I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (14 page)

She had forgotten the Quarter Pounders.

“I couldn't. He said he would hurt me.”

“But he was in the car. With Holly.”

“Yes, because she couldn't be trusted.”

“And you could?”

“When I was good, he was nicer to me.” She looked to her parents. Her mother nodded, encouraging her, although she looked slightly stunned. Her father looked angry, but not at her. He was glaring at the prosecutor.

“How did you earn Walter's trust?” the prosecutor asked, and her parents could no longer contain themselves.

“Really—” her mother began. “Why must you—” her father said, trying to use what Eliza recognized was his professional voice, but not quite controlling it as he usually did.

“What do you think Walter Bowman's lawyer is going to do with this information?” The prosecutor's manner was bland, like one of the jocks at Eliza's new school, the kind of boy who lets a girl know she wasn't even worth teasing. “She had a chance to get away, to save both of them. She didn't.”

“So don't put her on the stand at all,” her father said. “You'll get no argument from us.”

“I need her testimony about the cash box, and how Walter refused to let Holly go. I have to establish the kidnapping or another felony to ensure he gets the death penalty, and we can't prove rape.”

Eliza pondered that, then realized: He meant Holly. They couldn't prove Walter raped Holly. What he had done to her didn't count.

“Eliza's behavior is consistent with dozens of hostage cases,” her mother began.

“Stockholm syndrome, I know.” The prosecutor's voice was bitter, belittling. “That worked so well for Patty Hearst.”

“No, not Stockholm syndrome, not exactly. She didn't sympathize with her captor. But Elizabeth”—her mother had trouble remembering the new name—“is a young girl and she believed he had the power he claimed he had. He threatened her. He threatened us.”

The prosecutor looked to Eliza. She nodded, then realized he would not be satisfied with a nod. “He told me all the time that he would kill me and my family if I tried to get away from him. He said he would kill them while I watched.”

He looked down at his notes. “Back at the roadside, where you first met Holly—why did you get out of the truck and let her sit in the middle?”

“Because that's what Walter wanted.”

“Did he say that?”

“No, but I understood. He gave me a look, and I realized that he wanted the new girl to sit next to him.”

“The new girl?”

“Holly. But she wasn't Holly yet. I didn't learn her name until she was in the truck.”

“You were the new girl, once.”

Eliza didn't understand his point. “Not really. There wasn't another girl, when he took me.”

“You saw him with a shovel, digging a grave.”

“Yes, but I didn't know that. I just saw a man digging.”

“A grave for Maude Parrish.”

“That's who you found there, right?”

The prosecutor didn't always answer her questions. Apparently, he owned the questions. “So you were the new girl, after Maude. And you knew that when Walter switched girls, he got rid of the old one.”

“No…” It was different, not at all the same.

“Elizabeth, why do you think Walter kept you alive? Why did he kill every girl but you?”

“I think,” she said, “it was because I always did what he told me to do.”

The prosecutor asked her to leave, so he could speak to her parents privately, but her parents refused. She was sixteen, she was going to testify in court. She should be part of every discussion.

“Okay, I'm going to lay it out for you. The prosecutor in Maryland is scared to go for the death penalty in his county, precisely because he has no evidence that Maude was kidnapped. Walter Bowman refuses to confess to any other homicides, although there are quite a few missing person cases that seem plausible. The murder of Holly Tackett is our only chance to put this guy to death, and I can't afford to give the defense anything to play with.”

The Lerners were united in their mystification, staring at this young, pompous man in bewilderment.

“A smart defense attorney is going to go to town with this. Suggest Elizabeth wasn't a victim at this point, but an accomplice. And once you let that idea worm its way into the courtroom, you've got all sorts of reasonable doubt. What if Elizabeth was the one who pushed Holly into the ravine, out of fear, or even jealousy? What if Elizabeth was really Walter's girlfriend?”

“That is offensive beyond belief,” Inez said.

“A good attorney isn't going to worry about giving offense. He'll be playing for big stakes. He's playing for Walter's life.”

“And you're playing,” Manny said, “for his death. That's quite a game you've got going there. Some would call it playing God.”

The prosecutor studied Eliza's parents. “You're enlightened types, right? Don't want to see the guy die. Don't want to see anyone die. But then, you've got your daughter. Two other families, probably a lot more, weren't so lucky.”

“As a father,” Manny said, “I want to strangle him. When I see him, I want to go over to him and pound his face off, knock him to the ground, kick him until he coughs up blood. But I know that's not right, and I shouldn't do it. Nor would I have the state do it for me, by proxy. So, no, I don't believe in the death penalty, if that's what you're asking.”

“The Tacketts don't feel the same way. Fact is, that's who the commonwealth of Virginia represents in this case. Not your daughter. Holly Tackett and Virginia. I hope you haven't let your own”—he paused for a minute, seeming not so much to search for a word, as for the spin he wanted to place on it—“altruistic ideas influence your daughter. I hope this story about McDonald's, which I'm hearing for the first time, isn't something you've cooked up to create enough confusion about events that a jury will be reluctant to consider the death penalty.”

Inez put a hand on Manny's arm, almost as if she feared he
would try to do to the prosecutor the things he said he wanted to do to Walter. But, of course, he stayed in his chair.

“The only thing we've instructed our daughter to do,” Inez said, “is tell the truth. Tell the truth, and not look for reasons this happened to her, because there are no reasons.”

“That's a nice thing to tell your daughter and probably very helpful,” the prosecutor said, trying to scoot back to their side, reunite the team.
Yea, Eliza! Boo, Walter!
Only he had slipped, revealed his true loyalties, and Eliza knew she could never trust him again. “But jurors will want reasons. I'm trying to anticipate the worst-case scenario. I'm sure things will work out.”

Things did, at least as far as the prosecutor was concerned. Walter's defense attorney was far from expert, and he treated Eliza with an almost bizarre politeness, as if she had a condition that should not be referenced directly. No, it was the prosecutor who asked her about the trip to McDonald's, and made her tell, in excruciating detail, what Walter did to her the night after Holly died. It was Jared Garrett, a few months later, who devoted a large section of his book to the theory that Elizabeth Lerner might have been Walter Bowman's girlfriend and coconspirator, whom he decided not to implicate for reasons known only to him, given that he never testified. If Elizabeth had been raped, why was Walter allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of kidnapping and assault? Garrett cited no sources for his theories, asserting only that there was a “school of thought” that Elizabeth Lerner may have evolved into something more than a hostage. “School of thought!” Vonnie had snorted. “There's only one student in that school and he's the village idiot.”

It didn't matter. By the time Garrett's book was published, the sordid imaginations attracted to his kind of journalism had moved on. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker was terrorizing Los Angeles; two dead girls in the Mid-Atlantic simply couldn't compete. The crimes of Walter Bowman had been eclipsed even in
Virginia, where a high-achieving college student had enlisted her German boyfriend in the murder of her parents. Elizabeth Lerner was Eliza Lerner, enrolled in a new high school in a new county, her hair back to its natural color and curly disorder. Nobody knew her past, nobody cared.

 

OR WAS IT THE OTHER WAY
around: nobody cared, so nobody knew? Sitting at her kitchen table more than two decades later, Eliza found herself taunted by that question. Was it so unthinkable that Walter Bowman might have chosen her over Holly? She knew what her parents would say: Walter was mentally ill, incapable of any genuine feeling. Walter was a sociopath. Walter had not
chosen
anyone.

Yet he had, and only he knew why. Whatever he wanted now—and she had known from the first letter that he would not be satisfied with a one-sided contact, that his very words “I'd know you anywhere” were meant to remind her of a marker on a very old debt—she wanted something from him, too. She needed to ask: “Why me?” Was that wrong? Was it ego-driven, irrational? Did the very question desecrate the memories of the others, and if that was the case—then so what? Wasn't she entitled to ask that question, in private, of the one person who actually could tell her if there was a reason she was alive?

But if she dared to ask Walter that question, she had to be prepared for other answers, less pleasant ones. She had to confront the fact of the girl who walked into McDonald's, focused on nothing but ketchup and pickles. She had to think about what happened later that night. “We have to go,” he'd said, and they went, breaking camp in silence. As they drove down the long switchback in the dark, he handed her Holly's metal box, now empty, all those
well-intentioned dollars gone, some for food, the rest crammed into Walter's pocket. “Toss it,” he said, grunting with disapproval at how ineptly she hurled the box from the truck. “You can't throw for shit.” It was rare for him to use profanity, and the word felt like a slap.

The box was found a few days later, helping searchers pinpoint the campsite that Elizabeth had described for them, and then Holly's broken body on the other side of the mountain. Elizabeth was praised for being cagey enough to let this potent clue fall close to the roadside.

But perhaps Walter had it right: She just couldn't throw for shit.

Released 1985
Reached no. 1 on Billboard Hot 100 on February 16, 1985
Spent 22 weeks on Billboard Hot 100

THE NEW PHONE SAT
in the alcove off the master bedroom on an end table rescued from her parents' basement. Eliza had been shocked at how much resistance the local phone company had given her about adding a second, dedicated line to the house, but perhaps that was because she wanted the most basic package possible, with no extras and a limited number of outgoing calls a month.
Why not get a cell phone?
the helpful young woman at Verizon had queried.
Or just use your call-waiting feature?
Why indeed? She could get a cheap, disposable mobile, toss it when—well, whenever. She knew that what she wanted wasn't exactly logical, but it made sense to her. She wanted to limit Walter's access to her, her home, to one slender wire, one no-frills touch-tone telephone. It
was bad enough that
he
was the one who called her, and collect at that. She could at least pick the instrument and set the time frame for when he was allowed to call, ten to two weekdays, when the house was empty.

The children had been curious about the new phone, drawn to it as children are drawn to any novelty, but its lack of features quickly dampened their interest. They had been told that this was an outgoing line for emergencies only. Peter had gilded the lily by claiming Homeland Security recommended Washington-area residents have old-fashioned desk phones, ones that did not require electrical outlets. Unfortunately, this inspired falsehood inflamed Albie's imagination, and there was another round of nightmares. Eliza was exhausted in a way she had not been since Iso was a colicky infant, moving through the days under the fog of a constant headache.

Yet the telephone remained silent. There was, apparently, not a little bureaucracy involved in talking to a man on death row. For every rule that Eliza had invented—the dedicated line, the hours during which Walter was allowed to call—the Department of Corrections had far more. Or so Barbara LaFortuny informed them when she had taken the new number and forwarded it to Walter. It was a week since they had installed the phone, and it had rung exactly once, sending its full-chested sound through the house.

It was an automated service, claiming that her car warranty was about to expire.

Now the phone sat, beige and squat, utterly utilitarian. It was, in fact, almost identical to the phone that the Lerner family had installed in the “phone nook” in the Roaring Springs house, although that phone had seemed terribly sleek and modern at the time. Manny and Inez, permissive in most things, felt the telephone was an incursion on family life, and they insisted on having only two extensions, one in their bedroom and the other in the
hall. The girls could speak as much as they wanted, but it would be in the hall, with no chair, only the scratchiest of rugs on which to rest.

Vonnie, undaunted by the public venue, sat cross-legged in front of the hall phone as if it were Buddha or Vishnu. She stalked, she paced, she sometimes even put it on the floor and circled it, almost as if it were a campfire around which she was dancing. Fierce Vonnie, who was happy to march under the flag of feminism, saw no irony or contradiction in boy craziness. She was a passionate person, someone who lived a big life with big emotions and ambitions, and reaped big rewards as a consequence. Germaine Greer—the early Germaine Greer, the feminine eunuch posing in her bikini—was her role model. It was hard for Eliza to say Vonnie had been mistaken in her self-image. Never married, largely by choice, she had enjoyed affairs with an impressive assortment of men. Older, younger, richer, poorer. One or two were famous, most were wildly successful, and even the slackers were interesting, creative types. Vonnie had a big life, something out of the novels that Eliza preferred, the ones that managed to be respectable while still being replete with all the lifestyle details—clothes, food, home furnishings—that were disdained in so-called sex-and-shopping novels.

But Eliza preferred her sideline view of her sister's life. And unlike larger-than-life Vonnie, Eliza had been spared what their mother dubbed the Vikki Carr curse. Part of that was the simple good luck of meeting Peter when she was eighteen and falling into a relationship that, whatever its ups and downs, was pretty much without doubt. But even with her high school boyfriends, she had been…diffident. She almost never called them, for example. Vonnie sneered that Eliza was a throwback, that she was betraying all womanhood with her willingness to let men call the shots. Eliza didn't think so. She just didn't have that much to say.

But sometimes she wondered if Walter's self-help book, the
one that had urged women to embrace their “natural” roles, had left more of an imprint than she realized. While traveling with Walter—a euphemism, yet not—they had gotten into the habit of going to yard sales, and he would sometimes let her buy a book, if it was cheap enough. She had picked up a copy of Mario Puzo's
The Godfather,
of which Walter did not approve, so she had to read it during her brief moments alone, in the bath or on the toilet. She would soak in the tub—and tubs were fewer and far between, once Walter got the tent—and read until the water was tepid. She imagined what Don Corleone would do if she were his daughter, or even the daughter of a friend. He wouldn't kill Walter, not on her behalf. That would not be justice, as he explained to the undertaker whose daughter had been raped by the two college boys. But they would do something pretty bad to him, she was sure, especially if she asked them to avenge the girl whose body had been found in Patapsco State Park.

She still had the book with her when the state police picked them up near Point of Rocks. At first the book had reminded her of the time with Walter, and she hadn't wanted to read it. But then her high school boyfriend had said they should watch the film on his family's VCR, and she'd decided to finish the book first. She had plunged back in, following Michael into his Sicilian exile, feeling a bizarre kinship with him—she had been exiled, too—then on to his wedding night, where he had discovered his young bride was a virgin, and a virgin was the very best thing to be, according to Mario Puzo. She had stopped reading there and forgotten about the book until Vonnie had discovered it during summer vacation, while looking for the latest copy of
TV Guide
. (It was an article of faith in the Lerner household that Eliza's bed, the territory beneath it, was a kind of Bermuda Triangle where all sorts of things came to rest.) The book's spine was broken on the page where Eliza had abandoned it, and Vonnie, emerging
from beneath the bed with a few dust bunnies clinging to her hair, as unruly as Eliza's but not as red, looked at the pages, then at her sister.

“How would
he
know?” she said. Vonnie was exhausting and infuriating, but also loyal. Eliza, filled with warmth at this memory of her sister, decided to call her for no good reason, although she was almost certain to be dumped straight to voice mail. She began heading downstairs to the den, the coziest spot in the house.

The other phone rang, full-throated, robust. It had no answering machine, no voice mail, another decision on which Verizon had fought with her. It would ring forever if Eliza allowed it. Phones never rang that way anymore. It was one of the interesting things about older movies, where phones might ring six, seven, eight times, or—in that one gangster movie of which Peter was so fond—something like thirty-seven times. Nowadays, phones rang maybe three or four times, then rolled over to voice mail, or got picked up by answering machines, or—

She picked up on the seventh ring, almost hoping it was news about her car warranty or mortgage or credit card. The automated voice gave her a moment of hope. But this time, the voice was asking if she would accept a collect call from Walter Bowman.

She said she would.

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes.”

There was an echoing metallic sound that seemed to go on and on. “Excuse me,” Walter said, and the noise grew louder, swelled, then fell back, ending with a few faded clangs.

“What was
that
?” She had intended to ask him as few questions as possible, to put the burden of conversation on him, but her curiosity got the better of her.

“Oh, one of the guys went down to Jarratt and got a stay, so we're kicking him back in.”

“Kicking—?”

“We kick the doors, in solidarity, when a man gets a postponement. Although I have to tell you, I don't really have much for this particular fellow. He's managed the trick of being both the meanest and dumbest man here.”

She was nonplussed. It felt like the polite conversation a salesman makes as he settles in, getting ready to launch into his pitch. She wanted to blurt out:
What do you want? Get to it, stop stalling.
Before she could ask, her cell phone buzzed from her pocket. She glanced down at its screen. Iso's school.

“Walter, can you hold on? There's another call coming in on my cell and…”

She did not want to explain why the call could not be ignored, but nor was she happy when Walter said: “Sure, I understand. You've got young kids.”

“My husband told me he might need me to pick him up at the airport today,” she lied, with a promptness that made her rather proud. The old-fashioned phone could not be muted, so she walked out into the hall, determined that Walter not overhear the conversation with Iso's middle school.

It was the principal. “Can you come in, Mrs. Benedict? We have a…situation.”

“Is Isobel hurt? Sick?” In her worry, she couldn't help using her daughter's full name.

“No, just something to discuss before it becomes a problem. And we know that Iso's brother is in elementary school, so we thought it would be easier to have you come in now, rather than complicate your life with after-school detention, which means Iso would miss the bus.”

“Detention?”

“Only if it were warranted and it's not.” A pause. “Yet.”

She walked back to the beige phone, tried to think what she could say. “Walter, I'm sorry, but this is urgent—”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “We'll catch up later. We have a lot to talk about.”

As anxious as she was about Iso and the unspecified
situation,
Eliza couldn't take Walter's invitation to end the call. “Do we? Do we really have that much to discuss?”

“I think so,” Walter said. “And although I know you doubt this, it will be mutually beneficial, Elizabeth. Really, you have to believe that I have nothing but your best interest at heart. I'm doing this for you.”

She said good-bye, grabbed her purse and her keys, headed out to the garage, and then, almost as an afterthought, dashed back inside and threw up in the powder-room toilet.