The Drifter

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by Christine Lennon


  According to police interviews, it had been easy enough to get into the place. One thing about Gainesville was that the doors were rarely locked, and if they were, it was easy to pop them open like a can. Old Florida windows, the ones with the long, narrow panes of glass that opened with a crank, were the easiest to get into. All you needed to do was slide a couple of those narrow panes off of their tracks and pull yourself inside. Betsy had done it herself when she was locked out of her house once. Or a person could hop onto the back balcony and jam a screwdriver into the lock of the sliding door so fast that no one would notice. He could be inside in under a minute and no one was the wiser. She thought of him browsing through the apartment with a small flashlight between his teeth, examining the bookshelf next to the television and its stack of old videotapes—Purple Rain, Dirty Dancing. Did he notice that it wasn’t like the other apartments he had seen over the last week, all of them mostly the same with a futon, a plastic crate of books, one of those lamps that cast a sickly greenish light on the ceiling? Did he notice it was special? There was a rug that looked worn but expensive, real wood furniture, and a big chintz sofa. Betsy remembered the silver frames that were clustered on top of the tables, showing the girls in various poses: dressed up but cross-eyed drunk at a formal; Ginny glancing over her shoulder on a bike against a background of the bluest water in the world; Ginny and Betsy hanging upside down from a tree, their T-shirts falling down to expose their tan, teenage skin. He would have remembered them from the drive-thru, the way Ginny called him “Sir,” like no one ever did. Did he remember the way her ponytail blew in the wind behind her? Did he see Betsy’s face and think of the salute? Of course he did. That’s why he was there. It was no coincidence.

  McRae blamed the murders on a multiple personality disorder, claiming that a thing, a dark force, took over that convinced him to kill. But if he started following them at Taco Bell, he spent days trailing after Ginny. McRae confessed to stalking his victims for a day or two, sometimes trailing after multiple women at once. Then, Betsy wondered again, was it really Ginny he was after? Or Betsy? Could it have been Caroline? When he broke into that apartment, who was he expecting, even hoping, would walk through that door? Once he had Ginny in his grip, in the dark apartment, and was close enough to look directly into her terrified eyes as he wrestled her onto the ground, was he relieved, because she was the one he really wanted?

  Ginny’s hazel eyes shone through those picture frames, and Betsy hoped they peered through to him, bored into his brain.

  Betsy saw Scottie McRae in her dreams, in front of Ginny’s car, in the aisle at Walmart, in the shadows at Weird Bobby’s party, ordering juice at Bagelville. She would be riding on the handlebars of Gavin’s bike, but she’d turn around and see that it was Scottie pedaling hard, his hot breath on her neck.

  Did he hear me laughing when the markers dropped near his feet? wondered Betsy. Did her irreverence set him off, and seal her fate as his next victim? Or when he reached out to hand it to Ginny, did he feel her skin brush up against his sleeve and realize his good fortune? Like the gods had intervened and delivered this girl to him. She remembered that Ginny blushed crimson at their exchange. Was there a flash of recognition before she quickly looked away?

  She read about the blue duffel that he had strapped across his chest, the tapes, about the knife that was inside. How did he find out where they lived? With the traffic the way it was, and the stoplights, and the thoughtless way Ginny drove her car, it must have been easy for him to follow on a bike. Betsy must have tried to piece together that day after they left Walmart hundreds of times. They dropped Betsy off at the record store, and went back to the house. Did he wait there for Ginny and Caroline after they went inside? He had nothing better to do than watch those pretty girls come and go for hours. It was after midnight by the time she left, and she and Caroline never would have noticed the man across the street as he hopped on a bike and followed the two of them in Caroline’s car down the hill to their apartment.

  He knew there was a pattern. After a few days of following them, McRae knew no one would be back at that apartment until after midnight. He’d hide behind the bedroom door and grab her, tape her mouth, quickly bind her wrists and ankles like he did his other victims. He would draw his knife out of the bag, put two strips of duct tape together on his left hand, and find a spot in the shadows to wait.

  THE GIRLS AT the sorority house didn’t remember seeing Ginny leave. She was in the TV room until at least midnight, and someone remembered seeing her in the back with her arms outstretched in an exaggerated yawn. She asked Nan, the house supervisor, for an ice pack and some Excedrin earlier that night, which she washed down with a Diet Coke. She had a headache, everyone remembered her saying, and nothing she tried would dull the pain that crept in after lunch and lingered over her right eye. Even the nap she took after dinner in one of the cool, dark rooms lined with bunk beds upstairs where all the residents of the house slept—the “sleeping porch” system many sororities adopted after Ted Bundy’s killing spree at Florida State, designed to keep the girls together in one room, naively thinking there was safety in numbers—didn’t help. She and Caroline were sprawled out with at least twenty other students on the floor, half-awake, half-watching a lame thriller on VHS they’d all seen at least twice.

  She must have grabbed her bag and her keys from her mail cubby and tiptoed out the back door for fear of being caught. Betsy remembered the air that night, how it felt cool and wild in her ears as she coasted down that same hill on a stolen bike a few hours later. The emptiness of the streets and the dark quiet of the night must have made her feel better almost immediately. She thought of the conversation she and Caroline and Ginny had in the car on the way to Walmart. What are the odds? She remembered Caroline saying. In a town this big? Ginny needed her migraine pills, to be alone, peace and quiet.

  In her visions about that night, Betsy pictured Ginny walking inside the apartment, putting her keys in her bag, and walking down the hall toward the kitchen for a glass of water, which she’d need to take her medication. When she opened the refrigerator to pull out the pitcher, did she notice, in the pizza-slice of light it cast onto the counter and linoleum floor, a puddle of water? A used spoon or a bowl? Anything that would have hinted that she was not alone?

  She must have been too tired to think, or to register that anything appeared off or out of place. The days had been endless since murder mayhem began, and Ginny wanted so much for life to get back to normal, to get back to class and a regular schedule, and to figure out whether she and Betsy would have a shared afternoon off for Oprah and popcorn for another semester.

  Ginny could have been halfway up the stairs before she registered that the hall light was on. Did she peer up at it and notice a few dead moths in the dome of frosted glass, like Betsy had, and realize that she had never seen it illuminated? Did she see how the yellowish light cast strange shadows down the carpeted stairs, showing stains she’d never seen before and odd scuffs and marks on the white paint of the walls? Did she pause at the top of the stairwell, sensing his presence? It would have taken a fraction of a second for the adrenaline to start coursing through her body and send the message to flee. Did the angle of the opening of the bedroom door give her any clues? Did anything inside the apartment, any inanimate object pulsate or quiver, like the door of her bedroom, mute and wooden but wailing like a siren in its eerie stillness?

  Everything in Betsy’s vision up to that point plays out roughly the same way, no matter how many times she reviewed it in her head. But there were alternate endings, each playing out differently according to Betsy’s state of mind. In one version, Ginny makes it two steps down the stairwell before she slips and knocks noisily into the wall. That’s when Betsy arrives at the front door and hears the commotion inside. Ginny races down the rest of the stairs and the two friends run down the hill to safety.

  In another version, Ginny lands hard on her ass on the fourth stair as the bedroom door flings open an
d the knob strikes the drywall in her room with a thud. Behind her, she hears the quick, heavy steps of work boots across the creaky floor. To her left, she sees a black blur, an arm swinging around to knock her head against the railing. He, the he she was so certain wouldn’t be waiting for her, slaps tape over her mouth and part of one nostril and presses it, hard, against her skin. He hooks his right elbow under her armpit and drags her back up the stairs, into the room, and onto the bed. Her right temple, again, stings from the blow, and her pulse roars in her ears. She strains her eyes to focus on the figure before her, silhouetted by the hall light. Then she sees the knife, and feels him press the weight of his body against hers. That’s when Betsy barges into the room with the golf club they keep in the hall closet downstairs, and she swings it hard enough that it makes a fleshy thudding sound as it lands on his skull, and the two of them are free. But in the most persistent version, the one that creeps back into her consciousness again and again, Betsy shows up in time, but she does nothing. Nothing at all. Then Ginny dies.

  “I’m going to pull this tape off now if you promise not to scream. If you scream, you’re dead,” he growls in her ear. “This knife here,” he says, as he cut off her shirt, “would cut through you like warm butter. You hear me? Not a word. You scream, you fight, and that’s the end of you.”

  Ginny nods furiously as he binds her wrists together and forces her arms over her head. Her body shakes uncontrollably.

  “You let me do what I want and, honey, you can live,” he says, negotiating with her like he claims he did with all of his victims, plying her with lies. “You can go on your way, flipping your hair, laughing at guys like me, teasing guys like me.”

  Her shorts were off now, and he’s at her underpants. She heard him fumble with his buckle. He reaches up to stroke her face and then pulls, hard, ripping the tape from her mouth. Her head reels backward from the pain.

  “Somebody’s walking through that door any second now,” Betsy can hear Ginny saying the words before she spits in his face. “You’ll never get away with this. My friend’s going to walk in that door any minute, and you’re going to be done, do you understand? You’re never going to get away with this. You’re going to rot in prison and then in hell and I will not see you there.”

  Maybe she reaches for his ear, as Caroline said. Thirty pounds of pressure. I could rip his ear off with my hand.

  Downstairs, a key turns the lock of the front door. He clasps his hand over Ginny’s mouth and threatens to slit her throat if she screams. She struggles against his weight, jamming her knees and her elbows in the softest spots she can find.

  They hear someone downstairs. McRae shifts his weight to the edge of the bed and a creaky floorboard gives way. Then they hear the crash of a chair, the clamber of footsteps down the hall, and the slam of the front door.

  Then Betsy knows how the story ends. Ginny feels pressure on her chest, a hot sear of pain, a tearing sound coming from deep inside.

  This isn’t real, she thinks, as she stares at the blank, white expanse of her ceiling. This can’t be real.

  And the room around her starts to fade into what feels like a dream, and Betsy is falling backward.

  NO MATTER HOW many scenarios she imagined, Ginny was still gone when she came back to reality. And nothing would bring her back.

  WHAT IF MCRAE knew that Betsy was the one who walked in on him? Betsy had had to leave, to get as far away from that place as possible, to become Elizabeth, someone else entirely. After all of those years, even when she didn’t know who he was, he haunted her, behind bars and a death sentence.

  “I could have . . . ,” she said, trailing off. She straightened up, scanned the room to remember exactly where she was, to remember who she was talking to, forgetting that she was talking out loud at all. She rubbed her eyes. She heard a faint vibrating sound from across the room.

  “Ah, it’s me, my pager.” Ian unclipped his beeper from his back pocket. “Hold tight.”

  He checked the number and then scanned the address list in his phone.

  “Hey, Ian,” said Betsy.

  “Ian?” He laughed. “Who the hell is Ian?”

  “Um, I forgot. I’m supposed to see a movie tonight. With a friend. You’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve got to go. I was on my way anyway.” He folded up his box of treasures, slid it into his backpack, and skulked toward the door.

  “You alright?” he asked, stopping a moment to look back at Betsy.

  “Yeah,” she croaked a little, her throat suddenly dry. “I’m alright.”

  And then he was off into the still-warm night.

  She kicked off her Birkenstocks, shuffled to the bedroom, and spread herself out on top of the cool, percale sheets, the AC’s vents pointed directly at her face, where she would stay, motionless, until morning.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE BACHELORETTE

  August 15, 1997

  Five days on, two days off, two weeks’ vacation, summer Fridays on the jitney, cardio classes after work, wine-soaked dinners with big groups of acquaintances who haggled over the check, and lazy, queasy hungover mornings—time slid by whether Betsy noticed it or not. Before Betsy realized it, she had been promoted to Senior Cataloguer in the Prints and Multiples department. She had been employed for over six years. And she and Gavin were getting married. Betsy was amazed by how quickly time passed once you accepted your fate and succumbed to a steady rotation of work days and weekends, the almost imperceptible ebb and flow of daily life, as lethargic and uneventful as the tide in the flat waters of the Gulf Coast.

  She watched the clock perched on the rickety side table next to the bed burn through the minutes. Its orange-red numbers glowed in the murky dark hotel room. It was 2:45. Betsy, after abandoning hope of sleep, started to sift through the schedule of events in her head. At 11:00 a.m., a small group of friends and family would gather on the lawn at the Gideon Putnam hotel in Saratoga Springs. A string quartet would play “Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Radiohead as she walked down the aisle. By 11:12 a.m., they would be married.

  They chose the location both for the New Deal–era park, full of graceful brick archways and shady woods that surrounded it, and for the opportunity to wear big hats and bet on the ponies at the track nearby with twenty of their bourbon-thirsty friends. Her dress, an oyster satin column that hit just below the knee, hung on the back of the door next to Gavin’s gray suit. Her flowers, a tiny cluster of lilies of the valley, would be delivered in just a few hours. When she stood in the grass at the rehearsal that afternoon, long fingers of sun reached through the clouds to warm Betsy’s shoulders through the thin silk of her sleeves. The smell of damp grass, mixed with the mint in her julep and the gardenia in her hair, was such a dizzying combination of so many good things that it made her want to close her eyes to block out everything else and concentrate on the scents alone. She wanted to lock down the memory in a place where her other senses couldn’t reach. But behind her eyelids, despite the warmth on her skin and the fragrant air and the excitement of the day, all she could see was what was missing: Ginny, and even Caroline, and she felt a shot of loneliness and regret that took her breath away.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw Gavin, who narrowed his eyes to peer at her more closely, no doubt wondering what she was thinking, as always. Some say the secret to a lasting relationship is a continual element of mystery. Close the bathroom door. Never reveal all of your secrets. Keep them guessing. If that was true, she and Gavin were in it for the long haul. Even though Betsy felt so raw and exposed all of the time, she was beginning to realize that everyone else—including her future husband—perceived her as something of a closed book. Gavin reached out to touch her elbow and Betsy shuddered.

  “You OK?” He mouthed the words to her, trying not to interrupt the chatty local clergy that the hotel hired to marry them. Betsy forced a smile and offered a tense little nod.

  “Totally fine,” she whispered. “Jitters, no big deal.”


  At the rehearsal dinner, Betsy shifted uncomfortably in her seat when Teddy raised a glass to the happy couple, alluding to the way the two of them met, how he knew them both separately but could hardly remember a time when they weren’t a unit, and how tragedy brought them together but they weren’t going to dwell on sadness that day. Jay, Gavin’s brother who was struggling through business school in Atlanta, was six beers into the evening when he stood up to offer what Betsy thought would be a fairly uninspired toast. And it was, for a while.

  “Gavin, you know, we always say that the day you met Betsy, it was like a solar eclipse.” He chuckled. “Kind of cool to observe, in some ways, but dark.” Here, he faked a shiver for added emphasis. “Spooky, even. But I know you’ve been through a lot together, some hard times, and, I can only assume, some good ones. I can see that she makes you laugh. She makes you happy, I guess? Can you call it happy? If not, we wouldn’t be here, right? All the way up here in New York? Or are we in Canada yet? You’re happy, I’m happy.”

  Teddy tried his best to be nonchalant when he wandered over to Jay and patted him on the back with a hearty thwack.

  “Alright, Jay,” said Teddy. “Thanks for that, that sentimental journey.”

  The table laughed a bit, in relief no doubt. And Betsy wondered if anyone noticed, or noticed as much as she did, that no one was there to offer quaint or funny stories from her distant past. No one there had seen her climb the kumquat tree in Key West with Ginny, or sat on the back of the sputtering secondhand scooter Betsy had for a single semester before its tiny motor failed, or sat outside Krispy Kreme with her waiting for the hot doughnuts sign to turn on at 4:00 a.m. No one knew about her Golden Girls obsession, or kept track of how many bikes she either lost, forgot to lock, or stole, how many dance parties she’d started in the middle of the night. There was no proud father’s speech. Kathy thought it inappropriate for the mother of the bride to make a toast, so she sat there silently, shifting in her own brand of discomfort and uncertainty, attempting to deflect all of the attention that was directed her way. Jessica stood up to offer a few early work stories, like the time Betsy was in the warehouse digging a print out of storage and knocked over a hanging metal sculpture, which she then convinced the maintenance men to help her “fix” with spray paint.

 

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