I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (10 page)

It wasn't there.

1985

ALTHOUGH HE HAD GROWN UP
nearby—perhaps
because
he had grown up nearby—Walter had never visited Luray Caverns, and he took a notion that he and Elizabeth should spend a day there. It seemed a foolish thing to do, given that money was always tight, yet the various highway signs called to him. He really wanted to see those caverns, not to mention the classic cars, although he didn't understand why there was a collection of classic cars at Luray Caverns. He talked himself into thinking it would be a nice treat for Elizabeth.

But Elizabeth, to his surprise, argued on the grounds that it was an extravagance. He had been picking up fewer jobs of late
and they had been sleeping out more often, even as the nights got cooler here in the mountains.

“Hey, I'm just thinking of trying to do something fun for
you
.” Besides, who was she to argue with him over money? Who was she to argue with him about anything? She seldom talked back, and he didn't like the fact that she was starting. This was a troubling development. She needed more discipline.

“
I've
been,” she said. “Just two years ago.”

“What was it like?”

“Okay. All I learned was how to remember the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite.”

He didn't want to ask, but she clearly wasn't going to volunteer the information: “And how do you remember?”

“Stalactites, which have a
c,
hang from the
ceiling
. Stalagmites come up from the ground.”

“Well, then, you could just as well remember
g
for
ground,
couldn't you?”

That cowed her.

“Sure, I suppose you could.”

“And you may have gone, but I've never been. Is that fair?”

“You said it was something you wanted to do for me,” she said, correctly and infuriatingly. “If it's my choice, I'd rather use the money we'd spend on that for something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. A meal in a restaurant, one night, instead of fast food or making do with cold things from grocery stores. Something to wear.”

“I've got even fewer things to wear 'n you.”

She started to say something, thought better of it, slumped back in the front seat of the car with a sigh so heavy that the exhaled breath stirred the bangs hanging in her eyes. Walter saw, in that moment, what it would be like to have a teenage daughter one day, how exasperating and tender and terrifying.

In the next instant, he realized that he would never have a daughter, or a son, or a wife. Something was coming for him, something big. Yes, because of what he had done, but also because that was his destiny. His death would be heroic, at least. A chase, a battle. He would die large, and that pleased him.

Yet what had he really done except try to have the things that others have and take for granted, things that came so easily. All around him, he saw people, couples, holding hands and enjoying each other. He saw men much less good-looking than himself, and probably less capable, with knockouts, and he could not understand how that happened. He had started out wanting nothing more than a girlfriend, and he had wanted a girlfriend because, one day, he wanted to have a wife, then kids. True, he had rushed things, he had made poor choices. But it was hard, making good choices, when you had to settle for meeting people on the fly. And once you were out of school, how did you meet people at all? Working in his father's shop wasn't any way to meet women. The few that came in, he never got to talk to them, and the coveralls made him look shorter than he was. Even if they could see past the coveralls, to his nice face and his green eyes, they probably thought,
Oh, a grease monkey
. A grease monkey! Did people know how smart you had to be to work on cars? Hell, doctors weren't any smarter than mechanics. Doctors got to specialize. One did the heart, one did the brain, one did bones. He and his father were the kind of mechanics who did everything, domestic and foreign, and they were
honest
. No one who knew them had ever called them out on a single charge. One time, a stranger had been passing through and had a breakdown, and it was a newer car with an electrical ignition, always tricky, but they had gotten that guy back on the road the same day, which meant they saved him the cost of a motel, and all he wanted to do was ask why they had gone ahead and replaced his brake pads, which were thin as handed-down baby pajamas. He had been a tall man, probably
only six or seven years older than Walter, who was seventeen at the time, but he carried himself as if he was important. The inside of his car smelled of cigars, and when, the repairs finally done, they had switched the car back on to check everything, the music that poured out of the radio was classical, opera. Walter didn't believe for a minute that the man really enjoyed that music. He was on the lookout to impress someone. But Walter also realized that it probably worked, and girls were impressed. God, women were shallow.

“We're going to the caverns,” he said to Elizabeth. “It's educational.”

She sighed harder, went beyond sighing, stuck out her bottom lip and made a noise that was downright rude. His palm itched to slap her. He flicked her cheek, not hard, and was pleased to see her eyes go fearful.

 

SHE WAS ENJOYING THE TOUR,
he could tell, even though they weren't dressed quite warmly enough for the caverns. Soon they would require more clothes. Coats and sweaters and boots. He needed to figure things out, find more permanent work. But he couldn't land a mechanic's job if he couldn't provide references, and opening his own shop would involve way too much capital and overhead. Besides, what he would really like to do is run his own general fix-it shop, a place that promised: “If you can break it, I can fix it.” Or: “I can fix anything from a screen door to a broken heart.” He had stolen that line from Earl, the one who had gone off to the Marines. He had been younger than Walter, but nice, one of the few people who didn't seem to think he was a moron. Could Walter enlist? No, it wasn't like those old movies where people joined the French foreign legion and disappeared. Or that movie that had come out just a few years earlier, about a guy who parachuted
out of a plane with $200,000 in ransom. Boy, the woman in that movie had been pretty, just his type. Thin, but with really big breasts and one of those curly smiles. Could he get a ransom for Elizabeth? Not much, based on what he knew about her parents. She was always talking about how they didn't have a lot of money. Computers could find anybody, no matter where they went. He had seen that movie
War Games
.
What was he going to do?
His mind was so busy running through his options, or lack of options, that he could barely pay attention to the tour guide.

There weren't many people on this tour, only one school group. Younger kids, no more than ten or eleven, and loud, loving the way their voices boomed and echoed. Elizabeth looked at them curiously, as if she couldn't remember being that young. Then he realized—it wasn't age that made her distant. It was him, the life he had created for her. She wasn't part of their world anymore, a world with parents and television and dinner and school. She had accepted this so readily that he found himself losing a little respect for her. True, he had made sure to scare the shit out of her at first, and showed her that he could hurt her—swiftly, searingly, with not much effort. But he had not raised a hand to her since those first few days, and still she stayed. He didn't count today, that was just a tap, a warning. He was stuck with her, in a way. Why this one, the one who had just stumbled on him? Why couldn't he have a girl he chose? Nothing was ever fair.

He could free her, right now. He could tap her shoulder, tell her he was going to use the restroom and she wasn't to move, and she would do just that. Or, he could wait until
she
asked to use the restroom, go through his usual rules and admonitions, about how much time she could have and how she must not speak to anyone, even if spoken to, how she would come to regret it, and don't think she wouldn't. Then, when she came out, he would be gone. How long would she wait? He'd almost want to hide him
self somewhere to watch, to see how much time elapsed before she thought to speak to anyone. She would probably sit there all day until a security guard told her it was closing time.

Or, he could slowly back away, right now, eyes fixed on those narrow shoulders in the sweatshirt she claimed to detest, quietly retreating until he was out in the sunlight, then breaking into a run, getting into his truck, and driving away, seizing a head start.

What did she know, what could she tell the police? They had already found the one body, Maude's, but she didn't know where the other girls were, didn't even know there were other girls, although he had dropped hints about how far he would go when angered or challenged. Elizabeth could tell them about his truck, however. She could tell them his name, that he was from West Virginia. He had told her other things, too, the kind of things you tell people when you spend hours with them, although they weren't the kind of details that made a man findable. Favorite foods, television shows, his one and only trip to the ocean and how disappointing it had been, particularly saltwater taffy, which wasn't anywhere near as special as people had made it out to be.

He could let her go, let the screaming, singing ten-year-olds slowly close around her, gather her up, carry her forward before she noticed. She wasn't that far away from being their age, no matter what she thought. She was still a pretty innocent girl, with her stories about that dog. And her tears, the ones late at night in the bathroom, when she thought he couldn't hear her, or the ones right before sleep, which she tried to muffle with her pillow or her fist.
You're just a kid,
he wanted to tell her.
Go back, be like them
. It's not too late. He could—

She turned around, caught his eye, and the moment, the impulse, was gone. Who was he kidding? They were stuck with each other.

IT WAS TWO DAYS BEFORE
Eliza found the piece of paper, tucked into the recycling bin, a drawing by Albie on the blank side. It was a sketch of Albie and Reba riding a bicycle built for two.

“Albie, why did you draw on”—she paused to think about what she wanted to call it—“Mommy's letter?”

“I was in the TV room and I just had an idea and I didn't want to go upstairs to get my paper and Daddy always says not to pull paper out of the tray in the computer that we should use scrap paper and I found this in his trash can—where it shouldn't have been, anyway—and I thought it would be okay to draw on the back and then I put it in the recycling because I didn't like it very much, the bicycle didn't look right.”

The words came out in a rush, as if he
might be punished. But, unlike Iso, there was no guile in Albie. Not yet.

“No, no, that's okay.” She tried to think of a way to ask if he had read it, without suggesting he might have wanted to read it. “It must have seemed pretty unimportant, anyway. Just a lot of dull stuff.”

“It was in the trash,” Albie reminded her. “I thought it was a format letter.”

“A format—oh, a form letter. Yes, it is. Do you have any homework?”

“No,” Albie said with a sigh, genuinely disappointed. He wanted to be like Iso, loaded down with work in middle school, but he came home with only a few, easy assignments. “We're working on multiplication tables and I already know my twelve times.”

“You can put a video in, then. If you like.”

Albie considered his mother's offer, which was slightly out of the ordinary. Though Eliza didn't limit the children's television, she also didn't propose it as a way to spend time. “I think I'll play a game with Reba,” he said. He went into the long, rambling backyard. Almost too long, Eliza decided now, although the yard had been her favorite feature of the house. There were places along the back fence where Albie disappeared from her sight line. But he was with Reba, she reminded herself, and Reba was growing more confident every day, first growling at Barbara LaFortuny, now barking at the postman on his daily rounds. She had mentioned this to Peter, wondered at this clichéd verity. Why do dogs bark at postmen? “Because it works,” Peter said. “Every day, they bark, and every day, the postman retreats.”

She sat at the desk in the television room, positioning herself so she could see the yard. This letter was typed in a small, fussy font that had allowed Barbara LaFortuny to squeeze a lot of text onto the page. A form letter, Albie had thought, and he was right
in a way. The writing was stilted, almost as if it had been translated from another language. Maybe Barbara LaFortuny was doing this without Walter's knowledge. At any rate, Walter's second letter seemed dry, airless, reminiscent of his droning recitations of what he would do to—for—certain women if they would just let him. Not sexual things, but nice things—holding open doors, sending flowers on ordinary days, remembering key anniversaries.

Hurt,
in Walter's world, must be a euphemism for
killed
. He couldn't honestly believe he hadn't harmed her. He had said in his first letter that he wanted to make amends to her.

As if they were old friends, as if she might have searched for him on Facebook, or asked a mutual acquaintance for news of him. As if there were anything to keep up with. Getting a letter from Walter was like some exiled citizen of New Orleans getting a telegram signed “Katrina.” Hey, how are you? Do you ever think of me? Those were some crazy times, huh?

Remorseful, formidable
. Walter was one of those people who believed that using big words would make him sound educated. She could imagine him poring over
Reader's Digest
's “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Did they have
Reader's Digest
in prison? Hey, they had
Washingtonian
.

Okay, she had to give Walter that: Dean of Death Row was kind of funny, and the one thing Walter had never shown any talent for was laughing at himself. He had changed a little if he could write a line like that.

A spark, but not a shine. She remembered his truck slowing down as he drank in the eyeful that was Holly. “Look at the shine on that girl.”

With those words, that paragraph, Walter had given something far greater than offense. Hands shaking, Eliza fed the sheaf of paper into the shredder by Peter's desk, facedown, so the image she saw sliding into the machine's teeth was Albie and Reba on their bicycle built for two. Walter never touched this piece of paper, she reminded herself. He had dictated these words to Barbara.
Perhaps these weren't even his words,
she thought. For all she knew, Barbara LaFortuny had created this entire drama. But, no, that was Walter's voice, odd as it sounded this time.

Her paranoia far from abated, she emptied the shredder's canister directly into the trash and then took the trash out to the garage, although shredded paper could go into the single-stream recycling bins provided by the county. If she could, she would have driven the garbage to the local dump, or burned it in a bon-fire on her lawn, although bonfires were illegal.

But even if she could have watched Walter's words blacken and disappear in leaping flames, she could not erase the knowledge that she should have sussed out the moment she saw Barbara LaFortuny's sinister little car following her down the street. Walter not only had learned where she lived, and what her husband did, and what she looked like. He knew she had children. He knew she
had children and—far more crucial—he wanted her to be aware that he had that knowledge.

He wanted something from her. A visit, a call. He wanted something, and if she didn't submit, he would find a way to use Iso and Albie to get it.