by Bill Floyd
In the parking lot, a woman came running after me, calling my name as I approached my Camry. A man with a camera hung around his neck followed at the woman’s heels, pausing frequently to snap photos. I got into the car and locked the doors before they could reach me, and the woman stopped a few steps away. The guy took some more pictures. The woman started talking and I could hear her through the closed windows, she was saying how they were going with the story regardless, and I might want to give my side, for the record. I turned the radio up and pulled out fast, nearly clipping her with my side-view mirror.
Randy’s name was all over the national media when the story first broke. Yes, he was that Randall Roberts Mosley. The papers always use the full name for assholes like him, a respect you never see granted to the victims. No, assassins and psychos are worth knowing by their full titles, but not the dead. Randy killed at least twelve people over the span of a decade. If you watched A&E, there was a whole episode of American Justice devoted to him. I’d never seen it, but I caught the blurb in TV Guide or on the digital cable summaries from time to time. I didn’t care to imagine how I came off in the hour-long summary of the unreckonable devastation that had spread from my husband’s hand; I certainly wasn’t a press darling during the initial furor. It might’ve had something to do with the dismissive way I’d treated the two big-name writers who wanted to get “my side of the story.” Lane Dockery and Ronald Person had both called me several times; their agents and editors had called me, too; they all wanted me to go on the record. I had no regrets, though. It wasn’t only myself I was protecting.
When I learned that Randy had killed again in prison, suffocating another convict during what the media suggested (without ever coming right out and stating it) was a sexual assault, it was on the scrolling ticker that endlessly unfurls underneath the talking heads on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels. I’d noted it merely as a blip at first, and when my brain registered what I’d read my whole body went electric. I rushed to my PC and read the story on CNN’s Web site and I remember clearly my first and last real thought on the subject: It should have been him. Damn it, it should have been him that died. At that point it had already been four years since his conviction, and his appeals were predicted to hold up his execution for another five years. California was notoriously slow to execute the people it condemned to death. And now another inmate had attempted to take time into his own hands, saving the taxpayers any further cost. Instead, Randy had unintentionally avenged some other victims, the ones who’d died at his assailant’s hands. I’d started shaking before I could get my computer shut down. I had gone and locked myself in the bathroom and had a quiet sort of breakdown, screaming into a wadded towel so I wouldn’t wake my son.
That was when I decided to tell Hayden the Biggest Lie of All. It would be the crown on the pile of little lies I’d been telling him already. I’d been ducking the real story since he’d been old enough to ask the question.
3.
Tuesday morning at work, everyone was trying to look through me. The whole atmosphere felt different: the long rows of cubicles seemed more penal, the hushed ring tones suggestive of sanitized emergency, the omnipresent sound of fingers clacking away at keyboards like swarming birds.
I’d stayed home last night. Hayden didn’t say anything unusual when I picked him up, so I guessed the press hadn’t honed in on him yet. I had intended to address the situation with him, honestly I had, but I couldn’t even begin to find the words. So I put him to bed early, then took a Xanax and lay in bed watching TV. I channel surfed past the local ten o’clock news broadcasts, afraid to look.
But now I could tell, just from the way people wouldn’t meet my eyes. I had a unit meeting scheduled for nine o’clock, but at eight forty-five my boss called me into his office. Jim Pendergast was a pretty decent guy, marginally attractive and divorced for a few years. He’d made his availability known to me in subtle ways, without any overt pressure, but I couldn’t get around the idea of dating someone at work. Not that I’d been out on a date for quite a while. A couple of years after we’d moved here, I had gone through a stage where I tried attending some singles functions but I always felt so stupid. The men were either sad or intimidating. And the Internet was just plain frightening. That was four years ago, and I hadn’t really made any efforts since then. Hayden took up a sizable amount of my time, and I got my satisfaction from knowing he was well cared for; at least that was the excuse I used when the nights ran long and sleep wouldn’t come. I told myself I didn’t miss the romantic world and its attendant satisfactions and disappointments, not to a crippling degree. If I was ever going to take the plunge, Jim would certainly have been at the top of the list of probable targets. Alone at the top, actually. He was a native of the area, and I loved his accent, his hokey colloquialisms; I fully understood that I found him quaint, and I felt the requisite guilt. Jim was constantly out of the office, often caring for his thirteen-year-old son, who had learning disabilities due to an early bout of some childhood disease, I could never recall which one. Tack on some more guilt.
Also in his office was a representative from HR, one of those impeccably dressed girls only a few years out of college, who introduced herself as Susan Myers. I shook her hand and found myself marveling at its cool smoothness. My own knuckles cracked and flaked at the first shadow of winter, and it was already late January.
Jim suggested I sit down.
“I guess I know what this is about,” I began.
Jim raised his eyebrows and picked up this morning’s edition of the News and Observer from his desk. “You read it?”
I shook my head and he handed it over.
I hadn’t rated a banner headline, but the article made the front page, just below the photo of soldiers returning to Ft. Bragg from a stint overseas. The accompanying picture was from yesterday afternoon, my face half-shielded from the camera as I climbed into my car. I looked harried, guilty. The headline: SERIAL KILLER’S EX-WIFE LIVING IN TRIANGLE. Beneath it: Some Still Harbor Doubts About What She Knew and When. I realized that I was holding the paper with shaking hands.
“You want to take a minute to read it?” Susan Myers asked.
I placed the front page back on Jim’s desk. I smoothed my skirt. “I think I get the gist.”
“I understand they came here looking for you yesterday,” Jim said.
“Jim, this is something I never brought up because it’s a chapter of my life I wanted to remain closed. I’m so sorry if this is causing trouble for anyone here.”
Susan Myers started to say something but Jim cut her off. “Don’t even think of apologizing to me. You’ve worked here for over five years without any blemish, and you’ve been an asset to me personally and to the company as well, on a thoroughly consistent basis. You’ll always have a place here, and if the higher-ups say anything, I’ll go to bat for you. But this guy …” He swiped disdainfully at the paper. “This Pritchett person. He seems to be on something of a mission. My suggestion to you is that you take a week off, get out of town, and let all the fuss die down. Something else will come along for people to flap their lips about.”
Susan Myers had waited patiently, and now she said, “We agree that this is something that should be allowed to fizzle out. We’ve alerted the people in Security to turn away Mr. Pritchett or any media representatives who might show up here to harass you. But it might be less of a distraction for everyone if you took Jim’s advice.”
Suddenly, and for the first time since Pritchett accosted me in the supermarket, I started crying. Not because of any of the awful things that had happened, or the awful possibilities that I felt hovering in the near future, but simply because my big lug of a boss and this twenty-something girl were being kind and respectful to me. They didn’t say, But really, you can’t expect anyone to believe that you had no idea that your ex-husband … They didn’t say, You must have known something was wrong …
They were both just considerate people, and obviously disco
mfited by the tears I could no longer hold back. Jim made himself busy looking for tissues, but he didn’t have any, and ended up handing over the napkin from his breakfast, a biscuit and gravy that were still congealing in their foam container on his desk. He hadn’t even had time to finish eating before he called me in. That made me want to cry harder, for some reason, but I managed to stifle it and I dabbed at my face, not making too much of a mess of my makeup. I apologized repeatedly, and both of them told me to stop it. I told them I wanted to at least finish out the day, if only because it would keep me distracted. Susan Myers seemed hesitant but in the end she agreed. She advised me to take care of myself and “go do something fun.”
It worked all right for a little while, until I could no longer ignore the voices of the employees in my department. What is it about cubicles that makes people think they can’t be heard? Such a fake insulation. The seven women and one man in my unit, all of them reliable and sweet and fairly hardworking, were also, unfortunately, unrepentant gossips. Celebrities, people from their churches or neighborhoods, their coworkers … it didn’t matter. All were fair game for rumor and innuendo, and throughout the morning I caught bits and pieces: Leigh isn’t even her real name … Well, it’s her middle name at least … She seems more like a Nina … Can you believe what she looked like back then? And her husband, I mean, I hate to say it, knowing what he did and all, but the man was pretty hot … Which was the one that finally sent me fast-walking down the hall to the restroom, heads popping up from behind the cubicle partitions to follow my passage. I retreated to the farthest stall for a real freakout.
Someone had left the front section of today’s paper hung over the handicap bar beside the toilet paper dispenser. Although this was a frequent occurrence, I couldn’t help but think it was meant as a message for me specifically. After a long while, I picked it up.
In large part, the article was simply a recap of Randy’s horrific crimes. It used the nicknames that the press had adorned him with at the time, before the killings were solved: Cross-Eye Killer, Harvester. There was a small side article with bullet points listing the victims by name, along with the dates of their deaths. Or, in the case of Wendy Pugh and Tyler Renault, the dates their bodies were discovered. The story described how Randall Roberts Mosley was eventually shot and captured on the front lawn of his very own home while his wife and infant son looked on.
Sensational.
There was a snapshot of me that I couldn’t recall ever having seen before; it had to have been taken not long after our wedding, but certainly prior to my pregnancy, and my God I did look twenty years younger. In real time, it was only a little over half that, but I’d learned long ago that “real time” was largely a bullshit concept. Look at that carefree smile on my face, what a stupid fucking child I was, a stupid little girl with no concept of how time could go elastic and speed up or stop altogether. The text featured a brief mention of how “police were led to the house by a call from Mrs. Mosley, who had discovered grisly evidence of her husband’s guilt.” A last photo of me had been thoughtfully included, this one taken from the courthouse steps on the day of my initial testimony. The paper quoted police at the time saying that some suspicion had fallen on me because my picture was found on some of the fake ID documents Randy had hoarded, and my DNA was present at two of the crime scenes. Strands of my hair were identified but the police had quickly concluded that they probably came from Randy’s clothes. The police never charged me with any crime, but that didn’t stop the media from speculating.
I wanted to shake the paper and scream, He wanted it that way! He set it up to cast doubt! but of course that wouldn’t help anything so instead I cried some more. Hot tears, shameful ones that vented not the least bit of relief.
The third part of the article was dedicated to Charles Pritchett, a summary of his daughter’s death at Randy’s hands. “I was always bothered by Nina Mosley’s involvement, which was never satisfactorily addressed at the trial,” he was quoted as saying. He spoke eloquently of his years of grief. He said he’d hired a private investigative firm to track me down. He now planned on sticking around until his questions were answered. “I hate to think this community has a person with her history living in its midst without even being aware of it,” was Pritchett’s penultimate comment. “There are a lot of families with children living here.”
I wanted to hate him. He was very likely going to wreck everything I’d worked to build, to regain from the nightmare swirl of ashes Randy left in his wake. But Carrie Pritchett was only twenty-two when she died, the same age as I was at the time. She was a student, working on her degree in economics. She never got to be twenty-three. Randy gouged out her eyes and wedged smooth agate stones in their place, then left the disfigured body on the floor of her apartment, where some friends discovered it the next morning. They’d come looking because they were concerned that she’d missed an exam.
I heard the bathroom door open. I recognized the voices of two of my workers, Betsy and LaTonya.
“I’d feel better if she hadn’t lied about it,” Betsy was saying. “I mean, anyone could understand, if it wasn’t your fault and all. But the deception, I don’t know.”
“Shit, she’s got a kid. Wouldn’t you change your name?”
“Yeah, I guess so. God, can you imagine? Finding out the man you’ve been sharing your bed with is a murderer?”
“A serial killer, girl. Ain’t like he shot someone for money or something. I heard he was all Ted Bundy.”
I’d been trying to hold back but now a sob caught me by surprise, a hitching sound that echoed off the tile walls. I could almost see them, pointing to the closed stall door I was hiding behind and mouthing, “Oh, my God,” their faces going red. They didn’t say anything else I could discern, just flushing and then some unintelligible whispers and they were gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
1.
Randy often came home with random scratches and bruises, sometimes after business trips, other times when he’d only been gone for the afternoon. He liked me to trace them with my fingernails as we lay in bed, after lovemaking, idly watching the TV and neither of us in the mood to talk. Just touching seemed like enough of a connection during the first couple of years. I let my fingers linger. These weren’t love marks, but his vague and often lame deflections when I asked about them were enough to set eddies spinning out somewhere in the deeper, darker currents of my heart.
“They were moving the machinery around the floor when I was in LA, and I got scraped up,” he said one time when I inquired. “Our satellite plant, they’re rearranging everything along some schematic Drew Holloway pulled out of his ass. Supposed to increase efficiency by four percent or some such bullshit. I think Drew followed the techs around for a month, counting steps or something. They’re barely within specs.”
Which didn’t go far toward explaining why my husband would have a deep abrasion running from the hollow of his neck back across his left shoulder blade. Or why he, a compliance officer, a rules-and-regulations guy who never stayed longer on a production floor than it took to calibrate the machinery and audit the work logs, had decided to pitch in and assist with the reconfiguration.
The truth of it was that while Randy was away on his inspection tour of the Jackson-Lilliard plants down in LA, he made time on his last night in town to torture and kill Carrie Pritchett. She was one of several victims who put up a substantial fight, and years later the flesh that had been removed from underneath three of the fingernails on her right hand would be used to help secure his conviction.
I caressed his wounds lovingly. Sometimes I kissed them. He would become aroused, and turn, wrapping those thick arms around me, his rough hands already on my breasts. I used to love the sensation of being carried away.
Another time it looked like he’d been punched in the ribs. He told me some asshole knocked him over in the aisle of the plane while they were still on the tarmac in SeaTac, when said asshole tried to muscle his way past with an ov
ersized carry-on. Randy and some of the other passengers nearly got into it with the asshole, and the stewardesses eventually had the asshole removed from the flight. “You should be glad you don’t have to travel for work,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the junior-league dipshits they’re letting onto planes these days. This guy was some loser sales rep from Omaha, past his prime twenty years ago and determined to make everyone else suffer for it.”
His stories were always filled with little details. This time he’d just returned from Calgary, his first trip to Canada. Two young women disappeared while he was in the city, but the news stories I was able to find, much later, never made mention of any suspects or any resolution. None of Randy’s victims, alleged or proven, were from that part of the world. The women’s bodies were never found.
But I can still see the shape of that bruise in my mind; it started just below the right armpit and extended down three or four ribs, purple and yellow in its exploded center, the approximate size of a balled fist.
2.
By the time I got pregnant with Hayden, I knew something was wrong, but by then I was frightened on such a fundamental level I was becoming obsessive-compulsive. True fear doesn’t make you scream—true fear paralyzes, makes you afraid even to breathe. You are reduced to praying that the object of your fear will pass you over, not give you its attention—that’s your last single hope. Think of your worst nightmares, the ones that leave your heart thundering too hard as you sit up gasping into the dark of your own bedroom; you haven’t come awake screaming, you’ve come awake just trying to take a breath.