The Never List (3 page)

Jim stared at me for a minute with pity in his eyes. I looked away from him, feeling a little ashamed of myself for the first time in a while. His voice turned serious again when he finally spoke.

“Sarah,” he said, “there
is
another letter.”

“Send it to me,” I replied, with a fierceness that surprised us both.

“Dr. Simmons is not sure it’s a good idea. She didn’t want me to tell you.”

“It’s mine. It’s addressed to me, isn’t it? And therefore you
have
to send it to me. Isn’t that federal law or something?” I stood up and started pacing the room, biting my thumbnail.

“It doesn’t even make any sense,” he started. “It’s more of his ramblings. It’s mostly about his wife.”

“I don’t doubt that it makes no sense. None of them do. But one day he’s going to slip up, and there’ll be a clue. He’ll tell me where the body is. Not in so many words, but he’ll let something out, something that will tell me where to look.”

“And how will you do that? How will you look? You won’t even leave the apartment. You won’t even testify at the guy’s parole hearing.”

“And what kind of a freak woman marries a guy like that anyway?” I interjected, ignoring him as I paced faster. “Who are these women who write letters to prisoners? Do they secretly
want
to be chained up, tortured, and killed? Do they
want
to get close enough to the fire to get burned?”

“Well, apparently she got his name through her church. They set this up as some kind of mission of mercy. According to him and his attorney, it worked. According to them, he’s a true convert.”

“Do you believe that for one second?” He shook his head, as I went on. “I’m sure she’ll be the first one to regret it when he’s out.”

I walked back around to the sofa and sat down, putting my head in my hands. I sighed.

“I can’t even have sympathy for this person. Such an idiot.”

In ordinary circumstances, I’m sure Jim would have patted my shoulder or maybe even put his arm around me. Normal acts of comfort. But he knew better. He stayed right where he was.

“You see, Sarah,
you
don’t believe he’s had a religious conversion, and
I
don’t believe it. But what if the parole board believes it? What if this guy serves just ten years for keeping you all locked up and—killing one of you? Ten years. Is that enough for you? Is that enough for what he did to you?”

I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see the tears forming in my eyes.

“He still owns the house,” Jim continued. “If he gets out, that’s right where he will be going. That house. In four months. With his Southern Baptist jailhouse wife in tow.”

Jim shifted in his seat and leaned forward, changing tack. “Your best friend, Sarah. Your best friend. Do it for Jennifer.”

By then I couldn’t hold back the floodgates. I didn’t want him to see my tears, so I stood up and quickly walked to the kitchen to get a drink of water. I stood running the faucet for a full minute, pulling myself together. My hands gripped the edge of the sink until my knuckles were as white as the cold porcelain under my fingers. When I came back, Jim was standing up to leave. He was slowly gathering his things and putting them back in his case one by one.

“I’m sorry to push you, Sarah. Dr. Simmons won’t like it. But we need you to make this victim impact statement. Without you, I’m worried. I know we let you down.
I
let you down. I know the kidnapping charge wasn’t sufficient for all he did. At the end of the
day we just didn’t have the proof to charge him with murder. Without a body, and with DNA evidence that was … contaminated. But we have to make sure he serves at least the full sentence on what we’ve got him for. We can’t take any chances on that.”

“It wasn’t your fault. It was the lab—” I started.

“My case, my fault. And believe me, I’ve been paying the price ever since. Let’s get through this and put it behind us.”

Easy for him to say. I was sure that’s just what he wanted, to put this mess in his past. His big career mistake. For me, it was a little more difficult.

He held up his card, but I waved it away. I had the number.

“I will prep you here at your apartment. Anywhere you want. We need you.”

“And Tracy will be there too?”

“Yes, Tracy will be there, but …” He looked over at the window, embarrassed.

“But she made it a condition that she doesn’t have to see me, talk to me, or be alone with me, right?”

Jim hesitated. He didn’t want to say it, but I could see right through him.

“You can say it, Jim. I know she hates me. Just say it.”

“Yes, she made that a condition.”

“Okay. Okay, I’ll think about it, not just ‘okay.’”

“Thanks, Sarah.” He took an opened envelope out of his notebook and placed it on the table. “The letter. You’re right, it’s yours. Here it is. But please talk to Dr. Simmons before you read it.”

He walked to the door. He knew not to try to shake my hand. Instead, he gave me a quick wave from the other side of the room and closed the door quietly behind him, then stood right outside, waiting for me to fasten the bolts. When he heard the final click, he walked away. He knew me well.

     CHAPTER 3     

I spent three days alone in the apartment with the letter. I put it in the center of the dining room table and walked around and around it for hours, thinking. I knew I would read it, of course. I knew it was the only way I could get closer to the truth. I had to find Jennifer’s body. It was the least I could do for her, and for me. As I stared at that letter alone with my fear, I could just imagine Jennifer looking up at me with her empty eyes, pleading without a word,
find me
.

Ten years ago the FBI had put their best men on the case. They questioned him for hours, but he didn’t give them anything. I could have told them that. He was cold and methodical and, I knew, totally unafraid of any punishment they could mete out. No one could touch him.

This was a man who had fooled the administration at the University
of Oregon for more than twenty years. The image that stuck in my head was of him at the lectern, with all those eager co-eds writing down every word he spoke. He must have loved that. I could just picture the teaching assistants sitting so close to him, one on one, in that stuffy little office I visited later with the prosecutor.

When Christine went missing, no one even remembered that she had been one of his favorite students. Good old Professor Jack Derber. What a great guy he was, a wonderful and brilliant professor. He had built a nice life for himself, and he even had a little mountain retreat nearby that his adoptive parents had left him. No one knew it had such an ample cellar. His parents had used it for pickling and canning. But not Jack.

I pulled myself out of my reverie. I was here. Safe in my own apartment, staring at this letter. I had practically memorized the crinkle of the paper, the soft line of the tear from when the lab tech had opened it with some sharp instrument. The seam was flawless. Derber would have liked to see that. He always admired a clean cut.

I knew they had studied the contents carefully, but I also knew there would be something in there only I would understand. Above all things, that’s how he operated. He wanted that personal relationship. Very deep and very personal. He got inside your mind, crawled in like a venomous snake slithering into a hole in the desert, then twisted around in there until he was fully comfortable and at home. It had been hard to resist him when physical weakness made you turn to your attacker as a savior. Harder to push him away when, after taking everything away from you, maybe forever, he doled out the only things you needed to sustain you—food, water, cleanliness, the least sign of affection. A small comforting word. A kiss in the dark.

Captivity does things to you. It shows you how base an animal you can be. How you’d do anything to stay alive and suffer a little bit less than the day before.

So I was scared looking at that letter, remembering the control he’d had, and in some ways might always have, if it was put to the test. I was scared that that envelope might contain words powerful enough to take me back there.

But I knew I couldn’t betray Jennifer again. I would not die letting her body sink deeper into the earth, alone wherever he had put her.

I could be strong now. I reminded myself that now I wasn’t starving, tortured, naked, deprived of light and air and normal human contact. Well, maybe normal human contact, but that was of my own choosing.

And now, after all, I had Bob the doorman downstairs and a whole city of saviors out there, shadowy forms far below my window down on Broadway, shopping, laughing, talking, never knowing that eleven stories up a ten-year-old drama was unfolding at my dining room table. Me against me,
mano a mano
.

I picked up the envelope and eased out the single piece of thin paper. The pen had been pushed so hard against it, I could feel the letters like Braille from the back. Sharp letters. Nothing curved, nothing soft.

Jennifer had been gone from the cellar only a few days when he started taunting me. At first I dared to hold out hope. Maybe she had managed to escape and would send for help. I would spend hours imagining how she had broken free, that she was just beyond the cellar walls, with the police, their weapons drawn, surrounding the house. I knew how unlikely that was, given that she’d barely had the strength to walk up the stairs when he pulled her from the box that last time, with her head covered and arms chained. Still I hoped.

He left me to my own imagination for a while, then slowly it dawned on me what his strategy was. He started smiling at me knowingly when he came down to bring us food or water. As if we had a secret together. He gave me extra each day, as though he were
nursing me back to health, as a reward for something. Christine and Tracy began to look at me suspiciously. Their voices sounded guarded when they spoke.

I was disgusted at first, but in the end, this new form of torture provided the germ of the idea that would save me.

After nearly two months, in a gesture of what might have even been compassion in his twisted worldview, he told me she was dead. I could not believe the emptiness that fell inside me in that instant, as if a black cloth had dropped over our cellar diorama. Despite the fact that Jennifer had not spoken a word in nearly three years, and I hadn’t seen her face for the last one because of the ever-present black hood, still her presence had defined my day-to-day existence. She had been there, silent, like a deity.

When Tracy was upstairs and Christine asleep, I could whisper to Jennifer safely without being heard. Prayers, supplications, musings, memories of our life were all spinning out into the darkness to her, my quiet goddess in the box. Her suffering was so much greater than mine. Maybe that was what gave me the strength to keep fighting, and, indeed, to stay alive.

He took exquisite pleasure in watching the pain on my face when he told me she was dead. I tried to hide it. For three years he managed to use my love for her as a component of my regular punishment. In those rare instances when I tried to fight back and even pain wouldn’t make me give in, he knew all he had to do was threaten to hurt her more than he already had. I suppose he did the same to her, but I wouldn’t know because after that first night we were never to speak again. She was kept bound and gagged in that box. Our only communication in those early days was through a rudimentary code she tapped on its sides. It only took a few months for the tapping to stop altogether.

Of course, my suffering over Jennifer did not end with her death. He made sure of that. He liked to tell me how he would dig
her up to look at her sometimes. She had been so beautiful in death that he wanted to see it, even though it took him hours to unearth her body. He loved to tell me how, in killing her, he’d been careful not to damage her pretty face, which had more eloquently than anyone else’s expressed the terror and loneliness of captivity. Her fragility, the unique quality of her vulnerability, made her his true favorite. It was why, he said, he chose her for the box.

So now here I was, with this letter in my hand. Touching what he had touched, reading what he had written. I spread the sheet out flat on the table before me and prepared myself to withstand the force of his words.

Dearest Sarah:

I wish you could understand the secret as well as I do. If only you had read in the Book Room that beautiful passage, scrawled in the mind’s eye in the darkness.

On the banks of the lake in the flat, low land by the ocean, danger lurked for so long, silent, waiting, and then it struck. If only you will be brave enough to shed your costume and walk with me into the holy sea where there is no weakness or sorrow or regret.

Sylvia can help you. She can show you the path. She has seen the innermost recesses of my heart. I have shown her the landscapes and vistas of my past, all of it. And she has forgiven me. She has opened my eyes and blinded me from evil. She is an angel of mercy with a candle in the darkness, filling my heart not with shame but with redemption.

Soon—I can feel this—we will be reunited. I will come for you and together we will walk through the valley of death, unharmed.

Like the Apostles, we must learn. We must sit at the feet of the Master and learn. Only listen to the teachings, Sarah. Read the teachings. Study the teachings.

Amor fati,

Jack

I read the letter slowly, five times, trying to find the meaning hidden in it. The only thing that was clear was that if they let him out, he was coming for me.

But there was also something new here—an urgency in this letter that I had not detected in the others. He was trying to tell me something else, the sick fuck. Probably sending me on some wild-goose chase, which would be just like him. But at the moment I had nothing else to chase. There was something here. I just needed to think. Only thinking could save me.