But in all the important ways, the story resembles ours. My novel features the confession of a man who was not the actual killer, and the death—not so long after—of the detective who led the investigation, until he was taken off the case. Though there was no way to prove this definitively, I make it plain in my novel that it was the belief of the detective’s daughters that what killed their father was not so much the nicotine in his cigarettes as the toxicity of the Mountainside Monster case—the frustration and rage he felt knowing the real killer had gone free, and his inability to do anything about it.
In my novel only one detail differs significantly from the truth of what took place in real life. In the novel, the older sister—hiking on the mountain some months after the sentencing of the wrong man—discovers, in the truck body, the stash of shoelaces taken from the victims’ shoes. She takes these home with her and keeps them with her at all times over the years that follow, as a reminder of her quest to find the real killer and to eventually bring him to justice. She knows those shoelaces mean a lot to him, and because they do, it is her hope that she will one day lure him to her, so she can finish, at last, the job her father had been unable to complete. In my novel, this is precisely what transpires.
In truth, I never found the shoelaces. Though up until that point we had never registered fear about anything, for many weeks after that terrifying encounter with the killer my sister and I couldn’t bring ourselves to go near the abandoned truck body, or anywhere on the mountain.
When we finally did return, almost six months later, everything was gone: the catalogs, the empty food containers, the random items of dirty clothing. There were no shoelaces or any indication at all that the truck body had been used by anybody but teenagers looking for a place to have sex.
FOR YEARS AFTER THE MURDERS and my father’s death, I continued to think about those shoelaces, and to wonder what had happened to them. (I remember one time eyeing a bird’s nest in a tree alongside the trail. I thought I caught sight of a single lace, woven in among the twigs and leaves, and I actually got my sister to climb the tree for a closer look. It was nothing but a piece of string some crow had collected and put to use.)
For me, the moment when I read the entry in my father’s notebook in which he revealed that he had found the laces felt like a resolution of the mystery, at long last. But only a partial one. Because now a second mystery presented itself. If, as his notebook suggested, my father had found the killer’s treasured shoelace collection—and recognized, as he did, its importance—then what had become of it? Though the Homicide Division had failed to accept his assertion that they’d sent the wrong man to San Quentin, as long as he lived my father would never have abandoned his pursuit of the real killer. He would have held on to those shoelaces.
But he got sick. He died knowing the killer remained at large and that nobody believed him. No one but Patty and me, anyway. And young as we were at the time, he would not have wanted us saddled with the same obsession—to find the Sunset Strangler—that had no doubt contributed to his death.
So what happened to the shoelaces?
IN MY NOVEL, THE OLDER sister finds the shoelaces in the truck—finds and holds on to them. Wherever she goes, from that day forward, she keeps those shoelaces with her. I changed this aspect of the story in my novel for one reason alone: there was a chance the killer might read my book and believe his treasured shoelaces to be in the possession of its author. This would lead him to seek me out. I had no better idea of what I’d do if he came after me now than I had thirty years earlier. I only knew I wanted to look him in the eye again, at last.
I did not divulge any of this to my editor or my publicist, or—most important—to Robert, who would have been deeply alarmed for my safety had he known the plan, however far-fetched, that I was hoping to set into motion.
There was only one person I would have told, if she’d been around, and that was my sister, Patty. She would have understood perfectly and insisted on accompanying me on my book tour, standing ready to protect and defend and—more than that—to confront the killer and bring him to justice once and for all.
But Patty was dead. And so I set out alone across the country on my fourteen-city tour from New Hampshire all the way to California, with the hope that one night, in some bookstore or lecture hall along the way, I might actually look up from the table where I was signing books, or look down from the podium where I was speaking, and lock eyes with the Sunset Strangler. (Eyes. Or eye. We never knew exactly what damage had been done when my sister fired that BB gun. We only knew he had let out a cry, dropped the piano wire, and covered his left eye. Then disappeared.)
Two eyes or one, I had no doubt the killer had reason to come after me. Maybe he had been as fixated on me as I had been on him over the years. Maybe it had bothered him that some other man had taken credit for his killings. Maybe he just wanted those shoelaces.
For this reason, before setting out on tour, I retrieved my father’s old gun from my safe-deposit box. I kept his gun in my purse at all times. Not the usual accessory for a writer preparing to meet her readers. But this was not going to be the usual book tour.
I GAVE MY FIRST READING at my little hometown independent bookstore in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to an audience of roughly thirty people, mostly friends. (Robert in the front row of course. Too early in the year for tomatoes, but he brought purple lilacs.)
Then came Boston; New Canaan, Connecticut; New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Chicago; Madison; Detroit; Indianapolis; Denver; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; L.A. Four solid weeks of radio interviews and readings, “friends of the library” talks, book-and-author luncheons. Hotel rooms, room service meals. Book signings.
Question: Who should play your father in the movie version of your book?
Answer: Whoever is the handsomest, most irresistible man in Hollywood. And I still doubt that any actor could do him justice.
Question: How long did it take you to write this novel?
Answer: Six solid weeks, chained to my desk at a cabin in Maine. And every day of my life for the thirty years before that.
Question: Did you really have a sister? Did she really die? How do you get over something like that?
Answer: You don’t.
I SAVED SAN FRANCISCO FOR last. I wanted to see my mother in Marin County, of course (and possibly Mr. Armitage and his wife, now the owners of a dancing school in Petaluma), but first I would finish up with a talk at the Herbst Theater—a sold-out event in which I would follow the standard procedure: twenty minutes of reading from the novel followed by questions from the audience. Then I’d sign books. Then back to my hotel for a glass of wine—two, probably—and my nightly call to Robert back in New Hampshire. It was a weekend he had his daughter, and by the time I got to him, it would be past midnight there. Still, I knew he’d be waiting up to hear from me.
I had asked my publicist to reserve a hotel room for me not in San Francisco, but across the bridge in Marin County, at a place on the side of Mount Tamalpais that Patty and I used to fantasize about when we were kids and we’d watch the fancy cars pull up and the rich people checking in. More than once, I had dared Patty to go inside and scoop up a few handfuls of the honey-roasted peanuts they set out on the bar. She’d done it, naturally.
The Mountain Home Inn looked out over the hills of Marin County, all the way to the city—the kind of view that could take a person’s breath away. I had chosen to stay at this place partly out of nostalgia for our old days rambling on the mountain, and partly for the spa services. I spent the early part of that afternoon getting a shiatsu massage and a facial, followed by a bath back in my room.
Stretched out in the tub, with the rolling hills of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area displayed outside the window, I surveyed my body. I had recently turned forty-three, but remained in good shape, thanks in large part to a combination of luck, good genes, and the fact that I had never had a baby.
Lying there now, I thought about the
facts-of-life movie from my girlhood: From the moment of your birth, your body holds a treasure chest of unfertilized eggs. Your lifetime supply. Your body can make a baby now.
Probably not anymore. And though I’d almost never wanted that, the fact that the days in which pregnancy and giving birth remained options were drawing to a close if not gone already struck me for a moment as almost unbearably sad.
I remembered how I’d longed for the blood to come, the summer of the Sunset Strangler. And the horror of the day, the next summer, when it finally did. I remembered those circling vultures, that day on the mountain as I sat in the ATV waiting for my father, and the feeling of the blood soaking my shorts.
MY TALK WAS SCHEDULED FOR seven thirty, so I had pictured myself spending the remainder of the afternoon on my hotel room balcony, reading and looking out over the landscape of my girlhood.
But the phone rang. It was the reception desk. Someone was here to see me. Should they send my visitor up?
“I’ll be right down,” I said. A public place was best for this of course.
Then with a calmness that surprised me, I finished dressing. My last act before heading out the door and down the stairs: tucking my father’s Chief Special into my purse.
ONLY ONE PERSON WAS IN the hotel restaurant when I walked in: a woman. I scanned the room a second time and looked back out to the lobby, but the woman was coming over to me then. She held out her hand.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”
So I was not meeting the Sunset Strangler after all. The knowledge hit me with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The risk is great, for a person accustomed to creating fiction, that she may come to imagine that events can unfold in real life as they would in a novel. In the fictional version, it would have been the Sunset Strangler who had come to meet me here. And (in a manner that remained hazy, even in my imagination) I would have gotten him to confess his crimes at last, and somehow overpowered him. Perhaps he would have turned himself in to the authorities then. Perhaps he would have saved them the trouble of a trial by jumping off the outdoor deck of my hotel, to meet a swift and certain death on the same mountain where those fifteen women had met a similar fate at his hands.
But real life hardly ever works as neatly as novels do, which may account for the reason so many people read novels. This woman extending her hand to me was apparently one of them.
I figured she must be one of my readers, one of those people who had followed my career over the years, and for whatever reason felt that my books spoke to her.
Maybe she was an aspiring writer herself (as was often true of the people who sought me out most fervently) and was looking for advice. She had a bag with her—containing a manuscript, no doubt. She wanted me to read it, and pass it on to my editor. No telling how far she’d driven to see me that afternoon.
“I can’t believe I’m really meeting you,” she said. “I’m nervous.”
“Let’s sit down,” I told her.
“Want some coffee?” I asked her. “Or wine?”
“That sounds good,” she said. “My name is Gina.”
We faced each other across the table then, and because she said nothing, I studied her face. She was a good eight to ten years younger than me, I guessed. A beautiful woman, with hair the color mine used to be before my hairdresser had told me I’d look younger if I lightened it, and dark eyes. Olive skin. Long lashes. She had lovely hands, and I could see, watching her take her wineglass, that they were trembling.
“I’ve imagined this moment for years,” she said. “I knew I had to talk to you. I’ve just been so afraid that once I did, you might turn me away.”
I gave her my standard speech then. I felt sympathy for unpublished writers trying to get their work considered. But if I started reading all the manuscripts that people sent me—people looking for advice and assistance—I’d never get any of my own work done.
“There are classes,” I said. “And workshops. Writers’ conferences.”
She looked at me a little blankly. “Workshops?”
“You brought a manuscript for me to look at in that bag, right?” I asked her. “A novel?”
Not a novel, she said.
“Shoelaces.”
THE STORY STARTED WITH HER mother. Whose name was Margaret Ann. Her father was my father.
She was four years old when my father died, she told me. Old enough to remember him, though not well. Most of what she knew about my father (“our father,” she said) she knew from her mother.
He was married when he and Margaret Ann met. He was one of those men, of course, that women love—a man who loved women. The problem was he loved all of them. Too many, anyway. It had taken Margaret Ann a long time to believe that with her it would be different, but finally he convinced her. This was the big love for both of them.
They were going to get married. He was going to tell Patty and me. They were going to make a life together, buy a house maybe. Have a baby.
First he brought us over to her apartment, just so we’d know who he was talking about later, when he sat us down and explained.
Only that never happened, and I knew why.
Never get over it. Never speak to you again. The words a nine-year-old left on the answering machine of a father she doesn’t want to share with anyone. And as brave as my father had been in the line of duty, evidently the idea that what I said that day might be true had terrified him. He had told Margaret Ann he could never marry her, never have another child who might leave the two he adored feeling supplanted.
She broke it off. A dozen times, easily. Weeks would go by, and sometimes months, in which they didn’t see each other or speak. Then he’d show up at her apartment and it would start again.
Then she got pregnant.
Some men who already had two daughters would long for a son. But when Margaret Ann gave birth (an event our father had failed to be present for, on account of the broken arm Patty had sustained when she rode a skateboard—for the first time—straight down a steep hill), our father had only said, “Another daughter! Just what I hoped for.”
THEY NEVER MARRIED. NEVER LIVED together, even. (Margaret Ann believed in marriage. “I’d marry you tomorrow, Tony,” she told him. “But I won’t shack up.”)
So he dropped by when he could, to read to Gina or to bring her a present. Once, when she was in a play at nursery school, he came to watch. She still remembered that because she’d wanted her teacher to meet him. See, she had a father after all. The handsomest of them all.
But it was never what you could call a regular family life, or anything close. He came over for dinner on Tuesday nights, and Sunday mornings he’d make them pancakes. (“Looking back now, I think he must’ve come over late on Saturday and spent the night,” she told me. “But I never saw him walk out of my mother’s bedroom.”)
Then came the Sunset Strangler, and even those times—brief as they were—could no longer be counted on. He worked all the time. Then he got sick. Then he was dying.
“He told my mother he didn’t want us to see him like that,” she said.
He came to say good-bye. Not that he said that’s what it was, but as young as Gina had been at the time, she remembered the look of the two of them, and she felt it. She saw the way her mother hugged him in the doorway, and her face after.
He had told Margaret Ann there’d be no funeral. If there were a funeral, she should be there, and if she were there with Gina, what would that have done to Patty and me? What would it have done to Margaret Ann and Gina, to sit there like two casual acquaintances?
Mostly, hearing this, I just sat there. If there was one thing I had known for certain my whole life, it was that however many women might love our father, and however many he might love, we were always his favorites. The best thing he’d ever done. His only girls.
Only we weren’t.
You had to ask yourself what else that you always believed might also not be true.
/> I studied Gina’s face. She looked like her mother, and in fact, I realized, she must be around the age that her mother had been back when we’d met Margaret Ann that first time, and she gave us the Kool-Aid with the special straws, and let us choose our dolls. When she sewed us those dresses.
But she looked like my father too, I realized. And it was that fact—the knowledge that she shared his hands, his hair, his eyelashes—that made me angry suddenly. The fact that she was here, and Patty wasn’t. It wasn’t Gina’s fault, but I hated her.
Neither of us said anything then. The waiter who had brought our wine came by to see if either of us wanted another glass. I shook my head. The thought came to me: it would have been easier in some ways if the person I’d met in this restaurant had been the Sunset Strangler instead of this beautiful young woman whose face, I now realized, resembled no one’s more than my own.
“In all these years, why did you never contact me?” I asked her.
“I was afraid,” she said. “I always wanted to meet you and your sister, but I decided it was better not knowing you than risking that you’d turn me away.”
“So why did you come here today?”
“I read your book. I’ve read all your books, but this one was different. After I read it, I knew there was something I had to give you.”
Here she paused. I prompted her to continue. “Yes . . . ?”
“My father . . . our father . . . didn’t keep much stuff at our apartment,” she said. “There was a bathrobe he always wore, that my mother gave him, and a razor. A pair of shoes he used to put on when they danced.”
But there’d been a box, she told me. After he died, her mother took it out. Only a few things in it. A ring that had belonged to his mother, with a note leaving it to Margaret Ann. A letter for Gina, with some advice about boyfriends. To be read when she reached age thirteen.
After Her: A Novel Page 28