I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (26 page)

Vonnie laughed, and the air cleared. They continued to laugh throughout the day, old stories bubbling up to the surface. The Stuckey's log (again) and their attempt to feign innocence as peanut-fouled water overflowed their bathroom at the charmingly quaint Martha Washington Inn. More memories followed throughout the day in Richmond, as they strolled through the fan district, ate dinner at the
New York Times
–anointed charcuterie restaurant. Vonnie remembered the terrible woman who had threatened to run them down at the beach, but also how Mr. Sleazak, their society painter neighbor back in Roaring Springs, had asked Inez to pose nude for a portrait, saying it would be “Just for me.” It was a most satisfactory day and one that had done the impossible—taken Eliza's mind off tomorrow. She wouldn't be surprised if the fight itself had been Vonnie's attempt to distract her. She was a good sister, in her way, and her way was all she had.

But that evening, as Eliza tried to fall asleep in a strange bed, away from Peter, Iso, and Albie, she found herself reviewing the day's events. Of all the funny stories she and Vonnie had shared, almost every one came from
before
. Was that because Vonnie had left for school? Or because the Lerner family lost its ability to be silly after Eliza came home? Strange, but she had never considered until now the totality of what Walter had taken, from all of them. From the day she came home, the Lerners had lived with a sense of remission, grateful yet skittish. They were well today, but that could end tomorrow. Of course that was true of every happy family. The difference was that the Lerners
knew
. Having
been unlucky once, they could be unlucky again. There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

“BACK AGAIN, MISS LAFORTUNY?”
asked the young woman at the Hampton Inn's front desk.

“You know me. I like to check on my boys.”

The clerk, a sweet-faced girl who should have taken better care of herself—everything about her appearance screamed poor nutrition and lack of exercise—smiled noncommittally. Like most people that Barbara met, she seemed torn between admiring her advocacy work and being horrified by it, with horror having a slight edge.

“How many you got now?”

“Just three, and they never let me see the one on death row. But I have the two others, and I am allowed to visit them from time to time. If they're good. And I'm good.”

“I'm sure you're always good, Miss Bar
bara,” the girl said. Not even two hundred miles from Baltimore and yet the manners were markedly different here.

“Oh, you'd be surprised. I can be a rabble-rouser.”

“I bet you can,” the girl said agreeably, going through those mysterious computer clicks that seem required of every transaction these days. Barbara wondered if teaching, too, now required moving through computer screens. Grading was probably done electronically, come to think of it. In her day, she had pressed hard, in ink, so her judgment would pass through multiple sheaves of paper. Cs. She had mainly given Cs, which had been slightly better than most of her students deserved. She'd never make it in today's more lenient environment.

Barbara had started writing her two “boys” at Sussex after she began her relationship with Walter. She had sought them out specifically for their location, keen to have a reason to drive down here, although she realized that she would never be given visiting privileges with Walter. Still, it made her feel closer to him, just passing through the gates of Sussex. And the two men she had chosen did need her. Both were African-American, and there was no doubt in her mind that their sentences were harsher because of that. Bobby Ray, the one she would visit tomorrow, had been a drug addict who ended up killing two women in a robbery attempt that could only be described as pathetic. The women were addicts, too, and also African-American. If they had been white, he almost certainly would be on death row with Walter. But that was small consolation to Bobby Ray, who yearned to take his sober self into the world, to find out what it might have been like to live clear-headed. He didn't go so far as to say it was unfair for his sober self to be locked up for what his drugged-up alter ego had done, but Barbara could tell it pulled at him. She believed he deserved a second chance, but she also had a hunch he would blow it, should that day ever come. Sobriety may have been forced on him in prison, but responsibility had not, not in any real way. Bobby
Ray was not equipped for the real world, not that she would tell the parole board that, if the day ever came. She would file a brief in his favor and do everything she could to help him succeed.

She unpacked her small bag, although she would be in the room no more than fourteen hours, checking out on her way to the prison. She wondered if Eliza Benedict was in this very motel, or if she had opted to drive down tomorrow. Perhaps she would see her at the breakfast buffet in the morning. She called the front desk, asked to be connected to Eliza Benedict's room. “No one by that name has checked in, Miss Barbara,” the desk clerk said. Lerner, then? “No, ma'am, and no one with a reservation under either name.”

All for the best. Barbara's presence would unnerve Eliza, perhaps even make her suspicious. She probably shouldn't have come down at all, but her trip was legitimate, and Bobby Ray looked forward to their visits. Why should he suffer? Besides, it was good karma, for Walter. She was putting her energy into the air, trying to create an aura.

She removed the bedspread—a friend who had attempted to organize Baltimore motel maids into a union had told her that motel bedspreads crawled with bacteria—and lay on the sheets, flipping through the channels to CNN, watching the crawl across the bottom of the screen. On Tuesday, one way or another, Walter's name would be there. Actually, his name probably wouldn't be used. He would be reduced to
DEATH ROW INMATE
or
VIRGINIA SERIAL KILLER
. The latter bothered her for several reasons. It wasn't correct, for one thing. Was two even a serial? By temperament, Walter was more of a spree killer; the odious Jared Garrett had that much right. Based on what Walter had told her, she believed he had a psychological defect that had been triggered by something the two girls had said or done. A woman in Texas had claimed she went temporarily insane when her lover's wife shushed her, and next thing she knew, the woman was lying on the floor of her
garage, hacked to death by her own ax. That woman had been acquitted. But Barbara had never tried to draw Walter out on the killings. Such a discussion seemed prurient, distasteful to her. Besides, that Walter no longer existed. Like Bobby Ray, he was a different man in prison than he had been before.

Unlike Bobby Ray, he had no chance of testing that new persona in the world at large, yet he would probably be more successful. Walter had skills. Walter had really thought about what he had done.

But it was Barbara who, in her letters, had pointed out to him the glaring inconsistency of Elizabeth Lerner's testimony, the hole that a more competent attorney could have driven the proverbial truck through. Why had no one else seen it, for all these years? Because no one wanted to see it, no one wanted to lean too hard on that brave young girl who had managed to survive the terrible rapist/killer. Even Walter had failed to notice.

She called for a mushroom-and-onion pizza from a nearby delivery place, made a pot of tea in the carafe, but only after washing it carefully. Her friend who had warned her about the bedspreads also had told her of seeing a hotel maid use a toilet brush to clean out a coffeemaker. Think about that. Think about all the little crimes against humanity, all the rudeness and unkindness, that go unchecked, day in and day out, things done by people who thought of themselves as good, the same people who cheered and posted nasty Internet comments when a man like Walter was killed. They used words like
animal
and
monster,
openly yearned for more painful, sadistic executions. They were killers, too, cowardly ones who contracted their bloodlust over to the state, telling themselves that their murders were in the service of justice.

WALTER WOKE UP THINKING
about ketchup. Why was he thinking about ketchup? Oh, because he was remembering that
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for ketchup, the one that showed it quivering on the edge, with all the ceremony of a first kiss, and the song coming up under it. An-ti-ci-pa-a-a-a-a-shun. He had read recently that the song had, in fact, been written about a date, although he had a hunch that
date
meant
sex
in this particular case. In Walter's experience, too much anticipation could wreck things, set you up to expect more and better than you got, then psych you out. He didn't want to feel an-ti-ci-pa-a-a-shun, didn't want to be dependent on gravity, or some other force of nature, to make things drop, unfold, happen. He wanted to be the one who made things happen. Again. Finally.

He reached for himself, but not because he was thinking of her. He didn't feel that way about her, plain and simple. He had always wanted to apologize for that, but how, exactly? Talk about adding insult to injury. Even with her, he hadn't been thinking about her. Maybe that had been the trick all along. Love the one you're with, think about someone else.

But he liked her. He was looking forward to seeing her, talking to her face-to-face. Plus, word would get around that a woman had come to see him, and that would give him some real cachet, especially if people heard she was attractive. Not that she would show up in that green dress, hair slicked up and back, but she would probably look okay. He just hoped he got to stick around and enjoy the burnishing of his rep. Then again, if he did stick around, he would be famous for a lot more than getting a visit from a redheaded woman.

Barbara had wanted him to write a script, had even suggested they practice on one of their phone calls. Role play, she called it. A script! Role play! Barbara trying to be Elizabeth! That would never work. He needed to be loose, spontaneous. But he also had to be mindful of the clock. Time could and would run out on this game.

Just as he found his release, an all-too-familiar sound reverberated through Sussex I, the loudest, most dreaded sound in a place full of loud, dreaded sounds.
No. No. Please, God, no. Don't do this to me.

ELIZA AND VONNIE APPROACHED
the prison gate with the kind of nervousness endemic to those who have seldom been in trouble, aware that they were entering a world where power was distributed quite differently from the one on the other side of the fence. They would have to do as they were told, go only where they were allowed, speak as permitted. It was a lot of freedom to relinquish, even for an hour, even in the name of a good cause. Eliza's palms were sweating, and Vonnie looked tense.

So when the guard said, “Sorry, ma'am, no visiting hours today,” the instinct was not to fight or argue but plead confusion.

“This is a rather extraordinary circum-stance,” Eliza said. “If you check the list, I'm sure you'll see my name.”

“Oh, I have your name. I have everybody's name,” said the guard, not unkindly. “But no one's going in today. They found something in Sussex II last night, and the whole prison went into lockdown. You'll have to come back for the next scheduled visiting day, which should be in two weeks.”

“The man she's visiting will be dead next week,” Vonnie put in, leaning across her.

“That a fact?” Bland, unmoved. “Well, there's nothing I can do about anything. Nobody's going into there today, I can tell you that much. And no one's any happier about it than you are.”

“There has to be a way,” Vonnie continued. “There's always a solution if—”

“Naw,” the guard said. “There doesn't and there isn't. No visiting hours today. Y'all can come back in two weeks.”

Eliza wanted to put her head on the steering wheel and weep. The only thing that stopped her was that she wasn't sure if she would be crying for the families she had hoped to comfort, or for being thwarted in her own selfish desires. But she couldn't help thinking that it was her own disingenuousness that had undone her, that this would never have happened if she had been completely honest about what she hoped to achieve. With Peter, with Vonnie. With herself.

“Buck up,” Vonnie hissed, and Eliza realized a tear was trickling down her cheek. “This is a roadblock, nothing more. Trust me, I will get you in to see him.”

 

VONNIE PROVED TO BE RIGHT,
although she would never have the satisfaction of going back and flinging that knowledge into the face of the imperturbable guard. And Eliza knew she wanted to do just that. Her sister had never been a gracious winner.

But she was a shrewd strategist, with sound instincts. Her first
decision was to extend their stay in Richmond, where she furiously worked her iPhone and MacBook all day Saturday and into Sunday, often simultaneously. Walter was to be moved to Jarratt, home of the so-called Death House, Sunday evening. Visits there were rare, even for lawyers, Jefferson Blanding warned them, and sure enough, Eliza's request was turned down by every official at the Department of Corrections. A part of her was almost relieved. She wasn't going to face Walter after all, but it wasn't her fault. She had tried to do the right thing. Why not go home, content with that knowledge? She said as much to Vonnie, who had turned their B and B into her command center, cursing its unreliable Internet connection as she searched for numbers and e-mailed journalist friends who knew how to find people on the weekends.

“Is that what you want?” Vonnie asked. “I'm doing this for you.”

“I don't know. I didn't want to see him, but—if there are other girls, don't their parents and relatives deserve to know?”

“Deserving
is a tough word. Yes, it would probably be better for them to know. And better for others to stop pinning their hopes, as it were, on Walter Bowman. But it's not your responsibility, E. Don't shoulder this burden if you can't.”

“I can, however. I can do this, and I should.”

“Then I'll keep calling.”

Vonnie, now turning her attention to politicians, was cagey. She didn't tell anyone what Eliza might accomplish in her visit until she made it to the top of the food chain, the governor's chief of staff. Instead, she kept telling everyone that these were special circumstances. Eliza wasn't even sure to whom she was speaking when she finally said, “Look, there's something else you should know.” It might have been the governor himself. All Eliza knew was that Vonnie said “Uh-huh, uh-huh” many times over, scrib
bled a few notes, and spent lengthy intervals on hold before saying good-bye in her terse way.

“You're in. But there are a few ground rules. Security in the facility itself is different, which is why this is such a big deal. You won't be speaking to him through glass, but bars. They're going to have the deputy put masking tape on the floor, and you cannot cross that line. Get me? You cannot come within arm's reach of him, or the deputy will physically drag you away and it will be over.”

“So not an issue. Anything else?”

Vonnie paused. “They also want us to record the conversation.”

Us. Eliza liked the sound of that first person plural, actually. “Is that legal?”

“If it isn't, that's their problem. I could take notes anyway. I have a pretty competent shorthand. The final thing is, they want us there first thing Monday, as soon as he's had breakfast. That gives them a full day to deal with whatever Walter tells you.”

“Deal?”

“The way I understand it, let's say he confesses to you about, I don't know, even as few as four murders. In each case, they want to be able to go to the families, tell them what's happened, then have the families agree that they're comfortable with the fact that there won't be actual court cases, even though Walter's confessions aren't legally binding. Feel me?”

“Vonnie, you sound ridiculous when you use that ghetto argot.”

“Thanks. The point is, they can't have a glory-hog prosecutor coming forward and declaring that he wants to try the case. Which may, in fact, be Walter's real agenda, Eliza. He probably thinks that these twenty-third-hour confessions start the clock over. And this is a complicated issue for the governor. He's anti–
death penalty, personally, and has fought the expansion of the death penalty while in office. But he's a lame duck, and he doesn't like to interject himself into these cases. Yet if some grandstanding prosecutor from outside Virginia insists on a trial, he'll have no leverage over that person. He's already reaching out to governors he thinks might become involved.”

“As you said, Walter could be counting on this. But what if he's lying simply for the hell of it? What if he confesses to things he didn't do and then he's executed? Is that fair to the families involved?”

Vonnie sat on the soft, fluffy, inevitably overdecorated bed. The room was even more quaint than their famed one in the Martha Washington Inn. Used to five-star hotels, Vonnie had been sneering at every item in the room—the pillows, the crockery, the embroidered samplers on the wall—since their arrival. But now she put her arm around Eliza, something she hadn't done—well, ever.

“Presumably, he's cagey enough not to overreach. In total, according to the governor's people, there are eight missing person cases, from 1980 to 1985, that he conceivably could be linked to, based on geography and opportunity. If he claims anything off that list, then they're going to decide he's disingenuous and let this whole thing drop, very quietly. Eliza—you have to sign a confidentiality agreement with the state in order to have this meeting. Frankly, it pisses me off. They have no right to do this. But given that you've never wanted to speak about any of this, I didn't think I was wrong to give that up.”

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
So that's what it was all about. Vonnie wasn't wrong, but Eliza felt a strange surge of anger. She had
chosen
to be silent all these years, but that was her prerogative. How dare someone else impose that condition on her? She felt as she had when she was fifteen, going on sixteen, and all the various adults—
prosecutors, judges, even her parents—kept insisting her story was hers to tell, yet instructed her in how and when to tell it.

“Okay, so I sign a confidentiality agreement. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. At least I'll be telling the truth when I say I can't speak of it.”

“One more thing—”

Vonnie's voice sounded dire, but Eliza couldn't imagine what else she had to impart.

“They wanted to know if you want to be a witness.”

“God, no.”

“That's what I thought, but I didn't answer for you on that score. Said okay, conditionally. Look, let's go to that Caribbean place for dinner if it's open on Sunday. Go out for dinner and see a girly movie, something you'd never see with Peter or the kids.”

They managed the dinner, but the multiplexes of Richmond were short of the kind of female-bonding experience they desired. They settled for a Batman movie, in what Eliza still thought of as a dollar house, although it cost five. She found it appalling—not because it was loud and violent, and not because it was hard to see, or imagine seeing, the pain in the young actor who had died before the movie's release, but because in Batman's world everyone was a vigilante or an amoral opportunist. Each person thought he was
right.
But wasn't that true of the less-stylized world in which Eliza now lived? Even Walter, for all his talk of change and redemption, probably had rationalizations for what he had done. But that was the one thing he had spared her. He had never spoken of anything he had done, not even the undeniable fact of Maude's death, or Holly's. Why was that?

Because, Eliza admitted to herself, he planned to leave her alive. That was his advantage over her, as much as his strength and brutality. He had decided that he wouldn't kill her. What might she have done with that knowledge? Could she have saved Holly, after all? Did she have power then that she couldn't glimpse or
fathom? Did she have any now? Less than twenty-four hours ago, only a few people knew what Walter had promised her—or so she believed. Had she walked into a trap? Was she once again making her way up the Sucker Branch, about to stumble on something that she would be better off not seeing, not knowing, wandering too far from the path?

At any rate, it was too late to turn back.