Laura Lippman Read online

  “I mean, I assume you know his story and mine. Which means you know he’s not someone I’ve been in contact with, ever.”

  “Do you think he deserves to die for what he did?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. He was sentenced to die for the murder of Holly Tackett, and her parents made it clear that they approved of the death penalty. I wasn’t consulted.”

  “Wasn’t your mom a Quaker?”

  “Grandmother,” she said, unnerved by this piece of information. Was it something she had told Walter? They talked a lot, during the weeks they’d spent together, but she had been careful not to reveal much. Even at the age of fifteen, she had been shrewd enough not to encourage Walter’s envy and resentment, and she had recognized, if only in the wake of her capture, that her family was eminently enviable. She had avoided telling him that her parents were psychiatrists, for example, much less that her mother worked with the criminally insane. She described her home as average, an aging split-level on the south side of Frederick Road, the better to throw him off the track if he ever made good on his threats. She had no memory of discussing her gentle grandmother, who attended the Quaker meetinghouse in North Baltimore and thought the girls should attend the Friends School, despite the distance from their house. She had even offered to pay their tuition.

  Later—after—that option had been raised again, sending Elizabeth-now-Eliza to Friends, perhaps having her live with her grandmother during the week. But Eliza was the one who vetoed it. She wanted to go to a larger school, not a smaller one. She needed to be someplace where being new wouldn’t attract as much attention.

  “I bet your grandmother wouldn’t want Walter to be executed.”

  “This conversation is…unsettling to me,” Eliza said. “I’m sure you can understand that. I’m going to need to let you go.”

  It occurred to her that she was being kinder to this woman—why hadn’t she offered her name—than she would have been to a telephone solicitor.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, with a sincerity that robbed Eliza of any self-righteousness she might have felt. “I get carried away. Walter would be the first person to tell you that. He’d be mad, if he knew that I had upset you. It’s just—there’s so little I can do. For him. Putting him in touch with you, it’s one of the rare times I could do him a solid.”

  Do him a solid. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that phrase.

  “He would be angry at me, for pressing you. That’s not his way. He would love to talk to you. But he would be the first one to say that he doesn’t want to bother you.”

  “Does he want to talk to me about something in particular?”

  “No,” the woman said. “He feels bad. He knows he’s going to die. He accepts that. He’s been on death row longer than anyone in Virginia. Did you know that? He’s seen other men come and…go. I think he started to believe his turn would never come, but his case was so unusual. As you know.”

  Eliza wasn’t sure that she did know the ways in which Walter’s case was unusual, but she refused to be drawn into this conversation.

  “Could I have your name?” she asked the woman.

  “Why?” Suspicious, skeptical. Eliza wanted to laugh. You call me, on Walter’s behalf, you make it possible for him to write to me, and you question my motives?

  “Because I’m going to think about this and call you back.”

  “You better not be up to anything,” the woman warned. “Don’t make trouble for us. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  This is silly, Eliza thought, thinking for the first time to look at the caller ID feature on her phone. Blocked. “This is silly,” she said. “You called me. You have asked for, well, an enormous favor and demanded an immediate reply. All I want is time to think about it.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” the woman said. “Early next week. We don’t have much time, you know.”

  12

  1985

  THE HAIR RIBBON, WALTER THOUGHT when he read the Baltimore papers two mornings later. That goddamn Madonna-inspired hair ribbon. When had it fallen off? Had she been sly enough to drop it on purpose when he pulled her into the truck? He had remembered to grab her boots, thinking she would need shoes, and those would have to do until he could get her more practical ones. No matter. Searchers had found the ribbon, and then they had found the grave. The paper, running a day behind events, said the body had not yet been exhumed, but as soon as it was uncovered, they would know it wasn’t her. The body had probably already been unearthed and identified, while he sat here with scorched coffee and runny eggs.

  He was in a truck stop in western Maryland, near the fork where one had to choose whether to keep going west, toward Cumberland, or head north into Pennsylvania. East, toward Baltimore, was out of the question. Head north, head north, head north, his brain told him, then west. But his truck had West Virginia plates, and it was a funny thing, one didn’t see them much on the open road, away from his home state. And he had been looking for those blue-and-gold plates, he realized. True, they probably weren’t quite as rare on the Ohio Turnpike, but he was still reluctant to go that way, in part because he had never been that way. He wasn’t adventurous, he realized now. He thought he had yearned to travel, to see places far beyond where he grew up, but now all he wanted was to go home. Only he couldn’t. Not with her, and maybe not at all, ever again. What would he tell his parents about the time he went missing? Whatever he did with her, he would have to answer a lot of questions.

  Elizabeth was flipping through the selections on the mini-jukebox set up on the table. Just thirty-six hours into their acquaintance, as he thought of it, she had already learned to speak when spoken to, not to yammer away about every little thing in her head. She had good manners, actually. This morning, she had ordered scrambled eggs and an English muffin, but accepted without complaint the fried eggs and wheat toast that came in their place. The waitress was a knockout in training, with flame-colored hair and a terrific figure, and Walter could tell she was used to not getting things right and facing no consequences. He had wanted to call her back, dress her down, but Elizabeth had said, “No, I’m fine.” It was clear from how she nibbled only the whites around the yolk that she wasn’t fine, but he admired her niceness. The waitress, all of nineteen or twenty, looked through him. Did she think Elizabeth was his girlfriend? Or that he was her father? Brother and sister, he decided. That would be the most believable play, the simplest.

  The smarter move, he knew, would be to kill her. Kill her, get rid of the body—don’t even bother to dig a grave this time, just leave her somewhere inaccessible, there was still plenty of wilderness out here—and go home. Tell his folks he’d been on a fishing trip, had some car trouble, had to wait for a part, didn’t want to call collect and couldn’t afford to dial long-distance because he was saving every penny to pay the mechanic in cash. There was nothing to connect the girl back in Patapsco State Park to him, or any other girl. This girl was the only one who could hurt him.

  Yet there was something about her, struggling to choke down her eggs, that reminded him of someone. She’s like me, he thought. She’s polite and nice, she does her best, and people don’t hear her, don’t pay attention.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

  She was in the habit of thinking before she answered him. He realized this was partly because she was weighing everything she said, intent on pleasing him. That was good.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Well, how old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “That’s too young for a boyfriend.” He knew that he had attempted to go with girls her age, or not much older, but there was fifteen and then there was fifteen. She was the first kind.

  “There was a boy, at this camp I went to last summer, and we were kind of boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t really count at camp because you don’t make plans.”

  “What do you mean?” He honestly didn’t have a clue what
she meant, and he hoped her answer might shed some light on one of the many things that baffled him when it came to women.

  “Well, at camp, there’s a schedule. No one can invite you to go anywhere—to a movie, or the mall, or even a McDonald’s. So you sit on the bus together, or swim together, and you hold hands”—she blushed at this. Maybe he was wrong, maybe she had done more than he realized. “It’s not a date, and it ends when camp ends. He called me, once, but we didn’t really have anything to talk about. I wrote him letters, and he never wrote back.”

  “Yeah, I see your point.” He didn’t, not really, but he didn’t have anything to contribute, so he wanted to move on. “Look, what would you do, if I just got up right now, paid the check, went out to my truck, and started driving?”

  Again, she did not answer right away.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “I guess I’d ask the people if I could use their phone, make a collect call, and I’d call my parents, tell them where I was.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Sort of. Not exactly. But the people here, they would tell me, right?”

  He looked around. “Lower your voice,” he said. “I’m serious.”

  She flinched. It was amazing how easily he could control her. He liked it.

  “I’d call my parents collect,” she whispered, “and then I’d wait for them to come get me.”

  “What’s my truck look like?”

  “Red.”

  “Make? Model?”

  She needed a second to understand that question, then shook her head. “I haven’t noticed.”

  “License plate?”

  “I haven’t paid attention.”

  She was a shitty liar. “Elizabeth.”

  She hung her head, whispered the plate numbers.

  “Look,” he said, “I have to keep you with me.”

  “I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “If that’s what you need me to do, I’ll do it.”

  “No, you would tell. Because you think it’s the right thing, and I can see that you’re the kind of person who tries to do the right thing. Like me. The thing is—I didn’t really do anything. It’s just that, no one’s going to believe that. This girl, she tried to get out of my truck while it was moving, she fell and hit her head.”

  It sounded plausible to him, now that he had said it. It absolutely could have happened just as he said, and who would believe him? It was so unfair.

  “But no one’s going to believe that, right?” He saw that Elizabeth didn’t believe it. Her face was interesting that way. Some people would call her an open book, but Walter didn’t think that expression was quite apt. An open book, glimpsed, was only words on a page, and you couldn’t make out the whole story. Her face was like…fish in an aquarium, all her thoughts and feelings on display, but moving kind of lazily, not in a rush to get anywhere.

  “I didn’t mean any harm,” he tried, and this had the virtue of truth, or was at least more in the neighborhood of truth, but he could see she was still dubious. “I’ve made some mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. People just don’t listen, you know? Girls. They don’t listen. They’re in too much of a hurry, all the time.”

  “We read this book, Of Mice and Men, in seventh-grade G-and-T English,” she began.

  “G and T?”

  “Oh, um, gifted and talented. But it’s my only G-and-T class.” She was embarrassed to be caught bragging. She hadn’t realized she was bragging at first, but now she was owning up to it. That was important. “Anyway, there’s a man in it, he doesn’t mean any harm, but he’s really strong, and when his hand gets tangled in this girl’s hair, he’s just trying to calm her down, but he breaks her neck.”

  “And what happened to this guy?”

  A long pause. “Well, he was simple. What people call retarded, sometimes, although my parents don’t like that word.”

  “It’s just a word.”

  She shot him a look, as if on the verge of contradicting him, then changed her mind. “That’s true. It’s just a word.” He liked that, the way she repeated after him. “He couldn’t understand the things he did. He never meant to harm anyone or anything. Once, he petted a puppy to death.”

  “People who hurt dogs are the lowest of the low.”

  “But he wasn’t trying to hurt the dog. He was just petting it. He didn’t know how strong he was. That was his problem.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He could see her considering a lie, then rejecting it. “His friend killed him. He was too pure for this world. That’s what my teacher said. He was forever a child, but in a man’s body, and he couldn’t live in this world.”

  He was taken with that phrase. Forever a child, in a man’s body. It touched on something he felt about himself. Not being a child, of course. He was the opposite of simple. He was complicated. That was his problem, most likely. He was too complicated, too thoughtful, too full of ideas to have the life that people expected him to have. He should have been born somewhere intense, interesting, not in a little town where people didn’t have get-up-and-get. Dallas, for example, which struck him as a place that rewarded ambition and masculinity. All the men on that television show, even the wimpy ones, were men’s men, big and strong. Maybe they should go to Dallas.

  And it would have to be “they,” at least for a while. He couldn’t let her go, but he also couldn’t do anything more definitive, not yet. That was the downside of spending too much time with someone, especially someone whose fears and dreams swam across her face. It was like naming the Thanksgiving turkey. Not that a name had ever kept him from petitioning for the drumstick, come the day.

  “Do you know more stories?” he asked her. “Like the one you just told, only maybe happier?”

  “Well, the same guy who wrote that, he drove around the country with his poodle, Charley. I mean, for real.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “You can tell me while I’m driving.”

  He let her use the bathroom, having checked ahead of time that it was a one-seater without a window to the outside, and there was a cigarette machine in the hallway, so he didn’t look odd, waiting there, pulling on the various handles, fishing for change. Once, when he was thirteen, he had found seventy-five cents in the pay phone at his father’s gas station, and that had seemed miraculous to him. A waitress—not the redhead, but an older woman—glanced back at him, curious, and he said, just thought of it out of the blue: “Her first, um, time, you know? With her ladies’ issues? And our mama’s dead and she’s freaking out.”

  “Poor thing. Should I ask her if she needs help?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. She’s shy. That would just make it worse.” The woman smiled, pleased with him. Maybe having a little sister would make him seem less threatening to women. Of course, this waitress was old, dried up, but maybe other women, women his age, would be charmed by a man taking care of his sister.

  The pay phone gave him an idea, and he asked the waitress if she could change five dollars for him. He called his father’s shop and spoke to C.J., the woman who kept the books and answered the phones. He had joined the Marines, he told her. Sold the truck to a friend, cashed out his bank account, what little there was of it. (Later that day, he would hit an ATM—take whatever it would give him—or find a branch that might cash his check.) No, please don’t call his father to the phone. He would only yell. About his truck, not about his only son and coworker going off to join the Marines.

  He hung up and listened to the various plumbing sounds, asking when she came out: “Did you wash your hands?” She shook her head, and he sent her back. She was a good girl. She would do whatever he told her to.

  13

  “THAT’S ENOUGH,” PETER SAID, when Eliza told him about the phone call the next morning as he prepared coffee for the enormous travel mug he toted to work each day. (She had been asleep when he arrived home, and although she roused when he slid into bed next to her, she hadn’t wa
nted to attempt a serious conversation so late. Besides, they had fallen in the habit of using Peter’s breakfast, that quiet lull after the children had left for school, to catch up.) “Who’s his lawyer? That should be easy enough to find out.”

  “You’ll be late,” she said.

  “This is worth being late for.”

  Within five minutes on the computer and another five on the telephone, Peter was demanding to speak to Jefferson D. Blanding, an attorney with a nonprofit in Charlottesville. Eliza couldn’t help being thrilled by the way her husband came to her defense. It was one of the qualities she had admired in him, even when they were nothing more than friends. Peter took charge of everything and everyone, not just her. He didn’t have to be the boss, but when certain situations came to a head—a disagreement with someone over a bill, a contractor who refused to do what he had promised, a mix-up at an airline ticket counter—Peter took over. He was forceful without being rude, intent on finding solutions, as opposed to venting his anger in a bullying way. In England, this part of him had become a little muted, so it was particularly exciting to see it engaged again, and on her behalf.

  “He was actually very nice, once he understood why I was calling,” Peter said. “I got the sense that he was even a little horrified, although he put it on the woman. He said she’s well meaning, but in over her head.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Barbara LaFortuny.”

  “No.”

  Peter laughed. “Yeah, and he swears it’s her real name. Sounds like a stage name for some exotic dancer.”

  Eliza thought about the voice on the phone, the vinegary rasp. “How old a woman?”

  “I didn’t ask, but I had the sense she’s in her forties or fifties. She was a schoolteacher in Baltimore city and she was attacked on the job several years ago, by a student with a knife. She won an undisclosed settlement from the system because the school had refused to remove the kid from her classroom despite repeated warnings. You think that would tilt her toward victims’ rights, but instead she became an advocate for prisoners. Got interested in conditions in state prisons, then began looking at the death penalty. Somehow came to befriend Walter.”