Laura Lippman - Don’t Look Back

‘I know this sounds odd, but I kind of forgot about Walter. That is, I forgot they were going to execute him. He never thought he would die that way.’

Peter shifted, redistributing her weight, moving her arm, which had left a damp stripe across the front of his shirt. ‘I don’t remember that in the letter.’

‘Then. The summer I was fifteen. I think he thought it would end in a slow-motion hail of bullets, like a movie. As opposed to a routine traffic stop at the Maryland line.’

Peter kissed the top of her head. His skin was warm, but then, it always was. Energy poured out of him, even when he was still.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you, too.’

‘You don’t know what love is.’

This was a joke, their own private call-and-response, so ingrained that Eliza couldn’t remember its origins, only that it always made her feel safe.

‘Gross.’ It was Iso, standing on the threshold. ‘Get a room.’ Eliza wondered how long she had been standing there, what she had heard and whether she could make sense of any of it. The summer I was fifteen, hail of bullets, routine traffic stop.

‘What do you need, baby?’ Eliza asked.

Iso made a face. Possibly because of the word baby, or possibly because the mere sound of Eliza’s voice irritated her. ‘I came down to remind you to wash my Spurs jersey, in case you forgot. I want to wear it tomorrow.’

‘I did. Wash it, that is. Not forget. But, Jesus, Iso, that jersey is made for damp England, not ninety-degree days in Montgomery County. Can’t you wear a T-shirt like the other kids?’

‘No. Did you wash my socks, too? I had to dig a pair out of the hamper this morning.’

‘Socks, too.’

‘You know,’ Peter put in, ‘if you can work an iPod and the television and the computer and TiVo, you could probably learn how to operate the washing machine, Isobel.’

Iso looked at him as if he were speaking Portuguese. Peter didn’t annoy her as much as Eliza, but she refused to acknowledge he had any power over her. She stalked off without a reply.

‘I don’t want them to know,’ Eliza said to Peter. ‘Not yet. That’s all I care about. Albie’s just gotten over those awful nightmares, and even Iso is more impressionable than she lets on.’

‘It’s your call,’ Peter said. ‘But there’s always the risk of someone else telling them. Especially as the execution draws closer.’

‘Who? Not you, not my parents. Not even Vonnie, volatile as she can be, would go against our wishes.’

Peter shrugged noncommittally, too polite to say that he considered his sister-in-law capable of just about any kind of bad behavior. It was funny how Peter and Vonnie, who had so much in common – similar intellects and interests, even some parallels in their career paths – remained oil-and-water after all these years. You say funny, Vonnie sneered in Eliza’s head, I say Freudian. He wanted a mommy, so he married one. Peter was more diplomatic about Vonnie: She’s a feisty one. You always know what’s on her mind.

Eliza pressed him for agreement: ‘No one else knows.’

‘Walter knows, Eliza. Walter knows, and he found you. Walter knows, and he might tell someone else. He has told someone else. The person who wrote the letter. Who clearly has our address, not that addresses are hard to find these days.’

‘Well, there’s no one – oh, shit . That asshole. That alleged journalist, Garrett. But I’m sure he’s moved on to other lurid tales, assuming he’s still alive. Is it a proper use of irony to say that it would be ironic if he died in some hideous, salacious crime?’

‘I don’t know if it would be irony, but it has a certain poetic justice.’

‘Walter never spoke to him, though. Not during the trial, and certainly not after that book. He probably disliked that book even more than I did.’

‘But his book is out there. Nothing really disappears anymore. Once, that kind of true-crime crap would be gone forever, gathering dust in a handful of secondhand bookstores, pulped by the publishers. Now, with online bookstores and eBay and POD technology, it’s a computer click away for anyone who remembers your original name. For all you know, he’s uploaded it to Kindle, sells it for ninety-nine cents a pop.’

Eliza wasn’t worried about computer clicks. But if she complained to the prison officials, that would be another set of people who knew definitively who she was and where she was. Why should she trust them? Better to ignore Walter, although she knew that Walter was most unpredictable when someone dared to ignore him. Only not where he was now, locked away. And usually not to her. The One Who Got Away, to borrow the hideous chapter heading from that nasty little book. As if she were a girl in a jazz ballad, a romantic fixation. The One Who Got Away . The one who was, as the book said repeatedly, ‘only raped, allegedly.’ Only. Allegedly.

Only a man who had never been raped could have written that phrase.

‘Let’s wait him out,’ she told Peter. ‘He’ll either drop this, or he won’t. As he said, he doesn’t have long. And he’s not being put to death for what he did to me.’

That night, in bed, she surprised Peter by initiating sex, quite good sex, with those little extras that long-married couples tend to forgo. It was, by necessity, silent sex, and she had to clap her hand over Peter’s mouth at one point, fearful that the children would hear him. But it was important to remind herself tonight that her body belonged to her, that this was sex, this was love. She deserved her life. She had created it, through sheer will and not a little help from Peter and her family. She had every right to protect it.

But as she fell asleep, spooned by her husband, the other girls came to her as they sometimes did. Maude and Holly, followed by all the faceless girls, the ones that Walter was suspected of killing, although nothing had ever been proven. Two, four, six, eight – the estimates climbed into the teens. They were, all things considered, remarkably kind and forgiving little ghosts. Tonight, however, they were mournful in their insistence that she was not alone in this, that they must be factored into any decision she made about Walter. Holly, forever the spokeswoman, reminded Eliza that her life was theirs, in a sense. Polite even to her phantoms, Eliza did not argue.

Eventually the others slipped away one by one, but Holly lingered in Eliza’s thoughts, keen on some private business. ‘I was the last girl,’ she said. ‘They shouldn’t have called you that. I was the last girl, and he’s going to die for what he did to me .’

‘Oh, Holly, what does it matter? Last or next-to-last? Ultimate or penultimate? They’re just words. Who cares?’

‘I do,’ Holly said. ‘And you know why, even if you always pretend that you don’t. Ha-ha!’

Chapter Four

1985

Point of Rocks. He had always liked that name, seen it on signs for years, but somehow never managed to visit. Now that he had – well, it wasn’t that much different from any of the towns along the Potomac. From his own town, in fact, back in West Virginia. Almost heaven, the license plate said, and Walter agreed. Still, he liked to drive, wished he could see more of the world.

When he was a child, no more than four or five, his father took him to a spot in Maryland, Friendsville, where it was possible to see three states – Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. He had been disappointed that the area wasn’t marked, like a map or a quilt, that one state was indistinguishable from another. He told his father he wished they could go out west, stand in the four corners, which he had heard about from his older sister.