Black-Eyed Susans (40 page)

So now Terrell is tearing out hearts on talk
shows, reassuring people about a purposeful life, God, forgiveness, all the things that
should not fall out of the mouth of a man who was the innocent victim of a racist
system. Off camera, Terrell confines himself to one room, keeps the shades drawn, sleeps
best on the couch, so far unable to wean himself from claustrophobia.

He’s also collecting $1 million in
compensation from the state of Texas and a guaranteed $80,000 annuity every year for
life. Who
knew that the state that executed the most people also was
the most generous in compensating for its errors?

Charlie and I miss Effie. She Skypes us in
pink plastic curlers, mails food bricks without regard to the cost of postage, keeps up
the good fight with her gremlins. The new owners next door painted her house a
non-historical Notre Dame blue and gold. The three tiny human terrors they brought with
them have ripped out every bit of Effie’s landscaping. Charlie politely refuses to
babysit for a standing offer of $20 an hour.

Jo continues her battle with a never-ending
supply of monsters, throwing on her white lab coat every day and grinding up the bones
of the lost. We’ve become running buddies, and more. The night before
Lydia’s grand appearance, she had dropped by. She unfastened her gold DNA charm
necklace and looped it around my neck like an amulet of protection.

I spend a lot more time than I’d like
to admit thinking about Lydia Frances Bell aka Elizabeth Stride aka Rose Mylett. She
makes her home in England, where she lives with her two cats, Pippin and Zelda. At least
that’s what it says in the bio on the back of her
New York Times
bestseller,
The Secret Susan.
Charlie is reading Lydia’s book on the sly.
Let her do it,
Dr. Giles insists.

Charlie and Aurora text regularly. They
started following each other on Facebook after the media coverage that threw all of us
into a boiling soup for two months.
Aurora’s had a sucky life, and I
haven’t,
Charlie tells me, as if defending the relationship.
She
wants to be a nurse. Her foster parents just bought her an old yellow Bug.
She’s still hoping her mom will pick up the phone and call.

Their relationship makes me happy, and
uneasy.

My gaze is stretching as far as it can over
the sloshing, murky Gulf. I’m thinking about how to paint it. With dark, reckless
abstract strokes? With a brilliant Jesus sky resurrecting everything that lives under
the surface?

Jesus isn’t a sunburst today. There
was a shark attack an hour ago, so there are only a few spots of brave color in the
water. It’s
cloudy. The water is leaden and impenetrable, like
it often is in Galveston even when the sun is shining. The sand is littered with seaweed
that makes it feel like you are walking barefoot on a thousand snakes.

My daughter and I return to this rickety
rental house for a week every summer anyway. The hard, chunky sand is perfect for castle
building. The sunsets are worth every second of still watching. At night, you can plunk
down on the seawall and count the fish jumping out of the water in the moonlight.
It’s an island, ugly and beautiful, with a history as deep and dark and quirky as
ours.

For the first time, we tentatively invited
company. Bill may drop by this weekend. I’m on the deck, watching Charlie run
along the water’s edge with her friend Anna, whose mom has been whisked to a
three-month rehab for her Big Gulp Diet Coke and vodka habit. No one passing by would
guess that anything tugs at either of these teen-agers. They are kicking at the surf,
laughing, their chatter mixing it up with the seagulls.

Reminding me of two other girls.

Before Lydia hopped a plane, she told the
police a serpentine and wholly convincing tale about the night she took out the
Black-Eyed Susan killer. Self-defense. Rape. Manipulation by her parents. The police
have never considered filing charges. When they stumbled across the same online
psychological journal pieces I did, written under the doctor’s name, Lydia freely
admitted penning them herself. “It made me feel less like his victim to use his
name,” she told them. “I can’t explain it.” So they even let her
off the hook for that.

Anti-death-penalty advocates are still
trying to goad Terrell into suing her. The female talk show hosts who chatter in silly
tribal circles don’t like that Lydia cashed in. Domestic violence groups remain
staunchly behind her. She was a teen-age girl sexually manipulated by a killer.
Either that,
I think,
or the other way around.
Much has been made
about the doctor’s cleverness. The risks he took to thwart the process. His
ability to fool a district attorney and
a devoted father. The way he
snaked onto a list of doctor candidates so I’d choose him myself.

I lock my rage in a place I go less and less
often. I use the tricks he taught me. When I do let him crawl into my head, he is very
much alive. Sitting under that Winslow Homer painting with his legs stretched out,
waiting for me. Slithering in the dark along the lake bottom. They’ve dragged
parts of Lake Texoma with high tech equipment three times now, unearthing the skulls of
a fifty-something unidentified woman and a two-year-old boy who went under last fall,
but not the remains of a monster.

Of course, it makes me wonder.

If almost every word out of Lydia’s
mouth was a lie.

If her pockets are full of seeds.

If Lydia and I are really finished.

Just in case, I hold on to a final weapon.
Her diary. I’ve curled her notebook into my old hidey-hole in the wall of my
grandfather’s basement. I won’t hesitate to pry open that tomb if I need to.
Bring all of her darkness and vanity up to the light. Let Lydia’s own words
vanquish her. Strip her back down to the pale, weird little girl no one wanted to play
with but me.

I do go to sleep certain about one
thing.

Wherever Lydia is, alone with her pen or
lying on soft sands or stretched out in a field of flowers, the Susans are quietly
building their new mansion in her head, brick by brick.

Look, you shoot off a guy’s head with his
pants down, believe me, Texas ain’t the place you want to get caught.

—Lydia and Tessie, 14, watching
Thelma and Louise
,
hanging out the back of a pickup at the
Brazos Drive-in, 1992

This book took an army of kind, brilliant
human beings—scientists, therapists, and legal experts—who generously
advised me about cutting-edge DNA science, the impact of psychic trauma on teen-agers,
and the slow path to a Texas execution.

Mitochondrial DNA whiz and Oklahoma girl
Rhonda Roby
consulted on
Black-Eyed Susans
over text,
phone, email, and beer. She also shared her profound experiences identifying victims of
serial killers, the Vietnam War, Pinochet, plane crashes, and 9/11. She stood with some
of the best scientists in the world at Ground Zero in the days after the attack, and
spent years getting answers for families. Her personality, expertise, and humanity are
woven throughout this book. And that crazy deer story? It’s true. Rhonda now works
a dream job as a professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute.

The University of North Texas Center for
Human Identification in Fort Worth is represented with a little fictional license, but
not much. Its mission, under
Arthur Eisenberg,
is beyond
imagining—to put names to unidentified bones when no one else can. Law enforcement
agencies from all over the world send their coldest cases here. And, yes, UNTCHI did
identify one of the unidentified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy thirty-three
years after his remains were dug out of a crawl space under a Chicago house.

George Dimitrov
Kamenov,
a geochemist at the University of Florida, opened my mind to the
miracle of isotope analysis and its current use in solving crimes and identifying old
bones. He made me understand, more than anyone ever has, that we
are
the earth.
George also inspired one of my favorite twists.

Nancy Giles,
a longtime
children’s therapist, provided intricate detail about how both good and bad
therapists operate and a reading list of psychiatric textbooks (
Shattered
Assumptions, Too Scared to Cry, Trauma and Recovery
) that changed the course of
this book. I was also aided by her son,
Robert Giles III,
an expert
with the Child Assistance Program in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for the
U.S. Navy, and his wife,
Kelly Giles,
a therapist who has dedicated a
good portion of her life to treating abused children. Nancy’s husband,
Bob
Giles,
a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning editor and former boss of
mine, believed in me early in my journalism career. He’s a big reason why I
eventually had the crazy confidence to write a book.

David Dow,
a renowned Texas
death penalty attorney, jumped right into the imaginary plot of my book and told me how
he’d handle the case. What I didn’t expect is that he’d end up feeding
the philosophical core of one of my characters. His memoir,
The Autobiography of an
Execution,
is unforgettable, and I highly recommend it no matter how you feel
about the death penalty.

One of David’s former Death Row
clients,
Anthony Graves,
took time out of a precious day of freedom to
chat with me on the phone and share his experiences as an innocent man behind bars. He
spent eighteen years in prison, falsely accused of killing a family of six. Now free, he
operates with a spiritual confidence that makes most of us puny by comparison. Check out
his tireless advocacy at www .anthonybelieves.com.

Dennis Longmire,
a
professor at Sam Houston State University, has shown up for years as a steadfast regular
at Texas executions. He holds a battery-operated Christmas candle. One chilly night in
front of the Texas Death House, he and other regulars explained the matter-of-fact
reality of executions to me.
John Moritz,
a former
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
reporter who witnessed more than a dozen
executions, provided additional detail.

The mother-daughter team of
Mary and
Mary Clegg,
who run the Whistler bed and breakfast just blocks away from
the infamous Walls Unit, revealed the softer side of Huntsville, Texas. I took a little
fictional license with the ghosts of their beautiful ancestral home, but they did serve
me the most delicious Dutch baby pancake I ever ate. Anyone who stops in Huntsville,
don’t miss the Marys.

I’d also like to note an article by
Cathy A. Malchiodi
about the use of art intervention with
traumatized children. She detailed the case of little “Tessa” and a
dollhouse, which I’ve included as an anecdote in this book.

Laura Gaydosh Combs
led me
to information on fetal bones.

Black-Eyed Susans
is fiction, but
it was important to me that the forensic science, the role of therapy in psychic trauma,
and the legal path of Texas executions be rooted in truth. If there are any mistakes or
flights of fancy, they are mine.

I’d also like to thank:

Christopher Kelly,
a
phenomenal friend and writer who is a critic when I need one and a shoulder to cry on
when I don’t.

Kirstin Herrera,
the only
pal I know who would take me up on a grim invitation to stand outside the Texas death
chamber on the night of an execution.

Christina Kowal,
for
handing me the Big Mac line from the backseat and for inhabiting part of Charlie. Also
her mom, dear cuz
Melissa
.

Sam Kaskovich,
my son, for
drawing mustaches on Jane Eyre, thinking trophies are braggy, and operating with such
faith and kindness. This book is passionately dedicated to him.

Kay Schnurman,
who makes
magic out of thread and steel and was the inspiration for Tessa’s artistic
side.

Chuck and Sue Heaberlin,
my
parents, who must wonder why all this dark stuff jumps from my head to paper, but are
proud of me anyway.

At Random House, a
village:
Kate Miciak,
my editor, a bulldog and a poet who executes the
best line edits on the planet;
Jennifer Hershey,
an early champion of
Black-Eyed Susans;
Libby McGuire; Rachel Kind
and her foreign rights team; my
rockin’ publicist,
Lindsey Kennedy
. And the people who save me
from my errors and turn a book into a beautiful package: production editor
Loren
Noveck,
copy editor
Pam Feinstein,
production manager
Angela McNally,
text designer
Dana Leigh
Blanchette,
and cover designers
Lee Motley
and
Belina Huey.

Also,
Kathy Harris
for an
early copy edit.

Maxine Hitchcock
at Michael
Joseph/Penguin UK, for her enthusiastic support of this book and my career.

Danielle Perez.
I
won’t forget. Thank you.

Steve Kaskovich,
my
husband, therapist, and early reader. The luckiest day of my life was when he threw
those Mardi Gras beads across a newsroom and then asked me out until I said yes.

Garland E. Wilson,
artist,
morgue photographer, singer, and storyteller. He was the best grandfather a girl could
have. I miss your creepy basement.