history to bored seventh and eighth graders, skittered out of the Pimlico neighborhood at day’s end, cooked dinner, fretting over calories and fat and cholesterol. Graded papers in front of the television, usually falling asleep there. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Then she had awakened in the hospital, her face bandaged, twelve hours, a half day, lost to her. She had known even before they removed the dressing that the repair—she could not dignify it with the term surgery—had been botched. She could sense how lumpy the scar was, how large the stitches. They had not bothered to summon a plastic surgeon to the ER. That might have been another lawsuit, another arrow in her quill, but the hospital had been quick to remedy its work, and the result wasn’t bad. Her scar was like a ghost smile, a little happy face off to the side. “For Halloween,” she once told Walter, “I might go as both of the Greek masks that represent the theater.”

Yet it was in that moment—waking up, disoriented, unsure of the damage done—that Barbara realized she was no longer scared. This was before the settlement left her well fixed, before she even really knew what happened. But she understood this: She wasn’t scared anymore. She had almost died. She didn’t. There must be something she was supposed to do.

The first task she tackled was finding out everything about the boy who had sliced her face, following him through the system. Tuwan Jones was fourteen, a juvenile, and it was harder then to try juveniles as adults. Barbara didn’t have a problem with that, although she believed her assailant to be beyond rehabilitation. Someone, a parent or a relative, had killed that boy long ago. He was sent to the Hickey School, where he promptly became an escape artist, leaving at every chance, only to be flummoxed by the surrounding suburbs, so still and quiet. Tuwan could get out of Hickey, but not out of the neighborhood. He never got much farther than Harford Road, the main strip nearest the school. They called Barbara every time he escaped, a courtesy and probably a defensive measure against future lawsuits. Tuwan had no intention of coming after her. He didn’t even remember her. He was released from Hickey at the age of sixteen. By eighteen, he had finally managed to kill someone and was sent to Supermax in Baltimore City.

Perhaps another person would have taken this experience and resolved to prevent such tragedies, to help young men before they became assailants. But Barbara had been there already, on the front lines, and she had little confidence that she was the type of person who could change others. Instead, she became fixated on the idea of the death penalty. It was wrong to kill. Someone had tried to take her life from her, and failed. Given a chance to live, she had to become a better person. Not nicer, necessarily, but more confident, vigorous, even a little selfless. Perhaps men on death row could become better people, too, if only they could be spared execution.

And although Maryland had its share of interesting inmates, the best ones, the ones whose cases really deserved to be reconsidered, had all been taken. Barbara wanted an inmate more or less to herself, she wanted to champion someone that no one else thought worthwhile. She wanted to take a perceived monster and persuade the world that he was human.

Which is what led her to Walter, back in the 1990s, when his first execution had been set. She could not believe the bloodlust at the time, how keen people were to see him die. The man she saw in newspaper photographs and courtroom sketches looked gentle to her, resigned. Besides, it wasn’t immoral of him to challenge the state of Virginia’s right to execute him on jurisdictional grounds. “Loophole,” editorials snarled. “Technicality,” complained pundits. But Barbara, the former history teacher, knew that state lines were more than arbitrary markers on a map, that the United States were the united states, and if Holly Tackett had been killed in West Virginia, then Walter should have been tried there. That was no technicality. It was a cherished tenet of most conservatives, the right for states to make their own laws, the insistence on less interference from the federal government. It was hypocritical for these same conservatives to claim that state lines didn’t matter when they wanted to kill someone.

She began writing Walter. He seemed skeptical of her at first. Other women had written him. “Crazy women,” he later told her. “They want a boyfriend. I can’t be somebody’s boyfriend in here. Where were these women when all I wanted was a girlfriend?”

She thought that was funny, even self-aware. Over time, she began to pull out bits and pieces of Walter’s life. The late-in-life parents, the coldness of his home, the consistent undermining by all those around him. She sent him an IQ test and he scored above average, although he admitted that he had never done well in school. Eventually, they began to talk about sex. Walter said his first sexual encounter was with a local girl who was sort of a for-barter prostitute; she had sex with men whose services she needed. He would go over to her house and help her with various tasks—putting up curtain rods, for example, or moving heavy furniture. But she was so businesslike about the arrangement that Walter never enjoyed it quite as much as he thought he should, didn’t really count it. “In a lot of ways, I was a virgin,” he said of the year he ended up on the run. He was, Barbara realized, hopelessly confused about sex and women.

“I’m not that man anymore,” he told her. “If I left here—I don’t know. But I’m not going to leave here, and I think that’s right. But that’s the thing that seems weird to me. They locked me up, and I’m a better person for it. Cured, even. I needed to be locked up, no doubt about it. But when they execute me, they’re going to kill the wrong Walter. The one they want to punish doesn’t exist anymore.”

Barbara was the only person who seemed to agree. Virginia was going to kill the wrong Walter, commit murder as surely as he had. The state had spent millions toward this goal, far more than it would have if it had just allowed Walter to be a lifer from the start.

She reclined on her mat. Barbara had caught an infection from using one of the center’s mats, or so she believed, and she now brought her own bright fuchsia one. It was the part of class she hated the most, the part where she was supposed to empty her mind. My mind does not empty, she wanted to protest.

Instead she lay on her back, counting the days. November 25. Under Walter’s 1-2-3 plan, he wouldn’t even broach his request to Eliza until the third time they spoke, and Barbara was unclear whether he was counting that first, truncated conversation. He might enjoy more phone privileges as the execution date came closer, but still—Barbara thought he should just blurt it out, let it stew in her mind.

“I know her better than you do,” Walter had said, which was infuriating. He seemed to think he was closer, in some ways, to this woman than he was to Barbara. You don’t know Eliza Benedict, she wanted to tell him. You know a girl, one who hasn’t existed for years. And you might not even have known her, as it turns out. Barbara didn’t like Eliza Benedict and would give anything if they didn’t need her. She had disliked her the first time she saw her, walking down the street with that ugly dog. She had resented her…calm. This was a woman who clearly had no problem relaxing. Barbara had wanted to yell at her from the car: “A man’s going to die because of your testimony. But he’s not the same man who committed those crimes. You are killing a ghost, a phantom. How do you sleep at night? How can you live with yourself? You probably want him to die, but no court would give him death for what he did to you.”

She muttered “Namaste” but didn’t bow her head to the teacher. Barbara rolled up her mat and rushed out into the world, her muscles supple and stretched, her mind seething. Forty-seven days. They had forty-seven days to get to the governor and petition for a commutation. Forty-seven days to break down a shoddy little story that had somehow managed to stand, all these years, a child’s rickety tree house that should have fallen to ruin long ago. Forty-seven days to pry something out of Elizabeth Lerner that she might not even realize she had. It was like that child in that movie wandering around with stamps worth millions while grown-ups died. What if they had to hire a hypnotist, or some other professional? Barbara needed to go online, she needed another cup of coffee, she needed to see if Jared Garrett had returned her latest e-mail.

27

TRUDY TACKETT HATED THE WORD privilege. It was tricky, loaded, another benign word that had been twisted into an insult. It now was some comfortable zone above the fray, life lived at an altitude so rarefied that one didn’t even know the fray existed.

But Trudy had always been aware that she was fortunate—in her family, in her family’s wealth. She was aware that she and Terry lived in a charmed universe, where there was little worry about money, even when they had to contemplate up to four college tuitions. But they were not extravagant or showy people, especially by the standards of Middleburg. She looked at price tags. Sometimes. And she had never taken their good fortune for granted. That was what galled her. She had been grateful in her prayers, aware of the luck in which her life was steeped. Even when she had the string of miscarriages, she had not railed against God, had not asked Why me? In the wake of Holly’s death, she had turned to the church for strength, praying for the courage to find some kind of meaning in it all. Father Trahearne had recommended the book of Job. Which, in retrospect, was the beginning of the end of Trudy’s life as a true Catholic.

But, no, she had never used money, and never expected special treatment because of it. Trudy had always felt vaguely embarrassed by the perks of money—boarding an airplane first because one was in business class, for example. That seemed a little gauche to her. But then she met a problem that all the money in the world couldn’t solve, and her ideas began to change. She and Terry didn’t pay for Walter Bowman’s prosecution, which meant they also had relatively little say. Oh, everyone was nice. It was the dawn—flowering?—of the victims’ rights movement, with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Parents of Murdered Children chapters. There was no doubt in Trudy’s mind that everyone, from the sheriff’s deputy who had found Holly’s body to the lowliest clerk in the prosecutor’s office, cared about Holly almost as much as if they had known her in life. That’s how amazing her daughter was. Not even death could vanquish her charisma. It helped that the Tackett family had been early adapters, in terms of video, and had hours of those old clunky VHS tapes of Holly. They had played an edited clip, during the closing arguments, and Walter Bowman’s attorney had barely objected. Even he, Trudy believed, understood how extraordinary Holly was. Later, the new attorney, the unfortunately super-capable Jefferson Blanding, had argued the videos were introduced improperly and should have been screened only during sentencing, not at the actual trial. In hindsight, it would have been better if Blanding had been Bowman’s attorney all along. The first one’s incompetence had caused them all sorts of problems and delays. In a state more lenient than Virginia, it might have resulted in the death penalty being vacated altogether.

So—privilege, money. They were not things of which Trudy had ever availed herself. Until the day that a young clerk at Sussex had called Terry out of the blue and said she was the person who read all of Walter’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, to make sure it met the prison’s standards.

“Is there something specific we should know?” Terry had asked.

“Oh no,” the woman had assured him. “He’s careful. He understands the rules and he wouldn’t violate them. But the women who write him—they’re all over the map. I mean, there’s nothing that interesting now. But there might be. You never know.”

“Interesting?”

“Who’s on his call list, for example. Whether he thinks he has a valid shot at an appeal. I mean, all the lawyer stuff—that’s in person or on the phone, strictly confidential. That’s a right that can’t be tampered with. But when Walter turns around and tells someone else what’s going on—that’s not protected.”

Trudy had picked up the extension at Terry’s invitation. It was hard for her not to break in, explain to Terry what was going on. She’s inside, she wants a bribe, she’ll tell us what we need to know. Since Holly’s murder, Trudy had learned that Terry, like his daughter, was dangerously trusting. She had to be the vigilant one, the mean one, the cynic.

“If you knew,” the woman continued, “how little they pay us to work here. It’s really kind of shocking.” The voice had a youthful twang, yet Trudy believed it had to be someone older, someone who had put in enough time in state government and was ready to play the angles. Did she make this offer to the victims of every man on death row? Granted, it wasn’t a large population, and as Trudy had learned, most victims were as poor as the perpetrators. But even if this clerk picked up ten, twenty dollars a month from five families, that would be quite the little stipend.

“We would appreciate,” Terry said carefully, “any help you could give us.”

“Same here,” the woman said. “Why don’t you write me? I’ll give you my PO box.”

The first month, Terry had sent twenty-five dollars, in cash, and they had received a rather perfunctory report back. The next month, he sent an American Express gift card of $100, and the report lengthened considerably. Yet, over the years, the information hadn’t amounted to much. Walter was not as loose with details about his legal situation as the clerk had led them to believe, although one of his correspondents, Barbara LaFortuny, was more reliably indiscreet. And it was distressing to be told of the women who wrote him what could only be called love letters. What was wrong with people? With women? Trudy couldn’t imagine men writing lovelorn letters to female murderers.

It was more distressing still to hear that Walter and Elizabeth had corresponded and that it had somehow slipped through their source’s net. “We spot-check,” she had defended herself, when called on this oversight. “And her letter might have arrived on a day when I wasn’t working. But I can swear to you up and down that he did not send any letters to Elizabeth Lerner from this facility. We would have been on that like white on rice.”

“But she’s not Elizabeth Lerner,” Terry had pointed out to their source, careful not to offend, but also perturbed at what thousands of dollars had failed to buy. “She’s Eliza Benedict.”

“Right, and how do you know that? Because of me. You also have her phone number, which you can drop into any online reverse directory and get an address. That’s more important than any ol’ letter she sent.”

Trudy did not agree. But now she found herself studying the ten digits. What would she say, if she dared to dial them. (Trudy was still old enough to think “dial,” even if she was modern enough to use a cell phone.) The words How dare you came to mind. Those would cover a multitude of sins.

That phrase jolted her and she pulled out her Bible, tried to find the reference, but she had to cheat and use the Internet to narrow it down. Various things covered a multitude of sins, apparently. Love and charity. In Peter, it was written: Love covers a multitude of sins. That was not a passage that interested Trudy today, or any day. She kept clicking until she found a Web site whose interpretation worked better for her. From James 5:20. Remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Love could help a sinner repent, the Web site instructed, but it must not turn a blind eye. That was not justice. Perhaps Trudy had been affiliated with the wrong church all these years, perhaps she should have embraced the hard-core fundamentalists. Her parents, both descended from Charleston’s French Huguenots, had been scandalized enough by her conversion to Catholicism upon her marriage to Terry. If Trudy had joined a church where people rolled on the floor and spoke in tongues, they would have been just as mortified by the sheer tackiness of it all. Her parents were alive, distressingly healthy. Distressing because it meant that Trudy was genetically predisposed to live a long time.

How dare you? What are you thinking? What are you up to? She found herself dialing—okay, furiously poking—the ten numbers that she had managed to commit to memory without even trying, this at a time when she could barely remember an errand from room to room. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang. She imagined the house in which it rang, a house with a husband, maybe children. A happy house. That was privilege.

How dare she. How dare she.

28

ISO WAS GROUNDED. GIVEN THAT this was a first for her, it was also a first for Eliza and Peter, who were still trying to work out how to define the punishment. They allowed her to play soccer, because they had rationalized that Iso’s transgressions should not punish the entire team. (Although her team was quite good, its bench was a little thin, and Iso’s nonparticipation could force them into forfeits.) She was permitted to watch television, but only programs that other family members chose. Eliza hoped that this would at least lure Iso out of her bedroom, force her to interact with her family. Finally, they had taken her phone away and limited her computer time, but Iso said she needed to use the Internet for some of her homework, and she appeared to be telling the truth.

Appeared to be was the key phrase. For Iso, while now an exemplary citizen at North Bethesda Middle School, had been caught lying about her after-school activities. She had told Eliza that she and a classmate needed to go to the library on a Saturday to research a project; the other girl’s mother would pick them up and bring them home. Eliza had checked with the other mother, not out of suspicion but caution. If Iso had garbled the message in any way, two young girls might be left waiting in front of the library at dusk. Granted, they would be in supersafe Bethesda, almost within walking distance of the Benedicts’ house. But Eliza wanted to be sure she wasn’t imposing on the other mother.

“The library?” The mother, Carol DeNadio, had a warm, throaty voice and laugh. “I wish Caitlin wanted to spend Saturday afternoon at the library. No, I was going to drop them off at Montgomery Mall.”

Eliza, caught off guard, embarrassed and humiliated that Iso had set her up this way, blurted out: “Is that safe?”

“The Montgomery Mall? Safe as anywhere, I suppose. Especially when the girls are together in their gaggle. Iso has lovely manners, by the way. I wouldn’t mind if that rubbed off on Caitlin.”

“Th-th-th-thank you.”

“I suppose that’s from living in England? Or maybe you’re just a better mother than I am.” The latter was said with breezy self-deprecation. “But, seriously, I’ve been dropping Caitlin off there since she was eleven. I give her three hours and strict instructions. She’s not allowed to leave the mall, and there will be hell to pay if she’s not at our meeting point. Also, her phone has to be on, and she has to take my calls. Screen me, and she loses the privilege.”

It certainly sounded harmless enough. So why had Iso lied about it?

“I didn’t think you would give me permission,” Iso said, her eyes focused on a spot on her bedroom wall, somewhere between her parents’ heads. The wall, by Iso’s choice, was a pale, pale lavender.

“We certainly won’t now,” Peter said. “You know how we feel about lying, Iso.”

She sighed. “Yes, it’s the one thing we must never do.” Parroted back in a tone that bordered on mockery, as if it were ridiculous, this mania for truthfulness.

“Why did you think we would prohibit it?” Eliza was genuinely puzzled.

“Because you’re always blah, blah, blah, shopping is evil, the more stuff you buy, the bigger your carbon footprint, blah, blah, blah. And when I want to go to McDonald’s, I have to hear the whole Fast Food Nation thing, E. coli and worms in my stomach, whatever.”

“It’s true, shopping for shopping’s sake is a bad habit,” Peter said. “As for hamburgers, I think if you’re going to eat one, you should eat a really good one.”

“The really good ones, the ones you like, are at restaurants and cost eight dollars. At McDonald’s, I can get a full meal for less than five dollars.”

Eliza did find this amusing, father and daughter in a discussion over relative economics, the cost of values. Peter was willing to pay for taste. Iso wanted quantity. It wasn’t that far removed from Peter’s work at his firm, where they were banking on the idea that people with certain values would be drawn to their investment tools, even if they could get faster, better results through other companies.

“Let’s not get derailed by hamburgers,” she said. “The fact is that you lied to me, Iso, and we can’t have that. You have to be punished. By the way, if you had asked me, I probably would have been okay with you going to the mall. My own parents were very strict about that when I was young. They had a lot of blanket rules about how I was allowed to spend my time, and I resented it. You couldn’t pay me to go to a mall now for recreation. But when I was fourteen, it was all I wanted to do.”

“Really? Granny I and Grampy M were strict?” Eliza no longer remembered how her parents’ initials had become affixed to their names, or why.

“Not about most things. They merely hated the idea of the mall.”

“But things were safer when you were young, right? You had a lot more freedom.”

Iso’s comment wasn’t meant to provoke. She was just repeating something she had heard or intuited. The world used to be so safe. No, that wasn’t a sentiment she was likely to have picked up at home. Eliza found the current culture of paranoia a good cover for her. She could be careful about her children without anyone thinking she was odd or strict.

“Iso, you’re grounded,” Peter declared. “For two weeks.”

“What does that mean?”

Several days in, they were still trying to figure that out. Could Iso walk Reba? That was a tricky one. It was nice to see Iso taking an interest in the dog and volunteering to do an essential task, but also unusual. “If you take Albie,” Eliza had decreed. Iso decided she didn’t want to walk Reba after all. Could she call a friend about homework? Only if she did it from the kitchen telephone, within earshot. If Albie was watching television and Iso joined him in the family room, could Iso at least mention to him that there was probably a better program? No. Because Albie would give Iso anything she wanted.

It was true, Albie was a completely indiscriminating television watcher. Today was Sunday, a gray, drizzly one that managed to be at once humid and chilly. Peter had gone into the office, and Eliza was trapped in the house with Albie and Iso. That was the problem with having a child under house arrest. One had to stay with her. Early in the afternoon, the three found themselves in the family room, regarding one another warily. A game? They couldn’t agree on one. A jigsaw puzzle? Iso couldn’t be bothered with anything that uncool. Books? Even Albie seemed to find this appalling. Eliza grabbed the remote and turned it to the only channel she really liked, TCM. If she could design her perfect cable system, it would have only TCM and maybe AMC, although she hated the way the second network edited films and inserted commercials.

Mist-shrouded mountains, clearly a set, rose into view. Gene Kelly, Van Johnson—“Oh, it’s Brigadoon,” Eliza said. “That’s a wonderful movie.”

Albie, who probably would have watched a test pattern without complaint, crawled onto the sofa and nestled into Eliza’s side, and she tried not to show how overwhelmingly happy this made her. Iso lay on the floor, chanting, “BOR-ing.” But eventually Gene Kelly caught her attention.

“I don’t get it,” Albie said. “How does the town sleep for a hundred years?”

“It’s magic,” Eliza said.

“But that funny man said they worked out a promise with God. Is God magic?”

Big question. Eliza and Peter had not given their children much of a religious education. Part of her, the reflexively honest part, wanted to say, “Yes, religion and magic are pretty much the same thing.” But she imagined Albie carrying that wisdom to school, the hell to pay later. Instead she said, “God is always seen as an all-powerful entity, whatever religion you believe.”

“That doesn’t really look like Scotland,” Iso complained. She spoke on some authority. The family had taken a driving trip through the Highlands the summer before last. “It doesn’t look real.”

It didn’t, and Eliza missed Gene Kelly’s usual archness, that slight smirk of ego he brought to most roles. Here, he was just a straight-up romantic, while Van Johnson got to be the dissolute wisecracker. Still the movie was marvelous and so romantic. Except, of course, for the character of Harry Beaton, who had to watch his true love marry someone else, knowing all the while that he must stay in Brigadoon or the village would perish. Brigadoon’s bargain with God was fine, if your true love happened to be there already. But what was a Harry Beaton to do? He really had drawn a tough hand.

Eliza’s sympathy for Harry vanished when he attacked his true love at her wedding, lashing out: “All I ever did was want you too much.”

Of course it ended happily—at least for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. But what of the other Brigadooners—Brigadoonites?—who might not meet their true loves in the small village, or who might not love with a ferocity that awakens a town that otherwise would slumber for a century? What would happen over the years, as the town’s residents became more connected by blood?

A phone rang. A single phone, up in her bedroom.

“The security phone!” Albie sang out, thrilled to be here to witness the mysterious instrument in action. Her instinct had been to ignore it, but now she would have to go answer it, refuse Walter’s charges, and tell the children that it was just a test, like the test of the Emergency Broadcast System. In the case of a real emergency…

And as Eliza headed to the stairs, she was reminded that Iso was not the only liar in their family.

By the time she reached the phone, it had stopped. She glanced at her watch: 2 P.M., on a Sunday. She did not think Walter would have broken the rules, at least not so quickly. Over time, she could imagine him becoming careless, forgetting what he was supposed to do, or no longer caring. But not on this, his third call. A wrong number? How could one know unless the phone was answered? Why hang up?

“I thought it was going to be Homeland Security,” Albie said wistfully. “I thought we were going to be told to evacuate. That would be exciting at least.”

“I think,” Eliza said, “we can come up with something to do that might be almost as exciting.” They spent the afternoon making cupcakes, with much emphasis on decoration. Even Iso, denied the television, joined in, and eventually Peter. They ruined their appetites, filling up on cream cheese frosting and miniature cinnamon disks and squiggles of pressurized decorating icing, straight from the can. Their appetites destroyed, they ended up driving over to Five Guys for a late supper of hamburgers and fries, passing the very mall that had cost Iso her freedom. Eliza saw Iso cast it a wary glance, as if the mall itself was the source of her problems. In a sense, wasn’t it? Whether it was the apple in Eden, the Roy Rogers on Route 40, or Bonnie Jean, betrothed to another in a village where there was no chance of meeting someone new, and no chance that the love of one’s life might ever disappear—in the end, wasn’t it yearning that led one astray, the pining after something or someone that had been denied?

Iso’s punishment was to end the next day, and Eliza found herself wishing that she might commit a new infraction in the remaining hours, resulting in another week of forced companionship with her family. Hadn’t she noticed how much fun they’d had? Didn’t her sides ache from laughing at her father’s antics with the frosting, the froth of family jokes that had carried them through dinner and then to Rita’s, as if there had never been all those cupcakes? That night, as she tucked in Albie, he said: “Can we do that every Sunday? Cupcakes and Five Guys and Rita’s?” She understood. She felt the same way. But unlike Albie, she knew how hard it was to replicate a perfect day. Wasn’t that the story of yet another movie?

Back in her room, she took Iso’s phone from the nightstand. Tomorrow, at breakfast, she would have to give it back to her, and the wall would go up again, separating Iso from the family.

The phone rang—but not the phone in her hand, the one that sat by itself, dedicated to one caller and one caller only, a caller who had been told never to call on weekends or evenings. It rang once, twice, then fell silent, like someone poking her in the back and running away.