The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Joyce Carol Oates Will You Always Love Me? from Story

When Harry Steinhart introduced himself to Andrea McClure that evening, at the crowded reception in the atrium of Kress, Inc., he allowed her to assume that she was encountering him for the first time. Yet, in fact, Harry had been well aware of the young woman for months, since she’d come to work at Kress, Inc., the investment firm for which he was a market analyst. She was not a beautiful woman exactly, but rather odd-looking, with an asymmetrical face, sharp cheekbones, large liquid-dark quick-darting eyes that nonetheless failed to absorb much of their surroundings. Her hair was a fine fawn-brown streaked prematurely with gray. She was in her early thirties, with a habit of crinkling her forehead, a quizzical half-smile. There are women who preserve their faces by denying such expressions of emotion (Harry had known such women, well) and there are women so indifferent to their faces as to seem reckless, even profligate. Maybe that was why Harry found himself so attracted to her: a lack of guile?

Once, Harry had ridden alone with her in a swiftly rising elevator for twenty-two floors but she’d been so distracted by a sheath of papers she was carrying, she hadn’t noticed him at all. (And he was a man accustomed to being noticed by women, especially at Kress. Inc.) Another time, sighting her in a local park where, one misty-bright April morning, she was running alone on a jogging trail. Harry found himself following her, at a discreet distance; he’d unobtrusively crossed a rocky strip where the trail doubled back and the young woman would have to pass him a second time. He’d been strangely excited, watching her. Watching her and not being seen. The small-boned woman with the prematurely graying hair, legs in loose-fitting white shorts slenderly muscular, small fists clenched. She wasn’t a natural runner: Her arms swung stiffly at her sides, not quite rhythmically. She was frowning, crinkling her forehead, her mouth working as if, silently, she was arguing with someone. Harry climbed up onto an outcropping of rock, to stand in full view in the sun, in order not to be misunderstood (truly, he wasn’t the kind of man to spy on a woman in a lonely place), but still the woman seemed oblivious of him. Possibly, as she ran past, her eyes brushed over him, but only for an instant.

Harry stared after her, amazed. It was not that he’d been rebuffed — he hadn’t even been noticed. His maleness had not been acknowledged, let alone contemplated. Yet he’d felt not annoyed, but oddly amused. And protective of the woman.

After that, he’d avoided the park at that hour, to spare himself the temptation of seeking her out, watching her, again.

And now she was smiling up at him, saying, “Why do I like to act? — because I feel comforted by the stage.”

An amateur actress! Harry was intrigued.

Andrea McClure spoke with a curious bright impersonality, as if discussing a third person. Her deep-socketed eyes took on a tawny light, the dark iris rimmed with hazel as, with her peculiar intensity; she responded to a casual question of Harry’s. Even in high-heeled shoes she was much shorter than Harry, so she had to peer up at him — which he liked. As he liked her frankness, how within minutes of shaking hands, exchanging names, she spoke with such warmth. “I played Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a few years ago. Irina is the youngest of the sisters, the most naive and the most hopeful. Now I’d like to play Masha — ‘in mourning for my life,’ Masha says. I love the stage because emotions, there, are always justified — even self-pity. Even despair. At Kress, Inc., I’m one of hundreds of employees — I’m an ‘editor,’ I’m reasonably well paid — but the job is interchangeable with a thousand others. I feel no emotional commitment to it, and the company certainly feels no commitment to me. But when I’m on the stage, I know exactly who I am. I’m in another person’s imagination, not my own. I can’t say—” and here she began to act, with exaggerated “feminine” mannerisms, to make Harry smile, “—‘Look, please, I’m not important, that any of you should care about me! — pay attention to me!’ No, I’m an integral part of the production. It’s a family, and I’m a member. Whatever a play is, it’s a family.”

How moved Harry was by the young woman’s warm response. By the end of the evening, he’d forgotten his first impression of her, as a woman who look little notice of her surroundings, and of him.

They began to see each other in the evenings and on weekends, and through that spring and early summer Andrea’s mysteriousness in Harry’s eyes deepened — that vexation, almost sometimes like a physical chafing, of the not-known: the sexually provocative. Harry had been confident that they would soon become lovers, and was surprised that they did not; their relations were sociable, and warm — to a point. He was hurt, baffled, somewhat resentful, not at Andrea exactly but at the situation. Didn’t she like him? Wasn’t she attracted to him? Was there something wrong with him? (He was thirty-six years old, long ago married, and divorced. That part of his life belonged to the eighties, as if to another man.) Yet Andrea seemed to him so strangely oblivious, innocent. Even when she spoke with apparent artlessness, baring her soul.

“You really should find someone normal. Hairy!” Andrea joked after kissing him, and stiffening in his embrace. So she acknowledged the tension between them, even as, by her manner, and the searching way she looked at him, she seemed to suggest there was nothing to be done.

Harry said, smiling, “Yes, but, Andy — I’m crazy about you.”

This, too, in a mildly jokey manner. The first evening they’d met, she’d told him, “My name is Andrea McClure and no one ever calls me ‘Andy.’” Which Harry interpreted not as a warning but as a request.

When finally, in late summer, they made love, it was in silence, in the semi-darkness of Andrea’s bedroom into which one night, impulsively, she’d led Harry by the hand as if declaring to herself Now! now or never! Andrea’s bedroom was on the ninth floor of a white-brick apartment building overlooking a narrow strip of green, her window open to a curious humming-vibrating sound of traffic from the interstate a mile away. Penetrating this wash of sound through the night (Harry stayed the night) were distant sirens, mysterious cries, wails. Harry whispered, “You’re so beautiful! I love you!” — the words torn from him, always for the first time.

It would be their custom, then, to make love in virtual silence, by night and not by day. By day, there was too much of the other to see and to respond to; by day, Harry felt himself too visible, and in lovemaking as opposed to mere sexual intercourse, it’s preferable to be invisible. So Harry thought.

They were lovers, yet sporadically. They were not a couple.

So far as Harry knew. Andrea was not seeing other men; nor did she seem to have close women friends. Unlike the women he’d known intimately, including the woman who’d been, for six years, his wife. Andrea was the one who never inquired about his previous love affairs — how tactful she was, or how indifferent! She doesn’t want you to ask any questions of her, Harry thought.

Harry told Andrea he’d been married and divorced and his ex-wife now lived in London and they were on “amicable” terms though they rarely communicated. He said, as if presenting her with a gift, the gift of himself, “It’s over completely, emotionally, on both sides — luckily, we didn’t have any children.”

Andrea said, frowning, “That’s too bad.”

What was not-known in her. Which not even lovemaking could penetrate, after all.

Once lifting her eyes swiftly to his, startled as if he’d asked a question — “I’ll need to trust you.” This was not a statement but a question of her own. Harry said quickly, “Of course, darling. Trust me how?” And she looked at him searchingly, her smooth forehead suddenly creased, her mouth working. There was something ugly about the way, Harry thought. Andrea’s mouth moved in an anguished sort of silence. He repeated, “Trust me how? What is it?”

Andrea stood and walked out of the room. (That evening, they were in Harry’s apartment. He’d served an elaborate Italian meal, chosen special Italian wines — preparing meals for women had long been a crucial part of his ritual of seduction which perhaps he’d come to love for its own sake.) He followed Andrea, concerned she might leave, for the expression in her face was not one he recognized, a drawn, sallow, embittered look, as of a young girl biting her lips to keep from crying, but there she stood in a doorway weakly pressing her forehead against the doorframe, her eyes tightly shut and her thin shoulders trembling. “Andy, what is it?” Harry took her in his arms. He felt a sharp, simple happiness as if he was taking the not-known into his arms — and how easy it was, after all.

I will protect you: Trust me!

Later, when she’d recovered, calmed and softened and sleepy by several glasses of wine, Andrea confessed to Harry she’d thought he’d asked her something. She knew he hadn’t, but thought she’d heard the words. When Harry asked, what were the words, Andrea said she didn’t know. Her forehead, no longer creased with worry, kept the trace of thin horizontal lines.

Harry thought: We’re drawn to the mystery of others’ secrets, and not to those secrets. Do I really want to know?

In fact. Andrea would probably never have told him. For what would have been the occasion? — he could imagine none.

But: One day in March a telephone call came for Andrea which she took in her bedroom, where Harry heard her raised voice, and her sudden crying — Andrea, whom he’d never heard cry before. He did not know what to do — comfort her, or stay away. Listening to her cry tore at his heart. He felt he could not bear it. Thinking, too, Now I’ll know — now it will come out! Yet he respected her privacy. In truth, he was a little frightened of her. (They were virtually living together now though hardly as a conventional couple. There was no sense of playing at marriage, domestic permanency as there usually is in such arrangements. Most of Harry’s things remained in his apartment several miles away, to which he retreated frequently; sometimes, depending upon the needs of his work or Andrea’s schedule or whether Harry might be booked for an early air flight in the morning, he spent the night in his own bed.)

Harry entered Andrea’s bedroom but stopped short, seeing the look on her face which wasn’t grief but fury, a knotted contorted fury, of a kind he’s never seen in any woman’s face before. And what are her incredulous, choked words into the receiver — “What do you mean? What are you saying? Who are you? I can’t believe this! Parole hearing? He was sentenced to life! That filthy murderer was sentenced to life!”

Later, Harry came to understand how the dead sister had been an invisible third party in his relationship with Andrea. He recalled certain curiously insistent remarks she’d made about having been lonely growing up as an “only child” — her remoteness from her mother even as, with an edge of anxiety, she telephoned her mother every Sunday evening. She refused to read newspaper articles about violent crimes and asked Harry please to alert her so she could skip those pages. She refused to watch television except for cultural programs and there were few movies she consented to see with Harry — “I distrust the things a camera might pick up.”

In a way, it was a relief of sorts, for Harry to learn that the not-known in Andrea’s life had nothing to do with a previous lover, a disastrous marriage, a lost child, or, what was most likely of all, an abortion. He had no male rival to contend with!

This much, Harry learned: In the early evening of April 13, 1973, Andrea’s nineteen-year-old sister Frannie, visiting their widowed grandmother in Wakana Beach, Florida, was assaulted while walking in a deserted area of the beach — beaten, raped, strangled with her shorts. Her body was dragged into a culvert where it was discovered within an hour by a couple walking their dog, before the grandmother would have had reason to report her missing. Naked from the waist down, her face so badly battered with a rock that her left eye dangled from its socket, the cartilage of her nose was smashed, and teeth broken — Frannie McClure was hardly recognizable. It would be discovered that her vagina and anus had been viciously lacerated and much of her pubic hair torn out. Rape may have occurred after her death.

The victim had died at about eight o’clock. By eleven, Wakana Beach police had in custody a twenty-seven-year-old motorcyclist-drifter named Albert Jefferson Rooke, Caucasian, with a record of drug arrests, petty thefts, and misdemeanors in Tallahassee. Tampa, and his hometown, Carbondale, Illinois, where he’d spent time in a facility for disturbed adolescent boys. When Rooke was arrested he was reported as drunk on malt liquor and high on amphetamines; he was disheveled, with long scraggly hair and filthy clothes, and violently resisted police officers. Several witnesses would report having seen a man who resembled him in the vicinity of the beach where the murdered girl’s body was found, and a drug-addicted teenaged girl traveling with Rooke gave damaging testimony about his ravings of having “committed evil.” In the Wakana Beach police station, with no lawyer present, Rooke confessed to the crime, his confession was taped, and by two o’clock of the morning of April 14, 1973, police had their man. Rooke had relinquished his right to an attorney. He was booked for first-degree murder, among other charges, held in detention, and placed on suicide watch.

Months later, Rooke would retract his confession, claiming it was coerced, that police had beaten him and threatened to kill him. He was drugged-out, spaced-out, didn’t know what he’d said. But he hadn’t confessed voluntarily. He knew nothing of the rape and murder of Frannie McClure — he’d never seen Frannie McClure. His lawyer, a public defender, entered a plea of not guilty to all charges but at his trial Rooke did so poorly on the witness stand that the lawyer requested a recess and conferred with Rooke and convinced him that he should plead guilty, so the case wouldn’t go to the jurors, who were sure to convict him and send him to the electric chair; Rooke could then take his case to the state court of appeals, on the grounds that his confession had been coerced, and he was innocent.

So Rooke waived his right to a jury trial, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison. But the strategy misfired when, reversing his plea another time to not guilty and claiming that his confession was invalid, his case was summarily rejected by the court of appeals. That was in 1975. Now, in spring 1993, Rooke was eligible for parole, and the county attorney who contacted Andrea’s mother under the auspices of the Florida Victim/Witness Program, and was directed by Andrea’s mother to contact her, reported that Rooke seemed to have been a “model prisoner” for the past twelve years — there was a bulging file of supportive letters from prison guards, therapists, counselors, literacy volunteers, a Catholic chaplain. The Victim/Witness Program allowed for the testimony to parole boards of victims and family members related to victims, and so Andrea McClure was invited to address Rooke’s parole board when his hearing came up in April. If she wanted to be involved, if she had anything to say.

Her mother was too upset to be involved. She’d broken down, just discussing it on the phone with Andrea.

Except for a representative from the Wakana County Attorney’s Office, everyone who gave testimony at Albert Jefferson Rooke’s parole hearing, if Andrea didn’t attend, would be speaking on behalf of the prisoner.

Andrea said, wiping at her eyes, “If that man is freed, I swear I will kill him myself.”

“I was fourteen years old at the time Frannie died,” Andrea said. “I was supposed to fly down with her to visit Grandma, at Easter, but I didn’t want to go, and Frannie went alone, and if I’d gone with Frannie she’d be alive today, wouldn’t she? I mean, it’s a simple statement of fact. It isn’t anything but a simple statement of fact.”

Harry said, hesitantly, “Yes, but—” trying to think what to say, knowing that Andrea had made this accusation against herself continuously over the past twenty years, “—a fact can distort. Facts need to be interpreted in context.”

Andrea smiled impatiently. She was looking, not at Harry, but at something beyond Harry’s shoulder. “You’re either alive, or you’re not alive. That’s the only context.”

Where in the past Andrea had kept the secret of her murdered sister wholly to herself, now, suddenly, she began to talk openly, in a rapid nervous voice, about what had happened. Frannie, and how her death had affected the family, and how, after the trial, they’d assumed it was over — “He was sentenced to life in prison. Instead of the electric chair. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

Harry said, “There’s always the possibility of parole, unless the judge sets the sentence otherwise. You must have known that.”

Andrea seemed not to hear. Or, hearing, not to absorb.

Now she brought out of a closet a scrapbook. Showing Harry snapshots of the dead girl — pretty, thin-faced, with large expressive dark eyes like Andrea’s own. Sifting through family snapshots, Andrea would have skipped over her own and seemed surprised that Harry would want to look at them. There were postcards and letters of Frannie’s, clippings from a Roanoke paper — Frances McClure the recipient of a scholarship to Middlebury, Frances McClure embarked upon a six-week work-study program in Peru. (No clippings — none — pertaining to the crime.) Andrea answered at length, with warmth and animation, Harry’s questions; in the midst of other conversations, or silence, she’d begin suddenly to speak of Frannie as if, all along, she and Harry had been discussing her.

Harry thought. It must be like a dream. An underground stream. Never ceasing.

“For years,” Andrea confessed, “I wouldn’t think of Frannie. After the trial, we were exhausted and we never talked about her. I truly don’t believe it’s what psychiatry calls ‘denial’ — there was nothing more to say. The dead don’t change, do they? The dead don’t get any older, they don’t get any less dead. It’s funny how Frannie was so old to me, so mature, now I see these pictures and I see she was so young, only nineteen, and now I’m thirty-four and I’d be so old to her. I almost wish I could say that Frannie and I didn’t get along but we did — I loved her. She was older than I was by just enough, five years, so we never competed in anything, she was the one, everybody loved her, you would have loved her, she had such a quick, warm way of laughing, she was so alive. Her roommate at Middlebury would say how weird it was, that Frannie wasn’t alive because Frannie was the most alive person of anybody and that doesn’t change. But we stopped talking about her because it was too awful. I was lonely for her but I stopped thinking about her. I went to a different high school, my parents moved to a different part of Roanoke, it was possible to think different thoughts. I dream about Frannie now and it’s been twenty years but I really don’t think I was dreaming about her then. Except sometimes when I was alone, especially if I was shopping, and this is true now, because Frannie used to take me shopping when I was young, I’d seem to be with another person. I’d sort of be talking to, listening to, another person — but not really. I mean, it wasn’t Frannie. Sometimes I get scared and think I’ve forgotten what she looks like exactly — my memory is bleaching out. But I’ll never forget. I’m all she has. The memory of her — it’s in my trust. She had a boyfriend, actually, but he’s long gone from my life — he’s married, has kids. If he walked up to me on the street, if he turned up at work, if he turned up as my supervisor someday — I wouldn’t know him. I’d look right through him.

“I look through my mother sometimes, and I can see she looks through me. Because we’re thinking of Frannie but we don’t acknowledge it because we can’t talk about it. But if she’s thinking of Frannie, and at the moment I’m not, that’s when she really will look through me. My father died of liver cancer and it was obviously from what Frannie’s murderer did to us. We never said his name, and we never thought his name. We were at the trial and we saw him and I remember how relieved I was — I don’t know about Mom and Dad, but I know I was — to see he truly was depraved. His face was all broken out in pimples. His eyes were bloodshot. He was always pretending to be trying to commit suicide, to get sympathy, or to make out he was crazy, so they had him drugged, and the drugs did something to his motor coordination. Also, he was pretending. He was an actor. But the act didn’t work — he’s in prison for life. I can’t believe any parole board would take his case seriously. I know it’s routine. The more I think about it, of course it’s routine. They won’t let him out. But I have to make sure of that because if I don’t, and they let him out, I’ll be to blame. It will all be on my head. I told you, didn’t I? — I was supposed to go to Grandma’s with Frannie, but I didn’t. I was fourteen, I had my friends, I didn’t want to go to Wakana Beach exactly then. If I’d gone with Frannie, she’d be alive today. That’s a simple, neutral fact. It isn’t an accusation, just a fact. My parents never blamed me, or anyway never spoke of it. They’re good people, they’re Christians I guess you could say. They must have wished I’d gone in Frannie’s place but I can’t say I blame them.”

Marry wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “Your parents must have — what? Wished you’d died in your sister’s place? Are you serious?”

Andrea had been speaking breathlessly. Now she stared at Harry, the skin between her eyebrows puckered.

She said. “I didn’t say that. You must have misunderstood.” Harry said, “I must have — all right.”

“You must have heard wrong. What did I say?”

At such times Andrea would become agitated, running her hands through her hair so it stood in affrighted comical tufts; her mouth would tremble and twist. “It’s all right, Andy,” Harry would say, “— hey c’mon. It’s fine.” He would stop her hands and maybe kiss them, the moist palms. Or slide his arms around her playful and husbandly. How small Andrea was, how small an adult woman can be, bones you could fracture by squeezing, so be careful. Harry’s heart seemed to hurt, in sympathy. “Don’t think about it anymore today, Andy, okay? I love you.”

And Andrea might say, vague, wondering, as if she were making this observation for the first time, which in fact she was not, “— The only other person who ever called me ‘Andy’ was Frannie. Did you know?”

He’d been trained as a lawyer. Not criminal law but corporate law. But he came to wonder if possibly Andrea had been attracted to him originally, that evening, because he had a law degree. When he’d mentioned law school, at Yale, her attention had quickened.

Unless he was imagining this? Human memory is notoriously unreliable, like film fading in amnesiac patches.

Memory: Frannie McClure now exists only in memory.

That’s what’s so terrible about being dead, Harry thought wryly. You depend for your existence as a historic fact upon the memories of others. Failing, finite, mortal themselves.

Though they’d never discussed it in such abstract terms, for Andrea seemed to shrink from speaking of her sister in anything but the most particular way, Harry understood that her anxiety was not simply that Albert Jefferson Rooke might be released on parole after having served only twenty years of a life sentence but that, if he was. Frannie McClure’s claim to permanent, tragic significance would be challenged.

Also: For Frannie McClure to continue to exist as a historic fact, the memories that preserve her as a specific individual — not a mere name, a sexual assault statistic — court case must continue to exist. These were still, after twenty years, fairly numerous, for as an American girl who’d gone to a large public high school and had just about completed two years of college, she’d known, and been known by, hundreds of people; but the number was naturally decreasing year by year. Andrea could count them on the fingers of both hands — relatives, neighbors who’d known Frannie from the time of her birth to the time of her death. The grandmother who’d lived in a splendid beachfront condominium overlooking Apalachee Bay of the Gulf of Mexico had been dead since 1979. She’d never recovered from the shock and grief, of course. And there was Andrea’s father, dead since 1981. And Andrea’s mother, whom Harry had yet to meet, and whom Andrea spoke of with purposeful vagueness as a “difficult” woman, living now in a retirement community in Roanoke, never spoke of her murdered daughter to anyone. So it was impossible to gauge to what extent the mother’s memory did in fact preserve the dead girl.

Sometimes, when Andrea was out of the apartment, Harry contemplated the snapshots of Frannie McClure by himself. There was one of her dated Christmas 1969, she’d been fifteen at the time, hugging her ten-year-old sister Andy and clowning for the camera, a beautiful girl, in an oversized sweater and jeans, her brown eyes given an eerie red-maroon glisten by the camera’s flash. Behind the girls, a seven-foot Christmas tree, resplendent with useless ornamentation.

Harry noted: When he and Andrea made love it was nearly always in complete silence except for Andrea’s murmured incoherent words, her soft cries, muffled sobs. You could credit such sounds to love, passion. But essentially there was silence, a qualitatively different silence from what Harry recalled from their early nights together. Harry understood that Andrea was thinking of Frannie’s struggling body as it, too, was penetrated by a man’s penis; this excited Harry enormously but made him cautious about being gentle, not allowing his weight to rest so heavily upon Andrea. The challenge for Harry as a lover was to shake Andrea free of her trance and force her into concentrating on him. If Harry could involve Andrea in physical sensation, in actual passion, he would have succeeded. At the same time Harry had to concentrate on Andrea, exclusively upon Andrea, and not allow his mind to swerve to the mysterious doomed girl of the snapshots.

The call from the Victim/Witness Program advocate came for Andrea in late March. Giving her only twenty-six days to prepare, emotionally and otherwise, for the hearing on April 20, in Tallahassee. Andrea mentioned to Harry that it was only a coincidence, of course — the first parole hearing for Rooke had been scheduled for a Tuesday, which was a week and two days following Easier, and it was 12:10 A.M. of the Tuesday following Easter 1973 that the call came from Wakana Beach notifying the McClures of Frannie’s death.

Andrea went on, wiping at her eyes, “It wasn’t clear from that first call just how Frannie had died. What he’d done to her. She was dead, that was the fact. They said it was an ‘assault’ and they’d arrested the man but they didn’t go into details over the telephone — of course. Not that kind of details. I suppose it’s procedure. Notifying families when someone’s been killed — that requires procedure. When they called Grandma, to make the identification, that night, that must have been difficult. She’d collapsed, she didn’t remember much about it afterward. My mother and father had to make the identification, too. I suppose it was only Frannie’s face? — but her face was so damaged. I didn’t see, and the casket was closed, so I don’t know. I shouldn’t be talking about something I don’t know, should I? I shouldn’t be involving you in this, should I? So I’ll stop.”

“Of course I want to be involved, honey,” Harry said. “I’m going with you. I’ll help you all I can.”

“No, really, you don’t have to. Please don’t feel that you have to.”

“Of course I’m going with you to that goddamned hearing,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t let you go through something so terrible alone.”

“But I could do it,” Andrea said. “Don’t you think I could? I’m not fourteen years old now. I’m all grown up.”

Except: Harry heard Andrea crying when he woke and discovered she was gone from bed, several nights in succession hearing her in the bathroom with the fan running to muffle her sobs. Or was it Andrea talking to herself in a low, rapid voice. Rehearsing her testimony for the parole board. She’d been told it was best not to read a prepared statement, nor give the impression that she was repeating a prepared statement. So in the night locked in the bathroom with the fan running to muffle her words which were punctuated with sobs, or curses. Andrea practiced her role as Harry lay sleepless wondering. Am I strong enough? What is required of me?

This, without telling Andrea: A few days before they were scheduled to fly to Tallahassee, Harry drove to the Georgetown Law School library and looked up the transcript of the December 1975 appeal of the verdict of guilty in the People of the State of Florida v. Albert Jefferson Rooke of September 1973. He’d only begun reading Rooke’s confession when he realized there was something wrong with it.

That night I got a feeling I wanted to do it... hurt one of them real had... so I went out to find her... a girl or a woman... I hate them... I really hate them... I get a kick out of hurting people... I get a kick out of putting something over on you guys... so I saw this girl on the beach... I’d never seen her before... I jumped her and she started to scream and that pissed me off and I got real mad... and so on through twenty-three pages of a rambling monologue Harry believed he’d read before, or something very like it; its Wakana Beach, Florida, details specific but its essence, its tone familiar.

What was Albert Jefferson Rooke’s “confession” but standard boilerplate said to have been used until recently in certain parts of the United States by police who have arrested a vulnerable, highly suspicious subject? A stranger in a community, so drunk or stoned or so marginal and despicable a human being witnesses take one look at him and say He’s the one! cops take one look at him He’s the one! and if the poor bastard hadn’t committed this crime you can assume he’s committed any number of other crimes he’s never been caught for so let’s help him remember, let’s give him a little assistance. Harry could imagine it: This straggly-haired hippie-punk brought handcuffed to police headquarters raving and disoriented not knowing where the hell he is, waives his right to call an attorney or maybe they don’t even read him the Miranda statement, he’s eager to cooperate with these cops so they slop beating his head against the wall and won’t “restrain” him with a choke hold when he “resists” for it’s self-evident to these professionals as eventually to a jury that this is exactly the kind of sick degenerate pervert who rapes, mutilates, murders. Sure we know “Albert Jefferson Rooke,” he’s our man.

Harry sat in the law library for a long time staring into space. He felt weak, sick. Can it be? Is it possible?

Andrea said, “Please don’t feel you should care about this — obsession of mine. You have your own work, and you have your own life. It isn’t—” and here she paused, her mouth working, “— as if we’re married.”

“What has that got to do with it?” Harry saw how the quickened light in Andrea’s eyes for him, at his approach, had gone dead; she was shrinking from him. He’d come home from the law library and he’d told her just that he’d been reading about the Rooke trial and would she like to discuss it in strictly legal terms and she’d turned to him this waxy dead-white face, these pinched eyes, as if he’d confessed being unfaithful to her. “That isn’t an issue.”

“I shouldn’t have told you about Frannie. It was selfish of me. You’re the only person in my life now who knows and it was a mistake for me to tell you and I’m sorry.”

She walked blindly out of the room. This was the kind of apology that masks bitter resentment. Harry knew the tone, Harry had been there before.

Still. Harry followed Andrea, into another room, and to a window where she stood trembling, refusing to look at him, saying in a low rapid voice as if to herself how she shouldn’t have involved him, he had never known her sister, what a burden to place upon him, a stranger to the family, how shortsighted she’d been, that night the call had come for her she should have asked him please to go home, this was a private matter — and Harry listened, couldn’t bring himself to interrupt, he loved this woman didn’t he, in any case he can’t hurt her, not now. She was saying, “I’m not a vengeful person, it’s justice I want for Frannie. Her memory is in my trust — I’m all she has, now.”

Harry said, carefully, “Andy, it’s all right. We can discuss it some other time.” On the plane to Tallahassee, maybe? They were leaving in the morning.

Andrea said. “We don’t have to discuss it at all! I’m not a vengeful person.”

“No one has said you’re a vengeful person. Who’s said that?”

“You didn’t know Frannie and maybe you don’t know me. I’m not always sure who I am. But I know what I have to do.”

“That’s the important thing, then. That’s the—” Harry was searching for the absolutely right, the perfect word, which eluded him, unless, “— moral thing, then. Of course.”

The moral thing, then. Of course. On the plane to Tallahassee, he’d tell her.

But that night Andrea slept poorly. And in the early morning, Harry believed he heard her being sick in the bathroom. And on their way to the airport and on the plane south Andrea’s eyes were unnaturally bright, glistening and the pupils dilated and she was alternately silent and nervously loquacious, gripping his hand much of the time and how could he tell her, for what did he know, he knew something, only suspected, it was up to Rooke’s defense attorney to raise such issues, how could he interfere, he could not.

Andrea said, her forehead creased like a chamois cloth that’s been crumpled, “It’s so strange: I keep seeing his face, he’s my audience. I’m brought into this room that’s darkened and at the front the parole board is sitting and the lights are on them and he’s there — he hasn’t changed in twenty years. As soon as he sees me, he knows. He sees, not me, of course not me, he wouldn’t remember me, but Frannie. He sees Frannie. I’ve been reading these documents they’ve sent me, you know, and the most outrageous, the really obscene thing is. Rooke claims he doesn’t remember Frannie’s name, even! He claims he never saw her and he never raped her and he never tortured her and he never strangled her, he never knew her, and now, after twenty years, he’s saying he wouldn’t remember her name if he isn’t told it!” Andrea looked at Harry, to see if he was sharing her outrage. “But when he sees me, he’ll see Frannie, and he’ll remember everything. And he’ll know. He’ll know he’s going back to prison for the rest of his life. Because Frannie wouldn’t want revenge, she wasn’t that kind of person, but she would want justice.”

Harry considered: Is the truth worth it? — even if we can know the truth.

In the end, in the State Justice Building in Tallahassee, it wasn’t clear whether Albert Jefferson Rooke was on the premises when Andrea spoke with the parole board: and Andrea made no inquiries. In a blind, blinking daze she was escorted into a room by a young woman attorney from the Victim/Witness Program and Harry Steinhart was allowed to accompany her as a friend of the McClure family, though not a witness. At last, Harry thought. It will be over, something will be decided.

The interview lasted one hour and forty minutes during which time Andrea held the undivided attention of the seven middle-aged Caucasian men who constituted the board — she’d brought along her cherished snapshots of her murdered sister, she read from letters written to her by Frannie, and by former teachers, friends, and acquaintances mourning Frannie’s death in such a way as to make you realize (even Harry, as if for the first time, his eyes brimming with tears) that a young woman named Frances McClure did live, and that her loss to the world is a tragedy. The room in which Andrea spoke was windowless, on the eleventh floor of a sleekly modern building, not at all the room Andrea seemed to have envisioned but one brightly lit by recessed fluorescent lighting. No shadows here. The positioning of the chair in which Andrea sat, facing at an angle the long table where the seven men sat, suggested a minimal, stylized stage. Andrea wore a dark-blue linen suit and a creamy silk blouse and her slender legs were nearly hidden beneath the suit’s fashionably long, flared skirt. Her face was pale, and her forehead finely crossed with the evidence of grief, her voice now and then trembling but overall she remained composed, speaking calmly, looking each of the parole board members in the eye, each in turn; answering their courteous questions unhesitatingly, with feeling, as if they were all companions involved in a single moral cause. It’s people like us against people like him. By the end of the interview Andrea was beginning to crack, her voice not quite so composed and her eyes spilling tears but still she managed to speak steadily, softly, each word enunciated with care. “No one can ever undo what Albert Jefferson Rooke did to my sister — even if the State of Florida imprisons him for all his life, as he’d been sentenced. He escaped the electric chair by changing his plea and then he changed his plea again so we know how he values the truth and he’s never expressed the slightest remorse for his crime so we know he’s the same man who killed my sister, he can’t have changed in twenty years. He hasn’t come to terms with his crime, or his sickness. We know that violent sex offenders rarely change even with therapy, and this man has not had therapy relating to his sickness because he has always denied his sickness. So he’ll rape and kill again. He’ll take his revenge on the first young girl he can, the way he did with my sister — he can always pretend he doesn’t remember any of it afterward. He’s claiming now he doesn’t even remember my sister’s name but her name is Frances McClure and others remember. He claims he wants to be free on parole so he can ‘begin again.’ What is a man like that going to ‘begin again’? I see he’s collected a file of letters from well-intentioned, fair-minded people he’s deceived the way he hopes to deceive you gentlemen — you know what prison inmates call this strategy, it’s a vulgar word I hesitate to say: bullshitting.’ They learn to bullshit’ the prison guards and the therapists and the social workers and the chaplains and, yes, the parole boards. Sometimes they claim they’re sorry for their crimes and won’t ever do such things again — they’re ‘remorseful.’ But in this killer’s case, there isn’t even ‘remorse.’ He just wants to get out of prison to ‘begin again.’ I seem to know how he probably talked to you, tried to convince you it doesn’t matter what he did twenty years ago this Faster because he’s reformed now, no more drugs and no more crime now. He’ll get a job, he’s eager to work. I seem to know how you want to believe him, because we want to believe people when they speak like this. It’s a Christian impulse. It’s a humane impulse. It makes us feel good about ourselves — we can be ‘charitable.’ But a prisoner’s word for this strategy is ‘bullshitting’ and that’s what we need to keep in mind. This killer has appealed to you to release him on parole — to ‘bullshit’ you into believing him. But I’ve come to speak the truth. I’m here on my sister’s behalf. She’d say, she’d plead — don’t release this vicious, sick, murderous man back into society, to commit more crimes! Don’t be the well-intentioned parties whose ‘charity’ will lead to another innocent girl being brutally raped and murdered. It’s too late for me, Frannie would say, but potential victims — they can be spared.”

Only a half-hour later, Andrea was informed that the parole board voted unanimously against releasing Albert Jefferson Rooke. She asked could she thank the board members and she was escorted back into the room and Harry waited for her, smiling in relief as she shook their hands one by one. Now she did burst into tears but it was all right. Telling Harry afterward, in their hotel room, “Every one of those men thanked me. They thanked me. One of them said. If it wasn’t for you. Miss McClure, we might’ve made a bad mistake.’”

Harry said, in a neutral voice, “It was a real triumph, then, wasn’t it? You exerted your will, and you triumphed.”

Andrea looked at him, puzzled. She was removing her linen jacket and hanging it carefully on a pink silk hanger. Her face was soft, that soft brimming of her eyes, soft curve of her mouth, the woman’s most intimate look, the look Harry sees in her face after love. Yet there’s a clarity to her voice, almost a sharpness. “Oh, no — it wasn’t my will. It was Frannie’s. I spoke for her and I told the truth for her and that was all. Now it’s over.”

That evening Andrea is too exhausted to eat anywhere except in their hotel room and midway through the dinner she’s too exhausted to finish it and then too exhausted to undress herself, to take a bath, to climb into the enormous king-sized canopied bed without Harry’s help. He’s exhausted, too. And he’s been drinking. Since that afternoon foreseeing with calm, impersonal horror how, like clockwork, every several years Albert Jefferson Rooke will present himself to the parole board and Andrea will fly to Tallahassee to present herself in opposition to the man she believes to be her sister’s murderer; and so it will go through the years, and Rooke might die one day in prison, and this would release them both, or Rooke might be freed on parole, finally — of that, Harry doesn’t want to think. Not right now.

In the ridiculous elevated bed, the lights out; a murmurous indefinable sound that might be the air-conditioning, or someone in an adjacent room quietly and drunkenly arguing; the feverish damp warmth of Andrea’s body, her mouth hungry against his, her slender arms around his neck. Naively, childishly, in a voice Harry has never heard before, as if this is, of all Andrea’s several voices, the one truly her own, she asks, “Do you love me, Harry? Will you always love me?” and he kisses her mouth, her breasts, her warm flat belly, bunching her nightgown in his fists, he whispers, “Yes.”