Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

“As you said, Walter could be counting on this. But what if he’s lying simply for the hell of it? What if he confesses to things he didn’t do and then he’s executed? Is that fair to the families involved?”

Vonnie sat on the soft, fluffy, inevitably overdecorated bed. The room was even more quaint than their famed one in the Martha Washington Inn. Used to five-star hotels, Vonnie had been sneering at every item in the room—the pillows, the crockery, the embroidered samplers on the wall—since their arrival. But now she put her arm around Eliza, something she hadn’t done—well, ever.

“Presumably, he’s cagey enough not to overreach. In total, according to the governor’s people, there are eight missing person cases, from 1980 to 1985, that he conceivably could be linked to, based on geography and opportunity. If he claims anything off that list, then they’re going to decide he’s disingenuous and let this whole thing drop, very quietly. Eliza—you have to sign a confidentiality agreement with the state in order to have this meeting. Frankly, it pisses me off. They have no right to do this. But given that you’ve never wanted to speak about any of this, I didn’t think I was wrong to give that up.”

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. So that’s what it was all about. Vonnie wasn’t wrong, but Eliza felt a strange surge of anger. She had chosen to be silent all these years, but that was her prerogative. How dare someone else impose that condition on her? She felt as she had when she was fifteen, going on sixteen, and all the various adults—prosecutors, judges, even her parents—kept insisting her story was hers to tell, yet instructed her in how and when to tell it.

“Okay, so I sign a confidentiality agreement. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. At least I’ll be telling the truth when I say I can’t speak of it.”

“One more thing—”

Vonnie’s voice sounded dire, but Eliza couldn’t imagine what else she had to impart.

“They wanted to know if you want to be a witness.”

“God, no.”

“That’s what I thought, but I didn’t answer for you on that score. Said okay, conditionally. Look, let’s go to that Caribbean place for dinner if it’s open on Sunday. Go out for dinner and see a girly movie, something you’d never see with Peter or the kids.”

They managed the dinner, but the multiplexes of Richmond were short of the kind of female-bonding experience they desired. They settled for a Batman movie, in what Eliza still thought of as a dollar house, although it cost five. She found it appalling—not because it was loud and violent, and not because it was hard to see, or imagine seeing, the pain in the young actor who had died before the movie’s release, but because in Batman’s world everyone was a vigilante or an amoral opportunist. Each person thought he was right. But wasn’t that true of the less-stylized world in which Eliza now lived? Even Walter, for all his talk of change and redemption, probably had rationalizations for what he had done. But that was the one thing he had spared her. He had never spoken of anything he had done, not even the undeniable fact of Maude’s death, or Holly’s. Why was that?

Because, Eliza admitted to herself, he planned to leave her alive. That was his advantage over her, as much as his strength and brutality. He had decided that he wouldn’t kill her. What might she have done with that knowledge? Could she have saved Holly, after all? Did she have power then that she couldn’t glimpse or fathom? Did she have any now? Less than twenty-four hours ago, only a few people knew what Walter had promised her—or so she believed. Had she walked into a trap? Was she once again making her way up the Sucker Branch, about to stumble on something that she would be better off not seeing, not knowing, wandering too far from the path?

At any rate, it was too late to turn back.

SECURITY AT THE GREENVILLE FACILITYstricter than at Sussex, with checkpoint after checkpoint, search after search. That was to be expected, Eliza supposed, when someone was visiting a place known as the Death House.

But the building itself was a stark contrast to the grimly named facility, a small jailhouse, with a deputy at a desk and just one cell.

“It’s like the old Andy Griffith Show, ”

Eliza said, standing at her taped mark, her eyes fixed on it, not ready to look at the man in the cell. “Where they locked up Otis, the town drunk.”

“If Otis was going to die,” Walter said, his voice pleasant. “If you look to the side, you can see the death chamber.”

She looked to the side. Then—and only then—she looked directly at Walter. Although still quite trim, he was larger than Eliza had expected. Larger and younger. A slight man, he had been obsessed with his height, insisting that he was five nine, when it seemed apparent to five-four Elizabeth that he couldn’t possibly be more than two inches taller than she. Once, Eliza remembered, he had spent a long time studying a catalog photograph of shoes with Cuban heels and asked her what she thought of them. By then, she had spent enough time in his company to know how to disagree with him without seeming to. She told him the shoes were great (they were hideous) but too stylish, so trendy that they would go out of fashion long before he got much wear out of them. Men’s shoes were well made, she told him, parroting something she had heard her father say, choking a little bit at the memory. A man had to buy shoes that endured . Walter and Elizabeth had similar conversations about a cologne he thought would make him irresistible, and whether he should wear a T-shirt and white blazer like Don Johnson on Miami Vice . “Not after Labor Day,” she had advised, wondering if she would be with him when Memorial Day arrived and he once again petitioned for permission to wear linen pants and loafers without socks. He had been a small man and now he seemed to loom above her, despite the chunky heels on her boots. Did adults grow? Had he learned to stand straighter? Or was she drooping in his presence, burrowing into herself?

As for his face—lack of sunlight had its advantages. Walter was pale and remarkably unlined, his green eyes vivid. He had also always insisted, to the point of being boring on the subject, that he was a good-looking man. He wasn’t wrong. Yet he wasn’t right, either. He should have been good-looking. But there was something that caught at the corner of the eye, even when she was fifteen. Not like me, her mind had registered. Not someone I would know .

But then—Holly had made the same judgment about her.

“Hello, Walter,” she said, although she had said it once already, upon entering. “This is my sister.”

Vonnie nodded at him, staring hard, almost rudely. She had never seen him, Eliza realized, not in the flesh. Their parents had, in court, but Vonnie had been away at school.

“Hello, Yvonne,” Walter said, and Eliza was comforted to realize that much of what Walter knew about her came from official documents and newspaper reports and courthouse testimony, where nicknames were seldom used. She had not let Vonnie’s name pass her lips during the thirty-nine days they had spent together. Right now, if he dropped her children’s names to unnerve her, he would probably call them Isobel and Albert . “This is my deputy, who’s also named Walter, although I think you’ll be able to tell us apart. Helpful hint: He’s the one with the gun.”