He got into the car and rattled off a text—“Heading home, call me”—then started the engine.
The whole drive home, Julia never called. The mile markers on 95, then 295 South ticked off in a blur, while Tony mourned the death of his plans to kill Ray Walker.
75
Julia Hall, 2016
At 6:15 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker would go missing, Julia Hall reached her hand out of the stairwell on the ground floor of Raymond Walker’s house, and she felt blindly up the wall to her right. There was the light switch under her shaking fingers, and she flipped it off with a heavy sigh. Once again, darkness flooded the living room.
“All right,” she said. “Follow me.”
She glanced behind her, then started for the kitchen. His footsteps were hesitant, but he followed.
She turned back. The opening to the staircase was black and vacant.
“Come on,” she said firmly.
His voice resonated in the stairwell. “You aren’t going to stab me with a kitchen knife?”
She exhaled a soft laugh. “You can hear me all the way across the room, right?”
Raymond Walker melted into the black square that was the stairwell. After a beat he stepped into the living room and made his way toward her. He still held the washcloth against his bloody hairline.
She had started in with her old routine up in the bathroom. When she wanted to get her way with a client—earn their trust on something gravely important—she joked with them. It made her seem at ease, even when she was scared shitless, like now. She stood to the side of the refrigerator in Raymond Walker’s kitchen, keeping her eye on him as she opened the freezer and grabbed a bag of mixed vegetables.
“You can really just relax now,” she said as she shut the door. He was at the island, out of reach. “If I were here to kill you I’d have drowned you in that tub upstairs.”
He looked at her incredulously. She stepped forward to hand him the bag. He snatched it and stepped back. “Who are you?” he asked as he swapped the cloth for the frozen bag.
“I’ve said I’m Tony’s—”
“No, I—I got that.” He waved the cloth in her direction. “Same style as him, you ‘come over to talk’ and I get beat up.”
“I am here to talk, you just wouldn’t—”
“You’ve said,” he sighed, “as you cleaned my blood off the floor.” He eyed her strangely, and she realized he was being funny. Was he just doing the same thing as her, or was her old trick working?
“I am sorry for your head.”
“It would build trust if you’d give me my phone back.”
She shook her head. His phone was wet in her sweaty palm. She was boiling with adrenaline. She wished she could take off the winter coat, but she didn’t want to risk being seen without it. In the bathroom, Walker told her he thought she was a man when he first saw her in the kitchen. She knew the outfit was working to disguise her. It was just also cooking her to death.
“Let’s go back upstairs,” she said. “I’ll explain everything.”
“No, I’m staying right here.”
She patted her pocket. “We’ll need light to look at everything I brought.”
“I’ll turn on this light,” he said as he leaned toward the wall at the end of the counter.
“No!” Julia lunged across the island and grabbed his wrist. “Someone will see.”
“What?” he said as he shook his arm free. “What will they see?”
She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m here to help you escape.”
76
John Rice, 2019
Good, sweet Julia. God forgive him, he’d judged her the second he crossed the threshold of that house. Doing the dishes, watching the children, round-faced, a picture of femininity. He’d judged her as good on nothing but his own ideas of what a woman like her should be.
She sat beside him now, looking just like she did the day he came to question them about Walker’s disappearance: wide-eyed, stiff as a board with fingers that trembled. That first time, he’d mistaken it as fear about Tony: fear about what her husband might have done. Well, she’d fooled him. It made him feel pathetic. Would she have fooled O’Malley? No. O’Malley would have seen it. Everyone got the same messaging about men and women—what they’re like, what they aren’t. But O’Malley was from a younger generation. A generation that saw the world differently.
They’d been frantic to find Walker, and O’Malley had been busy putting in calls, so Rice had gone to the Hall house alone. If he’d brought O’Malley, she would have seen what Rice couldn’t. Julia hadn’t been frightened of what her husband might have done. It was guilt in her eyes. Guilt and self-preserving terror, just like now.
Rice leaned toward her. “Is this your invocation?”
Julia said nothing.
“Which are you trying to invoke, Julia? God, or your right to remain silent?”
Her eyes flicked in his direction. She scratched at her sleeve. The wind whistled at the window behind her, and she held her tongue.
77
Julia Hall, 2016
At 7:00 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker would go missing, Julia sat with him on the floor of the living room, shielded from the window by the couch. Walker had taken the small lamp and set it on the floor, and its orange glow fell over the pages Julia had brought.
Already, Julia had gone over each sheet and talked him through his journey. They’d start by walking several streets over, to where she’d parked her car. She’d keep her hood up and her head down, and hopefully, like Walker had, anyone who saw her would think she was a man. Then Julia would drop him at the bus in Portland, which he’d take to Boston using a ticket under the name Steven Sanford. There was a small sum of cab money for him to get himself to the train station there, and he’d get on the train west with a ticket to Chicago, also purchased for Steven Sanford. His eyebrows had raised, impressed, when she explained he’d get off the train early in Toledo, Ohio, and use a third ticket bought under a different name to take a bus to Columbus.
“And your friend will pick me up there,” he said as they talked through it again.
“Yes.” She glanced at her phone. Still nothing from Tony; that meant he hadn’t left Nick yet, but he’d be in the car within the hour.
“And her name is?”
Julia looked up from the phone. “I hadn’t said. Elisa.”
“Elisa what?”
She shook her head. “I’m not giving you that. Or your phone back, at all.”
Ray was looking at the bank statement again now. Even as he’d looked back through the other sheets, he’d kept a tight grip on that one.
“Afraid I’ll change my mind halfway to Toledo?”
“So you’re going?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed. “What will you do if I say no?”
Her stomach clenched, but she forced a smile. “Nothing.”
“And when I call the police?”
“No one will believe your victim’s family tried to help you get away with it.”
He smiled. “You think I’m guilty.”
“I know you are.”
“No one but Nick or I can know that. Actually, even Nick doesn’t know, what with his blackout. Very convenient.”
Julia wasn’t going to dignify that with a response.
“I’m just curious,” he said. “You think I’m guilty. So how do you feel about this?” He paused. “Letting me get away with it?”
He was picking at it—the scab that had formed over the questions she kept asking herself. If everything went perfectly: If Walker went, if she was never caught, if Tony and the kids were safe when this was over, what would it mean? What would she have done, on a grander scale? Would she be hurting Nick even more than Walker had already? More than he’d be hurt by news coverage of the case, the opinions of s
trangers on the internet, the gossip of his classmates, the system?
“I’d rather do something than nothing,” she said at last. “Wouldn’t you?”
Now Walker was silent.
“Do you really want to see if a jury believes you? Because if they don’t, your life is over. I know you know that, because you can’t seem to shut up about it. Have you thought about what happens if you’re acquitted? You’re not proved innocent, and nobody thinks you are. They just think you got away with it. Did you know Nick could still sue you? That you could be fired for this? That every time someone googles your name, for the rest of your life, the word rape is gonna come up?”
He looked back at the sheet in his hands.
“You’re not fooling me,” she said. “You feel just as trapped as I do.”
Walker sifted through the papers between them to pull out the photocopy of the passport. Elisa had mailed Julia the photocopy and retained the actual passport. It belonged, apparently, to a man named Avery King.
“So your friend Elisa will give me the actual passport when she picks me up in Columbus,” he said.
He was talking like he was going to go. Like she was right. He just didn’t want to say it. Julia decided not to push him. “Right,” she said.
Walker studied the photo. “He does look a lot like me. How’d she get this?”
“Didn’t ask; don’t wanna know.” This had always been her approach to Elisa, including when Julia was representing Elisa’s son, Mathis. Julia felt, then and now, that she was on the tip of the iceberg with that family, and she was terrified to duck beneath the water and open her eyes.
“Your friend sounds shady as shit,” Walker said. “How do you even know someone like this?”
Julia shifted the cross of her legs. “I helped out her son, a long time ago.”
“Avery King. I could get used to that name.”
Julia smiled. “It is a great name.”
“Much better than Steve Sanford,” he said with a grimace. He picked up the fake ID from the floor. The picture was actually Walker’s mug shot from his arrest. You’d never guess it without knowing: he looked calm, with the faintest crook of a smile. But Julia had recognized it from the paper instantly, when her package from Elisa arrived in the mail.
“When you meet Elisa, you become Avery. Steve’s just a holdover until you get to her.”
“Still,” Walker said, and he smiled at her. She unpacked it in her mind: it was warm, teasing, genuine. He was starting to like her. Something deep inside her ached, and she spoke abruptly to break her train of thought.
“Are you with me?”
He looked back at the sheets in his hands. At the new life she was offering him.
He sighed. “Fuck it. Yeah.”
The relief she felt at his words nearly overwhelmed her. “Okay,” she breathed. “The last thing, then.”
“Yeah?”
“Wait to call your mother.”
His face went flat. He’d thought of it; why wouldn’t he have? He could easily borrow a stranger’s phone to make a call.
“It’s in both of our best interests that your mother be genuinely unsure of what happened tonight,” Julia said. “Whenever they figure out you’re missing, they’ll question her. Don’t leave it to her acting skills—you need to make it to Elisa before they figure out that you left on your own.”
Ray said nothing for a bit. Then he said, “That’s actually a good point.”
“I wouldn’t want to leave my mom scared that something had happened to me,” Julia said. “But I also wouldn’t want to get her in trouble. And like I said, it’ll help buy you time to get your money and get wherever you choose to go, before you tell her you’re all right.”
Ray nodded thoughtfully but said no more.
He looked around the living room. “Should we mess it up in here? Like a fight happened or something? So they go in the wrong direction, first?”
“No,” Julia said quickly. “If we do a bad job of staging it, which I’m guessing we would, they’ll suspect even faster that you’re on the move.”
Ray nodded slowly. “How long have you been planning this?”
In truth she wasn’t sure—it had started subtly, like something she could see out of the corner of her eye that she didn’t want to turn and look at too closely. The planning had been quick, but thinking about planning . . . that was harder to say. “I dunno. Long enough.”
“You’re a natural,” he said.
She grimaced at him. “Really?”
“It’s a compliment.”
“Well, that makes me feel like a terrible person.”
“I guess just get me to the bus, then, and you won’t have to think of it again.” He brought a hand to his chest. “I’ll remember you fondly, though.”
She grinned and pointed at the bank statement in his hand. “I’m sure you will!”
Terrible or not, Ray was right. She was good at this.
78
Tony Hall, 2016
At 10:00 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker went missing, Tony pulled into the driveway behind Julia’s car. From outside, he could see the living room bathed in that flickering, blue-white light. Maybe she’d fallen asleep in front of the TV.
He pulled his boots off in the mudroom and wandered toward the living room, through the kitchen and into the dining room. He jumped when he found her sitting at the table there, facing him.
“Christ, you scared me.”
The look in her eye was familiar but hard to place. Her face was drained of color, and she shivered, then crossed her arms. She looked frozen.
“Were you outside?”
She shook her head.
“Are you okay?”
She didn’t speak, and kept her eyes on the table before her.
“Honey,” he said as he crossed the room to her. “You’re scaring me.”
She shivered again as he knelt beside her. He placed a hand on her thigh and rubbed up and down her leg.
There was a palpable electricity between them, and he knew she would speak if he waited.
Finally, without turning her eyes from the table, she did.
“Before I tell you what I’ve done, promise you’ll forgive me.”
79
John Rice, 2019
Still, Julia had not spoken. Rice would have given anything to see inside her head. Was she running over what she knew—what she thought safe to reveal? Was she planning a lie? Maybe. It would sting to hear her lie to him now, even if he knew she was doing so for understandable reasons. But she owed him the truth. She owed him after what he’d done.
* * *
The last time John Rice had seen Julia Hall, she was in her backyard, bundled in winter clothes, watching her children play.
Rice could remember January 18, 2016, more vividly than he could remember dinnertime yesterday, it seemed.
It was afternoon and bitterly cold. The sky was saturated with color—yellow sun on bright blue. He’d driven out to the pastures of Orange and found the Hall house deserted. He drove farther up the lane and parked the unmarked car. The Hall house was small in his rearview; he could have plucked it from the mirror and crumbled it between his fingers. Eventually he saw Julia’s red Subaru Baja—unforgettably ugly—grow from a speck on the country lane in his rearview. The car pulled into the Hall driveway and parked.
How his heart had pounded as he watched that car. He’d recognized it on the grainy security footage from the Portland bus depot instantly. Two days after Raymond Walker disappeared, Megan O’Malley had called Rice to Portland to view a recording of Walker walking up to the depot at 8:11 p.m. on Friday, the day before his mother reported him missing. The video quality was poor, but he’d come right to the edge of the building, and his face was unmistakable. Then he boarded the eight fifteen bus to Boston, and he was gone.
O’Malley had directed the depot worker to pull up the footage of the parking lot. The first of his sins, Rice had shaken his head when O’Malley asked if he recognized “the truck” that dropped off Walker at the very edge of the screen. Only a hint of the car was visible, and the bed made it look like a small red truck. A ubiquitous vehicle in Maine. But Rice knew better. It wasn’t a small truck—it was a Subaru Baja.
Guilty people were always trying to convince him that strange coincidences had caused their DNA to be at a crime scene, or stolen property to end up in their garage, or their make and model to happen to be the same as the getaway car. This was no coincidence: a Hall had driven Walker up to the bus station in Portland the night he disappeared, and Tony Hall was accounted for.
Watching her driveway three years ago, Rice had stared at that stupid car, waiting to see her face. He had been sure she’d done it to stop her husband from killing Walker. To keep her perfect life from collapsing with her husband’s crime and inevitable arrest. Rice had craned in his seat, heart pounding in his neck, and strained to see her face. The face he had once compared to Irene’s. She would look different to him now: selfish and vain, nothing like Irene. Nothing like who he made her out to be.
After a moment there was movement at the car, and the little girl climbed out on the passenger side. She ran ahead, and then Julia appeared in front of the car, walking toward the house. She was carrying two large totes of groceries, the little boy trailing after her. Rice had been too far away to be sure, but they looked like they were speaking. Her son had run past her, his smile wide enough to see from the street, and toward the yard behind the house. Julia had followed him, out of view. Slowly, Rice backed up until he was across from their driveway. Julia stood at the cedar fence, her back to the street. Her children ran in the yard, and she watched them. She’d put the groceries down at her feet, and one had tipped over, spilling groceries into the snow. She didn’t care. She just wanted to watch her children.
The Damage Page 29