The Girls (24 page)

There were all kinds of rumors those first days. Howard Smith reported, erroneously, that Mitch Lewis had been killed, though this would be corrected more swiftly than the other rumors. David Brinkley reported six victims had been cut up and shot and left on the lawn. Then the number was amended to four people. Brinkley was the first to claim the presence of hoods and nooses and Satanic symbols, a confusion that started because of the heart on the wall of the living room. Drawn with the corner of a towel, soaked in the mother's blood.

The mix-up made sense—of course they'd read a ghoulish meaning in the shape, assume some cryptic, doomy scrawl. It was easier to imagine it was the leftover of a black mass than believe the actual truth: it was just a heart, like any lovesick girl might doodle in a notebook.

A mile up the road, I came upon an exit and nearby Texaco station. I went in and out of the sulfur lights, the sound they made like bacon frying. I rocked on my toes, watching the road. When I finally gave up on anyone coming for me, I called my father's number from the pay phone. Tamar answered. “It's me,” I said.

“Evie,” she said. “Thank God. Where are you?” I could picture her twining the cord in the kitchen, gathering the loops. “I knew you'd call soon. I told your dad you would.”

I explained where I was. She must have heard the crack in my voice.

“I'll leave now,” she said. “You stay right there.”

I sat on the curb to wait, leaning on my knees. The air was cool with the first news of autumn, and the constellation of brake lights was going along 101, the big trucks rearing as they picked up speed. I was reeling with excuses for Suzanne, some explanation for her behavior that would shake out. But there wasn't anything but the awful, immediate knowledge—we had never been close. I had not meant anything.

I could sense curious eyes on me, the truckers who bought bags of sunflower seeds from the gas station and spit neat streams of tobacco on the ground. Their fatherly gaits and cowboy hats. I knew they were assessing the facts of my aloneness. My bare legs and long hair. My furious shock must have sent out some protective scrum, warning them off—they left me alone.

Finally I caught sight of a white Plymouth approaching. Tamar didn't turn off the ignition. I got into the passenger side, gratitude for Tamar's familiar face making me fumble. Her hair was wet. “I didn't have time to dry it,” she said. The look she gave me was kind but mystified. I could tell she wanted to ask questions, but she must have known that I wouldn't explain. The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence. I was already disappeared.

“Don't worry,” she said. “He didn't tell your mom you took off. I told him that you'd show up and then she'd just be worried for no reason.”

Already my grief was doubling, absence my only context. Suzanne had left me, for good. A frictionless fall, the shock of missing a step. Tamar searched her purse with one hand until she found a small gold box, overlaid with pink stamped leather. Like a card case. There was a single joint inside, and she nodded to the glove compartment—I found a lighter.

“Don't tell your dad?” She inhaled, eyes on the road. “He might ground me, too.”

Tamar was telling the truth: my father hadn't called my mother, and though he was shaky with rage, he was sheepish, too, his daughter a pet he'd forgotten to feed.

“You could've been hurt,” he said, like an actor guessing at his lines.

Tamar calmly patted his back on her way to the kitchen, then poured herself a Coke. Leaving me with his hot, nervous breath, his blinky, frightened face. He regarded me across the living room, his upset trailing off. Everything that had happened—I was unafraid of this, my father's neutered anger. What could he do to me? What could he take away?

And then I was back in my bland room in Palo Alto, the light from the lamp the featureless light of the business traveler.

The apartment was empty by the time I emerged the next morning, my father and Tamar already at work. One of them—probably Tamar—had left a fan going, and a fake-looking plant shivered in the wake of air. There was only a week before I had to leave for boarding school, and seven days seemed too long to be in my father's apartment, seven dinners to soldier through, but, at the same time, unfairly brief—I wouldn't have time for habits, for context. I just had to wait.

I turned on the television, the chatter a comforting soundtrack as I foraged in the kitchen. The box of Rice Krispies in the cabinet had a barest coating of cereal left: I ate it by the handful, then flattened the empty box. I poured a glass of iced tea, balanced a stack of crackers with the pleasing quantity and thickness of poker chips. I ferried the food to the couch. Before I could settle back, the screen stopped me.

The crowd of images, doubling and spreading.

The search for the perpetrator or perpetrators still unsuccessful. The newscaster said Mitch Lewis was not available for comment. The crackers crimped into shards by my wet hands.

Only after the trial did things come into focus, that night taking on the now familiar arc. Every detail and blip made public. There are times I try to guess what part I might have played. What amount would belong to me. It's easiest to think I wouldn't have done anything, like I would have stopped them, my presence the mooring that kept Suzanne in the human realm. That was the wish, the cogent parable. But there was another possibility that slouched along, insistent and unseen. The bogeyman under the bed, the snake at the bottom of the stairs: maybe I would have done something, too.

Maybe it would have been easy.

They'd gone straight to Mitch's after leaving me by the side of the road. Another thirty minutes in the car, thirty minutes that were maybe energized by my dramatic dismissal, the consolidation of the group into the true pilgrims. Suzanne leaning on folded arms over the front seat, giving off an amphetamine fritz, that lucid surety. Guy turning off the highway and onto the two-lane road, crossing the lagoon. The low stucco motels by the off-ramp, the eucalyptus loomy and peppering the air. Helen claimed, in her court testimony, that this was the first moment she expressed reservations to the others. But I don't believe it. If anyone was questioning themselves, it was all under the surface, a filmy bubble drifting and popping in their brains. Their doubt growing weak as the particulars of a dream grow weak. Helen realized she'd left her knife at home. Suzanne shouted at her, according to trial documents, but the group dismissed plans to go back for it. They were already coasting, in thrall to a bigger momentum.

They parked the Ford along the road, not even bothering to hide it. As they made their way to Mitch's gate, their minds seemed to hover and settle on the same movements, like a single organism.

I can imagine that view. Mitch's house, as seen from the gravel drive. The calm fill of the bay, the prow of the living room. It was familiar to them. The month they'd spent living with Mitch before I'd known them, running up delivery bills and catching molluscum from dank towels. But still. I think that night they might have been newly struck by the house, faceted and bright as rock candy. Its inhabitants already doomed, so doomed the group could feel an almost preemptive sorrow for them. For how completely helpless they were to larger movements, their lives already redundant, like a tape recorded over with static.

They'd expected to find Mitch. Everyone knows this part: how Mitch had been called to Los Angeles to work on a track he'd made for
Stone Gods,
the movie that was never released. He'd taken the last TWA flight of the night out of SFO, landing in Burbank, leaving his house in the hands of Scotty, who had cut the grass that morning but not yet cleaned the pool. Mitch's old girlfriend calling in a favor, asking if she and Christopher could crash for two nights, just two nights.

Suzanne and the others had been surprised to find strangers in the house. No one they had ever met. And that could have been the abortive moment, a glance of agreement passing between them. The return to the car, their deflated silence. But they didn't turn back. They did what Russell had told them to do.

Make a scene. Do something everyone would hear about.

The people in the main house were preparing to go to bed, Linda and her little boy. She'd made him spaghetti for dinner and had snuck a forkful from his bowl but not bothered to make anything for herself. They were sleeping in the guest bedroom—her quilted weekend bag leaking clothes on the floor. Christopher's grimy stuffed lizard with its jet button eyes.

Scotty had invited his girlfriend, Gwen Sutherland, to listen to records and use Mitch's hot tub while Mitch was away. She was twenty-three, a recent graduate of the College of Marin, and she'd met Scotty at a barbecue in Ross. Not particularly attractive, but Gwen was kind and friendly, the kind of girl that boys are forever asking to sew on buttons or trim their hair.

They had both had a few beers. Scotty smoked some weed, though Gwen had not. They passed the evening in the tiny caretaker's cottage Scotty kept to military standards of cleanliness—the sheets on his futon tight with hospital corners.

Suzanne and the others came across Scotty first. Nodding off on the couch. Suzanne cleaved away to investigate the sound of Gwen in the bathroom, while Guy nodded at Helen and Donna to go search the main house. Guy nudged Scotty awake. He snorted, jolting back from a dream. Scotty didn't have his glasses on—he'd rested them on his chest as he fell asleep—and he must have thought Guy was Mitch, returning early.

“Sorry,” Scotty said, thinking about the pool, “sorry.” Blindly tapping for his glasses.

Then Scotty fumbled them on and saw the knife smiling up from Guy's hand.

Suzanne had gotten the girl from the bathroom. Gwen was bent over the sink, splashing water on her face. When Gwen straightened, she saw a shape in the corner of her eye.

“Hi,” Gwen said, her face dripping. She was a girl who had been well raised. Friendly, even when surprised.

Maybe Gwen thought it was a friend of Mitch's or Scotty's, though within seconds it must have been obvious that something was wrong. That the girl who smiled back (because Suzanne did, famously, smile back) had eyes like a brick wall.

Helen and Donna collected the woman and the boy in the main house. Linda was upset, her hand fluttering at her throat, but she went with them. Linda in her underpants, her big T-shirt—she must have thought that as long as she was quiet and polite, she'd be fine. Trying to reassure Christopher with her eyes. The chub of his hand in hers, his untrimmed fingernails. The boy didn't cry until later; Donna said he seemed interested at first, like it was a game. Hide and go seek, red rover, red rover.

I try to imagine what Russell was doing while all this was happening. Maybe they'd made a fire at the ranch and Russell was playing guitar in its darty light. Or maybe he'd taken Roos or some other girl to his trailer, and maybe they were sharing a joint and watching the smoke drift and hover against the ceiling. The girl would have preened under his hand, his singular attention, though of course his mind would have been far away, in a house on Edgewater Road with the sea out the door. I can see his tricky shrug, the inward coiling of his eyes that made them polished and cold as doorknobs. “They wanted to do it,” he'd say later. Laughing in the judge's face. Laughing so hard he was choking. “You think I made them do anything? You think these hands did a single thing?” The bailiff had to remove him from the courtroom, Russell was laughing so hard.

They brought everyone to the living room of the main house. Guy made them all sit on the big couch. The glances between the victims that did not know, yet, that they were victims.

“What are you gonna do to us?” Gwen kept asking.

Scotty rolled his eyes, miserable and sweating, and Gwen laughed—maybe she could see, suddenly, that Scotty could not protect her. That he was just a young man, his glasses fogged, his lips trembling, and that she was far from her own home.

She started to cry.

“Shut up,” Guy said, “Christ.”

Gwen tried to halt her sobs, shaking silently. Linda attempted to keep Christopher calm, even as the girls tied everyone up. Donna knotting a towel around Gwen's hands. Linda squeezing Christopher one last time before Guy nudged them apart. Gwen sat on the couch with her skirt hitched up her legs, keening with abandon. The exposed skin of her thighs, her still wet face. Linda murmuring to Suzanne that they could have all the money that was in her purse, all of it, that if they just took her to the bank, she could get some more. Linda's voice was a calm monotone, a shoring up of control, though of course she had none.

Scotty was the first. He'd struggled when Guy put a belt around his hands.

“Just a second,” Scotty said, “hey.” Bristling at the rough grasp.

And Guy lost it. Slamming the knife with such force that the handle had splintered in two. Scotty struggled but could only flop onto the floor, trying to roll over and protect his stomach. A bubble of blood appearing from his nose and mouth.

Gwen's hands had been tied loosely—as soon as the blade sank into Scotty, she jerked free and ran out the front door. Screaming with a cartoon recklessness that sounded fake. She was almost to the gate when she tripped and fell on the lawn. Before she could get to her feet, Donna was already on her. Crawling over her back, stabbing until Gwen asked, politely, if she could die already.

They killed the mother and son last.

“Please,” Linda said. Plainly. Even then, I think, hoping for some reprieve. She was very beautiful and very young. She had a child.