Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

She was lost enough in her thoughts that she did not notice Barbara LaFortuny’s humpbacked car creeping up behind her. However, Reba did, planted herself and issued one muted, but undeniable bark as the car idled to a stop.

“It’s okay, girl.”

Barbara rolled down her window. She was hard to see in the darkness of the car’s interior, while Eliza was under a streetlamp, exposed. Still, she could make out the various shapes of Barbara’s remarkable hairstyle. All that time, all that effort…did she really think it was attractive? Architecturally impressive, yes, undoubtedly. But attractive? Just because you worked hard on something didn’t make it worth doing.

“Hello, Barbara.”

“I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

Eliza considered this. “In some ways, I am. But I’m more proud of Walter.”

“You have no right to be proud of him. He didn’t do it for you.”

She believed this was true. “Still, he did the right thing, in the end, releasing that statement. Two families now know what happened to their daughters. I just feel sorry for the others.”

“What others? Walter had no other victims, and he never would have been given the death penalty for the two murders to which he did confess, if only because—” Barbara, ever the advocate, ever wound up, always wielding her talking points like a squadron of flying monkeys. If only she could hear anything that others said in the rare spaces she left between her words. Holly, Maude, Dillon, Kelly . Eliza’s ghosts all had names and faces now. She wondered if that meant they might stop visiting her.

“I feel sorry for all the families who pinned their hopes on Walter Bowman, thinking he was the answer to the questions that torment them. As a serial killer, he proved to be something of an underachiever, didn’t he?”

She had hoped she could make a small joke, but all she did was set Barbara off again.

“He wasn’t a serial killer in the classic sense. I really do believe he suffered from a kind of temporary insanity—”

A less kindhearted person might have laughed at Barbara then. Eliza didn’t laugh, but she also couldn’t bear to let her keep talking. “I’m sorry, Barbara.”

“For not doing the right thing?”

“No, I’m sorry you lost someone you love.”

“It wasn’t like that with us.” The more Barbara automatically denied any romantic attachment to Walter, the more Eliza believed it was so. But, as her own parents might have said, Barbara got to be the expert on Barbara.

“I didn’t mean it that way. You cared about him. I think it’s nice that you cared about him.”

“You certainly didn’t. You let him die. You let him die because he knew the truth about you—that you were cowardly, that you are a liar—and now that he’s dead, no one will ever know. That’s why you let him die. To bury your own shame.”

Eliza was angry now and her instinct, upon anger, had always been to flee. Instead she took a second to gather her thoughts. Life isn’t a timed event, as Vonnie said. The clock’s not on you. Take your time. Barbara had no power over her. It turned out no one cared about Elizabeth Lerner after all these years, not really. She and Peter had told Iso about Walter, and they would tell Albie when he was older. Interestingly, the secret had made Iso feel important, in a good way, although she didn’t see any parallels between her secret life and her mother’s, could never be convinced that her string of covert PG-13 text messages was like a bread-crumb trail along the banks of the Sucker Branch, another girl wandering off the path and into something she couldn’t control. Iso was merely proud that her parents acknowledged she was more of a grown-up than Albie.

“Well, Barbara, if you feel that way, you can always call Jared Garrett, send him the other letter that Walter dictated to you, release it to the world at large. Why haven’t you?”

“It’s not what Walter wanted.” Said stiffly, grudgingly. “But I might, one day. I do what I think is right, not what’s easy or expedient.”

“That’s a nice way to be,” Eliza said, meaning it.

She began walking again. A few seconds later, Barbara’s car drove past, as round-shouldered and dejected as a car could be. Eliza wondered why principled Barbara, whose license plate exhorted others to save the bay, hadn’t chosen a hybrid. Everybody wants to rule the world —but only according to his or her own ideas about what mattered. There wasn’t a principled position that couldn’t be followed to an extreme where it then clashed with someone else’s equally fervent beliefs. Eliza studied the stars above her, wished she knew the constellations, as Peter did, that she could identify more than the Big Dipper and the North Star. To her, the stars were simply random points of light. Some bright, some dim. Some far, some relatively near. Some lucky, some unlucky.

She let herself and Reba in through the kitchen door, listened to the cheerful beep-beep-beep of the security system, which signaled that a door had opened. They used the system religiously, but it wouldn’t be enough if anyone was determined to do them serious harm. There would never be enough alarms and walls and dogs and gates and spyware to protect one’s self and one’s family. Beep-beep-beep. It was like being guarded by the Road Runner.

But then—the Road Runner was pretty resilient.

“You know what I would like to do tonight?” she asked Peter, who had barely glanced up at the door’s chime, so intent was he on his laptop, the work he had brought home.

“Find a Rita’s that serves this late in the season?”

“No.” She laughed, thinking of Rita’s scarlet neon promise. ICE * CUSTARD * HAPPINESS. Could happiness really be that simple? Maybe it could be, if she only would let it. Certainly, if unhappiness came for her family again— when it did, because no one got a lifelong pass, no one, even Trudy Tackett would discover now that all life’s banal tragedies were waiting for her—there would be little solace in having been on guard all along, wary and pessimistic. She would just feel stupid for having missed so many custards.

“No, I’m not hungry. Plus, I have my secret stash of biscuits if I need a treat.”

“I thought Iso found them. Again.”

“She did. And I hid them. Again.”

“What, then?” Peter pulled her into his lap. “Name your heart’s desire and I’ll give it to you.”

She did not feel the need to tell him she could do this for herself. And, in fact, she might need his assistance, given what paint and humidity could do to a house over the years. Did they have a straight razor? A paint scraper to use as a pry? Her mind inventoried the contents of various drawers, then spread to every corner of the house. Iso would be in her room, doing lord knows what, Reba at her feet, enthralled by Iso’s contempt for her. In the next room, Albie should be in bed, radio on, night-light off. Indifferent to baseball throughout the summer months, he had decided suddenly and arbitrarily that he was a fan of the Arizona Diamond-backs. He now listened to something called “hot stove baseball” as he fell asleep, then came to the breakfast table with breathless tales of pitchers and free-agent signings. From T. rex to A-Rod in the blink of an eye. Here was Peter, warm beneath her, capable of holding her weight without complaint. But she could hold his, too, if it came to that.

“Tonight—tonight, I’d like to sleep with the windows open.”

THIS BOOK, LIKE MANY I’VEwritten, was inspired by a true crime. But this time I’m not going to mention it. For one thing, the real case is unrecognizable, even to those who know it well, in this particular incarnation. And it involved the sexual abuse of a minor. There are many other key differences, but to enumerate them would be to make this a guessing game, which is not my intention. The bottom line is that there once was a man who raped and killed his victims, with one exception, and that man was put to death for his crimes. One day I got to thinking about the exception, the sole living victim. That’s all you need to know about the book’s origins.