No One You Know (5 page)

Six

T
HE SIXTH CHAPTER OF
M
URDER BY THE
B
AY
, more than any other, shined a spotlight on our home life. Entitled “A Tale of Two Sisters,” it focused in particular on the relationship between me and Lila. As I read the book that night, three weeks after its publication, I cringed at the picture Thorpe painted of the two of us, the idea that we could be so easily summed up.

One was tall and dark,
the chapter began,
the other petite and fair. One was a math prodigy, while the other was always lost in books.

Both of these sentences were basically true, although the language implied a kind of fairy-tale dichotomy that had not existed in real life. Lila did indeed have almost three inches on me, and she shared my father’s olive complexion and brown hair, while I had inherited the pale skin, red hair, and small stature of my mother’s Scotch-Irish family. Aside from those differences, though, we looked very much like sisters—a fact that people often commented on when they saw us together. We both had dark brown eyes, dimples, and rounded faces. We shared my mother’s mild cheekbones and my father’s straight, serious nose. And both of us had lucked out when it came to our mouths, a happy accident of genetics that combined my mother’s bow-shaped lips and my father’s full pout.

On the page facing the opening paragraph of chapter six, there was a photograph of me and Lila standing together on the day of her graduation from Berkeley. She looked academic and respectable in a cap and gown, her long hair fastened in a low ponytail. I fit the image of the carefree younger sister, with my low-cut sundress and sandals, hair falling loose around my shoulders. To further the contrast, Lila never wore more than a dab of mascara and a hint of pale lipstick, while I wore lipstick in rich shades of red. The photograph had originally been in color, so that when it was rendered in black-and-white on the cheap, porous paper, my lipstick appeared even darker. Readers might study the photograph and be utterly convinced that we were just as Thorpe had described us.

Thorpe went on to portray Lila as painfully shy, me as wildly sociable. But to anyone who actually knew us, it would have been clear that Thorpe had grossly exaggerated our differences for dramatic effect. Anything that might disrupt the narrative as he saw it was omitted: he never said that until Lila’s death, I had always been quite studious when it came to the classes I enjoyed. He never mentioned that Lila, while basically a loner, could be quite friendly with strangers.

I understood why. “It’s all about character,” he had said, in one of several lectures he gave on storytelling during my first class with him. Even though the class was called Contemporary American Literature, Thorpe took liberties with the syllabus, frequently requiring us to write short stories of our own. “Plot, setting, style—none of it means anything if you don’t have interesting characters, preferably in conflict with one another.” From his standpoint, I could see how the contrast of the shy, intellectual sister with the wild, artistic one might have made the book more entertaining. And that, I believed, was what he was after. It wasn’t accuracy that mattered in Thorpe’s mind, so much as the overall effect.

From page one, there was a “lean closer and I’ll tell you a creepy story” feel to
Murder by the Bay.
I had read and enjoyed many such books myself over the years. While I liked my Chekhov and Flaubert, my O. Henry and Pavese, I could always get into a well-written detective novel or a riveting true crime tale.
In Cold Blood
was one of my favorite books of nonfiction. The fact that Truman Capote had allegedly taken liberties with the truth had never really bothered me. Years after I first read the book in high school, I still had a clear picture in my mind of sixteen-year-old Nancy Clutter, “the town darling,” pleading for her life in the upstairs bedroom. I could still see the farmhouse as Capote had drawn it, with each member of the Clutter family isolated from the others at the moment of his or her death. But the unthinkable depravity of the crime didn’t keep me from feeling a voyeuristic thrill as I turned the pages of Capote’s book.

There are two characters in
In Cold Blood
who are mentioned only in passing, so that one easily forgets all about them.

The eldest daughter, Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently…Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse.

In the aftermath of the murders, Eveanna and Beverly must have felt the blow more deeply than anyone else. I wondered if they had ever read the book, and if so, what they thought of it. When Capote was writing the story that would make him famous, did it ever occur to him to consider how painful it would be for the surviving sisters?

A
T SOME POINT THAT NIGHT, AS I SAT ALONE IN
my room, reading, I heard my mother shuffling down the hall. She tapped on my door, and I stuffed the book under the covers. “Come in.”

She walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. “Your light was on,” she said, smiling. I’d noticed lately that she was always smiling, or trying to, but the expression never looked quite natural. I reached over and held her hand. It was soft and moist with night cream. She was a woman who believed in minor luxuries. As long as I could remember, she’d used the same expensive lotion on her hands that she used on her face, claiming that you could always tell how well a woman took care of herself by looking at her hands. It worked; despite the endless hours of gardening, hers were beautiful.

“You don’t have to do that, Mom,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Smile. You don’t have to smile for me.”

She looked down at the comforter, and with her free hand she rubbed at a dot of dried red nail polish that had been there for months. “Windex will take care of that.”

“Mom?”

Finally she looked up and said, “I’m not doing it for you, sweetie. I read somewhere that if you force yourself to smile, it will actually improve your mood.”

“Does it work?”

“Not yet.”

I had an idea. “You and Dad should take a vacation.”

She looked at me as though I’d suggested she quit her job and join a commune. “Whatever for?”

“Maybe it would help.”

I wondered if she entirely understood what I was saying. Over the past year and a half, my parents had become so distant with one another that I worried their marriage might end. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before Lila died—I’d never known a married couple who seemed more solid in their commitment, more certain of their love. But lately they had begun moving around the house like roommates who feared invading one another’s space. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen them touch.

She reached up and smoothed my hair. “We could go to Timbuktu, it wouldn’t matter, I’d still miss her so much I could hardly breathe.”

I wished, at that moment, that I could have traded places with Lila. I imagined a scenario in which my mother’s grief was smaller, more manageable, a scenario in which she had not lost her brilliant eldest daughter. Surely, if she’d only lost me, the recovery would have been quicker, the devastation less complete. Perhaps the family would have inched closer together rather than farther apart.

She hugged me good night, got up, and closed the door behind her.

It was four in the morning when I finished the book. I hid it under my bed and switched off the lamp.

What I felt for Andrew Thorpe could only be described as disgust. When I read the long passages about Lila—passages in which my sister was painted as a math prodigy, a loner, something of an oddball, a late-blooming beauty—it was clear that Thorpe had used me. Stupidly, blindly, I had delivered Lila right into his hands.

Nonetheless, in the matter of the murder itself, he was very convincing. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was compelled to believe his version of the story. The case he made wasn’t foolproof. There was no forensic evidence, for one thing, and some questions remained unanswered. In no way would Thorpe’s theory stand up to Lila’s own rigorous test—the standard of absolute proof. She would probably scoff at it, calling it what it truly was: mere conjecture. Nevertheless, Thorpe’s prime suspect—Peter McConnell—made perfect sense.

Seven

W
E LIVE OUR LIVES BY WAY OF STORY,”
Thorpe said one afternoon, a couple of months after Lila died. “Over time, we construct thousands upon thousands of small narratives by which to process and remember our days, and these mini-narratives add up to the bigger story, the way we see ourselves in the world.” He was talking to the class, in a lecture loosely based on
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
but I knew his words were really meant for me.

Looking back, it was easy to see that the major story of my own life had been my sister’s death. Andrew Thorpe’s book had deeply influenced the way I constructed this story. I was twenty years old when I read
Murder by the Bay,
young enough to believe that the things he said about Lila’s murder, and the things he said about me, were true.

In the world of mathematics,
he wrote,
Lila had found her place. When Lila was murdered, Ellie had yet to find hers. The sense of belonging and clarity of direction that simplified Lila’s short life would continue to elude Ellie.

There were times when I wondered if, in describing my flaws in relentless detail, in using me to create a character to fit the story he wanted to tell, Thorpe had somehow altered the course of my life. The Ellie he put on the page was uncertain, unanchored, incapable of finding her way. Did I take his words too much to heart?

But there was one part of the story even the author couldn’t have foreseen.

Nearly two decades after the fact, in a South American café, the villain of Thorpe’s book stood before me, tall and soft-spoken, nervous as a schoolboy, saying, “Do you know who I am?”

Gazing into Peter McConnell’s dark eyes, I had the same impression I’d had the first time I saw him outside his office at Stanford—the sensation that his face was comprised of perfectly ordinary features which, put together, added up to something memorable.

“Yes,” I managed to say.

“May I sit down?”

This was not part of my story, not part of the plot of my life as I saw it. My sister’s murderer would not simply walk up in a café and ask to join me. I must have nodded again, or perhaps answered in the affirmative, because Peter McConnell proceeded to sit down in the chair opposite me, lay his book on the table, lay his hat on top of the book, and place his large hands palms down, on either side of the book and hat, as if he did not know what to do with them.

“How did you find me?”

I was disappointed in my voice, which came out weak and uncertain. All the anger I had silently directed toward this man in the past, all the disgust, remained locked somewhere inside me, in a place I couldn’t, at this crucial moment, quite reach. All that came was my astonishment, which must have been as obvious to him as the sound of Maria’s footsteps in the kitchen.

“I didn’t. You found me.”

“I’m just here for work,” I protested. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the fact of his presence, trying to make sense of how he could have shown up here, of all places, from out of the blue. “I’ve been coming to this village for years,” I added.

I had given up looking for Peter McConnell a long time ago. My travels to the coffee regions of the world—Huatusco, Yirgacheffe, Poas, Sumatra—were, if anything, an attempt to leave that part of my past behind, to erase it, as much as possible, from the geography of my life. Although I still considered San Francisco home, I spent a good deal of my time elsewhere, among people who did not speak my language, landscapes that looked nothing like my hometown, places where I would not be reminded of Lila. I felt at ease wandering among the coffee trees, feeling the mist of a foreign climate and smelling unfamiliar earth. At home, I was always nervous, always looking over my shoulder. Abroad, I found a kind of peace.

“I know,” he said. “I’ve seen you in the past.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s a small town. You stand out. The first time was almost five years ago. You were at the outdoor market. I was going to say something, but then it started to rain, and you hurried away.”

I didn’t know how to respond. It occurred to me that perhaps he had followed me here, that he planned to do to me what he had done to my sister. It felt surreal, as if I had dreamt him out of thin air. I looked to Maria—for confirmation of his existence or, absurdly, for some kind of protection, I’m not sure. But she just smiled.

“You said ‘the first time.’ There were others?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

He paused for a moment. “Three.”

“Do you live here?”

“For the past seventeen years.”

I found myself staring at Peter McConnell’s hands, at his long arms. These were the hands, according to Thorpe, that had killed my sister, the arms that had carried her into the woods and left her there.

“I came to Nicaragua because of the book,” he said. “My wife, Margaret, didn’t believe what Thorpe wrote, of course. But it was too much for her. It didn’t matter that she knew I wasn’t a murderer, everyone else thought I was.”

I wanted to add, “You were, you
are,
” but McConnell kept talking, in a steady, unrelenting rhythm, as though he had something to say and did not plan on stopping until he was finished.

“Margaret and I held it together for a little while,” he continued. “Not for us, it had been over between us for a long time. We only made an effort to stay together because of our son, Thomas. He was three years old when the book came out. We picked up at the end of the summer semester and moved to the Midwest, where Margaret’s parents lived. We had hoped to leave the media circus, the suspicions, back in the Bay Area. By then the police had already questioned me twice, and they had no evidence on which to charge me, but that didn’t matter. As far as most people were concerned, I was guilty. Even in Ohio, we couldn’t escape that book. It seemed like everyone in my wife’s hometown had read it. In a way, I don’t blame Margaret for cutting me out of her life. She had Thomas to think of—she was afraid of what it would do to him to grow up under that kind of microscope, with that kind of stigma. And then there was Lila, of course. Margaret knew that I would never get over Lila.”

McConnell talked with the urgency of a man who had not spoken to anyone in a long time. It struck me as strange that he would be defending his wife to me. I kept wondering how this was relevant. His wife, their son—it was just a minor side note, I thought, to the larger story: what he had done to my sister.

“I used to follow you,” I said. “After I read the book, I went to Stanford and found your office. You had hours posted on the door. I was afraid to be alone with you, but I wanted to see you, to put a face with the name.”

“My picture was in the paper.”

“More than a face, I guess. I wanted to see you up close, in person. So I waited in the hallway outside your office one Monday. I wore a big hat and sunglasses. I felt ridiculous. You had the door shut. There was a line of students waiting. I kept hearing Lila’s name. It was obvious they weren’t all there to talk to you about class. It was more like they wanted to be a part of the action. One boy actually wanted you to sign Thorpe’s book. I was furious. Lila was dead, and here they were treating you like a celebrity.”

As I spoke, I tried to keep my voice steady, so as not to betray my fear. “After a couple of hours you finally came out. The first thing that crossed my mind was that you weren’t what I expected. The way you looked, the basic physical description—yes, Thorpe had gotten that right. But everything else—the way you moved, the way you spoke—he’d gotten it wrong.”

“Of course he did. He never met me.”

“What?”

“I know,” McConnell said. “In the book, he gave the impression that he spent a lot of time interviewing me, but we actually spoke only once, on the phone, for five minutes.” He rubbed his thumb back and forth over the bill of his cap; the cloth in that spot had faded to a pale purple. “What did you expect?”

“I expected you to seem more, I don’t know, dangerous. I thought there would be something about you—” Here, I stopped, surprised to hear myself saying these things to him. I remembered distinctly thinking that there should be something obviously
off,
something in his eyes, maybe, or his bearing, that marked him as a murderer, but there wasn’t.

“You took the train back to the city,” I continued. “I left my car behind and followed you. You ended up at Enrico’s in North Beach. I got a table and watched you eat. After that I didn’t go to Stanford again, but every Monday I went to Enrico’s. And every time, you were there—spaghetti with prawns in marinara sauce, ice water, followed by espresso. You were always alone, always working, scribbling away in your notebook, as if the world was invisible to you. I always wore a hat and sunglasses, but I expected that, one day, you would recognize me.”

McConnell shifted in his seat. His face in the candlelight was striking. I could see now what Lila would have seen in that face—the interesting angles, the depth of the eyes, the enormous pupils, the flat, honest width of the mouth. “I did,” he said.

“You did?”

“Of course. Lila had shown me pictures—some of you together in Europe, another of the two of you on the beach, pictures from childhood. And there were the photographs in Thorpe’s book. But even if I hadn’t seen pictures, I would have known.” His voice grew quieter, and his gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth, my neck. I looked toward the kitchen for Maria, but I could neither see nor hear her.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.

“I assumed you would approach me one day. I would have liked to talk to you. For several months before Lila died, I saw her constantly. Aside from the time I spent with my son, she was the best part of each day. I loved talking to her. More than that, I loved listening to her. Then she was gone. You looked so much like her, I wondered if you sounded like her, too. I wanted to hear your voice. But you just sat in a corner, watching.”

“I kept planning to confront you,” I said, “but I never could work up the nerve. Even in that setting, with all those people around, I couldn’t be sure how you would act. And then one day, you were gone.”

There had been a time, a period of years, when I looked for Peter McConnell everywhere, and because I was looking so intently, on a number of occasions I thought I saw him. On the street, I would catch a glimpse of a profile and hurry toward the man, only to realize it wasn’t him. Or I would see a movement in a museum, a tilt of the neck or a certain gesture of the hands, and sidle up beside the person, who would invariably end the illusion by turning his face toward me.

After a strange, unsettling year of sex and alcohol following Lila’s death, I had spent my twenties in a series of brief relationships, never willing to truly commit. At the time I told myself I was too busy, but I later realized that the problem was Peter McConnell. I had created a sort of personal mythology around him. He had done such enormous damage to my family, had taken on such absurd proportions in my mind, that no one could make me feel the depth of emotion he elicited. It was hatred I felt for him, and when hatred goes deep enough, no affection can compare. For love to take hold there must be available space in the mind and heart; I was so eaten up with anger toward him, I could not make room.

“Why did you do it?” I said quietly. This was the question I had been asking myself for almost half of my life. I had long since given up hope that I might find the answer. It didn’t occur to me, at that moment, to believe his claim of innocence. I had believed far too long in his guilt to simply let that conviction slip away.

I waited. He sat there staring alternately at his hands, and at me. Maria emerged from the kitchen, carrying a jar filled with insects. She went over to the windowsill, where her Venus flytraps sat, opened the jar, and shook it gently over the plants. Finally, McConnell said, “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It wasn’t me.”