The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “Nothing’s better than chocolate,” the older woman said, a cigarette dangling from her thin lips. “Except maybe sex, but it’s been a while since I’ve had either.”

  “Close your eyes, please,” Peggy said. “No fair peeking, either.”

  “Good God, Peggy, will you grow up and quit playing games?” Donna closed her eyes and expelled a lung-full of smoke, and it joined the cloud of yellow and white that circled over her like a swarm of wasps. She loved Almond Roca and the pretty pink tins that the candy came in.

  “You can open them now,” Peggy said.

  Donna looked at her daughter. She immediately had a disgusted look on her face. “What in the world have you got on your head now?”

  “Mother, it’s a wig. Long hair is very, very in, and you know mine takes forever to grow out.”

  “You look like some kind of a slut with that kind of long hair. Cheap. Like a dime-store floozy.”

  Peggy felt her face grow warm, but she vowed that she wouldn’t argue with her mother. She didn’t have anyone else she could really turn to. She needed that favor.

  “I’m not so sure about it, either.”

  “I must be going deaf,” Donna said. “I thought I heard you agree with me.”

  Peggy didn’t, but she hated fighting with her mother about everything. “I said I wasn’t sure. I looked in the mirror and I don’t think I like it as much as I had hoped I would. It’s a Gabor wig, you know.”

  “The Green Acres actress?”

  “Yes,” Peggy said, swinging her hair slightly as if to make it all the more real looking.

  “Makes sense in a way. Like one of those wigs on Miss Piggy.”

  “Mother!”

  Donna shrugged and reached for her smokes. “You asked my opinion. You get what you ask for when it comes to me. No holds barred. That’s the kind of mother I am and always will be. No matter how stupid you are, I’ll never feel sorry for you. Your stupidity came from your father’s side.”

  Peggy pulled a small Instamatic camera from her purse.

  “Will you take my picture? I want to see what it looks like in a photograph. It’ll help me decide.”

  “Waste of film,” Donna said.

  “Please, Mother. I’ll go to the mall and get you those chocolates.”

  Donna thought a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I have to do something in order to get a gift from you. Doesn’t seem right. You always were an unbelievably selfish creature. Got that from your dad, too. Bad genes.”

  Peggy ignored the poisoned words. As awful as her mother was just then, there were times when she was far, far worse.

  “Please,” Peggy said. “I’ll get you a two-pound tin.”

  Another drag on the cigarette followed by two streams of smoke out of her widening nostrils and then she held her hand out for the camera.

  “You look wretched,” Donna said. “But I want the candy.”

  Peggy handed her mother the small Kodak camera. She posed with her hand on her hip and her lips slightly parted. It was her attempt at a come-hither look. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to pull it off. There wasn’t going to be any coaxing from her mother to make sure the shot was just right.

  “Take another, Mother, please. I’m at the end of the roll.”

  Peggy had known her mother would only snap one or two, so she’d taken a bunch of filler photographs before coming over.

  “Waste of film,” she said.

  “Only three left. I could take your picture.”

  “Like hell you will. Unlike you, I know I’m past my prime. I don’t need any reminders of what I used to look like. Too bad you didn’t get my good looks. And too bad you got your dad’s bad hair. Whole family on his side has bad hair.”

  The camera went off two more times and Peggy’s mother pushed it back at her.

  “Now get out of here and get me my candy, you stupid little bitch.”

  “Yes, Mother,” she said. “Fuck you, Mother.”

  Donna narrowed her brow. “What did you just say?”

  “I said, ‘thank you, Mother,’ ” Peggy said.

  Donna paused a moment, scouring her daughter’s face for the trace of a lie.

  “That’s what I thought you said,” she said.

  Peggy spun around and went for the door, promising to come back right away with the chocolates.

  A half hour later, she stood at the one-hour photo place and waited for the images to roll off the conveyor belt.

  A spectacled worker in a white lab coat with a name tag that said ANSON met her back at the counter.

  “Only three shots,” he said. “The rest of the roll must have been damaged. Other shots look blurry like they were taken of a carpeted floor or something.”

  He was very observant.

  “I’m sure they are fine.”

  “No really. I can give you a free roll.”

  “No, I’ll pay for those now.”

  “Honestly, no problem, ma’am.”

  “Give me those photos,” she said, her voice carrying the distinct tenor of a person impatient and annoyed.

  Peggy didn’t even wait until she got in to the car. She’d gone to a lot of trouble—not to mention the purchase of some chocolates for the woman she hated more than anyone in the entire world. It was ironic that her mother had taken the photos. Her mother would call her every name in the book if she’d known how she’d fallen for Ted Bundy. She would never, ever understand.

  Peggy took a deep breath as she stood in the parking lot and opened the envelope. The first one had her sexy look approximating something closer to indigestion. She blamed her mother for that. She was always putting her down. The second photo depicted her with her eyes half closed.

  Her mother’s fault, too!

  Finally, photo number three. Her last chance. Peggy took in a deep breath. “Oh God,” she said loud enough for a box boy nearby to hear her. He probably thought she was looking at some baby pictures. She didn’t know why people always acted so animated about such photographs.

  She smiled and put the envelope in her purse.

  Ted will adore this. I am the girl of his dreams and I alone can save him.

  When Peggy got home, she ignored her cat and hurried to the kitchen table. The post office was open for another hour. He’d have the photo before the weekend—before their weekly phone call. Being in love with Ted was a dream come true.

  That stupid professor would never have left his wife.

  CHAPTER 44

  Peggy Howell put on a coat and stomped out the door. She was irritated by a lot of things and she needed to get out of the house. She cracked her window and smoked her last cigarette as she moved into downtown Tacoma traffic heading east toward River Road and the smoke shop where she bought her weekly carton. She turned up the music on the radio and listened to another Captain and Tennille song, “The Way You Touch Me.” Like “Love Will Keep Us Together,” it always made her think of Ted.

  Peggy Howell’s best friend, the one who understood her above all others, the one who knew that she was worth something, was Ted. He was always the man of her dreams—smart, sexy, charismatic. He could have chosen any other girl in the world.

  She looked over at the turnoff where the dead girls had been found. The yellow tape that announced a criminal investigation had been removed. She slowed her car and pulled over. The field of grass and blackberries had been trampled by the investigators as they sought to assemble the flotsam and jetsam of a murderer’s work. She unrolled the window and looked around, noticing the tire tracks, the footprints, even a LUNA bar wrapper that someone had left behind.

  Chocolate chip, she mused. Ted’s favorite cookies were chocolate chip, not shortbread or oatmeal.

  Next, she remembered a conversation they’d shared a few weeks before his execution.

  “I can’t believe they are going to do this to you,” she said.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “I know. I have faith.”

  “Ba
be, we all need faith. Faith and peace.”

  “I wish I could see you.”

  “They won’t even let Carole,” he said.

  “Do you have to bring her up?”

  “She’s my wife,” he said. “But she’s nothing compared to you.”

  “I know. But it still hurts whenever I hear her name. I would have done the same thing if you called me as a witness. I would be Mrs. Theodore Robert Bundy. Not her. She’s not even pretty, Ted.”

  “She’s pretty enough. Not all of them were . . . or . . . are beautiful.”

  There was a pause in the line and Peggy’s heart raced.

  “You still there?”

  “I’m here. Just another snap, crackle, and pop in the electrical wires here.”

  It was a joke, but Peggy didn’t laugh. Ted’s nearly literal gallows humor was lost on her. She couldn’t imagine a world without him. He understood her so much better than anyone ever could. His letters were pure poetry. Better than Rod McKuen, she once said in a compliment that Ted ate up.

  “Rod’s good, thank you.”

  “You’re better.”

  “No, no, you are the best. You always will be.”

  Another crackle in the line.

  “Ted?”

  “Yeah, baby,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “You are the best,” she repeated.

  “There will always be others to follow in my footsteps, Peg. I’d like to brag and say that I’m the best, but I’m told over and over by the matchbook university shrinks that they know better. That I’m an aberration, a deviant.”

  “Deviant means different than the others,” she said. “And different can be a very beautiful thing. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Have to go now. Will be looking at your picture and thinking of you tonight.”

  Peggy sat in the car looking at the slow-moving Puyallup River wondering if there was anything more she could have done for Ted. That was the last time they’d spoken. A week later, she’d watched the live feeds from Florida showing the crowd gathering there to celebrate his execution. She wanted to be with his parents on the other side of Tacoma. She’d met Ted’s mother a couple of times at the grocery store. She’d pretended not to know who Louise Bundy was. Peggy was a shopper looking for a ripe watermelon. Louise was a small woman with thick lenses and quiet, shy demeanor. She barely looked up when she told Peggy to sniff the stem end of the melon.

  “That’ll give you a good idea,” she said. “Don’t bother pressing it to see if it is soft. The skin is pretty thick and it really isn’t a good indicator.”

  “You’re very kind,” Peggy said as Louise moved on down the aisle. She wanted to add that “your son is a great man, like a great misunderstood artist.” But she held it inside. She wasn’t sure if Ted’s mother would really understand, if she really knew the son that she’d once pretended was a little brother was a man of importance. Peggy thought of running after her and thanking her again, just to get a glimpse into her eyes. Ted’s eyes. But she didn’t. She held back. Way back.

  A few days after Ted’s execution, Peggy met a man at a bar on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma. She never knew his name. Never asked. Three months later, Peggy was showing. She ran into Susie’s mother, Anna Sherman, outside the Fred Meyer store on Nineteenth.

  Mrs. Sherman’s eyes landed on Peggy’s swelling abdomen.

  “Honey, I didn’t know you were expecting.”

  Peggy beamed. “I’m due in the fall.”

  “I didn’t know . . . you got married.”

  “Oh, I didn’t. I don’t need a husband to be a mother.”

  “I guess that’s very modern of you,” Anna said. “I was always glad I had a husband.”

  Peggy patted her stomach and pushed her cart toward her car. The miracle inside her was always to be hers, and hers alone. Her son was going to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  He was going to be the greatest of them all.

  Donna Howell showed up at Tacoma General Hospital the morning after her grandson was born. She came without balloons or flowers. Instead, the former grocery checker brought with her a kind of palpable bitterness that permeated every puff of her smoky breath. Indeed, Donna Howell was one of those women who’d thought she’d done everything right with the raising of her children, but she’d been repeatedly disappointed by each and every one of them. Peggy was at the top of that list, or at the bottom. The middle, too. Donna Howell considered Peggy a heartbreakingly sorry excuse for a daughter. That is, if she’d deigned to waste a piece of her heart on her.

  Which, not surprisingly to any of those who observed her, Donna Howell seldom did.

  Some women are not cut out to be mothers. They don’t have the lovey-dovey component in their personality that makes 2 AM feedings and projectile vomiting forgotten with the baby’s innocent smile, first laugh, steps.

  Donna was one of those women.

  “You’re never going to lose that weight, Peg,” she said, bursting into the hospital room where her daughter had labored for seventeen hours, alone. She looked over at the new mother in the next bed and zipped the curtain shut without even so much as an acknowledgment of her presence.

  “Hi, Mother,” Peggy said, barely looking up from her bed adjacent to the window. She never called her Mom, or Mama, or anything so cozy or familiar. It was always Mother, more a biological term than anything familial.

  “Did the baby’s father show up?” Donna asked, her voice as cold and sharp as an ice pick.

  Peggy looked out the window, searching the gray Tacoma horizon for something with eyes that brimmed with tears. Anything.

  “Figured,” Donna said, her reflection spreading over the window like an oil slick. “You are so stupid. Now, fat and stupid and with a bastard boy to boot. Your life just couldn’t get any better, could it?”

  Peggy turned to face her mother, holding her emotion as tightly as she could. “Nice to see you, too, Mother.”

  Donna unzipped her black-and-white nylon tracksuit jacket. “Well, where is he?”

  “He’s in the infant care unit, if you must know. There were complications.”

  “Life is full of complications, Peg. You’re an expert at creating them.”

  Saying the shortened version of her name brought back years of bad, awful, humiliating memories. Donna used to introduce her daughter as Piggy or Pig to strangers, and then pretend that she’d said it correctly.

  “Oh, you misheard me. I said Peggy, not Piggy!” And then she’d laugh. Except it was never funny. Not to the sad-eyed little girl who ate too much and knew she was a little overweight. Nor was it funny to the audience of her mother’s pretend non-joke.

  Peggy did what she’d always done to survive. She changed the subject.

  “Aren’t going to ask what’s wrong with your grandson?” she asked.

  Donna slithered across the room and perched on her daughter’s bedside. “I asked. He’s going to be fine.”

  Peggy brightened a little. Mother asked. She must care some. At least a little bit.

  Donna looked around and smiled. No flowers. Good. No cards. Even better.

  “What are you going to name him?” she asked.

  Peggy’s eyes met her mother’s. “I was thinking of naming him after his father, Theodore.”

  A look of exaggerated puzzlement came over the older woman. “Theodore? That’s a hifalutin name for a bastard.” Donna stopped herself for a second, the wheels turning. “That must mean you know who the father is, which I suppose is a minor miracle for a slut.”

  Peggy’s face reddened. Her mother always knew where to stick the knife.

  “Get out of here,” Peggy said.

  Donna shrugged it off. She tugged at her tracksuit jacket as if it needed straightening.

  “Aren’t you the brash little bitch, telling me to get out when I came all the way here to see you and your baby, my bastard grandson?”

  “Leave or I’ll ask the nurse to call security, Mother. I don’t
need this. When you said you were coming, I don’t know, I thought just maybe you’d finally be what I wanted you to be. For once.”

  “That’s funny coming from you. I thought you’d be what I wanted you to be—a decent daughter.”

  “Decent? Now you’re almost making me laugh. You’ve had more live-in boyfriends than anyone in a trailer park, Mother—that’s right, more live-ins than anyone in a trailer park. That’s saying a lot about you, Mother.”

  “You disgust me,” Donna said. “You always have. Your father was no good and you carry his poisoned blood.”

  “He left you, remember that? He left you!”

  “I was glad he left. He’s dead to me. Just like you.”

  A nurse entered the room, but backed off a little before finally speaking. The atmosphere was tense, brittle.

  “Is everything all right here?” she asked.

  “We’re fine,” Peggy said, her eyes riveted to her mother’s. “My mother was just leaving.”

  “Oh . . . did she want to hold her grandson?” she asked.

  Donna looked at the nurse, a young woman with strawberry blond hair and freckles like a seabird’s egg. “I don’t want to hold him or see him. My daughter, you see, is an unmarried woman and the baby is a product of one of her many one-night stands.”

  “Good-bye, Mother,” Peggy said in her calmest tone, refusing to take the bait.

  “All right then,” the nurse said, opening the door and motioning for Donna to exit.

  Donna, her face tight with anger, did something remarkable just then: She said nothing more. No parting shot. No cruel remark to make Peggy feel lower than the bugs that crawl in the darkest depths of the forest floor. Not another word.

  “Are you all right?” the nurse said as the door closed.

  Peggy nodded. “I am. I’m fine. My mother and I have a complicated relationship.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” the nurse said, surveying the physician’s charts.

  “I guess so,” Peggy said. The door was open a crack for a little sympathy, but she didn’t seek any more of it. Her mother was her worst enemy. Her mother was her tormenter. Her mother never once gave her a drop of human kindness. Yet she didn’t hold that completely against her. Her mother was all she had.