After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  “It’s just a matter of time before he strikes again,” I told them. “Once they get a taste of blood, they always come back for more.”

  Chapter Nine

  Three weeks after the disappearance of Charlene Gray, a twenty-three-year-old named Vivian Cole set out late one afternoon on a hiking trail on the far side of Mount Tamalpais in search of wildflowers to press for handmade notecards. She was reported missing. Her body turned up on Mount Tamalpais next to a stream on the Matt Davis Trail. We found out about that one when Patty ran into our neighbor Helen taking out her trash.

  “Your dad must be one busy fellow these days,” she said. “Everybody’s counting on him to put this terrible person behind bars.”

  The county was still taking in the news of Vivian when Daniella Carville and Sammi Raynor, best friends since grade school, and about to enter their senior year in high school, disappeared somewhere between the parking lot where they’d left their bicycles and the East Peak of the Bolinas Ridge, where the brother of one of the girls had sprinted up ahead, waiting to meet them for a picnic they would never share. It was the second week of August, and brutally hot.

  Their bodies turned up a few hours later, just after sundown—strangled (and raped, no doubt) with that same electrical tape over their eyes, arranged in the same begging position as the one in which Charlene Gray and Vivian Cole had been found. That last information we learned when a reporter at the press conference led, once again, by our father, had called out, “Why do you think he makes them get down on their knees?” As if there could be any good reason.

  This time, I actually managed to see our father’s press conference on television. I had gotten a job babysitting for the Pollacks, who were headed to the city for the afternoon and left us in charge of Karl Jr. I had figured out from evidence in the Pollack home—the fact that Karl Pollack no longer kept a stash of condoms in his bedside table the way I’d observed in the past, and a chart on the refrigerator listing her temperature every day for the last seven weeks, and an appointment reminder card on the counter for a medical office, with a picture of a smiling baby on it—that Jennifer Pollack must be trying to have another baby.

  I was fixing Karl Jr.’s lunch when the phone rang: it was Jennifer’s mother, calling to tell her daughter to turn on the television set. When I told her my name, she seemed to know who I was.

  “What do you know? Your father’s on TV right now, talking about the most recent murders. Two more girls dead, out on the trails, can you believe it?” she said. “I sure hope your dad’s got some good clues to catch this maniac before he strikes again.”

  THE FIRST MURDER HAD BEEN terrible enough. But not surprisingly, the news of three more killings within the space of less than six weeks seemed to have left the entire population of the county in a state of panic. Mothers drove their children to the pool now (all mothers but ours) rather than letting them ride their bikes, and practically overnight the trails behind our house, where we used to see hikers setting out on weekends, were mostly empty.

  Back when the first murder took place, a person might have held out hope that the killing of Charlene Gray was some isolated event, but with the discovery of Vivian’s body, and Daniella’s and Sammi’s, it had become clear that we had a serial killer on the mountain (the mountain and the extensive trail system that wove beyond it, over a stretch of nearly fifty miles). If he had killed four young women, there was no reason to suppose he would not kill more.

  The media were all over the story, of course. One of the papers, demonstrating its penchant for alliteration, dubbed the killer “the Sunset Strangler,” referring to the general time of day the four bodies had been found. The girls might have been killed at any time during the day, but somehow the image of the sinking sun lent an extra note of poignancy to the growing scandal.

  I could see, from my father’s face at the press conference, and even more so from his voice, the pressure he was under now. There he was again, up on the screen—looking grave and purposeful, so handsome in his sport coat, with his sideburns and his jet-black hair, his big hands gripping the sides of the podium. I hated what was happening, but I loved being his daughter—and this would have been so even if it hadn’t resulted in my sudden and unexpected rise in social status with the likes of Alison Kerwin and her friends.

  In art class the year before, when we did ceramics, I had made a medallion with the words World’s Best Dad inscribed and a hole that I threaded with a silk cord and gave him for Father’s Day. Maybe, in certain ways, he wasn’t the world’s best dad, but he had promised he’d wear my gift every day. Watching my father now on the television screen, I thought I could detect the shadow of the medallion under his shirt. I liked thinking that every day, when he stood in front of the mirror getting ready for work, he fastened that cord around his neck.

  Hearing him as he made his statement to the press, I had no doubt that my father would find the killer very soon—my magic father, stronger than anyone else’s. Whenever I heard his voice, it seemed to carry the promise that everything would be okay.

  “I stand before the people of Marin County today,” he said, “to assure you that, along with every member of our dedicated force, I will not rest until the perpetrator is brought to justice. We will find him, and once we do, we’ll see to it they lock him up forever, so the women of this county and everyone who cares about them—which is everyone—can sleep soundly again.”

  There were a million questions. What weapon had been used to commit the murders? Had anybody spotted a suspicious character on the mountain that day? Did the killer leave any evidence—footprints, an item of clothing? Was there any relationship between these most recent victims and the first one?

  Only that they were young and female and—from the photographs displayed on the screen—all of them dark haired and good-looking.

  A reporter asked how anyone could feel safe in Marin County with a serial killer at large. My father said they were posting police officers on all the hiking trails now, as a safety measure. “If you want to enjoy the trails,” he said, “do so in a larger group, preferably in the company of a male. We’re speaking of a ruthless individual, single-handedly capable of murdering two women at the same time, from the looks of it.”

  “Given that four girls have now been murdered within a matter of weeks,” a woman asked, “we have to ask: Is the police force taking these crimes with sufficient seriousness?”

  “I have two daughters of my own,” my father said. “Nobody needs to remind me of the urgency here to find this man and make the mountain safe again.”

  This was us he was talking about, on television—Patty and me. I felt a glow of pride, hearing our father speak of us this way. He was thinking about us, looking out for us. Of all the fathers, all the police officers—all the detectives, even—they had chosen our father as the one to stand up in this place and reassure everyone, because he was the strongest and the best. And he belonged to us alone.

  THEY PUT UP SIGNS AT all the trailheads. CLOSED, BY ORDER OF THE MARIN COUNTY HOMICIDE DIVISION. HIKER ADVISORY: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  But Morning Glory Court was not connected by trail to the mountain. The mountain was just there, in our backyard. There was no way we were staying off it. Least of all now, when something exciting was finally happening there.

  Chapter Ten

  Looking now at pictures of our mother’s young self, I can see she was a pretty woman, with a trim figure, slim ankles, and bouncing brunette curls. Knowing my father—a man incorrigibly drawn to beauty, with the endearing ability to locate what was beautiful in nearly every woman he met—it’s not that surprising he would have struck up a conversation with her that first day they met. He was working on the city road crew, fixing a pothole just as she approached it on her old one-speed bicycle. Her glasses fell off and he picked them up. Picked them up and polished them.

  She had been on her way home from her favorite place, then as now—the library. She was twenty-one years old—h
ad never kissed a boy before—and she loved to read. For three years she’d been saving up money for college. Our dad was twenty-five, working two jobs while attending the police academy at night. Standing there on the sidewalk, holding out her glasses, he had actually started singing to her.

  When he found out she was called Lillian, he made a song out of her name.

  The affair would have lasted no more than a few weeks if my mother hadn’t gotten pregnant. In fact, it may have been over already by the time she found out. I know she rode the bus to his house then, knocked at the door, was met by his Italian father, and introduced herself. Shy as she was, my mother had always possessed a strict sense of fairness and an unblinking eye when it came to seeing that a person did the right thing, or failed to do so.

  Our father would have honored his responsibility and did. Their wedding—in church for the parents’ sake, but a small ceremony, pulled off on a low budget—was set for the end of November 1963. The day after the Kennedy assassination, as it turned out. My father’s mother had been gone for years by this point; his father would die of a heart attack the following spring. My grandmother on my mother’s side, who’d kept JFK’s photograph on her nightstand, wore black and wept through the ceremony.

  “I don’t know which fact about the day made her cry,” my mother told us. “Everything, most likely.”

  Our mother had remained dry eyed. “I never trusted that man,” she said, referring to Kennedy, I assume, though the remark could have been construed other ways. Even before all the stories about JFK’s cheating came out later, she’d known. She maintained a strong affinity for Jackie, a woman she claimed to identify with, though the two could hardly have had less in common.

  With a baby on the way, the college plan was scrapped. Three months later she suffered a miscarriage.

  Our parents could have split up then, but something had changed. Where before my mother dreamed of college, and my father had his eye on a big career as a city homicide detective, in their grief and shock all they could think of was another baby.

  My mother enrolled in secretarial school and got a job as a typist. Our father graduated from the police academy, joining the force around the time my mother finally got pregnant again, with me. From the photographs she had of that time—one of her and my father on a cable car, and another of her in a maternity dress and him with his hand on her stomach, grinning—I figured this must have been a period my parents were actually happy together.

  One of my earliest memories concerns how handsome my father looked in his uniform—the sparkling badge, shiny shoes, the hat he’d put on my head or twirl with his finger or toss in the air and retrieve without even seeming to try. Good as he looked in that uniform, though, what he always wanted was to be a plainclothes detective.

  Plainclothes: hardly the word for how my father dressed. Even in those days, when his salary was very low, he paid regular visits to a tailor to make sure everything fit just right: a black leather jacket that showed off his broad shoulders and narrow waist and hips; shoes of the softest leather; a shirt of some very good cotton, or sometimes silk. His pants were perfectly pressed (ironing, the one domestic chore he performed, other than cooking). His hair was black and shiny as my tap shoes and he cut it himself, perfectly—a gift he’d learned from his barber father.

  I have no memory of my sister’s birth, given that I was not yet two years old when she was born. That’s when we moved to Marin County, the house on Morning Glory Court. And all the other places that made up the landscape of our childhood: Marin Joe’s, where our father took us for tiramisu. That wonderful bridge—the Golden Gate—its implausibly red beams spanning the dark and churning water of San Francisco Bay. On one side, the glittering city. And on the other side, the mountain.

  Always, before, it had been the city that conjured images of danger, while our side of the bridge remained a safe and sleepy haven. That summer, 1979, everything changed.

  THE FACT THAT HE WAS married to our mother—back when he still was—never got in the way of our father’s expressing interest in other women. More than that. He didn’t try that hard to conceal this, even from us. He never saw his appreciation for the opposite sex as anything to be ashamed of. That’s how he was, and the rest of us should just accept it. Love him for it, even.

  When we were out with our father, we were always bumping into women we’d never met before, who seemed to know our father well, or think they did.

  Once, when I was walking down a street with him—heading to his office at the Civic Center—a woman had mistaken my father for Dean Martin (or claimed to anyway; that might have been her way of striking up a conversation). Oblivious to the presence of a little girl in a Brownie uniform holding his hand (or if she noticed, this didn’t stop her), she’d told a long story about seeing him—meaning Dean—with Sammy and Frank one time in Las Vegas on an anniversary trip with her husband. They were divorced now, she told my father—that look in her eye I knew so well. That look in his.

  He let her tell every detail of her trip to the Sands, not simply taking it in but conveying, as he always did, the impression that nobody, ever, had told him a more compelling story than this one. My father was not one to cut a woman’s story short, and when it was over he asked if she was in show business herself.

  “I was thinking you must be a dancer,” he said. “It’s something about how you hold yourself. There’s nothing more attractive in a woman than good posture.”

  You had to believe him. Even when he said something that would probably sound like a line if delivered by anybody else; he had this unimpeachable sincerity about him. Our father could walk into any bar and find someone he knew, or if he didn’t know them before, he would in five minutes. Men bought my father drinks and offered him cigarettes. Women flat-out adored him. Partly because he was handsome, but it was more than that. He was so unmistakably a man who loved women, which is a rarer kind of man to find than a person might think.

  But there was one who occupied a different place for him than all the others, though neither Patty nor I could identify exactly what it was.

  The first time I heard her name—a wail that pierced the night like the cry of a wounded animal and made my sister and me tremble in our beds—was the night our mother told our father to leave.

  “Don’t come back,” she called out, into the night.

  He didn’t.

  MARGARET ANN. A YEAR MIGHT have passed, after that night, in which her name was never spoken. And then it was.

  It was one of our Saturdays. He’d picked us up in the Alfa he’d bought after moving out. He got the car used, from a buddy on the police force whose wife had a baby; all of a sudden a car with only two seats just wasn’t practical. Not that having a couple of daughters stopped our father from taking us out in that car: he just buckled my sister and me in together in one bucket seat. We were skinny enough.

  He’d taken us to the beach that day and set out bocce balls. (What other father did a thing like that? Only ours.) Now we were headed back up the highway. “Volare” had just come on the eight-track player. I was on the side next to the shift column, close enough to my father that I could smell his aftershave and play with the thick dark hair on his arms.

  “I thought we’d stop by Margaret Ann’s on our way home,” he said. He said her name as if she’d been around forever. No explanation needed. Margaret Ann.

  I felt something then, like what a field mouse might sense on the mountain in the moments just before a hawk dives down for him. I didn’t ask “Who’s Margaret Ann?” It seemed I should know.

  She lived in an apartment complex on a lagoon somewhere in Corte Madera. There was a pool and a tennis court, which made me think she must be rich. She was wearing a dress that day we met her—and high-heeled shoes though it was the middle of the day, and she smelled like night-blooming jasmine.

  When we got there, she had cookies on a plate, and Kool-Aid, already poured, with colored plastic bendy straws of the sort I’d always want
ed us to buy, but that our mother said were a waste of money.

  She was very pretty—slim, with dark hair that hung down her back in a way that the hair of our friends’ mothers never did. In the car on the way over, my father had instructed us not to ask Margaret Ann if she had kids.

  “It’s a sore spot for her, girls,” he told us. “Margaret Ann doesn’t have any children.”

  She had a doll collection though, arranged in a glass case in her living room, and a music box that played the song from Dr. Zhivago, she told us, and a lemon tree with real lemons on it, and a little dog that looked like a combination of two breeds that never should have gotten together, with patchy fur that probably clogged up her vacuum cleaner. Patty kept that dog on her lap the whole time we were over at Margaret Ann’s, naturally.

  “This one’s got your eyes, Tone,” Margaret Ann said, as we seated ourselves around the table, nodding in my direction. She knew without asking that our father liked three scoops of sugar in his coffee.

  We played cards, and I won, though it seemed to me that Margaret Ann might not be trying. She wanted to give us manicures and brought out a little silver tray with four different colors of nail polish. I would have liked to have her put some on me, but I didn’t think it would go over well with our mother.

  “No nail polish,” I told Patty. She looked disappointed but did not argue.

  “You girls can each pick out a doll,” she told us. We’d been studying them closely already, in the cabinet. Close enough that Patty’s breath had fogged up the glass.

  This time the offer was too good to resist—even for Patty, though she was not generally a doll lover. “You take your time deciding,” Margaret Ann said. “Choose whichever one you want.”