After Her (28 page)

She had written to me from Africa about what the game of basketball meant to the young, poor girls she was teaching there. Because of her damaged voice—she never was able to speak above a whisper—classroom teaching was impossible for Patty. She tutored her kids, one-on-one, and it almost seemed they listened better, she wrote to me, because they had to strain so hard to hear her.

She started to run basketball clinics—first in Senegal, and then other countries too. She was always on a bus going to some village or other with her basketball shoes around her neck, and a bag of balls above her seat. Her one regret about the work she'd chosen was that she couldn't bring a dog with her.

She was in Somalia, running one of her clinics at a school for junior-high-school-aged girls, when a UN bombing there that killed a hundred civilians set off a mob riot. The journalist who reached me sometime that night with the news explained to me that the riots had been touched off right where the school was, at the time her girls—the Warriors, she called them—would have been putting on their uniforms.

Who would ever think of a basketball court as a dangerous place? But knowing that for those girls, that day, it would be, my sister had left her rented room in a safe part of Mogadishu to make sure they were out of danger. On a bus first, and then, when the streets got too mobbed and no vehicles could get through, on foot. Still carrying her basketball. Running like the wind.

She had almost reached the school where the girls were—nine players, just about the ages we were that day we met the killer on the mountain, when Patty had let out her string of loud and powerful words that saved my life.

She couldn't raise her voice to call her players' names, so she ran into the crowd to get them out, and when one of the men grabbed her, she could not cry for help.

The stone, thrown by one of the faceless mob, hit her square in the head. It is my only source of comfort knowing that my sister died instantly.

T
HERE NEEDS TO BE A
blank page in my story here. Or a thousand of them—more than that—for all the days she hasn't been there that I've spent missing her.

At first I wanted to disappear—cut off my hair and burn it, run out onto the mountain or to the bluffs at Tennessee Valley, or somewhere in Point Reyes—and jump off the edge of the world. I went through the motions of getting through the days, though sometimes just lifting the covers off the bed and setting my feet on the floor beside it felt like too much of an effort. There was no place to go, no place to look that did not summon a picture of Patty. Oddly enough, the one thing that seemed bearable was writing my stories and losing myself in the lives of people other than myself and my sister.

It was after Patty died that our mother came out of her room. Always before, when anything hard had happened in my life, the person I looked to for comfort was Patty, but this time, the hard thing was losing her. There were all those hours to get through, when Patty would have been there, only she wasn't. This time our mother was. And Mr. Armitage. After my sister's funeral, he and his wife had come by my mother's house with food for us. They just sat there in the living room for a long time—knowing, as others appeared not to, that there was no need to say anything, and nothing to be said.

At some point during those first months after Patty's death, it occurred to me how it must have been for our father, the year of those fifteen murders, having to visit all those families who'd lost someone they loved to a terrible and violent death, people who wished they were dead themselves. I had imagined, before, that it was the evil of the killer that made its way into my father's body and ate away at him, but I think now that just as much it was the exposure to that much sorrow. Some people can shut out pain better than others, but for my father, who loved women, those mothers' losses—the losses of the fathers and the brothers and the lovers too, of course, but above all, the losses of the mothers and the sisters—would have been as real as a blow to his own body. Say what you will about the dangers of nicotine—all correct. But I will always believe it was exposure to a toxic killer and to crushing grief, and the knowledge that he had not succeeded in righting that wrong, that simply took up residence in my father's lungs and suffocated him.

It had been a goal of mine—long deferred—to write a letter to the man serving consecutive life sentences for the Sunset Strangler killings. I had no particular faith that I would be any more skillful than my father—the master of extracting the truth from criminals—at getting J. Russell Adler to admit that he was not the real killer. But I did hold out some hope that more than a decade at San Quentin might have altered his view of his actions to the point where he'd be ready to retract his confession, thereby paving the way for the reopening of the case and, perhaps, restoring my father's reputation.

This never happened. Sometime in the 1990s—seventeen years after J. Russell Adler had turned himself in, and the hasty sentencing that followed, Adler was found dead in his cell, murdered by a fellow inmate. His death appeared to end, forever, any hope I might have had in convincing law enforcement authorities and the district attorney that for all these years they'd had the wrong man.

Still, I tracked murders—keeping watch, among the databases I checked in on regularly, for a killer who favored rural locations, campsites and hiking trails, one who used piano wire when committing his crimes, possibly, or even (though I didn't count on this) collected shoelaces.

I kept writing my stories, but after my sister's death, I took pains to keep the stories I wrote as far from my own as possible.

The novels in my series always featured as the central characters and heroines a devoted pair of sisters (one tall, one not so tall) who function in the unlikely roles of amateur detectives. The younger sister in my series is a professional tennis player, the other a harpist. Though the harpist bears a slight resemblance to me (that much was unavoidable, since I was three books into my series by the time of Patty's death) and the two women came from an Italian-American family, I made sure when I created the characters that the younger sister—the tennis player—followed a radically different path from that of my real sister. She won big professional tournaments, for one thing, and she got rich. She started endorsing products and modeling tennis outfits, while solving murders on the side. She had perfect teeth, and a pet that traveled with her on the tennis tour: a cat.

Around the eighth book in my series—
Blood Love
—my harp-playing sister falls in love and gets married. She gives birth to a son—a plot choice I made to ensure that no further associations could be made between myself and my character. I was in my late thirties by this point, and if there was one thing I knew, it was that I'd go through life solo now. I could never form an attachment again as strong as what I'd had with my sister. I could never bear another loss like the loss of her.

I met Robert at a bookstore reading in Keene, New Hampshire. That night I'd read a particularly grisly passage involving the discovery, by the tennis-playing sister, of body parts in her tennis bag, moments before she is supposed to head out onto the court to play the Paris Open. My days of writing anything remotely romantic were long behind me, obviously.

During the question period, I'd called on a man in the back row—not particularly handsome or distinctive looking, though he wore a nice shirt. Flannel, I thought.

“I was wondering what it does to a person's state of mind, writing about all these terrible events?” he said. “Do you ever think that maybe, someday, you'll give your characters a happy ending? Let them go home and rest, maybe?”

“Happiness doesn't sell books,” I said. “Murders do.”

He'd found me in the parking lot after, headed toward my car. My father's old Alfa that I still drove now and then. Not a car for New England winters, but it was late summer at the time.

Some other man might have suggested a drink. He said he had this great garden, and that week the tomatoes had been ripening faster than he could eat them. He wanted to know if I'd like to take some home with me. He had a bagful in the car.

“I don't cook,” I said.

“That's odd,” he said. “In your books, you're always describing these great Italian meals.”

“That was my father,” I told him. “He used to say he'd give us the secret to his marinara sauce when we turned twenty-one. But he died before then.”

“I could teach you that one,” Robert said.

It was unlike me that I did this, but I said okay.

I
DID NOT FALL IN
love with Robert. Falling in love was not something I did by this point, if I ever had. But we spent time together after that—every other weekend, when I was around, and not off researching murders—and it would not be inaccurate to say that Robert fell in love with me.

I saw him every other weekend only, because Robert had a daughter. Justine. Six years old, and living mostly with her mother, but she spent alternate weekends and holidays with her father. The divorce had happened long before, when she was four, he told me. No hard feelings; he and his ex-wife got on well enough, Justine was happy most of the time, and when she wasn't, her parents' divorce did not appear to be the reason, he said.

After we'd been together for six months, he suggested I come over for a meal with Justine. I said no thanks. I don't meet people's daughters.

He raised this again at the nine-month point. Also on the one-year anniversary of our meeting over the tomatoes, and regularly, after that, until I told him that if he brought the subject up again I'd have to leave.

“I won't be anybody's stepmother,” I said. “Or the girlfriend her father shacks up with, when she wishes he was home with her mother and her.

“Eight-year-old girls are not my cup of tea,” I said. (Justine had celebrated a couple of birthdays by now.) “I remember what they're like. I used to be one.”

“You don't even know her,” Robert said. “What are you afraid of? That you might like each other, and then we'd break up, and you'd feel bad about it? So let's get married.”

“And getting married means we'll never split up, right?”

“Getting married to me means I'll never leave. But I won't anyway.”

He said he just wanted to live in a house with the two people he loved best in the world, both there at the same time. He said that the next time he went to Maine with Justine—something they did every summer—he wanted me to be there too.

“She wants you to herself,” I said. “She doesn't need me tagging along.”

“She wants me to be happy. I'm happiest when I'm with you.”

 

Chapter Thirty-four

A
round my forty-second birthday, a package arrived for me. No return address, though the postmark indicated that it had been mailed from San Rafael, California.

Inside was a notebook of a sort you don't see often anymore. White lined paper, no rings, a stiff canvas cover. The handwriting, when I opened it, was instantly familiar. My father's.

It was a journal. Notes mostly, not sentences. Pages and pages of notes. I had to read a few pages before I understood they were about the Sunset Strangler case, which meant that they'd been made almost thirty years earlier, back when my father was still in charge of the investigation.

I decided that this notebook must have turned up in some office at the Civic Center that they were cleaning out after all these years. Some secretary who was retiring—a woman who'd always been sweet on my father, probably—must have located my address and thought to mail it to me.

I spent all that weekend studying the notebook. I was supposed to fly to Detroit that Monday to begin research on a new book based on a murder there, involving a woman who'd killed her auto company executive husband and stashed his body in the back of their SUV for a week.

The morning of my trip, I changed my mind. I stayed home and studied my father's notes instead. Like a message from the grave.

S
HORTLY AFTERWARD,
I
TOOK OFF
in the Alfa for the little cabin in Maine I always go to when I start a new book. Usually I stay there a week, but this time, when the week was up, I called the owners to see if anyone had reserved it after me, and when I found out nobody had, I stayed on another month.

Robert, who always suffered my absence when I was gone in ways I told him I did not suffer his, drove up one weekend with a big pot of homemade soup for me. “I bet you hardly ever stop to eat up here,” he said. Correct.

When I came home, I had the finished manuscript for a book I called
Man on the Mountain
. No harp- and tennis-playing sisters this time. No catchy title. This one was the story, more or less, of what happened when I was thirteen years old and the Sunset Strangler showed up on the mountain.

It was a work of fiction, like all my other books, but this time there was a sister who made up stories, and a sister who played basketball, and the father was a detective, and the mother was sad all the time.

A man who didn't really commit the murders confessed to them. The man who really did got away.

My editor loved the book. My publishers brought it out the next summer, which happened to be the thirtieth anniversary of the Sunset Strangler killings. This meant that a number of newspapers and magazines in the Bay Area were running stories about the case—follow-ups on the families of the victims, the police officer responsible for taking down the initial confession from J. Russell Adler, and an interview with the director of the special task force that had been given credit for solving the case. No mention of my father anywhere, except for a comment by one of the officers that the investigation “had been in shambles” until his team, along with the FBI, had come on the scene.

I
N RECENT YEARS,
I
HAD
chosen not to go on book tours for the promotion of my novels. My name was well enough known without my traipsing around the country, signing books and explaining, for the one-hundredth time, that I do not play the harp. Though I did not live with Robert, I had recently noted, somewhat grudgingly, that I slept better when I slept with him. Which I did, with surprising frequency, if his daughter wasn't around.

With this new book, however, I decided to go on tour. I told my publisher I'd travel to as many cities as they cared to send me, which turned out to be a lot. Sales of
Man on the Mountain
were going well. There was talk that it might make the bestseller list.

But it wasn't the goal of selling more books that inspired me to go on that tour and give all those interviews along the way—even to tiny radio stations and reporters from low-circulation local papers.

I had an idea—a dream really, but it haunted me. I was remembering what the killer had said to me that day he spoke to me on the mountain, as he moved in with the piano wire.

I've been keeping an eye on you, wench. I'll always be out there watching you.

All these years, a part of me had continued to believe this might be true. If so, he would have read my books, or at least known of their existence. And maybe he would learn of this one and buy a copy.

With this in mind, I had put an element in my story for the Sunset Strangler alone. Other readers would think nothing of this particular detail. But to one man, it might be enough to cause him to seek me out.

If he did, I'd be ready for him.

E
IGHTEEN MONTHS EARLIER, WHEN MY
father's notebook had arrived in the mail, I'd spent a long time studying his entries on the investigation. Some of the notations made little sense, and virtually all had proved to be dead ends. Page after page was devoted to license plate numbers of cars reported to have been seen at various parking spots near the entrances to hiking trails on the days the murders had been committed; names of individuals who'd called in tips; names and addresses of Bay Area suppliers of piano wire. And so much more.

From my careful study of the notebook, it was clear my father had been keeping a highly detailed ongoing log of his activities over the many months of the investigation. Every page featured a date, beside which, in a shorthand scrawl, was a record of places he'd gone, people he'd checked out. Now and then, on the top of some page on which he'd recorded some interview or other, I noted a different kind of entry. My mother's birthday, mine, Patty's. “
B Ball, P. 6 p.m.,
” he'd written. “
P, tournament. Get there!
”

“
Rachel: Discuss boy.
” (Beside this note, three exclamation points and a star.)

There were a few notes that surprised me, concerning a series of conversations my father appeared to have had with an orthodontist about possible payment plans for braces. A doctor's appointment for himself, with a line drawn through the date and a note:
Reschedule
. A recipe for caponata, and a reminder to get the tires on the Alfa rotated. A hotel name, Italian sounding.

A few of the entries, which appeared personal, were baffling. “
Birthday, G.
” “
Molinari. Mozzarella Best.
” A reminder to himself? “
Candles. M.
” And another
:
“
Pink princess dress
.” (What could he mean? My sister and I had hated the color pink and were long past the age for princess dresses by that point.)

There was an entry from late March 1980 that I realized, on reflection, must have been made the day I called my father from the phone booth to come pick me up after I'd left Alison's house. The day I told Teddy Bascom I wasn't having sex with him.

The name Bascom. With a line through the middle, the pen having slashed across the page with sufficient force that it ripped through the paper. What more to say?

O
NE OF THE LAST PAGES
in the notebook was the most significant by far. Unlike the others—those random scraps of data apparently leading nowhere—what my father had written on this page were actual sentences that told a story.

This entry began the day the FBI agents had brought my sister and me down the mountain, following our encounter with the Sunset Strangler. The encounter nobody, including our father, had believed to have taken place.

In the notebook, my father recounted the visit from the agents to our mother's house—the meeting in which they'd explained to my parents the seriousness of their daughter's offenses and laid out to my mother and father the scenario in which I could be charged with reckless nuisance and sent to juvenile detention.

Then came the mention of the therapist. His name, the phone number. An appointment time. Not voluntary. Mandatory.

The next entry—written the following day—concerned my father's meeting with the chief of police, in which the news was conveyed to him that he'd been taken off the Sunset Strangler case.

After that, almost nothing. A few sentences about his job in Novato, though he'd called it “Siberia.” Mention of another doctor's appointment—an X-ray he appeared to have rescheduled, again.

There was a rant about the FBI, and an entry in which my father speculated, with unmistakable bitterness, that the sheriff of Marin County appeared less interested in the safety of the people of Marin County than he was in winning reelection.

T
HE SURPRISE FOR ME CAME
in the next entry. The second to last, dated several weeks later. Late August 1980.

The day after J. Russell Adler presented himself to the Marin County police department to say he was the Sunset Strangler—at a time when my story, and my sister's, had long since been discredited, and his career was in ruins—my father had taken it upon himself to make his way up the mountain, alone, to revisit the scene of the attack against my sister and me that the FBI agents had asserted I had made up to get attention.

Evidently (I learned this from his notebook) my father hiked over to the truck body. (The place, I had told them all, where the Sunset Strangler had been camping out. The place where he'd come after me with the piano wire, and where my sister shot him with the BB gun. Where Patty had lost her voice and saved our lives.)

Your daughter is very good at making up stories, Detective Torricelli,
the FBI agent had said that day in our living room on Morning Glory Court, as he handed my mother the card with the therapist's name on it.

But stories belong in books. Not in testimony to law enforcement. That's an important lesson, Rachel. You're old enough to know that.

That's when I'd run to my room. No one to trust anymore but my sister.

What followed in the notebook entry was a detailed list of every single item my father found inside the truck that day. The two catalogs. A storehouse of empty pudding containers. A plastic spoon, and a bunch of Spam tins. A roll of toilet paper and a photograph of Kate Jackson from
Charlie's Angels
(the man favored brunettes) wearing a bikini.

Then this: shoelaces. Various lengths. All worn, some fraying. Unlike the shoelaces I'd purchased for the purpose of taking a Polaroid photograph of them and inserting it in my scrapbook—and thereby incriminating Mr. Armitage—these shoelaces appeared to have been removed from actual shoes. There was dirt on them, and mud. The tips appeared chewed. Tooth marks were visible on several. All told, there were sixteen pairs stashed in the truck body. (Sixteen, not fifteen. No accounting for that.)

In his notebook, my father recorded one other interesting observation about the shoelaces. Where every other item in the truck seemed to have been randomly flung inside the rusted-out cab, the shoelaces he found there had been carefully—one might even say lovingly—wound into individual loops and placed inside what was left of the glove compartment.

According to my father's notebook entry, he had taken numerous photographs of the contents of the truck. He had then collected each of these items—most significantly, the shoelaces—and packaged them in sealed plastic evidence bags. It was his plan to take these bags to police headquarters—to the office he once headed—and announce that the shoelaces he and the rest of his homicide team had noted as having been removed from the shoes of the victims—every single victim over the last fourteen months since the murders began—appeared to have been located.

Understanding the significance of this development, my father anticipated filling out a complete report for the officer who'd replaced him. He would then make the obvious recommendation that given the discovery of this new evidence, it was now important—essential—to revisit the statements previously made by his daughters, Rachel and Patricia Torricelli—statements that had been swiftly dismissed, concerning the alleged assault attempt made on them by an unknown individual whom his older daughter claimed to have seen emerging from the truck body moments before the attempted assault.

In light of these findings, my father wrote—most particularly in light of his discovery of the shoelaces—it seemed clear to him that the events his daughters had recounted to the FBI that day had in fact taken place.

It was now clear to him that we had actually encountered an attacker on the mountain that day, who had in fact used the abandoned truck body as his base of operations on the mountain, and that this individual had in fact been the Sunset Strangler. There remained no doubt in his mind that the Marin Homicide Division had put the wrong man in prison.

T
HE NOTEBOOK CONTAINED JUST ONE
more entry. If his handwriting were any measure, the last entry, which was dated several days later, appeared to have been written in a state of extreme agitation.