Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

GIRL: (long pause) No, I guess not. I was just mad. I just wanted someone to talk to.

TED: Call me anytime you are sad.

GIRL: I’m sad a lot. I don’t know what time you work.

TED: I’ll give you my home number.

After the conversation was over, Ted set down the phone and swiveled his chair to face one of the other operators on the line, a pretty young woman with blond hair and light eyes.

“Ted Bundy, I should report you for giving out your phone number to that girl,” Iris O’Neal said, nearly wagging her finger in Ted’s direction.

Ted grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Iris. It just came out.”

“Well, I won’t turn you in,” she said, looking over at another of the counselors, a Goody Two-shoes who walked around with a clipboard marking down everything that happened on the lines.

“Thanks. Why not?” he asked.

Iris smiled. “Because I know you. I know that you can’t help but empathizing with these callers. You just can’t help but do good, Ted. You’ll be a legend around here, long after you’re gone.”

She’d thought about her way out of wherever she was from the moment she’d regained consciousness. Every conceivable scenario ran through Emma’s first groggy and confused, then sharper and more determined, mind. She considered a myriad of remedies she could pursue to subdue her captor, that is, if she could only get close enough to strike. Emma didn’t have many weapons at her disposal in the so-called apartment. There was the gooseneck lamp, of course. It was the most likely candidate. The teenager imagined how the fixture could do double duty. She could pick it up, hide it behind her back, and when the moment was right strike him over the head with it. In her mind’s eye in that scenario, her captor would fall to the floor after a single blow. She was a better hitter than Alex Rodriguez. She’d been infatuated with the ballplayer before he became a Yankee. She was sure, like A-Rod, she could swing, swing hard, over the fence. He’s out! Dead. Home run! Then, Emma believed with complete certainty, she would be able to take the cord and wrap it around her abductor’s veiny neck, cutting off his air supply until he was absolutely, positively, for sure, dead. When he was dead she felt pretty sure no one would blame her. Although he hadn’t raped her, she would say that he did-as if being held hostage God-knows-where wasn’t enough of a reason to kill him.

She looked around the dimly lit space. The only other weapon was the bucket that she’d used as a toilet. She’d like to drown the pig in the stinking bucket, but as disgusting and fitting as that was, it wasn’t practical. Her captor emptied it every other day. He filled it with fresh bleach-water and made her lay on the mattress while he took it and brought it back. She remembered how she’d been so embarrassed that someone had seen her feces in a bucket, but that kind of modesty was over by the first or second day. When Emma Rose came to grips with the fact that she had but one chance to get out of there she vowed not to blow it.

She just wasn’t sure when that chance would present itself.

Emma lay still on the mattress listening. For a second she thought she heard the voice of Ellen DeGeneres. Yes, it is Ellen! She loved Ellen’s show and the comedienne’s voice calmed her. She listened more carefully. She was pretty sure that the man who held her captive had gone out. If he was out, then maybe there was someone else in the house. Someone, somewhere, watching Ellen. Maybe whoever it was would save her.

She screamed as loudly as she could. “Help me! Get me out of here! I’m being held prisoner by some creeper! Help me.”

She stopped and listened. Ellen was no longer talking. The house was quiet.

Had she misheard? Was she hallucinating?

The space above her was soundless.

Emma started to tear up a little, but she fought the emotion. She didn’t want to be weak. She didn’t want to succumb to her worst fears. He would rape her, probably. He would kill her, too. And whoever was watching Ellen DeGeneres didn’t give a rat’s ass about her.

“It isn’t right,” she said, crying as softly as possible into the smelly mattress while pulling the scratchy blanket over her. “Ellen would never have let me suffer.”

Sometimes memories are manufactured. Sometimes it isn’t intentional. Grace knew that from cases she worked for the Tacoma Police Department. Manufactured memories were different from so-called repressed memories. Grace’s own life history had one. She had been only a small child when it happened, but it had been told to her so many times, it seemed real. Vivid. True. On June 8, 1977. Sissy O’Hare had braided her daughter’s damp hair the night before so she could have “wavy hair.” She dressed in her prettiest pink top with brand-new cropped blue jeans. It was a special day, the beginning of summer vacation. Sunlight poured through the open curtains and a robin pecked at its reflection on the glass, an occurrence that had brought more interest than annoyance to the O’Hares.

When the phone rang, Sissy set down the hairbrush and went to answer. Instantly, her cheerful demeanor fell like a stone tossed into a very still pond.

“He what?” She looked over at Grace, then turned away toward the window and the robin. The rest of the words came from her amid gasps, in a rapid-fire fashion that pelted the glass windowpane.

“No,” she said.

And then: “What time?”

“Did he hurt anyone?”

“Where did he go?”

“Why is this happening?”

“Why does God hate all of us?”

By then her mother was crying. Sissy let the phone fall into the cradle of the receiver. Her tears were twin streams, just moving down her cheeks and dropping onto the floor.

“Mommy,” Grace said, rushing to comfort her. “Daddy?”

Conner was away on a business trip.

“No. Worse than that, baby. Something terrible has happened.”

“Mommy?”

Sissy steadied herself, her hands finding the back of a dining chair. She bent close to her daughter and held her, and then pressed her lips to her ear.

“Do not be afraid,” she whispered. “Ted escaped.”

Later the “memory” would become more complete as the bits and pieces of Ted Bundy’s story emerged and filled her memory bank. Ted’s incarceration had been short-lived. He was transferred from Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, an hour away to the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, for a preliminary hearing. Ted was full-on Ted then-the Ted he wanted the world to see. He was acting as his own lawyer and in doing so was granted special-and, ultimately, foolish-privileges. He was able to shed the shackles and handcuffs that prisoners wore-items he said that were not only prejudicial, but made it impossible for him to maneuver around the second-floor law library. Moments later, the Pacific Northwest’s least favorite son jumped from the window, landing on the ground and disappearing into the mundane spring day.

Later when she played the exchange between her and her mother, Grace escalated her vocabulary to concepts beyond her age.

“They’ll catch him, right?” she asked when her mother told her what happened.

Sissy had pulled herself together and looked into her daughter’s brown eyes and nodded.

“Yes. I think so. The police know that they can’t let him be free. No one is safe. They told me they have already set up roadblocks all around Aspen. He can’t go far.”

The next morning the Tacoma News Tribune ran a story on the front page:

IS TED BUNDY THE REINCARNATION OF HARRY HOUDINI?

That brought a memory, too. Sissy immediately called the newspaper and screamed at the nice girl who answered the phone, telling her that in no uncertain terms the paper was glorifying a monster and in doing so diminishing the unspeakable evil that he’d done to an untold number of women and girls.