I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (18 page)

BARBARA LAFORTUNY WAS ONE
of the wonders of her twice-weekly yoga class, the kind of older woman whose effortless flexibility and strength mocked the girls with more perfect bodies and outfits. She was, in fact, a little smug about her standing as one of the best in the practice, which she realized was antithetical to the experience, but there it was. If you couldn't face the truth about yourself, then you weren't ready for the truth about anything, and Barbara recognized this fact about herself: She was competitive. She liked to win.

Yet, for all her skill at holding difficult poses, she failed at the most basic task of all: stilling her mind. Right now, she was in child's pose, about as relaxed as a person could be, or should be, and her mind was
racing, racing, racing, far outside this pleasantly dim studio in a converted mill.

“Be kind to your body,” cooed the instructor. “Tune into what it's feeling.”

She tried, but all she managed to locate was the caffeinated rumble of her heart. This was a 9
A.M
. class, what Barbara thought of as the ladies-of-leisure and college-students class, because who else was free at 9
A.M
. every Tuesday and Thursday? Technically, she belonged to the first group, but she didn't see herself that way. Barbara had been up since six, checking her Google alerts, eating a healthy breakfast of homemade whole-grain bread and organic almond butter, reading the
Times
on paper, the local paper, and the
Wall Street Journal
online.

Barbara had never been a patient person, and her near-death experience had not changed that aspect of her personality. She sometimes thought her impatience, her shortness with fools, had contributed to the attack. Not that she was making excuses for the boy, who was one of the rottenest kids she had met in her years of teaching. That boy had been dead inside, with flat, lightless eyes. But he might not have attacked a more good-humored, patient teacher. Barbara had humiliated him in front of his friends. And if he had lashed out then, in an impulsive fit of anger, she almost could have made sense of it. But he had waited for her by her car, in that ill-lit parking lot, springing up, knife in hand. Luckily, he was as inept as an assailant as he was in the classroom, and he had mistaken the blood gushing from her face for a mortal wound and left her there. The attack had led to many profound changes in Barbara's life—a new purpose, an interest in healthful food and pursuits, the amazing gift of prosperity, which only led her to hold the rich in greater disdain. But it had not made her more patient.

Walter, however, had patience to burn. Too much, she sometimes thought. She wondered if prison had perverted his relationship with time, if he didn't understand how little they had.
Bureaucracies moved as nimbly as eighteen-wheelers, as Barbara knew from her years in the public school system. They needed time and space to turn this thing around, and yet Walter could not be more goddamn nonchalant.

She raised her right leg behind her, swung it down into pigeon pose, gloating a little at the openness of her hips. Some of the thinner women in the class looked absolutely constipated.

Or maybe Walter wanted the drama of everything happening at the last minute, which was truly harebrained. She had said as much, the last time they spoke:
No drama, Walter. Then too much attention will be paid, and she will run away. She's a scared little mouse.

Barbara knew from scared little mouses. Mice. She had been one, behind her cranky facade. She had skittered to her car in the morning, worried it wouldn't start, skittered into the school, tried to teach history to bored seventh and eighth graders, skittered out of the Pimlico neighborhood at day's end, cooked dinner, fretting over calories and fat and cholesterol. Graded papers in front of the television, usually falling asleep there. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Then she had awakened in the hospital, her face bandaged, twelve hours, a half day, lost to her. She had known even before they removed the dressing that the repair—she could not dignify it with the term
surgery
—had been botched. She could sense how lumpy the scar was, how large the stitches. They had not bothered to summon a plastic surgeon to the ER. That might have been another lawsuit, another arrow in her quill, but the hospital had been quick to remedy its work, and the result wasn't bad. Her scar was like a ghost smile, a little happy face off to the side. “For Halloween,” she once told Walter, “I might go as both of the Greek masks that represent the theater.”

Yet it was in that moment—waking up, disoriented, unsure of the damage done—that Barbara realized she was no longer scared. This was before the settlement left her well fixed, before she even really knew what happened. But she understood this:
She
wasn't scared anymore
. She had almost died. She didn't. There must be something she was supposed to do.

The first task she tackled was finding out everything about the boy who had sliced her face, following him through the system. Tuwan Jones was fourteen, a juvenile, and it was harder then to try juveniles as adults. Barbara didn't have a problem with that, although she believed her assailant to be beyond rehabilitation. Someone, a parent or a relative, had killed that boy long ago. He was sent to the Hickey School, where he promptly became an escape artist, leaving at every chance, only to be flummoxed by the surrounding suburbs, so still and quiet. Tuwan could get out of Hickey, but not out of the neighborhood. He never got much farther than Harford Road, the main strip nearest the school. They called Barbara every time he escaped, a courtesy and probably a defensive measure against future lawsuits. Tuwan had no intention of coming after her. He didn't even remember her. He was released from Hickey at the age of sixteen. By eighteen, he had finally managed to kill someone and was sent to Supermax in Baltimore City.

Perhaps another person would have taken this experience and resolved to prevent such tragedies, to help young men before they became assailants. But Barbara had been there already, on the front lines, and she had little confidence that she was the type of person who could change others. Instead, she became fixated on the idea of the death penalty. It was wrong to kill. Someone had tried to take her life from her, and failed. Given a chance to live, she had to become a better person. Not nicer, necessarily, but more confident, vigorous, even a little selfless. Perhaps men on death row could become better people, too, if only they could be spared execution.

And although Maryland had its share of interesting inmates, the best ones, the ones whose cases really deserved to be reconsidered, had all been taken. Barbara wanted an inmate more or
less to herself, she wanted to champion someone that no one else thought worthwhile. She wanted to take a perceived monster and persuade the world that he was human.

Which is what led her to Walter, back in the 1990s, when his first execution had been set. She could not believe the bloodlust at the time, how keen people were to see him die. The man she saw in newspaper photographs and courtroom sketches looked gentle to her, resigned. Besides, it wasn't immoral of him to challenge the state of Virginia's right to execute him on jurisdictional grounds. “Loophole,” editorials snarled. “Technicality,” complained pundits. But Barbara, the former history teacher, knew that state lines were more than arbitrary markers on a map, that the United States were the united
states,
and if Holly Tackett had been killed in West Virginia, then Walter should have been tried there. That was no technicality. It was a cherished tenet of most conservatives, the right for states to make their own laws, the insistence on less interference from the federal government. It was hypocritical for these same conservatives to claim that state lines didn't matter when they wanted to kill someone.

She began writing Walter. He seemed skeptical of her at first. Other women had written him. “Crazy women,” he later told her. “They want a boyfriend. I can't be somebody's boyfriend in here. Where were these women when all I wanted was a girlfriend?”

She thought that was funny, even self-aware. Over time, she began to pull out bits and pieces of Walter's life. The late-in-life parents, the coldness of his home, the consistent undermining by all those around him. She sent him an IQ test and he scored above average, although he admitted that he had never done well in school. Eventually, they began to talk about sex. Walter said his first sexual encounter was with a local girl who was sort of a for-barter prostitute; she had sex with men whose services she needed. He would go over to her house and help her with various tasks—putting up curtain rods, for example, or moving heavy
furniture. But she was so businesslike about the arrangement that Walter never enjoyed it quite as much as he thought he should, didn't really count it. “In a lot of ways, I was a virgin,” he said of the year he ended up on the run. He was, Barbara realized, hopelessly confused about sex and women.

“I'm not that man anymore,” he told her. “If I left here—I don't know. But I'm not going to leave here, and I think that's right. But that's the thing that seems weird to me. They locked me up, and I'm a better person for it. Cured, even. I needed to be locked up, no doubt about it. But when they execute me, they're going to kill the wrong Walter. The one they want to punish doesn't exist anymore.”

Barbara was the only person who seemed to agree. Virginia was going to kill the wrong Walter, commit murder as surely as he had. The state had spent millions toward this goal, far more than it would have if it had just allowed Walter to be a lifer from the start.

She reclined on her mat. Barbara had caught an infection from using one of the center's mats, or so she believed, and she now brought her own bright fuchsia one. It was the part of class she hated the most, the part where she was supposed to empty her mind. My mind does not empty, she wanted to protest.

Instead she lay on her back, counting the days. November 25. Under Walter's 1-2-3 plan, he wouldn't even broach his request to Eliza until the third time they spoke, and Barbara was unclear whether he was counting that first, truncated conversation. He might enjoy more phone privileges as the execution date came closer, but still—Barbara thought he should just blurt it out, let it stew in her mind.

“I know her better than you do,” Walter had said, which was infuriating. He seemed to think he was closer, in some ways, to this woman than he was to Barbara.
You don't know Eliza Benedict,
she wanted to tell him.
You know a girl, one who hasn't existed for
years. And you might not even have known her, as it turns out.
Barbara didn't like Eliza Benedict and would give anything if they didn't need her. She had disliked her the first time she saw her, walking down the street with that ugly dog. She had resented her…calm. This was a woman who clearly had no problem relaxing. Barbara had wanted to yell at her from the car: “A man's going to die because of
your
testimony. But he's not the same man who committed those crimes. You are killing a ghost, a phantom. How do you sleep at night? How can you live with yourself? You probably want him to die, but no court would give him death for what he did to you.”

She muttered
“Namaste”
but didn't bow her head to the teacher. Barbara rolled up her mat and rushed out into the world, her muscles supple and stretched, her mind seething. Forty-seven days. They had forty-seven days to get to the governor and petition for a commutation. Forty-seven days to break down a shoddy little story that had somehow managed to stand, all these years, a child's rickety tree house that should have fallen to ruin long ago. Forty-seven days to pry something out of Elizabeth Lerner that she might not even realize she had. It was like that child in that movie wandering around with stamps worth millions while grown-ups died. What if they had to hire a hypnotist, or some other professional? Barbara needed to go online, she needed another cup of coffee, she needed to see if Jared Garrett had returned her latest e-mail.

TRUDY TACKETT HATED THE WORD
privilege.
It was tricky, loaded, another benign word that had been twisted into an insult. It now was some comfortable zone above the fray, life lived at an altitude so rarefied that one didn't even know the fray existed.

But Trudy had always been aware that she was fortunate—in her family, in her family's wealth. She was aware that she and Terry lived in a charmed universe, where there was little worry about money, even when they had to contemplate up to four college tuitions. But they were not extravagant or showy people, especially by the standards of Middleburg. She looked at price tags. Sometimes. And she had never taken their good fortune for granted. That was what galled her. She had been grateful
in her prayers, aware of the luck in which her life was steeped. Even when she had the string of miscarriages, she had not railed against God, had not asked
Why me?
In the wake of Holly's death, she had turned to the church for strength, praying for the courage to find some kind of meaning in it all. Father Trahearne had recommended the book of Job. Which, in retrospect, was the beginning of the end of Trudy's life as a true Catholic.

But, no, she had never used money, and never expected special treatment because of it. Trudy had always felt vaguely embarrassed by the perks of money—boarding an airplane first because one was in business class, for example. That seemed a little gauche to her. But then she met a problem that all the money in the world couldn't solve, and her ideas began to change. She and Terry didn't pay for Walter Bowman's prosecution, which meant they also had relatively little say. Oh, everyone was
nice
. It was the dawn—flowering?—of the victims' rights movement, with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Parents of Murdered Children chapters. There was no doubt in Trudy's mind that everyone, from the sheriff's deputy who had found Holly's body to the lowliest clerk in the prosecutor's office, cared about Holly almost as much as if they had known her in life. That's how amazing her daughter was. Not even death could vanquish her charisma. It helped that the Tackett family had been early adapters, in terms of video, and had hours of those old clunky VHS tapes of Holly. They had played an edited clip, during the closing arguments, and Walter Bowman's attorney had barely objected. Even he, Trudy believed, understood how extraordinary Holly was. Later, the new attorney, the unfortunately super-capable Jefferson Blanding, had argued the videos were introduced improperly and should have been screened only during sentencing, not at the actual trial. In hindsight, it would have been better if Blanding had been Bowman's attorney all along. The first one's incompetence had caused
them all sorts of problems and delays. In a state more lenient than Virginia, it might have resulted in the death penalty being vacated altogether.

So—privilege, money. They were not things of which Trudy had ever availed herself. Until the day that a young clerk at Sussex had called Terry out of the blue and said she was the person who read all of Walter's incoming and outgoing correspondence, to make sure it met the prison's standards.

“Is there something specific we should know?” Terry had asked.

“Oh no,” the woman had assured him. “He's careful. He understands the rules and he wouldn't violate them. But the women who write him—they're all over the map. I mean, there's nothing that interesting now. But there might be. You never know.”

“Interesting?”

“Who's on his call list, for example. Whether he thinks he has a valid shot at an appeal. I mean, all the lawyer stuff—that's in person or on the phone, strictly confidential. That's a right that can't be tampered with. But when Walter turns around and tells someone else what's going on—that's not protected.”

Trudy had picked up the extension at Terry's invitation. It was hard for her not to break in, explain to Terry what was going on.
She's inside, she wants a bribe, she'll tell us what we need to know.
Since Holly's murder, Trudy had learned that Terry, like his daughter, was dangerously trusting. She had to be the vigilant one, the mean one, the cynic.

“If you knew,” the woman continued, “how little they pay us to work here. It's really kind of shocking.” The voice had a youthful twang, yet Trudy believed it had to be someone older, someone who had put in enough time in state government and was ready to play the angles. Did she make this offer to the victims of every man on death row? Granted, it wasn't a large population, and as
Trudy had learned, most victims were as poor as the perpetrators. But even if this clerk picked up ten, twenty dollars a month from five families, that would be quite the little stipend.

“We would appreciate,” Terry said carefully, “any help you could give us.”

“Same here,” the woman said. “Why don't you write me? I'll give you my PO box.”

The first month, Terry had sent twenty-five dollars, in cash, and they had received a rather perfunctory report back. The next month, he sent an American Express gift card of $100, and the report lengthened considerably. Yet, over the years, the information hadn't amounted to much. Walter was not as loose with details about his legal situation as the clerk had led them to believe, although one of his correspondents, Barbara LaFortuny, was more reliably indiscreet. And it was distressing to be told of the women who wrote him what could only be called love letters. What was wrong with people? With women? Trudy couldn't imagine men writing lovelorn letters to female murderers.

It was more distressing still to hear that Walter and Elizabeth had corresponded and that it had somehow slipped through their source's net. “We spot-check,” she had defended herself, when called on this oversight. “And her letter might have arrived on a day when I wasn't working. But I can swear to you up and down that he did not send any letters to Elizabeth Lerner from this facility. We would have been on that like white on rice.”

“But she's not Elizabeth Lerner,” Terry had pointed out to their source, careful not to offend, but also perturbed at what thousands of dollars had failed to buy. “She's Eliza Benedict.”

“Right, and how do you know that? Because of me. You also have her phone number, which you can drop into any online reverse directory and get an address. That's more important than any ol' letter she sent.”

Trudy did not agree. But now she found herself studying the
ten digits. What would she say, if she dared to dial them. (Trudy was still old enough to think “dial,” even if she was modern enough to use a cell phone.) The words
How dare you
came to mind. Those would cover a multitude of sins.

That phrase jolted her and she pulled out her Bible, tried to find the reference, but she had to cheat and use the Internet to narrow it down. Various things covered a multitude of sins, apparently. Love and charity. In Peter, it was written:
Love covers a multitude of sins
. That was not a passage that interested Trudy today, or any day. She kept clicking until she found a Web site whose interpretation worked better for her. From James 5:20.
Remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.
Love could help a sinner repent, the Web site instructed, but it must not turn a blind eye. That was not justice. Perhaps Trudy had been affiliated with the wrong church all these years, perhaps she should have embraced the hard-core fundamentalists. Her parents, both descended from Charleston's French Huguenots, had been scandalized enough by her conversion to Catholicism upon her marriage to Terry. If Trudy had joined a church where people rolled on the floor and spoke in tongues, they would have been just as mortified by the sheer tackiness of it all. Her parents were alive, distressingly healthy. Distressing because it meant that Trudy was genetically predisposed to live a long time.

How dare you? What are you thinking? What are you up to?
She found herself dialing—okay, furiously poking—the ten numbers that she had managed to commit to memory without even trying, this at a time when she could barely remember an errand from room to room. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang. She imagined the house in which it rang, a house with a husband, maybe children. A happy house.
That
was privilege.

How dare she. How dare she
.