“You know, it’s a great decoy, the Minor Threat thing,” Gavin said, chuckling. “Though I’m not sure the NYPD would totally get the reference.”
Betsy scanned “Ian’s” face for a reaction, but he just stared at Gavin blankly, impatient for him to stop talking to him about this amusing paradox. Betsy had become his more frequent customer, and she could always sense a relief in the kid’s face when he saw that she was the one who answered the door. It was harmless, she would rationalize to herself, just a few pills and pot, and the only repercussion was that she was a little foggy at work the day after a “delivery.” Which is one of the reasons she was so startled when the phone rang at work one day, mid-daydream, and taken off guard when she answered it and heard her mother’s voice on the line.
“May I please speak to Betsy Young?” she asked, in her most efficient and professional voice.
“Mom?” Betsy asked, her eyes darting around her desk to see if anyone was around to hear. “It’s me.”
“Oh, hi, darling. Is this a good time?”
“Not really,” she said, clicking the top of her Tupperware over the rest of her uneaten lunch. “But I guess I have a minute.”
She covered her mouth with her hand and lowered her voice to a whisper.
“Also, I’m Elizabeth at work, remember?”
“Oh, darn it, hon. That’s right. I’ve got to remember to be more official.” Kathy giggled. She had had time to get used to the idea that her daughter was living in sin, and only asked when Betsy and Gavin planned to get married about once a quarter now.
“So what’s up?”
“Well, I don’t want to upset you, but I also didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else,” Kathy said.
“Hear what? What’s going on? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine, Betsy, it’s just that, there was a story in the paper today about Gainesville. They think they got him, the killer. And it’s not that Rhodes boy, either.”
The last Betsy had heard of the investigation, before she willed herself to stop obsessing over details and following it completely—not that it would have been easy in New York, where it wasn’t exactly headline news—they’d arrested Dwayne Rhodes, a violent twenty-year-old who attacked and robbed his disabled mother two days before the first body was found, and kept him in custody for longer than what was necessary. It was the only lead they had, even though it was clear to everyone that they had the wrong man. The police needed to save face with the university, which was answering to an understandably concerned student body and their anxious parents who demanded action, but it was a feeble effort. Betsy’s throat tightened. She leaned forward in her chair until her head was practically under the desk.
“Are you serious? Are you sure? What happened?”
Kathy took her time reporting the details she’d read in the local Florida papers. His name was Scottie McRae. He was twenty-nine, twenty-six at the time of the murders, but he could have passed for early twenties with his longish sandy curls and rumpled, slouchy posture. He was a drifter with a long criminal record on the run from authorities in Mississippi. He said he picked Gainesville on a whim, because voices in his head told him that something was waiting for him there when he rolled through on his journey south from his hometown, Biloxi, on the run from the police after he shot at his grandfather. Betsy pictured the bus wheezing and groaning out of the empty depot as it started its journey through the deepest South, across the Panhandle into Fort Walton, Destin, Pensacola, Tallahassee, and on to Gainesville. He bought a ticket through to Sarasota, but, mysteriously, got off two stops early. For nearly seventeen hours, half of them in darkness, McRae must have considered what awaited him in the Sunshine State. Why Gainesville? Betsy thought. Maybe he couldn’t be still and quiet on that bus with his own thoughts any longer? Maybe he walked off of it and felt relief, with the last, pneumatic sigh of air before the doors clapped shut? With each dot on the map he passed, he widened the gap between the past and the present, between reality and the infinite possibilities of starting anew. He arrived in Gainesville on August 19, 1990.
The worst part of the story, Betsy thought, was that they didn’t even arrest him for murder. They picked him up for armed robbery after he held up a convenience store near Orlando. He only confessed to the killings to brag about them to his fellow inmates. The theory was that he wanted to be recognized, to be famous in the way that serial killers, not armed robbers, are.
Scottie had been cooperative, almost docile, with the Orange County jail authorities and in court during his armed robbery trial back in 1991. It wasn’t until he attacked a fellow inmate, biting his face in a fit of rage, that the warden started to believe that he was capable of any kind of real violence. Their interest in him was officially piqued, and when detectives from Mississippi started to reach out to law enforcement in states across the southeast to look for someone who fit certain behavior patterns of a man wanted for triple homicide, they started looking more closely at Scottie. Scottie, sensing the increasing scrutiny, must have loved the adrenaline rush it caused and wanted to add to the intrigue, because he started to run his mouth to fellow inmates about the women he assaulted in Gainesville. Eventually, state authorities dug out the blue duffel bag from the box of evidence they’d sealed and stowed away when they first arrested him. In it, underneath some white Reeboks and dirty clothes, were cassettes and a small tape recorder. Scottie made a habit of recording songs, his thoughts, letters he hoped to transcribe and send to his family, an attempt to finally be seen and understood by them. At the end of the one cassette still snug inside the tape deck, which was filled with long descriptions of the women he was following, was one simple but ominous warning.
“I’ve gotta go. There’s something I’ve gotta do.”
The attack in prison and the contents of the bag—including the disturbing tape—were grounds to bring him in for questioning. Three hours into the interrogation, he described in dispassionate detail carving the first victim with that foot-long blade. Then another, and another, until they had linked him to all five murders. The newspapers described it all. Kathy avoided the details specific to Ginny. But as she rattled off the information, Betsy closed her eyes and she was back in Gainesville, on the stolen bike, in Ginny and Caroline’s dark apartment. She heard someone clear her throat and opened her eyes to see Jessica standing at her desk, staring at her. Jessica mouthed “What the fuck?” and nodded toward the end of the hall, where the department head and a handful of other supervisors were returning from lunch.
Betsy straightened up in her seat.
“Betsy, I’m sorry,” said Kathy over the phone when her daughter fell silent. “But I think we should focus on the fact that he’s behind bars, and he will never hurt anyone again.”
Kathy agreed to fax the articles to Betsy, and she stood by the machine waiting for the slick paper to churn slowly out.
After work, Betsy raced to the newsstand to see if any of the papers ran the story, and in the following weeks she collected all the clippings she could find. Her mom sent her the manila folder filled with all of the articles she had started clipping back in 1990, and Betsy kept it in a drawer in her desk at home.
Her thoughts took another obsessive turn. Scottie McRae was all she could think about.
“Aren’t you feeling at all relieved?” asked Gavin one night after work. They were sitting on the large fire escape outside of their bedroom window, wrapped in blankets, watching the sunset, sharing a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “He’s behind bars. He confessed. Those rednecks on the jury are going to give him the chair. He’s going to die in the Florida state pen. There’s no way that guy’s getting out of prison alive.”
“I guess I should be relieved,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen his face, it’s all I can see, you know? I see his face and I think, That face is the last thing Ginny saw. It seems weirdly familiar to me, like I knew him. And I just feel like I’m there, in that apartment, all over again.”
On the evenings whe
n she decided to take a long amble home down Madison Avenue past the jewel box stores that sold precious objects to the precious people she avoided at work all day, she would walk through the canyons between towering skyscrapers manned by bored security guards whose revolving doors exhaled indistinguishable men in important suits and women in snug pencil skirts and white sneakers. She would watch them scatter off to Metro-North trains and buses at a very important pace, wondering how many of them had lost someone too soon. Whenever she wasn’t distracted by work or Gavin, or Ian’s pills, or long runs along the Hudson, she would try to piece together the details of what happened in Gainesville.
She was fixated on the duffel bag. Why did that detail stick with her? Betsy hated to admit it, but McRae had what people might describe as a sympathetic face, handsome even. He had a strong jaw and a delicate nose, and eyebrows that turned down at the corners, slightly, so he wasn’t likely to be pegged as a murderer or an armed robber at first glance, though he was both several times over. His eyes were what gave him away eventually, though. They were hollow and haunted. The look of them made her so sick she could never stare at his picture in the newspaper for long.
Of course he found Gainesville, she thought. The town was flat enough to suit a bike without gears, easy enough to navigate, big enough to absorb strangers in its daily routine without anyone noticing. And the sun’s glare hid everybody’s flaws for a while. There was a revolving door of people showing up for the party. How many times had Betsy turned away random guys just like him when they stumbled into the bagel store, drunk and desperate, asking for food? Maybe he was one of them? He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. It had been two and a half years since she left Gainesville, and she had filled her brain with new scenery, as many distractions as she could, in an effort to erase those memories. Now she was struggling to recover them and it brought out a certain recklessness in her. Every night, she fell asleep wondering how many times she could be in a room with a murderer and still make it out alive.
PART 3
CHAPTER 16
NUMBER 79
August 27, 1995
Betsy noticed the sheets first, which were dark and flannel, and completely unfamiliar. Is that . . . plaid? she thought, recognizing how odd it was for her to be asleep on top of a bed made with a combination that she found so offensive. She struggled to focus her one opened eye, which felt heavy and crusted at the edges.
That usually meant that the previous night involved too much bourbon and a couple of lint-covered pills that she found buried in a pocket. She scanned the room for familiar details: the IKEA school clock on the wall that she loved but Gavin hated because of its faintly perceptible ticking, the chipped, black dresser she found on the street when they first moved into their place on the Bowery, the fraying, stuffed armchair in the corner that was always piled high with their rumpled clothes. When she spotted nothing she recognized, a shot of adrenaline coursed under her skin, and it took her roughly twenty seconds to execute her quick escape. She checked to make sure she was still wearing the last article of clothing she remembered putting on (a vintage sundress, which was cheery enough to draw disapproving glances from her colleagues, even under a prim beige cardigan), scanned the bed to see if there was another occupant beside her (there wasn’t), and surveyed the rest of the sad studio. Despite her panic about waking up, again, in a stranger’s apartment, she couldn’t stop her mind from wandering back to her favorite moment of Wall Street, ca. 1987. Whenever she saw an “exposed brick wall,” she thought of Daryl Hannah’s withering critique, and remembered what an impression that movie made on her. It was when she first realized that New York was amazing, which she now realized was not the intended moral of the story. There was no time to consider the profound impression Gordon Gekko left on her young mind, and the ripple effects that would push her toward this place, through uncertain waters, and eventually to this weird little hovel of an apartment, whose current occupant was unknown. She spotted an asymmetrical slice of light under the crooked bathroom door and knew her next moves had to be stealthy and swift. Betsy scooped up her shoes and her bag, which were dropped on the floor next to the bed, and as she stooped down she realized, to her horror, that it was actually a futon, and raced out of the battered front door down far too many flights of stairs. Betsy burst past a row of neglected mailboxes in the vestibule and out onto a sidewalk. She identified her whereabouts instantly by smell alone. In the far–West Village, one avenue from the Hudson River, the pre-dawn sounds and odors of slaughterhouses at work on a muggy summer morning were unmistakable. She checked her watch. It was nearly 5:00 a.m. She remembered it was Saturday.
As she trotted east, she raced through all of the pertinent details of the situation: Gavin was out on Long Island, fishing in Montauk with a few of his friends. It was way too early to call and check in, and if he had called the house the night before and left a message on the machine, Betsy would claim that she missed it because she was out, and she crashed at Jessica’s house, again. She had stayed in town to finish the October auction catalogue before it shipped to the printer, one of a small, skeleton crew left behind while the rest of her higher-ranking colleagues scattered to other less aromatic, or more pleasantly fragrant, end-of-summer vacation spots. She imagined all of them putting distance between themselves and oppressive Manhattan, on small prop planes, or jitneys, or gleaming wooden speed boats with tiny American flags flapping at the stern. Jessica was visiting her family in Martha’s Vineyard, but Gavin didn’t know that. Maine and Nantucket and the homes-behind-the-dunes across Long Island didn’t reek of animal parts and sun-warmed garbage, or oily water stagnating in gutters. She and Gavin had ventured out to some of these places, for weddings and long weekends, and were amazed by the crispness of New England, the brisk sweater-across-the-shoulders evenings, its polished, rust-free boats, and utter lack of rowdy, beer-soaked beach bars.
Betsy had spent most of her summer-Friday evenings working on a fall sale of modern prints, poring over every book she could find about the artists. She was deep into research on a series of Frank Stella prints, dizzy from the rainbow bright optics, feeling as wonky as an irregular polygon after filling her brain with as much information as she could before her colleagues suspected that she didn’t really know what she was talking about.
Thanks to a little boost from Jessica, who was now high on the chain in Client Services, where she was determined to stay even after she found a rich husband, and wasn’t embarrassed to admit that her goals had been modified slightly, Betsy was promoted to a more senior position in her department. Prints was still the shabby cousin to Post-War and Contemporary Art, or any kind of painting, really. Even still, every time she discovered the price of a coveted item, the fact that it was beyond her reach, that all of it was beyond her reach—most of them more than her rent—filled her with doubt about her choices and a sense of defeat.
She left the office at around 8:30, so confused by the psychedelic midcentury time warp she had been in for the last few hours that she wasn’t certain of the day, the month, or even the year. After a head-clearing stroll through the city on a sweltering summer night, she remembered. It was August 1995, almost exactly five years since Ginny died.
Like Betsy, Ginny would have been twenty-five, about to turn twenty-six, with a job of some kind. Betsy imagined her living in the South somewhere, though she couldn’t place her anywhere precisely. Betsy often wondered what would have become of her friend if she had lived. When she pictured Ginny at twenty-five, she imagined her somewhere lovely, surrounded by fabric samples and paint chips, pinning images to mood boards in an interior design office, debating the merits of brushed nickel or chrome hardware. If she weren’t already married, she would have been engaged, though God knows to whom. Betsy had to stop and imagine herself erasing her mind, to actually picture herself with a chalkboard eraser wiping all of her dreams about Ginny away, to push the beautiful bleakness of a life never lived out of her mind. It hurt just to think about i
t, so she rarely did. Better just to try to piece together her own messy life, starting with last night.
Betsy had a vague memory of wandering south on Madison Avenue, wondering which of her favorite dives she’d end up in that night: Siberia Bar in the 50th Street subway station, Smith’s in Hell’s Kitchen, any of the dark, depressing holes near Penn Station. Every once in a while, she and Gavin would splurge on two martinis at Bemelmans after a movie at the Paris, or order rare steaks at Les Halles, share a bowl of pasta and a bottle of red wine at Gino’s and fool themselves into thinking that they’d become real New Yorkers. But when Betsy was alone, she would explore a different side of the city she was growing to love. She would buy some fancy Fantasia Lights at Nat Sherman and then scour the city to find the dankest, cheapest bars she could, park herself on a stool, and sit, hunched over a Jameson on the rocks.
Had she been to any of her favorite places the night before? She rustled through her bag as she walked to dig for clues, a receipt, a matchbook, any kind of breadcrumb she could follow that would help solve the mystery. But she came up short. She remembered a pool table, someone daring her to try to smuggle the cue out of the bar in the back of her dress, the angry bar manager asking her to leave, and finding it all hysterical. After that, she went blank.
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