Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself (2 page)

He told me that when it really hit him like this he was only about ten miles from home, had some three hundred more to go. But despite his pleas to himself he drove on, trying to assure himself that he could turn back at any point. And what’s more, even if he did go on it wasn’t as if he was going there to confess. And the point was, there might be nothing to confess. He really didn’t know if he’d killed her; hurt her, yes, he’d hurt her, but killed her? He was sure he hadn’t. He’d run from the scene in terror, falling, jumping up, running on, a kid in horror at himself, a fifteen-year-old kid who had never knowingly hurt anyone in his life, afraid at that moment that he’d killed her, but then gradually, back in his home and over the years that followed, sure he hadn’t.

Except at those times when he wasn’t sure, and a flame would sweep through his whole body.

It was winter, mid-February, but the highway under the bright sky was free of snow except on the shoulders and on the dark limbs of trees. And it was pretty much free of cars.

He wasn’t even sure how he would find out. The answer lay in one of the towns on Cape Cod, South Minton. He had found out the name of the newspaper there, the Cape Cod Breeze, a daily, and had looked it up on his computer, trying to go back to July 8, 1989; but the paper’s Web site only had stories as far back as ’92. And he hadn’t seen anything about such a crime in the handful of other newspapers throughout the state he’d been able to find online. Nor had he seen it, on the several occasions he’d dared to look, on any of the “unsolved true crime” shows on television.

So how did he expect to find out now? The newspaper office was one way, of course, and if not there, the public library, or maybe a paper in another town up there. But all of these options could be risky, might arouse suspicion, even though he would ask for papers starting way before that day and ending way after.

He just had to know.

He felt as if he couldn’t go on any longer with Anna, or even with his new work, if he didn’t know.

His eyes kept checking the gas: It was getting low and he would have to stop soon. Only at that moment did something strike him, although of course he had Known it all along — that this was the same highway they had taken, his mother and father and him, in that motor home they’d rented.

And he remembered the three of them even, yes, singing.

Actually, it was completely out of character — both Alan and I agreed on this — for his father to rent a mobile home. His parents had moved out of Philadelphia and into the suburbs when Alan was eleven. They had also owned a summer house in the Pocono Mountains, about seventy miles away, so they used to spend most of their vacations there, sometimes with us. But then they sold it and his father came up with the idea of renting one of these mobile things for about a month, starting off by visiting a few East Coast beaches and then heading into Maine and up to Cape Cod. It was a large motor home, some thirty feet or so. My aunt was hesitant at first: He was sixty and had never driven one before except for a short practice run at the dealer’s. But as it turned out there was to be no problem with that; even she drove it a little. No, not with that.

My uncle had been forty-five — and my aunt thirty-nine — when Alan was born, which I mention because their ages came to worry Alan as a small boy, mainly because they were much older than his friends’ parents. He had learned about death firsthand when our grandfather died, and at first it scared him that one day, without fail, he would be in a coffin. But then his Concern began to focus on them, that they would die long before him.

My uncle was a lawyer, mostly in real estate law, and my aunt a stay-at-home mom. From what Alan used to tell me, he was sure he was going to be a lawyer too, though not in his father’s specialty — somehow it came to him that he would be a criminal lawyer. And the way he talked about it to me, it wouldn’t be about saving criminals but saving the innocent. But oh how that was to change.

They were rich though not, except in my mind, super-rich. After leaving our neighborhood for the suburbs, they lived in an area of fairly large homes, ones with long circular driveways. Alan began going to private schools. The best friend he had as a small boy was a kid named Will Jansen; in fact, as he told me, he didn’t think he ever loved any friend more, though he was never to see him again after moving out of our neighborhood, except once, much later, on a television interview program. He remembered them doing so much together and talking about everything, except — strangely, though perhaps not — about what was happening to their changing bodies as they entered adolescence, about the strange new directions Alan found his boyish fantasies taking.

His father — Alan didn’t even think of talking to him about sex, undoubtedly because his dad had never talked to him about the subject. Alan looked on him simply as a hardworking, brilliant man who lived for his mother and him. And his mother, in his mind, was asexual. In fact the only thing he remembered her ever saying to him that had any kind of sexual connotation was a remark she made one time when she looked up from the newspaper she was reading and, out of nowhere (though it probably had something to do with what she had been reading), said to him, “It’s important that you treat a girl like a flower. Like a flower.” And that was all; she went back to her reading, and it left Alan so uneasy, as though she’d said it to something dark inside him. Nor did I, his big-brother cousin, ever say anything to him; it was easier not to, and in a way, as I see it now, it was as if I was protecting him, the way I used to protect him, say, from crossing the street on a red light. And so when, late in grade school, a certain tall, ungainly half-idiot in special-ed, Henry, would come up to him and other kids in the schoolyard and grin with large teeth and make fast, long strokes of his clenched hand in the air, Alan had no idea what it meant. Until one day, alone in the gray silence of his house, he found out. It was the end of his childhood, and the start of a new phase of his life characterized by bewilderment and self-loathing.

As I was to learn, Alan often envied me because my mother was smart-looking, “modern,” dated frequently between marriages and laughed loudly. And he couldn’t help envying me because I was allowed to do things he never could, like go to overnight camp or live with friends in Italy one summer when I was only twelve; and though I lived apart from my father it seemed in Alan’s eyes that I went to just about every kind of ballgame with him. But it was just to a few.

Now I don’t want to give anyone the idea that Alan was some kind of creep as a kid. He was good in school, was never so much as scolded by a teacher, never lied that I knew about (his mother had an expression, “A liar and a thief are the same thing, they steal something from you”), was a decent athlete: fairly tall, skinny, he was on the soccer and tennis teams in high school. Unlike me, he didn’t smoke pot or, except for a few experiments, cigarettes; had friends, though none he felt he could really open up to about what was troubling him about sex; they all seemed so confident. By the time he was fifteen he hadn’t gone out on a one-to-one date but had been to some parties and church — Lutheran — dances, though he could never relax when he danced, was stiff and uncomfortable. He’d never kissed a girl, except when he was a kid at one of those spin-the-bottle things.

His father worked late most nights, coming home after Alan and his mother had dinner, and he took a lot of business trips. But he occasionally took Alan to a ballgame, and he generally saw to it that they went fishing on at least the first day of trout season. He gave Alan a good feeling about reading, and neither he nor my aunt made a big fuss about him watching too much TV. My uncle was tall, six-feet, slender, with gray-streaked brown hair; Alan sort of looked like him, though he had black hair and was a little shorter, about five-eleven.

My aunt was of medium height and a little heavyset, with a round pretty face and short sandy hair that was gradually turning gray; a good cook and housekeeper though she always had a twice-a-week maid. She used to tell Alan stories about her childhood, always happy ones, but once in a sudden burst of tears she told him she’d had a miscarriage a few years before he was born: late enough so they knew it was a girl. It was the first and last time she ever mentioned it. But Alan often thought of that little girl who would have been his older sister.

That flower.

Alan stopped at the first service station he came to and filled the tank and bought a bottle of water at its so-called mini-mart. As he was pulling out it began to snow, tiny dots at first on the windshield and then heavy splatters. He found himself wishing it was the start of a blizzard, that soon he wouldn’t be able to drive on; but that, he told himself, was crazy, he could turn around at any time. But in any event the snow stopped shortly; he had driven under a black bloated cloud and now was in sunshine again.

The weather had been perfect every day of that trip fifteen years ago but the trip itself had started off wrong. For one thing, he was angry at his parents and at himself. They had come to him with the idea of this vacation as if it were a done deal, when he had a first-time job he was looking forward to as an assistant sports counselor at a day camp.

“Come on,” his father said, “you’ve got your whole life to work. Don’t ruin this, we’re a family, it’s probably something we’ll never do again.”

“But you could have asked me, couldn’t you?” he demanded. “You could have at least asked me!”

“Alan,” his mother said, “don’t raise your voice. You always raise your voice.”

“I’m not raising my voice.” Always, it seemed, he was being warned about a fiery temper he didn’t know he had. And this would only make him angrier. “I’m just talking, I’m just making a point.”

“Well, then just talk,” she said.

Eventually he gave in without much more of an argument than that, though the feeling of being treated like a baby, hardly anything new, smoldered in him.

And then, the second way it started off wrong was that his mother and father had a fight only about ten miles into the trip.

They hardly ever fought but when they did it was as though, to him as with most kids probably, his world was in collapse.

This time it was over something as trivial as his father’s sunglasses.

His father asked her as he was driving to get them out of the glove compartment. When she couldn’t find them he said, “You put them in there, didn’t you? I asked you to.”

“Well, I did.”

“Then they’re in there. Look for them again.”

She went through the compartment again. “No, they’re not. You must have taken them out. Try to remember.”

“Don’t tell me to remember. I didn’t take them out.”

“Bob, please. Check your pockets.”

“I told you I didn’t take them out.” But he patted at his shirt and then dug into his pants pockets. “I don’t have them. Now you try to remember. Did you really put them in there?”

“Of course I did.”

“Well, they’re not there and I don’t have them!”

“Then they must have fallen out of your pocket.”

“Christ, will you stop that? I told you I never took them out!”

“Bob, don’t yell at me.”

“Yell at you! Yell at you! You don’t know what yelling is!”

And on it went, in that luxury motor home, their voices growing louder and more accusatory. And though Alan loved his father deeply, he was the one he always hated when they quarreled.

The shouting back and forth gradually turned into silence, then the tension in the silence began to ease up when his father found his glasses when he reached under his seat, where they’d fallen. He apologized, several times, but Alan’s mother stayed silent for a while. But then, looking out her window, she began remarking about the beauty of the bay they were crossing over, so blue and dazzling in the sun; and soon they were a family again.

My own mother and her new husband — a marriage that would last about five more months, ending in her second divorce — had rented a beach-front house (on pilings) for a couple of weeks in Sea Belle, on the New Jersey seashore. I was nineteen, a junior at Bucknell, and was spending the weekend with them before going back to my summer job moving things from one place to another in a large wholesale grocery warehouse. I didn’t like the guy and wasn’t all that happy about being there. But I was looking forward to seeing Alan and his folks, who’d said they would be visiting for a few hours before moving on.

I remember their large motor home pulling up in front of the house, and marveling that my uncle was driving one for the first time at his age. He represented to me all the security in the world, a little remote but solid, just as my aunt was all smiling warmth. I envied Alan his parents, though that didn’t mean I wasn’t crazy about my mother. Thin where my aunt was a little heavy, she sold dresses at a luxury department store, loved to laugh, was the first on the dance floor at weddings, and thought I could do no wrong. I just wished she had better taste in men, including my father, who was living somewhere or other.

Alan had a nice smile, and we slapped each other’s hand hello. In a way, he was still a kid to me at fifteen; it wasn’t easy to let go of the memory of once making sure he held my hand when he crossed a street. He was thin and as tall as he would ever be, just as at his age I was already my present six-one.

After the usual hugging, they showed us through the motor home, something that only enhanced my feeling of their togetherness, and after lunch we went out to the beach. I remember walking single-file along the path through the high dune that almost hid the ocean from the street. Long tufts of grass speckled the dune and there was a partly buried line of wire-strung palings along both sides of the path.

The beach was fairly crowded; a lifeguard stand was about a half-block away. A few people waved to us as we came out. We set up the chairs we’d been carrying and put up a large beach umbrella, though no one sat under it.

As I remember, I was talking to Alan about a soccer game he’d been in when another couple, the Devlins, who were friends of my mother from home and were staying nearby, walked over to say hello. He was a rather short, bald-headed man, his wife a homely woman, gaunt-faced and with a slightly hooked nose and red-tinted hair. They set up their chairs to sit for “just a few minutes,” as Mrs. Devlin said.