Don’t Look Back

Which, in a way, was pretty close to the truth.

The dress that had excited Peter wasn’t a sexy dress, not really, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she normally wore, and that was novelty enough. The shoes had been a London splurge, a ridiculous thing to buy there, given the exchange rate at the time. Vonnie could have picked up the same shoes in New York for almost half the price and brought them to Eliza on one of her business trips. Eliza had purchased them to save face when she was snubbed in a Knightsbridge boutique, the kind of shop where the clothes appeared to have been tailored in defiance of the female body. The shoes were not visible in the photograph in Washingtonian magazine, but the dress – emerald green, with a boat neck – was. She studied it now. This was what Walter had seen, this was how he had found her. Did she really look that similar to her teen self? She had been almost eighteen the last time she saw him, and although she had filled out since the summer he had kidnapped her, she still looked younger than her age. Even now, ten pounds over her ideal weight, her face remained thin, her jawline sharp. Maybe that was all he needed to spot her. That, and the shortened first name, which wasn’t much of a mask when someone knew the real one.

‘Mom?’ Albie’s voice seemed to be coming from the kitchen. ‘Are we going to have lunch?’

‘Soon,’ she called back from the desk in the family room, still looking at her photo, trying, and not for the first time, to see herself as Walter had seen her. She looked nothing like his two known victims, tall blondes. She understood why he had taken her, but why had he let her live? He claimed he had been planning to let her go when he started driving toward Point of Rocks, but was that just a story he told after the fact? It didn’t matter. They had found Holly’s body at the bottom of a ravine; they had already dug up Maude, the Maryland girl he had attempted to bury in Patapsco State Park.

It occurred to Eliza, truly for the first time, to try her old name in an Internet search. Paging Dr Freud, Vonnie would have said with a snort. But Eliza’s identity had been so entrenched as Eliza Benedict by the time the Internet became a part of daily life that she had never stopped to think about Elizabeth Lerner. It was a common enough name that multiple Elizabeths popped up, in family trees and press releases and blogs. The first reference she found to herself was taken from that book. Ugh. Murder on the Mountain was a disgusting quickie churned out by Jared Garrett, a bizarre cop groupie who had followed Walter’s story with what even a teenager could see was an inappropriate fascination. There was an excerpt on Google, and her name leaped out from the leaden prose.

A boyish girl who looked younger than she was, Elizabeth testified that Walter did not attempt sexual congress with her for several weeks, but that she was, ultimately, subjected to his advances. Curiously, he left her alive. Walter clearly considered Elizabeth different from his other victims, although he himself has refused to explain the relationship, other than to remark once, in an interview with state police: ‘She was good company.’ Asked if she was a hostage, Bowman said: ‘I didn’t demand ransom, did I?’ His answers did little to deflect curiosity about the true nature of the relationship between the two.

‘What are you doing, Mom?’ Albie leaned against the door-jamb, hands in pockets. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his mother’s activities, merely bored enough with his own life to try to engage her.

‘Nothing,’ she said, erasing the cached history and closing the window. She wouldn’t want Iso’s prying fingers to wander into any of these Web sites. ‘Are you hungry? What do you want for lunch?’

‘Those sandwiches that Grandmother makes?’ he asked hopefully. Peter’s mother made elaborate sandwiches from deli roast beef and dark bread, chopping cornichons and putting them in brown mustard, then adding horseradish and a judicious sprinkling of salt and pepper.

‘I might not have everything Nonnie has, but I think I could make a fair approximation,’ she said, taking a quick mental inventory of the refrigerator’s contents, calculating that butter pickles would approximate the experience Albie craved, which was more about the chopping and mixing, making an exciting ritual out of something mundane. Albie loved productions, and with a child as easily pleased as Albie, it seemed a shame not to try to meet his expectations. Especially now, when everything and anything she did antagonized Iso. ‘Mom, you’re breathing too loud,’ she had said the other day in Trader Joe’s. ‘Loudly,’ Eliza had corrected, then felt awful for using grammar to one-up her daughter. Not that it had worked.

Albie put his hand in hers, as if the walk to the kitchen were a journey of miles. She wished it were, that he would stay this age for three, four years, then be nine for a decade or so, then spend another ten years being ten. But onetime graduate student of children’s literature that she was, she knew there was no spell, no magic, that could keep a child a child, or shield a child from the world at large. In fact, that was where the trouble almost always began, with a parent trying to outthink fate. Stay on the path. Don’t touch the spindle. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t pick the rose.

Chapter Eight

1985

He had gone too far this time. Literally, too far. He had headed out Wednesday morning, telling himself he had no plans, then driven and driven until the landscape had changed, civilization coming at him all of a sudden. He would never get back in time for dinner now. And, although there were girls everywhere, they were never alone, but traveling in groups, gaggles. He stopped at a mall and almost became dizzy at the sight of all the girls there, girls with bare midriffs and short shorts. He leaned on the railing on the second floor, watching them move in lazy circles below, flit in and out of the food court, where they would briefly interact with the boys, then plunge back into the mall proper. The boys looked baffled by these quicksilver girls. They were too immature, they couldn’t give these girls what they wanted.

But neither could he, unless he got one alone, had a chance to sweet-talk her. He would go slow this time, real slow.

He drove past a fenced swimming pool – that was a kind of water, wasn’t it? – stationed himself in the parking lot, stealing glances through the chain-link fence. The girls here seemed intertwined. Not actually touching but strung together by invisible threads, their limbs moving in lazy unison. They would flip on cue, sit up on cue, run combs through their hair at the same moment. Boys circled these girls, too, silly and deferential. They didn’t have a chance.

He caught an older woman, a leathery mom, frowning at him, decided to move on.

He had almost given up, was wondering how he would explain all the miles on the truck – he could fill the gas tank, but he couldn’t erase seventy, eighty, ninety miles from an odometer – when he saw the right girl. Tall, filled out, but walking as if her body was still new to her, as if she had borrowed it from someone else and had to give it back at day’s end, in good condition. She was on a sidewalk in a ghost town of a neighborhood, a place so empty and quiet that it felt like they were the last two people on Earth. He stopped and – sudden inspiration – asked her for directions to the mall, although he knew his way back there. Her face wasn’t quite as pretty as he had hoped – Earl, the other mechanic back at his father’s place called this kind of girl a Butterface – but she had a serious expression that was very touching, as if she wanted to make sure she gave precise directions. Only she kept getting a little mixed up over the street names, trying to give him directions according to landmarks he couldn’t know – the Baileys’ house, the nursery school where her little sister went, the High’s store.

‘I admit, I just can’t follow all these directions,’ he said with an aw-shucks grin. ‘Are you going that way? Maybe you could show me.’

Oh, no, she wasn’t going that far. She just had to catch a bus to Route 40.

Maybe he could take her as far as she was going?

The sun was strong, so powerful that everything looked white, unreal. This was a pale girl, one who didn’t get to spend her afternoons at the pool. She was heading to work. He could take her to work, Walter said, and then she could draw him a map on – where did she work?

‘An ice-cream parlor.’

‘Friendly’s? Swensen’s? Baskin-Robbins?’

‘Just a local place. It’s kind of old-fashioned.’

She could draw him a map on a napkin, then, once he dropped her off. How would that be?

He waited until she was in the cab of the truck and they had driven a little ways before pointing out that she would be early for her shift. Right? She had been walking to a bus stop, and the bus would take so much longer than a direct shot in the truck. He was hungry. Was she hungry? Would she like to stop for something?

She got to eat free at work, she said.

Well, gosh, that was great, but he sure didn’t expect her to give him the same deal.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The manager is really strict, always looking out for girls who gave freebies to their . . . friends.’

‘Boyfriends?’ he asked, and she blushed. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

She considered the question, which struck him as odd. Seemed a clear yes-or-no proposition to him. Maybe she had a boyfriend who didn’t satisfy her. Maybe she was thinking about breaking up with him but was tenderhearted, didn’t want to hurt his feelings. What a nice girl she was.

‘Anyway,’ she said, not answering him either way, ‘it’s only ice cream, no burgers or hot dogs or even pizza. We had hot pretzels for a while, but no one wanted them and—’

Then maybe they could stop at this little place he knew, by a stream? There was a metal stand, kind of like an old-fashioned trailer, and it made the best steak sandwiches. There was no such place, not nearby, but Walter had heard a gentleman at the shop describe the steak sandwiches he had eaten in his youth, back in Wisconsin.

Walter got lost, looking for the steak shack that wasn’t, driving deeper and deeper into what turned out to be a state park. He made conversation, asked again if she had a boyfriend. She hemmed and hawed but finally said no. Good, he wouldn’t like a girl who would cheat on her boyfriend. She was getting nervous, her eyes skating back and forth, but he promised her that she would be on time for work. He told her he was surprised that a girl as pretty as she was didn’t have a boyfriend. He could tell she liked hearing that, yet she continued to hug the door a little. The road ran out and he parked, told her that he had screwed up, the steak place was on the other side of the creek, but they could cross it and be there in five minutes, if she would just take his hand. Once he had his hand in hers, he tickled the palm with his middle finger, a trick he had heard from Earl, before Earl ran off and joined the Marines. It was a signal and, if the girl liked you, she tickled back. Or maybe if she just didn’t jerk her hand away, he decided, that was proof enough that she was up for things.

He tried to take it slow, but she kept talking about work, fretting about being late, and then she started to cry. She cried harder when he kissed her, and he was pretty sure he was a good kisser. She cried so hard that snot ran out of her nose, which was gross, and he stopped kissing her.

‘I guess you don’t want to be my girlfriend, then,’ he said. She kept crying. Why were girls so contrary? Of course, he lived pretty far away. They wouldn’t be able to see each other except on his days off. But she should be flattered, this girl who no one else had claimed, that a man, a nice-looking man, wanted her. A man who would please her, if she would allow herself to be pleased.

‘Are you going to tell?’ he asked.

She said she wouldn’t, and he wished he could believe her. He didn’t, though. So he did what he had to do. He was tamping down the hole he dug when he saw the other girl coming. How much had she seen? Anything, everything? He thought fast, told her how to cross the stream. He held his hands out to her, and she didn’t hesitate. Her hands felt cool and smooth against his, which were burning with new calluses from the digging. If anyone should have wanted to let go, it should have been him. It hurt, holding her hands. He studied her face. He wished women didn’t lie so much, that there was a way to ask if she had seen anything without giving away that there had been something to see. It was like that old riddle, the one about the island with just two Indians, one who always lies and one who always tells the truth, but there’s one question that will set things straight. Only he could never remember what the question was. Something like: If I ask your brother, will he tell me the truth? No, that wasn’t it, because both would say no. What should he ask her? But he had taken too long, held her hands too roughly, and given himself away.

‘You’re with me now,’ he said, buckling her into the seat next to his, then tying her hands at the wrists with a rope from the bed of the pickup.

Then, as an afterthought: ‘What’s your name?’

Chapter Nine

She decided to write Walter a letter, nothing more. That’s the way she characterized her decision, when she spoke of it to Peter and her parents. ‘I’m going to write him a letter,’ she said, ‘nothing more.’ A letter would be private, final. (Although she supposed his mail was read by prison officials. Again, there was the worrying detail of his confidante, the person who had written the letter on his behalf, but she didn’t want to write him in care of that PO box in Baltimore.) A letter seemed the best way to go if she wanted to keep this matter contained.

Yet whenever she sat down at Peter’s home computer, trying to use those oddments of minutes at a mother’s disposal, she ended up second-guessing herself. A letter wasn’t a small thing, not these days. Even when she lived in London, she hadn’t written letters. Trans- Atlantic calls weren’t that expensive, and e-mails were always handy for rushed bulletins, or sharing the details of their visits home. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had written a letter, and Walter’s was the first real one she had received in years, probably since Vonnie switched to computers for those furious missives about how everyone in the family had disappointed her, a brief mania during her early thirties, when she was under the sway of a disreputable therapist, possibly her lover. But how else did one communicate with a man in prison?

Eliza smiled in spite of herself, thinking how this question would fit nicely on the running list she and Peter kept, ‘Things We Never Expected to Say.’ They had been keeping this since their college days, almost since the day they met, and it was actually a list of things they had overheard: The bouillabaisse is dank. I left my poncho at the Ritz-Carlton. I have a fetish for fried chicken.

Except – How does one communicate with a man in prison was not quite that bizarre, much less unique. Not in the world at large, and certainly not in Eliza’s world in particular, given her mother’s work at the Patuxent Institute and Eliza’s peculiar history. One could even argue that it was an inevitable question, that if she had allowed herself to think about such things, she would have known that Walter would not leave this world without sending out some sort of manifesto. Not to her, necessarily. She really had come to be almost smug about how she had hidden herself in plain sight. She may not have deliberately chosen to hide herself from Walter, but between Peter’s surname and the move to London, she had felt relatively invisible.

Walter always had a grandiose streak, a concept of himself as someone much larger than he was, in every sense of the word. He had insisted he was five nine, when he was clearly no more than five six or five seven. He became about as angry as Eliza ever saw him, talking about his height, claiming those inches he didn’t have. It was one of the rare times she felt she had the upper hand with him, which had been terrifying and pleasing in equal measure. She couldn’t afford the upper hand with Walter, or so she thought. Later, when people used terms like ‘Stockholm syndrome’ – not her parents, but people far removed from her, prosecutors, journalists, and that odious Jared Garrett – she had found it offensively glib. That experience of being labeled had left her with a lifelong distaste for gossip, a reticence so pronounced that many people thought her incurious, when her real problem was an almost pathological politeness. She hated Iso’s fascination with celebrities, the way she pored over magazine and Internet photos, passing judgment on dresses and hairdos and habits of people she had never met. But Eliza could never explain the virulence of her revulsion to her daughter, not unless she was willing to tell her everything. She would, one day, not today.

As she dawdled at the computer – it was late, after ten, but Peter had yet another function, one from which she was spared because the babysitter had fallen through – an icon glowed in the lower corner of her screen, announcing her sister’s arrival into this netherworld.

Hi, Vonnie, she typed.

Eliza! The exclamation mark signaled surprise, if not necessarily delight. Eliza had never before initiated an IM conversation with her sister, and had been famously taci-turn when her sister tried to engage her via this mode. What’s up?