After Her (19 page)

 

Chapter Twenty-three

I
t was April, when the weather should have been getting nice again, but every morning we woke to the sound of rain. It never let up. Other years, there would be a few days at least in which the sun came out to give us a break, but that year it seemed all light left the sky sometime in December. It was anybody's guess when sunlight would return.

For the first months after the murders began, the knowledge of a serial killer on the loose had not completely discouraged hikers, but at this point hardly anyone ventured out on the mountain, partly out of fear probably, but likely also on account of the weather. Almost four months had passed without another body turning up—the longest crime-free stretch since the Sunset Strangler had commenced his attacks.

But my father wasn't resting easy, and unlike other people, he couldn't even look forward to the end of the rainy season, knowing that when the sun came out again, so would the hikers, and so most likely would the killer.

Some of the families of the murdered women had formed a group, called Mothers for Justice. They wanted to bring in a special task force of experts from outside. Because a majority of the killings had taken place on land that fell within the national park system, the FBI had also become involved. Lately, some prominent citizens, including a couple of councilmen, along with the Take Back the Mountain contingent, were demanding that direction of the case be handed over entirely to the federal officers. According to Mothers for Justice, the local homicide squad, under the direction of Detective Anthony Torricelli, had come up empty long enough.

We knew our father's feeling about the FBI: they were a bunch of overpaid suits with fancy toys who flew around the country staying in expensive hotels, men who never cocked a gun or broke a sweat. Would any of them spend a day driving around used car lots with a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker who'd seen a red late-model Toyota at a parking lot near the scene of a recent murder, hoping to spot a similar one? Would members of the special task force sit on the couch with Tanya Pope's mother, looking at every one of her baby pictures? Would they haunt shoe stores, looking for a tread that matched the plaster cast of the shoeprint that might—just might—have been left by the killer? Would they listen to a tape of eight-year-old Kelly Cunningham singing “Side by Side” in her third-grade talent show?

Our father still stopped by our house almost nightly at this point, to have a cup of coffee or more often a glass of scotch with our mother. Perhaps the fact that he didn't feel an obligation to charm her the way he did with all the others—it would never have worked if he tried—had allowed him to have what may well have been his one truly honest relationship with a woman. For her part, my mother kept to herself to such a degree that he was probably for her, too, the closest she had to a friend.

Almost every night, I could hear them in the kitchen talking—the sound of the coffee percolator, or the clink of the ice in their glasses. Day and night appeared to have become interchangeable for our father, and because our mother slept so little, it didn't matter to her what time it was when he came by. She kept the light on.

He stopped over on his way home to his apartment, or maybe on his way to his office in the Civic Center to put in more hours sifting through paperwork. There were still a few thousand red Toyota Coronas to follow up on, along with a totally different make and model of car added to the list of vehicles that might or might not belong to the perpetrator—a green Fiat with one of those car deodorizers in the shape of a tree dangling from the rearview mirror, which had been seen tearing out of the parking lot on the day of the Point Reyes murder.

Lying in my bed at night, I wanted to tell my father that I knew a few things about the killer too. (About his black loafers. His chubby fingers. And maybe a dog.) But I knew he would just have told me to stop thinking about it.

“You should get some sleep, Anthony,” I heard our mother telling him.

“I could lie down,” he told her. “But sleep's a different matter.”

I could hear the sound of his lighter hitting the table. The low, rasping cough that had become as much a part of him as his singing used to be.

“You need to see a doctor about that,” my mother said.

“I can't do anything until I hear the snap of the cuffs on this mutt,” he said. “If there was ever a guy who deserved the chair, this is the one. Then I can have a life, maybe. Take our girls to Italy. Cook up a nice eggplant parm.”

“You might think of cutting back on the cigarettes while you're at it,” our mother said. “Not that I should talk.”

A
T SCHOOL, MY SOCIAL STATUS
changed—not for the better—following the breakup with Teddy, and the simultaneous ending to my relationship with Alison and Soleil and their crowd. I was no longer simply invisible. Now I was shunned.

At the start of eighth grade I'd been a celebrity, due to my association with my father, but now that same fact, and the knowledge that the case was dragging on unsolved, produced the opposite effect. Nobody had anything to say to me anymore when my father made a statement to the press. Nobody said he looked like Sean Connery, that was for sure. Not that I would have been around to hear it. Lunchtimes in the cafeteria now, I ate alone.

But my social problem went deeper than my being the daughter of the detective who hadn't caught the Sunset Strangler. It was about Alison and Soleil and the little posse of girls who had magically allowed me into their circle only a few months before but now, with a terrible swiftness, excluded me from it so utterly it was as if they no longer knew my name. They had not needed to inform me of my changed status. It was something I could sense the Monday morning after I'd told Teddy Bascom I wasn't going to have sex with him. The look Alison had given me when I walked into homeroom had been enough for me to know where I would no longer be sitting at lunchtime. She was having sex with her boyfriend, of course, and probably had been for a while now. The fact that I had made a different choice (as everyone in our grade undoubtedly knew) must have seemed like an indictment by me of her own behavior.

Or maybe—and this was likely—the details of how I'd ended things with Teddy had not been broadcast accurately. Unaccustomed as he was to having a girl tell him she didn't want to be with him, Teddy would have been likely to portray himself as the instigator of our breakup. Maybe he even said I was too fast. Or desperate. Very possibly the entire eighth grade now viewed me as a slut.

Whatever they said about me, the end result was clear. After school I rode the bus home—though now, in an ironic turning of the tables, my sister was the busy one, off at basketball practice. I had nothing but time, and nothing to do with it but think about the Sunset Strangler—and my own malfunctioning body that had left me trapped in the no-man's-land between childhood and womanhood. I had never been more lonely, or more miserable.

All those months I'd spent my afternoons at Alison's, I hardly ever took my bike out anymore, but one afternoon—a rare day without rain—I cleaned the dust off my old Schwinn and pumped up the tires.

I had set off that day with no destination in mind. Just pedaling to pass the time and barely noticing where I was headed, which was no place, mostly. Just away.

But somehow I found myself in Peacock Gap again. I hadn't set out to go there, though maybe it was longing that took me to the place—the memory of all those afternoons on Alison's bed with Soleil and Heather and the rest of the girls, eating pizza and telling secrets, real or invented.

I'd pedaled up a long hill, winding past the houses with their automatic sprinkler systems watering their unnaturally green lawns—never mind the nonstop rains that winter and spring—and the Mexican gardeners tending them. Here, all the garage doors opened and closed easily. This was Alison's neighborhood and Soleil's.

The road took me past the country club, and the golf course, and past a row of tennis courts where I saw a group of girls around my age in cute outfits playing some kind of tournament. At tables not far off, shaded by oversized umbrellas, the mothers looked on.

In the past, I had frequently felt envy for these kinds of girls—for their outfits, their rackets, their cute, friendly mothers, unlike my own, so involved in their daughters' activities and ready at a moment's notice to buy them outfits and drive them places. I had tried to be one of those girls myself, and for a while (to my sister's disgust) I may even have resembled one of them.

Those days were over now.

I had gotten off my bike for a moment to take in the scene at the country club, just at the moment some tennis match for girls around my age appeared to be ending. One of the girls had walked up to the net to shake the hand of the other as—over in the mother section—the mothers of the two girls appeared to gather up their considerable assortment of belongings: snacks, sweaters, suntan lotion, cameras for recording the game, cans of tennis balls, and some additional tennis rackets that evidently served, for these girls, as backups—in case something happened to the one they were using in the match, I supposed.

It was a small thing I noted. The mother of the winning girl had zipped all three extra rackets into a racket bag. Now her daughter appeared at the table and handed her mother the racket she'd just finished playing with. The mother handed the girl a Gatorade, along with her sweater. The girl walked off, a few steps ahead of her mother, as the mother—carrying a cooler, purse, tennis balls, and the large racket bag—followed after her. The girl carried nothing but a pair of sunglasses.

An odd thing happened then: I felt a rush of love for a person I didn't think about that often—my own seemingly neglectful mother, who never told me what to wear, or took me for pedicures with her, or tried to get me to sign up for cheerleading. At that moment, she was probably off at the library, searching for more books by obscure Indian gurus or Sylvia Plath poetry. Wherever she was, it seemed like a great gift that day that she had simply left my sister and me to make our own choices. However different they might be from hers.

She had allowed us to make our own lives, free of the burden of pleasing her. Patty and I belonged to nobody but our own selves.

T
HE PREVIOUS
C
HRISTMAS
I
HAD
been given a Ouija board. With the rainy season unrelentingly upon us (too wet for Drive-In Movie; invitations to Alison's house no longer forthcoming), my sister and I were spending our nights now—after basketball—on opposite sides of our kitchen table with our fingers touching the edges of the plastic pointer, asking questions about our lives and the world. We lit candles when we had them.

During our first session, Patty had managed to make contact with a family named Fletcher who'd died of starvation going over the Donner Pass and ended up getting eaten by their neighbors from the next wagon—the very topic she'd been studying that year in sixth grade, amazingly enough. When Patty asked Mrs. Fletcher if she had anything to say, the woman had responded with a series of consonants that seemed—if a person used her imagination—to spell out the observation “Next time, stay home.”

Over the weeks that followed we progressed to more current topics: Patty's basketball performance (would her team win the tournament?) and the sex of Mrs. Pollack's baby. I might have liked to ask when, if ever, I'd be getting my period, but I was too afraid of what the answer might be. After my breakup with Teddy Bascom, Patty did consult the Ouija board once as to whether I'd be getting back together with him.

No way.
He jerk,
the pointer told us. Or so Patty concluded.

“Will I ever get to play in the WBL?” she asked.

WKKK. HRJJD. Work. Hard.

The planchette stopped over the word
yes
.

The way it worked best with the Ouija board, you started off calling to the spirits, asking someone to make contact from the other world, the place where the dead people were. On some occasions it appeared nobody was available. Tied up with other girls doing the same thing we were, most likely.

One night I'd taken out the Ouija board with a particular sense of urgency. This time we found a spirit in the mood for communicating.

She said her name was Zara. She'd died in a car accident about ten years earlier, not far from Route 101. I asked her if she'd heard about the Sunset Strangler killings.

Messages sent to our Ouija board from the other world, if that's where they came from, were never all that simple to decode. A lot of extra letters got in there, or they'd be out of order, requiring whoever it was receiving them to do a certain amount of interpretation before you could understand what they said.

Anticipating this problem, I'd equipped my sister with a notepad and pen to use to write down the letters the pointer led us to. This made it easier to figure out what whoever it was on the other side—Zara, it appeared—was trying to get across. But what came up in response to that first question appeared with surprising clarity.