Sisters of the Road (13 page)

By the following month Trish was in another foster home where they would hardly let her out of their sight. She ran away from them to W.’s who turned her on to some really good speed. It sounded like she was shooting it.

The diary stopped and didn’t take up again until late summer and again it was a different Trish writing, a little older and wiser. She’d been through a drug abuse program and was clean. She was living at a halfway house and attending a group for prostitutes. There were few references to Wayne and they were all in the past tense, but a lot about Beth Linda and some of the girls in the group.

“
August
5. Julianne started crying in the group tonight, talking about how her Dad started having sex with her when she was only six. She didn’t understand what was going on until she was older and by then it seemed too late to tell her Mom, because she’d say Julianne had been doing it for too many years. Julianne started running away when she was eleven. A lot of these girls seem really stupid to me and I don’t think Julianne can even read. But then I think, I’ve been stupid too, even though I thought I was acting so grown-up and reading all those books Wayne gave me. Then Julianne said something that really shocked me, she said she didn’t feel anything in her body anymore and she thought it was because when she was little she would just pretend it wasn’t happening to her, like she would just close it all off. And that was weird because I know that feeling. So many times I was high and I didn’t think about what I was doing. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what I’d done, it was like a bad dream. A couple of other girls in the group said that too. It was weird to think you can stop feeling like that.

“Beth said it happens a lot. That it’s a way of protecting yourself. She said to think about how you maybe did it not because you hated yourself and hated to think about what you were doing, but because deep inside you loved yourself and that was the only way you could protect yourself. She said a lot of girls get things done to them by people who say they love them. It’s like a mixed message and it screws up your trust for people. She said we shouldn’t think of ourselves as victims but as survivors. We were all alive and we were here to change some bad parts about our lives and get more in control.

“It was a good meeting, but afterwards I felt depressed. I thought about how happy I was last summer when I first met Wayne, and thought I was learning so much about the world. It was like we had a real friendship and he was teaching me about psychology and literature and everything. He said he loved me but he just let me get all screwed up. It’s weird that he’s never gotten hooked himself. Maybe if you’re a dealer you don’t. I guess it was my fault though. I guess that’s why he got tired of me.”

“
August 12.
I told Beth I had read some Freud and Jung. She said she liked Jung better because he was more hopeful. We talked about dreams and she asked me if I ever wrote mine down. I said it was hard to remember them, but she said if you thought about it you could do it. She said she’d done that once and it had helped her. She told me that she’d been an alcoholic and that she’d had a baby when she was fifteen. She wasn’t like that foster mother who said to watch out, I’d end up like her. Beth said you can change, you can do anything you want to.”

“
August 19.
In the group tonight Julianne said she went to her father and told him what he’d done to her. She said it had been hard but it had made her feel a whole lot better. Beth called that confrontation. She said it could be dangerous, but that it could also make you feel more in control and assertive. She said a lot of times the man would lie and say he didn’t do anything and you just had to expect that. Julianne said her father told her she was crazy and didn’t say he was sorry at all, but
she
knew. This made me start remembering a lot of things I didn’t think I remembered. I thought about confronting Wayne. I don’t know what I would say. First I loved him and then I hated him, but somewhere inside I still love him. I haven’t seen him for almost three months.

“Last night I dreamed that he and I were sailing in a boat. It was on a lake with the sun setting. He was reading a book to me. At first it was a fairy tale kind of thing with a princess and a king. He started explaining it all to me though and it got dirtier and dirtier. Pretty soon it was just words like fuck and dick and cunt coming out of his mouth. I put my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear him. And then all of a sudden it was nice again. He looked so handsome and sweet, smiling at me with his lips moving, but with no words coming out to spoil it.”

And then, abruptly, the diary ended. The last couple of pages had some notes and addresses, including one for Art Margolin in Portland. Her father. She must have bought another diary, perhaps she had it with her now, wherever she was. Perhaps it told about confronting Wayne and falling in love with him again, about dropping the group and taking up prostitution again, about Rosalie and what had happened to her.

It was two when I fell asleep and my dreams were sad, violent ones.

I
T WASN’T EASY TO
get the blood out of the back seat. June came over early the next morning and we took a pail of soapy water and a bottle of all-purpose spray cleaner down to the car along with rags and a stiff brush.

“This is something you never see on TV,” June commented. “Bang, bang, and then a commercial. If Magnum, P.I. had to clean up after himself you’d see a whole different type of show. Hey, he could even do his own commercials—‘If
you
have trouble getting out those stubborn blood stains after a big shoot-up, try FLEX. And
see
the difference!’”

I needed her humor, especially after reading Trish’s diary last night. I told her about it and about going to Rosalie’s old hotel room.

“I was hoping the diary would give me some clue about who killed Rosalie and why Trish disappeared, but it ended last fall, with an entry about confrontation. I suppose Trish went to Wayne to confront him and that’s how she got involved with him again. But the diary doesn’t have much about Karl and nothing about Rosalie.”

“You ever think that old Trish herself killed Rosalie, used you to make her getaway and to screen her from the cops, and then went into hiding on her own?”

“You know that can’t be true, June,” I said, scrubbing with an averted face. “If you’d seen her that night. She was so upset… No, I keep thinking about what Cady said, that Rosalie wanted to get out of prostitution. If she was working for Karl or Wayne maybe that’s why they killed her. Or maybe she was involved with them in some kind of drug ring, and tried to rip either one or both of them off. She had to make money
some
way if she wasn’t hooking.”

“And Trish was seen by the murderer and had to keep low?” June was inside the car now, trying to get into the corners of the backseat.

“Especially if it was Karl or Wayne,” I said. “Especially if she thought she might have been the one they were trying to kill.”

“Tell me about this Karl character.”

“There’s not a whole lot to tell. Cady said she didn’t know him or if he was a pimp or not, and there are only initials in Trish’s diary for the most part. She only mentioned him directly once, when Wayne met him. But you should have seen Wayne when Karl came into the room. Wayne was nervous, like a little kid trying to please him almost. What if he was totally under Karl’s influence, what if Wayne was just a mock pimp, a front man for Karl? What then?”

June muttered something indistinct and I went on. “That still doesn’t solve the problem of where Trish is, and if she’s in danger. She could be hiding on her own, or Wayne could be hiding her from Karl or Karl could be hiding her from Wayne.”

June climbed out of the Volvo. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Trish might have just wanted to get away from
you
? Maybe she didn’t like mothering all that much. Maybe she was afraid you’d turn her in after all.”

“Maybe,” I admitted, though that hurt a little. “But she wrote me that note, June. She said she’d be back.” I wrung out my cloth and tried to think. “Or what if it was her stepfather who killed Rosalie, I mean, what about that possibility? Would Trish try to tell her mother, or would she want to keep it a secret? Even though she hates him, maybe she’d want to protect her mother.”

“Aren’t you forgetting about the Green River killer? It could have been a total stranger who got Rosalie.”

“The Green River killer is probably long gone by now—they just keep finding bones two and three years old and no traces of the guy. He could have moved to another state, anything. Just because a girl gets killed doesn’t mean it was him.”

“That’s right. Girls get killed every day. No big deal. But did you ever think of the possibility that one of those guys, Rob, Wayne or Karl is the Green River killer? I mean, take Wayne…”

“That’s impossible,” I said shortly. “It’s hard for me to think that someone like Wayne killed one woman, much less forty or seventy or however many it is. He may be a pimp and drug dealer, but I can’t believe he’s a serial murderer. He’s too smooth.”

“That’s exactly the type,” said June, stepping back and scrutinizing her labors. “Look at Ted Bundy, Republican campaign worker, law student, good-looking charm boy, going around with his arm in a sling to ask college girls, ‘Excuse me, dear, but I’m temporarily incapacitated. Could you please open my car door for me…’” June approached me with an ingratiating grin. “And then, bop! They still can’t lay a count to all those girls—Washington, Utah, Colorado, Florida. There was a raving maniac behind that handsome face. Or what about that guy they called the 1-5 Killer, the star athlete, who almost had his picture in
Playgirl
? Cruising up and down the Interstate looking for women working in out-of-the-way Burger Kings. ‘A large Coke and french fries, honey, and while you’re at it, into the back room so’s I can rape and murder you.’ He killed over forty girls. And nobody could believe it. My little baby,’ his mom said. And he had a fiancée who was head over heels about him too. Those are the guys to watch. Finished? Let’s go in and get some coffee.”

“Why are all the serial killers in Washington?”

“Cause it’s roomy and wild out here. And we’ve got all these cool highways. You don’t get girls into your car in New York City—you gotta kill ’em on the subway and then people see you. Plus, it’s a lot easier to get a gun permit in the West. You know, I was reading statistics in some magazine. Over ten thousand deaths from handguns in the U.S. last year. In the rest of the world it was like forty to fifty a year and in England it was only eight. Who says the frontier days are gone? Shoot ’em up, baby!”

“Yeah, but Ted Bundy strangled his victims and Rosalie was knocked out with a crowbar or something.”

We both looked at the pink-dyed water in the bucket. June dropped her joking tone.

“Maybe you ought to call the police and tell ’em what you know. Maybe they’ve got something on one of those guys already.”

“I would—if I knew more, and if I knew where Trish was. Anyway the police won’t be impressed by my suspicions. I’ve got to find out more. I just hope I’m not too late…” I stopped and looked at June. We were both thinking the same thing.

It was a beautiful cold clear day at the airfield in Issaquah. The women’s skydiving club was assembled and ready to go, parachutes, helmets and boots on.

“Can’t I just watch you from the ground?” I asked. “I think I’d like that perspective better.”

“Nobody’s going to push you out,” June assured me from somewhere inside her helmet. Her brown eyes sparkled. “Don’t worry, you’ll love it. The view’s spectacular. We’re really lucky with the weather. You’ll be able to see Mount Rainier.”

The plane was tinier than I’d imagined. I sat next to the pilot, a taciturn fellow named Alvin with a pustular red face. I hated to think he might be the last thing I saw before we went down.

We shot up at a forty-five degree angle that brought my stomach level with my eyebrows. I didn’t know how June expected me to see anything. In order to keep breathing I had to keep my eyes closed. The noise was deafening. Finally we straightened out and I risked a peek. It was spectacular all right. Lake Sammamish on one side, the sharp, sparkling white Cascades on the other, and to the south, the massive snow cone of Mount Rainier, looking like something out of Hiroshige.

“Ya ready, gals?” Alvin called back to June and the others, after he had circled up over the airfield a few times.

“Yeah.” They got ready and then one of them (in their bulky jump suits it was difficult to see who) moved to the open door.

Penny had told me she had a safe feeling when she jumped, as if she were being cradled in the wind. I found that impossible to believe. How could anyone feel safe at 10,000 feet? I didn’t feel safe climbing a ladder. And certainly not sitting in the cockpit of this rickety little plane.

Far below us I saw the bright spread of the parachute drifting like a candy wrapper in the breeze. Two insect legs kicked out, and then she was on the ground, no more than two minutes after she’d jumped. All this fuss for a hundred seconds of weightless fear?

One after another they jumped and drifted. Alvin hummed a tuneless little tune, and then he brought us down to safety with a bump.

“Isn’t it great, Pam?” June enthused, gathering up the folds of her parachute. “What a feeling! There’s nothing like it.”

My legs shook as I walked away from the airplane and towards her. “Yeah, great,” I said weakly.

“We’re going up again, want to come?”

“I’d love to, but—I just remembered something important I have to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Stay alive.”

When I got home there was a message from Carole on my machine.

“Hi, uh, hi Pam. Uh, this is Carole. Hi!” She was speaking in the loud, awkward voice people use when they are being tape-recorded with nothing much to say. “Well, I, uh, was wondering. Well, give me a call, okay? This is two p.m., Saturday,” she hastily added and hung up.

Her normal voice, when I called her back, was warm and lively as usual. She wanted to go to a midnight movie, and, when I expressed some hesitancy about being able to stay awake that long, she described it in such bizarre detail that I began to feel I’d already seen it, or at least Carole’s vision of it, culled from obscure reviews in years past and various hearsay reports.