Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  April Cooper is alive, it read.

  Three

  June 10, 1976

  4:00 A.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  Did you know that if you were to drop a penny from the top of the Empire State Building and it was to hit someone, it would go right through that person’s skull? But if you hold that penny in your hand, it’s shiny and harmless. It can even be good luck.

  We’re going somewhere, Gabriel and me. We’re leaving in ten minutes. I am in the bathroom, writing this very quickly, so if I spell things wrong, that’s why.

  Before I came in here, Gabriel asked me if I’m on his team. I said yes. He asked if I still love him. I said yes to that too, and he took the gun away from my head. He told me I’m the best thing that ever happened to him, that we will escape from here and move far away where we can always be together.

  I wanted to tell Gabriel that I’m not a thing to happen to him. I’m a person, a human being. But then I thought about Jenny and changed my mind. I told Gabriel it was Papa Pete who made me break up with him and that I’ve always loved him and will love him until the end of the world, just like we promised. I hope Papa Pete forgives me for telling that lie, and that when I meet him in heaven, he will understand.

  I made myself touch Gabriel. I put my hand to his cheek and felt a tear. Gabriel’s tear. I tried to make myself cry too, just to get him to love and trust me even more, but I couldn’t. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to cry again.

  Gabriel called me his angel. I called him my lucky penny. He seemed to like that.

  5:20 A.M.

  We’re in Papa Pete’s Cavalier. Gabriel is driving. I’m stretched out in the back seat. He thinks I’m sleeping.

  He told me to pack a bag, and so I did. Here is what I’m taking, besides clothes and my toothbrush:

  Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann. (My favorite book. I found it in Mom’s drawer after she died, and I’ve read it three times. If I decide not to name you Aurora Grace, I may name you January Grace.)

  Papa Pete’s college ring. It’s gold and it has a big red stone and it’s worn down smooth inside from never leaving his finger. I can fit two of my own fingers into that one ring of his, and it still feels warm from him. Papa Pete, I’m so sorry.

  A picture of Jenny, holding her favorite stuffed animal (a fluffy pink dog she named Todd for some reason). I will keep the picture in the pocket of my denim jacket, and I will look at it every day.

  Shalimar perfume. Gabriel made me take that because “my girl should always smell the way I like.”

  The big butcher knife from the kitchen, wrapped in one of my sweaters. For when Gabriel is asleep, and I find the courage.

  With love,

  April (Your Future Mom)

  Four

  Quentin

  “THE SMILE,” GEORGE Pollard said. “The way she runs her hand through her hair. The ring on her finger. See it? That’s aquamarine. April’s birthstone.”

  Quentin and Summer were sitting across from Pollard at his sprawling, polished desk at the Duarte Medical Center, watching the video clip of the woman he insisted was the very-much-alive April Cooper. It was well after his usual work hours—close to 8:00 P.M., Pollard having made up an excuse about a dinner meeting with the hospital board that his trusting wife had accepted without question.

  Pollard had sneaked around on his staff and lied to his wife in order to meet Quentin and Summer, which said a lot. But he wanted no part of the Closure podcast—no visible part of it, anyway. “I feel awful about what happened to your family and I want to help,” he’d said to Quentin over the phone that morning. “But if you mention me by name, position, or anything that directly identifies me, I’m afraid I will have to take legal action.”

  Quentin hadn’t pressed. To be honest, he understood where George Pollard was coming from, both in his desire to distance himself from April Cooper and in his need to do something to make up for the damage she’d done. But he also believed he could get Pollard to reconsider. Meeting the man in person, looking him directly in the eyes and witnessing the change in them as he gazed at the woman on his computer screen, Quentin saw a lot of the same emotions that had plagued him since childhood. Longing. Loathing. Guilt . . . The key was to convince Pollard—as he’d somehow convinced himself—that Closure was the cure for all of it.

  The video they were watching was the same link that Pollard had sent to the Closure email address. He’d sent it in response to a call for information Summer had posted on an Inland Empire Killers message board and it was a three-month-old clip of Robin Diamond, the film columnist for the popular website DailyCulture.com, discussing feel-good movies with her mom, Renee, in honor of this past Mother’s Day.

  It was Renee they were all focused on—soft-spoken, ash blond, sixtyish Renee. Renee, who had cried over Bambi when she was pregnant, who loved Easter Parade “above all other movies” and had watched it with her grown daughter “at least a dozen times,” and who Pollard swore up and down was a very-much-alive April Cooper. “She couldn’t wait to be a mother,” he was saying now. “She wanted kids, a house, and a husband. In that order.” His eyes clouded for a moment and he smiled. A dreamy, lost, young boy’s smile. “Actually, the husband part she said she could take or leave.”

  Great quote, thought Quentin, who was recording the conversation on his phone. He always did this, even with deep-background and off-the-record and completely unwilling sources. With some of the particularly distrustful ones, he even kept a mini voice recorder running as backup. (He’d bought it from a spy store, and it looked exactly like a pen.) Summer found it unethical, but he didn’t. He’d never air the interview without permission. And if he never got permission, he’d destroy the recording. Eventually. What was the harm in that?

  “It’s strange,” George Pollard said as the video ended. “I never go to the Daily Culture website. I so rarely go to any of those sites. But I saw the link to the video on my home page—‘Mother’s Day Means Movies,’ I think it was called. And for some reason I had to click through. It was like someone was guiding me there.”

  Summer said, “How soon into the video did you start thinking Renee was April?”

  “Immediately,” he said. “And it was more than thinking. It was knowing.”

  “Really?”

  “It was her voice. It sounds exactly the same.”

  Quentin studied Pollard’s face—a tanned and gently worn version of the teenager’s in the photograph, the dark hair gone silver and expensively cut, fine lines around the eyes and lips that looked as though they’d come from years of smiling. Hard to believe that George Pollard was two years older than Quentin’s mother would have been. He’d aged well—the way people of health, privilege, and happiness tend to do. Kate had none of those things in her life, and it had shown all over her.

  “You’re positive it was April’s same voice,” Summer said.

  Pollard nodded, his dark eyes misty. She was my first love, he had written in his email. But I’d rather not say any more than that here . . .

  Quentin said, “You never forget the voice of your first love.”

  Pollard’s gaze traveled to the desk—the one framed photograph he’d placed at an angle, next to his computer. “That’s right,” he said quietly.

  It was always interesting, the personal pictures people chose to frame and display. In his office at Claremont College, Dean had dozens of them—candid and staged photos of his parents, his younger sister and her husband and baby, a cheesy shot of Quentin feeding him cake at their wedding, even a black-and-white of his childhood dog. Reg Sharkey, of course, had a mantelpiece littered with framed pictures from a lifetime ago, while Summer’s desk at work held just two: a photo of Joan Didion and herself, taken at a book signing, and a college-era pic of Quentin, his face contorted in laughter. It embarrassed him every time he caught a glimpse of it.

  Quentin, for his part, had none. To him, framing a picture was an attempt to make time stand still—so
mething that was neither possible nor desirable. He preferred to keep his personal photos on his phone, ready at any given moment to be deleted forever.

  The sole framed picture on George Pollard’s desk, the one he stared at now as though he were asking it for guidance, was of his family—his entire family. There were at least twenty people in the shot, ranging in age from elderly to infant, all wearing pale blue T-shirts, the words POLLARD REUNION 2014 emblazoned in white on the front. “Do they know about April?” Quentin said.

  “No.”

  “None of them?” Summer said. “You haven’t shown your wife the video?”

  “No. And I never will.”

  “Why?”

  Pollard turned his attention to Summer, then Quentin. “You’re journalists,” he said. “Can’t you just investigate this?”

  Quentin exhaled hard. “Mr. Pollard,” he said. “My mother’s younger sister was killed at the gas station where you worked.”

  “I know. And I’m so sorry.”

  “Were you there that day?”

  “No.”

  “Did April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy expect you to be there?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure?” Summer said. Quentin glanced at her—those enormous cat eyes, that glow-in-the-dark pale skin, that red hair blazing furiously. Summer’s looks were as arresting as her rat-a-tat speech pattern, and she had a powerful effect on the people she interviewed, like a human interrogation lamp. Quentin had seen subjects break under her unblinking stare, revealing more than they ever intended. “Quentin and I always thought it was random,” she was saying to Pollard. “The police report says the Arco station massacre was a botched robbery. LeRoy had stopped there for gas and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold the place up.”

  “That may have been.”

  Quentin said, “You don’t think it had anything to do with you?”

  “I know it didn’t.”

  “How can you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “Mr. Pollard,” Quentin said. “Even if LeRoy went to your station out of revenge or jealousy. Or if April Cooper secretly wanted to see you again—”

  “She didn’t.”

  “I’m saying it isn’t your fault.” He kept his tone low, measured. “None of it is your fault. Just like it wasn’t my grandfather’s fault for taking Kimmy to the Arco station. You can be honest with us. It will go no further than here.”

  Pollard’s jaw flexed. “Are you recording this conversation?”

  Quentin felt Summer’s gaze on him. “I’d never record you without your permission,” he said.

  “I’m going to need you to take your phones out and turn them off.”

  Summer removed her phone from her purse and placed it on his desk. “It’s turned off already, sir,” she said.

  Quentin removed his phone from his jacket pocket. He powered it down and set it next to Summer’s, longing for his pen recorder, his eyes fixed on Pollard’s neat desk, lest someone look into them and read his thoughts. “You aren’t being recorded, Mr. Pollard,” he said. Which technically was not a lie.

  Pollard glanced at the door, then turned his attention back to Quentin, his gaze intense enough to give off heat. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice so low it was barely audible. “I met April after the shooting took place.”

  “What?” Quentin and Summer said it in unison.

  Pollard was staring at his hands, clasped against the polished desk as though he were praying for the strength to say more. “I met her,” he said, “after the Gideon fire.”

  DURING THE SUMMER between his junior and senior year in high school, an honors student, varsity quarterback, and part-time gas station attendant fell in love with a presumed-dead, fugitive murderer and harbored her for twenty-four hours, his parents and younger brother never the wiser. She’d shown up at the gas station where he worked, half dead from hunger and exhaustion. And instead of calling the police, he’d made a gut decision and hustled her out of there before anyone took notice. He’d given her food, shown her around town, shared his deepest secrets with her, and made sure she got out safely, after which he’d gone on with his life, telling no one about his “first love” for more than forty years. It sounded like a pitch for some ill-conceived romance novel, but Pollard swore it was true. Every word of it. And, during the brief time Quentin spent in his presence, he was inclined to believe him.

  It wasn’t Pollard’s respectable demeanor. Quentin had met plenty of people, not just in his career but throughout his life, whose kindly exteriors housed evil, untrustworthy hearts. It was something else—the earnestness with which he talked about April Cooper, maybe—that made Quentin think that, whether or not Robin Diamond’s mother, Renee, truly was the infamous teenage murderer, George Pollard believed she was. “We hid out in a movie theater—a revival house on the outskirts of town,” he was saying now. “We sat through the same movie for three screenings—at first it was so she could stay hidden. But at some point . . .”

  “Yes?” Summer said.

  “At some point, she stopped being who she was and I stopped being who I was, and we were just two teenagers, watching an old movie. Holding hands in the dark.”

  Quentin glanced at Summer. He wished his phone were recording. “You never forgot her,” he said.

  “Not a single day has gone by when I haven’t thought about her. I’ve read everything I could about the murders. I lurk on all the true crime message boards. I watched that terrible TV movie, back in the day . . .”

  “But you never contacted the police,” Summer said.

  Pollard shook his head.

  “You never said a word about her to anyone—not even your wife.”

  “No.”

  “You kept her secret.” Quentin said it without anger, without judgment. Though the “why” was implicit. “You let her live.”

  Pollard gave Quentin a slight, sad smile. “Our whole lives, we tell ourselves stories, don’t we? I was a kid, and I was in love, and so I told myself the most powerful story I could about her. In order for the story to work, though, she had to be innocent.”

  Quentin said, “Why would a killer return to the scene of her ugliest murders, less than a week after they took place?”

  Pollard’s face relaxed. “Exactly,” he said. “A guilty person would never do something like that, would they? They would want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the crime scene. Everybody knows that.”

  Pollard stood up. Quentin took the cue. He picked up his phone. Summer did the same, and they both thanked him for his time, shook his hand.

  “I almost forgot.” George Pollard removed a sealed, legal-size envelope from his pocket and handed it to Summer. “This is my stub from the movie we saw at the revival house,” he said. “I kept it all these years. But I’m thinking you guys might want it.”

  When they were alone in the elevator, Quentin spoke for the first time since he and Summer had left the office. “What I said about a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. I hadn’t meant it as a rhetorical question.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Do you think it’s true, Summer? I mean . . . I’ve been on the same message boards and websites as him. Every one of them treats it as a definitive fact that Cooper and LeRoy both died in that fire.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing is a definitive fact that happened in 1976. There was no DNA testing back then.” She opened the envelope Pollard had given them, slipped the ticket stub out.

  “I know that. But.” Quentin took a breath. “I mean . . . Look. Maybe George Pollard hooked up with some crazy girl forty years ago, and she told him she was April Cooper. I believe that. But do we really want to fly to New York and freak out this poor woman and her entire family, just because Pollard says her voice sounds familiar?”

  “Quentin.”

  “And anyway. I want to tell the story of the survivors of a forty-year-old killing spree. I don’t want to go all CSI In
land Empire with this.”

  Summer said, “We might not have any choice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She handed him the movie ticket stub, soft as silk from so much holding over so many years. The revival house’s name was printed at the top along with the date: June 24, 1976. The exact same day that first responders in Death Valley found the charred remains of April Cooper, Gabriel LeRoy, and what looked to be the entire Gideon family. At the center of the ticket stub was that day’s feature—the movie George and April had watched from beginning to end three times in a row, falling deeper and deeper in love with each viewing. The letters were faded and so ghostly thin, Quentin had to remove his glasses and squint in order to read them: Easter Parade. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Way to bury the lede.”

  “RENEE LOOKS LIKE someone famous,” said Dean, who was watching over Quentin’s shoulder as he viewed the Daily Culture video clip for the umpteenth time. They were in bed, and it was close to midnight, Quentin having spent most of the evening chatting up the amateur sleuths on an Inland Empire Killers message board, asking for any possible clues—however shaky, however thin—that April Cooper might have survived the Gideon fire.

  TBH, one of the sleuths had written, I think there’s more of a chance that Amelia Earhart survived that plane crash, flew back to the States, and joined the Rockettes.

  The Gideons were all men and boys, another had explained. Mom died in childbirth six years earlier. The remains were of a girl April’s age, height, and build. And her body was right next to the one identified as LeRoy’s via dental records.

  Quentin had known all this, of course. It was information found in nearly everything that had been written about the Inland Empire murders, Wikipedia entry included. And it had made for some impressive pyrotechnics in the 1986 TV movie. But hearing it again, from people more genuinely obsessed with the case than even he was, force-bloomed the doubts that had seeded themselves in his mind the moment he dropped Summer off at her apartment. All they had to go on was one ticket stub and the off-the-record musings of a middle-aged man who’d been taken in for a few free meals by some vagrant girl forty-three years ago. That wasn’t a podcast. Hell, it wasn’t even a decent story to tell at a cocktail party.