Laura Lippman - Don’t Look Back

‘How’d you get scratched up, Walter?’ his father asked at dinner that night.

‘Stopped to relieve myself on the side of the road, walked right into one of those prickly bushes along the highway,’ he said. If someone had seen his truck parked out on Route 118, that would explain it.

‘Sure took you a long time to find that fan belt.’

‘Like I said, I had to go all the way to Hagerstown, and they didn’t have one either. I ordered it.’

‘Coulda sworn Pep Boys in Martinsburg said they had what I wanted in stock.’

‘Nope, wrong size. People in those places, they’re just ignorant. No work ethic, no interest in customer service.’

That was all his father needed, and he was off to the races about the death of the small businessman.

By the weekend, the local news was full of stories about the missing girl, Kelly Pratt. She’d never get a chance to change her name now, Walter realized. A week went by, a month, a season, a year. He thought of her as Kelly Brat. He had showed her who was boss. It could have been nice, she shouldn’t have taken him down to the river to smoke pot, the pot was what screwed him up, he probably wouldn’t have been her first, and her just fourteen, according to the news stories. Slut. Druggie. The very fact that they never found her, that he didn’t get caught, that the police never came to speak to him, that no one came forward to say that they had seen Walter Bowman’s pickup parked on the hill above the river that day, that they never even searched near that part of the river – all those things proved he had been right to do what he did.

He found himself taking long drives on his days off, looking for other girls who might need a ride.

Chapter Three

‘Ha-ha,’ Peter marveled. ‘He actually wrote “ha-ha.”’

‘If it were an e-mail, if he had access to a computer, he probably would have put an emoticon there, the one that uses a semicolon to wink at you.’

Peter held the letter at arm’s length, although he was not the least bit farsighted, not yet. He was actually a year younger than she was. He inspected the letter as if it were a painting, an abstract portrait of Walter Bowman, or one of those 3-D prints that had been popular for a time. Examined up close, it was words, in that furious, fastidious purple ink. At a distance, it melted into a lavender jumble, an impressionistic sketch of heather-colored hills.

Peter had arrived home at seven thirty that evening, early for him these days, but Eliza had waited until the children went upstairs to tell him about the letter. She might have been able to reference it covertly, using a familiar code: the summer I was fifteen. Over the years, this had been used to explain any number of things. Her need to leave a film that had taken an unexpected plot turn, her disinclination to wear her hair short, although the style suited her better than this not-long, not-short, not-anything haircut. Come to think of it, they hadn’t used the code for some time, not since Peter returned to the States earlier this year and began house hunting on weekends.

‘The Victorian that you like, it’s near – well, one county over – from where Point of Rocks is,’ he had told her via Skype. ‘It’s about an hour out of the city, but on the commuter line and it’s really pretty up there. Lots of people do it. But I thought—’

‘You thought it would bother me. Because of the summer I was fifteen.’ They were meeting each other’s eyes, yet not meeting each other’s eyes. She could never quite master that part of Skype.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not sure it would, but if you’re willing to commute, what about Roaring Springs, where I grew up?’

‘The trains on that line don’t run late enough, hon. And we’d have to have two cars, because I’d have to drive to the station.’

‘Oh.’ She still wasn’t sure why Point of Rocks was in contention but Roaring Springs was not. Wouldn’t he need to drive to the train station out there, too? ‘Well, I’d rather you had less of a commute, so if we can afford something closer in, something near a Metro line, that would be my choice.’

They could – barely – so they did, and that was that.

‘That stupid party,’ he said now, still studying the letter. ‘And you didn’t even want to go. It never occurred to me that we should worry about such things.’

‘Or me, to be fair. I didn’t want to go to the party because, well, I didn’t want to go to the party. I never thought – he never, all these years, made any overture to me, or even my parents or Vonnie, who are much easier to find, still being Lerners. Between taking your name and moving, first to Houston, then to London . . .’

Peter poured himself a glass of white wine and Eliza, as she sometimes did, took a sip. No, even as Peter upgraded the wines he drank, she still found the taste acidic, harsh. She preferred the Albie cocktail of fruit punch and seltzer.

‘So, he’s on death row, reading the party pages in Washing tonian —’

‘It’s almost funny. Almost.’

‘Are you going to write him back?’

They had been sitting on opposite ends of the sofa in the family room, her feet in his lap. Now she put his sweating wineglass on a coaster and curled up next to him, indifferent to how warm the room was, even with the house’s various window units droning away. She thought once again of the house in Roaring Springs, cool on the hottest summer nights with nothing more than window fans. Global warming? The fallacy of memory? Both?

‘I don’t know. And the very fact that I don’t know bothers me. I should be appalled, or angry. Which I am. But mainly, I just feel exposed. As if everyone knows now, as if tomorrow when I leave the house, people will look at me differently.’

Peter glanced at the letter, now lying on the old chest they used as a coffee table. ‘No reference to the kids.’

‘No. All he knows is that I have a prominent husband and a green dress. But it came to our address, Peter, from a Baltimore PO box. Someone did that for him. Someone else knows.’

‘A woman, I’m guessing. A woman with a purple pen. Walter’s sister?’

‘I doubt it. His family essentially cut all ties after his arrest. They didn’t even attend the trials.’

She pressed her face into his neck. He smelled of an aftershave that seemed particularly British to Eliza, crisp and citrusy. She wasn’t sure where it was made, only that Peter had started wearing it during their London years. Their growing-up years, as she thought of them, although two thirty-somethings with small children should have been much further along the road to being grown-ups. Peter’s jobs had always dictated their sense of themselves. When he was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, they had felt young and bohemian, right down to the funky little house in Montrose. His jump to the Wall Street Journal had dovetailed with the arrival of the children, but they remained in Montrose, although minus the wild parties for which they had been known, parties famous for benign drunkenness and unexpected couplings. At least three marriages in their circle had started at one of their parties, and two had ended. It was as if Peter, with his serious, stuffy job at the Journal – not to mention a wife and children – needed to prove he was still a young man.

London changed that. They were certifiable grown-ups within months of arriving there, and Eliza wasn’t sure if that was because of Peter’s job, as bureau chief, or the city itself. Perhaps their newfound maturity was a result of the sheer distance from everything and everyone they had known. Now, back in the States, she felt old, on the verge of dowdy. Yet her own mother didn’t even have her first child until she was thirty-six and remained exuberantly youthful in her seventies. Maybe it was their old-fashioned roles – full-time mother, full-time breadwinner – that were weighing them down, making them middle-aged, out of touch.