“Mr. Blanding, I’ve spent my entire life avoiding this topic. I wouldn’t want anyone to know that I’ve visited Walter.”
“Oh, people will know,” the lawyer said. “It’s a state agency, but it’s also just another office, where people gossip about anything out of the ordinary. And it’s extremely unusual for a death row inmate to receive a visitor, especially from one of his—” He paused, groping for a word.
“Victims,” Eliza supplied. “But then, I guess that’s the paradox of death row. They don’t tend to have many living victims.”
The lawyer was not particularly handsome, but he had pale blue eyes, made more vivid by his shirt, and a touching earnestness. “Mrs. Benedict, I understand that you are Walter Bowman’s victim. I never forget that. I also don’t allow myself to forget that he killed Holly Tackett and Maude Parrish.”
Maybe more.
“That makes two of us,” she said, and even Peter looked startled at the brittle glibness of her voice, not at all like her, although it was a tone she found herself using more and more with Iso.
“I’ve represented a lot of men on death row,” Blanding said. “They’re not monsters, not a one of them. It would be easier, in some ways, if we could say that of them. They have done monstrous things and most don’t deny that. Some are mentally ill, although they don’t meet the standard that would allow them to plead insanity. Others have IQs so low that it’s hard to imagine how they functioned at all in the world. But they all are capable of remorse, and that’s what most feel. Especially Walter.”
She wanted to believe him. Yet—if Walter had changed, could he answer her other questions? Would he remember the man he was and why he had treated her differently from the others? Assuming there was a new Walter, could he explain the old one?
“Let’s cut to the chase,” Peter asked. “How does she get in to see him?”
Blanding played with a pen and pencil set on his desk, the kind of item that a child gives as a present, thinking it grand. And his coffee mug was a lumpy, garish green thing, made by loving if not terribly skilled hands. “It wouldn’t hurt if you knew someone with some clout in Virginia. Connections are powerful.”
Peter stiffened. “I was a journalist before I went into finance. I don’t have those kinds of relationships and I’m still not comfortable with them. I don’t like trading favors.”
“But your bosses, their friends—”
“They don’t know about me,” Eliza said. “About Walter and me.”
“Mrs. Benedict—”
“Eliza, please.”
“My two cents? As the execution approaches, your ability to remain anonymous recedes. I’m not saying you’re wrong to want to live a life that isn’t defined by what happened to you as a teenager. And if you were still in London, or even on the other side of the country, maybe you could do that. Maybe. But the execution is going to shake memories loose, excite interest. People will almost certainly try to track you down through your parents and sister, who haven’t changed their names.”
“You make it sound like I went into hiding,” Eliza said, bristling. She had never denied her past. She simply had chosen not to let it be the single thing that defined her.
“Didn’t you?” Blanding asked, his manner as mild as his name.
“No. I shortened my name in high school to avoid…complications. Then I met Peter, and we decided to marry, and, well, do you know your Jane Austen? Can you imagine what it’s like to be wonderfully close to Elizabeth Bennet, if only on legal documents? It’s pretty much every Janeite’s fantasy.”
“It seems to me,” Blanding said, “that a woman who loved Austen would be more excited by the prospect of being Elizabeth Darcy.”
This was the moment, small and charged, in which Eliza could tell they were deciding if they were going to be allies or adversaries. She laughed, choosing to be an ally. It was an astute comment, funny and informed. She wished Blanding were her lawyer.
“I’m sorry,” Blanding said. “I didn’t mean to suggest you were hiding. I suppose it’s more correct to say that you don’t wish to be found. Yet sitting in Sussex I, Walter did find you. What makes you think that the Washington Post can’t?”
“I’m not worried about saying no to the Washington Post. I am worried about finding the right way—and time—to talk to my children about this. Our son is already prone to nightmares, and Iso went through this terrible obsession with mortality when she was five or so. There never seems to be a right time to tell them about me.”
“And what will you tell them about the death penalty? Will you say that you agree with the commonwealth of Virginia’s decision to execute people for certain crimes? Will you inform them that most civilized countries don’t put their own citizens to death?”
“How we parent,” Peter put in, “is a private decision. Do you have children, Mr. Blanding?” He, unlike Eliza, had missed the clues: the pen and pencil set, the coffee mug.
“Two, an eight-year-old and a three-year-old,” he said.
“Well, then you understand that some things are off-limits, not for others to comment upon.”
Blanding started to say something, checked himself. “I’ll do what I can do because I know it’s what Walter wants and I can’t see how it will harm him.” Again, Eliza felt guilty, wondered if the guilt read on her face. She didn’t like deceiving this man. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but I’ve really come to like him. He has such an interesting mind. I like the way he turns over words and phrases. He sees more than most people.”
But what, exactly, does he see? What did he see in me?
Peter and Eliza walked back to the hotel, hand in hand. “I could live in Charlottesville,” he said, but it was the only time either of them spoke during the walk, and he was just making conversation. Eliza didn’t think she could live here, although she didn’t blame Virginia for the memories she had of it. Still, it had been odd, skirting Middleburg on the way here. She could tell she and Peter were both weighed down by the secret they had withheld from Blanding. If Walter did confess to her, Blanding would not think her well intentioned. He might, in fact, believe her to be completely disingenuous, a glory hog who had considered only herself in this enterprise. But she could not allow herself to be affected by what Blanding, or anyone, thought of her. She was doing the right thing for the right reason. Almost.
The children wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon at the indoor pool, delighted as only children can be by the steamy, almost fetid room, with its fogged windows and chlorine smells. Eliza had never really liked swimming. She could do a passable bastard stroke, somewhere between breast and fly, and she was strong enough to swim in the currents of the Atlantic. It had been nice, when Iso was small, to go to the flat, friendly beaches of South Texas, where the steady stream of cars posed far more risk than the lazy wavelets that lapped the shore. But she didn’t really care for water. Whereas Peter was in his element, joining the children in the pool. She admired his body, still trim and athletic despite the fact that he had less time to exercise. She wondered if he still admired hers and decided to decide that he did.
“Mommy. Mommy? Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy?”
“What, Albie?”
“Aren’t you going to come in?”
“I didn’t bring a suit.”
“Then I’ll come out.”
“That’s okay, darling, I’m having fun watching you.”
Albie swam-walked back to his father and spent the next half hour squealing happily as Peter flung him away with great force. Peter would move toward the children like a lumbering gorilla, grunting the song about the man on the flying trapeze. Even Iso, presumably too big for such nonsense, begged for a turn, shrieking with laughter. They did this over and over again, never tiring.
Change the sound track and the setting, and it might look terrifying, Eliza thought. But did that work the other way around? Were there terrible things that could appear lovely if framed differently? She remembered a moment in
a Piggly Wiggly, when she had been difficult and obdurate, arguing for a snack that Walter had arbitrarily decided was off-limits. This was toward the end, perhaps a day or so before they happened upon Holly on the road. Walter put his hand on the back of her neck, viselike.
“How nice,” the checker had said, “to see a brother and sister who are affectionate with one another.”
Three days later, he took her to dinner in a nice restaurant, one with linen tablecloths and silver, and told her she could have anything on the menu. Again, the waitress complimented Walter on his solicitous manner toward his little sister.
An hour later, he raped her.
Eliza watched as Albie, then Iso, flew through the air with the greatest of ease, screaming with laughter.
34
TRUDY DID NOT CONSIDER HERSELF a Luddite. She liked technology. But she also believed machines required several generations before they became attractive. Televisions, for example, and all their accessories—it had taken years before someone had figured out how to design a system that wasn’t a welter of cords and extensions, snaky as Medusa’s hair. Computers, too, were hideous when they first came along, and while laptops were smaller, they were still ugly to her way of thinking. Even those clamshells, especially those clamshells, which one was supposed to carry like a purse. As if Trudy would ever own such a purse. And no matter what computer one used, e-mail itself was ugly, begging the eye to skim, flee. She wanted no part of it.
She prided herself on keeping a stock of rich, creamy monogrammed paper, writing notes as necessary. Or picking up a phone—a phone, not a cell—when she had something to say to someone. Her sons had pleaded with her to get an e-mail account, dangling visions of daily photos of the grandsons, more frequent communication. But e-mail, in Trudy’s view, wasn’t communication. It was a one-sided conversation, zipping back and forth, barely connecting. Terry had an account and she checked it a few times a week, but she never hit the “reply to” button. And, yes, sometimes, there were photos of grandchildren, but they existed only on the screen, she had to sit there if she wanted to look at them, as she didn’t have a proper printer for photos. “We could send them to your phone,” her sons said, but her cell phone was just a phone, with no other capacity, and it spent most of its life in its little cradle of a charger.
But since Terry’s conversation with their Sussex friend, Trudy’s mind had returned again and again to a tantalizing detail: I got you the number. You can put it in a reverse look-up. She hadn’t understood what the woman meant at the time and hadn’t wanted to ask, revealing her presence on the line. But Trudy was an old hand at puzzling through things, and she put it together eventually. All she had to do was plug Elizabeth Lerner’s number into the computer and there it was, her street and zip. She could even call up photographs. O brave new world, she thought.
Trudy had dialed Elizabeth Lerner’s number several times since she obtained it, at first hanging on only to hear it ring over and over, then hanging up on the first or second ring. No voice mail, how odd. And why was no one ever home to answer it? She always called on weekends or around supper, the most likely time to find people at home. Did they ignore the calls, thinking she was a telemarketer? Did they have caller ID, which would out her as T Tackett? Idly she picked up her phone, even as she continued to stare at the photograph of the Benedicts’ white, nothing-special house. She thought longingly of T’n’T, their farm in Virginia, which had managed to be gracious and comfortable, no small feat when someone has three rowdy sons. The name—she didn’t regret it, refused to find belated menace in its pun. The Tacketts hadn’t even chosen it, although they had laughed when a friend had made the joke at a party, then later gave them the painted sign they put at the foot of their long drive. She had considered it arch acknowledgment of their good fortune. Trudy always had known that life could blow up at any moment. But perhaps that was hindsight.
She listened to the phone ring. She knew the photograph was not live—the trees were green and leafy—but she couldn’t help feeling that she was watching the house, that she might see a curtain twitch or a light come on, even hear her own call ringing inside. Answer me. Talk to me.
Not even an hour later, she was standing in front of it. Funny, because the Maryland side of the Beltway always seemed miles, galaxies away, a place she seldom ventured. But the highways had been almost eerily empty. Oh, it was Saturday, she remembered. Terry had gotten up to go play golf, not go into work. She zipped around 495 and across River Road, telling herself that she was bound for Tysons Corner, then the Saks on Wisconsin Avenue.
But she was on Poplar Street. She parked her car and walked around the house. No sign of life. Brazen, uncaring, she let herself in the backyard—the low gate had a latch that she could easily slide open—peered into windows. Children lived here, their detritus was all around. (Really, was it that hard to pick up after children, or get them to clean up after themselves? Trudy had never allowed this kind of disorder.) Elizabeth Lerner had children and, presumably, a husband. This was not the house of a single mother, although that would explain the mess. A dog’s bed, a big one—so they had a dog, too. She found herself trying the door handle, testing it to see if Elizabeth Benedict dared to live in an unlocked house, as the Tacketts once had. They had never locked the doors at T’n’T, not when they were in town, and what if they had? Holly had been taken at the foot of their driveway.
The door was locked.
“Are you looking for the Benedicts?”
She almost jumped a foot into the air, more at the sound of the name than the surprise of the voice. Her interlocutor was a man, in his sixties, neatly dressed for a Saturday morning in suburbia, in a short-sleeved shirt and slacks, real slacks, not khakis.
“Yes,” she said. “I just happened to be passing through and I’m an old friend, someone they haven’t seen for years. I took a chance that they would be here.”
“They went away for the weekend, but they expect to be back Sunday night. They asked me to take in the paper. Shame that you missed them.”
“That’s what I get for not calling first. I’ll leave them a note.”
She had no intention of leaving a note, but she figured that lie might keep him from describing the incident when the family returned. She even went so far as to walk to her car, take a piece of paper from the pad she kept in the glove compartment, and pretend-scrawl a note. Only somewhere along the way, it ceased to be pretending and became real. After struggling over how to begin—she could not bring herself to use the word dear—she wrote:
Elizabeth,
Please call me at your convenience.
Trudy Tackett
After a moment’s thought, she included her cell, not the house number.
She stood at the front door, the piece of paper in hand. Once through the slot, it couldn’t be taken back. But what could be taken back in this world? Nothing, really. Apologies, trials, even executions, didn’t change that. The past could not be undone. Bones healed. Everything else stayed broken forever. She has suffered, too, Terry would say during the trial, glancing at Inez Lerner, but Trudy wasn’t convinced that the lines etched into her face were anything but evidence of a woman who didn’t take care of herself and, by extension, didn’t take care of her daughter, who had failed to take care of Trudy’s daughter. Trudy hated Inez Lerner on sight. The hippieish clothes, the graying hair, the two bangles she wore on her wrist, which once, just once, clacked together in the courtroom, loud as a gunshot, making everyone jump. Why are all your children alive? she wanted to scream. What makes you so special? Inez Lerner had not loved her children more, or watched them with more care. Holly had been at the foot of the driveway, not in a park. Holly had been raising money to buy a wig for that unfortunate girl who had lost her hair during chemo, not wandering around aimlessly, just looking for trouble. Even today, she felt the childish complaint rising in her throat, the hot tears of frustration: It isn’t fair.
Trudy missed Holly every day. Every day. And now s
he was looking at a shabbier version of the life her daughter might have had. House, husband, children, dog.
She put the letter in the slot, feeling as if she had launched a message in a bottle, something that had no chance of reaching civilization, much less the person who needed to read it. Logically, she knew it was there, waiting for Elizabeth Lerner to come home, that it would strike her as cruel—a bucket of water propped on a door’s upper ledge, a rug over a hole in the floor. Yet to Trudy, her note felt insubstantial and flimsy, capable of disappearing without a trace.
That’s because what she really wanted to do was strike a match and burn the place to the ground.
35
NORMALLY, WALTER LIKED TO TALK to his lawyer. Blanding was kind and intelligent. He raised Walter’s game. He also made Walter feel like he was part of a larger world. He wasn’t all-business, far from it. They talked about current events and discussed, within ethical limits, the other men that Jeff represented here. Today, for example, Walter told Blanding again how happy he was that the kid, the grandma killer, had gotten a stay. It wasn’t a lie. He was happy for the lawyer. He was happy, in principle, even if he didn’t care about the individual involved.
Still, even with that conversational tidbit, Walter had found it trying, talking to Jeff, because he had something to hide. Are you sure this is a good idea? Is there something you’re not telling me? Walter had come to be a little conceited about his own intellect over the years, especially after repeated intelligence tests showed he was above average. Not genius, or anything extraordinary, but definitely above average, and that had given him confidence that he could hold his own in any conversation, maybe even control them. But it was one thing to control what he said when he communicated with Elizabeth, another to lie to Jeff, with whom he had always been scrupulously honest. Jeff trusted him. He had never asked why Walter had written Elizabeth and arranged to have her on his phone list, or even questioned Walter’s story about seeing her in the magazine. (Lawyers didn’t even have to know who was on their clients’ phone lists, but Walter had told Jeff so it wouldn’t look like he was hiding anything.) Still, Walter had never lied to his lawyer before and he felt bad, misleading him now. But if he told him everything—no, he would never allow Elizabeth to come see him.
I'd Know You Anywhere Page 23