I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (7 page)

FOR A FEW DAYS,
letter to Walter was like a pink elephant, the one in the mental exercise that instructs a person to think about anything they desired—with the exception of pink elephants.
Had he gotten it? Was it enough? Would he be disappointed?

She had written him with what she hoped was polite finality. Yes, she was married and living in the area. (Funny to be vague, when he knew her exact address.) She omitted any reference, any hint, to Iso and Albie. Walter was not a pedophile, although there had always been some confusion about that, given the age of his victims, and she doubted he would escape, much less head toward Bethesda if he should. But the fact of motherhood was too intimate to share with him. She wrote that it was
inter
esting
to hear from him, yet
not completely unexpected
. How she had struggled over those words, weighed each one. What would Walter read into “not completely unexpected”? He had an uncanny ability to hear what he wanted, to glean meanings that no one else could see. Later, in college, when she took a course in semiotics, she couldn't help thinking that Walter could give Derrida a run for his money. Walter took everything down to the word, then made words signify what he wanted them to, justify whatever he wanted to do. He was like a character from
Alice in Wonderland,
or one of the later
Oz
books, the one with the town where everyone spoke nonsense. Rigamarole, that was it.

Still, she also was careful not to write anything that would cause him trouble, although the letter would not be scrutinized by some official. Walter was most unpredictable, most likely to lash out, when he thought someone was trying to hurt him. She chose to send her letter via the same PO box that had been used as the return address on the letter to her, not the prison's address. She knew this meant that Walter's coconspirator, whoever it was—please, not Jared Garrett—might read the letter first, although she put it in a sealed envelope within the stamped and addressed one. But whoever was helping Walter already knew who and where she was. If she sent the letter in care of the prison, it would take only one gossipy correctional officer to send her life careering out of control.

Besides, she understood now why he had written via an intermediary. As an inmate, he was not allowed to write just anyone, a fact she had been able to establish by a cursory search of the official Web page maintained by Virginia's prison system.
Correctional
facilities, as the official jargon had it. The word struck her as sweetly naive and utterly false. While she realized that prisons did attempt to rehabilitate inmates, she was not sure how anyone on death row could be said to be in a correctional facility, unless one considered death a correction.

She struggled most over the ending.
Sincerely
? Insincere.
All the best
? More like,
All my worst
. She chose to sign her name, assigning no emotion at all.

 

TIME, HER OLD FRIEND,
exercised its subtle power. The letter dropped to the back of her mind, like a sock lost behind the dryer. Or, perhaps more accurately, a bit of perishable food behind the refrigerator, something that would eventually stink or bring pests into the house but that enjoyed a brief, carefree amnesty in the short term. Meanwhile, there had been too much to do to prepare for the beginning of school. The children would be attending two different schools, with Iso riding a bus to middle school and Albie attending the elementary school within walking distance. It would be Eliza's responsibility to get them both off in the morning, which didn't bother her at all. This was her job, it was what she did, and she was—she admitted privately—superb at it. Privately because it was the kind of sentiment that did not land gently, anywhere. Vonnie became almost enraged at the idea that Eliza considered being a mother a full-time job, and a satisfying one at that. Even their mother couldn't help wondering where Eliza would find fulfillment as the children grew. Inez was forever suggesting that Eliza would want to return to school eventually, finish the graduate degree she had abandoned at Rice. The women in Peter's world, the ones she met at those endless functions, tried hard to remember to add “outside the home” when they asked if Eliza worked, or had ever worked, but their politeness could not mask their belief that what she did was
not
work. Hard, perhaps, tedious without a doubt. But not work.

That was okay. Eliza didn't consider it work, either, because she enjoyed it too much. It was the thing at which she excelled. She wasn't one of the smarmily perfect mothers, packing ambitious lunches, never falling back on prepared treats for classroom
parties. But she was more or less unflappable, rolling with things. In fact, she liked a bit of a crisis now and then—the science project left until the last minute, lost homework, lost anything. Nothing remained missing when Eliza began searching for it. She knew her children so well that it was easy for her to re-create those absentminded moments when things were put down in the wrong place. She was aware, for example, that Iso took out her retainer while watching television, so it was often found balanced on the arm of the sofa. She understood that dreamy Albie lived so far inside his own imagination that anything could become part of that world. His knapsack might be found perched on the head of the enormous stuffed dog his aunt Vonnie had given him, creating a reasonable facsimile of an archbishop, although Albie was probably aiming for a wizard.

She was on her hands and knees, looking under the bed for Albie's missing trainer—
sneaker
—when the phone rang. Albie had been forced to wear his sandals to school, which he didn't mind until Iso teased him about it, and he had walked the five blocks to school as if heading to the guillotine, sniffling and wailing the whole way. Eliza had promised she would find his shoes before day's end, perhaps even bring them at lunchtime. She snagged the shoe, marveling at how far it had traveled from its mate, which had been discovered in the first-floor powder room, then dashed for the phone, a habit she couldn't quite break. Even when the children were in the house, present and accounted for, the ringing phone taunted her with the possibility of an emergency. Strange, because if there were an emergency, it would be much more likely to arrive via the chirpy ringtone of her cell phone.
Got that one right,
she congratulated herself, picking up the phone in her bedroom.

“Is this Elizabeth?” a woman's voice asked.

Reflexively, she almost said no.

“Elizabeth Benedict?” the woman clarified. But those two
names were never paired, ever. It must be a telephone solicitor, working off some official list, perhaps one gleaned from the county property records? But, no, she used Eliza on all official documents except her driver's license and passport, had since her registration at Wilde Lake High School in 1986. Did call centers have access to MVA records?

“Yes, but please put me on your do-not-call list. I don't buy things over the phone, ever.”

“I'm not selling anything.” The woman's voice was husky, her laugh a throaty rasp. “I'm the go-between.”

“Go-between?”

“The person who passed that letter to you, from Walter. He wants to add you to his call list.” Again, that raspy laugh. “Not to be confused with the federal do-not-call registry.”

“Excuse me?”

“He's allowed to make collect calls to up to fifteen people. Of course, he doesn't have anywhere near that many. Just his lawyer and me, as far as I know. He can add you without his lawyer's knowledge. But you have to say it's okay. Is it?”

“Is it—”

“Okay.” The woman was clearly getting impatient. “And telling me isn't enough. You'll have to make an official request, via the prison. Then there's paperwork. There's
always
paperwork.”

“I don't…no, I don't think so. No.”

“It's your decision,” the woman said, and then promptly negated that obvious fact. “But I think you should.”

“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.”

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.”

“What's my truck look like?”

“Red.”

“Make? Model?”

She needed a second to understand that question, then shook her head. “I haven't noticed.”

“License plate?”

“I haven't paid attention.”

She was a shitty liar.
“Elizabeth.”

She hung her head, whispered the plate numbers.

“Look,” he said, “I have to keep you with me.”

“I wouldn't tell,” she said. “If that's what you need me to do, I'll do it.”

“No, you would tell. Because you think it's the right thing, and I can see that you're the kind of person who tries to do the right thing. Like me. The thing is—I didn't really do anything. It's just that, no one's going to believe that. This girl, she tried to get out of my truck while it was moving, she fell and hit her head.”

It sounded plausible to him, now that he had said it. It absolutely could have happened just as he said, and who would believe him? It was so unfair.

“But no one's going to believe that, right?” He saw that Elizabeth didn't believe it. Her face was interesting that way. Some people would call her an open book, but Walter didn't think that expression was quite apt. An open book, glimpsed, was only words on a page, and you couldn't make out the whole story. Her face was like…fish in an aquarium, all her thoughts and feelings on display, but moving kind of lazily, not in a rush to get anywhere.

“I didn't mean any harm,” he tried, and this had the virtue of truth, or was at least more in the neighborhood of truth, but he could see she was still dubious. “I've made some mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. People just don't listen, you know? Girls. They don't listen. They're in too much of a hurry, all the time.”

“We read this book,
Of Mice and Men,
in seventh-grade G-and-T English,” she began.

“G and T?”

“Oh, um, gifted and talented. But it's my only G-and-T class.” She was embarrassed to be caught bragging. She hadn't realized she was bragging at first, but now she was owning up to it. That was important. “Anyway, there's a man in it, he doesn't mean any harm, but he's really strong, and when his hand gets tangled in
this girl's hair, he's just trying to calm her down, but he breaks her neck.”

“And what happened to this guy?”

A long pause. “Well, he was simple. What people call retarded, sometimes, although my parents don't like that word.”

“It's just a word.”

She shot him a look, as if on the verge of contradicting him, then changed her mind. “That's true. It's just a word.” He liked that, the way she repeated after him. “He couldn't understand the things he did. He never meant to harm anyone or anything. Once, he petted a puppy to death.”

“People who hurt dogs are the lowest of the low.”

“But he wasn't
trying
to hurt the dog. He was just petting it. He didn't know how strong he was. That was his problem.”

“What happened to him?”

He could see her considering a lie, then rejecting it. “His friend killed him. He was too pure for this world. That's what my teacher said. He was forever a child, but in a man's body, and he couldn't live in this world.”

He was taken with that phrase. Forever a child, in a man's body. It touched on something he felt about himself. Not being a child, of course. He was the opposite of simple. He was complicated. That was his problem, most likely. He was too complicated, too thoughtful, too full of ideas to have the life that people expected him to have. He should have been born somewhere intense, interesting, not in a little town where people didn't have get-up-and-get. Dallas, for example, which struck him as a place that rewarded ambition and masculinity. All the men on that television show, even the wimpy ones, were men's men, big and strong. Maybe they should go to Dallas.

And it would have to be “they,” at least for a while. He couldn't let her go, but he also couldn't do anything more definitive, not yet. That was the downside of spending too much time with someone,
especially someone whose fears and dreams swam across her face. It was like naming the Thanksgiving turkey. Not that a name had ever kept him from petitioning for the drumstick, come the day.

“Do you know more stories?” he asked her. “Like the one you just told, only maybe happier?”

“Well, the same guy who wrote that, he drove around the country with his poodle, Charley. I mean, for real.”

“And what happened?”

“Lots of things.”

“You can tell me while I'm driving.”

He let her use the bathroom, having checked ahead of time that it was a one-seater without a window to the outside, and there was a cigarette machine in the hallway, so he didn't look odd, waiting there, pulling on the various handles, fishing for change. Once, when he was thirteen, he had found seventy-five cents in the pay phone at his father's gas station, and that had seemed miraculous to him. A waitress—not the redhead, but an older woman—glanced back at him, curious, and he said, just thought of it out of the blue: “Her first, um, time, you know? With her ladies' issues? And our mama's dead and she's freaking out.”

“Poor thing. Should I ask her if she needs help?”

“Oh, no, ma'am. She's shy. That would just make it worse.” The woman smiled, pleased with him. Maybe having a little sister would make him seem less threatening to women. Of course, this waitress was old, dried up, but maybe other women, women his age, would be charmed by a man taking care of his sister.

The pay phone gave him an idea, and he asked the waitress if she could change five dollars for him. He called his father's shop and spoke to C.J., the woman who kept the books and answered the phones. He had joined the Marines, he told her. Sold the truck to a friend, cashed out his bank account, what little there was of it. (Later that day, he would hit an ATM—take whatever it would give him—or find a branch that might cash his check.) No, please
don't call his father to the phone. He would only yell. About his truck, not about his only son and coworker going off to join the Marines.

He hung up and listened to the various plumbing sounds, asking when she came out: “Did you wash your hands?” She shook her head, and he sent her back. She was a good girl. She would do whatever he told her to.