After Her (31 page)

Whoever this was moved closer. Close enough that I could make out that it was a woman and that she had a weapon of her own, pointed squarely at the killer, who still had me locked in his grip.

“Drop the gun. Now.” I knew that voice because I'd heard it only hours earlier. It was Gina. My sister.

He did not let go of me. Or of his gun. With his arm still clamped around my neck, he spun sideways to look at her.

She spoke again. “Drop it, shithead. Do you really want to get shot?”

He let go of me. Of me, not his gun. And then he was running, into the darkness. With Gina close behind and closing in.

Then I heard Gina yell from what sounded like a few hundred yards away. “Call 911. He's had a heart attack.”

Suddenly the area was ablaze with light as the police backup she must have called for earlier pulled up—three officers running toward us, blue lights strobing. I could see Gina in the distance, bending over the killer, who lay on the ground, unmoving. She had rolled him onto his stomach and placed her knee in the small of his back. She snapped a pair of handcuffs on him.

Now we could hear the approaching siren. He was still breathing when the ambulance arrived.

“You'll need police coverage with this one,” she said as the EMTs strapped him to a gurney. “He was armed and remains dangerous. Assuming he lives, he'll be looking at charges of kidnapping and attempted murder.”

“Who is this guy, anyway?” one of the medics asked as he looked dubiously at the frail old man with the oxygen mask. “Doesn't look that dangerous to me.”

“You ever heard of the Sunset Strangler?” she said. “Or was that before your time?”

 

Chapter Thirty-seven

T
he name of my abductor and assailant was Kenneth Purdy—age sixty-six, no known address or employer. At the time of his attack on me, it appeared he had been holed up in a series of decommissioned World War II bunkers in the Marin Headlands. Before that he'd been squatting in Golden Gate Park for an unknown period of time.

Kenneth Purdy did in fact suffer what was described as a massive coronary that night he took me across the Golden Gate Bridge at gunpoint, but he survived, and once released from the hospital, where he was kept under guard, he was arraigned on charges of abduction and assault. Later, there would be additional charges: fifteen counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder. That one, to which he confessed first, had been committed in his home state of Oregon. The victim, a woman by the name of Eileen Purdy, had been his mother.

I had to stay around in California to give my statement, and would have returned to testify if there had been a trial, but because of his confession and guilty plea, the D.A. waived trial.

He was sentenced to San Quentin State Prison. Life without possibility of parole.

I
WENT HOME TO
N
EW
Hampshire, where a good man was waiting for me with a pot of marinara sauce from his garden tomatoes.

That summer, we went hiking on Mount Desert Island with Justine, my thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, as we have continued to do, every summer since—and though she is of an age now when many more exciting options exist other than camping with her father and his wife, Justine seems to look forward to these trips and even, from what I gather, to enjoy my company. Give her another year, and this may change. We enjoy these days while we have them.

At night in our tent we tell stories in the darkness. Her father's are about fishing trips he took as a boy, or his great-uncle's farm in northern New Hampshire. As was true with my sister when she'd try to make up some imaginary plot involving the Bradys on Drive-In Movie night, nothing much ever happens in Robert's stories. (He grows a prize zucchini; he almost catches a twelve-pound bass but it slips off his line.) But there is something comforting about this very fact. And about the fact that he has lived a life so singularly lacking in drama.

The stories I tell tend to feature Patty and me and the adventures we had together growing up on the mountain. The deer fetus still in its sac. Ding Dong Ditch and the day we found the record albums. The naked people running through the poppies. The time my sister rode a flattened refrigerator box down the side of the mountain, and the time she did her striptease to “Take Back Your Mink” on the outdoor amphitheater stage to an audience of crows. Some images I do not feature in my stories: My sister, Patty, sailing down Morning Glory Court with Petra on her leash, like the queen of the world. My sister, Patty, dribbling that basketball all the way home. I do not speak about the sound the ball made on the pavement, growing louder as my sister dribbled her way home, or the sound of her breathing in the bunk above me, the quiet comforting presence of her in the night. I do not speak of the silence that roars in my ears sometimes or the space my sister left that no one, however loved, can ever fill.

And then there is this: the absence of that sound. The silence that roars in my ears now that there is no one out there dribbling that ball home.

The person I now speak of as my sister—Gina—has suggested that I write these stories down and put them in a book, but I prefer to reserve them for a select few: My mother, who no longer keeps herself in her bedroom as she did when we were young, and Mr. Armitage, when I see him. I tell my stories to Gina, and to Robert. And Justine.

Justine: the only one of us who makes her stories up from the whole cloth of imagination—a gift I once possessed, but which seems to have dimmed with age. When she tells her stories in the tent, it is in a low and breathless whisper, acting out the different voices of her characters, or pausing to let the full force of an image take hold. It is not an infrequent occurrence for Justine to scare herself so much with her own stories that sometime in the night she'll ask if she can climb into the sleeping bag with her father and me—and because Robert sleeps through anything, I'll be the one to put my arm around her then.

I saw an old man's face just outside our tent,
she tells me
. There was a family of bears, loose from the circus, and they were dancing. Justin Bieber in a coffin. A baby rabbit that, when it opened its mouth, had a set of fangs. A boy—left by his parents years ago, in the woods, and raised by wolves—howling at the moon. A clown who couldn't stop laughing. A bloody hand. A woman with her hair on fire.

It's all right,
I tell her.
Your father is here. So am I. Nothing bad will happen to you.

Or maybe something will. And you'll survive it.

N
OT RIGHT AWAY, BUT AFTER
a few minutes, she falls asleep again, pressed up between the two of us. I lie there in the darkness then, and listen to her breathing, same as I used to on my old bottom bunk, to Patty. My irreplaceable sister.

“Sometimes I worry about these stories of hers,” her father has said to me.

She's almost thirteen, I tell him. She feels everything—fear, pain, as well as joy—five times as much as we do. In a year or two, her world will cease to be so filled with such dark and thrilling possibilities.

This is the good news. And the pity.

She will grow out of it.

 

Acknowledgments

T
wo well-loved and loyal friends made it possible for me to dedicate the better part of a year and a half to the writing of this novel, as I could not have done otherwise. They are Jim Dicke II and David Schiff. Not for the first time, I am in their debt.

Warmest thanks go to my agent, David Kuhn, and the team at Kuhn Projects, who continue to oversee my writing life so wisely and well. My gratitude also to Wayne Beach, an early reader who offered invaluable counsel in the early stages of my work at the Maine Media Workshop. My thanks as well to an unlikely pair of basketball advisers: Juan Manuel Chavajay, of San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala—a man who, at five foot three, stands unafraid of guarding any six-foot-plus American on the courts of Lake Atitlán with his fearless Mayan brand of play—and Paul Bamford, star center-forward on my hometown team at Oyster River High School, who talked me through his shooting style over long-distance all the way from New Hampshire to California.

I also want to express my appreciation for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I traveled on three separate occasions to work, free from the interruptions and distractions of daily life, with the additional extraordinary gift—after a long day's writing—of good food, the inspiring and supportive company of artists, writers, photographers, and musicians, and midnight swims in the VCCA pool.

Some words now about music. For me, nearly every work of fiction I've ever written has had, playing quietly in the background of my brain (or pounding at top volume), an interior sound track—sometimes a passage without words, sometimes a collection of songs. I may play this piece of music a hundred times over the months I'm immersed in my story. I may refer to it in the pages of my book or simply draw on the mood it brings forth within.

For this novel, I knew from the first page what the song was, that captured the mood of thrill and anxiety and sexual pursuit I sought to conjure up. It happened that this song was the number one hit of 1979—the year my story begins. The song is “My Sharona,” performed by the Knack and written by the band's lead singer, Douglas Fieger, and its guitar player, Berton Averre.

Douglas Fieger died in 2010 at the age of fifty-seven. His sister, Beth Falkenstein, along with Berton Averre, displayed great generosity in granting me the rights to reprint lines from “My Sharona”—a deceptively simple and utterly seductive anthem, and one that crystallizes, as well as any rock-and-roll song ever has, maybe, the pounding, driving insistence of a sexual obsession. I wish I could have put this book into the hands of both of the song's authors, and I hope its presence in these pages serves to summon up the mood of that summer—those times, and that age—and to honor the two who wrote it.

Over the many years of my writing life (forty of them, now) it has been among the greatest gifts of my profession to know and befriend a range of readers who have enriched my life and broadened my understanding of so many experiences I would otherwise never have known. One such individual, who first wrote to me over ten years ago, proved to be an invaluable resource and adviser in the writing of this story. He is Detective Luke Daley (very possibly the Chicago Cubs' number one supporter), of the Chicago Homicide Division. When I realized, as I embarked on the writing of this story, how little I knew of a police officer's life, I turned to Luke, and for the year and a half that I continued to work on the story of my fictional detective, it was Luke Daley, again and again, to whom I turned not only for the small but crucial details of a detective's habits (yielding the discovery, for instance, that only on television and in the movies would he wear a shoulder holster; he'd carry his gun on his ankle), but also for what I hope I achieved here, which is a deeper understanding of what it feels like to be confronted, day after day, with death and violence, criminals and victims. Virtually every detail of my fictional detective's description of how he conducts a police interrogation was informed by what Luke Daley told me about how he'd do it—and because of what he told me, I plan to stay on the right side of the law. At least in the state of Illinois.

I want to say something now about the two women who gave me what is, for a writer, the most precious gift: the idea for my story. Living as I do on the side of Mount Tamalpais, I have experienced the mountain as a daily presence—out my window, and under my feet as I hike it—for the seventeen years I've made my home in California. I had been dimly aware for as long as I've lived here that a series of murders once took place on this mountain so close to where I live. But it was two adult sisters—Janet Cubley and Laura Xerogeanes, whom I first met when they showed up in my living room to attend one of my daylong writing workshops—who shared with me the story from their own lives (and largely played out on Mount Tamalpais) that inspired this one. They also gave me their blessing to change as much as I wanted, which I did.

In the year 1979, when Laura and Janet were roughly the ages of the two young sisters in this story, and—like my fictional characters—growing up as the daughters of divorced parents, in Marin County, a real-life serial killer who came to be known as the Trailside Killer did, in fact, haunt the hiking trails of Mount Tamalpais and the surrounding Bay Area. Though many—virtually all—of the real details of that case differ markedly or even totally from those described in these pages, this part is true: Laura and Janet's father, Detective Robert Gaddini, served as the head of Marin County Homicide during the period in which the Trailside Killer remained at large, and headed up the investigation into the murders. Like my fictional detective, Detective Gaddini devoted himself to the case with a tireless and obsessive devotion and suffered deeply the deaths of that killer's victims.

The story I tell in these pages—though a work of fiction—was undeniably inspired by the real one, which the adult Gaddini sisters shared with me, with immeasurable generosity and tenderness. Early on, they filled an entire notebook for me with details from their Marin County girlhood. As a lifelong basketball player, Janet presented me with the gift of my own NBA-approved basketball (and the most patient coaching for its use), before taking me out on her backyard court and setting her sons loose to defend the basket against my not remotely threatening shots. It was under Janet's gentle coaching that I came to understand how it might happen that a girl could fall in love with the sport of basketball.

It is important for me to say here that unlike my fictional detective, Detective Gaddini was never discredited or taken off the case. But it was in another jurisdiction that the Trailside Killer was ultimately arrested and brought to trial, where he was found guilty of five murders and sentenced to the San Quentin State Prision in California. Not long after this, while still in his forties, Robert Gaddini died. Though the official cause of death was lung cancer, it is the belief of his daughters, and the rest of his family (his former wife, Martha, daughter Dana, and son, Frank) that he never recovered from the toll taken by this case.

What first moved me to pursue his daughters' story (or at least, to invent one containing a pair of sisters who witness the cost, in the life of their detective father, of his failure to apprehend a killer) was a single event in the life of the real-life older sister, Laura Xerogeanes. Well into adulthood, but haunted still by the mark the killings had left on her family, Laura chose to visit the man known as the Trailside Killer on death row. It was the story she told me of the need she felt, years after her father's death, to look into the eyes of the killer as an adult woman, and her ultimately unsuccessful goal of extracting from him the confession he had withheld for thirty years, that gave me the idea to write this book.

As one who makes her home in Marin County, in an era when so few children experience the freedom to engage in a single activity not scheduled and programmed into the calendar, I was transported by the picture of a childhood (so unlike my own) in which the children (girls, even!) were left to create their own world of wild and occasionally dangerous adventures. I was moved by the sisters' devotion to their deeply flawed and deeply human father, and most of all, by their devotion—which continues into their adult lives—to each other. At its core, that is the story I wanted to explore in these pages: the story of two powerfully bonded sisters.

I offer humble thanks to the team at William Morrow, most particularly Emily Krump and Ben Bruton, who shepherd my books into publication—and into the hands now holding this volume: those of the all-important reader. Above all, I offer highest respect, supreme gratitude, and affection—once again—to my editor, Jennifer Brehl, who demands more of me than I think I have to offer, and causes me to discover that it was there after all. I have never worked harder for any editor or felt happier to be doing so.

Finally, to the man who offers the wisest counsel, even when not practicing the law, and listened to me in the middle of the night a few dozen times at minimum—when I felt the need to run by him one more possible scenario for the outcome of this case, one more idea for how a pair of girls, ages eleven and thirteen, might succeed in vanquishing a serial killer—and never fails to reassure me that I will get through the dark woods and out into the sunlight: my love always to Jim Barringer.