After Her (13 page)

“That's why he got a little rough with her. Just to quiet her down. Who wouldn't?”

This was the place in my interview with my father where he came back to the world again—the part of the world with the half-eaten bowl of tiramisu in front of him, and the ashtray full of cigarette butts, and the waitress saying, “No charge for this one, Tony,” and me with my cassette recorder, taking it all down.

“And that's how you conduct an interrogation, Farrah,” he told me.

 

Chapter Sixteen

I
t was nighttime. Patty breathing softly overhead, Cat Stevens singing “Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world” as I lay there in the dark. More and more now, this was the time when the pictures started coming to me.

I was thinking about something the gym teacher had said that day, about girls getting excused from gym if they had cramps, and my having told her that I had them. Knowing I'd have to keep track, now, of the date I offered the cramp excuse, without the presence of a real period to make the keeping track unnecessary. I was wondering if I had some disease that made it so I didn't menstruate. Leukemia, or a brain tumor.

I was thinking about my father, and how thin he looked when I saw his picture in the paper that day. I was thinking about Teddy Bascom, and the murdered girls—the deer fetus, and the vultures, and the horses having sex.

I tried to think about something nice then. The picture came to me of my father, sitting on the couch while my sister and I snuggled up on either side of him, watching
Rockford Files,
and our mother standing in the doorway with a bowlful of popcorn, looking almost happy for once. Margaret Ann (a different day now), opening the glass doors of that cabinet of hers filled with the dolls and saying, “Pick any one you want.” I wanted to linger there, but the picture shifted to the bad part of that story. My mother finding the key to Margaret Ann's apartment. My father walking out the door, with his one suitcase. The sound of his car starting up. His headlights disappearing down the street.

Your girls will never get over it.

Then all the pictures were gone, but that wasn't good news either. Now came the Sunset Strangler.

All these weeks I'd been trying to locate one of my visions. That night one came to me, and I wished it hadn't.

I was inside a car. Not our father's car, or our mother's, though like hers this one looked a little beat-up.

There were fast-food wrappers on the floor, and a plastic key ring with a woman's naked body on it—all but the head—with huge breasts and little red lights where the nipples would go, which lit up when you pushed a button on her back.

From where I sat—a bucket seat facing the steering wheel—I could see his hands winding a shoelace around his wrist. Knotting and unknotting it. With the hard end of the lace, the part encased in plastic, he was picking his teeth.

Even with the windshield all steamed up the way it was now, I could see out onto the sidewalk of the street. There was a young couple walking past the car, the boy's hand on the girl's breast, the way Teddy Bascom's was always ending up on mine, though in the case of these two, there was more for him to find there.

I knew what the killer was thinking then. That he never got to put his hands on a girl that way. Not a living one, anyway. Not without a length of piano wire around her neck.

The couple stopped by a streetlight and started kissing—but not the way Teddy Bascom kissed me. This was real, passionate kissing. This was the kissing of two people who were crazy about each other and could hardly wait to get home and do something about it. This might even have been love.

Here was the worst part for the man in the car: he was totally invisible to them. I don't know how I understood this but I did.

My lips felt dry and chapped now, and there was a sour taste in my mouth as if I might throw up, but didn't. I told myself to think about some small, good thing: the pair of Chemin de Fer jeans I'd put on layaway, that I was one or two nights of babysitting away from bringing home. Soleil telling me she was going to invite me to come up to her family's place in Sonoma and go horseback riding. Teddy Bascom (this part was fantasy) playing with my hair and whispering, “You're so beautiful,” though what he really said was, “Let's get this shirt off you.”

Now there was a hand reaching inside a pair of pants. I saw the hand move up and down inside the pants—eyes locked on the man and the woman kissing. Now came the sound of breathing. Deeper and faster. Then a long, low sigh.

His fingers were opening the glove compartment. Out came a roll of electrical tape. Key in the ignition, car backing out and heading onto the highway now, turning the radio on to a country station. A Kenny Rogers song. How was it that I knew the words?

I could see the feet—one on the gas pedal—in their black loafers, recently polished. Not shoes for hiking, but I knew where this car was headed. Those red towers looming overhead in the moonlight. He was driving to the Golden Gate Bridge, headed north to the mountain.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT WAS
H
ALLOWEEN.
My sister, in her clown costume, lay stretched on our bedroom floor, sorting her candy. I had come outside to sit on the front step to watch the last of the trick-or-treaters straggling home, sacks in hand. All up and down our street the candles inside the jack-o'-lanterns flickered, casting an orange glow over the yards and front steps of Morning Glory Court. Inside our house, I heard the ringing of the telephone and headed inside. Of the three people who lived at our house, I was the only one who ever got a call.

“It's Alison,” Patty said, making a face.

There'd been another murder on the mountain that day, number seven. A woman named Kelly Cunningham, a twenty-three-year-old hairdresser from Cotati whose New Year's resolution had been to lose forty pounds by hiking on the mountain five days a week, rain or shine, had been found raped and strangled in a grove of eucalyptus near the east peak of Mount Tamalpais, with tape over her eyes and a Snickers wrapper on the ground beside her. The report on television offered few particulars, Alison told me, but one thing I could guess: she would have been naked, except for her shoes. The shoelaces would be gone from them. And I wouldn't be seeing my father anytime soon.

B
Y NOW, EVERYONE KNEW ABOUT
the Sunset Strangler. Now all they had to put in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that next morning were the initials: “S.S. Strikes Again.” No further explanation required.

The
Marin IJ
ran a feature in which local residents were interviewed—parents, teachers, a city councilwoman and a variety of businesspeople, the owner of a restaurant—and asked how the murders had affected their lives; the gist of the story being that the entire population of Marin County now inhabited a state of high anxiety, if not terror. “What's going on here, anyway?” one woman was quoted as saying. “I pay my taxes. Where are the police when we need them?”

There was also an interview with a haircutting client of Kelly Cunningham, the most recent victim.

“She was more than halfway to her goal weight,” the woman said. “She was wearing size twelves. I even asked her if it was a good idea to keep jogging on the mountain, but she just told me you can't stop living your life.”

Only she could.

N
OVEMBER.
I
N OUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOW,
police patrolled the streets—Daffodil, Honeysuckle, Morning Glory Court—that led most prominently to the mountain from where we lived, and they staked out the parking lot where hikers left their cars. Over at the Pollacks' house, on one of my babysitting nights, a new item had shown up in the bedside table drawer where they always used to keep the K-Y jelly and the condom supply: a small pink .45-caliber revolver. Purchased, no doubt, by Karl for Jennifer, as protection against the serial killer at large.

There were no more hippies on the mountain, with or without clothes, and no more hikers. Every one of the girls I ate lunch with had been given a beeper by her parents—this being before the days of cell phones—so their mothers could locate them and get them to call home if they went to the rec center or the mall.

Patty and I had no beeper. As before, our mother was off at work most days, or at the library, and in her room a lot of the time when she got home. Like our father, she had told us to stay away from the mountain, and we assured her that we would.

But the truth was we weren't afraid of the Sunset Strangler. The only thing that kept us from spending our afternoons out on the mountain as we'd always done was the fact that for the first time in our lives as sisters, we were spending long hours apart, away from our old haunts. Thanks to my recently acquired popularity, I no longer came home right after school the way I used to. Even on weekends, I was apt to be tied up with the girls, hanging out at the mall or sitting on the bench at the dojo, watching Teddy at karate practice.

In many ways, though, it was not me so much as my sister who'd found other and more consuming things to do with her time than making up adventures on the mountain with me. Where, only recently, I'd felt as though I was abandoning my sister, now it seemed as though Patty was the one, more than I, who'd chosen other ways to occupy herself.

Patty was working hard on her jump shots; she was always trying to improve. But more than anything, her days that fall revolved around her visits to the home of Mr. Armitage, who had entrusted her with a key to his house—kept hidden under a flowerpot—so Patty could let herself in on the afternoons he was at work, to play with Petra and take her for walks.

Even when she was home, her talk was often of the dog. “You know something cute?” she told me one afternoon. “Petra never gets it that she's little. When I'm walking her, and we pass another dog, even if it's a really big one like a golden retriever or a malamute, she barks like she's protecting me.

“Mr. Armitage says that sometimes he used to take Petra along when he taught his ballroom dancing classes, because he didn't like to leave her by herself. Only he had to quit doing that, because it made her mad to see him dancing with people. She got jealous.

“I don't know what I'd do if Mr. Armitage moved away,” she said. “I don't think I could stand it if I didn't get to see Petra anymore. And Mr. Armitage is nice too.”

“But he's a weirdo,” I told her. “First he had a wife, then he didn't. Who ever heard of a man that teaches dancing for his job?”

“You know what I think?” Patty said. “Everybody's a weirdo. With some people you just don't know what their weird part is, but everybody has one.”

B
ASED ON HER PERFORMANCE ON
the sixth-grade girls' JV basketball team—her superb passing skills, as well as her footwork and shooting—my sister had been invited to try out for the CYO basketball team, something no sixth grader had accomplished in the past. She was practicing for the tryouts, and spending time with the girls she was meeting, playing ball, and a couple of coaches who'd taken an interest in her. One of them had played Division I basketball out in Indiana some years back and even tried out for the newly formed Women's Professional Basketball League. She was too old now for a pro basketball career, but for my sister, she said, anything remained possible.

“Professional basketball,” Patty said. “Out on the court like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. My dream come true.”

“Europe, maybe,” I suggested. For me, travel was the dream. But for my sister, it was all about the game.

“Imagine getting to play basketball every single day, with the best players,” she said. “I'd love that more than anything.”

This might have been the moment for me to say how happy I was with my new activities too: how much I loved going to Alison's house, and hanging out with Teddy every day the way I did now. Only I didn't say those things. They weren't true.

The truth was, I found Alison and her friends boring. As uncool as the things were that my sister and I thought up to do, they were more interesting. My sister loved dogs, and basketball, and adventures on the mountain. Alison loved shoes and nail polish, looking at her face in the mirror, and going to the mall.

The most boring thing of all, really, was Teddy Bascom, whose interests were
Space Invaders,
pizza, and making out. Except for that one time when Patty had inquired about my feelings on the subject, I didn't ask myself whether I enjoyed kissing him. I only knew that doing it conferred on me a worth and social standing unlike anything I'd known. The fact that Teddy Bascom wanted to kiss me at all made me feel important, I told my sister.

“To me, you were always important,” she said.

T
HERE WAS A GAME WE
played in Alison's rec room, called Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. It only worked when there were enough people—six at least—but more often than not, there were. Alison's house was everybody's favorite, no doubt because her parents both worked in the city (one as a cosmetic surgeon, the other an attorney) and they seemed to be gone all the time.

One person would lie flat on the floor, with everyone else spaced around her. The darker the room remained for this, the better, which was easy at Alison's, since we kept the venetian blinds shut, and the lights off.

Each of us put two fingertips under the body of the person lying down in the middle. Then the person standing closest to her head made up a sentence telling how she'd died. You could say, “She died in a car accident when she was thirteen years old,” or “Her mother didn't like her so she fed her rat poison.”