After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  “I need to ask about Petra,” Patty reminded me. “That’s the whole point of my paper.”

  Since Patty was the dog lover, I asked for her suggestions here. What would a person want to know about a dog?

  Where to begin? There was so much to discover. You wanted to know about a dog’s food preferences, if she had a particular favorite toy; how did she feel about getting bathed? Had she been fixed, and if not, might she have puppies sometime? It was hard to imagine a dog as small as Mr. Armitage’s having puppies, but if she did, they would definitely be adorable. Patty could ask our mother again if she could have one. Though we both knew the answer to that one.

  “You’re getting off track,” I said. “You aren’t getting a puppy. You need to keep your focus here.

  “You can ask him what he likes about small dogs over large dogs,” I said. “You could ask if it’s a lot cheaper having a small dog, since they probably eat a lot less food. But the main thing is to bring the conversation around to Mr. Armitage’s wife. Without getting him upset.”

  Here was another tip for Patty to keep in mind while conducting her interview. Although it was important to take notes, she should not write down any observations that directly related to the aspect of Mr. Armitage’s life that inspired our greatest curiosity: the mysterious absence of his wife. On the chance that he was suspicious of my sister, I wanted to be sure that all he saw on her notepad, if he looked at it, were things like his birth date and his job that wouldn’t make him uneasy. Anything he said about his wife, my sister would have to remember and write down later, once she was home.

  She wasn’t wild about the idea of this interview. “It feels like I’m snooping,” she said.

  “Of course you’re snooping,” I told her. “That’s what detectives do.”

  Reluctantly, she went ahead with her assignment. Knocked at the door—same as she’d done all those times in the past when we’d played Ding Dong Ditch, except this time she didn’t run away when Mr. Armitage came to the door. She stepped into the house.

  He fixed her a root beer float, evidently, to go with a plateful of homemade cookies, oatmeal raisin. He showed her a collection of china dogs he had—not simply small dogs, but all different breeds. He explained that actually, he’d love a large dog but given that he traveled home to Ohio twice a year to see his parents, and he’d never want to leave a dog of his in a kennel, it was important for him to have a dog small enough to take on an airplane.

  One amazing fact did emerge over the course of Patty’s interview. In the living room, there had been a framed poster of a dancer, a handsome young man, bare chested and wearing tights, holding a woman over his head. When Patty had asked if Mr. Armitage was a ballet fan, he’d offered the surprising information that in fact this was a photograph of himself in his younger days. Back in Ohio, he’d been a member of a dance company in Cincinnati for several years.

  “As you can tell, I don’t do much dancing anymore,” he told my sister, patting his stomach. “But I still love to attend the ballet in San Francisco.”

  The afternoon she conducted her interview with Mr. Armitage, Patty was in his house so long I started to get worried. Finally, after close to an hour, she emerged. She got down low to the ground to hug the dog good-bye. Mr. Armitage had told her how rare it was for Petra to lick a person’s face this way and wag her tail as she did for Patty.

  “See you soon,” he called out as she was leaving. “Glad I could help.”

  Later, at home—transcribing my sister’s findings into the scrapbook and taping a few strands of dog hair that had stuck to her pants onto a page labeled “Sample Hair from Subject’s Dog”—she expressed her hope that she might get to know our neighbor better.

  “I think he’s my kind of person,” Patty said. “Shy with people but not with dogs.”

  “What about his wife?” I said. “Didn’t you ask him anything about her?”

  “We didn’t get around to it,” she told me.

  “He showed me this trick he taught Petra,” she added. “When he puts on this one record of an opera singer, she sings along. Not really singing but she gets up on her hind legs and makes noises.”

  “You were supposed to ask about the wife—”

  “It seemed like that might be a sore subject,” she said. “But other than that, he seems like a pretty regular person. Friendly and cheerful.”

  “Some people have a secret dark side,” I told her. “They wouldn’t call it a dark side if there wasn’t a bright side too. That’s the part he showed you.”

  “Maybe your dark side is criticizing Mr. Armitage,” Patty said, “when he never did a single mean thing to you.”

  IT WAS ONE OF THOSE afternoons when I’d gone over to Alison’s to hang out. She and her mother had gone into the city the previous weekend—the city meaning San Francisco—to stay in a hotel and do school shopping, and now she was going to show us all her new clothes and maybe let us try on some of them. This meant that I’d left Patty on her own again as I’d been doing more and more.

  I felt bad about this, not because my sister complained but more because she didn’t. “You could get some new friends too,” I told her. “I bet there’s lots of kids in the fifth grade who’d like to have you over.”

  I wasn’t actually so sure of this. When it was just the two of us, my sister could be the funniest person, but her shyness around everyone else made it hard for her to make friends. On the basketball court, going after the ball, she was a wild woman, but the rest of the time, with other people, she hardly opened her mouth.

  But this one afternoon, when I got home from Alison’s—carrying a shopping bag she’d given me from Bloomingdale’s with some hand-me-down clothes she didn’t want anymore—Patty was not in her usual spot on the steps waiting for me, or over at the Marcellos’ shooting hoops. Not out in back either, though it had seemed unlikely she’d go up on the hillside by herself. Not in our room. Her bike was in the driveway. So was her basketball.

  I was starting to worry when I saw her coming up the street from the far end, the cul-de-sac. Except for a time when our father came to her game the year before, just at the moment she’d made a perfect hook shot, I could not remember a moment my sister had a more euphoric look on her face.

  Tall as she was, Patty had a tendency to slump her shoulders and bow her head forward—something our father, with his belief in the importance of good posture, used to get after her for. But that day she walked like a fashion model down the runway, except what she was showing off was not an outfit; it was Mr. Armitage’s dog, Petra.

  Mr. Armitage was paying Patty fifty cents a day, but that wasn’t the point for her. She would have paid him for the chance, if she had the money.

  “You need to be very careful,” he had told her. “My dog is my life.”

  Petra was six years old. She had a brown spot in the shape of a heart on her face and her tail was mostly missing, due to a mistake at the puppy kennel when they’d clipped it. Because of this, Mr. Armitage had gotten her at a discount, but to him she was priceless beyond measure.

  This was my sister’s first day on the job, a tryout. The trial didn’t last long. It was apparent to everyone (Mr. Armitage, Patty, and Petra) that this was a perfect arrangement. Patty would have come home at lunch to walk Petra too, if this were possible.

  After a few days, I reminded Patty about our scrapbook project, accumulating data on the Mysterious Life of Albert Armitage. But her focus had shifted, so that now, if she made an entry in the book, it concerned something particularly cute Petra had done or some little-known fact about Jack Russell terriers.

  Though her great love was the dog, she was becoming fond of Mr. Armitage too. He was still mysterious. But where I remained fixated on the fact that his wife no longer seemed to live with him—and that no mention was made of her ever having done so—my sister seemed to have largely forgotten about that, or put it aside anyway, in favor of a friendship forged over a mutual passion for Petra.

&nbs
p; On one occasion, she even raised, briefly, the idea that we could introduce Mr. Armitage to our mother as a possible romantic interest, but even Patty recognized the impossibility of this connection. Really, all she wanted was to ensure that Petra could be in our lives forever.

  If she couldn’t have her own dog, walking Petra was the next best thing.

  AFTER THAT ONE TIME, THE year after he left us, I never again heard our father speak of marrying Margaret Ann, but the fact of her, and who she’d been to him, was always there, off in the background somewhere. In my mind I could still hear the quickness of my father’s boots on the step, climbing the stairs to Margaret Ann’s apartment that day he introduced us to her, where we let Patty ring the doorbell. Running a comb through his black hair as he stood there waiting for her to open the door, though as soon as she did the first thing she did was muss it up.

  He took us to her apartment only a few other times. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, as we pulled into the parking space in front of her apartment. Sky blue, with a window box of petunias, and beyond it, the glittering pool where I pictured the four of us—Patty and me, our father and Margaret Ann—jumping off the diving board and sipping drinks with paper umbrellas in them. And then felt instantly guilty, for having dreamed up such a scene.

  She had sewn us matching dresses. That was the reason for the visit. She had chosen just the kind of fabric we loved: a slightly shiny turquoise cotton with yellow kittens on it, unraveling balls of yarn. There were big pockets, and wide sashes long enough to tie into a giant bow at the back that made us look like presents.

  “What are they supposed to do with these, Maggie?” my father said, when we put them on. But he was smiling when he said it. His face, when he was around her, took on a different look from the rest of the time, and even Patty, though she normally hated wearing a dress, looked happy.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Margaret Ann said. “I saw the pattern and it just seemed like so much fun.”

  After we took them off, we hung the dresses in the closet at her apartment, next to Margaret Ann’s own beautiful dresses—so different from anything our mother had. We wore them only twice, when my father and Margaret Ann took us to miniature golf in Santa Rosa one Saturday, and another time, to brunch at the Hotel Flamingo, where we swam in the pool with them—Margaret Ann in a white bikini, our father looking like Rock Hudson, she said—and after, we loaded our plates high with so many rolls Patty got sick in the car driving home, all over her dress and Margaret Ann’s too. The dress was white like the bikini.

  “You think I care, honey?” she said, when Patty apologized. “Dresses don’t matter. Just people.”

  “Don’t tell your mother about this,” our father said. But we knew that already.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The end of August brought another murder. This time it was a park ranger, clearing brush on the trail, who came upon the body: Sally Jansen, age twenty-nine. She was a freelance journalist who’d driven from Sacramento to take pictures of the mountain in the hopes of selling a story about the Sunset Strangler to some magazine. They found her camera next to her, with a full roll of film inside, with shots of her own dead body. Taken by the killer, evidently, though as before, he’d been careful to leave no fingerprints.

  Five murders. No evidence. (I knew this from a call our father made to us to explain why, once again, he’d have to cancel our weekend visit.)

  “Are you getting closer to catching the killer?” I asked.

  On the other end of the line, I heard him let out a long breath. Exhaling the smoke from his Lucky, probably.

  “This guy’s smart,” my father said.

  “When this mess is over,” he said, “I’m taking you and your sister to Italy.”

  “Just the three of us?” I asked him.

  “Yes.”

  AFTER THAT FIFTH MURDER, WE saw our father even less, except on television, and in the paper. He stopped by just before that Labor Day weekend—one of those brief drop-ins our mother spoke of as his cameo appearances. He had a present for each of us—an Adidas jacket for Patty, a necklace for me.

  “It’s been a little stressful lately at work,” he told us—the closest he came to mentioning the Sunset Strangler investigation since his original call to tell us to stay off the mountain. “But I want you to know that even when I don’t come by, I’m always thinking about you two.”

  “This is so you’ll look sharp on the basketball court, Patty Cakes,” he said, zipping the jacket up for my sister.

  “As for you, Farrah,” he said, handing me the box with the necklace, “this is the year you figure out how beautiful you are. You’ve got one of those faces that take a little time to grow into. But you’re getting there.

  “Any boy wants to get near you, he’ll have to talk with me first,” my father said. “They’ll all be wanting to soon. Just don’t waste your time on someone who doesn’t deserve you.”

  My father had never even heard the name of Teddy Bascom. So how did he know?

  SCHOOL STARTED. WE WORE OUR new back-to-school outfits—of which we had two, purchased on sale at JCPenney. Our mother had insisted on cutting Patty’s bangs, and they’d turned out so short they were like the fringe on a placemat, nothing more—leaving a broad, pink expanse of forehead. When she saw herself in the mirror, Patty cried. Our mother had none of our father’s talent for hair.

  “It’s not so bad,” I told my sister. “It’ll grow.” But I wouldn’t let our mother go near me with the scissors after that, so Patty knew my real opinion.

  Even with Patty’s bad haircut and my bargain jeans, we were in big demand with our classmates that first day back. I was, anyway. Alison Kerwin had been away with her family at Lake Tahoe, so she hadn’t checked in since the most recent murder. Now she came up to me in first period to say I should sit with her at lunch. This was a definite step up from my old spot in the cafeteria.

  She wanted to know if my father had any new leads. “Even if it’s top secret, none of us would breathe a word,” she said. “Pinkie promise.”

  “Like that thing about the bite marks,” Soleil said—though I’d only told Alison that one, back in the summer, with the reminder that it was for her ears only. “And the panty hose.”

  So much for her pinkie promises.

  “I don’t know,” I told Soleil. “Our father made us swear we’d never discuss this part with anyone. Certain information is classified.”

  “I bet it has to do with sex, right?” Alison said. “Some really disgusting thing he made his victim do before he strangled her?”

  “Let’s just say, by the time he killed this one, she must have wished she was already dead,” I told them. Sometimes the details you withheld could be more terrifying than the ones you shared. Also, as active as my imagination was, I’d found myself running low on ideas lately.

  We talked a lot about boys. Whatever minuscule piece of information any of us had gleaned that day about a boy one of the others considered cute, we shared with the group. This data would be along the lines of a particular boy looking in the direction of one of us, or a different one appearing to have shaved and cut himself. Somebody else would have an opinion about the socks Vincent was wearing that day. One of us would observe that during history class when Mrs. Brennan called on a boy named Larry Odegard, a boy about as unpopular as I used to be, his voice had cracked—starting out in one octave, slipping or more likely rising into another, the old one. To hear me laugh you would not have known that only a few months earlier, these girls might well have been laughing at me.

  Our own mortifications we did not discuss, though some attention was given to outbreaks of skin problems—Alison’s one beauty flaw—and attempts to cover them up with concealer. She owned a vast range of products for this.

  “Teddy Bascom decided he wants to go out with you,” she told me. “He said Heather’s butt is too big, and you’re hotter.”

  “You know someone else that’s hot?” Soleil said, mouth full of
tuna fish, gesturing in my direction. “Her father. When he came on the news last night, my mom said if he ever gave up being a detective he could have his own TV show. She said he’s as sexy as Paul Michael Glaser.”

  When she said this, I was still taking in the news concerning Teddy. The part about my father inspired an odd combination of emotions. Partly pride. Partly discomfort. You didn’t really want your friends to view your father as sexy. On the other hand I recognized I’d never have been invited to sit at this table or find myself lying on Alison’s big canopy bed with these girls after school—and never would have attracted the attention of Teddy Bascom either—if it hadn’t been for my father and the Sunset Strangler case.

  Patty was never around for any of these discussions. Now that I was in eighth grade I ate in a whole different cafeteria in another building. But when we saw each other after school, waiting for the bus, my sister looked at me in a way that I recognized meant she was onto me. Not mad, just disappointed looking, and sad. She was like a dog that, even if you hit it, still brings you the paper.

  On the bus now, I sat with Alison and Soleil. We might go over to Alison’s house, or to Soleil’s or Heather’s. When we did, there would usually be other kids there too. We’d lie on Alison’s bed and play records or try on clothes or watch the little portable television she had on her dresser, her own personal set. We ate peanut butter crackers or nachos—though the girls were always on diets—and sometimes we’d order pizza and have it delivered, without even needing to pay, because her parents had an account.

  I’d get a ride home from one of the mothers around dinnertime. (Their dinnertime, anyway—mine and Patty’s still being flexible to nonexistent.) When this happened, the mothers were as likely as their daughters to want to hear about my father and what he was doing on the case.

  “Tell your dad we’re all thinking of him,” Mrs. Kerwin said to me one time. “I sleep better knowing he’s out there tracking this monster.”