Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

“I have to admit,” Peter said, “I didn’t remember who Trudy Tackett was. She’s one of the relatives, right.”

“Holly,” Eliza said. “Holly’s mother.”

“Oh.” Peter knew Holly’s significance. Or thought he did. “It could be a coincidence. She doesn’t necessarily know that Walter has been in touch with you.”

“What did Blanding say? It’s an office, like any other. People gossip. Someone at the prison could have told her.”

“About the calls. Not about the visit, because it hasn’t been arranged.”

“For all we know, they listen in on his phone calls.”

Bereft of chores, she sat on the bed.

“I would think she wouldn’t care, one way or another. Her daughter’s murder at least ended in a trial, with a death sentence. What more can she want?”

Eliza shrugged, as if in agreement. But she was thinking: So much more. She wants so much more. She wants me to be dead, and her daughter to be alive.

They had spoken only once. It was the second day of Eliza’s testimony, and she had eaten something that disagreed with her. It wasn’t nerves; her father was felled by the same waves of nausea, this odd feeling of wanting to throw up but not producing anything. About midway through the afternoon, they broke for a recess and Eliza had rushed to the nearest bathroom. She still couldn’t get anything to come up, no matter how much she retched.

When she came out of the stall, Trudy Tackett was standing there. She was a pretty woman. Of course, she seemed ancient to Eliza at the time. Funny, because Mrs. Tackett was younger than Inez. But her suit was unusually formal, even for court, and she wore very thick, unbecoming makeup.

“I’m Holly’s mother,” she said.

Eliza nodded. She was under strict instructions not to speak to any of the spectators, and she assumed that Holly’s mother knew the rules. She didn’t want to be rude, but she didn’t want to do anything wrong. That could lead to a mistrial, the last thing she wanted.

“She was younger than you,” her mother said. “A month away from her fourteenth birthday, in fact. We were going to have a lovely party.”

Eliza widened her eyes to signify that she thought this a nice idea, a lovely party. She wanted to leave, but Mrs. Tackett stood squarely in her path, and Eliza couldn’t see how to go around her without being rude.

“I mean, I know Holly looked like she was sixteen or eighteen. Don’t you think we knew that? Her father and her brothers spent most of their lives with their fists balled up, ready to hit men just for looking at her. But she was playing with dolls as recently as two years ago. She wasn’t in a hurry to grow up, like some girls. She certainly didn’t worship Madonna.”

That was one of those stray details that had become something so much larger than it was—the hair ribbon, the gloves and boots Eliza was wearing when she was kidnapped. Now she was defined by those things, and she could barely remember them.

“I didn’t worship her,” she said, feeling misunderstood. “I…liked her. I liked her style.”

Her current role models were Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, high-necked blouses and big skirts, brooches and pearls.

“You should have taken care of her,” Mrs. Tackett said. “You were older. You knew what was going on.”

“I couldn’t…I didn’t…”

“You should—”

Another woman pushed her way into the bathroom just then, and Eliza escaped. She never spoke to Mrs. Tackett again, although she felt her eyes on her, the day of closing arguments. (She had not wanted to attend, but the prosecutor had said it would look bad if she wasn’t there.)

She always felt that Mrs. Tackett had been interrupted just as she was about to say the words that Eliza feared the most: You should be dead. Everyone knows that you’re the one who should be dead and Holly should be alive. You let her die so you might live.

LIKE THE LOVELORN TEENAGERshe never was, Trudy kept returning to Elizabeth Lerner’s neighborhood—the scene of the crime—over and over again. She would get in her car, intent on nothing more than buying a carton of milk or dropping off Terry’s dry cleaning and, next thing she knew, she was crossing the Potomac in a trancelike state. And once a river was crossed…well, everyone knew that saying. She did this one, two, three times, and ended up stuck in horrible traffic jams one, two, three times. On her fourth trip, she surfaced from a long blank spell just in time to apply her brakes and avoid rear-ending the car in front of her.

Then she discovered that she could walk to the local Metro stop and take the train all the way up to Bethesda, changing only once, in downtown D.C. It was a long journey, but the D.C. Metro was reliably neat and orderly, and it wasn’t dangerous to zone out on the subway; all she risked was missing her stop. But she never missed her stop. In sensible walking shoes, ones purchased for a London trip taken in dutiful honor of their thirtieth anniversary, Trudy made her way to Elizabeth Lerner’s house, hoping—for what? A glimpse of her? A confrontation? Could she really walk up to the woman and ask to know why she had not called Trudy? It had been only a week, give or take. But Trudy believed that Elizabeth would have called within the first twenty-four hours if she had intended to respond at all. Why was she ignoring her?

She had not told Terry about these trips. He wouldn’t forbid her to make them, but he wouldn’t approve, and she found that she still cared about his approval, more or less. She had gone back to hiding her cigarette smoking, for example, and continued to pretend she was taking her Lipitor. When would those subterfuges catch up with her, if ever? If Terry confronted her—difficult to imagine, but it had happened a few times during their marriage—she would say she was trying to even the actuarial odds, given their genders and the age difference. She was tired of outliving people. She felt as if she were going to outlive everyone—her husband, her sons, her grandchildren.

Everyone except Walter Bowman.

The prosecutor said there was no way he could get a stay this time. There may be some pro forma filings at the last minute, an assertion that lethal injection was cruel and unusual, but those would be token protests, lawyers earning their money. Still, it had been disturbing when that one man had been given a stay just last month and the Supreme Court had agreed to hear his petition. Third time’s the charm, Terry said grimly.

Unless Elizabeth Lerner had something up her sleeve. Why else would she be talking to Walter? Perhaps she was going to make some big show of forgiveness, issue a public statement about her opposition to the death penalty, make Terry and Trudy the bad guys.

Setting a brisk pace, Trudy began her walk around the neighborhood. She drew absolutely no attention. It had been a long time since Trudy had attracted attention, and she liked to think she had been gracious about that transition. Married young, the first three pregnancies coming so swiftly, she felt she had been on a shelf since her twenties. Interestingly, around the time that Holly entered adolescence—Trudy was in her late thirties, then—she had a second flowering. And although Holly had started drawing increasingly sexualized attention about the same time, Trudy had not felt competitive with her daughter. Quite the opposite. Like a good tennis partner, Holly elevated Trudy’s game, inspired her to take more care with her appearance. Her marriage picked up a little charge, especially as Holly began to attend sleepovers and they had the house to themselves for the first time since, well, the first nine months of their marriage, before the arrival of Terry III. Although she was, reflexively, a Democrat, Trudy had felt secure in Reagan’s America, secure in Middleburg. It had been a prosperous time, and the bad news—Lebanon, famine, the Unabomber, the Mexico City earthquake, Leon Klinghoffer—seemed so very far away. Or, in the case of AIDS, based on other people’s decisions. Terry’s gaze was the only one she craved.