The Phantom Prince

by Elizabeth Kendall

  In June, Ted went to work for the State Department of Emergency Services in Olympia, and our time together shrank further. Olympia is a two-hour drive from Seattle. Some nights he stayed with a friend in Olympia. Some nights with his parents in Tacoma, some nights at his place in Seattle. We talked on the phone every day and he still came to my place a couple of times a week. Usually we’d go out to eat, and then he would go back to his place to sleep and I’d go back to my place to lie awake and think. I was hurt that he hardly ever wanted to make love. There had to be someone else. I wished I knew what she was like so I could be more like her.

  The Fourth of July fell on a Thursday, so I had a four-day weekend. On Saturday, Ted and I piled into his VW with his rubber raft and my inner tubes in the back seat, and his bike tied to the ski rack, and headed east to go rafting on the Yakima River. It was a beautiful summer day and we were both in good spirits. Molly was with my parents for a month, and I was on my own.

  We stashed the bike in some bushes by the river, then drove a few miles upstream and unloaded the raft. We would float down to the bike. Ted would ride the bike back to the car, tie it on, and then drive back down to pick up me and the raft. We had done this at least half a dozen times before.

  The river was wide and slow, the water so cold it hurt. We scrambled in with our beer and suntan lotion and began to float downriver. The beer, the sun, and the water made all of life seem golden, at least for that day. Ted was quiet as we drifted slowly, daydreaming.

  After a while we pulled up on a small island and had lunch, hardly talking, not wanting to disturb the perfect peace of the afternoon. Then we climbed back into the raft and pushed out into the river again.

  About an hour later, I was sitting on the edge of the raft, paying attention to nothing in particular, when suddenly and without warning, Ted lunged at me, put his hands on my shoulders, and pushed me into the river. The plunge into the icy water took my breath away. I came up sputtering and grabbed the rope on the edge of the raft, too dazed for the moment to do more than hang on. I looked up at Ted and our eyes locked. His face had gone blank, as though he was not there at all. I had a sense that he wasn’t seeing me. I struggled to pull myself into the raft. He didn’t move, he didn’t speak. I could find no expression on his face.

  “Why do you have to ruin everything?” I began when I could finally talk. “That’s not funny at all.”

  He still looked at me as if I were a stranger. Then he looked away and said, “It was no big deal. Can’t you take a joke?”

  On the way home we alternately bickered about what had happened and fell into long, unhappy silences. When we got to my house, he refused to unload the car. I grabbed what I needed, hurried up the steps, and slammed the front door behind me as he roared off.

  The next day, Sunday, July 7, Ted came over in the afternoon with all the stuff still in the car. When I asked him where he’d been, he said he’d gone to Lake Sammamish, a few miles east of the city. I asked him what he had done there.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I walked along the water and thought, and then I ran into some friends. I just came over to unload the car.” He was obviously still angry, but I wasn’t about to apologize.

  We talked every day on the phone during the week, as usual, and gradually the battle faded. We spent an evening together in the middle of the week, and it was as if nothing had happened.

  The following Saturday, the thirteenth, the weather was still clear and hot. After cleaning the house and doing the laundry, I rode my bike to Green Lake to lie in the sun. The park was full of people, and when a Frisbee landed on me, I tossed it back to its owner. He was handsome and friendly, and I felt a stray tug. But he thanked me and moved on without inviting me to join the game. I was bored and lonely.

  That night I called Ted at his parents’ house to ask if he’d like to do something with me the next day.

  “No, I can’t. I have other things to do.”

  “What other things?”

  “Just things, Liz.”

  I hung up feeling terrible.

  The next morning, Sunday, July 14, as I was getting ready to leave for church, there was a knock on the door and Ted breezed in, full of morning good cheer, acting as if nothing was wrong between us. I was hurt and furious, but I didn’t want to keep the battle going.

  Ted wanted to know my plans for the day. I planned to go to church and then to a beach, but I hadn’t decided which beach. He pressed me to tell him. Maybe he’ll join me later, I thought, to make up.

  “I guess I’ll go to Carkeek Park,” I said. We walked out of the house together, kissed coolly, and parted.

  Carkeek Park was crowded that day, full of children and beer and handsome young men. I lay on the beach reading All the President’s Men, turning restlessly. Hour after hour went by but Ted didn’t show up. Late in the afternoon, a high, thin layer of clouds obscured the sun, and I went home.

  I was stepping out of the shower when Ted phoned; I stood dripping on the floor as he asked me to have dinner with him. He was at the door in ten minutes, starving, he said.

  The university student newspaper had just run a hamburger sweepstakes and declared the hamburgers at a bowling alley near Green Lake the best in town. Ted flopped in a chair while I got ready to go. He had a cold that seemed much worse than it had been that morning. He was so stuffed up he could hardly talk, and he looked tired. I asked him what he’d been doing. He just cleaned his car, he said, and helped his landlord with yardwork.

  The hamburgers lived up to their reputation—good and big. It was all I could do to finish one of them, but Ted ate two and then wanted to go to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour for dessert. I had hoped our dinner would give us a chance to talk about our fight, maybe even to settle how he felt about me, but when I began, I could see that he wasn’t particularly interested.

  “Yeah, I understand what you mean,” he said, as though that took care of the matter.

  I could see that he didn’t feel well, so I stopped pushing. He was unusually quiet. As I looked at him across the table, I was struck by how close together his eyes looked. They were a little puffy from his cold, but it was odd that I had never noticed it before.

  After dinner we went for ice cream, but we didn’t linger. Ted wanted to go home and sleep; his cold was getting worse by the hour. But the ski rack we’d used the weekend before to carry his bicycle was still on his VW, and tired as he was, he decided to put it back on my car. It took about fifteen minutes in the fading twilight. It was dark when he finished and went home.

  Ted stayed home ill on Monday. After work I took him some orange juice, a can of chicken soup, and my copy of All the President’s Men.

  On Wednesday the seventeenth, the morning paper reported that two young women had disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park on Sunday. There had been a huge crowd at the lake that day—forty thousand people had turned out for a promotion staged by a beer company and a radio station. The two women, Denise Naslund and Janice Ott, had disappeared several hours apart, and it seemed possible that the same person might be responsible for both disappearances. The police were asking anyone with information about the two women to contact them. Within a few days, the papers reported that several witnesses had overheard Janice Ott talking to a man who had his arm in a sling. He was described as a smooth talker, possibly with a British accent, wearing expensive-looking tennis clothes. He had asked her to help put a sailboat on top of his car. She was last seen pushing her bicycle towards the parking lot chatting with the man who had introduced himself as “Ted.” The car was described as a bronze or metallic-colored Volkswagen. Pictures of the women were in the papers. They were young and attractive, and both had long hair—just like the two women who had disappeared earlier from the University District.

  In a phone call I told Ted what I’d read in the papers. He was back on his feet and at work. He wanted to know everything I had heard.

  “They said he asked the first woman to help him put a sailboat on top o
f his VW,” I said. “And that his name was Ted. I guess Ted’s going to be a hot name for a while.”

  “Yeah. And I guess it’s a good thing the guy didn’t ask for help with a rubber raft,” he joked.

  We talked about other things: Ted was feeling good about his job, preparing a budget for the department. He’d never done a budget before and he was really learning a lot. His cold was better, but he was still tired.

  For the next few days, reports of police interviews with witnesses from Lake Sammamish continued. Janice Ott’s family offered a reward for the return of her bicycle. The radio was on in the office all day long because the Senate Watergate hearings were in progress, so I heard a lot of news. The newspapers were full of speculation, not only about the possible connection with the disappearances from the University District, but about reports that as many as seven young women had vanished from the Northwest since the beginning of the year. Donna Manson had disappeared from the campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia on March 12; Susan Rancourt had disappeared from Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, about a two-hour drive from Seattle, on April 17; Roberta Kathleen Parks had disappeared from Oregon State University in Corvallis, 235 miles south of Seattle, on May 6. Later the police added the name of Brenda Ball to the list. She was last seen at 2:00 A.M. on June 1 at the Flame Tavern in south Seattle. The newspapers printed pictures of the women. They were all young and attractive, with long hair. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a police sketch of the “Ted” suspect. It didn’t look like anyone I had ever seen.

  It was spooky. When Angie and I wanted to lie out in the sun the next weekend, we decided to stay on the deck of her houseboat, rather than go to a beach. Ted came over to join us for a while, then went home to sleep off the last of his cold.

  I was still stewing about Ted, fighting off the sinking feeling that he was moving out of my life. In the years we had been together he had become even more polished, even more sophisticated, moving through the world as though it belonged to him. I hadn’t changed; I was going to be left behind. The thought of him in Utah going out with other women was unbearable.

  On Monday afternoon, July 22, I had coffee with one of the men I worked with. As we were walking back through the long corridor from the hospital cafeteria, he pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket and handed it to me. “Don’t you think this looks like someone you know?”

  The clipping was another police sketch, this one from the Seattle Times. I didn’t read the Times regularly and hadn’t seen this sketch before. Underneath the picture, my friend had underlined the name “Ted.” “Doesn’t your Ted have a VW?” he said in a joking way.

  “But not metallic,” I said. The drawing did look vaguely like Ted. I tried to laugh, but it stuck in my throat. I went back to my desk and stared at the clipping, then put it in the pocket of my backpack. I took it out several times to look at it, then put it back. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I watched the clock until it was time to go.

  I rode my bike home in a hurry, went straight to my photo albums, and started pulling out pictures of Ted. The jawline was strikingly similar to the sketch. The little laugh lines under the eyes were the same, and there was a quality about Ted’s eyes that I saw in the drawing. But there were discrepancies, too. The suspect had straight hair; Ted’s was curly.

  I took one of the photos and the sketch and headed for Angie’s houseboat. I needed to talk. I stopped for a six-pack of beer, drove to the dock, and walked down the wooden planks. Angie let me in.

  “What’s wrong? You look awful.”

  “Angie, you’ve got to promise me that you’ll never tell anyone about this. I think I’m going crazy.” I shoved the newspaper clipping and the photo of Ted at her.

  She looked from one to the other and then at me. “So?”

  “I know I’m crazy, but I think they look a little alike. And then there’s all the coincidences. It’s all just weird.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Stop saying you’re crazy and weird and we’ll talk. Where did you get this picture? What coincidences? When did you start thinking about this?”

  I told her how I got the clipping and what it did to me. I listed the coincidences: “The accent. The witnesses said the suspect had a British accent. You remember the first night we met Ted in the bar, we thought he was from back East because of the way he talks? The suspect wore expensive-looking tennis clothes, and you know how Ted dresses in the best of everything.”

  “Just because he wears Adidas doesn’t make him a murderer. Weren’t you with him that Sunday?”

  “In the evening. But I spent the day by myself. . . . I don’t know. . . . It’s just that the name, the Volkswagen, the cast, the expensive clothes.”

  “Cast? What does that have to do with Ted?” Angie asked me.

  I took a long pull on my beer. It was beginning to take the edge off my anxiety. “Do you remember me telling you about the plaster of Paris?” She shook her head. “Well, once, a couple of years ago, I was going through Ted’s desk drawers while he was taking a bath—you know how snoopy I am—and I found some plaster of Paris at the back of a drawer. I asked Ted about it and he said he didn’t know why, but he had taken it when he was working at the medical supply house. He said a person never could tell when he was going to break a leg, and we both laughed. Now I keep thinking about the cast the guy at Lake Sammamish was wearing—what a perfect weapon it would make for clubbing someone over the head.”

  “Oh, please,” Angie said, rolling her eyes. “You’re forgetting a few things. The Volkswagen in the news is metallic bronze. Ted’s is hardly metallic.” That was true. The tan paint on his VW had weathered and looked sort of dull. “Besides,” she went on, “if he was going to abduct someone, would he stroll up and introduce himself by his real name? Liz, you don’t go with someone for four years and not know what they’re about. You know Ted. You know his morals. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me about, then I don’t know why this has you so upset.”

  “Well I have been thinking about his morals—you know the way he steals things? I always made excuses for him, but when he continued to rip things off even after he got those good jobs, well I started to think there might be something more to it, like maybe he enjoys getting away with the con.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “the stealing is stupid, but there is a big difference between stealing something and murdering someone.”

  “But I’ve been thinking about it. Somewhere there is someone who knows what happened to the two women who disappeared that day and to the two women who disappeared from my neighborhood. This is a real person. He isn’t suspected, so he can move around freely.”

  I struggled to maintain control. “It’s not so much the name or the car or the cast. . . . It’s this dreadful feeling I can’t shake. I know it can’t be true, but it hit me like a ton of bricks when I saw the picture. I can’t figure it out. I can’t think. I feel like my head’s on backwards. Angie, you’ve got to help me!” I grabbed her arm so hard that it scared her.

  “Let me think,” she said. “Have you prayed about this?”

  I nodded. “It didn’t do any good.”

  “Give me a minute. I can’t think either.” She sat quietly and I thought she was praying, so I looked out the window at the blue sky and the colorful houseboats. It was too nice a day for this, I thought.

  “It seems to me,” Angie started slowly, “that you should call the police.”

  I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what she had said. “Can you imagine what Ted would do when he found out?”

  “I mean call them anonymously. I’m sure you’re wrong, but how else are you going to get rid of that feeling? How long are you willing to feel the way you do?” We began thinking of questions to ask the police.

  Our first question was whether the VW was positively metallic in color. That could rule out Ted right away. Then we decided to ask if “their” Ted had a cold, and if he wore a watch on his right wrist.
“My” Ted was left-handed and always wore his watch on his right wrist.

  We wouldn’t call from Angie’s: There was a chance the police would be tracing all the calls that came in about the case. We got in my car and drove to a phone booth in a supermarket parking lot near Green Lake. We knew that the police had set up a “Ted Hotline,” but how were we going to get the number? Call Information?

  “Hello, Information? I want the number I call to find out if my boyfriend is a murderer.” We sat in the car looking at the empty phone booth. I found a dime. Angie had to get up her nerve to get out of the car. She had to practice what she was going to say. She had never called the police in her life, not about anything.

  I sat in the car while she phoned. For me it was like being on hold. I don’t know if it was a long time or a short time, but she was back in the car and I was asking her questions as fast as I could.

  “What did they say? What did you say? Did they ask your name?”

  “He told me all reports about the VW were that it was metallic. No reports mentioned a cold,” she said.

  “What about the watch?”

  She’d been so rattled she’d forgotten to ask about the watch. I told her to go back and call again.

  “No way!” she said. “They’ll know it’s me. You do it. It’s easy. They don’t want to know who you are or who you’re calling about.”

  She was right. I had to do it myself, and it was as easy as she said. I got the number again from Information. I asked the policeman if the suspect had a watch on his right arm. He said that none of the witnesses had mentioned anything about a watch.

  We had done it. I drove out of the parking lot without any idea of where I was going. After a few blocks I pulled over and parked. I opened another beer. We had called the police, but I didn’t feel relieved and it wasn’t over.

  Suddenly Angie looked at me and laughed. “Do you realize what you’re doing?” she asked. “You’re sitting in front of the Mormon Church, drinking a beer.” I laughed, too. I needed some comic relief. With my luck the bishop would stroll by.