Stiltsville: A Novel (27 page)

“You shouldn’t stay away,” Jack said. “You don’t need to do that.” He spoke softly, but I was aware of Marse sitting beside me, her uncanny ability to read my mind, and I thought of the first day we met, at Stiltsville, when she’d known even before I had that I’d won Dennis and she’d lost him. I turned toward her, to try to pull her into the conversation, but she wasn’t there. She’d stepped a few feet away and was intent on the television behind the bar. Adam was standing, too, chatting with another man who had come in. The bartender was watching the television, and he had—I realized this without having registered it at the time—turned up the volume a moment earlier. I had the thought that maybe Marse was going to flirt with the bartender, and that Adam was occupied, and Dennis was with Julia, many steps away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there Wednesday, I promise.”

“Let’s not trash your tennis career over one afternoon at the beach.”

“No, of course. Of course not.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

“Frances?” said Marse. There was an edgy timbre in her voice, a shiver of hardness. I turned toward her, and she crooked her finger. “Come here,” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said to Jack. Had our flirting been so obvious, so terrible, that I was being scolded? When I reached her, Marse said, “Watch this,” and put her hands on my shoulders to turn me toward the television. On the screen was a newswoman in a yellow blazer with large gold buttons, and behind her was a white front door in a low brick building cordoned off by yellow police tape. There were officers milling around, and in the corner of the screen, an ambulance with its back doors open.

Did I recognize the building, in that instant? In the bottom third of the screen was the story ticker: GAINESVILLE STUDENTS SLAIN, it read, and then: TWO DEAD AT WILLIAMSBURG VILLAGE APARTMENTS.

I had no trouble placing the building’s name. The newswoman was saying, “
We’re reporting that the victims were both women in their late teens or early twenties, students at the university, where the fall semester is currently under way. The bodies were discovered this afternoon at four p.m., after one of the girls’ mothers reported that she had not heard from her daughter. The killer appears to have entered through the apartment’s sliding glass doorway
.”

“Dennis?” I said to Marse.

“Your friend’s getting him,” she said.

“When did I talk to her?” I said.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure she’s safe.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

“Yes.”

Dennis rushed into the bar with Jack as the newswoman closed her segment, saying, “
For now, Gainesville students are being cautioned by police to stay alert, travel in pairs, and lock their doors
.”

“Give me the phone,” said Dennis to the bartender, and after some maneuvering, the bartender was unable to pull the phone away from its spot beside the cash register, so Dennis went around the bar. He started dialing, then stopped and looked at me. “Is it 5269 or 6952?” he said, then without waiting for an answer turned back and finished dialing. Marse and I watched him. After a long moment, he spoke into the phone. “Call your parents,” he said urgently, then put the phone down and reached across the bar for my hands. “Just the machine,” he said. “She’s not in, that’s all.” My chest was tight. “We’re going home—we’ll be there in ten minutes—and she’ll have left a message. If I know Margo, she’s already on a bus.”

I nodded. Home seemed a long way away.

“I’ll walk out with you,” said Marse. She collected my purse and took my arm, and the three of us headed together toward the parking lot. Only later did I consider that I hadn’t said good-bye to Jack, and that I owed him a word of gratitude: not only did he retrieve my husband when I needed him, but he also must have paid for our drinks.

T
oday, with cell phones and the Internet, the whole event would have unraveled differently. But then, the only people I knew who had cell phones were a secretary at Dennis’s firm whose husband was rumored to be a member of the Cuban mafia, and a doctor I knew from my office, who preferred it to a beeper in case of emergencies. We knew several people who had car phones, and indeed our next car would have one, but at the time we did not, and so we drove in silence, Dennis squeezing my knee. As I’d watched the newscast at the bar, my mind had been cloudy with panic, my vision had narrowed, and I’d had difficulty viewing the screen as a whole—instead I’d seen the ambulance in the corner, then the words on the screen, then the newswoman in her yellow jacket. But in the car, looking out at the clear bright night, I grew calm. Not this, I prayed. This is not going to happen to me. To someone else, this is happening, but it is not happening to me. One thing I felt, beyond the fear and frenzy, was love: for my daughter, for my husband. When we turned into our driveway, I said, “If there’s no message, we’ll call the Gainesville police, and if we can’t get through, we’ll get back in the car. We can be there in six hours.”

Dennis paused. “We’ll check the machine,” he repeated. “Then we’ll call the police. Then we’ll drive.” We were people who needed a plan, and he seemed to consider this a good one. But when we rushed into the kitchen, I saw the red light on the answering machine blinking, and I cried out in relief. He hit the play button, and then there was a woman’s voice—but it wasn’t Margo, it was Gloria, and she said something about a picnic at the beach before Dennis hit the delete button, and the machine sounded a long beep. And then—finally, like wheels touching down after a turbulent flight—it was Margo, saying, “Are you there? You’re going to see the news. I’m all right.” She paused. “Those girls—they lived right next door to me.” There was the soft, wailing sound of my daughter crying, and I started to cry, too. Dennis replayed the message and we listened again. He dialed her number, frowned, and handed the phone to me. I got the tail end of a recorded message, and then it repeated:
All circuits are busy, please try your call again.

“The world is trying to get through,” he said. “Those poor girls.”

“Their poor parents.”

He pulled off his tie, and we moved together to the living room and sat on the sofa. After a long time, he said, “Frances, why was Jack at the wedding?”

I closed my eyes. It seemed ridiculous to talk about this now, but I didn’t have the energy to refuse. “He wasn’t. He was upstairs, having dinner.”

“Were you with him? At the bar, I mean?”

“No.” Then I said, “No more than you were with Julia at the reception.” This seemed a nod toward a confession, and it was the only admission I would ever make.

“Will you see him when you switch to this new team?”

“No.” This wasn’t exactly true—he would be around, even if he wasn’t my coach—but I knew I would not join another team at the Biltmore. I would play somewhere else, if I kept playing at all.

“Thank God for that,” he said. “I don’t think of myself as a jealous guy . . .”

I took his hand, and pulled his palm toward my mouth, then kissed the warm soft space at the base of his thumb—this was something I did when I wanted to express my love, though I knew it wasn’t a gesture he particularly understood. “I love you,” I said, and the tears came again, along with the specific feeling of being at the end of something long and difficult, like a marathon, or in this case short and difficult, like a sprint, or both.

Dennis was partially correct: Margo had gone to the bus station, but after waiting an hour and a half had been unable to get out of town, even though Greyhound had added two buses to its southbound service. We continued trying in vain to get through to her, and finally, at midnight, she called. Dennis was watching the news in bed and I was in the bathroom, staring at myself in the vanity mirror. “Are you coming home?” said Dennis when he answered the phone. I rushed to the kitchen to pick up the other line.

“Mom? Isn’t it horrible?” she said. “A policeman threw up on my doorstep.”

“Lord,” I said.

Dennis groaned. “Don’t think about that, sweetheart.”

She explained the situation at the bus station. “I’m not at the apartment anymore. I’m at the dorms, with friends. There are five of us sleeping in one room. We’re on campus. We’re safe.”

Gainesville seemed a very small town. In my mind the place was dominated by the presence of a roaming monster, like the flashing red dot on a radar screen, blinking closer to its target. He could be a student, I thought. He could be one of the students Margo was with right now.

“I’m coming to get you,” said Dennis. Over the line I heard a dresser drawer in our bedroom opening.

“Daddy?” said Margo. “I’m going to stay. The semester’s just starting, and I don’t want to miss anything. I won’t be able to catch up.”

“I don’t think that matters, sweetheart,” I said. “Aren’t other people leaving?”

“Some,” she said. She sounded stern when she spoke again, even though her voice was shaking. “I think I’m going to stay. I’ll be safe. I promise.”

Dennis breathed into the phone. I said, “We won’t sleep until he’s caught.”

She was crying again. “They lived in One-Thirteen,” she said. “I live in One-Twelve.”

“I know, sweetheart,” said Dennis. Again he insisted that she come home, and again she refused. Then, after giving her cautionary tips—don’t walk alone, don’t go out at night, lock the doors, and for Christ’s sake, lock the windows—and after getting the phone number of the dorm room where she was staying and repeating it twice back to her, he reluctantly said good-bye.

The following morning we woke to learn that the Gainesville police had found another body, a student named Christa Hoyt. She was found in her apartment, two miles from Williamsburg Village. Again, the killer had pried his way in through a sliding glass door. (From this time on in my life, I’ve disliked sliding glass doors, and have wondered if the tragedy would have occurred without them. I’d let my daughter live on the first floor of an apartment complex, never thinking to ask whether there was a solid barrier between her and the outside world. The Williamsburg Village Apartments had a swimming pool—of course there were sliding glass doors.) The reports said only that Christa’s body had been mutilated; we learned later of the rapes, the decapitation, the gruesome poses. Gainesville officials urged students to be careful, to not go out at night, and to stay in groups whenever possible. All the murders had happened during the daylight, in the victims’ homes, but still this was the advice given. A press conference followed: the president of the University of Florida, John Lombardi, answered questions about precautions being taken. They’d added thirty more campus police (again, I thought: but this killer could be a member of the campus police!) and were opening up unused dorm rooms to students living off campus who wanted the extra protection.

It hit me, as I sat in bed watching television: this was not even a danger I’d thought to fear. The notion that I had let this happen, that my daughter had been asleep while on the other side of her wall two girls were raped and murdered, sent me into a panic. I reached for the phone and the piece of paper with the number Margo had given us, but the line was busy again, that goddamned automated message. Dennis wrapped his arms around me. One of the many things I felt at the time was anger—at myself for letting her move off campus in the first place, and at both of us for letting her stay in Gainesville while this killer continued to choose new victims. Of course I understood that living next door to a murder is not a fate equal to the murders themselves; I’d never felt a stronger sense of gratitude. But I knew that this experience—her proximity, her unbelievable luck—would haunt Margo. The knowledge that this might have happened to her would change her life. This was not the carefree college experience we’d wanted for our daughter. “It’s my fault,” I said to Dennis, because I’d approved of her moving off campus, and he said, “It’s not your fault.” But I’ll always remember the tone of his voice as he said it—weary, guilty, and impatient—because in that moment, if not after, I think Dennis might have agreed.

W
e heard from Margo again that afternoon. She’d moved with friends into a vacant dormitory suite, which meant she now had her own bed. We continued to insist she come home—Dennis packed a bag in anticipation that she would finally relent and he could go get her—but she was determined to stay. It was as if she had seized on staying as the only way to get through it all intact. She reminded us that she was twenty years old. Twenty! How old this seemed to her, and how young it seemed to me. The next morning Dennis left for work as if it were a normal day, though I stayed home. I got dressed and straightened the house, but left the television news on in the bedroom and the living room, and whenever the coverage shifted to the murders, I sat down and watched, and it was many minutes before I could return to my feet. I called Margo in the morning, then twice in the afternoon, then Dennis and I called together when he got home from work. “It’s like a ghost town,” said Margo when we finally reached her. The university continued to remain open—President Lombardi explained to the press that many students couldn’t reach their homes, and the university was better equipped to ensure student safety by continuing business as usual. We watched the news together that night: stores were selling out of Mace; Southern Bell was begging people not to call Gainesville unless absolutely necessary; pizza joints were losing money because of a rumor that the killer might be a delivery man; gun shops were reporting record sales; hardware stores had run out of deadbolts and door chains.