After Her (22 page)

I
SKIPPED SCHOOL THAT DAY.

I knew when Jennifer Pollack took Karl Jr. for his walk. Ten thirty, every morning. Right after
Sesame Street,
and before his nap.

The Pollacks locked their front door now, but not the back. In the time it took Jennifer to push the stroller to the end of Morning Glory Court and back again, I had managed to make my way into the Pollacks' bedroom, locate the revolver in the bedside table drawer, stick it in my pocket, and leave. I was back at my own house when Jennifer Pollack returned home, with time to spare.

U
NDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, IT WOULD
have been a twenty-minute bike ride to the mall, but with my heart pounding this way, I got there in ten. I made my purchase, pedaled home, ripped off the packaging.

I took out the Polaroid camera I hadn't used for months now. Three exposures left on the roll, but for the picture I had in mind, I needed only one.

It had been a long time since I'd stuck anything new in our scrapbook, but this one merited its own new page. No caption necessary, just the photograph.

To be sure my father would find it, I left the scrapbook open on my bed. Now, in addition to featuring an assortment of photographs of its subject—walking his dog, collecting mail, hosing down the stones in his yard, and exchanging a greeting with the meter reader—my book documenting the Mysterious Life of Albert Armitage would highlight a new and crucial element to his story. Some people might not grasp the significance of the photograph I'd pasted in, but I knew my father would.

It was a picture of shoelaces. Multiple pairs. As many pairs, if a person cared to count, as there'd been murder victims.

D
EAR
A
LBERT,
MY NOTE BEGAN.

(Rather than risk revealing my identity through telltale handwriting, I employed the manner I'd seen kidnappers and blackmailers use in movies and TV shows that involved notes designed to conceal the author's identity: cutting letters out of magazines and pasting them on blank paper to spell out their message.)

I know your secret. We need to talk.

Come to the mountain Saturday.

Meet at rusty truck.

Near place where they put on the shows. You know what I'm talking about.

3 pm. If you don't come, I'm telling.

That was about it, except for the name at the bottom. What to put there? I could use Farrah of course. He wouldn't know that one. Or Miss X.

In the end I chose the simplest option.

Signed, Anonymous.

I
PLACED THE NOTE IN
an envelope and sealed it. Then I walked to the cul-de-sac at the end of Morning Glory Court. The street was empty, as it generally was these days. No one out to see.

I put the envelope in the mailbox marked “Armitage.”

Walking home, I understood: the whole world was about to change. For so long, everything had been going wrong. Now I was going to fix it.

I
KNEW MY FATHER WOULD
be at his office that Saturday, because he was always at his office now. He never went anywhere anymore, except when another murder happened, and he went to the crime scene. And to our house, in the middle of the night, to drink and smoke and talk with our mother. Patty was at basketball practice, and my mother was sure to be at the library all afternoon.

I was right, my father was at the office that day. The secretary who answered the phone said he was busy, but when I told her it couldn't wait, she put me through.

“Farrah,” he said. My father knew I wouldn't call if it wasn't important.

“I think he's after me,” I said, in a voice that sounded as if I'd been running. “The Sunset Strangler.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He said he was coming to get me,” I said. It wasn't all that hard, sounding scared. My heart had not stopped pounding since I'd set my plan in motion.

“Talk slow now, honey. Catch your breath. You need to tell me everything that happened.”

“He called the house,” I said. “He said he saw me with you on TV, on the news. He said he knows what I look like now. He said he's coming to get me.”

“You're sure about this?”

For a few seconds, I hesitated. I could not remember a time I'd lied to my father.

Later, he'd understand why. Once it was over, and he'd arrested the killer—when everyone was happy again, and saying what an amazing job he'd done—I'd tell him the truth. Just my father, no one else.

I had to get you to see it was Mr. Armitage,
I'd explain to him
. I knew you wouldn't believe me, unless I got you there to see for yourself.

He couldn't be mad then. He'd thank me. He'd say he was sorry he ever failed to believe my visions. Until then, though, I had to give him my story. Now came more:

“He said he was teaching you a lesson,” I told my father, still breathing hard. “He knows where we live. He's coming here. He said he'll make you sorry.

“He said he's outside the house right now. Right now at this very moment, he's watching me.”

There was a silence on the other end, but not for long.

“I don't know what this is about, Rachel,” my father said. All playfulness gone from his voice. “I'll be right over. Don't go anywhere. I'm coming.”

W
HAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS THE
one thing I hadn't planned on. Maybe it was the excitement inside my body that did this—my heart racing and my insides clamping down into a hard, tight ball. All of a sudden, there it was, the thing that hadn't happened all those months, the thing that I'd been waiting for. Blood coming out of me as if I was hemorrhaging.

I reached my hand under my shorts to touch the place I felt it, the warm damp spot. My fingers, when I looked at them, were red.

I stuck a wad of toilet paper in my underpants—all I had time for. I scrawled a note, in a style of handwriting I hoped would suggest that it had been written in a state of desperation:
Help. Come. Truck.
Then I was out the door and running—as fast as I could up the side of the mountain, with the gun in the pocket of my old red sweatshirt. No time to think about the blood on my shorts, or how the victim of a serial killer might know in advance where it was the serial killer meant to take her, or what I'd say to him when I got there. I did not consider what I'd do if the killer was there and the man I counted on to stop the killer wasn't, or how to release the safety on Jennifer Pollack's gun. I only knew that everything would be okay once my father got there. He'd know what to do.

I
T WAS ONLY AFTER IT
was over that I learned this: after he read the letter left in his mailbox, signed by Anonymous, Mr. Armitage had done something totally different from anything I would have expected. He went to the police.

To Mr. Armitage, it had not seemed out of the question that this document, with its glued-on letters cut out from old issues of magazines and flyers from newspapers had been written by the Sunset Strangler himself.

It would have been hard for anyone (the police, or Mr. Armitage) to fathom why a middle-aged man might be the recipient of such a letter from the Sunset Strangler, of course—given he did not come even close to fitting the profile of one of the killer's victims. Maybe Mr. Armitage believed it had been during one of his late-night walks with Petra through our neighborhood in that polka-dot dress of his that he had caught the eye of the killer, who had then set his sights on meeting the mystery woman in the cherry-trimmed hat. Stranger things had happened, perhaps, though it might be hard to know when.

But other scenarios were also possible. More likely, perhaps. That morning, at the exact time I'd called my father's office, and heard his secretary say that he was busy, my father was in fact sitting at his desk across from none other than the Mysterious Albert Armitage. Who had just finished laying out for him the story of the anonymous letter, raising his belief that this letter may also have been the handiwork of a young person. Possibly someone who knew a certain secret about his behavior and meant to use it to manipulate or even blackmail him.

Instead of giving in to this kind of intimidation, Mr. Armitage had made the decision to explain to my father in clear and straightforward terms the nature of his own secret habit of dressing up in women's clothing now and then, and—on increasingly rare occasions—walking around the neighborhood that way.

“It doesn't hurt anyone,” Mr. Armitage told my father, evidently. “It's not against the law.”

My father, fair man that he was, agreed that this was so.

“Back in North Beach, when I was a kid, I knew a boy, Vinny Marzano, who liked to put on his mother's brassieres now and then,” my father said. “You know how many kids Vinny's got now? Seven.”

At the moment I had called his office, my father had not yet worked his way through to the conclusion that the anonymous letter lying in front of him on the desk at that very moment had been authored by his own older daughter. But he was getting there.

A
FTER HIS MEETING WITH
A
LBERT
Armitage—and his call from me—my father made the trip to Morning Glory Court of course, and he didn't waste any time getting there. With Patty and my mother gone, he had let himself in the house. It didn't take him long to locate the clue I'd laid out for him—the scrapbook bearing the name of the man with whom he had been talking, less than half an hour before, concerning the anonymous letter. And the message spelling out where he might find me.

It took my father even less time, after that, to understand that he was witnessing the evidence of a not very successful plan on the part of his older daughter to frame a man for murder, who had done nothing more than put on a polka-dot dress now and then.

His daughter was in trouble all right. But not because a serial killer was after her. She was in trouble with him.

I
T WAS JUST BEFORE TWO
o'clock when I reached the rusted-out truck body where my letter had instructed Mr. Armitage to meet me. There'd been a lot of brush sprouting up since I'd been here last on one of my adventures with Patty, but it also appeared that other people besides me (teenagers looking for a spot to have sex probably) had been here recently. The weeds in one spot, at least, were mashed down enough to make it easier getting in the rusted cab of the truck. The door had disappeared long before, but someone had draped an old shower curtain over the top.

How long did I sit there? Twenty minutes possibly? Two hours? To calm myself, I thought about the time I'd come here with my father and Patty all those years back, when he taught us how to use the BB gun, and other times with only my sister, when we'd huddled in the cab, reading
My Secret Garden
or her favorite,
The Golden Treasury of Beloved Animal Stories.

There was a Coke can on the floor of the truck—what remained of the floor anyway—that seemed to have been left here not that long ago, given that there was still a little Coke in it. Also fast-food wrappers, a bunch of empty Spam tins and plastic containers that had once held chocolate pudding, a microwave cookbook, and a couple of catalogs. (Odd combination: L.L.Bean and Victoria's Secret.) Under the seat, someone had stashed an old jacket that said Goodyear Tire, and a pair of socks, almost as if they camped out here on occasion. Patty and I always wanted to do that ourselves, but as laissez-faire as our mother was, the idea of us camping out all night on the mountain—even before the killings started—would have been a little much even for her.

Sitting there now, awaiting the arrival of the man I believed to be the Sunset Strangler—and the arrival of my father, to perform the rescue and arrest—I ran my hand over the remains of the steering wheel. In the past, Patty and I used to try and imagine how this truck had ended up here in the first place—inventing theories to answer the question. Patty's were always hopeless. As good as she was at playing games if I made them up, she had no talent for creating fiction of any kind. She was too attached to the truth.

Thinking about this, a wave of guilty sadness came over me. Patty loved me more than anything, but she cared deeply for Mr. Armitage too. As loyal as she was to me—
loyal as a dog,
I used to say—Patty could never believe Mr. Armitage was a killer. The thought came to me then: When Mr. Armitage went to prison, what would become of Petra?

I
STAYED THERE A LONG
time on the mountain that day, hunched down in the truck body, waiting for my father and Mr. Armitage.

It had to be well past three and no one had shown up. I had been keeping my eye on the horizon, watching for the first glimpse of them. Partly worried, partly relieved.

Maybe Mr. Armitage never got the letter. Maybe he'd thrown it out with his junk mail. Maybe he figured it was just a prank. If so, I could go home and forget all this. Only what then?

I know your secret.

If you don't show up, I'm telling.

And even if Mr. Armitage didn't come, how was it that my father, having found the shoelace picture and the note, had failed to recognize the need to rescue me?

I studied my leg—a spot on my thigh where a bug had landed and was making its way across my skin. I studied the fine hairs—the first time I'd noticed any. I felt the blood seeping out of me. The wad of toilet paper was soaked now.

More crows overhead, a red-tailed hawk, and the shriek of vultures—though only high up, not zeroing in—smelling my blood maybe. Off in the distance now, I heard the sound of a radio, or walkie-talkies. Scratchy voices. Static.

Getting closer.

Then a noise I hadn't expected. A four-wheeled ATV of the sort the park rangers used to patrol the mountain now, bouncing over the rise and making its way toward the truck. The engine stopped.