I'd Know You Anywhere

33

“A PRISON IS A CORPORATION, a world unto itself,” said Jefferson D. Blanding, Walter’s lawyer. “Entrenched, committed to its own rules and policies. They don’t like to make exceptions for anyone.”

“So I learned,” Peter said, “when I called. That’s why we’re here, in hopes that a two-prong approach might help.”

“Here” was Blanding’s office in Charlottesville, Virginia, near the bricked-in Main Street mall. It was a Friday, and the children had an in-service day, which meant that teachers reported but students did not. Eliza remembered these from her Maryland youth, but she certainly didn’t remember so many of them on the calendar. At any rate, the three-day holiday had given them a chance to drive here on the pretext of a visit to Monticello, a trip so drearily self-improving that Iso didn’t smell a rat. Albie was game, if a little vague, about who Thomas Jefferson was. All the more reason to visit Monticello.

“You assume that I’m in favor of this,” Blanding said. “I’m not sure I am.”

“It’s what Walter wants,” Eliza put in. She didn’t mind letting Peter be the more aggressive one in this conversation, but she liked to keep her hand in, not allow Blanding to think she was some sort of throwback who let her husband call the shots. Peter just had more experience in arguing with people.

“I serve my clients’ best interests. That doesn’t mean I blindly do their bidding. Walter has not always been the best steward of what is good for Walter.”

Eliza nodded. “He wanted to take the stand in his first trial,” she told Peter. “He had a different lawyer then and—well, he probably wouldn’t have helped himself, insisting that everything that happened was an accident. But that was a very long time ago. In our conversations, he does appear to have changed. He’s more thoughtful, more measured.”

“Agreed,” Blanding said. “Still, I’m skeptical.”

What could Eliza say to that? Walter’s current lawyer had good instincts. Of course, they hadn’t told him what Walter had promised in return for Eliza’s visit. Peter saw their decision as strategy, nothing more, but Eliza was also protecting herself against the perception that she was being played by Walter, that he was toying with her. She would not be surprised if Walter was luring her to the prison with a promise he had no intention of keeping. Oh, he would tell her something, reveal some nugget of information that fell short of full disclosure, then argue the technicality, claim she had misunderstood. Walter was like a ten-year-old boy that way. Eliza’s mother had long believed that Walter had experienced something particularly wounding in his youth and that he reverted to the boy-self when threatened or upset. There had been times, all those years ago, when Eliza had felt older than Walter, or at least more knowledgeable in the ways of the world. She remembered watching him grab a handful of the pastel mints in a bowl by the cash register at a diner, then telling him later, as gently as possible, that he should have used the plastic spoon. He had been humiliated, offended, and gone on the attack. “I’m clean,” he said. “I wash my hands after everything, which is more ’n you can say.”

He was right about that. Sometimes when Eliza found herself exhorting Albie to wash up, she remembered Walter’s criticism of her young hygiene.

Peter asked Blanding: “Does the fact that he’s been given an execution date give us more or less leverage?”

“A little more,” Blanding said, looking pained. He was sad that Walter was going to die, Eliza realized. Was it a personal sadness, a professional one, or a combination? “But not if there’s publicity. If you want to come in there with a reporter, or if you give interviews before or after the fact—they won’t want to have anything to do with you.”

“Mr. Blanding, I’ve spent my entire life avoiding this topic. I wouldn’t want anyone to know that I’ve visited Walter.”

“Oh, people will know,” the lawyer said. “It’s a state agency, but it’s also just another office, where people gossip about anything out of the ordinary. And it’s extremely unusual for a death row inmate to receive a visitor, especially from one of his—” He paused, groping for a word.

“Victims,” Eliza supplied. “But then, I guess that’s the paradox of death row. They don’t tend to have many living victims.”

The lawyer was not particularly handsome, but he had pale blue eyes, made more vivid by his shirt, and a touching earnestness. “Mrs. Benedict, I understand that you are Walter Bowman’s victim. I never forget that. I also don’t allow myself to forget that he killed Holly Tackett and Maude Parrish.”

Maybe more.

“That makes two of us,” she said, and even Peter looked startled at the brittle glibness of her voice, not at all like her, although it was a tone she found herself using more and more with Iso.

“I’ve represented a lot of men on death row,” Blanding said. “They’re not monsters, not a one of them. It would be easier, in some ways, if we could say that of them. They have done monstrous things and most don’t deny that. Some are mentally ill, although they don’t meet the standard that would allow them to plead insanity. Others have IQs so low that it’s hard to imagine how they functioned at all in the world. But they all are capable of remorse, and that’s what most feel. Especially Walter.”

She wanted to believe him. Yet—if Walter had changed, could he answer her other questions? Would he remember the man he was and why he had treated her differently from the others? Assuming there was a new Walter, could he explain the old one?

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Peter asked. “How does she get in to see him?”

Blanding played with a pen and pencil set on his desk, the kind of item that a child gives as a present, thinking it grand. And his coffee mug was a lumpy, garish green thing, made by loving if not terribly skilled hands. “It wouldn’t hurt if you knew someone with some clout in Virginia. Connections are powerful.”

Peter stiffened. “I was a journalist before I went into finance. I don’t have those kinds of relationships and I’m still not comfortable with them. I don’t like trading favors.”

“But your bosses, their friends—”

“They don’t know about me,” Eliza said. “About Walter and me.”

“Mrs. Benedict—”

“Eliza, please.”

“My two cents? As the execution approaches, your ability to remain anonymous recedes. I’m not saying you’re wrong to want to live a life that isn’t defined by what happened to you as a teenager. And if you were still in London, or even on the other side of the country, maybe you could do that. Maybe. But the execution is going to shake memories loose, excite interest. People will almost certainly try to track you down through your parents and sister, who haven’t changed their names.”

“You make it sound like I went into hiding,” Eliza said, bristling. She had never denied her past. She simply had chosen not to let it be the single thing that defined her.

“Didn’t you?” Blanding asked, his manner as mild as his name.

“No. I shortened my name in high school to avoid…complications. Then I met Peter, and we decided to marry, and, well, do you know your Jane Austen? Can you imagine what it’s like to be wonderfully close to Elizabeth Bennet, if only on legal documents? It’s pretty much every Janeite’s fantasy.”

“It seems to me,” Blanding said, “that a woman who loved Austen would be more excited by the prospect of being Elizabeth Darcy.”

This was the moment, small and charged, in which Eliza could tell they were deciding if they were going to be allies or adversaries. She laughed, choosing to be an ally. It was an astute comment, funny and informed. She wished Blanding were her lawyer.

“I’m sorry,” Blanding said. “I didn’t mean to suggest you were hiding. I suppose it’s more correct to say that you don’t wish to be found. Yet sitting in Sussex I, Walter did find you. What makes you think that the Washington Post can’t?”

“I’m not worried about saying no to the Washington Post. I am worried about finding the right way—and time—to talk to my children about this. Our son is already prone to nightmares, and Iso went through this terrible obsession with mortality when she was five or so. There never seems to be a right time to tell them about me.”

“And what will you tell them about the death penalty? Will you say that you agree with the commonwealth of Virginia’s decision to execute people for certain crimes? Will you inform them that most civilized countries don’t put their own citizens to death?”

“How we parent,” Peter put in, “is a private decision. Do you have children, Mr. Blanding?” He, unlike Eliza, had missed the clues: the pen and pencil set, the coffee mug.

“Two, an eight-year-old and a three-year-old,” he said.

“Well, then you understand that some things are off-limits, not for others to comment upon.”

Blanding started to say something, checked himself. “I’ll do what I can do because I know it’s what Walter wants and I can’t see how it will harm him.” Again, Eliza felt guilty, wondered if the guilt read on her face. She didn’t like deceiving this man. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but I’ve really come to like him. He has such an interesting mind. I like the way he turns over words and phrases. He sees more than most people.”

But what, exactly, does he see? What did he see in me?

Peter and Eliza walked back to the hotel, hand in hand. “I could live in Charlottesville,” he said, but it was the only time either of them spoke during the walk, and he was just making conversation. Eliza didn’t think she could live here, although she didn’t blame Virginia for the memories she had of it. Still, it had been odd, skirting Middleburg on the way here. She could tell she and Peter were both weighed down by the secret they had withheld from Blanding. If Walter did confess to her, Blanding would not think her well intentioned. He might, in fact, believe her to be completely disingenuous, a glory hog who had considered only herself in this enterprise. But she could not allow herself to be affected by what Blanding, or anyone, thought of her. She was doing the right thing for the right reason. Almost.

The children wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon at the indoor pool, delighted as only children can be by the steamy, almost fetid room, with its fogged windows and chlorine smells. Eliza had never really liked swimming. She could do a passable bastard stroke, somewhere between breast and fly, and she was strong enough to swim in the currents of the Atlantic. It had been nice, when Iso was small, to go to the flat, friendly beaches of South Texas, where the steady stream of cars posed far more risk than the lazy wavelets that lapped the shore. But she didn’t really care for water. Whereas Peter was in his element, joining the children in the pool. She admired his body, still trim and athletic despite the fact that he had less time to exercise. She wondered if he still admired hers and decided to decide that he did.

“Mommy. Mommy? Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy?”

“What, Albie?”

“Aren’t you going to come in?”

“I didn’t bring a suit.”

“Then I’ll come out.”

“That’s okay, darling, I’m having fun watching you.”

Albie swam-walked back to his father and spent the next half hour squealing happily as Peter flung him away with great force. Peter would move toward the children like a lumbering gorilla, grunting the song about the man on the flying trapeze. Even Iso, presumably too big for such nonsense, begged for a turn, shrieking with laughter. They did this over and over again, never tiring.

Change the sound track and the setting, and it might look terrifying, Eliza thought. But did that work the other way around? Were there terrible things that could appear lovely if framed differently? She remembered a moment in a Piggly Wiggly, when she had been difficult and obdurate, arguing for a snack that Walter had arbitrarily decided was off-limits. This was toward the end, perhaps a day or so before they happened upon Holly on the road. Walter put his hand on the back of her neck, viselike.

“How nice,” the checker had said, “to see a brother and sister who are affectionate with one another.”

Three days later, he took her to dinner in a nice restaurant, one with linen tablecloths and silver, and told her she could have anything on the menu. Again, the waitress complimented Walter on his solicitous manner toward his little sister.

An hour later, he raped her.

Eliza watched as Albie, then Iso, flew through the air with the greatest of ease, screaming with laughter.

34

TRUDY DID NOT CONSIDER HERSELF a Luddite. She liked technology. But she also believed machines required several generations before they became attractive. Televisions, for example, and all their accessories—it had taken years before someone had figured out how to design a system that wasn’t a welter of cords and extensions, snaky as Medusa’s hair. Computers, too, were hideous when they first came along, and while laptops were smaller, they were still ugly to her way of thinking. Even those clamshells, especially those clamshells, which one was supposed to carry like a purse. As if Trudy would ever own such a purse. And no matter what computer one used, e-mail itself was ugly, begging the eye to skim, flee. She wanted no part of it.

She prided herself on keeping a stock of rich, creamy monogrammed paper, writing notes as necessary. Or picking up a phone—a phone, not a cell—when she had something to say to someone. Her sons had pleaded with her to get an e-mail account, dangling visions of daily photos of the grandsons, more frequent communication. But e-mail, in Trudy’s view, wasn’t communication. It was a one-sided conversation, zipping back and forth, barely connecting. Terry had an account and she checked it a few times a week, but she never hit the “reply to” button. And, yes, sometimes, there were photos of grandchildren, but they existed only on the screen, she had to sit there if she wanted to look at them, as she didn’t have a proper printer for photos. “We could send them to your phone,” her sons said, but her cell phone was just a phone, with no other capacity, and it spent most of its life in its little cradle of a charger.

But since Terry’s conversation with their Sussex friend, Trudy’s mind had returned again and again to a tantalizing detail: I got you the number. You can put it in a reverse look-up. She hadn’t understood what the woman meant at the time and hadn’t wanted to ask, revealing her presence on the line. But Trudy was an old hand at puzzling through things, and she put it together eventually. All she had to do was plug Elizabeth Lerner’s number into the computer and there it was, her street and zip. She could even call up photographs. O brave new world, she thought.

Trudy had dialed Elizabeth Lerner’s number several times since she obtained it, at first hanging on only to hear it ring over and over, then hanging up on the first or second ring. No voice mail, how odd. And why was no one ever home to answer it? She always called on weekends or around supper, the most likely time to find people at home. Did they ignore the calls, thinking she was a telemarketer? Did they have caller ID, which would out her as T Tackett? Idly she picked up her phone, even as she continued to stare at the photograph of the Benedicts’ white, nothing-special house. She thought longingly of T’n’T, their farm in Virginia, which had managed to be gracious and comfortable, no small feat when someone has three rowdy sons. The name—she didn’t regret it, refused to find belated menace in its pun. The Tacketts hadn’t even chosen it, although they had laughed when a friend had made the joke at a party, then later gave them the painted sign they put at the foot of their long drive. She had considered it arch acknowledgment of their good fortune. Trudy always had known that life could blow up at any moment. But perhaps that was hindsight.

She listened to the phone ring. She knew the photograph was not live—the trees were green and leafy—but she couldn’t help feeling that she was watching the house, that she might see a curtain twitch or a light come on, even hear her own call ringing inside. Answer me. Talk to me.

Not even an hour later, she was standing in front of it. Funny, because the Maryland side of the Beltway always seemed miles, galaxies away, a place she seldom ventured. But the highways had been almost eerily empty. Oh, it was Saturday, she remembered. Terry had gotten up to go play golf, not go into work. She zipped around 495 and across River Road, telling herself that she was bound for Tysons Corner, then the Saks on Wisconsin Avenue.

But she was on Poplar Street. She parked her car and walked around the house. No sign of life. Brazen, uncaring, she let herself in the backyard—the low gate had a latch that she could easily slide open—peered into windows. Children lived here, their detritus was all around. (Really, was it that hard to pick up after children, or get them to clean up after themselves? Trudy had never allowed this kind of disorder.) Elizabeth Lerner had children and, presumably, a husband. This was not the house of a single mother, although that would explain the mess. A dog’s bed, a big one—so they had a dog, too. She found herself trying the door handle, testing it to see if Elizabeth Benedict dared to live in an unlocked house, as the Tacketts once had. They had never locked the doors at T’n’T, not when they were in town, and what if they had? Holly had been taken at the foot of their driveway.

The door was locked.

“Are you looking for the Benedicts?”

She almost jumped a foot into the air, more at the sound of the name than the surprise of the voice. Her interlocutor was a man, in his sixties, neatly dressed for a Saturday morning in suburbia, in a short-sleeved shirt and slacks, real slacks, not khakis.

“Yes,” she said. “I just happened to be passing through and I’m an old friend, someone they haven’t seen for years. I took a chance that they would be here.”

“They went away for the weekend, but they expect to be back Sunday night. They asked me to take in the paper. Shame that you missed them.”

“That’s what I get for not calling first. I’ll leave them a note.”

She had no intention of leaving a note, but she figured that lie might keep him from describing the incident when the family returned. She even went so far as to walk to her car, take a piece of paper from the pad she kept in the glove compartment, and pretend-scrawl a note. Only somewhere along the way, it ceased to be pretending and became real. After struggling over how to begin—she could not bring herself to use the word dear—she wrote:

After a moment’s thought, she included her cell, not the house number.

She stood at the front door, the piece of paper in hand. Once through the slot, it couldn’t be taken back. But what could be taken back in this world? Nothing, really. Apologies, trials, even executions, didn’t change that. The past could not be undone. Bones healed. Everything else stayed broken forever. She has suffered, too, Terry would say during the trial, glancing at Inez Lerner, but Trudy wasn’t convinced that the lines etched into her face were anything but evidence of a woman who didn’t take care of herself and, by extension, didn’t take care of her daughter, who had failed to take care of Trudy’s daughter. Trudy hated Inez Lerner on sight. The hippieish clothes, the graying hair, the two bangles she wore on her wrist, which once, just once, clacked together in the courtroom, loud as a gunshot, making everyone jump. Why are all your children alive? she wanted to scream. What makes you so special? Inez Lerner had not loved her children more, or watched them with more care. Holly had been at the foot of the driveway, not in a park. Holly had been raising money to buy a wig for that unfortunate girl who had lost her hair during chemo, not wandering around aimlessly, just looking for trouble. Even today, she felt the childish complaint rising in her throat, the hot tears of frustration: It isn’t fair.

Trudy missed Holly every day. Every day. And now she was looking at a shabbier version of the life her daughter might have had. House, husband, children, dog.

She put the letter in the slot, feeling as if she had launched a message in a bottle, something that had no chance of reaching civilization, much less the person who needed to read it. Logically, she knew it was there, waiting for Elizabeth Lerner to come home, that it would strike her as cruel—a bucket of water propped on a door’s upper ledge, a rug over a hole in the floor. Yet to Trudy, her note felt insubstantial and flimsy, capable of disappearing without a trace.

That’s because what she really wanted to do was strike a match and burn the place to the ground.

35

NORMALLY, WALTER LIKED TO TALK to his lawyer. Blanding was kind and intelligent. He raised Walter’s game. He also made Walter feel like he was part of a larger world. He wasn’t all-business, far from it. They talked about current events and discussed, within ethical limits, the other men that Jeff represented here. Today, for example, Walter told Blanding again how happy he was that the kid, the grandma killer, had gotten a stay. It wasn’t a lie. He was happy for the lawyer. He was happy, in principle, even if he didn’t care about the individual involved.

Still, even with that conversational tidbit, Walter had found it trying, talking to Jeff, because he had something to hide. Are you sure this is a good idea? Is there something you’re not telling me? Walter had come to be a little conceited about his own intellect over the years, especially after repeated intelligence tests showed he was above average. Not genius, or anything extraordinary, but definitely above average, and that had given him confidence that he could hold his own in any conversation, maybe even control them. But it was one thing to control what he said when he communicated with Elizabeth, another to lie to Jeff, with whom he had always been scrupulously honest. Jeff trusted him. He had never asked why Walter had written Elizabeth and arranged to have her on his phone list, or even questioned Walter’s story about seeing her in the magazine. (Lawyers didn’t even have to know who was on their clients’ phone lists, but Walter had told Jeff so it wouldn’t look like he was hiding anything.) Still, Walter had never lied to his lawyer before and he felt bad, misleading him now. But if he told him everything—no, he would never allow Elizabeth to come see him.

“I mean, I think it’s wonderful that you want to apologize to her in person,” Jeff said. “But how it ends up making you feel—well, it depends on what you expect, going in.”

I expect she’s going to keep me from going to the death chamber, buddy. “What do you mean?”

“Well, she might withhold the, I don’t know, emotional experience you expect. I mean, if you want forgiveness or absolution—I don’t think you’re going to get that. She’s nice enough—”

“She always was a nice girl.”

“But she’s pretty firm in her insistence that people not forget that she was a victim, too.”

“She was,” Walter said. “She’s entitled to feel that way.”

“Okay, that’s easy for us to discuss in the abstract. But I want you to think about what it will be like, to be face-to-face with her, through the glass, and to hear her say that she won’t forgive you, that she can’t forgive you. That might make things a lot harder.”

Things. That was Jeff’s way of saying this was real, that Walter was going to die this time. Twenty-plus years, a literal record on Virginia’s death row, if not in other states. Twenty-plus years, and he wasn’t even fifty yet. Who wouldn’t do what he was doing, in his situation? Who wouldn’t fight for his life?

The girls—the girls had fought, struggled to breathe. He had felt terrible, doing what he did to them. But if they lived, they would have told, and that seemed so unfair. It wasn’t his fault. It had taken him a long time to get to a place where he realized that it was possible to feel remorse without accepting the labels that society put on things. He was sorry that he had to kill those girls, but it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t stupid enough to say that out loud, even to Barbara, although he had confided in her a few details no one knew. To Jeff, he talked only about the remorse, his belated understanding that no one should take another person’s life.

But if he had come to that realization all on his own, why couldn’t the commonwealth of Virginia have the same epiphany? That was the true unfairness of things. He agreed: It had been wrong to kill those girls because it was wrong to kill, always. Always.

He decided to put Jeff on the defensive, make him be explicit: “So this is it, huh? No chance this time of anything stopping it.”

“There’s always a chance, and you know we’ll cover it from every angle. Appeal to the Supreme Court, ask the governor for a commutation.”

“Be straight with me.”

A pause. “It’s hard to see any other outcome at this point.”

If only you knew! It was hard not to brag to this earnest young man, a top-flight thinker, about the plan Walter had concocted. It was hard not to tell him that his discovery of Elizabeth’s picture, while a coincidence, had happened after months and months of Barbara trying to get a lead on her. (At one point, she had even called her mother and sister, claimed to be an old friend, but they had been appropriately skeptical. He liked Barbara, surely he did, but that voice! You just couldn’t imagine a girl like Elizabeth being friends with someone who had that voice.) He knew that Jeff wouldn’t approve of his tactics, but he would be pleased with the result, downright proud of him. Jeff put him in the mind of Earl, the mechanic back at his father’s place, the one person who seemed to realize that Walter had something to offer. He wondered what had happened to Earl, if he had gotten out of the Marines alive, if he had ever opened up his fix-it business. Did he know of Walter? He hated to think of Earl, reading about him in the paper all those years ago, believing he was a monster, lower than low.

“I understand,” he assured Jeff.

“It’s just—it would be awful if this meeting didn’t bring you the peace you expected.”

“I can deal with that, Jeff. It’s not about me. It’s about her.” A beat. “How did she strike you?”

A pause on Jeff’s end. “Nice.”

“You said that already. That’s one of those say-nothing words.” Nice was ice with an n butting in front of it, making it even colder and more colorless. Nice was nothing.

“Okay, kind of placid, then. Her husband has the big personality, and she seems to be used to letting him run things.”

“You mean, he’s bossy? Domineering?”

“No, just very much in charge, the fighter in the family. She doesn’t seem to have much appetite for conflict.”

Oh, I know that. I’m counting on that.

He didn’t press Jeff further on the subject of Elizabeth, feeling that was too risky, might tip his hand. Now, lying on his bunk and staring at the ceiling, the sounds of Sussex I sharp and harsh around him, he allowed himself to remember the affection he had felt for her, almost in spite of himself. Was it love? He wasn’t sure it could be called love. But they had something, all those years ago. There was a bond. He could make her do anything. Wasn’t that proof of something between them? He had granted her life. If you thought about it, he was kind of a god. And it was time to call that marker in.

36

“WHO’S TRUDY TACKETT? ISO ASKED.”

“How do you know that name?”

They had just crossed the threshold in a cranky heap, tired and worn-out from the trip, in which they had been stuck in a terrible backup on I-66. The precipitating accident was apparently quite bad, according to WTOP, which Peter had switched off after hearing that two people had been killed in the collision. By the time their car inched past the accident site, the ambulances and helicopters had long departed, leaving behind two cars so mangled that it was impossible to imagine anyone surviving the crash. If they had left Monticello earlier, as Iso had urged repeatedly, they might have been here when it happened, their car could be another one in the pileup.

Eliza couldn’t help saying that out loud, without the Iso part, hoping her daughter would make that connection. “If we had left earlier, we might have been in this very spot when it happened.”

“At least that would have been interesting,” Iso said. “Unlike the rest of the day.”

Monticello had been a bit of a bust. Iso had attempted to wear her iPod headphones the entire time, and when Peter remonstrated, she had stalked through the tour with a boredom so palpable it felt like a weapon, aimed at them all. Albie, sensitive to his sister’s moods, had found it hard to take in the old house, and his confusion about Thomas Jefferson hadn’t helped. (Midway through the tour, it became obvious that he thought they were going through George Washington’s house. Eliza and Peter really needed to help him with his American history. He could rattle off the Tudor monarchs but couldn’t even name the first three presidents.) At any rate, Eliza’s nerves were already raw when Iso casually tossed out a name that always made her flinch.

“Trudy Tackett,” Iso repeated. “She signed this note that was with the mail, although it’s not in an envelope. See? Says she wants you to call her.”

Eliza glanced at Peter, knowing the name would not necessarily resonate with him, but hoping he would step up and say something, which she could not imagine doing just now. She felt as if a piece of clay was lodged around her larynx, slowly hardening. Trudy Tackett. As Jefferson Blanding had told her a mere two days ago, she wasn’t that hard to find.

“She went to school with your mom,” Peter said. “At least, I think that’s how you know her. Right, Eliza?”

She nodded, then managed to croak: “Her daughter. It was her daughter I knew.”

“Why would she leave you a note?”

“She was probably in the neighborhood.” Again, it was Peter who spoke.

Iso had expended about as much curiosity as she could on her mother’s behalf. She went into the family room and turned on the television, and Albie joined her at the opposite end of the sofa. He would spend the next hour stealthily closing the distance between them, patiently taking territory one inch at a time. Eventually, he would get too close and Iso would scold: “Get away from me. You smell” or “You breathe too loudly. You make funny noises.” Albie would retreat, then start over again. He loved her so much. Why couldn’t Iso see that, glory in it? Eliza had felt the same way about Vonnie when they were young, and she bet that Vonnie missed it, regretted the way she had squandered that affection. No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.

She and Peter rushed upstairs, as if unpacking their small overnight bag was an urgent, complicated matter, requiring them both. And it felt good, Eliza discovered, to have something to do with her hands, to sort the dirty clothes into piles, to get a wash going.

“I have to admit,” Peter said, “I didn’t remember who Trudy Tackett was. She’s one of the relatives, right.”

“Holly,” Eliza said. “Holly’s mother.”

“Oh.” Peter knew Holly’s significance. Or thought he did. “It could be a coincidence. She doesn’t necessarily know that Walter has been in touch with you.”

“What did Blanding say? It’s an office, like any other. People gossip. Someone at the prison could have told her.”

“About the calls. Not about the visit, because it hasn’t been arranged.”

“For all we know, they listen in on his phone calls.”

Bereft of chores, she sat on the bed.

“I would think she wouldn’t care, one way or another. Her daughter’s murder at least ended in a trial, with a death sentence. What more can she want?”

Eliza shrugged, as if in agreement. But she was thinking: So much more. She wants so much more. She wants me to be dead, and her daughter to be alive.

They had spoken only once. It was the second day of Eliza’s testimony, and she had eaten something that disagreed with her. It wasn’t nerves; her father was felled by the same waves of nausea, this odd feeling of wanting to throw up but not producing anything. About midway through the afternoon, they broke for a recess and Eliza had rushed to the nearest bathroom. She still couldn’t get anything to come up, no matter how much she retched.

When she came out of the stall, Trudy Tackett was standing there. She was a pretty woman. Of course, she seemed ancient to Eliza at the time. Funny, because Mrs. Tackett was younger than Inez. But her suit was unusually formal, even for court, and she wore very thick, unbecoming makeup.

“I’m Holly’s mother,” she said.

Eliza nodded. She was under strict instructions not to speak to any of the spectators, and she assumed that Holly’s mother knew the rules. She didn’t want to be rude, but she didn’t want to do anything wrong. That could lead to a mistrial, the last thing she wanted.

“She was younger than you,” her mother said. “A month away from her fourteenth birthday, in fact. We were going to have a lovely party.”

Eliza widened her eyes to signify that she thought this a nice idea, a lovely party. She wanted to leave, but Mrs. Tackett stood squarely in her path, and Eliza couldn’t see how to go around her without being rude.

“I mean, I know Holly looked like she was sixteen or eighteen. Don’t you think we knew that? Her father and her brothers spent most of their lives with their fists balled up, ready to hit men just for looking at her. But she was playing with dolls as recently as two years ago. She wasn’t in a hurry to grow up, like some girls. She certainly didn’t worship Madonna.”

That was one of those stray details that had become something so much larger than it was—the hair ribbon, the gloves and boots Eliza was wearing when she was kidnapped. Now she was defined by those things, and she could barely remember them.

“I didn’t worship her,” she said, feeling misunderstood. “I…liked her. I liked her style.”

Her current role models were Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, high-necked blouses and big skirts, brooches and pearls.

“You should have taken care of her,” Mrs. Tackett said. “You were older. You knew what was going on.”

“I couldn’t…I didn’t…”

“You should—”

Another woman pushed her way into the bathroom just then, and Eliza escaped. She never spoke to Mrs. Tackett again, although she felt her eyes on her, the day of closing arguments. (She had not wanted to attend, but the prosecutor had said it would look bad if she wasn’t there.)

She always felt that Mrs. Tackett had been interrupted just as she was about to say the words that Eliza feared the most: You should be dead. Everyone knows that you’re the one who should be dead and Holly should be alive. You let her die so you might live.