After Her (18 page)

This was a pretty good one. I wondered if Patty even remembered that Raymond's father was an ophthalmologist, or if it was just one of those weirdly appropriate things she came out with.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you to get some braces?”

L
UNCHTIME AGAIN.
I
WAS SITTING
in my spot across from Alison, who had her usual bag full of raw vegetables that were supposed to make her skinny as a model, which might have if she didn't douse every carrot in blue cheese dip. The girls were talking about the upcoming Sadie Hawkins dance where the girls asked the boys. The obvious thing would have been for me to invite Teddy Bascom, but that would have meant that I considered him my boyfriend, and in spite of all the making out we did, I wasn't sure that term applied.

“They found some footprints after the last girl got killed,” I said. “My father thinks he might be able to tell what kind of shoes the killer wears. The ground was really muddy from the rain, but they still got some kind of impression.”

This part was actually true, for once. I knew this from my father, who had made a rare appearance at our house the night before, just as Patty and I were going to bed, to say good night to us and have a drink with our mother. Their usual routine now.

I had started noticing that my bulletins about the Sunset Strangler case no longer had the effect on the girls at school that they used to. Back in September, Alison had hung on my words, but my father's position as chief of homicide no longer carried much weight with anyone at school.

“Finding the imprint of a shoe is really good news,” I continued, having gotten no response to my first disclosure. “My dad says this guy is so smart, that's probably the best clue they've located yet.”

A couple of months earlier, this statement would have inspired a lot of questions. Now, nobody said a word.

I wished then that I hadn't said anything. When I made things up about the case, I never felt guilty, but it felt wrong revealing something that was real, or even talking about something that my father had shared with me in a moment that had been just ours up until that second. Those moments felt too precious to talk about here.

The night before, he had come into our bedroom to say good night to us. Months had passed since he sang us one of our familiar songs, but he had sat on the edge of my bed, not even talking, just sitting in the quiet darkness for a surprisingly long time.

My sister had fallen asleep. It was just the two of us, and so I had asked him—as I generally never did—how things were going with the case.

“I can't lie to you. It's rough, baby,” he said. “But maybe we got a little break with this last one.”

That's when he told me about making the plaster impression of the shoe imprint, and how it was the first good lead they'd had in weeks. “I brought over a bag of the plaster for you,” he said. “I thought you and Patty could use it to do something fun, like making casts of your handprints. Maybe give them to your old man to put on my desk at work.”

“What size shoe does he wear?” I asked my father. Meaning the killer.

“Don't keep putting this creep in your brain, Farrah,” he'd told me, stroking my head. “I can tell you from personal experience, once he gets in there, he doesn't get out. It's not good for a person's health.”

“So what did your dad say then?” Alison asked me, plunging another carrot in the blue cheese dip and sounding more bored than enthusiastic now. “Are they getting close to catching him?”

“Once this guy is in your brain he doesn't get out,” I told the girls, though I had meant to keep quiet. “It's like a toxic virus.”

“Or that old movie,
The Exorcist,
” Soleil offered. “A person can get possessed.”

“Your dad's not possessed, is he?” Heather said. “Like where a person's eyeballs turn crazy and gunk comes out of their mouth?”

“He's a professional. They know how to keep that from happening. There's things he knows how to do, to keep it from messing him up,” I said.

I hoped this part was true.

H
E WAS NOT POSSESSED, BUT
by March our father seemed to have aged ten years. He gave the impression of being not just tired, but weary in a way I'd never seen before. Some of the changes were so small nobody but Patty and I would have picked up on them: a heaviness in his step on the stairs, his failure to bring us our gardenia and chocolate bar on what had always been his favorite holiday—Valentine's Day. He was as thin as I'd ever seen him, and I could tell when he gave me rides to school—the ashtray overflowing—that he was smoking a lot in the car. Once that winter, when he'd taken my hand—warming it up in the cold by blowing on it—I had noticed his fingertips were yellow from cigarettes. It had been a long time since we'd ridden together in his Alfa with the sunroof and all the windows open, singing “Volare” at the top of our lungs.

I CAUGHT SIGHT OF HIM
on television one time over at Alison's. The pizza had just arrived and we were in her rec room, diving for slices.

There had been no new murders on the mountain for a couple of months, probably due to the rainy season, but with the rains expected to end soon, and the killer still at large, a group of citizens had been putting pressure on the governor to do something about securing the mountain. A reporter had asked my father for a comment on developments in the case. There were none.

I sat on the beanbag chair in Alison's family room, while Heather applied polish to my toenails. My father stood in front of the microphone, looking like a “before” picture in an ad for some miracle rejuvenation product. His skin sagged and his eyes were puffy. Knowing him, and how he prided himself on his appearance, what alarmed me most was his hair. He always cut it himself, so regularly you were never even aware he'd had a haircut. This time it looked as though he'd taken whatever pair of scissors was closest and hacked it all off without bothering to check in a mirror.

“What if this guy just keeps going on and on murdering people?” a boy named Rich said, to nobody in particular.

“I'd get a gun,” said Soleil, never the brightest bulb.

“I'd get my parents to move to L.A.,” said Heather. “The weather's better there anyway.”

“Maybe we could form our own SWAT team, and stake out the trails with our nunchucks,” one of the boys offered. Another idiot.

I kept my mouth shut. What could I say? The terrible part was, looking at him now, I wished nobody even knew Detective Anthony Torricelli was my father. Maybe I was the daughter of the designated protector of the girls of Marin County, but if the girls of Marin County kept getting murdered, what did that say about us?

 

Chapter Twenty-two

T
eddy Bascom had decided it was time I had sex with him. He told me this—not in any romantic way, more along the lines of “hey, let's get it on”—one afternoon at Alison's, after our usual makeout session: the breast, the hand, the wetness after.

“Alison and Chase do it,” he said. “Everyone does after they've been going out this long.”

I never understood why people used the term “going out.” All I ever did with Teddy was stay
in
the rec room.

“Thirteen's too young,” I said, though my fourteenth birthday was coming up. (My fourteenth birthday. And still no period.) I could have offered a bunch of other reasons, most particularly the fact that I didn't want to have sex—that in fact I didn't want to be doing the other things we had been doing all this time either—but I kept it simple.

“Not going all the way is bad for my health,” Teddy said. “The way it is with guys, if you get too frustrated, even if you get to come, it can mess up your balls.”

I didn't know why it was my responsibility, making sure Teddy Bascom's balls were all right. He hadn't shown much concern about my breasts; I was starting to worry that all the manhandling might make them stretched out and droopy, the way our mother's were. I didn't bring this up either. I just repeated that thirteen was too young. And then, not so much because it would have any effect on Teddy, but more for myself and the small comfort that saying these next words out loud would offer me, I added, “My father wouldn't want me to do that.”

“It's not like you'd tell him.”

“He'd know.”

This part was true, not so much because my father happened to be a detective as because he loved me so much, and, absent as he was, when he was with us, he noticed every single thing. If I had sex with Teddy Bascom, I knew something would change about me, and my father would pick up on it.

All my life—my life, and my sister's—our father had told us we were the most special girls. “Don't ever let some guy treat you like less than a princess, or he'll be hearing from me,” our father had said, time and again.

Thinking about this, lying on the beanbag chair with Teddy on top of me, I started to cry.

“Oh, Jesus,” Teddy said. “Here comes the waterworks.”

I wasn't sobbing. No sound came out. But there were tears streaming down my face.

“I can't believe you,” he said. “I should just break up with you now.”

“That's a good idea,” I said. I realized then—though until this moment it had not occurred to me—that I had no further interest in spending my afternoons on the beanbag chair while Teddy Bascom yanked on my small, sad breasts and rubbed his penis against my jeans. I didn't want to be in this room at all, not with Teddy, or with Alison and her friends either. I wanted to be home with my sister.

“I think I'll go now,” I told him.

A
LISON'S HOUSE ON
P
EACOCK
G
AP
lay on the opposite side of the freeway from ours. On my bike I could have made it home in fifteen minutes, but on foot it was a few miles, and the rain was heavy enough that afternoon to make it hard to see.

I knew how busy my father was with the case, but maybe because I'd just invoked his name I was wishing, even more than usual, that I could see him. I had a couple of dimes in my pocket. Enough to place a call.

One of his deputies answered, but when I said I was Detective Torricelli's daughter, she put me through right away. I told him I was sorry for interrupting him at work.

“What's more important than one of my girls when she needs me?” he said.

I asked if he could pick me up. I told him where I was. The 7-Eleven out by the highway.

“I'm on my way,” he said.

U
SUALLY WHEN
P
ATTY OR
I
rode someplace with our father it was in the Alfa, but this time he had the patrol car. The unmarked kind, since he was a detective, not an ordinary member of the force.

“Oh, Farrah,” he said when he saw me. “Who made you cry? Tell me his name.”

We drove out past the sandpit to a spot where, when Patty and I were younger, he'd taken us to learn to ride our bikes, and where, another time, with Margaret Ann, we'd had a picnic, and he'd set up the bocce balls that used to be his father's. Margaret Ann had brought bubble solution and taught us a song in French. It was after that afternoon that I told my father I didn't want to spend time with her anymore. I wanted it to be just the three of us, like before.

“I wish you didn't have to work all the time,” I said.

“Once we nail this killer, I'm taking a vacation. I'm taking you and your sister to Italy.”

Other people's fathers might have offered Disneyland. Ours talked about Venice.

“Do you ever worry the Sunset Strangler might try to get you, Dad?” I asked him. “If he gets the idea you're onto him.”

“I can take care of myself, baby. Me, and my girls too.” He didn't mention the gun, but I knew he had one, in a holster on his shin. It was there even now, as we sat in the car talking, though what made me feel safe when my father was around had never been the presence of a gun.

I put my head on his shoulder. The bench seats in my father's unmarked police car made it possible to lean up against him, the way we used to do in our old station wagon when my sister and I were little. He lit a cigarette and stroked my head.

“I'm sorry about how it worked out between your mother and me,” he said. “She's a wonderful woman. I never meant to hurt anybody. ”

I wanted to ask, What about Margaret Ann?, but I couldn't say it. Whatever happened there was between the two of them.

“Do you think you'll ever marry anybody else?” I asked him. As close as I was ever going to get to that topic.

“No woman in her right mind would marry a mope like your old man,” he said. “And anyway, I don't have time to be a husband to anybody. I did a pretty lousy job the first time around. I figured I should quit before I did any more damage.”

“We're fine,” I said. Even if we weren't, I'd tell him that.

“I'm sorry I don't get over to the house much lately,” he said. “I only saw one of your sister's games all season.”

“It's okay,” I said, though it hadn't been. Patty wasn't the crying type, but I knew from the look on her face what she was thinking when her team won the semifinals game that would send them to the playoffs—scanning the bleachers and seeing only other people's fathers.

“Who'd ever think some serial killer would hang out on hiking trails, huh? We've gone crazy, trying to keep people off those trails, but he keeps extending his range and they keep coming in with whistles in their fanny packs and their Swiss Army knives, whatever good that does, like none of our warnings apply to them.”

It was never uncomfortable sitting in silence with my father. I sat there breathing in the smell that was just him—the smoke, the aftershave, the scent that was just him. Studying his face that day—no longer handsome as he had been, but the face I loved—the thought occurred to me, what would I do if he died?

I could not imagine the world without my father in it.

To change the subject, I asked him why he had wanted to be a police officer. Just for a moment, I let myself picture how it would have been if he had a different kind of job and I had one of those dads who came home every night at five thirty carrying a briefcase. The kind that plays checkers with you and has a hobby like stamp collecting instead of taking you to an R-rated James Bond double feature. This would be a whole different person of course. Not him. So, never mind.

“Maybe I watched too many movies,” he said. “I liked the idea of being a hero. Protect innocent citizens from criminals. Rescue women in distress from bad guys. Only problem is, while you're busy saving the world you can lose track of your own family.”

He put his cigarette out. For once he didn't light another right away. He sat there stroking my head, and then I felt a swift, sharp tug at my scalp, gone before there was anything like pain.

He was making one of his spiders for me, that he hadn't done for either of us in a long time, since before the first murders. When it was done, he set it on my arm—eight feathery legs crafted miraculously from a single strand of my one black hair. It almost looked real.

“You tell that piece-of-shit boy for me, Farrah—the one who made you cry—that if he does anything more to hurt you, he'll spend the rest of his life seeing my face in his nightmares,” my father said.

He turned the key in the ignition and we drove away.