After Her (8 page)

So we rode our bikes over to the pool. We figured we'd splash around there, or more likely, work on our tans. Hot as it was, I kept a shirt on over my swimsuit, to cover up my lack of a bustline.

We didn't expect it that as soon as we laid out our towels Alison Kerwin would come over to our spot. She sat on the ground next to me, peeling the paper off her Creamsicle.

“I saw your dad on TV again last night,” she said. “He's so cool.”

I told her thanks, though it seemed strange to me, thanking a person for something nice they said about a member of your family. As if you had anything to do with it.

“He probably tells you all the grisly details they don't put in the paper,” she said. She was sitting there in her sunglasses on her towel, wearing a string bikini. I hated it that all I had was a one-piece from a box of hand-me-downs given to our mother by a coworker at the insurance agency where she worked. From where I sat on the grass, I could see Alison's toes, with their pearly silver polish. A professional job, from the looks of it. This was the second occasion she had spoken to me since the murder. Before that, the only time she'd acknowledged my existence had been to check my hall pass when she was Hall Monitor of the Week.

“There were bite marks on her neck,” I said. “And he cut off one of her fingers.” No special psychic vision this time, just words that came out of my mouth from someplace I barely recognized. A pure invention, though it was the song with her name in it that gave me the idea. That part my sister and I never understood, where Elvis Costello sang about the fingers in the wedding cake.

Now Patty looked at me but said nothing. I knew she would never betray me, which made me feel guilty about how I felt at the time, myself: Embarrassed to be seen with her. Wishing she was someplace else.

“But don't tell anyone,” I said. “They don't want that part in the papers. It could create a panic.”

Alison nodded. “You want to come over to my house later?” she said. “Or do you have to look after her?” She gestured in the direction of Patty, who was listening hard though she wouldn't let on.

The development where Alison lived was out by the golf course, in an area called Peacock Gap. To get home from the pool, Patty would need to cross the highway on her own. She was eleven, and tall for her age, but I knew getting to the other side of that highway was scary for her. Always in the past, I'd held her hand when we crossed. We pretended there were bad guys after us, and gunfire. It was one of our Angels moments. “I'll cover you, Bree,” I'd say, and then we'd run for it.

Alison was getting up to go now. “There could be some boys coming over,” she said. “Teddy Bascom probably. You know where I live, right?”

“My sister's okay on her own,” I said, though in all the years, I'd hardly ever left her. Patty, hearing this, said nothing.

O
F ALL THE BOYS IN
our grade, Teddy Bascom was the coolest. He was one of the best basketball players—one of the showiest anyway—but his particular claim to fame was karate, where he'd competed at the state level and brought home a trophy that we heard about on the announcements at school. He had a deep voice before any of the other boys did, and when he raised his arms executing a jump shot, you could see the hair in his armpits.

He'd been my lab partner one time, in sixth grade, for a fruit fly experiment. I still remembered the comments he'd made about fruit flies having sex, and the strangely stirring effect this had on me.

“I could kill him with one kick if I wanted,” he said, speaking of our biology teacher, Mr. Long. This was during that brief period when the two of us worked on the fruit fly project together—my work mostly—and Mr. Long had accused Teddy of doing nothing but putting his name on the report, which was true, not that I'd minded.

Apart from this, I'd never breathed the same air as he did.

That afternoon at the rec center, I didn't get my hair wet, knowing I'd be headed over to Alison Kerwin's house and that Teddy Bascom would be there. Patty had wanted to play Marco Polo with me, but I said I wasn't in the mood. I lay on my towel for a while, after Alison and the others left, with my copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
open to the same page, not wanting to look obvious about following them.

“I guess I'll stop by Alison's,” I told my sister.

“I thought we were going to go back on the mountain to look for clues,” Patty said. We had placed the wad of gum from our information-gathering expedition in a jewelry box, along with a notebook we'd started, labeled “Murder Investigation.” When we got something really good, we'd turn the whole thing over to our father.

“Can't you ever do anything by yourself?” I told her. Even as I said this, I knew I was being mean.

Patty hardly ever complained about anything I did. She was like the most loyal dog, the kind who follows her master in a snowstorm even if it means she'll freeze to death, or goes into a burning building to lead her to safety or die at her side, whichever. Now, though, her mouth was tight in that way she had that was about more than simply concealing her overbite.

“You'll be fine,” I told her. “Mom should be home in a couple of hours.” As if this meant anything. I could see from Patty's face she wasn't happy, but she left.

The Kerwins had one of those refrigerators with an ice dispenser on the front that gives you crushed ice, and a whole pantry filled with sodas. Alison's bed had a canopy, and there was a vanity table next to it with all kinds of makeup and a little metal tree holding earrings. But the place we hung out that afternoon was the rec room, where there were beanbag chairs and a Ping-Pong table and a real jukebox filled with 45s. The boys mostly leaned on the jukebox, punching in songs, while the girls lay on the couch.

“It must be so exciting having a detective for a dad,” one of them said—a girl named Sage whose father owned a company that manufactured corrugated boxes. “Like your life's a TV show.”

“Does he wear his gun under his clothes?” Alison said. “Even around you?”

“Shoulder holsters are just for characters on TV shows,” I told her. “Real police officers wear their gun strapped to their ankle.”

“At least you know you're safe,” the girl named Soleil—Alison's best friend—offered. “The killer's never going to try anything with the daughter of the detective in charge of the whole thing.”

“Not necessarily,” Alison pointed out. “He could take her hostage, to make a statement. Like, ‘I dare you to come after me. I've got your kid.' ”

I said I didn't really worry about that. The other girls seemed focused on the killer. I was more focused on them and worried I'd do something uncool, which was pretty much inevitable.

“Does your dad think the murderer's still in the area?” Soleil asked. Once, back in fourth grade, when she'd first come to our school, I pronounced her name wrong, though everybody now knew it was French for sun.

“It's just a matter of time before he strikes again,” I told them. “Once they get a taste of blood, they always come back for more.”

 

Chapter Nine

T
hree weeks after the disappearance of Charlene Gray, a twenty-three-year-old named Vivian Cole set out late one afternoon on a hiking trail on the far side of Mount Tamalpais in search of wildflowers to press for handmade notecards. She was reported missing. Her body turned up on Mount Tamalpais next to a stream on the Matt Davis Trail. We found out about that one when Patty ran into our neighbor Helen taking out her trash.

“Your dad must be one busy fellow these days,” she said. “Everybody's counting on him to put this terrible person behind bars.”

The county was still taking in the news of Vivian when Daniella Carville and Sammi Raynor, best friends since grade school, and about to enter their senior year in high school, disappeared somewhere between the parking lot where they'd left their bicycles and the East Peak of the Bolinas Ridge, where the brother of one of the girls had sprinted up ahead, waiting to meet them for a picnic they would never share. It was the second week of August, and brutally hot.

Their bodies turned up a few hours later, just after sundown—strangled (and raped, no doubt) with that same electrical tape over their eyes, arranged in the same begging position as the one in which Charlene Gray and Vivian Cole had been found. That last information we learned when a reporter at the press conference led, once again, by our father, had called out, “Why do you think he makes them get down on their knees?” As if there could be any good reason.

This time, I actually managed to see our father's press conference on television. I had gotten a job babysitting for the Pollacks, who were headed to the city for the afternoon and left us in charge of Karl Jr. I had figured out from evidence in the Pollack home—the fact that Karl Pollack no longer kept a stash of condoms in his bedside table the way I'd observed in the past, and a chart on the refrigerator listing her temperature every day for the last seven weeks, and an appointment reminder card on the counter for a medical office, with a picture of a smiling baby on it—that Jennifer Pollack must be trying to have another baby.

I was fixing Karl Jr.'s lunch when the phone rang: it was Jennifer's mother, calling to tell her daughter to turn on the television set. When I told her my name, she seemed to know who I was.

“What do you know? Your father's on TV right now, talking about the most recent murders. Two more girls dead, out on the trails, can you believe it?” she said. “I sure hope your dad's got some good clues to catch this maniac before he strikes again.”

T
HE FIRST MURDER HAD BEEN
terrible enough. But not surprisingly, the news of three more killings within the space of less than six weeks seemed to have left the entire population of the county in a state of panic. Mothers drove their children to the pool now (all mothers but ours) rather than letting them ride their bikes, and practically overnight the trails behind our house, where we used to see hikers setting out on weekends, were mostly empty.

Back when the first murder took place, a person might have held out hope that the killing of Charlene Gray was some isolated event, but with the discovery of Vivian's body, and Daniella's and Sammi's, it had become clear that we had a serial killer on the mountain (the mountain and the extensive trail system that wove beyond it, over a stretch of nearly fifty miles). If he had killed four young women, there was no reason to suppose he would not kill more.

The media were all over the story, of course. One of the papers, demonstrating its penchant for alliteration, dubbed the killer “the Sunset Strangler,” referring to the general time of day the four bodies had been found. The girls might have been killed at any time during the day, but somehow the image of the sinking sun lent an extra note of poignancy to the growing scandal.

I could see, from my father's face at the press conference, and even more so from his voice, the pressure he was under now. There he was again, up on the screen—looking grave and purposeful, so handsome in his sport coat, with his sideburns and his jet-black hair, his big hands gripping the sides of the podium. I hated what was happening, but I loved being his daughter—and this would have been so even if it hadn't resulted in my sudden and unexpected rise in social status with the likes of Alison Kerwin and her friends.

In art class the year before, when we did ceramics, I had made a medallion with the words
World's Best Dad
inscribed and a hole that I threaded with a silk cord and gave him for Father's Day. Maybe, in certain ways, he wasn't the world's best dad, but he had promised he'd wear my gift every day. Watching my father now on the television screen, I thought I could detect the shadow of the medallion under his shirt. I liked thinking that every day, when he stood in front of the mirror getting ready for work, he fastened that cord around his neck.

Hearing him as he made his statement to the press, I had no doubt that my father would find the killer very soon—my magic father, stronger than anyone else's. Whenever I heard his voice, it seemed to carry the promise that everything would be okay.

“I stand before the people of Marin County today,” he said, “to assure you that, along with every member of our dedicated force, I will not rest until the perpetrator is brought to justice. We will find him, and once we do, we'll see to it they lock him up forever, so the women of this county and everyone who cares about them—which is everyone—can sleep soundly again.”

There were a million questions. What weapon had been used to commit the murders? Had anybody spotted a suspicious character on the mountain that day? Did the killer leave any evidence—footprints, an item of clothing? Was there any relationship between these most recent victims and the first one?

Only that they were young and female and—from the photographs displayed on the screen—all of them dark haired and good-looking.

A reporter asked how anyone could feel safe in Marin County with a serial killer at large. My father said they were posting police officers on all the hiking trails now, as a safety measure. “If you want to enjoy the trails,” he said, “do so in a larger group, preferably in the company of a male. We're speaking of a ruthless individual, single-handedly capable of murdering two women at the same time, from the looks of it.”

“Given that four girls have now been murdered within a matter of weeks,” a woman asked, “we have to ask: Is the police force taking these crimes with sufficient seriousness?”

“I have two daughters of my own,” my father said. “Nobody needs to remind me of the urgency here to find this man and make the mountain safe again.”

This was us he was talking about, on television—Patty and me. I felt a glow of pride, hearing our father speak of us this way. He was thinking about us, looking out for us. Of all the fathers, all the police officers—all the detectives, even—they had chosen our father as the one to stand up in this place and reassure everyone, because he was the strongest and the best. And he belonged to us alone.

T
HEY PUT UP SIGNS AT
all the trailheads.
CLOSED, BY ORDER OF THE MARIN COUNTY HOMICIDE DIVISION. HIKER ADVISORY: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

But Morning Glory Court was not connected by trail to the mountain. The mountain was just there, in our backyard. There was no way we were staying off it. Least of all now, when something exciting was finally happening there.