Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “The world is trying to get through,” he said. “Those poor girls.”

  “Their poor parents.”

  He pulled off his tie, and we moved together to the living room and sat on the sofa. After a long time, he said, “Frances, why was Jack at the wedding?”

  I closed my eyes. It seemed ridiculous to talk about this now, but I didn’t have the energy to refuse. “He wasn’t. He was upstairs, having dinner.”

  “Were you with him? At the bar, I mean?”

  “No.” Then I said, “No more than you were with Julia at the reception.” This seemed a nod toward a confession, and it was the only admission I would ever make.

  “Will you see him when you switch to this new team?”

  “No.” This wasn’t exactly true—he would be around, even if he wasn’t my coach—but I knew I would not join another team at the Biltmore. I would play somewhere else, if I kept playing at all.

  “Thank God for that,” he said. “I don’t think of myself as a jealous guy . . .”

  I took his hand, and pulled his palm toward my mouth, then kissed the warm soft space at the base of his thumb—this was something I did when I wanted to express my love, though I knew it wasn’t a gesture he particularly understood. “I love you,” I said, and the tears came again, along with the specific feeling of being at the end of something long and difficult, like a marathon, or in this case short and difficult, like a sprint, or both.

  Dennis was partially correct: Margo had gone to the bus station, but after waiting an hour and a half had been unable to get out of town, even though Greyhound had added two buses to its southbound service. We continued trying in vain to get through to her, and finally, at midnight, she called. Dennis was watching the news in bed and I was in the bathroom, staring at myself in the vanity mirror. “Are you coming home?” said Dennis when he answered the phone. I rushed to the kitchen to pick up the other line.

  “Mom? Isn’t it horrible?” she said. “A policeman threw up on my doorstep.”

  “Lord,” I said.

  Dennis groaned. “Don’t think about that, sweetheart.”

  She explained the situation at the bus station. “I’m not at the apartment anymore. I’m at the dorms, with friends. There are five of us sleeping in one room. We’re on campus. We’re safe.”

  Gainesville seemed a very small town. In my mind the place was dominated by the presence of a roaming monster, like the flashing red dot on a radar screen, blinking closer to its target. He could be a student, I thought. He could be one of the students Margo was with right now.

  “I’m coming to get you,” said Dennis. Over the line I heard a dresser drawer in our bedroom opening.

  “Daddy?” said Margo. “I’m going to stay. The semester’s just starting, and I don’t want to miss anything. I won’t be able to catch up.”

  “I don’t think that matters, sweetheart,” I said. “Aren’t other people leaving?”

  “Some,” she said. She sounded stern when she spoke again, even though her voice was shaking. “I think I’m going to stay. I’ll be safe. I promise.”

  Dennis breathed into the phone. I said, “We won’t sleep until he’s caught.”

  She was crying again. “They lived in One-Thirteen,” she said. “I live in One-Twelve.”

  “I know, sweetheart,” said Dennis. Again he insisted that she come home, and again she refused. Then, after giving her cautionary tips—don’t walk alone, don’t go out at night, lock the doors, and for Christ’s sake, lock the windows—and after getting the phone number of the dorm room where she was staying and repeating it twice back to her, he reluctantly said good-bye.

  The following morning we woke to learn that the Gainesville police had found another body, a student named Christa Hoyt. She was found in her apartment, two miles from Williamsburg Village. Again, the killer had pried his way in through a sliding glass door. (From this time on in my life, I’ve disliked sliding glass doors, and have wondered if the tragedy would have occurred without them. I’d let my daughter live on the first floor of an apartment complex, never thinking to ask whether there was a solid barrier between her and the outside world. The Williamsburg Village Apartments had a swimming pool—of course there were sliding glass doors.) The reports said only that Christa’s body had been mutilated; we learned later of the rapes, the decapitation, the gruesome poses. Gainesville officials urged students to be careful, to not go out at night, and to stay in groups whenever possible. All the murders had happened during the daylight, in the victims’ homes, but still this was the advice given. A press conference followed: the president of the University of Florida, John Lombardi, answered questions about precautions being taken. They’d added thirty more campus police (again, I thought: but this killer could be a member of the campus police!) and were opening up unused dorm rooms to students living off campus who wanted the extra protection.

  It hit me, as I sat in bed watching television: this was not even a danger I’d thought to fear. The notion that I had let this happen, that my daughter had been asleep while on the other side of her wall two girls were raped and murdered, sent me into a panic. I reached for the phone and the piece of paper with the number Margo had given us, but the line was busy again, that goddamned automated message. Dennis wrapped his arms around me. One of the many things I felt at the time was anger—at myself for letting her move off campus in the first place, and at both of us for letting her stay in Gainesville while this killer continued to choose new victims. Of course I understood that living next door to a murder is not a fate equal to the murders themselves; I’d never felt a stronger sense of gratitude. But I knew that this experience—her proximity, her unbelievable luck—would haunt Margo. The knowledge that this might have happened to her would change her life. This was not the carefree college experience we’d wanted for our daughter. “It’s my fault,” I said to Dennis, because I’d approved of her moving off campus, and he said, “It’s not your fault.” But I’ll always remember the tone of his voice as he said it—weary, guilty, and impatient—because in that moment, if not after, I think Dennis might have agreed.

  We heard from Margo again that afternoon. She’d moved with friends into a vacant dormitory suite, which meant she now had her own bed. We continued to insist she come home—Dennis packed a bag in anticipation that she would finally relent and he could go get her—but she was determined to stay. It was as if she had seized on staying as the only way to get through it all intact. She reminded us that she was twenty years old. Twenty! How old this seemed to her, and how young it seemed to me. The next morning Dennis left for work as if it were a normal day, though I stayed home. I got dressed and straightened the house, but left the television news on in the bedroom and the living room, and whenever the coverage shifted to the murders, I sat down and watched, and it was many minutes before I could return to my feet. I called Margo in the morning, then twice in the afternoon, then Dennis and I called together when he got home from work. “It’s like a ghost town,” said Margo when we finally reached her. The university continued to remain open—President Lombardi explained to the press that many students couldn’t reach their homes, and the university was better equipped to ensure student safety by continuing business as usual. We watched the news together that night: stores were selling out of Mace; Southern Bell was begging people not to call Gainesville unless absolutely necessary; pizza joints were losing money because of a rumor that the killer might be a delivery man; gun shops were reporting record sales; hardware stores had run out of deadbolts and door chains.

  And the following morning, August 28, there were two more victims, which brought the total to five murders within seventy-two hours. This time, the killer had varied the profile. One victim was a petite twenty-three-year-old brunette named Tracy Paules, but the other was her male roommate, Manny Taboada. Manny was—these details were included in the reports—six feet, two inches, 200 pounds, and a former football player. Again, the killer had entered through a sliding glass door
by jimmying it with some kind of tool. These killings had happened in the middle of the night, when Tracy and Manny had been sleeping. When I reached Margo on the phone, Dennis grabbed his packed bag and headed to the kitchen to get on the other line. “Don’t let her talk you out of it,” he said to me, and I nodded. But again she repeated what she’d been saying: that she was safe on campus, that she was with people all the time, even at night, and that she knew the university was forgiving tuition for anyone who needed to leave Gainesville—this is when Dennis picked up the other line—but she really didn’t think it was necessary, and besides she really liked her American history class. Her professor wore a tunic and took off his shoes when he came into the classroom. “Don’t let him sell you any baloney about the ‘good’ war,” said Dennis, who had always had, in my estimation, an enviable talent for switching focus. “If he does, ask him about the internment camps.”

  Before she hung up, Margo reassured us again. “They gave us whistles. If I get in trouble, I just blow on it and someone appears in the blink of an eye.”

  “They gave you whistles?” I said, thinking of the tools this killer had: a knife, obviously, and duct tape, and cleaning products of some kind—there were reports that all the bodies had been cleaned up before being staged for discovery. And of course he had something unnameable and unknowable, something Margo and Dennis and I could not understand: a force. I found it amusing and terrifying, this fact: the university had issued my daughter a whistle.

  Dennis reluctantly unpacked his suitcase. In the face of Margo’s determination not to let us rescue her, I realized that the transition we’d been so worried about had come to pass. She really had left home.

  Despite the fact that a man had been killed, I was reassured by the roster of Margo’s bunk mates. In one suite, there were two rooms and three kids sleeping in each room—the housing division had hastily made space and provided cots—and four of the six kids were young men. Normally, I would’ve been appalled to learn that the university was allowing my daughter to room with boys, but in these circumstances, I think the administration showed an admirable willingness to depart from tradition. They did what they had to do. We can go on about the benefits of equal rights, but when a killer is loose, you want a man—or men, plural—looking out for your daughter.

  Several times when we called Margo’s suite we reached a young man named Stuart, whose name we’d never heard before. “Margo kicked ass on her biology assignment,” he would say to me. Or, “Yesterday we rode out to Hampton Lake for a swim.” By the third time we’d talked, I’d developed the sense that this boy and my daughter were close, in no small part because of the speed with which she reached the phone whenever he passed it to her—physically at least, geographically, they were together. Once, Dennis asked him bluntly how tall he was, and Stuart said, “I’m not tall, but I’m fast and strong. You don’t need to worry about your daughter. We’re taking good care of her. We’re taking care of each other.” This was something I’d seen stressed in televised interviews with the university’s director of psychological services—students relying on each other not only for safety but for comfort. Dennis choked up when Stuart said good-bye. He wanted to be the man protecting his daughter.

  A day passed with no news—no leads on the killer, no new victims—and then another day passed, and then it had been a week. Five thousand students had left campus. There was a lot of nonsense in the Gainesville student paper, the Alligator—Margo sent us a copy—linking the murders to Ted Bundy, who had been executed a year earlier. (The theory went: Bundy was born on November 24 and executed on August 24 at the age of forty-two; the Gainesville murders started on August 24 and happened in a neighborhood off State Road 24; the second murder was on SW 24th Avenue, and so on.) I ran into Kathleen Beck at the grocery store—her twins had come home and were enrolling in classes at the University of Miami so they wouldn’t fall behind. Kathleen seemed confounded when I told her Margo was still in Gainesville, so I rushed to reassure her. “She’s not off campus anymore,” I said. “She’s in a dorm with a bunch of kids—half of them are boys.”

  “Boys?” said Kathleen. “She lives in an apartment?”

  “Not anymore,” I said, but then I ran out of patience with Kathleen, and said good-bye. That evening, Gloria called—she’d called daily since the murders—and after I’d reassured her that yes, Margo was still insisting on staying on campus, and still being very cautious, Gloria said, “You know, with all the hubbub I’d forgotten what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Yes?” I was putting away groceries, leaving out ingredients for a stew. I had a bag of black beans in my hand.

  “Eleanor Everest said she saw you the other day at the beach with a man.” I put down the beans. The tone in Gloria’s voice was one I’d never heard from her before: not accusing exactly, but stumped and oddly intimate, as if she were saying: Come on, you can tell me. “Someone with dark hair,” she said. “She didn’t recognize him.”

  I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was deciding whether to lie, or how much.

  “Was that you?” she said. “Are you not working anymore?”

  “Actually, it was me,” I said. My voice was loud and unsteady. “I’m still working—I’m working more, in fact, as of this week—but I’ve been playing tennis at the Biltmore this summer”—Gloria knew this—“and after practice one day a few of us went to the beach. It was just so hot . . .”

  “Who was the man?” said Gloria.

  “My coach, Jack.” And then it occurred to me that the best lie was a stretching of the truth. Don’t deny, embellish. “There were—let’s see—four of us? Plus Jack. The women are wild about him, but he’s married—and so are they, to be honest.” I used a gossiping tone, as if I were as interested in the tidbit as she might be. “We’ve gone to lunch together a few times, several of us girls, and that day someone—I don’t remember who—invited Jack along. We ended up at the beach.” The story was fine, depending on when exactly I’d been spotted by Eleanor Everest: was it while we were standing at the car, closest to the road—this was most likely, I thought—or in the brief moment when we’d stood together at the shoreline, where we would have been recognizable only by people on the sand? I didn’t recall there being anyone close by. A betrayal of Dennis was a betrayal of others, of Gloria and Grady and Bette, and even Marse. I felt a little sick, lying to my mother-in-law. I felt lesser for it, and I suppose I was.

  “Eleanor said you were picnicking—I thought maybe Dennis had played hooky. Maybe you should do that sometime, kidnap him from his office in the middle of the afternoon. That would be pretty, wouldn’t it? Take slacks for him so he doesn’t ruin his suit, and a nice fruit salad.”

  “That would be nice,” I said. “It’s a great idea.” It was something I vowed to do, in that moment—sweep by his office in the middle of the day and abscond with him to the beach—and also in that moment, as Gloria said something about how they used to go to Key Biscayne as a family when the children were young, I heard Dennis’s key in the door, and I said, “Gloria, I’m sorry, I hate to interrupt, but Dennis is home and I just have to—”

  “Go on, dear,” she said. “I just wanted to check on you.”

  “Love you,” I said. I said it only every so often.

  “You, too,” she said.

  Dennis appeared in the kitchen doorway. His hair was wet, and I could see through the window that it had started to rain. He wiped his cheek with one hand and asked me about my day. I took his briefcase and set it down on the kitchen table, and although I really wanted to apologize for betraying him—never again, I would say, I don’t know what I was thinking—I couldn’t do that, not exactly. So instead, I said, “Do you want to fool around?” and he nodded and we went together down the hallway, past Margo’s room and the guest room that so long before I’d wanted to turn into a nursery. We went into the bedroom with its outdated furniture and the alarm clock that didn’t work very well but we’d never replaced and the clothes on the be
d that I’d folded but not put away. And while we took off our clothes, I turned away from him, so he wouldn’t see that I was keeping myself from crying.

  That week I joined a tennis team at the YWCA. I was matched with a doubles partner named Carolyn Baumgartner, who became a friend. Shortly afterward, I ran into Jane Brevard at the grocery store and told her about the team, and then she joined, too, and every couple of weeks she and I had lunch together after practice. She asked once if I knew that Jack wasn’t coaching at the Biltmore anymore—she might have been checking to see if we were in touch—but she didn’t say where he’d gone and though I wanted to, I didn’t ask. Carolyn and I won more than we lost, and though a few of the pounds I’d dropped crept back, tennis continued to be part of my life. Sometimes while I played I imagined Jack standing on the sidelines, watching me from behind sunglasses, calling out pointers: Don’t chase your toss! Show your shoulder on your forehand! In September, Dennis and Margo ran together in the Conch Classic 5K in Key West, and Dennis placed third in his age group. I’d had no idea, but that summer, while I’d been improving my tennis, Dennis had become a serious runner.

  The Gainesville hysteria dissolved. No more bodies were found. The police arrested a disturbed teenager, but then let him go because he had an alibi. It would be a year before they charged the real killer, a Louisiana native named Danny Rolling; even then he would be arrested first for robbery, and only afterward would confess to the murders. Apartment 113 at Williamsburg Village would become a model apartment, the one management showed to prospective renters. Security alarms would be installed and extra locks added to the sliding glass doors throughout the complex. I know this because I called the management office to ask.