I'd Know You Anywhere

29

BARBARA LAFORTUNY SAT OUTSIDE the Baltimore train station, parked in the line reserved for those waiting, staring idly at the enormous man/woman statue with the glowing purple heart. Purple heart made her free-associate—from war, and the honors given for valor, to the old Baltimore thrift store by that name. When she first started teaching, Purple Heart was a terrible taunt used by the children in her class about wearing clothes from there.

But ultimately the statue made her think of her and Walter, the way they intersected. They were close enough now that they even squabbled like an old married couple. Certainly, Walter had the capacity to exasperate her like no one else on God’s green earth. He was secretive and a control freak to boot, an almost valiant temperament for a man on death row, who controlled nothing in his life. Every time they made a plan—every time—he changed it on her. First he said, Go slow, don’t rush, don’t worry. She’ll come see me and then I’ll bait that hook. Now he had decided just as arbitrarily to jump ahead several moves, just like that, no explanation.

Yet Barbara had already set Plan B in motion, at Walter’s insistence, and there was no calling it back. So here she was, parked outside Penn Station on a sunny October day, waiting for the Amtrak from Philadelphia. She frowned at a driver idling in the drop-off lane, which was clearly marked, ignoring the line of cars backing up behind her, the chain reaction of problems she was causing. She should be in the waiting lane, like Barbara, or parked on the traffic circle. Barbara hated people who didn’t follow the rules. She gave her horn a little tap, tried to get the driver’s attention, but the woman was clearly an expert at tuning out the world. Barbara got out of her car and walked over, rapped on the woman’s window, forcing her to roll it down and acknowledge Barbara’s presence.

“You’re in the wrong lane,” she said to the driver.

“I pulled in by accident and I’m only going to be a minute,” the woman said. “People can still get around me.”

“Not that easily, and traffic is backing up behind you clear to St. Paul Street. Just pull around the circle and you can get in the correct lane to wait.”

“Do you work here?”

Barbara wasn’t one to be derailed by irrelevant questions. A person didn’t have to work somewhere in order to insist on civility and order. “You really should pull around.”

“And you should mind your own business.”

Barbara took off her sunglasses, which not only allowed her to make eye contact, but also showcased her scar, that phantom smile. She wasn’t deluded enough to think it made her look tough or intimidating. But she believed that it announced that she had lived in this world, that she knew things others did not. “I’m sure you think you’re the special case, that you have all these rationalizations for behaving as you do. But you are one person inconveniencing many, and there’s ultimately no way to rationalize that. Is your presence in this line a matter of life and death? Will someone suffer if you do what everyone else is doing, without a fuss?” Even as Barbara was speaking, cars were pulling around, honking and squealing, the drivers making irked faces. They seemed to lump her in with this woman, think she was part of the problem. But now that they were in a standoff, pride was involved. Pride—someone else’s—had almost killed Barbara. Still, she couldn’t back down.

“I will take down your tag number,” she said. “And make a complaint. Did you know that citizens can do that? Complain to the MVA about other motorists’ bad behavior?” She wondered as she said this if her threat might be true. It should be true, and that was good enough.

The woman looked balefully at Barbara, put her car in gear, and lurched forward, almost running over Barbara’s foot in the process. You would think that cars that had been stalled behind her might show Barbara a little gratitude for breaking up the bottleneck, but they just drove furiously past, dropping off their passengers with no acknowledgment of Barbara’s efforts for them. She dashed across the lane to her own properly parked car, but even before she could open the door, she saw her visitor coming out of the station, a colorless, meek-looking man in a sports jacket and a homburg. She recognized him by his tentativeness, the wary, unsure glance of a person being met by someone he doesn’t really know. She flung up an arm, waved him over.

“Ms. LaFortuny?” he asked.

“Mr. Garrett,” she said, shaking his hand. “I’m such a fan.”

Now that was a lie. She was really piling them up today. She and Walter both considered Garrett’s book a joke, a travesty. But he might be useful, if deployed correctly, and wouldn’t that be a great joke on him?

“How was your trip?” she asked.

“Uneventful,” he said. “I guess that’s all one can ask for. I can’t believe government subsidizes that service.”

She knew she shouldn’t argue with him, but she hated that kind of knee-jerk critique. “I believe the northeastern routes make money for Amtrak. Besides, this country needs more rail service, not less.”

“The covers were torn on half the seats,” he said. “And there was no coffee in the café car.”

“Do you want a cup of coffee? There’s a Starbucks not even three blocks from here—”

“No, I’m fine. I just think that’s outrageous on general principle.”

So it was going to be that kind of day.

She drove toward the county, taking him on a tour of the Lerners’ old neighborhood, driving into the state park, circling back to the now rather worn-looking neighborhood where Maude Parrish had lived. He claimed to have seen these sites before, but Barbara doubted him. Garrett was a lazy man, according to Walter, content to sit in a courtroom and read official records but reluctant to initiate anything on his own. He had never spoken to Walter’s sister, for example, never even tried as far as they knew. (Thank God, given her feelings, but still, how hard would it have been?) He hadn’t even been particularly dogged about getting to Walter, or his lawyer. But that way, he didn’t have to deal with all the messy contradictions. Long before the Internet and blogging, Jared Garrett had the thumb-sucking incuriousness of a person who can’t be bothered to muddle his theories with fact. He now kept a blog on cold cases, throwing up his wildly speculative ideas willy-nilly. His grammar was suspect, and as best as Barbara could tell, he couldn’t even be bothered to spell-check half the time.

They stopped for a late lunch in Clarksville. They were only a few miles from where the Lerners lived. She wondered if Garrett had even gleaned that much information, which was available via property records.

“Vegan?” he said with dismay, studying the menu.

“You’ll never know. I ate here before the switch and found out that most of the entrées I liked were vegan all along.”

He ordered the chili, which Barbara knew to be absolutely delicious, but seemed glum about it. He was probably not much older than Barbara, but he had a bowling ball of a gut and a terrible pallor. Why did people treat themselves so horribly? Barbara was well aware that she had the great gift of leisure, that it was easy for her to go to yoga class and shop the farmers’ market and choose healthful restaurants, but this man was clearly making no effort to take care of himself. She thought of Walter, struggling to maintain his health in prison. She had sent him books with basic yoga instruction and he had adopted a vegetarian diet despite much protest from prison officials, who wanted to honor dietary needs only for religious or medical reasons. Fine, Walter had said, I’m a Muslim now. Put me on the vegetarian diet that you give them.

“Ms. LaFortuny—”

“Barbara.”

“I don’t mean to be rude and I’m sure you mean well, but when you approached me and said you had significant new information to share, I expected more than a tour of places I saw twenty-some years ago.”

“Things change. I thought it might be helpful for you to revisit places, see them anew.”

“Helpful if I were writing about the Walter Bowman case, but I’m not. I devote my time to cold cases now.”

“There are those who think they can link various cold cases to Walter Bowman.”

“Yes, and I’m one of them. But unless Walter wants to give an interview before his execution—?”

She took a bite of her roasted corn quesadilla, sipped her tea. “Well, he might. Walter’s talking a lot these days.”

“To other journalists?”

She forced herself not to smile at Garrett’s sense of himself as a journalist. He was an accountant for the state of Pennsylvania, and he hadn’t published a book for at least fifteen years. Nothing he had written was even in print.

“No, not other journalists.” She lowered her voice. “To her. Elizabeth Lerner.”

His shock was gratifying. “Why?”

She gave a mystified shrug. “He doesn’t tell me everything. I just know he added her to his call list and they’ve been speaking regularly.”

“I always thought—I said—that things between them were much more complicated than anyone wanted to admit. People criticized me, but she did have multiple chances to escape.”

Barbara almost felt bad. Engaging Jared Garrett’s sordid imagination was like teasing an animal or a small child. Too easy to be fair. And she honestly didn’t want to cause the woman pain, but she was their only hope. To save a life, to prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice—why, anything was permissible. Elizabeth Lerner had nothing to be ashamed of. Unless she let Walter die, and then she was a killer, more cold-blooded than any death row inmate.

“And you know where she lives, her phone number? Do you think she would talk to me?”

“No,” Barbara said, relieved to be back in her usual world of blunt, tactless candor. “I mean, Walter has her phone number, but that doesn’t mean I do.” Another white lie. “Besides, I don’t think she would talk to you now, because she’s still keen that no one know her whereabouts, her past. Perhaps if Walter goes, however—”

“If? I didn’t think there was much doubt.”

“I think it’s important to leave the mind open to possibility. Certainly, there’s no harm in hoping.”

“Elizabeth Lerner.” He shook his head as if he had seen a celebrity, albeit one he didn’t particularly admire. “Her parents threatened a libel suit against me. They even talked about an injunction.”

“They were her parents,” Barbara said. “Of course they felt protective of her.”

“Do you have kids?”

“No,” Barbara said. “I never married, not that I needed a husband to have children. But I don’t like children much.”

“Weren’t you a teacher? I mean, I know you had a horrible run-in with one student, but before that, did you like them?”

“I don’t remember, but—no, I don’t think so. I liked my subjects, government and history. I thought they were important, and I wanted to share them with others. But I wasn’t drawn to teaching because of a blanket love for children. I accepted children as a necessary condition. You?”

“Me? I never was a teacher.”

“Do you have children?”

“No. My wife and I—it didn’t happen for us, and we accepted that. God’s will, and all.”

“You didn’t want to adopt?”

He lowered his voice, although there was no one in the restaurant to hear them. “No, never. You do what I do, you learn some things.”

“What do you mean?”

“About adoption. In crime. Those kids are damaged.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous. There’s no empirical data to support that. Death row is full of men who were raised by their biological parents. Biological parents who beat them or mistreated them, in most cases. Some of the men I’ve met would have been better off if they had been adopted.”

“You think having bum parents is a reason not to execute someone?”

“Yes, in fact, I do. But then, I don’t think there’s anything that supports the state’s right to murder. Killing is wrong or it isn’t. If it’s wrong for an individual to take someone’s life, it’s wrong for the state. The state doesn’t steal from thieves—”

“It seizes money. It exacts fines.”

“That’s not the same thing. The state doesn’t sexually assault rapists. Why is it only with homicide, and only a particular type of homicide, that we insist on this kind of justice?”

“Walter Bowman did some pretty horrible things.”

“Yes, he did. He’d be the first person to tell you that. And he accepts that a lifetime in prison, with no chance for parole, is fair.”

Jared had abandoned the chili and was picking at the corn bread that accompanied it.

“Look, I can’t promise anything,” Barbara said. “But there’s a possibility that Walter will give you an interview. Walter and Elizabeth. But you have to be patient.”

“How do I know you can deliver either one of them? Why should I believe that you even know where Elizabeth Lerner is?”

“I’ll show you after lunch.”

30

“SO WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN up to?” Walter asked Eliza. It was a natural question. So natural it seemed even more unnatural.

She found herself tempted to tell him about their perfect Sunday. Of course, she would not. She would not speak of her children to Walter, ever, and, so far, he had the good sense not to inquire about them. Besides, it would have been insensitive to prattle on about her happiness, cruel and taunting. That, of course, was part of the appeal. It would have been a way of saying, indirectly: I am where I am, I have what I have, because I am a good person at heart. You are where you are because you’re bad. Just because I was dragged into your life for almost forty days doesn’t make me bad, too.

But the more pressing need was to have the conversation with someone, anyone. She had tried to engage Peter on the topic, but satisfactory husband that he was, he was a man and not one inclined to wax poetic about a day of cupcakes and movies. Vonnie had no patience for such conversations, and Eliza’s own mother often ended up talking about how difficult Vonnie was when Eliza spoke of her trials with Iso. As for friends—she had yet to make any. People were friendly, but they seemed to think she was reserved. Funny, because Eliza had been considered ebulliently capital A American during her London years, and now her countrymen—countrywomen?—seemed to find her cool, detached. Or perhaps she had yet to make friends because most of the parents she met were in Iso’s peer group, where Eliza was probably known as the mother of the subtle bully. Maybe, in retrospect, she should have overlooked Iso’s lie about the mall if only to form an alliance with that friendly-seeming mother.

And here was Walter, someone who knew her in a way that almost no one did. With the exception of her parents and Vonnie, there was no one left in her life who had ever called her Elizabeth. She remembered being sixteen, filling out the papers for her new school. “Why can’t I change my name?” she had asked her parents. “Legally?” her father asked. “I suppose it could be done.” “No, I mean, just change it, call myself something else.” “Bureaucracies are bureaucracies,” her mother said. “Your name has to match the name on your birth certificate or they won’t enroll you.” “But I could shorten it, say it’s something else, or use my middle name.” “Of course you can,” her mother said.

Her full name was Elizabeth Hortense Lerner, after her maternal grandmother. Elizabeth Hortense Babington had lived on Baltimore’s North Side, walking distance from the Quaker meetinghouse she attended. But then—she walked everywhere and didn’t even own a car, relying on cabs for journeys that could not be made on foot. If she had been someone else’s grandmother, Elizabeth and Vonnie probably would have considered her queer, this thin, black-clad woman with long, woolly hair, out of time and out of place as she marched through the city’s streets. Elizabeth had always been proud to carry her name, Vonnie a little bitter that she had been named for their father’s mother, Yvonne Estelle. It was awful to cut down her grandmother’s elegant name, almost like cutting up a wedding dress for bedding. But it presented so many possibilities: Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Betsy, Bette, Bets…Eliza! It retained more of her real name than any other version yet sounded different enough that it was plausible no one would put it together. It was Uh-liz-a-beth Lerner who had been kidnapped a county over. E-Li-Za Lerner was the new girl.

So she had amputated “Beth” and never looked back.

“My life is very ordinary,” she told Walter. “It doesn’t produce much drama.”

“Same here,” he said, with a laugh. That was new. She didn’t remember Walter being able to laugh at himself. “But I guess, in your case, that’s a good thing. You’ve put together a very nice life for yourself.”

“That wasn’t what you said in your letter.”

“What do you mean?” Puzzled, on the boundary of hurt.

“You said you expected more of me.”

“No,” Walter countered. “I said it wasn’t what I envisioned for you.”

She couldn’t argue the words; she had shredded the letter. But she could contest the meaning. “But that was the implication. That you expected me to achieve in a career setting.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Walter said. “I mean, no offense”—she braced herself for the insult that inevitably followed those words—“but you didn’t even like kids. You were always pointing out how grubby this one was, or complaining about the ones who cried.”

“I was?” She had been fifteen. She didn’t remember thinking about children one way or another, but neither had she been thinking about a career. Her only goal was to be…grown-up. Which she thought meant being some version of Madonna, crashing with a friend in a funky apartment where the phone was covered with pink fuzz and seashells, and where there was enough money for carry-out pizza, if not much else. Later, in college, she was the type of student who truly dreaded the question “What’s your major?” not because it was such a cliché, but because she couldn’t answer it until junior year, when she began to study children’s literature with an eye toward becoming a librarian. Even then, she wasn’t choosing a career path. She had been drawn to children’s literature because it gave her an excuse to reread fairy tales, and her own young favorites, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. But her intellect had been engaged by the work in a way it never had been before—and never was again. Although she started graduate school in Houston, she dropped out when she was pregnant with Iso.

“No one likes children when they are a child,” she said now.

“Do you remember going to Luray Caverns?”

“Yes.” The answer was actually more complicated. Her time with Walter—it existed in some odd space in her brain, which was neither memory nor not-memory. It was like a story she knew about someone else, a story told in great detail so many times that she could rattle it off. It was The Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood, one of those grim Grimm fairy tales filled with horrible details—collapsing households, devoured animals, Red and Grandmama stepping out of the wolf’s sliced-open belly—made tolerable by their happy endings.

“I tried to leave you there that day.”

“You did not.”

“I thought about it. There was a group of schoolchildren, a few years younger than you, and they were loud and rowdy, and I thought, I’ll just back away and she’ll start talking to those kids and as soon as she’s distracted, I’ll run to the parking lot and drive away.”

She was weeping, as silently as possible, determined that he not know. “I don’t believe you.”

“That’s understandable. I don’t doubt it sounds self-serving. You know what I did—taking you—it was so stupid. If I had had a moment to think about it, I would have realized that you didn’t know anything, that you couldn’t hurt me. I thought, I have to kill her. She’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. But—look, whatever you think about me, whatever the law says about intent and first-degree, I never planned to kill anyone. It happened, yes, but I would be in this, like, other state. I wouldn’t even really remember doing it.”

“Walter—this is not a conversation I can have with you.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just trying to explain why I couldn’t hurt you.”

“Walter, you more than hurt me. You raped me. Which would have been awful enough, under any circumstances, but I not only had to endure the rape, I had to endure it while assuming that you would kill me afterward, as you did with Maude.”

“I never told you what I did.”

“I found you at a grave. I understood what had happened. And then there was Holly…”

He sighed, the misunderstood man. “I didn’t kill Holly. And the thing is, you know that. You’ve always known that, but people talked you out of it, told you it couldn’t be.”

“Stop.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to upset you, Elizabeth. But if we can’t speak honestly of what happened that night, to each other…”

“I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t there.”

A long pause. “I’ve clearly upset you, and that’s the last thing I want to do. Truly. Where were we? Talking about you, as a mother. As I said, I just didn’t think it interested you much. That’s all I meant, when I wrote you that time. I wasn’t denigrating what you do. I just never thought that was what you wanted.”

“You don’t know me, Walter.”

“Now that’s just hurtful, Elizabeth. Yes, I harmed you. There’s no doubt in my mind that I victimized you, and I only wish I had been called into account for those things. That I wasn’t is not my fault.” He had her there. She and her parents had asked that Walter not be prosecuted for rape, and he had accepted a plea bargain on the kidnapping charge, meaningless in the larger scheme of things, years attached to a life sentence that wasn’t to have lasted this long. “And I don’t know all of you, no, but, then—do you know me? Can you understand that I have changed, that I do understand the importance of making amends to those I’ve harmed?”

She felt she should apologize. Then she felt furious, being put in the position of thinking, even for a moment, that she owed Walter Bowman an apology.

“Elizabeth—I wish I could say these things face-to-face, let you see how remorseful I really am. Clearly, I can’t persuade you over the phone. But if I looked into your eyes, I think you would see I am a different man.”

“I don’t think so…”

“If I could see you—maybe I could apologize for everything.”

“You did apologize. You apologized the last time we spoke. You apologized just moments ago.”

“No, I mean for everything. Maybe, if I saw you, I would talk about those things I never talk about.”

“Are you saying—?”

“I’m not going to be more explicit over a phone line. But if you come to see me—you might be surprised by what I would say.”

His comment about the phone line, the implication that it was insecure, jogged her memory. “Walter—did you call Sunday?”

“No.” Adamant, but not defensive. “You told me during which hours I could call, and I’ve followed that to the letter.” He almost seemed to expect praise.

“Someone did. Called and hung up, at least twice. Have you given this number to anyone else?”

“Well, it’s on my sheet. And Barbara knows, but I’ve told her not to use it, ever. But, no, I haven’t given it to anyone. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have it.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You’ll visit?”

“No. I mean—I’ll talk about it—I mean, I’ll think about it.” Again, she didn’t want to admit to the intimacy of her marriage, how she reviewed all important decisions with Peter.

“Time is running out,” he said.

“I realize that.”

“And once I’m dead—well, let’s just say that some secrets are going to go with me. But maybe that’s what you’re counting on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. A person gets a little ornery, at times, living as I do. I’m not a saint. And I’m offering you something pretty big, Elizabeth. But it’s only for you, no one else.”

“Walter—I need to go.”

“Right—there’s soccer practice on Wednesday.”

How do you know that? But she didn’t ask. He wanted her to ask, she was sure of that much. Still, he knew he had rattled her. The pause alone gave her away.

“Good-bye, Walter. We’ll talk soon.”

“In person, I hope. Eventually.”

“We’ll see.” But, again, she had paused, given herself away. He knew she was considering it.

31

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW seat looked over Jared Garrett’s shoulder at the notes he had arrayed on his tray table. He had hoped she would. He had taken out his index cards because he was bored and restless, his mind churning from the events of the day. It seemed primitive to him that Amtrak didn’t provide wireless service on its trains. He would have been better off driving, after all, but he had assumed he could do e-mail en route. Now he was stuck on this wheezy old regional—only a sucker or a fool would pay extra for the Acela, which cut a mere ten minutes off the trip—with another forty minutes before he arrived back in Philadelphia. He could actually write, he supposed, but it felt odd to write without the option of the “publish” button, waiting to reward his efforts. Of course, the Bowman story was bigger than his blog. He must not waste it there, tempting as it was. He remembered when people criticized him as a cut-and-paste writer because he had managed to deliver his manuscript on Bowman within six weeks of his death sentence in the first trial. That pace seemed positively leaden by today’s standards.

“Colored index cards,” the woman said. “Are you a writer?”

“Yes,” he said. If his wife were here, she would roll her eyes or give an exaggerated sigh. She saw his writing as a hobby, one used to escape her in the evenings, when she parked herself in front of the television to watch reality shows. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

“What kind of books do you write?”

“Nonfiction,” he said. “Usually about crime.”

“True crime?”

“Nonfiction,” he repeated. “Fact crime is probably the best label. One of my books was nominated, once, for best fact crime.” He did not mention the name of the prize because it was not well known, but it was a prize, and he had been nominated for it. And fact crime might not be the most elegant construction, but it was better than true crime. Of course, fact crime was problematic, too, as it sounded almost like a criminal act driven by fact, like a so-called hate crime. But true crime had acquired a nasty taint over the years.

“Would I have read any of your books?”

The inevitable question. He wanted to turn it on her, say, “How would I know what you’ve read or not read? Are you a world-famous reader?”

Instead, he said: “My best-known book was about the Walter Bowman case, but that was over twenty years ago. I haven’t published for a while.”

“Walter Bowman?” The name clearly didn’t resonate with her. But then—Walter Bowman didn’t resonate. Jared always felt that Walter’s lack of charisma had dampened interest in his book, kept it from becoming the success it might have been. If only he could have written about someone like Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy. He had thought he lucked out, all those years ago, when the big guns didn’t come to Virginia. Turned out the big guns knew what they were doing.

But now—now the story had its long-missing climax, and it was going to be all Jared’s. Oh, other journalists might write about the execution. But no one would get to talk to Walter. He had Barbara LaFortuny’s word.

“A spree killer, back in the eighties,” he said. “Probably a serial killer, but that was never proven.”

“Is there a difference?”

He began to explain but almost immediately felt the woman’s attention drifting away from him. He interrupted himself, pointed to the cards arrayed before him: “I should get back to my work,” he said.

“Of course,” she said with apparent relief. “I’m going to go to the café car.” He couldn’t help noticing that she took her computer bag and purse. She would probably stay in the café for the rest of the trip, drinking white wine, sizing up the men. She was on the prowl, Jared decided, a lonely woman on a train. He was grateful for his thirty-year marriage, his solid life with Florence, even if she did roll her eyes at him from time to time. A woman alone—that was a sad thing. Barbara LaFortuny had seemed pathetic to him, although he had tried not to betray this. No one liked to be pitied.

He had Googled her, of course, as soon as she had e-mailed him. She had made a point of telling him that she wasn’t some sad sack, pining for Walter, but he thought she was kidding herself. Walter was good-looking, at least in photographs. Less so in person, but she had never seen him in person. She may not admit it, but LaFortuny was motivated by something more than a principled stand against the death penalty.

Still, it seemed clear, after several e-mails, that she really did have something to offer. He had taken a sick day from work, reasoning that his sick days were one of his remaining benefits in a world of shrinking benefits and he shouldn’t be penalized just because he was healthy. By not taking his sick days, he was cutting his own pay, in a sense. But the first half of the day, spent driving around sites he had long ago explored on his own, had been a big honking disappointment, and he had begun to feel that he was being taken, especially when she drove out to a large county park.

“Walter Bowman’s never been linked to this area,” he said, thinking of his own obsessive map, how he had examined every missing person case. The true-crime bloggers who followed the Bowman case fell across a wide range, from total apologists who would deny even the two obvious murders to those who basically put every missing teenage girl, 1980 to 1985, in his column. Jared was one of the more moderate, believing that Walter could be linked to at least four unsolved murders and four missing person cases in the Mid-Atlantic region. Jared had his own formula based on distance, opportunity, and victim. Distance: Walter Bowman had never been more than three hundred miles from home in his entire life and, per Elizabeth Lerner’s testimony, he seemed to rotate around a fixed point in his mind, staying in Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia. Opportunity: He had nonconsecutive days off and, before he killed Maude Parrish, had never spent a single night away from home. Finally, victims: Both were young, under sixteen, and not the least bit streetwise, so throwing in every random hooker killing was really missing the mark. Hookers didn’t fit Walter Bowman’s pattern.

But then—neither did Elizabeth Lerner, not in the looks department.

At any rate, he had known, when Barbara turned into this suburban park, that it had no connection at all to Bowman and he was beginning to get a little angry at being suckered this way. He was on a six-thirty train, and that was by Barbara LaFortuny’s instruction. She said she had tickets to a play, or something. That had been over lunch, at a vegan place called Roots, which hadn’t exactly thrilled Jared.

“Sounds like you have a nice life,” he said, just to make conversation, hoping to conceal his dismay at the menu offerings.

“I do,” she said. “Being attacked was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Not because it freed me from working, but because it showed me that my life was empty, purposeless, and that was through no one’s fault but my own.”

He pulled out his microcassette recorder, more to be polite than anything else, and let her drone on and on about her life. Perhaps this was all she had to offer, he thought. Perhaps she thought it was a great gift, the Walter Bowman story, as strained through the eyes of his greatest supporter. The thing is, she hadn’t told him a single thing about Walter that he didn’t know, and her insistence that Walter had changed—he couldn’t buy it. Barbara LaFortuny had a near-death experience through no fault of her own. She should be able to see that Walter wouldn’t be able to experience that kind of awakening until they strapped him to the gurney. And even then, even if some miracle happened and he didn’t die, he probably wouldn’t change.

She had let one tantalizing detail drift across the lunch table. “You know about the autopsies, right? What wasn’t there?”

“What wasn’t…oh, yes. I wrote about that. I thought you had read my book?”

“I did. I just wanted to remind you.”

“It doesn’t matter, not in the case of Holly Tackett.”

“No, it doesn’t. If one believes the testimony of Elizabeth Lerner. And you seem to be the one person willing to be skeptical of her.”

“I merely raised some questions. Killers have patterns. Elizabeth Lerner breaks the pattern in almost every way. She finds him, he doesn’t find her. He takes her and—if you believe her—doesn’t attempt sex with her for weeks, and then only once. She’s not a tall, shapely blonde. If she’s not actively helping him, why does he keep her around? I mean, I know the prevailing theory was that she was a witness and Walter always killed while in some sort of near-psychotic state, brought on by the other victims’ sexual rejection of him. And maybe all she did differently was submit, not fight him. Still, no, I think there’s always been something off about her testimony.”

The check came and Barbara LaFortuny picked it up, although she seemed surprised that he didn’t offer. But he had come down here on his own dime and he sure hadn’t chosen to eat vegan. What did she expect? And now she had brought him to some park. What could she possibly have for him here?

“Athletic field number nine,” she said, stopping the car.

“What about it?”

“It’s at the top of this hill. I have to stay here, because she knows my car, my face. It’s not a face people easily forget.” She laughed at her own lopsided visage, as if it were a delightful joke. “But you can probably walk up and get close enough to see her.”

“Her?”

“Elizabeth Lerner. Although, of course, that’s not the name she uses now. But go on, take a gander.”

“What name does she use now? How did you find her?”

She smiled. “We’ll save that for another day. I just wanted you to know how much we can give you, if you’re patient.”

“We?”

“Walter and I.”

“How can Walter have any influence over her?”

“As I said, they’re talking.”

“Will I be able to recognize her?”

“Look for the redhead, with the redheaded son and a rather ugly dog. Her daughter is number seventeen, I believe. Doesn’t look a thing like her. If anything—well, you’ll see.”

He felt ridiculous, trudging up the long drive in his loafers and work clothes. If he were one of these parents, he’d make him for a pedophile. Yet the parents, almost all mothers at this time of day, paid him no mind. The drive was on an incline and he was puffing and sweating by the time he arrived at field nine. A quick sweep—no one. Wait, there was the redheaded boy and dog, romping along the sidelines.

And there she was. He would not have recognized her in a crowd, or without the expectation of seeing her. She was curvy, whereas the teenage Elizabeth had been straight up and down, with no shape. (He had speculated, too, that Walter might have confused sexual leanings. Walter hadn’t liked that, but it was fair, given what Elizabeth looked like and how he had made her dress. And it was consistent with the other evidence.) But there was something else that was different about her, something that took him a moment to diagnose.

She looked happy. Wind ruffling her hair on this pleasant October afternoon, eyes trained on—which one? Oh, the little beauty, long-legged and lean, not at all like her mother, at least not like any version Jared ever saw. The daughter—the daughter looked more like Holly Tackett than she did like her mother. Not in the coloring, but in her grace, her long-limbed body, her ease with herself. Out of her soccer uniform, in street clothes, she would appear much older than she was.

Elizabeth wasn’t one of the more vocal mothers, but she was clearly proud of her daughter. And when her son came running up with the dog, his small grubby hand thrust forward to show her something, she inspected his offering with grave interest.

Jared watched her for a little while longer, hoping that her husband might arrive, or that the game might end and he could, discreetly, follow her to her car. With a license plate, he wouldn’t be dependent on Barbara LaFortuny. He could get a name, an address, a phone number. Perhaps he could ask some other parent about the team, figure out where it was based, how to get the roster. But, no, that would invite attention. If he had his camera, he could pretend to be a photographer, but photographers did not dress like auditors, as he did, being an auditor. No, better to keep his distance. For now.

He remembered the one photograph he had managed to take of Elizabeth, back in the courthouse hallway, camera held hip level. “Hey, Elizabeth,” he had called, and she had looked back, for only a split second, which was all he needed to grab the shot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the damn school photo, which had been used on her missing posters. She looked startled, wide-eyed, even a little guilty. They had used it on the cover, with Walter’s mug shot and a heartbreaking photo of Holly Tackett between them.

His train slowed for the approach to Philadelphia. He couldn’t wait to get home, to get on the Internet. He must not write about this yet. But it would be fun tonight to sit in his study and read the other bloggers, to imagine their envy and astonishment when he broke this story. How had Walter found her again? Perhaps she had found him.

32

“OCTOBER GIVETH AND OCTOBER TAKETH away,” Peter intoned the next morning. Golden autumn had been replaced by a dark, lashing storm, almost monsoonlike. Eliza felt she had no choice but to drive Albie to school. She struggled with this, on principle. Was she being overprotective? Hadn’t she walked to school in driving rainstorms? And Albie was used to the wet because of England. But this was the kind of downpour in which visibility dwindled to nothing, and she could not bear to think of dreamy Albie walking along the streets in his slicker, which was nowhere near bright enough. If she had her way, Albie would wear a bright yellow coat and hat like the little girl on the Morton salt box, but even Albie had enough fashion sense to choose dark navy. Besides, it was touching how much Albie cherished the novelty of the ride to school, especially when Reba automatically piled in. Apparently Reba understood that the walk to school was not about her. It had a purpose, a mission, and if she was in on the nice days, she should go along on the dreary ones, too.

Yet the moment they dropped Albie off, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the day felt freshly scrubbed, an enticing invitation to do something, anything, outdoors. Eliza, who had no shortage of tasks at home, believed she was heading there when she pulled out of the school’s driveway. Somehow, she found the Subaru nosing east and north, toward Baltimore. She did not take the highways, preferring the secondary roads, the very ones on which she had learned to drive, skirting close to her parents’ home and even detouring past her old high school—although it wasn’t her school, the windowless octagon that she remembered more or less fondly. That hopelessly small structure had been demolished back in the 1990s and replaced with a handsome brick-and-glass rectangle that allowed light to pour in from every angle. She continued along Route 40, little changed to her eyes, although the Roy Rogers had been replaced by a Church’s Fried Chicken. The road dipped, as it always had, and all the trappings of the suburbs fell away as she descended into the section that was bordered by the state park. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and they glistened in the sun. She parked in the lot and let Reba out. She didn’t have a leash, but she knew the dog would stay close to her, even in a novel environment, full of new smells.

They walked, following the spindly waterway that was the Sucker Branch, even after hours of heavy rain. She told herself she couldn’t be sure where she was, not really. There were no landmarks, and she hadn’t been here since August 1985. It would be impossible to pinpoint the exact place where she had seen Walter, tamping down the earth with his shovel.

That is, it would have been impossible if it weren’t for the plastic spray of flowers tucked at the foot of an old oak tree.

A coincidence, she told herself, then Reba. “It’s a coincidence.” Reba looked as if she were considering this information. The bouquet was bedraggled; it had been out in the elements for quite some time. It might be trash, for all Eliza knew, something tossed here, not left in memorial. Who would have trudged into these woods to leave a plastic nosegay at a site where Maude had spent barely a day? Eliza tried to remember what she knew about Maude’s life. She had attended Mount Hebron High School. She had been on her way to work at an ice-cream parlor on Route 40 and gotten a ride with Walter. She was tall and thin, one of two children whose divorced mother was just scraping by. This was all from information that filtered out during the trials. Walter never spoke of what he had done, except in the most general way.

“He must have said something,” the prosecutor had insisted. Baltimore County was known for the ferocity with which its state’s attorney sought the death penalty in all applicable cases, and the Howard County attorney had happily ceded the case to him, saying it was almost certain that Walter had killed Maude here, just over the county line, not where she was taken. But they couldn’t prove it was a capital crime if Maude had gotten into Walter’s car willingly, and he said she had. And there was no evidence of rape. The assumption was that Walter used a condom, unusual but not unheard of, although this did not explain the lack of trauma to Maude’s body. There were a lot of gaps in the case, and they leaned on Elizabeth to fill them in.

He must have said something about Maude, the prosecutor said.

No, Elizabeth told the prosecutor, Walter had offered varying stories about the girl whose grave he had dug—she fell out of the car, she fell in the park and hit her head. But he spoke vaguely about other crimes he might have committed, and that was only in order to scare Elizabeth to do whatever he asked her to do. “‘I’ve done some terrible things,’ he would say. ‘I didn’t want to do them. I was left with no choice. But I will do what I have to do.’”

In the end, Walter was convicted of murder in the first degree and given a life sentence. He had already received the death penalty in Virginia, so it didn’t really matter. The Maryland prosecutor had spun the whole experience as a saving to taxpayers. Maryland would be spared the cost of Walter’s appeals, and the cost of his maintenance over the years, yet justice had been done. The prosecutor said.

Eliza and Reba kept walking, inhaling the dense, wet smells of the woods in autumn. The leaves would have been thicker, in summer, it would have been harder to see as far as she could today. If she had been able to spot Walter from a distance—no, she wasn’t supposed to think that way.

Eventually the path led back into the old neighborhood, her mother’s Brigadoon. It was unchanged, almost as if it had slumbered through the past two decades. Although they probably had cable now, Eliza thought, noting a small satellite attached to one roof. She walked among the stone houses, assigning each one its past, astonished at how much she remembered. The Sleazaks had lived there, old man Traber there. (She had been stunned to learn from his obit, which her mother clipped for her a few years ago, that this stereotypical crank, the original get-off-my-lawn guy, was actually a well-regarded society painter.) The Billinghams’ door was still scarlet, a scandalous choice back in the 1980s, when the community board debated if the color might prevent the neighborhood from being included in the National Register of Historic Places, a status it had long coveted.

The primary difference, Eliza deduced from the cars, was that the neighborhood’s residents were more prosperous now, or more inclined to flaunt their wealth. Her mother wouldn’t have cared for that. And she wouldn’t have liked the fact that a woman in a BMW slowed when she saw Eliza and Reba, regarding them with frank suspicion. She drove past them, turned around, and came past again, rolling down her window as she pulled abreast of them.

“Can I help you?” she asked Eliza. “Are you looking for someone?”

“Just taking a stroll down memory lane. I lived here, as a child.”

Eliza pointed to the house where she had grown up, the house she had never fully appreciated until her family decided to leave it. Could they have stayed? Were they wrong to cut themselves off from their pre-Walter life? Hers was not such an unusual name. Media exposure was not as intense then. She wasn’t Patricia Hearst. If she told this woman her maiden name—that quaint term, yet also literal in her case—the woman would probably evince no recognition. Who remembers names, anyway? The runaway bride, the girl killed in Aruba, the girl killed in Italy—they made headlines, yet Eliza couldn’t name one of them to save her life.

“Well, it’s almost impossible to buy here now,” the woman said. “Houses are sold before they even go on the market.”

“Even since the mortgage crisis?”

“Houses here never lose their value,” the woman said. Eliza felt like a blasphemer for suggesting that Roaring Springs could be touched by anything as commonplace as the world economy.

“What do they go for these days?”

Judging by the look on the BMW driver’s face, Eliza had progressed from blasphemer to merely classless. The woman lowered her voice:

“I heard that the Mitchells got almost $500,000.”

The number was at once laughably low, relative to what Peter had paid for their house in Bethesda, and shockingly high. Eliza’s parents had paid no more than $40,000 for the house in the 1970s and felt like robber barons when they sold it for $175,000 in 1986. We could have lived here, Eliza thought. The commute would have worked out. Iso and Albie would have attended her old schools, walked down Frederick Road to the Catonsville branch library, eaten gyros at the old Greek diner, although Maryland’s gyros were thin pleasures when compared to the falafels they had known in London.

They could have walked along the Sucker Branch, too, wandered into the park. Did parents still allow children to do such things? No, probably not. But that detail did not derail Eliza’s fantasy. She had never blamed the location, the park. No, the problem with this spasm of nostalgia was that she was longing for her children to reclaim the territory she had ceded, Elizabethland, the realm of her pre-fifteen-year-old self. And if they wandered back into her past, she would have to tell them everything about the girl that she used to be. As far as they knew, there was no home between the Lerners’ early years in Baltimore City and the house they owned now. An entire chapter of the family’s life was missing, and Eliza’s own children had never noticed.

“That much,” she said to the woman in the BMW, widening her eyes in what she hoped would appear to be wistful awe. In some ways, it was. She and Reba turned around and headed out of the neighborhood. She had a feeling that the woman watched her go. That was okay. It was good to be vigilant. She wouldn’t deny anyone that right.

Passing Maude’s temporary grave again, she stopped and examined the bouquet. So sad, but then—what did the parents of the missing do? What territory did they mark, what did they visit? I’ll tell you things, Walter had promised. Things I’ve never told. But was it her obligation to listen?