Don’t Look Back

‘Excuse me, but who are you?’

‘A friend of Walter’s.’ She rushed on, as if forestalling a question she was asked all the time. ‘I’m not one of those women who moons over an inmate, one of those wackos. I’m opposed to the death penalty in general, but Virginia is where I’ve decided to focus my interest, especially since Maryland has a de facto moratorium. I’m a compassionate friend to several inmates. But Walter’s my favorite. Do you know that Virginia is second, nationwide, in terms of the raw numbers of people executed? Texas is first, of course, but it has a much larger population. And if you knew how the appeals process was structured here—’ That laugh again. She was one of those people who used laughter as punctuation, no matter how inappropriate.

‘If you really know Walter—’

‘I do,’ she shot back, apparently offended at Eliza’s use of the conditional.

‘I mean, I assume you know his story and mine. Which means you know he’s not someone I’ve been in contact with, ever.’

‘Do you think he deserves to die for what he did?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think. He was sentenced to die for the murder of Holly Tackett, and her parents made it clear that they approved of the death penalty. I wasn’t consulted.’

‘Wasn’t your mom a Quaker?’

‘Grandmother,’ she said, unnerved by this piece of information. Was it something she had told Walter? They talked a lot, during the weeks they’d spent together, but she had been careful not to reveal much. Even at the age of fifteen, she had been shrewd enough not to encourage Walter’s envy and resentment, and she had recognized, if only in the wake of her capture, that her family was eminently enviable. She had avoided telling him that her parents were psychiatrists, for example, much less that her mother worked with the criminally insane. She described her home as average, an aging split-level on the south side of Frederick Road, the better to throw him off the track if he ever made good on his threats. She had no memory of discussing her gentle grandmother, who attended the Quaker meetinghouse in North Baltimore and thought the girls should attend the Friends School, despite the distance from their house. She had even offered to pay their tuition.

Later – after – that option had been raised again, sending Elizabeth-now-Eliza to Friends, perhaps having her live with her grandmother during the week. But Eliza was the one who vetoed it. She wanted to go to a larger school, not a smaller one. She needed to be someplace where being new wouldn’t attract as much attention.

‘I bet your grandmother wouldn’t want Walter to be executed.’

‘This conversation is . . . unsettling to me,’ Eliza said. ‘I’m sure you can understand that. I’m going to need to let you go.’

It occurred to her that she was being kinder to this woman – why hadn’t she offered her name – than she would have been to a telephone solicitor.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, with a sincerity that robbed Eliza of any self-righteousness she might have felt. ‘I get carried away. Walter would be the first person to tell you that. He’d be mad, if he knew that I had upset you. It’s just – there’s so little I can do. For him. Putting him in touch with you, it’s one of the rare times I could do him a solid.’

Do him a solid. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that phrase.

‘He would be angry at me, for pressing you. That’s not his way. He would love to talk to you. But he would be the first one to say that he doesn’t want to bother you.’

‘Does he want to talk to me about something in particular?’

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘He feels bad. He knows he’s going to die. He accepts that. He’s been on death row longer than anyone in Virginia. Did you know that? He’s seen other men come and . . . go. I think he started to believe his turn would never come, but his case was so unusual. As you know.’

Eliza wasn’t sure that she did know the ways in which Walter’s case was unusual, but she refused to be drawn into this conversation.

‘Could I have your name?’ she asked the woman.

‘Why?’ Suspicious, skeptical. Eliza wanted to laugh. You call me, on Walter’s behalf, you make it possible for him to write to me, and you question my motives?

‘Because I’m going to think about this and call you back.’

‘You better not be up to anything,’ the woman warned. ‘Don’t make trouble for us. We haven’t done anything wrong.’

This is silly, Eliza thought, thinking for the first time to look at the caller ID feature on her phone. Blocked. ‘This is silly,’ she said. ‘You called me. You have asked for, well, an enormous favor and demanded an immediate reply. All I want is time to think about it.’

‘I’ll get back to you,’ the woman said. ‘Early next week. We don’t have much time, you know.’

Chapter Twelve

1985

The hair ribbon, Walter thought when he read the Baltimore papers two mornings later. That goddamn Madonna-inspired hair ribbon. When had it fallen off? Had she been sly enough to drop it on purpose when he pulled her into the truck? He had remembered to grab her boots, thinking she would need shoes, and those would have to do until he could get her more practical ones. No matter. Searchers had found the ribbon, and then they had found the grave. The paper, running a day behind events, said the body had not yet been exhumed, but as soon as it was uncovered, they would know it wasn’t her. The body had probably already been unearthed and identified, while he sat here with scorched coffee and runny eggs.

He was in a truck stop in western Maryland, near the fork where one had to choose whether to keep going west, toward Cumberland, or head north into Pennsylvania. East, toward Baltimore, was out of the question. Head north, head north, head north, his brain told him, then west. But his truck had West Virginia plates, and it was a funny thing, one didn’t see them much on the open road, away from his home state. And he had been looking for those blue-and-gold plates, he realized. True, they probably weren’t quite as rare on the Ohio Turnpike, but he was still reluctant to go that way, in part because he had never been that way. He wasn’t adventurous, he realized now. He thought he had yearned to travel, to see places far beyond where he grew up, but now all he wanted was to go home. Only he couldn’t. Not with her, and maybe not at all, ever again. What would he tell his parents about the time he went missing? Whatever he did with her, he would have to answer a lot of questions.

Elizabeth was flipping through the selections on the mini-jukebox set up on the table. Just thirty-six hours into their acquaintance, as he thought of it, she had already learned to speak when spoken to, not to yammer away about every little thing in her head. She had good manners, actually. This morning, she had ordered scrambled eggs and an English muffin, but accepted without complaint the fried eggs and wheat toast that came in their place. The waitress was a knockout in training, with flame- colored hair and a terrific figure, and Walter could tell she was used to not getting things right and facing no consequences. He had wanted to call her back, dress her down, but Elizabeth had said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ It was clear from how she nibbled only the whites around the yolk that she wasn’t fine, but he admired her niceness. The waitress, all of nineteen or twenty, looked through him. Did she think Elizabeth was his girlfriend? Or that he was her father? Brother and sister, he decided. That would be the most believable play, the simplest.

The smarter move, he knew, would be to kill her. Kill her, get rid of the body – don’t even bother to dig a grave this time, just leave her somewhere inaccessible, there was still plenty of wilderness out here – and go home. Tell his folks he’d been on a fishing trip, had some car trouble, had to wait for a part, didn’t want to call collect and couldn’t afford to dial long-distance because he was saving every penny to pay the mechanic in cash. There was nothing to connect the girl back in Patapsco State Park to him, or any other girl. This girl was the only one who could hurt him.

Yet there was something about her, struggling to choke down her eggs, that reminded him of someone. She’s like me, he thought. She’s polite and nice, she does her best, and people don’t hear her, don’t pay attention.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he asked.

She was in the habit of thinking before she answered him. He realized this was partly because she was weighing everything she said, intent on pleasing him. That was good.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

‘Well, how old are you?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘That’s too young for a boyfriend.’ He knew that he had attempted to go with girls her age, or not much older, but there was fifteen and then there was fifteen. She was the first kind.

‘There was a boy, at this camp I went to last summer, and we were kind of boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t really count at camp because you don’t make plans.’

‘What do you mean?’ He honestly didn’t have a clue what she meant, and he hoped her answer might shed some light on one of the many things that baffled him when it came to women.

‘Well, at camp, there’s a schedule. No one can invite you to go anywhere – to a movie, or the mall, or even a McDonald’s. So you sit on the bus together, or swim together, and you hold hands’ – she blushed at this. Maybe he was wrong, maybe she had done more than he realized. ‘It’s not a date, and it ends when camp ends. He called me, once, but we didn’t really have anything to talk about. I wrote him letters, and he never wrote back.’

‘Yeah, I see your point.’ He didn’t, not really, but he didn’t have anything to contribute, so he wanted to move on. ‘Look, what would you do, if I just got up right now, paid the check, went out to my truck, and started driving?’

Again, she did not answer right away.

‘Elizabeth?’

‘I guess I’d ask the people if I could use their phone, make a collect call, and I’d call my parents, tell them where I was.’

‘Do you know where you are?’

‘Sort of. Not exactly. But the people here, they would tell me, right?’

He looked around. ‘Lower your voice,’ he said. ‘I’m serious.’

She flinched. It was amazing how easily he could control her. He liked it.

‘I’d call my parents collect,’ she whispered, ‘and then I’d wait for them to come get me.’