After Her (10 page)

Scarier than words were our mother's silences.

“Make that choice and your daughters will never get over it,” she said.

Our father had never seemed afraid of anything before. But he was afraid of our mother. Even more so, afraid of losing my sister and me.

I
CALLED HIM UP THE
next morning, at the number of his apartment in the city, but he wasn't there, and I knew now why he never was. He was at Margaret Ann's. I understood now: he was with her when we were not, which would mean he was with her most of the time.

I got my father's answering machine, but I was ready with my message.

“If you ever have any kids, besides Patty and me,” I told him, “I will never speak to you again.”

 

Chapter Eleven

T
he Sunset Strangler had done wonders for my social standing. When the invitations to Alison's started that June, they were sporadic, but pretty soon it was an unspoken understanding that I'd meet the other girls at the pool most afternoons—and often, after, we'd go over to one of their houses. We'd play the radio (still “My Sharona,” every twenty minutes, in rotation with Donna Summer's “Bad Girls” and Rod Stewart's “Do You Think I'm Sexy”). We read one another's horoscopes and tried on makeup, but we always ended up talking about the murders. When we did, I now felt the obligation—burdensome, at times, but also an interesting challenge for a girl like me, who planned to be a writer when she grew up—to come up with some new and chilling scrap of inside information about the crimes, known only to a handful of homicide detectives, and myself. (And the assembled group of girls, all of them sworn to secrecy.)

“He put lipstick on her mouth,” I said. “After he killed her.”

“He left a dead kitten next to her. Also a live snake.”

“He said he'd turn himself in if Olivia Newton-John came to San Francisco and went to bed with him.”

I
WAS GOING TO THE
pool almost every day now, and nearly always, after that, I'd head over to Alison's house with the other girls. Not always, but sometimes, Teddy Bascom stopped by, and though he paid little attention to me, just being in the same room with him was enough.

“I think he likes you,” Alison told me. I couldn't get those words out of my head, not that I wanted to.

My sister stopped going to the pool with me. “What's the point?” she said. “You don't talk to me when I'm there.”

“I just thought it would be good, making some friends,” I told her. “You could do that too.”

But we both knew she wouldn't. Patty spent her afternoons without me practicing basketball shots or cutting out pictures to paste in her scrapbook of “Favorite Dogs.” Our neighbor Mrs. Gunnerson had hired Patty to play Candy Land with her retarded daughter, Clara. She let Clara win.

Patty had sharp words about the type of person she believed Alison Kerwin to be, and—though she said nothing on this score—I knew she had a low opinion of Teddy Bascom too. She had watched him on the basketball court and said he was a dirty player. Always elbowing kids on the court, and hogging the ball when he should have passed, to make the glory shot, or talking about his karate dojo and some tournament he went to, where, according to him, a talent scout had said he should come down to Hollywood and get some head shots made. He could be the next Bruce Lee.

Still, my sister did not give up on me. When I came home now, from Alison's house or hanging out with Teddy, Patty was always out there on the curb waiting for me.

“I can't believe you want to spend all that time with those dumb kids,” she said. “Can't you tell they're just a bunch of jerks?”

Patty had asked if I thought any reason existed for Alison being interested in being my friend, besides our father's sudden visibility on television as the head of the homicide investigation. I had conceded there probably was not. As for Teddy Bascom, thoughts of him now occupied a significant portion of my waking hours, though when Patty asked me if I thought he was a nice person, I had similarly conceded that no, he probably was not.

Still, that summer I lived for my visits to Alison's house. To ensure that my invitations there would continue, I was now regularly making up things to tell her and the others who came over to the Kerwins'—purportedly inside information about the murder investigation gleaned from my detective father, though in fact I barely ever heard from him these days.

“The guy left a Care Bear at the scene of the crime,” I told them. “With all the stuffing pulled out.”

“Before he left the crime scene, he peed.”

“He drank her blood.”

I
SPENT MY AFTERNOONS THAT
summer pretending to be a cool and popular thirteen-year-old, but when I returned home and got back with Patty, we were weird, crazy girls again the way we used to be, and even at the time I recognized that the ideas my sister came up with, of things for us to do, and the adventures we cooked up together were invariably more interesting than the activities of Alison and her friends.

Point-blank my sister put the question to me: if being a popular girl meant sitting waiting for nail polish to dry, or listening to Teddy Bascom describe every move he'd made at some karate tournament in Vallejo, and being unpopular left your days open for swinging by a vine off the branch of a madrone or doing cartwheels down a mountain, or hanging out with your sister in the old truck body with a bag of Fritos, writing stories in your notebook and then reading them out loud to her—and making her laugh so loud they could probably hear her all the way down the mountain—then what was so great about being popular? Or so terrible, if you weren't?

But I chose Alison—a girl who shoplifted nail polish and drew mean cartoons of the boy in our class with forceps dents on the sides of his head, a girl who could be depended on to make fun of my sister. Almost every day now, I went over to her house. Usually one of the mothers drove me home from these afternoon get-togethers—those pretty, normal-seeming mothers, who didn't go to the library all the time or smoke in their bedrooms, or hang out in their bedrooms at all (because they were in the kitchen, making dinner, like normal mothers).

When I got home, my sister would be waiting on the steps for me. “I thought you'd never come home,” she said, as I came up the walk. She never acted mad. Just happy to see me.

“Suppose we took the bus to the Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday and dropped bottles off the side with messages in them?” she suggested. Or we could put up signs around the neighborhood, offering our services as clowns to entertain children at birthday parties. We could buy a couple of helium balloons and let the helium out in our mouths and make phone calls to people. (What we'd say was a minor detail, still to be worked out.) We could send in an application to
Supermarket Sweepstakes
—a TV show in which teams of contestants raced around a store, throwing food items in their cart, with the goal of racking up the highest total at the cash register. If we got picked, we'd get enough groceries that our mother wouldn't have to worry about food bills for a year, not to mention the prize money.

And of course, there was always the mountain—off-limits according to our parents since the murders began, but that kind of thing never stopped us before. Every few days, we took our tin can up there and lit our little fire, and my sister sang her song, and we closed our eyes and chanted. I kept hoping for a vision. But we never stopped looking for hard evidence too.

“Suppose we snuck out with flashlights this weekend after Mom goes to sleep and camped out someplace near where he got the girls last time,” Patty said.

“And then what?”

“We could bring your camera and take pictures.”

“What if the murderer was there? What if he saw us?”

“We'd be quiet.”

“Mom would kill us.”

“So?”

“That would be ironic,” I said. But the real reason I couldn't do a stakeout with my sister was because I'd been invited to a sleepover at Alison's. I wasn't just friends with the popular girls now. I was one of them.

“You never used to be this way before,” my sister said. “What's happened to you?”

“You don't understand what it's like,” I told her. “You just aren't a teenager yet.”

“If you're this big teenager all of a sudden,” she said—with a tone in her voice I could not remember hearing from her before, that could only have come from how deeply abandoned she must have felt that summer, by the person she loved most in the world—“why don't you even have your period yet?”

There it was. My big, shameful secret and the question I asked myself daily. I could have said something back, about her teeth, but I didn't.

“I didn't mean that,” she said. She looked stunned and horrified. In all our lives, I could not remember my sister saying a mean thing to me, though I'd said many to her.

But that was the question all right, as burning to me as the identity of the Sunset Strangler: The fear that I would never become a woman. The terror that I would.

 

Chapter Twelve

I
n late August, we had another heat wave. Karl Pollack had come home from work early and was sitting on the grass with his shirt off, watching Karl Jr. running through their sprinkler. The Gunnersons were barbecuing, and farther down the street, Mr. Marcello was washing his car.

I was sitting on the front step flipping through the back-to-school issue of
Seventeen
—filled with all the clothes Alison would be wearing this fall, and that I would not. Patty was dribbling her basketball in the driveway. That's when we spotted Mr. Armitage's dog, tearing down the street from the cul-de-sac with something in her mouth that looked like a chicken leg, or maybe a shoe.

A second later, there came Mr. Armitage, in pursuit. He wasn't much of a runner, so he was out of breath—the distance ever widening between the little dog and his own panting figure.

Somewhere around Helen's house, the dog disappeared, leaving Mr. Armitage standing there clutching his chest. For a moment, I thought he might burst into tears.

Two years had passed by now, since Patty and I had made our last entry in our scrapbook, and since then neither of us had paid much attention to the comings and goings at his house, except for my sister's occasional observations about his dog, and our mutual agreement that for whatever reason, Mrs. Armitage appeared to have moved out.

“I need your help,” he said, still panting hard. Because he'd kept to himself so much, it was the first time I'd ever heard him speak.

“I just opened the door for a moment to carry out the trash and Petra got out,” Mr. Armitage said, still panting. “I have to watch her like a hawk. She doesn't know her way back home.

“It's those coyotes I worry about,” he said. No need to explain.

Patty didn't have to think about what to do then. She was off. She shot across the street, headed in the direction of the trail, the direction of the dog. Too fast for anyone to remind her we weren't supposed to go up there. Now Mr. Pollack jumped up, as well as Mrs. Gunnerson. But Patty was gone.

Even without the motivation of catching a fugitive dog, my sister was a fast runner, but that day she flew. Five minutes later—less, probably—she was back, holding Petra in her arms.

“I don't know how to thank you,” Mr. Armitage told Patty.

“I could feel her heart beating against my chest while I carried her,” Patty said, handing the dog back to Mr. Armitage, though I could tell she wanted to keep holding her.

“I knew she was scared,” my sister said. “She wanted to get home, she just didn't know how.”

“I want to show my gratitude,” he said. He had taken out his wallet, and was extending a ten-dollar bill. Not what Patty would ever want, for rescuing an animal.

“Maybe I can take her for a walk sometime?” she said.

“Nobody has ever walked Petra but myself,” Mr. Armitage said, with no mention of his absent wife. “But why don't you come over to my house tomorrow, and I'll fix root beer floats and peanut butter cookies. Then we can talk about it, and Petra can get to know you better. It might be good for another person to spend time with Petra, now and then, and maybe she could get a walk in while I'm off at work, if you were interested.”

My sister was, of course.

“We'll need to discuss this carefully,” he said. “This little pup means everything to me.”

N
EXT DAY,
P
ATTY WENT OVER
to the Armitages' house, to get to know Petra better. And Mr. Armitage.

Although our original enthusiasm for compiling information about our neighbor had long since waned, the prospect of my sister actually gaining access to his house (and to Mr. Armitage himself)—combined with the growing mystery concerning the whereabouts of Mrs. Armitage—inspired me to revive our investigation into “The Mysterious Life of Albert Armitage.” As occupied as I'd been lately thinking about the Sunset Strangler, and Teddy Bascom, the Armitage case appeared to offer a greater prospect for resolution. Unlike the Sunset Strangler investigation—where police tape and barricades had made it impossible to get close to the scene of the crimes—this one was unfolding, or had already, right on Morning Glory Court.

The Polaroid photographs I'd taken of Mr. Armitage, before losing interest in our project, had failed to enlighten us about his inner character. Beyond the photographs, the fact that he preferred white stones to grass, and owned a dog, the only hard information we'd gleaned about our neighbor had come from the refrigerator magnet of the ballroom dancing school where he taught, that he'd given to my babysitting clients, the Pollacks. But now, with my sister having made direct contact, it seemed as if we might finally get to the bottom of things in the most direct manner—by simply putting some questions to him.

Patty was the perfect person for the job, and not only because she'd been invited into the Armitage home. People trusted her, and with good reason. There was something in Patty's manner that made it impossible to think of her ever doing something that wasn't exactly what it appeared to be.

As usual, I laid out the plan for my sister. Once Mr. Armitage came to the door, she'd explain that she was doing a report and was hoping to interview him. Here came another dicey aspect to our detective work: school was out, and anyway, what could her report be about (for
summer school,
I suggested) that might require her to talk with Mr. Armitage? We knew so little about him it was hard to create a topic for Patty's interview. A report on people who pull up the grass in their gardens and replace it with stone? A report on people who take the bus to work?

It was Patty who came up with this one. She would say she was doing a paper on dogs. Just to narrow it down, small dogs.

Once he invited her in, she'd ask the necessary questions, while taking in as many details as possible. Full name, for instance. Date of birth, and where did he come from? What were his parents' names, where did he work, what were his hobbies? Where had he met his wife, and what was her birthday? And her name, of course.

The question about Mrs. Armitage was bringing us around to our real mission, naturally, but by mixing it in with a bunch of other questions that were less loaded, I felt it wouldn't set off alarm bells for Mr. Armitage as it might if asked on its own. (This was not unlike my method of purchasing sanitary napkins at the drugstore—something I'd done, even though I hadn't had a single period, so I'd be prepared, rather than having to ask our mother about it. Along with the sanitary napkins, I included at least three other items in my cart—bobby pins, thumbtacks, a pencil—cheap items, since money was always an issue, but enough different things that the cashier, who might be a boy, would not pay so much attention to that one single, incriminating purchase.)

“I need to ask about Petra,” Patty reminded me. “That's the whole point of my paper.”

Since Patty was the dog lover, I asked for her suggestions here. What would a person want to know about a dog?

Where to begin? There was so much to discover. You wanted to know about a dog's food preferences, if she had a particular favorite toy; how did she feel about getting bathed? Had she been fixed, and if not, might she have puppies sometime? It was hard to imagine a dog as small as Mr. Armitage's having puppies, but if she did, they would definitely be adorable. Patty could ask our mother again if she could have one. Though we both knew the answer to that one.

“You're getting off track,” I said. “You aren't getting a puppy. You need to keep your focus here.

“You can ask him what he likes about small dogs over large dogs,” I said. “You could ask if it's a lot cheaper having a small dog, since they probably eat a lot less food. But the main thing is to bring the conversation around to Mr. Armitage's wife. Without getting him upset.”

Here was another tip for Patty to keep in mind while conducting her interview. Although it was important to take notes, she should not write down any observations that directly related to the aspect of Mr. Armitage's life that inspired our greatest curiosity: the mysterious absence of his wife. On the chance that he was suspicious of my sister, I wanted to be sure that all he saw on her notepad, if he looked at it, were things like his birth date and his job that wouldn't make him uneasy. Anything he said about his wife, my sister would have to remember and write down later, once she was home.

She wasn't wild about the idea of this interview. “It feels like I'm snooping,” she said.

“Of course you're snooping,” I told her. “That's what detectives do.”

Reluctantly, she went ahead with her assignment. Knocked at the door—same as she'd done all those times in the past when we'd played Ding Dong Ditch, except this time she didn't run away when Mr. Armitage came to the door. She stepped into the house.

He fixed her a root beer float, evidently, to go with a plateful of homemade cookies, oatmeal raisin. He showed her a collection of china dogs he had—not simply small dogs, but all different breeds. He explained that actually, he'd love a large dog but given that he traveled home to Ohio twice a year to see his parents, and he'd never want to leave a dog of his in a kennel, it was important for him to have a dog small enough to take on an airplane.

One amazing fact did emerge over the course of Patty's interview. In the living room, there had been a framed poster of a dancer, a handsome young man, bare chested and wearing tights, holding a woman over his head. When Patty had asked if Mr. Armitage was a ballet fan, he'd offered the surprising information that in fact this was a photograph of himself in his younger days. Back in Ohio, he'd been a member of a dance company in Cincinnati for several years.

“As you can tell, I don't do much dancing anymore,” he told my sister, patting his stomach. “But I still love to attend the ballet in San Francisco.”

The afternoon she conducted her interview with Mr. Armitage, Patty was in his house so long I started to get worried. Finally, after close to an hour, she emerged. She got down low to the ground to hug the dog good-bye. Mr. Armitage had told her how rare it was for Petra to lick a person's face this way and wag her tail as she did for Patty.

“See you soon,” he called out as she was leaving. “Glad I could help.”

Later, at home—transcribing my sister's findings into the scrapbook and taping a few strands of dog hair that had stuck to her pants onto a page labeled “Sample Hair from Subject's Dog”—she expressed her hope that she might get to know our neighbor better.

“I think he's my kind of person,” Patty said. “Shy with people but not with dogs.”

“What about his wife?” I said. “Didn't you ask him anything about her?”

“We didn't get around to it,” she told me.

“He showed me this trick he taught Petra,” she added. “When he puts on this one record of an opera singer, she sings along. Not really singing but she gets up on her hind legs and makes noises.”

“You were supposed to ask about the wife—”

“It seemed like that might be a sore subject,” she said. “But other than that, he seems like a pretty regular person. Friendly and cheerful.”

“Some people have a secret dark side,” I told her. “They wouldn't call it a dark side if there wasn't a bright side too. That's the part he showed you.”

“Maybe
your
dark side is criticizing Mr. Armitage,” Patty said, “when he never did a single mean thing to you.”

I
T WAS ONE OF THOSE
afternoons when I'd gone over to Alison's to hang out. She and her mother had gone into the city the previous weekend—the city meaning San Francisco—to stay in a hotel and do school shopping, and now she was going to show us all her new clothes and maybe let us try on some of them. This meant that I'd left Patty on her own again as I'd been doing more and more.

I felt bad about this, not because my sister complained but more because she didn't. “You could get some new friends too,” I told her. “I bet there's lots of kids in the fifth grade who'd like to have you over.”

I wasn't actually so sure of this. When it was just the two of us, my sister could be the funniest person, but her shyness around everyone else made it hard for her to make friends. On the basketball court, going after the ball, she was a wild woman, but the rest of the time, with other people, she hardly opened her mouth.

But this one afternoon, when I got home from Alison's—carrying a shopping bag she'd given me from Bloomingdale's with some hand-me-down clothes she didn't want anymore—Patty was not in her usual spot on the steps waiting for me, or over at the Marcellos' shooting hoops. Not out in back either, though it had seemed unlikely she'd go up on the hillside by herself. Not in our room. Her bike was in the driveway. So was her basketball.

I was starting to worry when I saw her coming up the street from the far end, the cul-de-sac. Except for a time when our father came to her game the year before, just at the moment she'd made a perfect hook shot, I could not remember a moment my sister had a more euphoric look on her face.