After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  When we got home, I went to beauty school. I hadn’t ever thought about college, but it occurred to me, after a couple of years of cutting hair and listening to all the stories told by women sitting in my chair, that I wanted to study psychology, with an emphasis on forensics and the criminal mind.

  I started out in community college, but after two years, transferred to Berkeley. My sister had gotten into Berkeley too, on a basketball scholarship. This meant that we could commute from our mother’s house in the blue Alfa our father had left to me, until we got our own apartment in my senior year.

  That was when Patty was able to fulfill her lifelong dream of getting a dog. Not surprisingly, to me, her ongoing debate—cute puppy versus lovable old rescue dog in need of home—ended in the adoption, from the Marin Humane Society, of a half-Lab/half-golden mix named Betty, who was missing one leg, but still managed to run alongside my sister when she jogged. Betty managed to live five years with Patty—longer than anyone would have guessed for a dog whose age was estimated at twelve when Patty brought her home.

  I did become a writer, as I’d always planned—though the international spy part, and the race car driving aspiration, fell by the wayside. I am almost embarrassed to admit—given how many fine writers struggle for decades before seeing a book published—that I sold my first novel, a darkly comic thriller titled Come the Blood, when I was twenty-nine.

  The book did reasonably well, and its sequel, Blood Again, fared even better. Since then, I have published a novel nearly every year, always in the spring. As for the rest of my story: this will be harder to tell.

  After our father’s death, and the sentencing of J. Russell Adler, I tried for a while to put the Sunset Strangler case out of my mind. The idea that J. Russell Adler—the man now serving his sentence in San Quentin for the murders on the mountain—was not the killer (despite his own insistence that he was) would have been difficult enough to live with. But the knowledge that the real killer remained at large ate away at me, as it had done to my father.

  And of course there was this: I knew well from my studies (as I would have, from my father) that once a person has manifested the behavior of a serial killer, he is highly unlikely to discontinue his behavior. Intervals may occur in which a serial killer goes on hiatus. He may make a geographical shift. He may even alter aspects of his M.O., though certain trademarks of his method of committing crimes are likely to endure, even when whole decades may have elapsed between one murder and another.

  But as I told Alison during that brief period when she had posed as my friend: once a person acquires the taste for blood, it’s virtually assured that he’ll go after more.

  A serial killer does not stop killing until he is arrested or dies.

  MY VISIONS, AS MY SISTER and I had always called them, became less frequent, and then they disappeared completely. It wasn’t a change I was aware of at the time, but one day somewhere around age eighteen or nineteen, I realized that a few years had passed since the last time I’d experienced one of those moments in which I knew something would happen before it did, or knew it had happened before anybody told me, or—as was most disturbingly true during the year of the Sunset Strangler—an instance in which I’d find myself inside the head of a person other than me: know what he was thinking, see the world through his eyes.

  It was a relief, in many ways, that my gift, or curse, had abandoned me. But in another way, I recognized that the landscape I now inhabited seemed less filled with color and richness. Where once there were layers to what surrounded me (things as they appeared to be, and the once-endless fantasies cooked up in my imagination), now there was only real life; I conjured up stories and wrote them down, but they no longer filled my brain as they once did, and I no longer confused what I dreamed up for what was actually taking place.

  I still thought daily, hourly, about the Sunset Strangler, however, as I had from the moment he first slunk onto our mountain with his piano wire and his electrical tape, and his deadly quest for shoelaces. Once and once only since the summer of 1979 did I succeed in putting the Sunset Strangler—and my need to redeem my father’s story—out of my mind. My sabbatical lasted about eleven months. It was a brief time—the only one I ever experienced—in which I allowed myself to fall crazily and ecstatically in love, to the point where everything else seemed to fall away (my father’s death, the Sunset Strangler, even my sister), and all I knew was that I wanted to be with this man, and my thoughts were only of the two of us.

  I had never wanted to get married, but when I got together with Chris, that idea seemed suddenly possible, even inevitable. I wrote a hopelessly romantic love story—an unfinished novel that would surely make me cringe if I looked at it now. Chris and I talked about moving to Oregon. Having a baby. We bought a VW bus and decided to drive around the country for a while, cooking over an open fire and sleeping under the stars whenever possible.

  We were at a campground in South Dakota when we heard the news over someone’s radio that a woman had been found murdered in the Black Hills, not far away. Whoever it was who’d committed the crime appeared to have been on foot at the time and had managed to depart the scene without leaving a trace of evidence.

  Knowing my history, Chris suggested that we take off right away for someplace else. Montana, maybe, or Utah. Plenty of beautiful places to go.

  But I wanted to stay in South Dakota. Not just for a few nights, but until they caught the killer. I wanted to know everything about the crime. Participate in the investigation, if possible. Believing as I did that the perpetrator of the Black Hills murder must be the man my sister and I had confronted on Mount Tamalpais years before, I wanted to be present for the triumphant moment, years in coming, when they slapped the cuffs on him.

  This was the beginning. We actually rented an apartment in Brookings. Chris was that crazy about me that he went along with my obsession, and he seemed to accept all the days I spent at the library, the long letters I wrote to law enforcement agencies around the state, filling them in on details of the Sunset Strangler case I felt might assist them in locating their killer. (Who was eventually apprehended, in Canada. And turned out never to have set foot in the state of California. This was the first moment I got it, that instead of there being one man out there murdering women in remote backwoods locations, the country was crawling with them.)

  In those days, the Internet had barely gotten going, and the concept of any kind of national database, beyond what the FBI maintained, remained primitive by today’s standards. Say a woman had been murdered with a .44-caliber pistol in the state of Georgia by a man who had posed as a vacuum cleaner salesman to gain entry into her apartment. It was unlikely that the investigating officers on that crime would have known whether some other woman around her age and physical type had survived an attack, eight months earlier, by someone using a gun of the identical caliber, who had gained entry by telling her he had a great set of knives for sale at a fantastic price. Particularly if this other woman lived in another state—Ohio, say, or Rhode Island.

  Unless you were an FBI agent, the only way you might know that these two events had both taken place, and recognized the similarities between the two, would be if you subscribed to a few hundred newspapers and made it your business to keep track of every murder you possibly could, in every state, and then recorded the details of every one of these murders or attempted murders. You would need to fill your brain with a great many terrible stories. You might even find yourself doing the very thing my father had done all those years before: tacking pictures of murder victims on your wall, so you could study their faces twenty-four hours a day. Their faces and the details of exactly how it was they had spent their final moments on earth.

  I did that.

  I covered one whole wall of the apartment Chris and I shared with a map showing the fifty states. (Alaska and Hawaii seemed unlikely destinations for a serial killer, but I wasn’t writing off any spot as a possible location for the Sunset Strangler to have touched down.)<
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  I spent my days in libraries, scrolling through microfiche, scribbling down data. Then sticking pushpins in the map, in every place I heard about in which a crime had occurred that sounded like something the Sunset Strangler could have pulled off.

  My conversation and my thoughts were consumed with details of rapes and murders, and the men who’d committed them. When I didn’t talk about murders, I thought about them. I no longer talked about Oregon, or a baby.

  Within a year, Chris and I parted. There was no room in my life anymore for another man, knowing there were two already whose stories occupied virtually my every waking hour. One was the Sunset Strangler. The other was my father.

  I moved around a lot after that. Same way I believed the killer must. Two months in Illinois. Six months in Minnesota. A year (that was a long stretch) in Nevada, during a period in which four young women turned up dead at ski resorts over the course of two successive seasons. When they eventually arrested the man responsible for that one, it was clear he wasn’t the one I was looking for. As hard as it had been to make out the particulars of the man who’d lurched toward us, that afternoon my sister and I had confronted the Sunset Strangler on the mountain, I knew he was a person of below-average height. The man found guilty of the Ski Mask killings was six foot five.

  For the first few years I tracked killers (hauling around my map and my pushpins to every stop), I got waitressing jobs, and sometimes I’d rent a chair at a beauty salon. Having no relationship with a man, and little need or ability to sleep, I wrote at night. My stories were fiction but filled with the details I picked up from my research. I had no use for love.

  I quit cutting hair the day I sold my first novel. After my second one was optioned as a movie, I bought an old farm in New Hampshire, about as far as a person could get from where Patty and I grew up, in the shadow of a mountain called Monadnock. After that, I returned to Marin County only once or twice a year—never for more than a few days—to see my mother. She was doing better by this time. She’d discovered antidepressants and gotten a job at her favorite place, the library.

  When she was young, my sister had held out the dream of one day playing professional basketball. The year of the trailside killings had also been the first year of the WBL, which had meant that even as the most terrible thing was happening up on the mountain where we lived, for Patty that year had also represented hope and possibility that her great dream might actually come true.

  Two years later, after the women’s professional basketball league folded, she shifted her focus. Strangely enough—considering I was the one who always talked about traveling around the globe—it was Patty who joined the Peace Corps. I used to tell her it would be easier to do without food than do without my sister. But we wrote each other long letters every week—though sometimes hers took months to reach me.

  She had written to me from Africa about what the game of basketball meant to the young, poor girls she was teaching there. Because of her damaged voice—she never was able to speak above a whisper—classroom teaching was impossible for Patty. She tutored her kids, one-on-one, and it almost seemed they listened better, she wrote to me, because they had to strain so hard to hear her.

  She started to run basketball clinics—first in Senegal, and then other countries too. She was always on a bus going to some village or other with her basketball shoes around her neck, and a bag of balls above her seat. Her one regret about the work she’d chosen was that she couldn’t bring a dog with her.

  She was in Somalia, running one of her clinics at a school for junior-high-school-aged girls, when a UN bombing there that killed a hundred civilians set off a mob riot. The journalist who reached me sometime that night with the news explained to me that the riots had been touched off right where the school was, at the time her girls—the Warriors, she called them—would have been putting on their uniforms.

  Who would ever think of a basketball court as a dangerous place? But knowing that for those girls, that day, it would be, my sister had left her rented room in a safe part of Mogadishu to make sure they were out of danger. On a bus first, and then, when the streets got too mobbed and no vehicles could get through, on foot. Still carrying her basketball. Running like the wind.

  She had almost reached the school where the girls were—nine players, just about the ages we were that day we met the killer on the mountain, when Patty had let out her string of loud and powerful words that saved my life.

  She couldn’t raise her voice to call her players’ names, so she ran into the crowd to get them out, and when one of the men grabbed her, she could not cry for help.

  The stone, thrown by one of the faceless mob, hit her square in the head. It is my only source of comfort knowing that my sister died instantly.

  THERE NEEDS TO BE A blank page in my story here. Or a thousand of them—more than that—for all the days she hasn’t been there that I’ve spent missing her.

  At first I wanted to disappear—cut off my hair and burn it, run out onto the mountain or to the bluffs at Tennessee Valley, or somewhere in Point Reyes—and jump off the edge of the world. I went through the motions of getting through the days, though sometimes just lifting the covers off the bed and setting my feet on the floor beside it felt like too much of an effort. There was no place to go, no place to look that did not summon a picture of Patty. Oddly enough, the one thing that seemed bearable was writing my stories and losing myself in the lives of people other than myself and my sister.

  It was after Patty died that our mother came out of her room. Always before, when anything hard had happened in my life, the person I looked to for comfort was Patty, but this time, the hard thing was losing her. There were all those hours to get through, when Patty would have been there, only she wasn’t. This time our mother was. And Mr. Armitage. After my sister’s funeral, he and his wife had come by my mother’s house with food for us. They just sat there in the living room for a long time—knowing, as others appeared not to, that there was no need to say anything, and nothing to be said.

  At some point during those first months after Patty’s death, it occurred to me how it must have been for our father, the year of those fifteen murders, having to visit all those families who’d lost someone they loved to a terrible and violent death, people who wished they were dead themselves. I had imagined, before, that it was the evil of the killer that made its way into my father’s body and ate away at him, but I think now that just as much it was the exposure to that much sorrow. Some people can shut out pain better than others, but for my father, who loved women, those mothers’ losses—the losses of the fathers and the brothers and the lovers too, of course, but above all, the losses of the mothers and the sisters—would have been as real as a blow to his own body. Say what you will about the dangers of nicotine—all correct. But I will always believe it was exposure to a toxic killer and to crushing grief, and the knowledge that he had not succeeded in righting that wrong, that simply took up residence in my father’s lungs and suffocated him.

  It had been a goal of mine—long deferred—to write a letter to the man serving consecutive life sentences for the Sunset Strangler killings. I had no particular faith that I would be any more skillful than my father—the master of extracting the truth from criminals—at getting J. Russell Adler to admit that he was not the real killer. But I did hold out some hope that more than a decade at San Quentin might have altered his view of his actions to the point where he’d be ready to retract his confession, thereby paving the way for the reopening of the case and, perhaps, restoring my father’s reputation.

  This never happened. Sometime in the 1990s—seventeen years after J. Russell Adler had turned himself in, and the hasty sentencing that followed, Adler was found dead in his cell, murdered by a fellow inmate. His death appeared to end, forever, any hope I might have had in convincing law enforcement authorities and the district attorney that for all these years they’d had the wrong man.

  Still, I tracked murders—keeping watch, among the
databases I checked in on regularly, for a killer who favored rural locations, campsites and hiking trails, one who used piano wire when committing his crimes, possibly, or even (though I didn’t count on this) collected shoelaces.

  I kept writing my stories, but after my sister’s death, I took pains to keep the stories I wrote as far from my own as possible.

  The novels in my series always featured as the central characters and heroines a devoted pair of sisters (one tall, one not so tall) who function in the unlikely roles of amateur detectives. The younger sister in my series is a professional tennis player, the other a harpist. Though the harpist bears a slight resemblance to me (that much was unavoidable, since I was three books into my series by the time of Patty’s death) and the two women came from an Italian-American family, I made sure when I created the characters that the younger sister—the tennis player—followed a radically different path from that of my real sister. She won big professional tournaments, for one thing, and she got rich. She started endorsing products and modeling tennis outfits, while solving murders on the side. She had perfect teeth, and a pet that traveled with her on the tennis tour: a cat.

  Around the eighth book in my series—Blood Love—my harp-playing sister falls in love and gets married. She gives birth to a son—a plot choice I made to ensure that no further associations could be made between myself and my character. I was in my late thirties by this point, and if there was one thing I knew, it was that I’d go through life solo now. I could never form an attachment again as strong as what I’d had with my sister. I could never bear another loss like the loss of her.

  I met Robert at a bookstore reading in Keene, New Hampshire. That night I’d read a particularly grisly passage involving the discovery, by the tennis-playing sister, of body parts in her tennis bag, moments before she is supposed to head out onto the court to play the Paris Open. My days of writing anything remotely romantic were long behind me, obviously.