The check came and Barbara LaFortuny picked it up, although she seemed surprised that he didn’t offer. But he had come down here on his own dime and he sure hadn’t chosen to eat vegan. What did she expect? And now she had brought him to some park. What could she possibly have for him here?
“Athletic field number nine,” she said, stopping the car.
“What about it?”
“It’s at the top of this hill. I have to stay here, because she knows my car, my face. It’s not a face people easily forget.” She laughed at her own lopsided visage, as if it were a delightful joke. “But you can probably walk up and get close enough to see her.”
“Her?”
“Elizabeth Lerner. Although, of course, that’s not the name she uses now. But go on, take a gander.”
“What name does she use now? How did you find her?”
She smiled. “We’ll save that for another day. I just wanted you to know how much we can give you, if you’re patient.”
“We?”
“Walter and I.”
“How can Walter have any influence over her?”
“As I said, they’re talking.”
“Will I be able to recognize her?”
“Look for the redhead, with the redheaded son and a rather ugly dog. Her daughter is number seventeen, I believe. Doesn’t look a thing like her. If anything—well, you’ll see.”
He felt ridiculous, trudging up the long drive in his loafers and work clothes. If he were one of these parents, he’d make him for a pedophile. Yet the parents, almost all mothers at this time of day, paid him no mind. The drive was on an incline and he was puffing and sweating by the time he arrived at field nine. A quick sweep—no one. Wait, there was the redheaded boy and dog, romping along the sidelines.
And there she was. He would not have recognized her in a crowd, or without the expectation of seeing her. She was curvy, whereas the teenage Elizabeth had been straight up and down, with no shape. (He had speculated, too, that Walter might have confused sexual leanings. Walter hadn’t liked that, but it was fair, given what Elizabeth looked like and how he had made her dress. And it was consistent with the other evidence.) But there was something else that was different about her, something that took him a moment to diagnose.
She looked happy. Wind ruffling her hair on this pleasant October afternoon, eyes trained on—which one? Oh, the little beauty, long-legged and lean, not at all like her mother, at least not like any version Jared ever saw. The daughter—the daughter looked more like Holly Tackett than she did like her mother. Not in the coloring, but in her grace, her long-limbed body, her ease with herself. Out of her soccer uniform, in street clothes, she would appear much older than she was.
Elizabeth wasn’t one of the more vocal mothers, but she was clearly proud of her daughter. And when her son came running up with the dog, his small grubby hand thrust forward to show her something, she inspected his offering with grave interest.
Jared watched her for a little while longer, hoping that her husband might arrive, or that the game might end and he could, discreetly, follow her to her car. With a license plate, he wouldn’t be dependent on Barbara LaFortuny. He could get a name, an address, a phone number. Perhaps he could ask some other parent about the team, figure out where it was based, how to get the roster. But, no, that would invite attention. If he had his camera, he could pretend to be a photographer, but photographers did not dress like auditors, as he did, being an auditor. No, better to keep his distance. For now.
He remembered the one photograph he had managed to take of Elizabeth, back in the courthouse hallway, camera held hip level. “Hey, Elizabeth,” he had called, and she had looked back, for only a split second, which was all he needed to grab the shot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the damn school photo, which had been used on her missing posters. She looked startled, wide-eyed, even a little guilty. They had used it on the cover, with Walter’s mug shot and a heartbreaking photo of Holly Tackett between them.
His train slowed for the approach to Philadelphia. He couldn’t wait to get home, to get on the Internet. He must not write about this yet. But it would be fun tonight to sit in his study and read the other bloggers, to imagine their envy and astonishment when he broke this story. How had Walter found her again? Perhaps she had found him.
32
“OCTOBER GIVETH AND OCTOBER TAKETH away,” Peter intoned the next morning. Golden autumn had been replaced by a dark, lashing storm, almost monsoonlike. Eliza felt she had no choice but to drive Albie to school. She struggled with this, on principle. Was she being overprotective? Hadn’t she walked to school in driving rainstorms? And Albie was used to the wet because of England. But this was the kind of downpour in which visibility dwindled to nothing, and she could not bear to think of dreamy Albie walking along the streets in his slicker, which was nowhere near bright enough. If she had her way, Albie would wear a bright yellow coat and hat like the little girl on the Morton salt box, but even Albie had enough fashion sense to choose dark navy. Besides, it was touching how much Albie cherished the novelty of the ride to school, especially when Reba automatically piled in. Apparently Reba understood that the walk to school was not about her. It had a purpose, a mission, and if she was in on the nice days, she should go along on the dreary ones, too.
Yet the moment they dropped Albie off, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the day felt freshly scrubbed, an enticing invitation to do something, anything, outdoors. Eliza, who had no shortage of tasks at home, believed she was heading there when she pulled out of the school’s driveway. Somehow, she found the Subaru nosing east and north, toward Baltimore. She did not take the highways, preferring the secondary roads, the very ones on which she had learned to drive, skirting close to her parents’ home and even detouring past her old high school—although it wasn’t her school, the windowless octagon that she remembered more or less fondly. That hopelessly small structure had been demolished back in the 1990s and replaced with a handsome brick-and-glass rectangle that allowed light to pour in from every angle. She continued along Route 40, little changed to her eyes, although the Roy Rogers had been replaced by a Church’s Fried Chicken. The road dipped, as it always had, and all the trappings of the suburbs fell away as she descended into the section that was bordered by the state park. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and they glistened in the sun. She parked in the lot and let Reba out. She didn’t have a leash, but she knew the dog would stay close to her, even in a novel environment, full of new smells.
They walked, following the spindly waterway that was the Sucker Branch, even after hours of heavy rain. She told herself she couldn’t be sure where she was, not really. There were no landmarks, and she hadn’t been here since August 1985. It would be impossible to pinpoint the exact place where she had seen Walter, tamping down the earth with his shovel.
That is, it would have been impossible if it weren’t for the plastic spray of flowers tucked at the foot of an old oak tree.
A coincidence, she told herself, then Reba. “It’s a coincidence.” Reba looked as if she were considering this information. The bouquet was bedraggled; it had been out in the elements for quite some time. It might be trash, for all Eliza knew, something tossed here, not left in memorial. Who would have trudged into these woods to leave a plastic nosegay at a site where Maude had spent barely a day? Eliza tried to remember what she knew about Maude’s life. She had attended Mount Hebron High School. She had been on her way to work at an ice-cream parlor on Route 40 and gotten a ride with Walter. She was tall and thin, one of two children whose divorced mother was just scraping by. This was all from information that filtered out during the trials. Walter never spoke of what he had done, except in the most general way.
“He must have said something,” the prosecutor had insisted. Baltimore County was known for the ferocity with which its state’s attorney sought the death penalty in all applicable cases, and the Howard County attorney had happily ceded the case to him, saying it was
almost certain that Walter had killed Maude here, just over the county line, not where she was taken. But they couldn’t prove it was a capital crime if Maude had gotten into Walter’s car willingly, and he said she had. And there was no evidence of rape. The assumption was that Walter used a condom, unusual but not unheard of, although this did not explain the lack of trauma to Maude’s body. There were a lot of gaps in the case, and they leaned on Elizabeth to fill them in.
He must have said something about Maude, the prosecutor said.
No, Elizabeth told the prosecutor, Walter had offered varying stories about the girl whose grave he had dug—she fell out of the car, she fell in the park and hit her head. But he spoke vaguely about other crimes he might have committed, and that was only in order to scare Elizabeth to do whatever he asked her to do. “‘I’ve done some terrible things,’ he would say. ‘I didn’t want to do them. I was left with no choice. But I will do what I have to do.’”
In the end, Walter was convicted of murder in the first degree and given a life sentence. He had already received the death penalty in Virginia, so it didn’t really matter. The Maryland prosecutor had spun the whole experience as a saving to taxpayers. Maryland would be spared the cost of Walter’s appeals, and the cost of his maintenance over the years, yet justice had been done. The prosecutor said.
Eliza and Reba kept walking, inhaling the dense, wet smells of the woods in autumn. The leaves would have been thicker, in summer, it would have been harder to see as far as she could today. If she had been able to spot Walter from a distance—no, she wasn’t supposed to think that way.
Eventually the path led back into the old neighborhood, her mother’s Brigadoon. It was unchanged, almost as if it had slumbered through the past two decades. Although they probably had cable now, Eliza thought, noting a small satellite attached to one roof. She walked among the stone houses, assigning each one its past, astonished at how much she remembered. The Sleazaks had lived there, old man Traber there. (She had been stunned to learn from his obit, which her mother clipped for her a few years ago, that this stereotypical crank, the original get-off-my-lawn guy, was actually a well-regarded society painter.) The Billinghams’ door was still scarlet, a scandalous choice back in the 1980s, when the community board debated if the color might prevent the neighborhood from being included in the National Register of Historic Places, a status it had long coveted.
The primary difference, Eliza deduced from the cars, was that the neighborhood’s residents were more prosperous now, or more inclined to flaunt their wealth. Her mother wouldn’t have cared for that. And she wouldn’t have liked the fact that a woman in a BMW slowed when she saw Eliza and Reba, regarding them with frank suspicion. She drove past them, turned around, and came past again, rolling down her window as she pulled abreast of them.
“Can I help you?” she asked Eliza. “Are you looking for someone?”
“Just taking a stroll down memory lane. I lived here, as a child.”
Eliza pointed to the house where she had grown up, the house she had never fully appreciated until her family decided to leave it. Could they have stayed? Were they wrong to cut themselves off from their pre-Walter life? Hers was not such an unusual name. Media exposure was not as intense then. She wasn’t Patricia Hearst. If she told this woman her maiden name—that quaint term, yet also literal in her case—the woman would probably evince no recognition. Who remembers names, anyway? The runaway bride, the girl killed in Aruba, the girl killed in Italy—they made headlines, yet Eliza couldn’t name one of them to save her life.
“Well, it’s almost impossible to buy here now,” the woman said. “Houses are sold before they even go on the market.”
“Even since the mortgage crisis?”
“Houses here never lose their value,” the woman said. Eliza felt like a blasphemer for suggesting that Roaring Springs could be touched by anything as commonplace as the world economy.
“What do they go for these days?”
Judging by the look on the BMW driver’s face, Eliza had progressed from blasphemer to merely classless. The woman lowered her voice:
“I heard that the Mitchells got almost $500,000.”
The number was at once laughably low, relative to what Peter had paid for their house in Bethesda, and shockingly high. Eliza’s parents had paid no more than $40,000 for the house in the 1970s and felt like robber barons when they sold it for $175,000 in 1986. We could have lived here, Eliza thought. The commute would have worked out. Iso and Albie would have attended her old schools, walked down Frederick Road to the Catonsville branch library, eaten gyros at the old Greek diner, although Maryland’s gyros were thin pleasures when compared to the falafels they had known in London.
They could have walked along the Sucker Branch, too, wandered into the park. Did parents still allow children to do such things? No, probably not. But that detail did not derail Eliza’s fantasy. She had never blamed the location, the park. No, the problem with this spasm of nostalgia was that she was longing for her children to reclaim the territory she had ceded, Elizabethland, the realm of her pre-fifteen-year-old self. And if they wandered back into her past, she would have to tell them everything about the girl that she used to be. As far as they knew, there was no home between the Lerners’ early years in Baltimore City and the house they owned now. An entire chapter of the family’s life was missing, and Eliza’s own children had never noticed.
“That much,” she said to the woman in the BMW, widening her eyes in what she hoped would appear to be wistful awe. In some ways, it was. She and Reba turned around and headed out of the neighborhood. She had a feeling that the woman watched her go. That was okay. It was good to be vigilant. She wouldn’t deny anyone that right.
Passing Maude’s temporary grave again, she stopped and examined the bouquet. So sad, but then—what did the parents of the missing do? What territory did they mark, what did they visit? I’ll tell you things, Walter had promised. Things I’ve never told. But was it her obligation to listen?
Part V
HOLIDAY
Released 1983
Reached no. 16 on Billboard Hot 100
Spent 20 weeks on Billboard Hot 100
33
“A PRISON IS A CORPORATION, a world unto itself,” said Jefferson D. Blanding, Walter’s lawyer. “Entrenched, committed to its own rules and policies. They don’t like to make exceptions for anyone.”
“So I learned,” Peter said, “when I called. That’s why we’re here, in hopes that a two-prong approach might help.”
“Here” was Blanding’s office in Charlottesville, Virginia, near the bricked-in Main Street mall. It was a Friday, and the children had an in-service day, which meant that teachers reported but students did not. Eliza remembered these from her Maryland youth, but she certainly didn’t remember so many of them on the calendar. At any rate, the three-day holiday had given them a chance to drive here on the pretext of a visit to Monticello, a trip so drearily self-improving that Iso didn’t smell a rat. Albie was game, if a little vague, about who Thomas Jefferson was. All the more reason to visit Monticello.
“You assume that I’m in favor of this,” Blanding said. “I’m not sure I am.”
“It’s what Walter wants,” Eliza put in. She didn’t mind letting Peter be the more aggressive one in this conversation, but she liked to keep her hand in, not allow Blanding to think she was some sort of throwback who let her husband call the shots. Peter just had more experience in arguing with people.
“I serve my clients’ best interests. That doesn’t mean I blindly do their bidding. Walter has not always been the best steward of what is good for Walter.”
Eliza nodded. “He wanted to take the stand in his first trial,” she told Peter. “He had a different lawyer then and—well, he probably wouldn’t have helped himself, insisting that everything that happened was an accident. But that was a very long time ago. In our conversations, he does appear to have changed. He’s more thoughtful, more measured.”
“Agreed,” Blanding said. “Still, I’m skeptical.”
What could Eliza say to that? Walter’s current lawyer had good instincts. Of course, they hadn’t told him what Walter had promised in return for Eliza’s visit. Peter saw their decision as strategy, nothing more, but Eliza was also protecting herself against the perception that she was being played by Walter, that he was toying with her. She would not be surprised if Walter was luring her to the prison with a promise he had no intention of keeping. Oh, he would tell her something, reveal some nugget of information that fell short of full disclosure, then argue the technicality, claim she had misunderstood. Walter was like a ten-year-old boy that way. Eliza’s mother had long believed that Walter had experienced something particularly wounding in his youth and that he reverted to the boy-self when threatened or upset. There had been times, all those years ago, when Eliza had felt older than Walter, or at least more knowledgeable in the ways of the world. She remembered watching him grab a handful of the pastel mints in a bowl by the cash register at a diner, then telling him later, as gently as possible, that he should have used the plastic spoon. He had been humiliated, offended, and gone on the attack. “I’m clean,” he said. “I wash my hands after everything, which is more ’n you can say.”
He was right about that. Sometimes when Eliza found herself exhorting Albie to wash up, she remembered Walter’s criticism of her young hygiene.
Peter asked Blanding: “Does the fact that he’s been given an execution date give us more or less leverage?”
“A little more,” Blanding said, looking pained. He was sad that Walter was going to die, Eliza realized. Was it a personal sadness, a professional one, or a combination? “But not if there’s publicity. If you want to come in there with a reporter, or if you give interviews before or after the fact—they won’t want to have anything to do with you.”
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