No One You Know (4 page)

“I’m begging you,” I said, “seriously, as a friend.”

I had told Thorpe in the past about Lila’s almost obsessive desire for privacy. It was the reason she lived at home rather than in an apartment; having an apartment would have required her to have roommates. It was why she rarely answered the phone, and she had so few friends. It probably had something to do with why she liked numbers, too: numbers kept their distance. They communicated without the messiness of emotion. Numbers possessed an inherent order that was impossible to find in human relationships. She would have been sick about having her face splashed across the papers, her name mentioned on the TV news. A book would be even worse. Books get passed from hand to hand, preserved in libraries. In a book, she would always be the victim.

Thorpe leaned back. “I’m too far into it to back out now, but I’ll feel better if I have your approval. The first draft is almost halfway done. I’d love for you to take a look at it. I’ve already found an agent.”

“Didn’t it occur to you to ask me before you started?”

He said nothing.

“I trusted you,” I said, feeling stupid. I thought about his endless questions, his incessant note-taking, and how I’d answered every question he asked, never really stopping to consider his motives.

He reached across the table and put his hand on mine. I pulled away.

“I thought you might be reluctant, and I completely understand. That’s why I wanted to get the ball rolling before I told you.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a file folder, which he slid across the table to me. I opened it. The stack of papers inside was two inches thick. I read the title page, feeling sick to my stomach.

MURDER BY THE BAY

A True Tale of San Francisco Noir

by Andrew Thorpe, Ph.D.

During the next few weeks, I saw Thorpe on several occasions. Each time, I begged him not to go ahead with the book, and each time, he refused. “Have you read it?” he would ask eagerly. “If you read it, I think you’ll change your mind.” But I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t need to relive, through someone else’s lens, the horror of Lila’s death.

The last time Thorpe and I talked was a foggy day on Ocean Beach, after I’d told my parents about the book. They had been devastated, and my normally calm father had been unable to hide his anger.

“You brought Andrew Thorpe into this house,” he said. “He had dinner with us. We trusted him because he was your friend.”

Thorpe and I walked along the shoreline, faces cold and wet from the fog. “I’m asking you one last time,” I pleaded. “For me, for my parents, for Lila. Just let this go.”

“Ellie,” he said. “I can’t.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

He looked out at the ocean, where an enormous ship was making its way slowly toward the bay. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I turned and walked away. When I was halfway to the board-walk, he shouted something, but his words were drowned out by the waves.

Four

F
OR SEVERAL YEARS AFTER
L
ILA DIED
, I wandered. It took me longer than it should have to complete my B.A. in literature, after which I worked as a waitress and an office temp in order to finance my travels around the U.S.—endless road trips in beat-up cars with on-again, off-again boyfriends. Eventually, I went alone to Europe. The summer after I finished high school and Lila graduated from Berkeley, our parents had paid for the two of us to spend six weeks backpacking by Eurail. We had so much fun on our trip, we vowed to do it again in five years. With Lila gone, the five-year mark came and went without fanfare. I lived in a kind of suspension, having never found a clear path forward. Four years later than planned, I bought a one-way ticket across the Atlantic. I spent the summer of my twenty-seventh year retracing the steps that Lila and I had made together. I traveled the same route we had traveled, from Amsterdam to Paris, Paris to Barcelona, across to Venice, up through Germany, and finally back to the Netherlands. I visited the same museums, even tried to sleep in the same hostels, though more often than not I couldn’t find them, as I’d never bothered to keep a journal.

I bought a book of mini-biographies of famous mathematicians and visited several of their graves—Blaise Pascal at Saint Etiennedu-Mont in Paris, Carl Gauss at the Albanifriedhof in Göttingen, Germany, Leibniz in Hanover, Christian Doppler at the Cimitero di San Michele in Venice. Visiting the gravesites of the mathematicians Lila had admired was a posthumous gift to my sister, one which served no practical purpose, but in some way I couldn’t quite explain, it made me feel closer to her.

Upon my return home, I continued working temp jobs, moving from one office to the next with no sense of joy or purpose. I often wondered what Lila would be doing, had she lived. Surely, it would be a great deal more than this; her life, I knew, would have amounted to something. A decade after her death I could not quite banish the thought that I was still living life as an imaginary number.

Then, when I was beginning to doubt that I would ever find anything to be passionate about, I found my calling in coffee. The discovery was accidental, what some might call luck. Lila, for her part, had never believed in such a thing. Once, when I exclaimed over her good luck at having won a Walkman in a high school raffle, Lila had said, “What we call luck is really just the result of natural laws playing themselves out, a matter of probability.”

A
CUPPER, LIKE A SOMMELIER OR A PERFUMER,
must have an excellent nose. I inherited mine from my mother, an avid gardener who arranged her plants not by color, but by smell. Walking through my mother’s garden as a child, I was enthralled by the way the heady sweetness of jasmine gave way to the tartness of lemon trees, or the way musky wisteria was buttressed by the piney smell of sage. I loved the crispness of peppermint against a carpet of cedar bark mulch, the earthiness of roses paired with delicate lavender. Once, when I was in elementary school, my mother told me I had a natural nose. I relished the compliment, and clung to it for years. My mother was always supportive, and nothing would have pleased her more than to have many fronts on which to praise me. But while Lila’s intellectual gifts made her a magnet for spontaneous and genuine praise, I knew our mother had to work a little harder with me.

Decades after the fact, I still remembered my first cup of coffee, enjoyed on the sly with my father one Sunday morning when Lila and my mother were at church. I was eight years old, homebound with poison oak following a family camping trip.

I’d always loved the smell of coffee, the way it filled the house in the mornings when my parents were getting ready for work. But that day, I noticed something new in the kitchen: a small wooden box on the countertop, with a metal cup affixed to its top and a crank on the side. A few dark beans rested in the bottom of the cup. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“A coffee grinder.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Your mother and I bought it in Venice.”

“What’s Venice?”

“A city in Italy. We went there on our honeymoon.”

“Why haven’t I ever seen it before?”

“I found it when I was cleaning out the garage. Why don’t you give it a whirl?”

I turned the crank round and round, watching the teeth in the bottom of the cup break the beans into smaller and smaller bits, releasing a rich, nutty fragrance. I continued cranking until the beans disappeared. Then I pulled out the little drawer where the coffee grounds had fallen, brought it to my nose, and sniffed. It was wonderful.

“I want some,” I said.

Dad smiled. “Aren’t you a bit young?”

Many years later, I would take a temp job doing administrative work at Golden Gate Coffee in South City. When the owner, Mike Stekopolous, offered me a permanent position as his assistant, I accepted without hesitation; it was the first office where I felt I truly fit in. I’d been at Golden Gate Coffee for a year when I first accompanied Mike on one of his trips. I was thirty-one years old, searching for something I couldn’t quite pinpoint—a sense of peace and well-being that had eluded me since Lila’s death. On a small plot of land in the Quezaltenango region of Guatemala, I stood side by side with three generations of a
campesino
family and picked ripe coffee cherries from glossy trees. By the end of the day my back was aching, my fingers sore, and my burlap bag only half full; I was stunned to learn that it required two thousand hand-picked cherries to produce a single pound of coffee. The next day, I took a tour of the processing shed, where the floaters were separated from the good cherries, which were then fed into the pulping machine before the beans, still wrapped in a thick skin of parchment, were separated by size. I saw the fermentation vats, dipped my hands into the soggy beans, and rinsed away the gooey mucilage, revealing the smooth, greenish beans with their delicate seams. Finally, I helped spread the beans on gigantic tarps to dry, raking them back and forth in the sun.

It was only after I had experienced the process from start to finish that Mike allowed me into the cupping room—a small shed in a clearing, with whitewashed walls and a floor of packed dirt. There, as I broke the dark crust with a heavy spoon, I remembered the morning I sat sipping coffee with my father. It was the first time in my adult life I could envision some version of my own story in which the disparate parts somehow came together, in which the various plots began to merge.

Five

M
URDER BY THE
B
AY
APPEARED IN STORES
on a Tuesday in June, eighteen months after Lila’s death. The following Sunday, a reviewer named Semi Chellas gave it a glowing front-page review in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
promising that it was destined to become “a true crime classic.” Days later, I came across a piece Thorpe had written for
San Francisco
magazine, titled, “Lila’s Story,” in which he detailed his friendship with me and claimed that while Lila had been the main character of his story, I had been his muse. It made me sick to my stomach. I hoped my parents hadn’t heard about the article; if they did, they said nothing.

I watched the book section, alarmed to see it debut at number seven on the
Chronicle
nonfiction best-seller list. Week by week, it rose, from seven to five to two, and eventually to number one, where it remained for twenty-three weeks. I couldn’t walk past a bookstore without seeing it prominently displayed in the window, often with a large poster, on which the cover art—a photograph of Lila’s face ghosted over the Golden Gate Bridge—was paired with Thorpe’s headshot: victim and author, side by side. I hated the thought of all those people reading about Lila, hated the fact that her private tragedy had become public entertainment.

During its third week on the stands, I was in the waiting room of a service station on Geary Boulevard, having the oil changed in my car, when I noticed that the woman across the aisle was reading
Murder by the Bay.
She saw me looking at the cover and asked, “Have you read it?”

“No.”

“You should. It’s fascinating. Slow in parts when the author gets into the math stuff, but overall I’d recommend it. It’s chilling to think this happened right here, in San Francisco. I know the streets he mentions, I’ve eaten in the restaurants, my son even went to the same high school as Lila—Lowell. He remembers her, she was apparently very quiet, pretty, a little strange. I’m three-quarters of the way through. The author just named the murderer.”

“He did?”

“Yes. I won’t spoil it for you.”

She looked at the cover, then back at me. “Actually, you kind of look like her.”

After paying for the oil change, I drove to Green Apple Books on Clement. Until then, I had been determined not to read Thorpe’s book. But the woman at the service station had caught me off guard. Was it possible that Thorpe had actually done what he said he would do—that he had ultimately found something that the police had not? The book was on the shelf of new releases, front and center. A gold sticker on the cover, just above Lila’s left eye, said
Autographed.
It was a staff pick. A card handwritten by someone named Pate said the book was “reminiscent of
In Cold Blood,
a chilling account of a grisly murder that will have you on the edge of your seat.” If the sales clerk hadn’t been looking straight at me, I would have ripped the card off and moved the stack to the calendar section at the back of the store. Instead, I just picked up a copy, placed it on the counter, and paid cash for the story of my sister’s life and death. That night in my bedroom, I began reading.

The book opened with a detailed description of the manner in which Lila’s body was found. Thorpe quoted the hiker who found her in the woods: “There I was unzipping my pants, getting ready to take a leak, when my foot caught on something and I tripped. When I caught my balance and saw that it was a body, I freaked out. I leaned against the nearest tree and puked my guts up.”

For weeks afterward, I couldn’t shake the image of this stranger in his unzipped pants, vomiting beside my sister’s body. I would have given anything to be the one who found her, to comb her hair with my fingers and wipe the mud off her face. I would have given anything to make her look more like herself, less exposed, before the detectives arrived with their notebooks and Polaroid cameras.

Thorpe found no detail too intimate or too gruesome to report. He described the crime scene photos as if he were describing a series of paintings: the pale bluish color of my sister’s skin, the high arch of her dark eyebrows, the way her bloodied hair fanned out around her face. Even, agonizingly, the way the police covered their noses when they approached her body, as it had been several days since she died. She was lying on her back in a straight, prim line, arms resting at her sides, a pile of leaves beneath her head like a pillow—a position which led the detectives to surmise that her murderer must have known her.

The killer appeared to feel some compassion for his victim,
Thorpe wrote.
Almost as if he was putting her to bed, tucking her in for the long night.

She had been clothed when the hiker found her, but her shirt was gaping open beneath her peacoat, the top four buttons missing. Thorpe took several sentences to describe her pale yellow bra, a full paragraph to describe a small tattoo above her left breast. She’d gotten the tattoo a few weeks before she died, and had shown it to me proudly one night before bed.

“What is it?” I’d asked, tracing my fingers over the dark purple ink.

“A double torus, or as good an approximation of one as I could get on Haight Street.”

“What’s a double torus?”

“It’s a sphere with two handles and two holes, formed by connecting two torii. Picture two doughnuts glued together, side by side.”

“What possessed you to get a tattoo of two doughnuts?” I asked.

“The double torus is a very elegant topological construct. It can be plotted like so—” She went to her desk, jotted something down on a scrap of paper, and handed it to me: z
²
= 0.04-x
⁴
+ 2x
⁶
-x
⁸
+ 2x
²
y
²
-2x
⁴
y
²
-y
⁴
. A few days after her body was discovered, I came across the paper tacked to her bulletin board. I realized it was the last thing she had written down specifically for me. I never threw it away. For years it would travel with me in my wallet, like some secret code.

Lila buttoned her pajama top to cover the tattoo. “Someone dared me.”

“Who?”

She smiled, a private smile, as if I wasn’t even in the room. “No one you know.”

Standing beside Lila’s body in the morgue in Guerneville, holding hands, my parents saw the tattoo for the first time. This scene, too, was described by Thorpe, who, of course, had not been there, but who claimed in his book’s preface that a “dramatization of this and other events, though fictional, was necessary to telling the story in a truthful way.” But there were things he got right: my parents’ surprise at the tattoo, the smell of Chinese takeout coming from the mortuary office, my father’s monotone phone call to me—things Thorpe only knew because I had told him.

For him, it was a story, pure and simple. Prior to the book, he’d been teaching part-time at various Bay Area universities for several years. He confessed to me that the only reason he ended up at USF was that it had the best views and the shortest semesters. “I used to think teaching was the perfect career,” he told me early in our friendship. “I had this idea that everyone was in it for the love of literature. But that was before I discovered how much jealousy and petty politics is involved. I love the students, but I hate the system. I have to come up with a way out.”

The book was Thorpe’s solution. He was thirty-two years old when
Murder by the Bay
made him a minor celebrity. Every time I glanced at the literary events section of the
Chronicle,
he was there. One morning, while eating breakfast in front of the television, I saw him on the
Today
show, being interviewed by Bryant Gumbel. He looked completely different from the Andrew Thorpe I knew, slick and polished and decked out in beautifully tailored clothes, expensive shoes. The next week,
Murder by the Bay
appeared on the
New York Times
best-seller list. His byline began cropping up in slick magazines like
Harper’s
and
GQ,
and eventually he landed his own column for
Esquire.
He went on to pen three more books in the true crime genre, growing richer murder by murder. Occasionally I would see him on CNN, talking about some new unsolved case as if he were an expert in forensics. And maybe, by then, he was.

While I despised the exploitative nature of
Murder by the Bay,
there was one thing I could not deny: Thorpe had done his research.

Ultimately, evidence about the crime was scant and the police investigation was unenthusiastic. Lila’s case was never much of a priority for the San Francisco Police Department, which was caught up in a scandal involving the police chief’s son. The Guerneville police, for their part, were underfunded and short on staff. Although Lila’s death was labeled a homicide, no one was ever charged. Thorpe, however, had a theory, which he pieced together using a complex series of clues and seemingly well-reasoned conjecture. He laid out his case meticulously, convincingly, over a span of 296 pages. Added to the details about the case itself were long passages about Lila, my parents, me.

This isn’t only the story of the murdered girl,
Thorpe wrote in the preface.
It is also the story of her sister, the one who was left behind. I knew her personally. It would be fair to say I knew her very well. Portions of this book are directly transcribed from conversations I had with Ellie Enderlin, who would strive, in the weeks and months following her sister’s death, to be exactly what her parents needed, to transform herself, as if by magic, into the good daughter.

The irony was that, if there had ever been a chance of my becoming “the good daughter,” it ended with the publication of Thorpe’s book. While my mother tried valiantly to treat me exactly as she always had, my father could not hide his disappointment. I heard it in his voice when he spoke to me, saw it in his face when he looked at me. Mine was an ambitious family—my father’s successful financial consulting business, my mother’s well-regarded law practice, Lila’s burgeoning genius. Only one of us was average—a break in the genetic code, perhaps, a dilution of the Enderlin family determination to succeed. My mediocrity was a fault which my father had largely chosen to overlook when Lila was alive. With a prodigy like Lila, he could afford for me to be average. Even after her death, there was a grace period during which I suspected he was trying to give me the benefit of the doubt; for the first time in my life, he took an interest in my studies, frequently asking about my classes, my goals. I tried to come up with worthy answers to his questions, never letting on that I skipped most of my classes or that my promises to follow in my mother’s footsteps as an attorney were meaningless. For a short time, he seemed to harbor a genuine faith in me. But after the book came out, everything changed. Our conversations became shorter and shorter, the silences between us more strained. I suspected it was an effort for him not to say what he was thinking: that the book was my fault, that, through my indiscretion, I had turned our family’s private tragedy into a public spectacle.