After Her (29 page)

In this one, my father went on for several pages, but the story he recounted of what had happened in the matter of the shoelaces was clear enough, and surprisingly simple:

My father had presented the evidence from the truck body to the detective now in charge of the case. It had not been easy for my father, even getting to see the man who had replaced him, given that he and his team were currently caught up in the media frenzy surrounding J. Russell Adler's recent admission that he was the Sunset Strangler, and the triumphant announcement from the recently created special task force that the killer had been apprehended.

My father's meeting with the newly installed director of the Sunset Strangler investigation had lasted exactly seven minutes, and it ended when the director reminded him that his press conference was about to begin.

“Given that the case has now been resolved conclusively,” he had told my father, “it would be highly inadvisable for you to pursue this matter further.”

Until now, the department had chosen to look the other way where the “antics” of Detective Torricelli's daughters were concerned. But should Torricelli elect to speak publicly of this matter in any way, his actions would not be viewed favorably.

After this entry, the rest of the notebook remained blank.

 

Chapter Thirty-five

I
n my novel
Man on the Mountain,
a confrontation takes place on the mountain between the man I refer to as the “Mountainside Monster” and the two daughters of the discredited detective. The shooting with the BB gun is there, as is the FBI agents' dismissal of the girls' account of what happened that day, and the infuriating therapy sessions that followed, in which the older sister's refusal to admit she'd made up her story had led to a report from the therapist that stated she was “at high risk for further pathological behavior.”

I changed a few details (the father drives a Fiat; the younger sister plays water polo) and there is no character bearing any resemblance to Mr. Armitage, and no Jack Russell terrier. The mother appears a little less depressed than ours was. She bakes chocolate chip cookies for her daughters, and sometimes on Friday nights she takes her daughters bowling.

But in all the important ways, the story resembles ours. My novel features the confession of a man who was not the actual killer, and the death—not so long after—of the detective who led the investigation, until he was taken off the case. Though there was no way to prove this definitively, I make it plain in my novel that it was the belief of the detective's daughters that what killed their father was not so much the nicotine in his cigarettes as the toxicity of the Mountainside Monster case—the frustration and rage he felt knowing the real killer had gone free, and his inability to do anything about it.

In my novel only one detail differs significantly from the truth of what took place in real life. In the novel, the older sister—hiking on the mountain some months after the sentencing of the wrong man—discovers, in the truck body, the stash of shoelaces taken from the victims' shoes. She takes these home with her and keeps them with her at all times over the years that follow, as a reminder of her quest to find the real killer and to eventually bring him to justice. She knows those shoelaces mean a lot to him, and because they do, it is her hope that she will one day lure him to her, so she can finish, at last, the job her father had been unable to complete. In my novel, this is precisely what transpires.

In truth, I never found the shoelaces. Though up until that point we had never registered fear about anything, for many weeks after that terrifying encounter with the killer my sister and I couldn't bring ourselves to go near the abandoned truck body, or anywhere on the mountain.

When we finally did return, almost six months later, everything was gone: the catalogs, the empty food containers, the random items of dirty clothing. There were no shoelaces or any indication at all that the truck body had been used by anybody but teenagers looking for a place to have sex.

F
OR YEARS AFTER THE MURDERS
and my father's death, I continued to think about those shoelaces, and to wonder what had happened to them. (I remember one time eyeing a bird's nest in a tree alongside the trail. I thought I caught sight of a single lace, woven in among the twigs and leaves, and I actually got my sister to climb the tree for a closer look. It was nothing but a piece of string some crow had collected and put to use.)

For me, the moment when I read the entry in my father's notebook in which he revealed that he had found the laces felt like a resolution of the mystery, at long last. But only a partial one. Because now a second mystery presented itself. If, as his notebook suggested, my father had found the killer's treasured shoelace collection—and recognized, as he did, its importance—then what had become of it? Though the Homicide Division had failed to accept his assertion that they'd sent the wrong man to San Quentin, as long as he lived my father would never have abandoned his pursuit of the real killer. He would have held on to those shoelaces.

But he got sick. He died knowing the killer remained at large and that nobody believed him. No one but Patty and me, anyway. And young as we were at the time, he would not have wanted us saddled with the same obsession—to find the Sunset Strangler—that had no doubt contributed to his death.

So what happened to the shoelaces?

I
N MY NOVEL, THE OLDER
sister finds the shoelaces in the truck—finds and holds on to them. Wherever she goes, from that day forward, she keeps those shoelaces with her. I changed this aspect of the story in my novel for one reason alone: there was a chance the killer might read my book and believe his treasured shoelaces to be in the possession of its author. This would lead him to seek me out. I had no better idea of what I'd do if he came after me now than I had thirty years earlier. I only knew I wanted to look him in the eye again, at last.

I did not divulge any of this to my editor or my publicist, or—most important—to Robert, who would have been deeply alarmed for my safety had he known the plan, however far-fetched, that I was hoping to set into motion.

There was only one person I would have told, if she'd been around, and that was my sister, Patty. She would have understood perfectly and insisted on accompanying me on my book tour, standing ready to protect and defend and—more than that—to confront the killer and bring him to justice once and for all.

But Patty was dead. And so I set out alone across the country on my fourteen-city tour from New Hampshire all the way to California, with the hope that one night, in some bookstore or lecture hall along the way, I might actually look up from the table where I was signing books, or look down from the podium where I was speaking, and lock eyes with the Sunset Strangler. (Eyes. Or eye. We never knew exactly what damage had been done when my sister fired that BB gun. We only knew he had let out a cry, dropped the piano wire, and covered his left eye. Then disappeared.)

Two eyes or one, I had no doubt the killer had reason to come after me. Maybe he had been as fixated on me as I had been on him over the years. Maybe it had bothered him that some other man had taken credit for his killings. Maybe he just wanted those shoelaces.

For this reason, before setting out on tour, I retrieved my father's old gun from my safe-deposit box. I kept his gun in my purse at all times. Not the usual accessory for a writer preparing to meet her readers. But this was not going to be the usual book tour.

I
GAVE MY FIRST READING
at my little hometown independent bookstore in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to an audience of roughly thirty people, mostly friends. (Robert in the front row of course. Too early in the year for tomatoes, but he brought purple lilacs.)

Then came Boston; New Canaan, Connecticut; New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Chicago; Madison; Detroit; Indianapolis; Denver; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; L.A. Four solid weeks of radio interviews and readings, “friends of the library” talks, book-and-author luncheons. Hotel rooms, room service meals. Book signings.

Question:
Who should play your father in the movie version of your book?

Answer:
Whoever is the handsomest, most irresistible man in Hollywood. And I still doubt that any actor could do him justice.

Question:
How long did it take you to write this novel?

Answer:
Six solid weeks, chained to my desk at a cabin in Maine. And every day of my life for the thirty years before that.

Question:
Did you really have a sister? Did she really die? How do you get over something like that?

Answer:
You don't.

I
SAVED
S
AN
F
RANCISCO FOR
last. I wanted to see my mother in Marin County, of course (and possibly Mr. Armitage and his wife, now the owners of a dancing school in Petaluma), but first I would finish up with a talk at the Herbst Theater—a sold-out event in which I would follow the standard procedure: twenty minutes of reading from the novel followed by questions from the audience. Then I'd sign books. Then back to my hotel for a glass of wine—two, probably—and my nightly call to Robert back in New Hampshire. It was a weekend he had his daughter, and by the time I got to him, it would be past midnight there. Still, I knew he'd be waiting up to hear from me.

I had asked my publicist to reserve a hotel room for me not in San Francisco, but across the bridge in Marin County, at a place on the side of Mount Tamalpais that Patty and I used to fantasize about when we were kids and we'd watch the fancy cars pull up and the rich people checking in. More than once, I had dared Patty to go inside and scoop up a few handfuls of the honey-roasted peanuts they set out on the bar. She'd done it, naturally.

The Mountain Home Inn looked out over the hills of Marin County, all the way to the city—the kind of view that could take a person's breath away. I had chosen to stay at this place partly out of nostalgia for our old days rambling on the mountain, and partly for the spa services. I spent the early part of that afternoon getting a shiatsu massage and a facial, followed by a bath back in my room.

Stretched out in the tub, with the rolling hills of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area displayed outside the window, I surveyed my body. I had recently turned forty-three, but remained in good shape, thanks in large part to a combination of luck, good genes, and the fact that I had never had a baby.

Lying there now, I thought about the facts-of-life movie from my girlhood:
From the moment of your birth, your body holds a treasure chest of unfertilized eggs. Your lifetime supply. Your body can make a baby now.

Probably not anymore. And though I'd almost never wanted that, the fact that the days in which pregnancy and giving birth remained options were drawing to a close if not gone already struck me for a moment as almost unbearably sad.

I remembered how I'd longed for the blood to come, the summer of the Sunset Strangler. And the horror of the day, the next summer, when it finally did. I remembered those circling vultures, that day on the mountain as I sat in the ATV waiting for my father, and the feeling of the blood soaking my shorts.

M
Y TALK WAS SCHEDULED FOR
seven thirty, so I had pictured myself spending the remainder of the afternoon on my hotel room balcony, reading and looking out over the landscape of my girlhood.

But the phone rang. It was the reception desk. Someone was here to see me. Should they send my visitor up?

“I'll be right down,” I said. A public place was best for this of course.

Then with a calmness that surprised me, I finished dressing. My last act before heading out the door and down the stairs: tucking my father's Chief Special into my purse.

O
NLY ONE PERSON WAS IN
the hotel restaurant when I walked in: a woman. I scanned the room a second time and looked back out to the lobby, but the woman was coming over to me then. She held out her hand.

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said. “I've waited a long time for this.”

So I was not meeting the Sunset Strangler after all. The knowledge hit me with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The risk is great, for a person accustomed to creating fiction, that she may come to imagine that events can unfold in real life as they would in a novel. In the fictional version, it would have been the Sunset Strangler who had come to meet me here. And (in a manner that remained hazy, even in my imagination) I would have gotten him to confess his crimes at last, and somehow overpowered him. Perhaps he would have turned himself in to the authorities then. Perhaps he would have saved them the trouble of a trial by jumping off the outdoor deck of my hotel, to meet a swift and certain death on the same mountain where those fifteen women had met a similar fate at his hands.

But real life hardly ever works as neatly as novels do, which may account for the reason so many people read novels. This woman extending her hand to me was apparently one of them.

I figured she must be one of my readers, one of those people who had followed my career over the years, and for whatever reason felt that my books spoke to her.

Maybe she was an aspiring writer herself (as was often true of the people who sought me out most fervently) and was looking for advice. She had a bag with her—containing a manuscript, no doubt. She wanted me to read it, and pass it on to my editor. No telling how far she'd driven to see me that afternoon.

“I can't believe I'm really meeting you,” she said. “I'm nervous.”

“Let's sit down,” I told her.

“Want some coffee?” I asked her. “Or wine?”

“That sounds good,” she said. “My name is Gina.”

We faced each other across the table then, and because she said nothing, I studied her face. She was a good eight to ten years younger than me, I guessed. A beautiful woman, with hair the color mine used to be before my hairdresser had told me I'd look younger if I lightened it, and dark eyes. Olive skin. Long lashes. She had lovely hands, and I could see, watching her take her wineglass, that they were trembling.