A Necessary End (32 page)

Y
ou all know I've been following the case of Joy Ellison,” Summer Jackson intones, “the Colorado woman who is presumed to have disappeared at least five months ago, though her husband only reported it six weeks ago. We've learned she had a number of aliases, with the possibility of criminal activity, though no charges were ever brought against her and no witnesses have come forward. Today, there's been a major development. Her body has been found.”

I can barely hear the TV over Michael's wailing. He's been crying for much of the afternoon. It's one of his rare and inexplicable jags, the first in a long time, and I wonder if he somehow knows, intuitively, that his mama could be in big trouble. He senses my connection to Joy. Or maybe it's withdrawal symptoms, he misses Trevor and Leah, who are off having afternoon delight. Or maybe it's just gas.

It is loud, though, and painful for both of us. I hate to hear him suffer; I hate to be incapable of easing his suffering. But I do need to hear this special breaking news. I push the volume button on the remote control and let it blare.

Summer interviews a law enforcement officer who explains that
the body is badly decomposed, it's too early to say if they'll be able to recover any forensic evidence, but they have been able to confirm that the remains are Joy Ellison's. I'm lucky, I suppose, that it's been just over six months, which I've learned from my reading is the average time it takes a body to wear down to the bones.

In my case—well, Patty's case—it was supposed to be quicker. The ground near the abandoned mine shaft speeds up decomposition, which is why people choose it as a dumping ground. I learned about it in a few quick Google searches: Scott Powell said it was the best place to get rid of a body only a year before he murdered his wife, Susan. Her body has never been found. That makes him as reliable a source as anyone. It's not like I had people I could call: “Hey, what should I do with Patty's body?”

I still can't really think of her as Joy. That's probably been self-serving: I could follow the coverage on Joy in this very removed way, because she's someone that I never met. She had a different hair color and cut; she had a husband I never knew about who might have been beating her. Joy was an abstraction; Patty was all too real.

Between my talk with Trevor last night and Summer's late-breaking news and Michael's crying, my brain is just too crowded. I need to think, desperately.

I do what I swore I never would: I put Michael in his crib to cry himself to sleep. Please, let it be fast. Let it be merciful for both of us.

When I come back to the living room, Summer Jackson is talking to a forensic geologist. She's cutting him off—apparently, he's getting too science-y for her audience's attention span. “Quick and dirty,” she says, “tell us the upshot.”

The upshot is, the body was dumped in the wrong place. The killer must have intended for the body to decompose quickly, but in order for that to happen, it would have had to be buried deep inside the mine shaft in western Utah. Instead, Joy Ellison's body was simply found in a hole in the ground in western Utah “where the composition of the soil is—”

“So we can assume,” Summer says, “that the killer was either in a hurry, under the influence, or just plain stupid. Or all of the above.”

The geologist laughs (of course he does, he wants to be invited back). “Those are all valid assumptions.”

When I drove out to Denver, my plan was not to kill Patty. Sure, I'd indulged in violent fantasies for a while, but I never would have killed a pregnant woman. Instead, I was going to scare her straight—for me, for the other adoptive parents.

I've never really been a violent person. I mean, sure, there was that one time in high school with Tatiana, but that surprised me more than anyone. I tended to avoid getting into it with other girls. I could easily walk away from girls calling me a slut, and if they attacked me first, it just devolved into typical hair-pulling, maybe a few scratches, until someone broke it up.

But with Tati, it was different. I'd considered her a friend, someone I'd even confided in about my crush on Gabe. Then one day, she turned on me. She thought I'd spread a rumor when I hadn't, and then she didn't believe my denials. She called me out, said she wanted to kick my ass. I ignored her but she wouldn't stop, so after school, she and I walked up the street to an empty playground. We were accompanied by a bunch of bloodthirsty high school kids who wanted to watch it all go down. Michael was there, and I could see he was excited to be included. He'd never been a spectator to a fight before, and he clearly thought it was one of the perks of dating me. He also seemed kind of turned on by the whole thing.

It started out the usual way: She called me a bitch, I called her a slut, blah blah. So Tati wasn't my friend after all, whatever. I could deal with that.

Then she talked about how she couldn't believe she'd ever been friends with someone as pathetic as me, someone who spent years stalking Gabe, who dated his brother just to get to him, and Gabe had already fucked half the girls here anyway (she gestured around broadly), and what was wrong with me that he didn't want to fuck me? . . .

My head started pulsing in a way it never had before, like my capillaries were about to burst, and I just rushed Tati. I don't know if it was on my behalf, or Michael's, or Gabe's; I'm not sure who I was really defending. Gabe and I hadn't been together yet by that point, and I was starting to think we never would be, but I didn't want Michael hearing any of that. Poor, innocent Michael—that was how I still saw him.

Tati was on the ground, and I just started kicking the side of her head, again and again. People had to pull me back but it wasn't like usual; it wasn't the way they had to extricate one girl's hand from another's hair. No, people were scared: of me, and for Tati. She wasn't moving.

I stood there breathing heavily, looking down at her, and I finally came back to myself. I could see that people were looking at me with a combination of admiration and fear. Tati was out cold, and there was discussion about what to do. Would we actually have to call an adult? It was anathema, involving adults. That's why we walked up to the street instead of remaining on the school grounds. This was teen business.

“Does anyone know CPR?” No one did, no one had paid attention in health class. “Do we call 911? Where's a phone booth?” It was before the days of teenagers having cell phones. “What do we do?”

Weirdly, people seemed to be looking to me for answers. I guess they wanted me to make the decision because I'd be the one responsible, I was the one who could go to jail if anything was seriously wrong with Tati.

I looked for Michael, and he was gone.

Then Tati woke up. Ultimately, she was fine. She had some pretty bad bruises, maybe a concussion, I don't know, but teen business stayed teen business. No police ever got involved.

No one ever talked shit about me again, not that I heard. There was no need for another fight the whole length of high school. Tati never looked in my direction again. And Michael—he never said anything about the fight or about Tati's accusations, not one word.

I'd always thought I could kick someone's ass if it really came down to it. I have a strong self-protective instinct, and it extends to people I love. I never did feel guilty about Tati. Before the fight, I'd never done a thing to her. Afterward, she'd learned her lesson. Maybe I even saved her life. She learned to think twice before she messes with people when she doesn't know what they're capable of. And we really never do know what other people are capable of when their backs are against the wall. If I know anything, it's that people are infinitely surprising.

Patty surprised the hell out of me, and I was determined to repay the favor.

Law enforcement couldn't touch her; I'd already consulted the police. They said that it was “unfortunate” but what I'd done for Patty constituted gifts rather than fraud. She'd never signed any contracts, hadn't violated any laws. It might have been rotten, but it wasn't actionable. The police never even filed a report. (Infuriating at the time, but ultimately, a good thing for me. There was no paper trail, no official connection, between Patty and me.)

When I had to face the fact that Patty had been running a scam on me, Gabe wanted me to let it go and move on. I didn't understand how that was possible. I see now, though, that he never had any investment in Patty or her baby. He was probably relieved that it fell through. All he wanted was for us to get back to normal.

I wanted that, too. But it wasn't going to happen unless she paid for her crime. Even if the law didn't define it that way, I certainly did.

I had off the week of Thanksgiving, and I told Gabe that I needed to get away. I suggested Maui or the Bahamas, knowing full well that his work would never give him the time off so close to the end of the month. His dealership was going to do a huge black Friday promotion, and he was the top salesman. There was no way Ray would approve leave.

Once Gabe's request was turned down, I said that I'd go to a spa alone. I showed him the website for a place in Palm Desert, with a
special promotional rate. “It'll be a detox,” I said. He thought it was a great idea.

I wasn't entirely lying. I did envision the trip to Denver as a kind of detox, a cleansing ritual. I needed to exorcise Patty once and for all.

I can hear that Michael's sobs are starting to abate. Soon, he'll be asleep. Summer Jackson has moved on to the next story, a new disappearance in Maine.

The whole time Summer's been covering the Joy Ellison case, I've been half-expecting one of the adoptive parents to come forward. I thought someone would want to talk about what Joy had done to them, who she really was. But maybe they had the same fantasies as me, and they were afraid they'd become suspects. Or they were just too ashamed to have been tricked; Joy had turned all of our desperation into gullibility. They probably didn't want to brandish their childlessness for all the world to see. What good would it do for them to come forward, when obviously, the husband did it anyway?

So back in November, the plan was: drive to Denver, stake out the post office branch where Patty's PO box was, follow her home, and scare her. Of course, it wasn't nearly that simple.

For one thing, stakeouts are a lot harder than they sound. I wanted to get a parking space right in front of the post office so I could see the door, but in a busy urban neighborhood, that involved waiting and circling for close to an hour. Meanwhile, I'm also trying to keep an eye peeled for an extremely pregnant woman whom I've only met once in person. Then, when I get the space, I can't figure out how to watch the door without being conspicuous. How do private investigators do it? Are they just not worried about appearing conspicuous? After all, they know they're not guilty of anything.

Once I accepted that I might be conspicuous if anyone cared enough to notice, there was the boredom to contend with. Hours of waiting and watching—it was mind-numbing. A hundred times I wanted to drive away, just go home, put Patty out of my mind, but I told myself I didn't drive twenty hours to reverse course. I'd been
obsessing over her for more than a month, and I was going to make something happen if it killed me.

After two hours passed, the meter ran out, and my car had been tagged by parking enforcement. So it was back to circling with a craned neck, and this time, after a half hour, the best I could do was across the street. That meant peering through the traffic, unless I wanted to circle again or get out of the car. I chose the latter, walking into the post office and pretending to peruse the stamps for fifteen minutes. Then I went back to the car, circled again, and finally reparked on the better side of the street with a clear view of the post office.

It occurred to me that Patty might not even make daily trips. Who knew if she was running any current scams? Or she might have five different PO boxes at different offices all over the city. The stakeout might take days. She could be out of town for Thanksgiving, could have connived her way into someone's family celebration. Since the post office would be closed on Thanksgiving itself, that would be a wasted day. If she didn't show up soon, I was screwed. The trip would have been for nothing.

I told myself that maybe that would be a lesson learned. I'm not supposed to get everything I want; better to find forgiveness than vengeance; I have to accept defeat and move on.

Fuck that. I was going to find that bitch, no matter what.

Stakeout Day Two. I'd barely slept, but I was all the more resolved for it. I decided that I'd spend more time in the post office, in case she'd somehow passed right by me. I needed to be able to see her up close and confirm her identity.

It turns out staking out is a skill to be honed. You can get better at loitering; you can improve your surreptitious glances. You get more comfortable pretending to tie your shoes, or holding up different packing materials as if in comparison, with one eye perpetually trained on the door. You lose your inhibitions and realize anew that humans are an incredibly self-absorbed lot. They barely notice anything.

In the early afternoon, a woman approached the row of PO boxes. She was slender, with short dark hair. I was about to turn my attention back to the door, but there was something in her walk, something familiar. As she pivoted toward me, I startled. That was Patty's face all right. But not Patty's belly, as I'd imagined it. Of course it wasn't. Patty was never pregnant.

Somehow, in all the hours I'd spent in violent rumination, I hadn't even considered that possibility. At that moment, it only enhanced her evil. She was tantalizing us with something she herself didn't even possess.

Michael is silent now. I creep down the hall and push his door open as quietly as I can. I need to make sure SIDS hasn't claimed him. No, it's only sleep. I could not love that boy more.