Part VIII
VOICES CARRY
Released 1985
Reached no. 8 on Billboard Hot 100 on July 13, 1985
Spent 21 weeks on Billboard Hot 100
45
SECURITY AT THE GREENVILLE FACILITY stricter than at Sussex, with checkpoint after checkpoint, search after search. That was to be expected, Eliza supposed, when someone was visiting a place known as the Death House.
But the building itself was a stark contrast to the grimly named facility, a small jailhouse, with a deputy at a desk and just one cell.
“It’s like the old Andy Griffith Show,”
Eliza said, standing at her taped mark, her eyes fixed on it, not ready to look at the man in the cell. “Where they locked up Otis, the town drunk.”
“If Otis was going to die,” Walter said, his voice pleasant. “If you look to the side, you can see the death chamber.”
She looked to the side. Then—and only then—she looked directly at Walter. Although still quite trim, he was larger than Eliza had expected. Larger and younger. A slight man, he had been obsessed with his height, insisting that he was five nine, when it seemed apparent to five-four Elizabeth that he couldn’t possibly be more than two inches taller than she. Once, Eliza remembered, he had spent a long time studying a catalog photograph of shoes with Cuban heels and asked her what she thought of them. By then, she had spent enough time in his company to know how to disagree with him without seeming to. She told him the shoes were great (they were hideous) but too stylish, so trendy that they would go out of fashion long before he got much wear out of them. Men’s shoes were well made, she told him, parroting something she had heard her father say, choking a little bit at the memory. A man had to buy shoes that endured. Walter and Elizabeth had similar conversations about a cologne he thought would make him irresistible, and whether he should wear a T-shirt and white blazer like Don Johnson on Miami Vice. “Not after Labor Day,” she had advised, wondering if she would be with him when Memorial Day arrived and he once again petitioned for permission to wear linen pants and loafers without socks. He had been a small man and now he seemed to loom above her, despite the chunky heels on her boots. Did adults grow? Had he learned to stand straighter? Or was she drooping in his presence, burrowing into herself?
As for his face—lack of sunlight had its advantages. Walter was pale and remarkably unlined, his green eyes vivid. He had also always insisted, to the point of being boring on the subject, that he was a good-looking man. He wasn’t wrong. Yet he wasn’t right, either. He should have been good-looking. But there was something that caught at the corner of the eye, even when she was fifteen. Not like me, her mind had registered. Not someone I would know.
But then—Holly had made the same judgment about her.
“Hello, Walter,” she said, although she had said it once already, upon entering. “This is my sister.”
Vonnie nodded at him, staring hard, almost rudely. She had never seen him, Eliza realized, not in the flesh. Their parents had, in court, but Vonnie had been away at school.
“Hello, Yvonne,” Walter said, and Eliza was comforted to realize that much of what Walter knew about her came from official documents and newspaper reports and courthouse testimony, where nicknames were seldom used. She had not let Vonnie’s name pass her lips during the thirty-nine days they had spent together. Right now, if he dropped her children’s names to unnerve her, he would probably call them Isobel and Albert. “This is my deputy, who’s also named Walter, although I think you’ll be able to tell us apart. Helpful hint: He’s the one with the gun.”
Walter’s newfound sense of humor. The deputy also was a broad-shouldered African-American and insanely tall, at least a foot taller than Elizabeth.
“We’ve met,” Deputy Walter said, his voice a honeyed drawl that also would have been at home in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, if Andy Griffith’s Mayberry had been the kind of place that employed towering African-American deputies.
“Would you like a chair?” Walter, the original Walter, asked.
“No, that’s okay.”
“This may take a while.”
“You’re standing.”
“That’s because I can’t pull a chair up to the bars. If I could, I would. But there’s no reason for us both to be uncomfortable.”
There’s not a chair in the world that could make me comfortable right now.
“I’m fine.” She watched Vonnie snake her hand into the deep pockets of her jacket, a laughably fashionable wrap that only heightened the dowdiness of Eliza’s suburban mother garb of slacks and sweater. But the pockets were a boon. Vonnie was starting the microcassette recorder.
“You look wonderful, Elizabeth.” Her full name hurt in Walter’s mouth. “But then—I saw your photo, I knew how you’d look. How do I look?”
“Well,” she said. He wanted more. “Fit.”
“I’m only forty-six. It’s hard for us to get exercise, but you’d be surprised what you can do in a cell, with no equipment but your own body. Barbara got me into yoga. I’m not much on flexibility, but my strength—I’ll show you.” To Eliza’s surprise—and apparently to the deputy’s consternation, as the man seemed to tense all over—Walter put his palms on the floor and then leaned forward until his knees rested against his elbows, his feet up in the air, his entire weight balanced on his arms.
“The crow,” he said, holding the position nonchalantly. “Hey, do you root for the Ravens or the Redskins?”
“What?”
“I mean, I know you grew up in Baltimore and its environs”—environs—“but now you live in the D.C. area, so it just popped into my head, which football team do you choose?”
“Walter, I don’t think this is an occasion for small talk.”
“Oh, so it’s going to be like that?” Standing up, dusting off his palms, but not particularly offended as far as she could tell. Relieved, almost playful. “Okay, but before we cut to the chase, as people say, there is something else we have to talk about first. The night that Holly died. And what happened after.”
She looked at the deputy, who had the good grace to try and pretend that none of this was happening, that he was watching them because it was his duty, yet unengaged. “I—” She looked at Vonnie, who understood her distress but had no solution.
“Hey, Walter?” That was Walter behind bars, talking to Walter at the desk.
“Yes, Walter?”
“Do you need to hear what we’re going to talk about?”
“I need to watch. You know that. I have to watch.”
“Watching’s okay. Do you have to hear?”
The deputy thought for a moment, nodded, took an MP3 player from his desk drawer, and plugged in the earbuds. Eliza couldn’t identify the music, but she could tell it was loud, loud enough so she could hear a tinny buzz. But he kept his eyes fastened on them, and she was not sorry for that.
“Tit for tat,” Walter said, inclining his head toward Vonnie.
“But—?”
“Just us. That’s nonnegotiable. She can go back to wherever they want to hold her, but she can’t stay here.”
The two sisters exchanged glances, but it was hopeless. Vonnie had secreted the microcassette player in her pocket precisely so her purse could be examined by the deputy as Walter looked on. They had made a great show of having their bags examined when they entered. They would have to forgo the taping. Vonnie knocked on the door, and another deputy came to escort her away.
“Hush, hush,” Walter said. When she looked at him, stony-faced, he added: “It was a joke, Elizabeth. Remember how much you liked that song?”
“I did. I liked a lot of songs that summer. I don’t like them now.”
“I ruined them, I guess.”
She selected her words with care. “When you hear a song, it’s natural to remember where you were when it was popular.”
“I ruined the songs.” He looked genuinely contrite. “I hadn’t thought about that. I may have ruined the songs
, but I didn’t ruin you. Look at you, Elizabeth.”
She considered this. Her life had not been destroyed by Walter, far from it. She had an unusually good life, especially for these uncertain times. She had Peter, she had Albie and Iso. She had her parents—hale and hearty into their seventies. And, as the past forty-eight hours had reminded her, she could even rely on Vonnie, impossible, exasperating Vonnie. What did she lack, what had been denied her?
The world at large. No truly close friends, just Peter’s friends and some acquaintances. And this wasn’t a function of the multiple relocations or the temperaments of the women she had met in Houston and London and now Bethesda. It wasn’t, as she had always rationalized, because she was too eastern in Texas, too American in London, too Baltimore for Washington-centric Montgomery County. She couldn’t even blame her lack of friends on being the mother of the girl who might be renowned as the subtle bully and sneak thief of North Bethesda Middle. Eliza didn’t have friends because friendship led to trust and confidences. The thick black line drawn through her life, demarcating where Elizabeth ended and Eliza began, had always made that impossible, at least in her mind.
“No, you didn’t ruin me. But the fact that you didn’t destroy me doesn’t mitigate what you did.”
“I’ll say it: I raped you.” Walter’s voice was low, as if to ensure these words would be heard by her, and her alone. Out of consideration or shame? “I did. I would never deny your experience. You were raped, and I did it. But can you see that it felt like love to me, Elizabeth? Just a little.”
She shook her head. “This is not what we’re supposed to be discussing. There is no point in talking about this.”
“Actually, there is. Because before I can tell you anything, you need to understand this—that night with you was the first and only time in my life that I had sex.”
“No—” She wanted to turn her back on him, hide her face as she sorted through her emotions. It was a lie, it couldn’t be, why was he doing this to her? “You’ve said…I read…”
“I lied. I lied because I was ashamed. That’s how screwed up I was. I was more ashamed of my lack of sexual experience than I was about the things I’d done. I made up this whole story about how I’d done it back home and everyone assumed I’d done it to the other girls. The true first time—the only time—was with you. Remember? That hotel near the Blue Ridge Mountains?”
IT WAS THE NIGHT after Holly had died. Walter had barely spoken throughout the day. He was dazed, semicatatonic, and Eliza had to prompt him to do the smallest things. Moving forward when lights turned green, speaking up when the waitress asked his order at dinner that night.
The hotel was a nice one, an actual hotel, with a restaurant, the kind of place that had linen tablecloths and an elaborate mural that showed people in old-fashioned clothes picnicking. Had there been that much money in Holly’s little tin box? A credit card? Walter urged Elizabeth to order whatever she wanted, but her stomach was sour, and she knew he would be angry if she wasted this food, expensive as it was. Yet Walter wasn’t eating at all. He cut his steak into ever smaller pieces, mashed his baked potato as if it were something he wanted to kill.
“Your dad eats even less than you,” remarked the waitress.
“I’m not her dad,” Walter said, and something in his voice made the waitress flinch. He softened his tone. “I’m her brother. She was a change-of-life baby, and now our parents are dead and all we have is each other.”
“That’s…nice. Real nice.”
They went upstairs. Eliza reveled in the shower, the nicest she’d had in weeks, although she had to put back on her dirty old clothes. The bedspread was wonderful, too, an old-fashioned white one with a raised design. It had been almost a week since she had been in a real bed, and she fell asleep quickly, the television humming in the background. She wasn’t sure what time it was when she awoke to find Walter standing over her.
“Turn over,” he said.
She did, even as she said, “Please don’t, Walter. Please?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to. But I’ll put some music on.” He picked up the remote, flicking through the channels until he found MTV. Madonna singing “Lucky Star.” “You like this one, right?” He turned her so she could face it, but she shut her eyes tight, not wanting to see anything, remember anything.
He was behind her. She had read a book one time, one of the best dirty books ever, where a woman’s boyfriend was always turning her over, and it was revealed that he really liked boys. But she didn’t think that was what was going on with Walter. He was having trouble. He was having a lot of trouble. “Dammit,” he said a time or two, arranging and rearranging her limbs, talking to her body the way he sometimes berated his tools during one of his handyman jobs. Eventually, he found his way. It hurt so much that she could not imagine that it ever wouldn’t, that anyone would do this voluntarily. His mouth was next to her ear, her neck, but he didn’t kiss her, and his arms were braced on either side of her, as if he were doing push-ups. He seemed to be holding his breath. Finally, he gave a little yelp, more surprised than anything else. Madonna was still singing, rolling across the floor, sending up thanks for her lucky star.
“I’m sorry,” he said for the second time. She was crying, her face pressed into what had been the most wonderful bed in the world and was now the worst.
The next day, he was absentminded again, but she stopped helping him, retreating into her own trancelike state. They stopped at a grocery store and ended up having a fight over a box of cookies. He relented and let her have them, but not before pushing her hard enough that she stumbled and went down to her knees. Shortly after they crossed the Potomac into Maryland, he was pulled over for driving too slowly, and if he thought he had anything to fear from the state police, he sure didn’t act that way.
“Who’s the young lady?” the officer asked.
“Elizabeth Lerner,” Walter said. “I’m taking her home. She’s been missing, a runaway, but I’ve convinced her to go home.”
Did he expect the trooper to wave him through? He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed as the trooper walked back to his car, made a call on his radio. Before Elizabeth knew what was happening, Walter was on the ground, his hands above his head, and the state trooper was shouting at him not to move, even as he assured Elizabeth that she was going to be all right, that she was safe now.
And she started to cry. Because she was safe. Or, perhaps, because she realized she would never be safe again.
“THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE,” told Walter now. “You raped Maude. You tried to rape Holly.” Walter was gripping the bars. She wished she had something to grip. She wished she hadn’t refused the offer of a chair, but it would be weak to ask for it now. Besides, she didn’t want to engage the deputy. It was strange enough that he was watching them.
“I couldn’t. With the others. I tried, but it never worked. The first one—she laughed at me, and after that, I never could. Except with you.”
This was her opening. “Maude wasn’t the first one.” Tentative, yet determined.
“No.”
“Who was?”
He held up a hand. “Before I tell you what I promised to tell you, Elizabeth, I want you to think about the penultimate night.” He was obviously pleased with himself, if only for the use of penultimate.
“I’d really prefer not to.”
“It’s important.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Important to me, then. You went to sit in the truck.”
“You told me to go sit in the truck.”
“I gave you the keys. You locked yourself in. The doors were still locked when I came back to the truck. I knocked on the window, and you let me in. You sat there the entire time.”
“What else could I have done? I couldn’t drive, and I couldn’t climb down that mountain in the dark.”
“You told the prosecutors that you saw Holly running, me following.”
“Yes. First I heard her—she scre
amed. Then you shouted, like you were in pain. I always assumed she had done something to you.”
“Clawed at my eyes. Someone taught her that. Some women, they go for the—” It was almost comical, how he gestured at his crotch, failing to find a word he considered proper or impressive enough. “It’s better to go for the eyes. Tell your daughter that.”
“Do not talk about my daughter.”
“Okay, okay. Just trying to be helpful.” He held up his hands to signal his supplication. “Yes, I probably did scream, although I don’t remember that. Here’s what I do remember, that’s a lot more important: I didn’t go after Holly.”
“You did. I saw you.”
“No you didn’t. Not if you were locked in that truck. The truck was parked on the far side of the tent, Elizabeth, away from the flap. Holly didn’t run toward it—probably because she didn’t trust you to help her—”
“That’s not fair, Walter.”
“We’re way beyond fair now. She ran toward the trees, toward the darkness. You couldn’t have seen her. And you didn’t see me chase her, because I didn’t. I was trying to find her, to help her—”
“You called her name. I heard that. And then she screamed. I heard that, too.”
“But you didn’t see me chase her, because I didn’t. All these years, that never occurred to me. I didn’t think about where the truck was. And you were so adamant in your testimony, so unwavering.”
And so determined to say what the adults wanted to hear. This was true. She had resolved not to disappoint anyone again, not to let anyone know how cowardly she had been. Yet there was the image in her mind’s eye, an image that had tortured her for years, that flash of white, Holly’s streaming hair. Walter had been right behind her, almost close enough to grab that banner of hair. Hadn’t he?
“She fell off that mountain, just like I said. All these years, I didn’t see how I could get anyone to believe me, because there you were, telling people I chased her, that you saw it. But then Barbara came along, began looking at things, reconstructing things. She was the one who realized it couldn’t be the way you said. She was the one who said I had to find you, get you to tell the truth. You probably didn’t even know you weren’t telling the truth. They brainwashed you.”
I'd Know You Anywhere Page 29