Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

Inez put a hand on Manny’s arm, almost as if she feared he would try to do to the prosecutor the things he said he wanted to do to Walter. But, of course, he stayed in his chair.

“The only thing we’ve instructed our daughter to do,” Inez said, “is tell the truth. Tell the truth, and not look for reasons this happened to her, because there are no reasons.”

“That’s a nice thing to tell your daughter and probably very helpful,” the prosecutor said, trying to scoot back to their side, reunite the team. Yea, Eliza! Boo, Walter! Only he had slipped, revealed his true loyalties, and Eliza knew she could never trust him again. “But jurors will want reasons. I’m trying to anticipate the worst-case scenario. I’m sure things will work out.”

Things did, at least as far as the prosecutor was concerned. Walter’s defense attorney was far from expert, and he treated Eliza with an almost bizarre politeness, as if she had a condition that should not be referenced directly. No, it was the prosecutor who asked her about the trip to McDonald’s, and made her tell, in excruciating detail, what Walter did to her the night after Holly died. It was Jared Garrett, a few months later, who devoted a large section of his book to the theory that Elizabeth Lerner might have been Walter Bowman’s girlfriend and coconspirator, whom he decided not to implicate for reasons known only to him, given that he never testified. If Elizabeth had been raped, why was Walter allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of kidnapping and assault? Garrett cited no sources for his theories, asserting only that there was a “school of thought” that Elizabeth Lerner may have evolved into something more than a hostage. “School of thought!” Vonnie had snorted. “There’s only one student in that school and he’s the village idiot.”

It didn’t matter. By the time Garrett’s book was published, the sordid imaginations attracted to his kind of journalism had moved on. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker was terrorizing Los Angeles; two dead girls in the Mid-Atlantic simply couldn’t compete. The crimes of Walter Bowman had been eclipsed even in Virginia, where a high-achieving college student had enlisted her German boyfriend in the murder of her parents. Elizabeth Lerner was Eliza Lerner, enrolled in a new high school in a new county, her hair back to its natural color and curly disorder. Nobody knew her past, nobody cared.

OR WAS IT THE OTHER WAYaround: nobody cared, so nobody knew? Sitting at her kitchen table more than two decades later, Eliza found herself taunted by that question. Was it so unthinkable that Walter Bowman might have chosen her over Holly? She knew what her parents would say: Walter was mentally ill, incapable of any genuine feeling. Walter was a sociopath. Walter had not chosen anyone.

Yet he had, and only he knew why. Whatever he wanted now—and she had known from the first letter that he would not be satisfied with a one-sided contact, that his very words “I’d know you anywhere” were meant to remind her of a marker on a very old debt—she wanted something from him, too. She needed to ask: “Why me?” Was that wrong? Was it ego-driven, irrational? Did the very question desecrate the memories of the others, and if that was the case—then so what? Wasn’t she entitled to ask that question, in private, of the one person who actually could tell her if there was a reason she was alive?

But if she dared to ask Walter that question, she had to be prepared for other answers, less pleasant ones. She had to confront the fact of the girl who walked into McDonald’s, focused on nothing but ketchup and pickles. She had to think about what happened later that night. “We have to go,” he’d said, and they went, breaking camp in silence. As they drove down the long switchback in the dark, he handed her Holly’s metal box, now empty, all those well-intentioned dollars gone, some for food, the rest crammed into Walter’s pocket. “Toss it,” he said, grunting with disapproval at how ineptly she hurled the box from the truck. “You can’t throw for shit.” It was rare for him to use profanity, and the word felt like a slap.

The box was found a few days later, helping searchers pinpoint the campsite that Elizabeth had described for them, and then Holly’s broken body on the other side of the mountain. Elizabeth was praised for being cagey enough to let this potent clue fall close to the roadside.

But perhaps Walter had it right: She just couldn’t throw for shit.

THE NEW PHONE SATin the alcove off the master bedroom on an end table rescued from her parents’ basement. Eliza had been shocked at how much resistance the local phone company had given her about adding a second, dedicated line to the house, but perhaps that was because she wanted the most basic package possible, with no extras and a limited number of outgoing calls a month. Why not get a cell phone? the helpful young woman at Verizon had queried. Or just use your call-waiting feature? Why indeed? She could get a cheap, disposable mobile, toss it when—well, whenever. She knew that what she wanted wasn’t exactly logical, but it made sense to her. She wanted to limit Walter’s access to her, her home, to one slender wire, one no-frills touch-tone telephone. It was bad enough that he was the one who called her, and collect at that. She could at least pick the instrument and set the time frame for when he was allowed to call, ten to two weekdays, when the house was empty.

The children had been curious about the new phone, drawn to it as children are drawn to any novelty, but its lack of features quickly dampened their interest. They had been told that this was an outgoing line for emergencies only. Peter had gilded the lily by claiming Homeland Security recommended Washington-area residents have old-fashioned desk phones, ones that did not require electrical outlets. Unfortunately, this inspired falsehood inflamed Albie’s imagination, and there was another round of nightmares. Eliza was exhausted in a way she had not been since Iso was a colicky infant, moving through the days under the fog of a constant headache.

Yet the telephone remained silent. There was, apparently, not a little bureaucracy involved in talking to a man on death row. For every rule that Eliza had invented—the dedicated line, the hours during which Walter was allowed to call—the Department of Corrections had far more. Or so Barbara LaFortuny informed them when she had taken the new number and forwarded it to Walter. It was a week since they had installed the phone, and it had rung exactly once, sending its full-chested sound through the house.

It was an automated service, claiming that her car warranty was about to expire.

Now the phone sat, beige and squat, utterly utilitarian. It was, in fact, almost identical to the phone that the Lerner family had installed in the “phone nook” in the Roaring Springs house, although that phone had seemed terribly sleek and modern at the time. Manny and Inez, permissive in most things, felt the telephone was an incursion on family life, and they insisted on having only two extensions, one in their bedroom and the other in the hall. The girls could speak as much as they wanted, but it would be in the hall, with no chair, only the scratchiest of rugs on which to rest.

Vonnie, undaunted by the public venue, sat cross-legged in front of the hall phone as if it were Buddha or Vishnu. She stalked, she paced, she sometimes even put it on the floor and circled it, almost as if it were a campfire around which she was dancing. Fierce Vonnie, who was happy to march under the flag of feminism, saw no irony or contradiction in boy craziness. She was a passionate person, someone who lived a big life with big emotions and ambitions, and reaped big rewards as a consequence. Germaine Greer—the early Germaine Greer, the feminine eunuch posing in her bikini—was her role model. It was hard for Eliza to say Vonnie had been mistaken in her self-image. Never married, largely by choice, she had enjoyed affairs with an impressive assortment of men. Older, younger, richer, poorer. One or two were famous, most were wildly successful, and even the slackers were interesting, creative types. Vonnie had a big life, something out of the novels that Eliza preferred, the ones that managed to be respectable while still being replete with all the lifestyle details—clothes, food, home furnishings—that were disdained in so-called sex-and-shopping novels.