After Her (5 page)

We never knew when he'd be back. You couldn't even be mad at him for this—though later, Patty would be. The times we had him made up for all the times we didn't, I used to tell her.

To me, it just seemed too much to expect that a person like our father would hang around a couple of girls like us in a normal way, that we could hold on to him like a regular dad, any more than you'd expect to hold on to a sunset or a breaking wave.

Nobody else had a father like ours. He was like a movie star or an astronaut, like someone you'd expect to see on television, sitting on the couch talking to Johnny Carson, only we were his daughters and he came to our house, just to see us—and as many women as there were who might love him, we knew he loved us more than anyone.

We were his all-time favorites, and we had no doubt we would remain so forever.

S
UMMER 1979.
I
WAS THIRTEEN
years and two months old, and I had just graduated from seventh grade. I didn't have a best friend, but I loved my sister more than anything, though our father came close. I was also in love with Peter Frampton and John Travolta, and when I grew up I planned to be a writer. Possibly an international spy also, or the first female race car driver. I had read
The Diary of a Young Girl
four times, folding over the page on the parts where Anne Frank talked about sex and being angry at her mother, and I was keeping a diary of my own, except that instead of writing about things that really happened, I made stories up, in which the two main themes were tragic love affairs and wild adventures in places I read about in
National Geographic
.

From the one marriage I'd observed closely—my parents' brief, sad union—I had acquired a low opinion of that institution. Marriage opened up the possibility of divorce, and divorce had broken our mother's heart. Divorce took our father away—not only from our mother but from my sister and me too. Now he was always running someplace, swooping down to take us to Marin Joe's, gliding up in front of our house in his blue Alfa Romeo, leaving us breathless.

Then gone again, on one of his cases. Or someplace else, anyway.

Marriage caused divorce, which caused the current situation, which in our mother's case meant she was never happy anymore. If that was where marriage took a person, who needed marriage? I'd rather be the one driving away someplace exciting than the one getting left at home. And anyway, I was going to be a writer. I'd be too busy to get married.

I didn't ever want to have a baby either. (Observing Jennifer Pollack's body after giving birth to Karl Pollack Jr. got me thinking, and changing the diapers of Karl Jr. sealed the deal.) But I counted the years till I'd be old enough to move out of our house and get a better job than babysitting, and buy a convertible, which would be black, not red like everybody else who wanted a convertible. It had also occurred to me to get a tattoo, which was not as common an idea in those days as it became later. And I would travel around the world, having adventures and doing research for my books, and sometimes I'd fly off to some city to meet my fans, and they would stand in a long line to get a copy of my latest bestseller, and when it was their turn to talk with me, they'd say it was the best thing they ever read, besides the diary of Anne Frank, or
To Kill a Mockingbird.

How do you think up all those stories? someone would ask me.

When I was young, I'd say, that's what I did to make life interesting. My sister and I were always looking for a little drama, and if the world didn't provide some, we'd invent it. We could make up stories so real we believed them ourselves.

And then something really did happen, of course. And all we wished for then was that it never did.

 

Chapter Six

I
t was June 21, the summer solstice. We'd been out of school exactly one week. The number one song was “My Sharona,” by the Knack. On the radio station Patty and I listened to, the DJs played it about a hundred times a day. We mouthed the words and danced to it in our room and later, out on the mountain, naked—not entirely clear what the lyrics meant, but recognizing that they were bad.

Sometime around my thirteenth birthday that spring, I had discovered that I liked to feel my heart beating fast. Not owning my convertible yet, I did the best I could to replicate the state of being a person might experience driving very fast on a road with sharp curves and extreme drop-offs. It was like being on drugs, without actually using them.

For me, the wild parts happened mostly in my head, but my sister would try anything. If she saw a sign on a fence that said
NO TRESPASSING—STAY OFF,
she climbed over it. If a boy said she'd be too chicken to take his skateboard down a hill, she hopped on. My job was watching, and thinking up the ideas.

I
T WAS CLOSING IN ON
eight o'clock. We'd spent most of that morning scrounging up change in the house—looking under pillows on the couch, and in the dryer, where we'd managed to come up with a grand total of a dollar eighty-five in quarters, nickels, and dimes. Most of the afternoon had been taken up with walking to the mall and back for the purpose of looking at clothes (not trying any on; that would have seemed beyond our scope) and sharing a Slurpee. Home again, we lay on my bottom bunk for a while, listening to our Rolling Stones record
Sticky Fingers,
eating radishes, and zipping and unzipping the fly on Mick Jagger's crotch that decorated the album cover.

Dinner that night had been SpaghettiOs. No relationship between that food and any meal our father ever created for us, back when he did.

Now we were settling in on our blanket for Drive-In Movie, the
Brady Bunch
hour. We were a little old for the show by this point, or at least I was—and we knew every episode by heart—but watching had become our tradition.

It was a hot evening, the longest day, meaning the sun had not yet fully set, which made it harder to see the images on the television set at Helen's house, and from the looks of things, Helen was opting for
Lawrence Welk
over the exploits of the Bradys that night, which was not good news. (She kept switching back and forth. Watching for when the accordion player she liked came on, most likely.)

So we decided to move our blanket farther along on the hill, to an alternate spot, behind the house of Karl and Jennifer Pollack, who had recently purchased a set even larger than Helen's. Moving our blanket was our version of changing channels.

The show was just starting—those old familiar faces smiling out at us, of all the Bradys smiling either up or down or sideways at each other from inside the grid framing their faces—when the screen went black for a second and a new image replaced the opening of our show. We couldn't actually make out the words on the screen but I knew from past experience this meant they were interrupting the broadcast to announce some kind of emergency, a report of breaking news.

“Maybe there's a wildfire,” I said—always a fear in those days. “Either that or the president got assassinated.”

The next image took us by surprise: it was the face of our father filling the television screen. He was wearing his sport jacket and a tie and standing at a podium in a room that appeared to be filled with reporters.

Our father.
On television.
We didn't even get to see him that much in real life, and now there he was, up on the screen.

We had no idea what he was saying, naturally. His face looked serious, the way it had when Patty broke her arm trying to ride a borrowed skateboard down a hill—first time she'd ever ridden one. Though even now, seeing him this way, I was aware of how handsome our father was. It seemed appropriate that he would be on television, like he belonged there.

“Something bad must have happened,” Patty said. Maybe a bank robbery or a high-speed chase and a crash somewhere out on 101. Only those were more the kind of crimes the ordinary police took care of. Not the detectives.

I had never wished harder that we had cable, so we could watch TV like normal people and know what our father was talking about. This was one time when making up pretend things for a person to be saying on the screen was completely unsatisfactory.

“We could knock on the Pollacks' door and ask if we could watch,” Patty said. Only then they'd know we'd been looking in the window, and anyway, by the time we got through all that, our father would probably be done saying whatever it was he was saying now, and they'd be back to
Brady Bunch.

We could ask our mother what was going on. Only we wouldn't. Long ago we'd learned, whenever possible, to keep her out of things.

So we just sat there, taking it in the best we could: the sight of our tall, strong, handsome father speaking to the reporters. Whatever he was talking about, you could tell it wasn't good news.

Right at this point we heard a low noise overhead, but growing louder, till it was a roar almost directly overhead: a helicopter. The helicopter was hovering over the mountain.

When the special report was over, we gathered up our blanket. But we didn't head back to the house the way we ordinarily would at that hour. Though it was mostly dark by this point, we trudged up the hillside that led to the outer reaches of the open space and the trail—one of dozens—that led to the peak of Mount Tamalpais, and the sound of the helicopter.

Somewhere off in the distance I could make out the static from a two-way radio—police, from the sound of it—and still that roaring engine, and blades spinning, low enough that they actually blew our hair around. A couple of police officers were standing near a trailhead, talking with a group of people carrying flashlights. We walked over to them.

“What's going on?” I asked. Patty, holding the blanket, was pressed up next to me. In situations like this it was up to me to do the talking.

“You two shouldn't be out here,” one of the men said. “A girl went missing on the trail yesterday. At first they were treating it as a runaway, but someone found a bloody sock. They've asked for volunteers to carry out a search.”

“Like maybe a coyote got her?” Patty could only whisper. At least once a year, someone's cat or dog would go missing, and for a few days the neighborhood would be papered with flyers showing her picture and advertising a five-dollar reward. Then the news: another mauled animal body had been found on the mountain. Could be a coyote. Could be a mountain lion or a cougar.

“Dad doesn't investigate when it's animals,” I told my sister. “When they call Dad in, it's because there's been a murder.”

T
HE NEXT DAY THEY FOUND
the body of Charlene Gray lying in a thicket of young madrone just below the Steep Ravine Trail, near where it intersected with Little Salmon Creek. She was twenty-one, newly graduated from San Francisco State, and breaking in a new pair of hiking boots, her boyfriend said, in preparation for a trip the two of them were planning on making down the Pacific Coast Trail.

The details we picked up—that she was naked, except for one sock, with tape over her eyes, and in a position that suggested she'd been on her knees, as if begging—were not the kinds of things our father would ever have shared with us, or our mother either. This information we learned the next day from a girl from my class named Alison Kerwin, who had never shown any interest in being friends, before, but called me up shortly after the press conference—his second in a twenty-four-hour period—in which our father announced that the victim's death had been ruled a homicide.

She was the coolest girl in our class and had been even before the Elvis Costello song. Someone had spread a rumor at school that it was written about her, and a few kids actually believed that.

“I saw your dad on television,” Alison said. “It must be cool having a real detective for a dad.”

When I didn't say anything, she went on.

“The killer raped her too. Sometimes these types of sickos have sex with a person when they're already dead, but my mom said she was probably still alive when he did it. I guess there's some kind of test they do where they can tell the difference, but you probably already know that.”

Again, I said nothing. Mainly because I had nothing to say.

“If anybody ever tries to do that to you,” she said, “you should close your eyes. That way you won't know what they look like and they might not think they had to kill you.

“But your father probably already told you that too,” she added. “And a whole bunch of other tips, I bet. I'd feel really safe having him around right now, with that killer on the loose.”

I didn't mention that my father wasn't around, exactly. Not now, or before the murder either. The difference was that now we could see him on television.

H
E CALLED US THE NEXT
day. It always felt like a big deal, getting a phone call from our father.

“I guess you heard there's been some trouble up on the mountain,” he said. “I don't want you and your sister to be scared, but I know you two like to spend time up there. You need to steer clear of there for a while.”

“We always go on the mountain,” I told him. “That's where we play.”

Only to my father would I admit to playing. At school, most girls spoke of hanging out, but the truth was, I didn't have friends at school, and neither did my sister. Who we had was each other, and we still played together all the time. Mostly on the mountain.

“Just until we get this guy locked up, I need you to keep away from there,” he said. “You need to promise me you'll stay around the yard.”

I said we would, but with my fingers crossed. There was no way Patty and I were going to remain inside all day on our long-awaited summer vacation. Some kids—Alison Kerwin, for instance, and most of the girls in my class at school—hung out at the mall, or the rec center pool, unless they were off at camp or taking trips with their families to Disneyland, or Lake Tahoe, but in Patty's and my case, it was up to us to make up ways to pass the time. The mountain was our favorite place.

“What are we supposed to do, Dad?” I said. Maybe I was hoping he'd suggest we spend a little time with him at his apartment in the city, though I knew this was unlikely.

“Bake cookies. Go to the library. Play Monopoly,” he said. “You're smart girls, you'll think of something. Help your mother. Learn Morse code.”

“What did that guy do to the girl on the mountain?” I asked him. “Was it someone that used to be in love with her, and then she dumped him?”

“You don't need to be thinking about those things, Farrah,” he told me.

He called me that a lot in those days, not that I resembled the actress in any way. But Patty and I liked to pretend we were Charlie's Angels. Sometimes, if we had made up a scenario where we pretended one of our neighbors was really a bank robber, or an international spy, I'd tell her, “Go get him, Bree,” and she'd take off like a shot, though of course she never actually used her jujitsu moves on anybody but our father or me.

“Do you have some good clues?” I said. Our father didn't talk about his cases, but asking was a way of feeling close to him, and special.

“Don't fill your head up with this mess, baby,” he said. “Take it from a guy who does. It's not good for you.”

“I know you'll get him,” I said. “You always do.”

“Just stay off that mountain,” he told me.