“God gave you free agency. You have to exercise it accordingly,” he told me.
“That’s just it,” I told him. “I am trying to do what’s right. I thought I had to go to the police, but when they told me I was wrong I was still scared. At the library, I felt like claws were tearing my soul to shreds.”
“I think the police should be made aware of what you read in the papers,” he said. “Give them the burden. They will know whether it bears pursuing.”
“I can’t call them again. They’ve already checked Ted out twice. They think I’m a hysterical nut out to get my boyfriend.”
“Do you want me to call them?” he asked.
Relief swept over me. I gave him Hergesheimer’s number and went home to start my nightly ritual of drinking myself to sleep. I knew the bishop would be disappointed if he could see me, but what else could I do? While I was having my first drink, I got out a calendar and looked at the date of the attempted abduction by the man in the Volkswagen, November 8, a Friday. That was the day my parents had left Seattle to go home. Ted had called me late that night. I had tried to reach him earlier but there was no answer. I had fallen asleep on the couch and when he called, I had a hard time waking up. He had gotten impatient with me and almost hung up. I kept saying, “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” and then when he waited, I had nothing to say. He said to call him in the morning. It was about 11:00 P.M. here, so it would have been midnight in Utah. That was almost proof that he hadn’t been out abducting women that night, wasn’t it?
My bishop called me at work the next morning. He had told Hergesheimer how upset I was by what I read in the Salt Lake papers and suggested that authorities in Utah be contacted. Hergesheimer agreed to call Utah and let me know. Time dragged on. My bishop called a second time and there was still no word. At last I called Hergesheimer myself. He told me that people in King County had been so busy killing each other off that he hadn’t had time to call Salt Lake City.
Christmas was coming and I was going home to Utah as usual. I could no longer get a whole night’s sleep. I would wake up about two or three in the morning and toss and turn until the sun came up. I sometimes wondered if I was possessed. As the sleepless nights stacked up, my mental state got worse. I was afraid I would be murdered in Utah. I could visualize Ted finding out that I knew the truth. He will murder me, I thought, but first he will murder Molly in front of me, and then my mother and father.
During one awful night, I decided that I would call my dad. He had friends on various police forces; maybe he could help me. I waited until it was 6:00 A.M. in Utah. Maybe he would be up by then. His groggy voice told me he’d been asleep.
“Hello, Dad. This is Liz. . . . I need help. I’m scared that maybe Ted’s involved in those murders in Utah. I wondered if maybe you could discreetly contact someone on the police force and they could check him out . . . ?”
There was total silence on the other end of the line. I thought maybe he’d gone back to sleep. But then, sounding absolutely appalled, he asked me why I would think such a thing. I fumbled to explain. He listened, and when I was through there was another long silence.
“You have to be absolutely certain before you contact the police,” he said. “You would ruin his career if you were mistaken. Are you that sure?”
When I said no, he declined to get involved and we hung up. I got out of bed and plugged in the Christmas tree lights. I wrapped myself up in the afghan my mom had made for me. I sat in the rocking chair that had been my grandma’s and stared at the lights on the tree.
As our plane circled over Salt Lake City, I was numb from lack of sleep. Ted was going to meet us and drive us to Ogden, but when we walked into the terminal he wasn’t in sight. Late as usual, I told myself. Then suddenly he was there. He threw his arms around me and we rocked back and forth. I had forgotten how good it felt when he hugged me. Then a hug for Molly and then another hug for me. Then Molly and I hugged each other just to round things out.
We walked arm-in-arm down the concourse. “It looks like you brought some extra bags,” he said, indicating the dark circles under my eyes.
“How unkind of you to notice,” I said. We both laughed. We collected my real bags, skis, poles, and boots, and we were off.
Before we drove to Ogden, Ted wanted to show me his apartment and the law school and the places he hung out. I couldn’t have been more relieved sitting next to him in the car, laughing, talking, enjoying his company. I could understand why my dad was so stunned by my early morning phone call. As we walked into Ted’s apartment, the phone rang. It was my dad.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh yes,” I answered, “everything is just fine.”
The holidays were wonderful. We spent the days going to Ted’s favorite places in Salt Lake City. We visited friends and relatives. Once again, I realized what a gift Ted had for being at ease in social situations. I still watched his every move, but what I saw was Ted playing games with Molly, carrying my niece on his shoulders, helping my mom in the kitchen. Hardly the actions of a madman. The shadows were lifting, and I thanked God for the peace of mind I was beginning to feel again.
But there were bad times, like the day we went skiing. It started off on a Laurel and Hardy note. We loaded our skis on the back of Ted’s VW while it was still in my parent’s garage, and when we backed out, the tips of the skis caught on the top of the garage door and pulled the whole ski rack off the car. We looked at each other and laughed—the sophisticated skiers off on a jaunt!
We drove to Snowbird, a first-class resort east of Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, it looked as if half of California had come to Snowbird for Christmas break.
“They’d have to pay me to stand in those lines,” Ted said. We decided to have lunch in the lodge and skip the skiing. We had to park in an outer lot, but that was okay because the resort sent big, open trucks around to pick people up and take them to the lodge. As we sat down in the truck on a bale of hay, a young, attractive woman started a conversation with Ted. He was so charming; she was soon telling him that she was from California and that she had come to Utah alone to do some skiing. I found myself thinking how easy it would be to trust this man, to go with him and die.
I didn’t have much to say over lunch: I was fighting those feelings again. Ted was watching a bunch of teenagers horsing around. He dubbed the boy the girls were paying the most attention to “the James Dean of Midvale.” Midvale was where Melissa Smith had disappeared. Would a time ever come when everything didn’t remind me of murder?
We drove back to Ted’s apartment. I had the urge to rip open his drawers and turn them upside down and pull everything out of the closet so I would know there was nothing there to worry about.
Ted had a little blue bottle of liqueur he said a woman who lived downstairs had made. “Here, have a taste,” he said, holding the bottle out to me.
“No thanks,” I said. I knew it was a knockout potion.
“You’ll like it—just have a sample.” He walked toward me holding the bottle in front of him. My mind was racing.
“No, I don’t want any. I don’t trust homemade stuff.”
“It’s okay. She makes it all the time. Here, just smell it.” He thrust the bottle under my nose.
“I don’t want to just smell it,” I said and moved away from him, ready to flee.
“Suit yourself,” he said, and took a big swig. The problem—as usual—was me.
I flew back to Seattle feeling better. My obsession with murder was gone, leaving as mysteriously as it had arrived. Ted would be flying to Seattle in two weeks at his semester break. I was genuinely looking forward to having him with me.
The first Sunday after I got back, I went in to tell my bishop the good news: My prayers had been answered. He was clearly happy for me, but he still thought I should check with the King County Police to make sure they had notified Salt Lake City. What for? I was irritated. Isn’t an answer to a prayer an answer to a prayer? My bishop thought I should s
tamp out all doubt; otherwise it might linger in a corner of my mind and fester and then . . . well, it might start all over again. He was probably right. But I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to call Hergesheimer again. This time, I was going to call Salt Lake City.
I put it off as long as I could. I was feeling so much better, why stir the pot again? Ted would be here in a couple of days, though, so I’d better get it over with. I slipped away to the same phone booth I’d been using to call Hergesheimer and called Information in Utah for the number of the Salt Lake Homicide Division. I was shaking as much as I had been the first day I called the police. A woman answered.
“I’d . . . like to speak . . . to someone who . . . knows about the woman who . . . escaped from a Volkswagen, you know, by a shopping center . . .”
“Just a moment please.” She put me on hold. Figure out what you’re going to say, for Godsakes, I told myself. Instead, I stared blankly at the dialing instructions on the phone.
She came back on the line. “May I ask who is calling?”
“Oh . . . I . . . I don’t feel that I can say. But it’s real important.” My voice was cracking, and I could feel the tears backing up. “I’m calling from Seattle and I just really need to talk to someone there.”
She put me on hold again. I rummaged in my purse for a Kleenex. Not only was I crying, but now my nose was running.
Great, just great. I would sound like a sniveling idiot.
“Captain Hayward here.”
I jumped. Then I started one of my long, rambling sentences about my friend and his Volkswagen and where he lived and where he moved to.
Hayward cut me off. “I think we’ve already investigated him. What is his name?” When I told him, he said, “We looked at him a few months ago when your police up there contacted us. He looked okay. Weren’t you just here for a vacation?”
How did he know that?
Hayward asked me what happened. What happened when? I was confused.
“Well, we had a nice vacation,” I said. “Nothing seemed wrong.”
“Then why are you calling today? What has happened?”
“Well . . .” I was asking myself the same thing. “I was just worried,” I said.
“Well don’t worry. We checked him out. There is nothing there to lead us to believe he is anything more than just a law student.”
I finally gave Hayward my name, which of course he must have known, and then I hung up, feeling like a fool. I stared at the phone. It had to be the dirtiest I had ever seen. I hoped I didn’t get a disease from it. Then I remembered that I had called Salt Lake City because Hergesheimer had let me believe that he hadn’t. What a creep!
As soon as his finals were over, Ted was to catch an evening flight to Seattle. But I got a phone call early that morning. Ted was crying and having a hard time talking. He wasn’t happy with himself. I asked him if he had bombed out on his finals. “It’s not that,” he said. “I just can’t seem to connect with people. Sure, I can hold doors open for women and smile and be charming, but when it comes to basic relationships I just don’t have it. There’s something wrong with me.”
I wasn’t sure what he was telling me. Two police departments had checked him out three times. I wasn’t going to get into that again. On the surface it sounded very much as if he felt bad because he didn’t have a girlfriend in Salt Lake City and wanted to cry on my shoulder about that. I wanted him to come to Seattle. “Please come. We can talk and talk when you’re here and we can hug and hold. You’ll feel better, I guarantee it.”
“No, I can’t. I just don’t think so.”
“We can walk down the Ave and get a sandwich at Gilly’s and maybe go see the Huskies play basketball.”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you back,” he told me. And he did call back—twice. Once to tell me he was coming; the second time to tell me he wasn’t. After we talked a bit, he changed his mind again and said he would come.
When I picked him up at the airport that night, he was happy and confident. It was hard to believe he had been in the throes of indecision all day. He was carrying a brochure from a ski resort in Aspen. A man sitting next to him on the plane, a salesman for dental equipment, had been on a ski trip to Colorado and had given Ted the brochure. Ted was also carrying late Christmas presents for Molly and me.
It was a marvelous visit. I no longer watched his every move, but just enjoyed the things about him that made me love him. At moments I would get cold sweats thinking about what I had done to him by calling the police; but then, how would he ever find out?
In March 1975, the remains of Lynda Healy, Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks, and Brenda Ball were found, all less than twelve miles from where Jan Ott and Denise Naslund had been found.
In April, the unthinkable happened—I turned thirty. I had made such a big deal of the onset of old age that I received five bouquets of flowers on that day. My house looked like a florist’s shop. My parents, Ted, my coworkers, the guys who lived upstairs, and a skiing buddy had all tried to ease the transition with flowers. Angie was back from a long trip to Europe and was staying with me temporarily. As she put it, I was another year closer to menopause. What a bummer! I had thought by the time I was thirty I would be happily married and have lots of kids. I had no one to blame but myself, so I had better get on with my life.
One day in early June, I straggled into the house after work and found Molly there, all sly grins. She was home by herself for two hours each day after school now, and I was pleased with how responsible she was. This day there seemed to be something going on.
“Come into my room for a minute,” she said. I didn’t know what to expect. I couldn’t see anything special in her room.
Suddenly, two arms slipped around me from behind. For a split second I froze in terror. It was Ted. My knees buckled and he had to hold me up. “I had no idea you were coming,” was all I could say.
He and Molly were pleased with themselves and their surprise. “I’m too old for this,” I told them. “Please, no more surprises.”
Ted stayed for almost a week. He had brought his raft and we went rafting on Green Lake a couple of times. It bothered me that his front license plate was propped up inside the car. But I refused to worry. When Ted said it had fallen off, that was enough for me.
Near the end of the visit, Ted called a friend who was going to be driving to Utah in August. He arranged for the friend to bring Ted’s little brother to Salt Lake City. When I found out the friend was a woman who had a son about his brother’s age, I thought that was so cozy it stank, and I told him so.
“Look,” he said, “I didn’t drive all the way up here to see her. I came to see you. I love you. You have friends that are men. Can’t I have friends who are women?”
It was logical and reasonable, but I was still jealous. When Ted would get mad at me, he would tell me that I was insatiable, that no amount of his time or his love would ever be enough for me. I knew he was right, and I spent a lot of time going over and over my life trying to figure out when the plug had been pulled that had left me a hollow shell. Maybe it was in the college years or maybe it was in my marriage. I prayed to God that I would someday be a whole person, and I still thought the way to do this was to marry Ted.
I went back to Utah in late July. I knew that this was the turning point, that Ted and I were going to get married or break up. The first night I was there, Ted and I sat up late at my parents’ kitchen table, talking and drinking. I asked him if he was still stealing things. When he waffled with a nonanswer, I exploded.
“You have a great future ahead of you and you jeopardize it with your stupid actions! Maybe you can’t control it. Maybe you’re a kleptomaniac.” He looked stunned.
“The last thing I need is more problems,” I went on. “If you got caught stealing, I wouldn’t stand by you for a second.”
“I get so tired of having nothing. You don’t understand,” he said, “because you’ve never had to go without.”
“I’ve ne
ver had to go without because I work hard.” I was angry. “I don’t go without, but you don’t see me furnishing my house with the best of everything.” On and on I went, my motor mouth completely out of control. “If you’re going to continue to steal, I don’t want anything to do with you.” The next morning, I woke with a hangover, going over the things I’d said. His stealing really did bother me, and I really did mean the things I’d said. I just wished I hadn’t been drunk when I said them.
Later that day, we drove to Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area in Wyoming to meet the rest of the family, who had driven over earlier. I was trying to be cheerful. Ted said, “You know, I don’t understand you. One day you act like I make you sick, and the next day you act like everything is fine.”
I tried to apologize without backing down. “I want the best for you—for us,” I said. “It scares me that you would gamble it all for a few material things.” I thought of the gamble I had taken by going to the police. If Ted ever found out, that would be the end of us for sure.
At Flaming Gorge, we put our problems aside and enjoyed the sun and scenery. The fishing was terrible. We had been out in the boat for hours and hadn’t caught a thing when my mother suddenly shouted, “I’ve got one! I’ve got one! Get the net!” Her pole was jerking and bending like there was a twenty-pounder on it, when Ted bobbed to the surface. He had slipped out of one side of the boat unnoticed, swum under it, and grabbed Mom’s line. We all laughed about the “one that got away.”
Ted and I had to leave the park early so he could get to work. On the way back we were talking about how our dads would never stop at scenic viewpoints or points of interest when we were kids, so when we saw a lovely river out in a cow pasture, we stopped the car and hiked over to it. Walking into the trees behind Ted, I was suddenly very scared and had an ominous feeling. The mosquitoes were huge and thick by the water.
The Phantom Prince Page 9