After Her (23 page)

A man got out. Then two more men. One of them my father.

“I know you're in there, Rachel,” my father said. My real name, which he hardly ever called me, except when he was mad, which was almost never before now.

“I've come to take you home.”

I had never seen him this angry before. And he didn't even know the part about stealing Jennifer Pollack's loaded gun.

“Get in the back,” he said, indicating the jump seat in the ATV. “Just off the top of my head I'm estimating that you're grounded for the next hundred years, but it could be more.”

O
NE MORE THING HAPPENED ON
the mountain that day. I was seated in the back of the ATV, with my father a little ways off, talking with the other officers. (No sign of Mr. Armitage—and the realization had come to me that there never would be. And that Mr. Armitage was not the killer after all. I'd got it wrong.)

I wasn't crying, but the thought had also come to me that this was probably the lowest moment in my life, and the fact that I'd be grounded forever (an experience I'd never known before, for one day even) was far from the worst of it.

In case my activities hadn't made enough trouble, a reporter had also shown up on the scene, which required my father to do some explaining. Even before today, the press had been touting the position of many citizens that the Marin Homicide Division, under the direction of Detective Anthony Torricelli, had mismanaged the investigation. Now here was Detective Torricelli himself, out on the mountain, chasing after his teenage daughter when he should be looking for the killer. Why was an investigation of this importance being entrusted to a man who couldn't keep his own children under control?

I could see my father speaking with the reporter now. See her writing in her notebook. See my father shake his head.

Judging from the angle of the sun, and the light hitting my face, it must have been approaching four thirty or five by this point. I could feel the sweat under my arms and the sweat on the backs of my thighs where they pressed against the plastic seat cover on the ATV. I was tired and thirsty, and my underpants were soaked with blood. I wanted to go home and see the one person I could imagine who wouldn't hate me by now. Patty.

This was when it happened: sitting there under the still-hot sun, waiting for my father in the back of the vehicle, I felt the familiar sensation of a vision coming to me.

I recognized the signs: the tightening in my chest, the dryness in my mouth, and the change in my breathing, almost as if the space I occupied no longer contained enough air. I felt hot at the same time as the chill came over me, and that sickening warmth between my legs, coming from the place I didn't even want to name.

Here was the killer, in my head again, and not just in my head. Inside my body was how it felt. More than that even. It was as if he was right there.

Remember me?

Did you think I'd dress up like a girl? What kind of pussy do you take me for?

You know the only good kind of dog in my book? A dead one.

Whoever this was talking—the killer, faceless again—I knew he was sweating. Like me, he occupied some hot outdoor place as he spoke to me. The part of me that registered his feelings now felt the sun as it beat down on him, same as it did on me. Sweat on his neck too. His shirt stuck to his chest. He wanted a Coke.

Through his eyes, I saw dry grass. Dirt. California poppies. Owl pellet: a little lump of undigested mouse fur, containing the bones of whatever other creature the owl had consumed the night before. The same thing Patty liked to stop and examine on our rambles. I could smell wild fennel and eucalyptus bark.

If he saw these things, and smelled them, he was here on the mountain.

Ooh my little pretty one. Pretty one
.

I could make out the sound of those walkie-talkies again, though whether it was me hearing this, or him, remained unclear. Not words, just static. I could make out a clearing—with a stage, and stone seats around it. I recognized this as the amphitheater where, for so many summers in the past, Patty and I had snuck in to watch production numbers from those Broadway musicals. “Do-Re-Mi.” “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” “Seventy-six Trombones.” “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”

Looking up, I caught sight of a group of crows overhead.
A murder of crows
was the term. (Seventh-grade vocab list.)

I knew he saw them too. The same formation.

But it was the next thing I saw that would have made me cry out, except the breath had left me.

It was a skinny girl slumped in the back of an ATV, wearing a red sweatshirt—face to the sun, and squinting, with a book bag in her lap that didn't fully conceal the red stain seeping through the crotch of her shorts. A girl with a look on her face as if she'd just laid eyes on something terrifying.

Which I had: him, seeing me.

Same girl that was on the news,
he was thinking.
Cop's kid.

No tits. Like the jogger. But it might be time to send this spic cop a reminder as to who was in charge here.

Him.

 

Chapter Twenty-eight

T
he way my punishment worked (
punishment,
a new concept in our family), my father had arranged it that as of the day school got out, I would have a job down at police headquarters—the only place he knew, he said, where he'd be sure I'd stay out of trouble. Sweeping the floors for fifty cents an hour. Six hours a day. There was no argument from my mother.

There turned out to be many rooms at the precinct in need of sweeping. As soon as I'd gotten through the last of them, it was time to start over again. These police officers were a dusty group.

School let out. Every morning, I now rode the bus to police headquarters, where my broom was waiting for me.

As awful a consequence as this was, coming just at the start of vacation—with the rain finally gone, and my bicycle calling, and my notebooks filled with half-written stories—it may have been worse for Patty. She had her basketball of course (though no practices in summer, or games) and her job walking Petra. (On this front, the small piece of good news was that Mr. Armitage—though he must surely have deduced the identity of the author of that anonymous letter—did not appear to hold my sister responsible for my own dark and baseless suspicions about him, or the potentially dangerous actions I'd undertaken as a result of them.)

Still, this left hours when my sister was on her own, instead of having adventures with me, as we'd done every other summer of our lives. The mountain was off-limits, the rec center occupied by all my former friends, now enemies. All that was left for Patty to do was listen to records and shoot baskets and think up tricks to teach Petra, who was a very slow learner. She had a hard enough time with “roll over.”

For me, the hours of sweeping left my mind free to think about what was happening on the mountain. The awful pictures of murder victims, in their last moments of life, no longer came to me, as they had all winter and spring. (As with our television, service appeared to have been disconnected—with nothing on the screen now but snow.) But the absence of pictures was almost worse. I knew the killer was out there, and based on that brief and terrible moment on the mountain, when I felt his presence so close that the same crows had circled over both our heads, I believed that he was watching me.

I had tried once to help my father capture the killer, and that had been a disaster. He'd never listen to anything I said now on this subject, even if I had anything to offer, which I didn't. All I could do was push my broom back and forth, with the knowledge that the Sunset Strangler was out there looking for another victim.

He had killed women in other places besides Mount Tamalpais, of course. (Point Reyes. Muir Woods. Tennessee Valley and Bolinas.) But I believed he had returned to the mountain, if only to convey to the police officers pursuing him the message that he was smarter than all of them.

If my father had once seemed to possess magical powers, it appeared the Sunset Strangler was the magic one now. I had felt his presence on the mountain that day my father came to get me in the ATV, and I believed he was there now, though how he continued to elude discovery was difficult to fathom—knowing the numbers of officers who patrolled the mountain and trails and monitored every parking lot where hikers left their cars before setting out to hike.

One law enforcement officer missing from the mountain now was my father. The day after he'd brought me home, the
San Francisco
Chronicle
ran its story in which their reporter revealed to the greater San Francisco Bay Area the news that Detective Anthony Torricelli, head of the entire Marin Homicide Division—and the officer whom the people of Marin County had entrusted with responsibility for apprehending the Sunset Strangler—had spent his Saturday (accompanied by two other officers, and in an official police department vehicle) out on the mountain intercepting what the reporter called “a teenybopper sting operation” set up by Detective Torricelli's own thirteen-year-old daughter.

The photograph that ran on the front page had shown me huddled in the back of the ATV in my red sweatshirt (the bloodstains in my shorts thankfully not visible) and my father, in his leather jacket, looking not so much angry as defeated. The two additional officers—whose energies could have been better spent elsewhere, as no one needed to point out—stood on the sidelines, by the truck body. Hands in their pockets. Looking as if they'd rather be just about anywhere else, which no doubt was true.

The reporter had done some legwork for this story. She had evidently solicited the observations of a group of my classmates from school. One of whom—Alison Kerwin—had volunteered that I used to come over to her house a lot, but she had to stop inviting me when bottles of nail polish kept disappearing. Alison's mother had made the observation that it had appeared to her—from times I spent with their family, and occasions when she'd driven me home after—that my parents seemed not to offer much in the way of supervision.

“She's a child of a broken home,” Mrs. Kerwin had said. “We all felt sorry for her. We even invited her to join us for Thanksgiving. But you can only help a person so much.”

There had been one other comment about me in the article, though this one was attributed to “a young person who asked to remain anonymous.”

“She's an okay kid, I guess,” the anonymous young person had said. “But it had me weirded out the way she was always, like, taking her clothes off and stuff.”

He had to fend me off sometimes, he said, I got so aggressive. But luckily, he knew karate.

F
IRST THING THE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY
morning, my father had been called in by the chief of police, who delivered the news: effective immediately, Detective Torricelli would be relieved of his duties overseeing the investigation of the Sunset Strangler killings. At the request of his superiors in Sacramento, by noon that day he was instructed to turn in all materials in his possession relating to the Sunset Strangler case, to be taken over by a Special Forces team and a group of FBI agents from Washington.

My father was reassigned to an office up north in Novato, to oversee a case involving a car dealership that appeared to have engaged in fraud in the sale of a half-dozen stolen vehicles that had been brought in over state lines.

“I went to bat for you on this one, Tony,” the chief told my father that day. “What happened the other day could have been the end of your career, but I told them you'd keep your nose clean from now on.”

It had been the chief's advice to my father that he should go home and spend some much-needed quality time with his kids. “So long as I don't hear word one about you and that daughter of yours getting anywhere near this investigation, your pension's safe,” he said.

“One more prank like this last one, and I'll be asking for your badge.”

I
HAD TO BELIEVE MY
grounding wouldn't last forever, though I knew better than to ask for the specifics of my sentence. But I had no doubt, even then, that my father loved me more than anything—and I even knew that at its core, his anger that day had not come from the fact that I had jeopardized his case and wrecked his twenty-year career. He was angry because I'd put myself in harm's way.

“If anything ever happened to one of you girls—” he said, on the way down the mountain in the ATV. He couldn't even finish his sentence.

A few days after they took him off the case, he came by to take us out for pasta. Marin Joe's as usual. Same booth. Same waitresses. Same marinara.

We didn't speak about what happened, that night, though of course Patty and I knew what the transfer to Novato represented to our father. I was quieter than usual, which left it to my sister to fill the space. I watched her across the booth, pressed up close against our father and stroking the hairs on his arm the way she liked to. Some people, observing the scene, would have taken in nothing but a young girl having a carefree night out with her family, but I recognized that Patty's relentless cheerfulness required as much of her as any playoff game.

“Some people think Jack Russell terriers are stupid,” she was saying. “But I can tell, from knowing Petra like I do, that she's just really, really sensitive. Sometimes she gets overexcited when she's happy, and it makes her do dumb things. Same as people do.

“Knock knock,” she said. (No attempt at anything approaching a natural segue to a new topic here.)

“Who's there?” (This, from our father.)

“Canoe.”

“Canoe who?”

“Canoe help me with my homework?”

Our father laughed of course, though his laughter sounded flat. “I never heard that one before,” he told her. “Now . . . who here might be interested in a little tiramisu?”

“Actually, Dad, I was thinking I'd like to get home,” I told him.

Nobody argued then, when we left without our usual dessert. In the car on the way home, Patty had tried one more time—launching into a round of “Volare.” Neither of us joined in.

T
HAT NIGHT
I
LAY IN
bed staring up at the slats in my sister's top bunk as usual, while she sang along with her record. (Dolly Parton, imploring a woman named Jolene not to take her man. Patty loved this song, though it baffled her, she said, how anybody could steal a man from a person as beautiful as Dolly.)

There was moonlight coming in the window, and a Santa Ana wind. No sound of coyotes for once, but the silence was worse.

No one said anything for a long time, and then Patty did.

“Do you think once they capture the Sunset Strangler, things can go back to normal?” she said.

What's normal, I could have asked her.

“Dad said he was taking us to Italy, for one thing,” she said when I remained silent.

“Dad says a lot of things,” I told her. Always before, it had been Patty who spoke of our father's failings. That summer, he had ceased to be, for me, my magical father. I could never hate him, but what I felt now—namely, pity, and guilt—was worse.

“Then maybe he'll marry Margaret Ann,” Patty continued.

Odd that my sister would think of this. She was only six or seven when we went to Margaret Ann's apartment and she gave us the dolls. And that time at the Flamingo Hotel, when we wore the dresses she'd made for us and my sister threw up.

“Do you think there's such a thing as one true love?” Patty asked me. Dolly was on to another song now: “I Will Always Love You.”

“Because if there is,” my sister said, “I think Margaret Ann was it for him.”

“Sometimes it's like that, maybe,” I told her. “But even when everything seems perfect, there could be one little thing you do, at just the wrong moment, to make your whole life go in a different direction. And you might never get back to where you were before.”

“Like in the song, with the guy in the phone booth, when he can't read the phone number he wrote down on the matchbook, and he never gets to call the girl back that went off with his best friend.”

“Or those girls that got killed,” I said. “What if they'd taken a different hiking trail on that particular day? Or they got a blister on their foot and decided to turn back? Or someone else came along, in front of them, and the Sunset Strangler decided to get her instead?”

“Or Mom,” Patty said. “If her glasses hadn't fallen off when she was riding her bike that day and met Dad.”

“In which case, we wouldn't have been born,” I pointed out.

“But for her, maybe, things would have worked out better.”

Silence.

“Dad could still call up Margaret Ann,” Patty said. The Dolly Parton record had ended now, but maybe Patty was still thinking about that song. Mostly though, she was thinking about our father.

Of all the things we'd talked about, I had never told her about that time all those years back when I had left the message on his answering machine about marrying Margaret Ann.
Never get over it. Never forgive you.

It was too late to let him know that wasn't true. I'd always forgive our father. I just wanted him to be okay.

“I think it would cheer him up,” my sister said.

“I don't even think Mom would mind anymore. Mostly she just wants to be left alone anyways. Plus, they could still be friends.”

“I wonder if she kept those dresses in her closet,” Patty said.

T
HAT NIGHT, AFTER
P
ATTY FELL
asleep, I saw the killer. I saw where he was, and it was not that far away.

He was lying under the stars on the mountain, never mind the coyotes. He was curled up on the floor of the old truck body where I'd waited for Mr. Armitage, wearing that Goodyear Tire jacket I'd seen stashed under the seat, with the
Victoria's Secret
catalog open, and the Coke can, and the empty tins of canned meat.