Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

Her mother’s fault, too!

Finally, photo number three. Her last chance. Peggy took in a deep breath. “Oh God,” she said loud enough for a box boy nearby to hear her. He probably thought she was looking at some baby pictures. She didn’t know why people always acted so animated about such photographs.

She smiled and put the envelope in her purse.

Ted will adore this. I am the girl of his dreams and I alone can save him.

When Peggy got home, she ignored her cat and hurried to the kitchen table. The post office was open for another hour. He’d have the photo before the weekend-before their weekly phone call. Being in love with Ted was a dream come true.

That stupid professor would never have left his wife.

Peggy Howell put on a coat and stomped out the door. She was irritated by a lot of things and she needed to get out of the house. She cracked her window and smoked her last cigarette as she moved into downtown Tacoma traffic heading east toward River Road and the smoke shop where she bought her weekly carton. She turned up the music on the radio and listened to another Captain and Tennille song, “The Way You Touch Me.” Like “Love Will Keep Us Together,” it always made her think of Ted.

Peggy Howell’s best friend, the one who understood her above all others, the one who knew that she was worth something, was Ted. He was always the man of her dreams-smart, sexy, charismatic. He could have chosen any other girl in the world.

She looked over at the turnoff where the dead girls had been found. The yellow tape that announced a criminal investigation had been removed. She slowed her car and pulled over. The field of grass and blackberries had been trampled by the investigators as they sought to assemble the flotsam and jetsam of a murderer’s work. She unrolled the window and looked around, noticing the tire tracks, the footprints, even a LUNA bar wrapper that someone had left behind.

Chocolate chip, she mused. Ted’s favorite cookies were chocolate chip, not shortbread or oatmeal.

Next, she remembered a conversation they’d shared a few weeks before his execution.

“I can’t believe they are going to do this to you,” she said.

“I’m not done yet.”

“I know. I have faith.”

“Babe, we all need faith. Faith and peace.”

“I wish I could see you.”

“They won’t even let Carole,” he said.

“Do you have to bring her up?”

“She’s my wife,” he said. “But she’s nothing compared to you.”

“I know. But it still hurts whenever I hear her name. I would have done the same thing if you called me as a witness. I would be Mrs. Theodore Robert Bundy. Not her. She’s not even pretty, Ted.”

“She’s pretty enough. Not all of them were… or… are beautiful.”

There was a pause in the line and Peggy’s heart raced.

“You still there?”

“I’m here. Just another snap, crackle, and pop in the electrical wires here.”

It was a joke, but Peggy didn’t laugh. Ted’s nearly literal gallows humor was lost on her. She couldn’t imagine a world without him. He understood her so much better than anyone ever could. His letters were pure poetry. Better than Rod McKuen, she once said in a compliment that Ted ate up.

“Rod’s good, thank you.”

“You’re better.”

“No, no, you are the best. You always will be.”

Another crackle in the line.

“Ted?”

“Yeah, baby,” he said. “I’m here.”

“You are the best,” she repeated.

“There will always be others to follow in my footsteps, Peg. I’d like to brag and say that I’m the best, but I’m told over and over by the matchbook university shrinks that they know better. That I’m an aberration, a deviant.”

“Deviant means different than the others,” she said. “And different can be a very beautiful thing. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “Have to go now. Will be looking at your picture and thinking of you tonight.”

Peggy sat in the car looking at the slow-moving Puyallup River wondering if there was anything more she could have done for Ted. That was the last time they’d spoken. A week later, she’d watched the live feeds from Florida showing the crowd gathering there to celebrate his execution. She wanted to be with his parents on the other side of Tacoma. She’d met Ted’s mother a couple of times at the grocery store. She’d pretended not to know who Louise Bundy was. Peggy was a shopper looking for a ripe watermelon. Louise was a small woman with thick lenses and quiet, shy demeanor. She barely looked up when she told Peggy to sniff the stem end of the melon.

“That’ll give you a good idea,” she said. “Don’t bother pressing it to see if it is soft. The skin is pretty thick and it really isn’t a good indicator.”

“You’re very kind,” Peggy said as Louise moved on down the aisle. She wanted to add that “your son is a great man, like a great misunderstood artist.” But she held it inside. She wasn’t sure if Ted’s mother would really understand, if she really knew the son that she’d once pretended was a little brother was a man of importance. Peggy thought of running after her and thanking her again, just to get a glimpse into her eyes. Ted’s eyes. But she didn’t. She held back. Way back.

A few days after Ted’s execution, Peggy met a man at a bar on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma. She never knew his name. Never asked. Three months later, Peggy was showing. She ran into Susie’s mother, Anna Sherman, outside the Fred Meyer store on Nineteenth.

Mrs. Sherman’s eyes landed on Peggy’s swelling abdomen.

“Honey, I didn’t know you were expecting.”

Peggy beamed. “I’m due in the fall.”

“I didn’t know… you got married.”

“Oh, I didn’t. I don’t need a husband to be a mother.”

“I guess that’s very modern of you,” Anna said. “I was always glad I had a husband.”

Peggy patted her stomach and pushed her cart toward her car. The miracle inside her was always to be hers, and hers alone. Her son was going to follow in his father’s footsteps.

He was going to be the greatest of them all.

Donna Howell showed up at Tacoma General Hospital the morning after her grandson was born. She came without balloons or flowers. Instead, the former grocery checker brought with her a kind of palpable bitterness that permeated every puff of her smoky breath. Indeed, Donna Howell was one of those women who’d thought she’d done everything right with the raising of her children, but she’d been repeatedly disappointed by each and every one of them. Peggy was at the top of that list, or at the bottom. The middle, too. Donna Howell considered Peggy a heartbreakingly sorry excuse for a daughter. That is, if she’d deigned to waste a piece of her heart on her.

Which, not surprisingly to any of those who observed her, Donna Howell seldom did.

Some women are not cut out to be mothers. They don’t have the lovey-dovey component in their personality that makes 2 AM feedings and projectile vomiting forgotten with the baby’s innocent smile, first laugh, steps.

Donna was one of those women.

“You’re never going to lose that weight, Peg,” she said, bursting into the hospital room where her daughter had labored for seventeen hours, alone. She looked over at the new mother in the next bed and zipped the curtain shut without even so much as an acknowledgment of her presence.

“Hi, Mother,” Peggy said, barely looking up from her bed adjacent to the window. She never called her Mom, or Mama, or anything so cozy or familiar. It was always Mother, more a biological term than anything familial.

“Did the baby’s father show up?” Donna asked, her voice as cold and sharp as an ice pick.