“But it could tell you something,” I told him. “If you could figure out who the dog belonged to. Maybe someone else saw him that day.”
“Locating the Sunset Strangler is my job, not yours,” he said. “Your job is to be a kid. Go to school. Make friends. Find out about boys, but carefully. Look after your mother and your sister. Leave the detective work to your old man.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I know things that could help you solve the case.”
“I don’t want to hear you talking about this anymore, Farrah,” he said. “Take it from me, this stuff can mess you up bad if you let it.”
He lit a Lucky and inhaled deeply.
“Put this garbage out of your head,” my father told me. “It can eat you alive.”
I WENT TO SCHOOL EVERY day. But I barely paid attention to anything the teachers said. My mind was occupied with the killer, my father, and Teddy Bascom. That took up all the space I had. My grades that year—which had never been distinguished—fell lower than my normal B-minus average.
My mother didn’t seem to mind. When she was young, she had harbored a dream of going to college, where she would have studied English, or maybe library science. But whatever ambition she’d possessed once had drained out of her long ago, and now she seemed not only devoid of ambitions for herself but lacking any expectation that her daughters might possess ambitions either. Maybe the thought of wanting something she couldn’t give us was too sad, or maybe she’d concluded that expecting nothing would save us the disappointment when nothing turned up.
So unlike many of the kids we knew, Patty and I never felt pressure from our mother—or our father either—to excel in school. Our mother never checked on our homework or inquired about particular projects or assignments. She loved books but seemed to make no connection between the experience of reading and learning and that of sitting in a classroom at our school. And in fact she had a point there.
Whatever the reason, report card days—so filled with anxiety for most kids in our class, and triumph for a few—were for us no different from any others. We forged our mother’s signature on our report cards ourselves most of the time, next to the Bs, Cs, and occasional Ds—though if we’d asked, she would have signed them willingly enough, with or without studying the grades and comments written inside.
“I know who you are,” she said. “I don’t need your teachers to tell me.”
Sometimes I passed in my homework. Other times not. If I did, I felt no particular need to garner distinction—my main objective was to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I hardly ever even showed one of my teachers a story I’d written, though I wrote constantly. My writing had nothing to do with school, and with my teachers, it didn’t matter if nobody ever noticed me.
So why did I care so much to win the favor of this boy, Teddy, who never showed me kindness, or even much in the way of interest? Only I did.
Our relationship, if you could call it that, had a predictable inertia. At lunch I sat with Alison and her friends—an honor never bestowed on me before that year, and one I recognized as having the potential to be withdrawn at any moment—but if Teddy gave indication that he’d like me to come and sit with him, that’s what I did. We seldom spoke.
Every day after seventh period, Teddy would wait at my locker for me, and we’d walk to the bus together, also without exchanging more than a few words. At this point, I no longer needed an invitation to go over to Alison’s after school; it was just understood we were all headed there, unless Teddy had practice that afternoon, in which case he’d tell me what time it started—not to ask if I was coming; he assumed it. He always rested his hand on the small of my back, but less in a spirit of any affection, I knew—as my father would have—than to steer me in the direction he chose, like the controller on a video game.
He steered. I followed.
“What’s happened to you?” Patty said. “You turned into a zombie, all because of a dumb boy.”
BECAUSE I ALWAYS TOLD PATTY everything, I had confided in her that Teddy now took my shirt off on a daily basis. Also my bra—though having done this, he had not found much. She offered the opinion that he didn’t sound to her like a very nice person. I knew she was right.
Still, I went over to Alison’s every day, and now when I did, the pressure was stronger than ever to take off not just my shirt but my pants too. So far I had resisted the pants part, but it was getting more difficult. When Alison’s boyfriend, Chase, showed up, they’d disappear into her bedroom; when they emerged eventually, her hair was messed up and her lips puffy looking. Soleil and Heather usually went home when the boys got there, or they went up to the kitchen to make slice-and-bake cookies or melt cheese for nachos. This left me in the rec room alone with Teddy.
Nothing in his approach was what you could call romantic, and as my father’s daughter—reminded by him all my life that I was beautiful, wonderful, perfect—this was a disappointment. Not that I’d believed everything my father told me about myself, but I had assumed it was part of what boys were supposed to do, to say these things or come up with some kind of compliment anyway, even if it was nothing more than liking your sweater.
Teddy took the no-nonsense approach.
“Hey, babe,” he said, settling into the beanbag. He patted his crotch then, as indication of what he wanted.
I’d sit on his lap. He put an arm around me—strictly a gesture of ownership. “You see me get that shot from midcourt in the first quarter at practice?”
“Really great,” I told him, though I hadn’t caught it.
He was rubbing his hand on my mostly nonexistent left breast. This led, within seconds, to the buttons on my shirt. “Why don’t you take this off?” he said.
So I did. Back before we’d gotten to this point, one of my main concerns had been the prospect of Teddy seeing my ridiculous training bra. My mother had bought the bra for me months ago, but it was more along the lines of what a fourth grader would wear—a tube of spandex stretched across the front of me like a bandage—than the style the other girls had, the ones who’d gotten their periods and had a shape.
Teddy had little time to notice this, since he always took my bra off immediately now, without studying it, or me. The look on his face when he did—dogged, purposeful, mechanical—reminded me of Mr. Pollack trying to get his lawn mower started.
“You can touch me here,” he said, putting my hand on the crotch of his pants. I gathered this was supposed to be a privilege, though I was unsure what to do once he’d placed my hand on the spot. He was rubbing against me, so I didn’t need to do anything, it turned out.
The picture came to me of the cover of the Sticky Fingers album, with Mick Jagger’s fly on the front, and the zipper my sister and I used to play with. Now that my hand was on a real zipper, with a real penis pressing up against it from all I could tell, it didn’t seem like fun anymore.
He put his mouth on one of my nipples and chewed on it, hard. Up until this point I’d been totally silent, but this made me cry out.
“Getting worked up, huh, babe?” he said. Never gonna stop. Give it up. On the radio again: that song.
I thought about the Sunset Strangler.
As I had feared, Teddy was unzipping his fly now. He had taken his penis out. I didn’t want to look down.
“Here,” he said. “Put your hand around it.”
He put his own hand over mine, moving it back and forth. He was breathing hard, but different from how he did when he was playing basketball. His free hand remained on one nipple. Then he made a groaning noise and my hand got wet. Teddy lay splayed on the beanbag, not moving. I breathed in an unfamiliar smell. My hand felt sticky and I didn’t know where to wipe it off. He probably wouldn’t like it if I got it on his shirt.
Chapter Eighteen
The first time Patty’s JV team played a home game—and based on our father’s assurances that he’d be there—she had announced to her whole team that he was coming. He never made it.<
br />
The next game, I could see her flashing quick glances into the bleachers, looking for his face and not finding it. Every time she played after that, she’d say she knew he was probably too busy so he wouldn’t get to this game either, but in the end she always looked for him.
There was a day, not long before the killings began, when Patty and I were out on our bikes in the neighborhood, and we came upon the unmistakable electric-blue Alfa parked outside a house a few blocks away. Our father’s friend Sal lived there—a buddy from his days in North Beach, who managed our favorite restaurant, Marin Joe’s, where our father took us on our birthdays, or just because it seemed like a good day for a bowl of minestrone. There’d been a time when we had stopped by with our father for these visits at Sal’s house, when the two of them would talk about old times while our father trimmed Sal’s hair. He still did this now and then, even though there was not so much of it left for our father to cut.
Seeing his car that day, Patty had gotten excited. “Dad’s probably coming by to see us after the haircut,” she said. “I bet he’ll take us out for tiramisu.”
I was less sure, but I kept my doubts to myself as we pedaled home. Patty had changed her clothes when we got there and set herself up out front to wait for him, holding her basketball in case he was up for a game of Horse at the hoop in the Marcellos’ driveway. It was close to dinnertime before she gave up and came in. Our mother, seeing this, said nothing.
As for Patty, maybe it was her growing awareness of how good she was at the game of basketball that did it—good enough that she was consistently the high scorer, and coaches from other schools had come to watch her play—but something began changing in her that year, not all at once but slowly, as the disappointments accumulated. She never gave up adoring our father, but he ceased to be, for her, the larger-than-life hero I continued to make him into. For Patty, he was more like a deeply lovable spaniel who keeps peeing on the rug and chewing on the upholstery, no matter how many times you tell him not to.
WE HAD A FAVORITE SPOT on the mountain—that old rusted-out truck body where we’d gone, time and again over the years, to hide out and eat peanut butter crackers, read our books, and make up stories.
Our father was the one who’d introduced us to the place. He had come home from work one time with a package—something important, he told us. Though he was never the hiking type, he had taken us up the trail with a certain sense of urgency as well as adventure, doling out a couple of sticks of beef jerky when I (not my sister) began to flag.
Who knows how our father discovered that truck in the first place. It occurred to me, much later—thinking back on that day—that perhaps it had been a woman who first introduced him to the spot. The image had come to me of him and Margaret Ann, lying on what was left of the seat, drinking from a wine bottle and kissing.
Clearly the truck was our father’s intended destination with us that day. He had brushed it off, laid his leather jacket on the hood, and lifted the two of us up onto it. He took out the package—wrapped not in fancy paper like a birthday gift, but brown paper of the sort used for packaging meat or nails—and slowly undid the string.
Inside was a gun. Not the kind that shot bullets, he told us, though real in its way. This was a BB gun. And in a small plastic bag next to it, a couple hundred BBs.
“Don’t tell your mother about this,” he said. “She’d say you were too young. She’d have a point there too.”
He said he was going to teach us how to shoot. It was better to learn properly than to try and figure this out on your own and do some damage while you were at it.
We spent the afternoon firing BBs at the truck body. Our father stood behind us the whole time, on his knees so his eyes were at our eye level, his arms around us, holding ours steady as we raised the gun to shoot and squeezed the trigger. Our mother wouldn’t have found this acceptable, but the way he had it set up, there was definitely no way either my sister or I could have hurt ourselves or each other.
I knew no other girl our age in our town—no other person, period—whose father would have taught her how to do this. The fact that he trusted us made us trustworthy.
“Before you shoot,” he said, “you need to be aware of your own heartbeat, know the rhythm, to steady your hand. You need to listen to your breathing. Before you squeeze the trigger, hold your breath.”
Looking back on this now, it occurs to me that our father probably knew at this point that he wouldn’t be living in the house with us much longer. Even though our mother had yet to banish him, he knew he was headed someplace else, as very likely we did too. Maybe he felt a need, before he left, to give us something. This.
“Your sister will hold on to the gun for the two of you,” our father told Patty. “She’ll decide when you’re old enough to take it out on your own. Not yet. Just know it’s there.”
He told us other things too: Never keep a gun loaded. Never pick it up if you’re mad or upset. This was not something to show our friends or to talk about with anybody else.
“You couldn’t kill a person with a BB gun,” he said. “But you could put their eye out if you wanted to, or had to. At close range, with a steady aim.
“It’s been my experience,” he said, almost as if he was talking to himself, “that girls are much better shots than boys. Maybe girls listen better. Maybe they want to please their dad.”
This part was true, for sure. There was nothing we wanted more than that. Even Patty, though she looked at our father more critically than I did, never stopped wanting to please him.
He let me carry the gun back down the mountain—empty of BBs—and when we said good-bye, he watched while I tucked the gun under my jacket, the BBs in my pocket. I kept it in the back of our closet, a place our mother never went. We did not speak of it again.
Over the years after that, we returned often to the truck, though never again for target practice with our father—a man who, with the exception of making spiders, specialized in doing most wonderful things with us exactly once. One summer we left a blanket and pillows inside the cab of the truck, along with a stash of hard candy and a few much-studied Betty and Veronica comics, a pack of cards, and my well-worn copy of Jennifer Pollack’s sexual fantasies book, My Secret Garden. We could spend a whole afternoon inside the truck, playing cards and reading.
It always made me think of our father, being there—not just because the cab of the truck, where we had made our hideout, was riddled with BB holes we’d made that day. (And sometimes, in wildflower season, we stuck flowers in those, for decoration.)
One time and one time only, while we were in our truck, we spotted a couple in the field just beyond where it sat, making love. We crouched low and looked out at them, hands over our mouths to keep our laughter from being audible, feeling like spies. What offered up our view of this pair were the bullet holes we’d made, ourselves, with the gun our father gave us, just before he moved out.
SUNDAY MORNING, EARLY—PATTY WAS JUST getting dressed for her dog-walking duties, while I lay in my bunk, writing in my notebook (something I hardly ever did anymore since I started hanging out with Alison)—we heard the helicopters on the mountain again. When we went outside, Helen’s paper was still on the ground, where we could read the headline. “Hiker Reported Missing. S.S. Strikes Again.”
Later that afternoon they found the body of Annette Kostritsky—a sixteen-year-old girl who had evidently returned to the county only that weekend, after her junior year abroad, and hadn’t taken in news of the killings.
They found her body on the Bolinas Trail, along with the body of the child who’d accompanied her that day—a nine-year-old girl with Down syndrome she’d babysat for since she was in junior high named Bunny Simpson.
It was late November now—five months since the first murder. The two girls’ deaths brought the total of victims to ten. A person couldn’t go anywhere in Marin County at this point without feeling it—a persistent state of anxiety, like the humming of high-voltage power li
nes or a Santa Ana wind.
Over at Alison’s house after school the next day, a group of us were sprawled out on the bed with a bowl of microwave popcorn. The conversation had been focused for a solid hour on menstrual cramps—a topic I dreaded because I never had anything to offer, and, strangely, considering how good I’d gotten at making up stories about the Sunset Strangler murders, I could never make anything up about this. I almost felt relieved when someone turned on Alison’s pink portable television set, and there filling the screen was my father’s face.
But the mood among the reporters asking him questions had shifted dramatically since the last press conference. A group of citizens calling themselves “Take Back the Mountain” were expressing their outrage at the failure of the investigation to locate the killer. Up at the podium, my father said he was asking the governor for emergency funds to double the number of officers patrolling the mountain. In the weeks since Patty and I had seen him last, he seemed to have aged: his cheeks had sunk in, and I could see a gap between his neck and the shirt collar encircling it, as though he no longer had the flesh or muscle to fill the space. My father—a man who always spoke of the importance of erect posture—hunched over the microphone. Seeing him now, it would have been difficult to imagine that people used to mistake him for Dean Martin.
“Even with all the publicity about the murders,” he said, “there are still some people who insist on venturing out onto our trails, and we don’t have enough manpower to protect them all. The problem is, we’ve got too many miles of territory to cover. It’s just not possible to be everywhere, or to shut everything down.”
Listening to him speak, I almost shivered. There was a quality to his voice that I’d never heard before. Almost a pleading sound. Not an admission of defeat, but close.
He had one small lead to report. Though there continued to be no actual witnesses to the crimes themselves, a woman had come forward with a description of an individual she’d spotted near the location of the most recent homicide, seen getting into a red Toyota Corona. He had not looked like a hiker, she said, and he had this look in his eyes. “Like he was hungry for something,” was the best she could do to explain it. A police artist was working with her now to create a portrait of this possible suspect.
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