“Interesting,” Thorpe said.
Encouraged, I told him more. Despite being pretty, Lila couldn’t stand mirrors and would go out of her way to avoid them. There were no mirrors in her bedroom, and when my mother finally got her to start wearing lipstick her senior year of college, it would often be a bit off-kilter because she put it on blindly.
One thing that came up often in our conversations was the question of who had killed Lila. The fact was, I didn’t have a clue. To my knowledge, no one had disliked her. I couldn’t imagine her getting on anyone’s bad side. I told Thorpe what I did not tell my parents: that whoever did it, I hoped he had been a stranger. I couldn’t bear the thought of it having been someone she knew and trusted.
“What about the man she was seeing?” Thorpe asked once. “Could he have murdered her?”
I flinched. “Please don’t use that word.” Murder was the term favored by reporters, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. It was too graphic. I was grateful for the official terminology, homicide, which was somehow softer around the edges. “Of course the police are very interested in him,” I said. “But no one knows who he is. The two of them were extremely discreet.”
He jotted something on a notepad, and I kept talking. With Thorpe, I felt free to say anything. He listened, nodded, asked questions. In hindsight, I should have been alarmed by the pen that was always at the ready, the way he would sometimes start scribbling into his notebook in the middle of a conversation, but every time I met with him, he was reading student essays or writing lecture notes, so I thought nothing of it.
The semester after Lila died, I enrolled in Thorpe’s survey of Eastern European literature. It was the only class I attended faithfully. Our private conversations always began with whatever we were reading in class that week—Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Václav Havel’s Temptation, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude—and ended with Lila. I began to suspect that my friends found me morose and difficult to tolerate; though I understood that grief makes for unpleasant company, I couldn’t get my mind off what had happened to my sister. Thorpe was the one person who never seemed to tire of the subject. It occurred to me more than once that he might have a romantic interest in me. Why else, I wondered, would he continue to indulge me?
Most often we met at the café, but sometimes I stayed after class. The classroom had large, rounded windows, through which I could see the mouth of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The sight of the bridge rising up through the fog, so aloof and yet so familiar, was comforting. Lila and I had walked across the bridge together many times, it was something we had done twice a year for as long as I could remember—on her birthday, and on the first day of fall. Talking about her in that setting, with this man whom I’d come to consider a friend, felt natural.
After the spring semester ended, we continued to get together. We’d meet in Dolores Park, which was close to his apartment, or at Creighton’s Bakery in Glen Park. A couple of times we saw a movie at the Roxie.
It wasn’t until June, six months after our talks began, that Thorpe told me he was writing a book. We were having lunch at Pancho Villa. We sat by the window, and while we dug into our burritos, Thorpe kept up a running commentary on the passersby. He had a story for each of them: the ratty-looking woman pushing the five-hundred-dollar stroller had stolen it from an unsuspecting yuppie mom; the attractive couple, hand in hand, was in town on a bogus business trip, both cheating on their spouses. It was a habit of Thorpe’s, creating backgrounds and motivations for complete strangers. I always suspected their actual lives were far less interesting than the stories he built for them.
At one point Thorpe sipped his orange soda and said, “Actually, I have some interesting news.”
“Really? What?”
“I’m writing a book.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, and meant it.
Thorpe had confessed to me early on that his secret desire was to be a writer. While in graduate school he had attempted to publish a number of short stories, but after a string of rejections he gave up. I knew there was a partially written novel in a drawer somewhere—“Half the English department has one of those,” he’d said to me once, dismissing years of his own work with a wave of his hand.
“A novel?” I asked.
“No, this is nonfiction.”
“About what?”
He bit his lip, fiddled with his silverware, and after a long pause finally said, “It’s about Lila.”
At first, I was certain I’d heard him wrong. “What?”
“A celebration of her life and an investigation of her death.”
It sounded rehearsed, as if he had said it before. But the very notion that he would write a book about Lila was so outlandish, I thought for a moment he was joking.
“That’s not funny,” I said. “Why would you say something like that?”
“It’s a fascinating story. I think people would want to read about it.”
I pushed my plate away. “You can’t be serious.” I kept waiting for him to tell me he was kidding, but he didn’t. A man passed by with several dogs on leashes and Thorpe tried, stupidly, to lighten the mood with a joke. “This one gave up a lucrative career in medicine to pursue his dream of being a dog walker.”
“Lila isn’t a story,” I said, so loudly the couple at the next table turned to stare. “She’s my sister.”
Thorpe glanced apologetically at the couple and spoke quietly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it that way. It’s just that, listening to you talk about Lila these last few months, I’ve realized there’s so much about this case that hasn’t been brought to light. The police are strapped for resources. To them, solving the crime is just a job, an unwelcome distraction. Maybe I can bring a fresh pair of eyes to the case.”
“What stone could you possibly overturn that they haven’t already looked under?”
“Look, somebody knows something. At the very least, maybe I can figure out who Lila was seeing.”
“If you want to play private eye, go ahead, but please don’t put it in a book. Lila would hate that.”
I could tell that, as I spoke, Thorpe was already planning his response. “She was an exceptional person, enormously gifted,” he said. “The book is a tribute to her.”
I felt my face getting hot. “But you didn’t even know her.”
“I feel as though I did. If it weren’t for you, she would have been nothing more to me than an item in the news. But you made her real to me. You made her matter.”
“I’m begging you,” I said, “seriously, as a friend.”
I had told Thorpe in the past about Lila’s almost obsessive desire for privacy. It was the reason she lived at home rather than in an apartment; having an apartment would have required her to have roommates. It was why she rarely answered the phone, and she had so few friends. It probably had something to do with why she liked numbers, too: numbers kept their distance. They communicated without the messiness of emotion. Numbers possessed an inherent order that was impossible to find in human relationships. She would have been sick about having her face splashed across the papers, her name mentioned on the TV news. A book would be even worse. Books get passed from hand to hand, preserved in libraries. In a book, she would always be the victim.
Thorpe leaned back. “I’m too far into it to back out now, but I’ll feel better if I have your approval. The first draft is almost halfway done. I’d love for you to take a look at it. I’ve already found an agent.”
“Didn’t it occur to you to ask me before you started?”
He said nothing.
“I trusted you,” I said, feeling stupid. I thought about his endless questions, his incessant note-taking, and how I’d answered every question he asked, never really stopping to consider his motives.
He reached across the table and put his hand on mine. I pulled away.
“I thought you might be reluctant, and I completely understand. That’s why I wanted to get th
e ball rolling before I told you.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a file folder, which he slid across the table to me. I opened it. The stack of papers inside was two inches thick. I read the title page, feeling sick to my stomach.
MURDER BY THE BAY
A True Tale of San Francisco Noir
by Andrew Thorpe, Ph.D.
During the next few weeks, I saw Thorpe on several occasions. Each time, I begged him not to go ahead with the book, and each time, he refused. “Have you read it?” he would ask eagerly. “If you read it, I think you’ll change your mind.” But I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t need to relive, through someone else’s lens, the horror of Lila’s death.
The last time Thorpe and I talked was a foggy day on Ocean Beach, after I’d told my parents about the book. They had been devastated, and my normally calm father had been unable to hide his anger.
“You brought Andrew Thorpe into this house,” he said. “He had dinner with us. We trusted him because he was your friend.”
Thorpe and I walked along the shoreline, faces cold and wet from the fog. “I’m asking you one last time,” I pleaded. “For me, for my parents, for Lila. Just let this go.”
“Ellie,” he said. “I can’t.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
He looked out at the ocean, where an enormous ship was making its way slowly toward the bay. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I turned and walked away. When I was halfway to the board-walk, he shouted something, but his words were drowned out by the waves.
Four
FOR SEVERAL YEARS AFTER LILA DIED, I wandered. It took me longer than it should have to complete my B.A. in literature, after which I worked as a waitress and an office temp in order to finance my travels around the U.S.—endless road trips in beat-up cars with on-again, off-again boyfriends. Eventually, I went alone to Europe. The summer after I finished high school and Lila graduated from Berkeley, our parents had paid for the two of us to spend six weeks backpacking by Eurail. We had so much fun on our trip, we vowed to do it again in five years. With Lila gone, the five-year mark came and went without fanfare. I lived in a kind of suspension, having never found a clear path forward. Four years later than planned, I bought a one-way ticket across the Atlantic. I spent the summer of my twenty-seventh year retracing the steps that Lila and I had made together. I traveled the same route we had traveled, from Amsterdam to Paris, Paris to Barcelona, across to Venice, up through Germany, and finally back to the Netherlands. I visited the same museums, even tried to sleep in the same hostels, though more often than not I couldn’t find them, as I’d never bothered to keep a journal.
I bought a book of mini-biographies of famous mathematicians and visited several of their graves—Blaise Pascal at Saint Etiennedu-Mont in Paris, Carl Gauss at the Albanifriedhof in Göttingen, Germany, Leibniz in Hanover, Christian Doppler at the Cimitero di San Michele in Venice. Visiting the gravesites of the mathematicians Lila had admired was a posthumous gift to my sister, one which served no practical purpose, but in some way I couldn’t quite explain, it made me feel closer to her.
Upon my return home, I continued working temp jobs, moving from one office to the next with no sense of joy or purpose. I often wondered what Lila would be doing, had she lived. Surely, it would be a great deal more than this; her life, I knew, would have amounted to something. A decade after her death I could not quite banish the thought that I was still living life as an imaginary number.
Then, when I was beginning to doubt that I would ever find anything to be passionate about, I found my calling in coffee. The discovery was accidental, what some might call luck. Lila, for her part, had never believed in such a thing. Once, when I exclaimed over her good luck at having won a Walkman in a high school raffle, Lila had said, “What we call luck is really just the result of natural laws playing themselves out, a matter of probability.”
A CUPPER, LIKE A SOMMELIER OR A PERFUMER, must have an excellent nose. I inherited mine from my mother, an avid gardener who arranged her plants not by color, but by smell. Walking through my mother’s garden as a child, I was enthralled by the way the heady sweetness of jasmine gave way to the tartness of lemon trees, or the way musky wisteria was buttressed by the piney smell of sage. I loved the crispness of peppermint against a carpet of cedar bark mulch, the earthiness of roses paired with delicate lavender. Once, when I was in elementary school, my mother told me I had a natural nose. I relished the compliment, and clung to it for years. My mother was always supportive, and nothing would have pleased her more than to have many fronts on which to praise me. But while Lila’s intellectual gifts made her a magnet for spontaneous and genuine praise, I knew our mother had to work a little harder with me.
Decades after the fact, I still remembered my first cup of coffee, enjoyed on the sly with my father one Sunday morning when Lila and my mother were at church. I was eight years old, homebound with poison oak following a family camping trip.
I’d always loved the smell of coffee, the way it filled the house in the mornings when my parents were getting ready for work. But that day, I noticed something new in the kitchen: a small wooden box on the countertop, with a metal cup affixed to its top and a crank on the side. A few dark beans rested in the bottom of the cup. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A coffee grinder.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Your mother and I bought it in Venice.”
“What’s Venice?”
“A city in Italy. We went there on our honeymoon.”
“Why haven’t I ever seen it before?”
“I found it when I was cleaning out the garage. Why don’t you give it a whirl?”
I turned the crank round and round, watching the teeth in the bottom of the cup break the beans into smaller and smaller bits, releasing a rich, nutty fragrance. I continued cranking until the beans disappeared. Then I pulled out the little drawer where the coffee grounds had fallen, brought it to my nose, and sniffed. It was wonderful.
“I want some,” I said.
Dad smiled. “Aren’t you a bit young?”
Many years later, I would take a temp job doing administrative work at Golden Gate Coffee in South City. When the owner, Mike Stekopolous, offered me a permanent position as his assistant, I accepted without hesitation; it was the first office where I felt I truly fit in. I’d been at Golden Gate Coffee for a year when I first accompanied Mike on one of his trips. I was thirty-one years old, searching for something I couldn’t quite pinpoint—a sense of peace and well-being that had eluded me since Lila’s death. On a small plot of land in the Quezaltenango region of Guatemala, I stood side by side with three generations of a campesino family and picked ripe coffee cherries from glossy trees. By the end of the day my back was aching, my fingers sore, and my burlap bag only half full; I was stunned to learn that it required two thousand hand-picked cherries to produce a single pound of coffee. The next day, I took a tour of the processing shed, where the floaters were separated from the good cherries, which were then fed into the pulping machine before the beans, still wrapped in a thick skin of parchment, were separated by size. I saw the fermentation vats, dipped my hands into the soggy beans, and rinsed away the gooey mucilage, revealing the smooth, greenish beans with their delicate seams. Finally, I helped spread the beans on gigantic tarps to dry, raking them back and forth in the sun.
It was only after I had experienced the process from start to finish that Mike allowed me into the cupping room—a small shed in a clearing, with whitewashed walls and a floor of packed dirt. There, as I broke the dark crust with a heavy spoon, I remembered the morning I sat sipping coffee with my father. It was the first time in my adult life I could envision some version of my own story in which the disparate parts somehow came together, in which the various plots began to merge.
Five
MURDER BY THE BAY APPEARED IN STORES on a Tuesday in June, eighteen mont
hs after Lila’s death. The following Sunday, a reviewer named Semi Chellas gave it a glowing front-page review in the San Francisco Chronicle, promising that it was destined to become “a true crime classic.” Days later, I came across a piece Thorpe had written for San Francisco magazine, titled, “Lila’s Story,” in which he detailed his friendship with me and claimed that while Lila had been the main character of his story, I had been his muse. It made me sick to my stomach. I hoped my parents hadn’t heard about the article; if they did, they said nothing.
I watched the book section, alarmed to see it debut at number seven on the Chronicle nonfiction best-seller list. Week by week, it rose, from seven to five to two, and eventually to number one, where it remained for twenty-three weeks. I couldn’t walk past a bookstore without seeing it prominently displayed in the window, often with a large poster, on which the cover art—a photograph of Lila’s face ghosted over the Golden Gate Bridge—was paired with Thorpe’s headshot: victim and author, side by side. I hated the thought of all those people reading about Lila, hated the fact that her private tragedy had become public entertainment.
During its third week on the stands, I was in the waiting room of a service station on Geary Boulevard, having the oil changed in my car, when I noticed that the woman across the aisle was reading Murder by the Bay. She saw me looking at the cover and asked, “Have you read it?”
“No.”
“You should. It’s fascinating. Slow in parts when the author gets into the math stuff, but overall I’d recommend it. It’s chilling to think this happened right here, in San Francisco. I know the streets he mentions, I’ve eaten in the restaurants, my son even went to the same high school as Lila—Lowell. He remembers her, she was apparently very quiet, pretty, a little strange. I’m three-quarters of the way through. The author just named the murderer.”
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