After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  He called me that a lot in those days, not that I resembled the actress in any way. But Patty and I liked to pretend we were Charlie’s Angels. Sometimes, if we had made up a scenario where we pretended one of our neighbors was really a bank robber, or an international spy, I’d tell her, “Go get him, Bree,” and she’d take off like a shot, though of course she never actually used her jujitsu moves on anybody but our father or me.

  “Do you have some good clues?” I said. Our father didn’t talk about his cases, but asking was a way of feeling close to him, and special.

  “Don’t fill your head up with this mess, baby,” he said. “Take it from a guy who does. It’s not good for you.”

  “I know you’ll get him,” I said. “You always do.”

  “Just stay off that mountain,” he told me.

  Chapter Seven

  The spot where they’d found the body of Charlene Gray lay on the side of the mountain close to where we lived—a part frequented by hikers, though there were fewer of them in those days than later, when the idea of suiting up with special poles and shoes and shirts made out of interesting materials that didn’t absorb sweat got really fashionable. You might see half a dozen people heading up the trail on a Saturday. Or only two.

  There was a parking area a half mile down our street, and a second parking area with a ranger station partway up the mountain, but it was also possible to access the trails—miles of them, going out in all directions—from behind our house. The day after they’d found the body, two officers appeared in the neighborhood, canvassing the residents of our development to ask if anyone had seen a suspicious character two days earlier, heading toward the trails, or away from them. Nobody had anything to offer from the looks of things.

  After that one call he made, following the discovery of the body, in which he’d told us to stay away from the mountain, Patty and I did not hear from our father for many days—and knowing how busy he’d be with the case, and how seldom he called even when he wasn’t busy, we didn’t expect to. From our neighbor Jennifer Pollack, whom we’d run into when she was pushing Karl Jr.’s stroller shortly after the police had questioned her, we learned they appeared to have no description to go on. But a man wandering down from the mountain alone would have stood out, so it was worth asking around.

  It was not lost on Patty and me—in fact, we dwelled on this realization—that we spent more time on the mountain than just about anybody. Maybe the murderer was someone who knew Charlene Gray and had a particular reason to want to harm her, but if this had been a random killing, I pointed out to Patty, we could have been the victims.

  Suppose we’d chosen that day to hike up to the ranger station, or venture into the eucalyptus grove on the mountain not far from our house for a game of Truth or Dare or spies, or to sled down the hillside on a piece of cardboard as we liked to this time of year when the grass got brown and dry enough to slide on. The picture came to me of the two of us, holding hands and running as fast as we could down the steepest part, until one of us tripped and we fell down on top of each other, rolling and laughing. Looking up then, into the face of a man, staring down at us.

  What would we have done if he’d nabbed us? From the jujitsu moves our father had taught us, we knew that a kick in the balls was one sure way to throw off a male attacker, at least momentarily, but very likely he’d recover well enough to carry on with his assault after a few seconds. Unless she could deliver a hard blow to her attacker’s Adam’s apple—not likely in our case—a person would need more than one good kick to stop a murderer.

  We were fast runners—and there were two of us. But suppose he caught up with one. Me, probably, since Patty ran faster?

  “I’d throw poison oak leaves on him?” she offered. Patty was fearless about physical challenges, but not always the best problem solver.

  “When he had me in a headlock, I’d bite him,” I said—a tactic I’d learned from Charlie’s Angels. “You’d come up from behind with a rock and bash him.”

  “Then once we had him unconscious we’d run home and call Dad.”

  “Too risky. The guy might come to and get away while we were off making the call.”

  “I’d keep an eye on him while you were gone,” Patty said. It was like her to disregard any thought of danger in a situation like that.

  “We’d take his clothes first, so he’d be too embarrassed to go anyplace,” I told her, not that being naked ever stopped my sister. “Then we’d tie him up with vines.”

  “I wouldn’t want to look at his bare butt,” Patty said. The rest—those even more alarming or more likely comical body parts—was more than she could speak of, though on other occasions (when the object of our curiosity seemed sexy enough) we had been known to contemplate them. Tying up someone like Peter Frampton with his clothes off, for instance, or (after we saw Grease, John Travolta)—and making him our slave—could have interested me.

  “Sometimes you have to do this kind of thing, in the line of duty,” I told her. “You think Dad hasn’t ever had to do something gross like that?” The Angels didn’t, but real life was different.

  “He could get here pretty fast, once I told him what was going on,” I said. “He’d turn on the siren in his glove compartment and bring backup.”

  We imagined the scene then: Our father in his black leather jacket, gold watch glinting in the sun, snapping handcuffs on the killer. The other officers leading the offender away as he shuffled down the hill, drool coming out of his mouth. As he passed Patty and me, he’d spit out some curse words, but we’d just laugh.

  After, our father would lift us up and whirl us around—both at once, knowing how strong he was. “If something ever happened to you two . . .” he’d start, but he couldn’t even finish the sentence. “What do you say the three of us go out for spaghetti and meatballs at Marin Joe’s?”

  We would get our favorite booth in the back, with the picture of Tony Bennett hanging on the wall behind us, and Gina Lollobrigida and Anthony Franciosa. The waitress would know our father, naturally. “A couple of beautiful daughters you got there, Anthony,” she’d say. “You better keep your eye on those two.”

  “Any guy tries to get his hands on my girls,” our father said, lighting his cigarette, “he’s going to have to deal with me first.”

  IN THE INTEREST OF PROTECTING the investigation, according to the Marin Independent Journal, Detective Torricelli was saying almost nothing about the particulars concerning the murder—what leads the police had uncovered, or if the killer had left clues. But in those first days after they located the body, there were a couple of articles about Charlene Gray, with a photograph of her at her senior prom and another of her and her brother at a Giants game, wearing their baseball caps backward and holding hot dogs. There was an interview with her boyfriend—initially a Person of Interest but swiftly eliminated as a suspect—in which he talked about Charlene’s love of hiking, as well as the students in the church youth group she led, the music she listened to (the Carpenters), and her collection of stuffed koala bears.

  Except for the one sock, she had been naked when they found her. No mention in the article of whether her clothes had been left at the scene of the crime. My father was quoted in the article, explaining that for reasons of pursuing the investigation effectively, the sheriff’s department was not at liberty to divulge information about the crime scene.

  For three full days after the murder, police swarmed the mountain near our house. It wasn’t something either of our parents shared with us, but we knew why they were there. Our father had told us stories in the past about how he approached a crime scene—if it happened in a house, the importance of not disturbing a single piece of furniture, or even the position of a coffee cup on a table, a cigarette butt in an ashtray, or even the ash. The breakthrough that led a detective to his suspect might be nothing more than a hair. Nothing more than an eyelash.

  “First thing I do when I arrive at the scene,” he told us, “is nothing. Just stand there a
long time, taking it in. You only get one chance for that. Once the homicide team gets to work, everything changes. I need to lock in the picture of how it was the moment it happened.”

  Now the crime scene was our own backyard, practically. As good a job as we knew our father would do, collecting evidence, it seemed obvious we should try to locate something ourselves. This was our Charlie’s Angels moment at last.

  There was no point attempting to survey the precise spot where the murder occurred. The homicide squad would have combed over that patch of ground and the surrounding area a million times and no doubt were still going over every inch of it. We needed to adopt a different strategy for our investigation.

  As always, I was the one in charge, with Patty my loyal follower. “I have to be quiet for a while,” I told her. “I need to work on this.”

  My sister understood what I meant. I was going into my zone—a very different one from our father’s. Less focused on the physical. More about feelings. My father looked at the outside world to provide clues. I looked inside myself.

  THERE WAS A THING I could do sometimes, though up to that point only on certain unforeseen occasions. I saw things before they happened. Or after they happened, even if I wasn’t present at the time. I had powers. Or believed I did. Others might be skeptical, but Patty never doubted that this was so.

  All my life—as long as I could remember it at least—pictures had come to me. The visions, Patty and I called them. They might be images of people I knew, or people I’d never met. Sometimes a scene that took place in the past would play out for me like an old movie, but only in my head. Other times I’d glimpse some moment in the future. I’d hear a voice talking, telling me something, or possibly speaking to a whole other person, a little like how it was back when there were party lines and you’d pick up the phone and listen in on someone else’s conversation. Only these conversations didn’t come through the phone lines. They entered directly into my brain.

  On other occasions it might be no more than a feeling. Trust this person. Or This one is bad news.

  Our mother recognized and accepted this gift of mine. She understood that on occasion I’d come out with observations or remarks that seemed to suggest I had access to some other sense beyond the usual five.

  “Even as a baby, you’d know when the telephone was going to ring,” our mother had told me. “Sometimes you’d run to the door at some odd hour and stand there. A minute later, your father would show up. Even though it wasn’t his usual time to come home.”

  There had been an earthquake once, when I was in third grade or maybe fourth—nothing major, but enough to knock some dishes off a shelf. The morning of the day it happened, I told our mother we should take them down.

  “Your blue mug’s going to break if you don’t,” I told her.

  Now every time she used that cup, with the glue showing from where she repaired the handle, I knew she thought about it.

  Once, on an errand with my mother, dropping off a pair of loafers at the shoe repair shop, I had started crying. I told her I was worried about Pete, the shoemaker who used to give me a candy when we stopped in.

  Two weeks later when we went back to pick up the shoes, there was a sign on the door to say the business was closed. DEATH IN THE FAMILY.

  My visions didn’t pop up all the time—or even often—but on certain rare occasions a feeling would come over me, as if I’d floated into another time zone ahead of the one we were located in, and all of a sudden I’d see something as clear as a photograph in Life magazine.

  No discernible pattern existed to the kinds of pictures that came to me: Helen’s husband, Tubby, getting that heart attack. My mother bringing home a gallon of chocolate ice cream. A Volkswagen bus pulling up in front of the Gunnersons’ house and their hippie son who hadn’t paid a visit in two years getting out. (One day later, there he was, though his car turned out to be a Datsun.)

  I imagined myself walking past the principal’s office at school and seeing my math teacher crying, a week before we found out they were firing her for stealing someone’s wallet. I had a vision of Patty bringing home a bird she’d found on the mountain, and then she did. That night, a second vision came to me: we found the bird dead in the shoe box she’d placed it in. And there he was the next morning, lying still in the bed of grass she’d made for him.

  More likely, an image would present itself that didn’t come from anything in front of my own eyes at the time. I could be out on my bike with Patty, or in gym class, and all of a sudden I’d know what some other person was seeing—not simply know, but see through that person’s eyes. The most disturbing moments occurred when I’d seem to enter the brain of a person I barely knew, or didn’t know at all, except that now I understood what she was thinking about.

  This could be nothing more than worrying about a pimple that was developing on her forehead. But it could be major too: I’d look at an ordinary-looking man in the supermarket, running his hand through his hair, and recognize that he was heading over to the house of some woman that wasn’t his wife, whose husband was out of town, to go to bed with her, but that her husband would come home early and find them there. (Sex hung over everything now. I saw it wherever I looked.)

  I’d observe a teenage girl, one aisle over at the mall where I was hanging out with my sister, and know there was a bottle of nail polish in the pocket of her jeans that she hadn’t paid for. Purple. I’d see a woman standing at the bus stop and know: She had a miscarriage the week before. The baby her husband had wanted badly. The boy.

  My father never liked to hear about my visions. In some ways this was out of character, because my father was, himself, a man who operated a lot on instinct—someone who followed leads that came from no discernible place but a gut sense he was onto something, which very often he was. Maybe part of his attitude concerning what I experienced came from not wanting to saddle me with the weight of some kind of otherworldly abilities that might in the end create sorrow or trouble for me, as perhaps they had for him. (He never said this, but I felt my father saw things too, though he just chalked it up to a detective’s instincts.) Suppose I saw into the future, and what I saw was frightening? Better to believe it wasn’t real.

  So he offered alternative explanations. There had been minor tremors for days leading up to that quake, he said. Pete the shoemaker had been so old he was bound to die before too long. If a person predicts the phone’s about to ring often enough, she’s bound to get it right now and then.

  “What you observe in Rachel,” he said to our mother, back when they were still together, “is how perceptive she is. She’s tuned in to her gut, and she’s a great observer. These are traits of a good detective, incidentally. She’s watched my comings and goings so well she’s gotten a feel for when I’m likely to come home. Even if it’s not the same time every day.”

  I had not mentioned, then, the other time I saw an event happening before it did. The night our mother found the key in our father’s pocket and knew who it belonged to. The crying I heard through the thin walls of our house, and our father’s low voice, saying little, denying nothing. Then gone, that same night. My vision had not revealed the woman’s face, but I knew she’d have black hair.

  Of all the people acquainted with my abilities to tune in to some other place besides the one we inhabited, Patty was the most fervent and steadfast in her conviction that they were real. In the past, my sister and I had considered the possibility that my gifts might be put to use in the purchase of winning lottery tickets or (if we could only get someone to take us there) at the racetrack. But I’d explained to her that this was not a gift I could call on at will. I wasn’t a fortune-teller. I was more like some CB operator, tuning the dial of his radio, picking up random frequencies. The moments when my powers presented themselves occurred spontaneously and seemed up to this point beyond my control. They could show up at any moment. They could also fail to do so.

  Now, though, I sought to call on this gift of mine for the pur
pose of locating the killer of Charlene Gray and seeing to it that he was put behind bars—though more so, probably, out of a desire to demonstrate to our father what wonderful and helpful daughters he had, what great members of his team we were. I knew he’d love me—love us both—whether or not we helped him solve his case. But we wanted to be more than his precious little girls. We wanted to be his helpers and sidekicks, his secret weapon. We might not get to live with him anymore. But we’d be irreplaceable.

  Chapter Eight

  Where we lived, the only crimes you generally heard about—the kind they had laws against anyway—were things like driving under the influence or shoplifting. In his career in the city, my father had handled many murders—and once, back in his days as a beat cop, he had taken a bullet in a domestic dispute in which a husband had put a gun to his wife’s head while she held their screaming baby.

  But mostly—as with that one—these crimes occurred among people who knew each other already, where things got out of hand. Because murder interested me—and someday in the future, as a writer, I felt it would be important to understand the workings of the criminal mind—I’d followed the story, the summer before, of a series of killings of women in New York City by a man who called himself “Son of Sam.” For a period of many weeks, it seemed as if people all over that city had been so terrified they hardly left their apartments at night.

  “If you were on that homicide squad, you would have gotten him,” I’d told our father. Patty and I believed he must be the smartest detective in America. The world probably.

  “It’s not always about the detective,” he told us. “Sometimes you’ve got a killer on your hands who just doesn’t give you much to work with. David Berkowitz was like that. You know how they got him in the end? A parking ticket.”

  “You would have figured something out,” I said. “You always do.”