Don’t Look Back. Laura Lippman
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‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘It was the detail about teaching in city schools—’
Peter started laughing.
‘– teaching in the schools and being swayed to the issue of prisoners’ rights, despite being attacked.’ But she was laughing now, too, unafraid of being exposed. She had never really understood the old saying ‘safe as houses,’ but it described how she felt with Peter. Safe, solid, loved unconditionally. They had been a couple, an official couple, for six months before she told him about Walter. It had started with an argument about sleeping with the windows open. A reasonable request, on Peter’s part – the New England spring, late as ever, had finally delivered its first perfect night, and they lived on the third floor of a ramshackle apartment building favored by students. But she had been adamant, oddly adamant, growing angry and tearful. Awed by this obstinacy in the otherwise pliant, easygoing Eliza, Peter had yielded. The next morning, over waffles at O’Rourke’s, she had apologized. It had not been her intent to explain herself further, but she couldn’t stop. The story tumbled out, as if she had never told it before. And, in some ways, she hadn’t. Yes, she had testified. Yes, she had been deposed, interviewed repeatedly by various official sorts. Debriefed, in a sense, by her own parents, who also sent her to a gentle therapist.
But Eliza had never told the story of her own volition, and to use the parlance of Peter’s future career, she buried the lead: ‘When I was fifteen, a man kind of abducted me,’ she began. ‘He thought I had seen something he had done, that I could identify him. Which was funny because when I was fifteen, all grown-ups looked alike to me, you know? I didn’t notice him, and I never could have described him. But he took me.’
Peter had not rushed in with questions. This would be his trademark as a reporter, in the years to come. Peter, Eliza had heard his colleagues say, was the master of the pause, silences that seemed designed to be filled with confidences.
‘I was with him five weeks. Actually, thirty-nine days. Five weeks, four days. One day shy of the flood in the Bible. I never thought forty days and forty nights was that long, when I was in Sunday school. I’d think, “It’s only a little more than a month.” But it can be a really long time.’
The waffles had a rich blueberry sauce on top. Eliza, who normally cleaned her plate, began mashing the tines of her fork into them, flattening them, eliminating their grids.
‘Toward the end, he took another girl. But that sparked a huge manhunt, and the police found us. But not before she died.’
‘She died,’ Peter echoed. ‘You mean – he killed her?’
Eliza nodded. ‘It wasn’t the first time, although no one knows how many girls he killed. He was burying a girl when I stumbled on him, in the park that ran near our old house. Some people say he may have killed as many as a dozen girls in the years before he was caught.’
Eliza waited, almost holding her breath. Peter did not ask: ‘Why didn’t he kill you?’ Instead, he asked: ‘How were you rescued?’
She almost said: ‘I’m not sure I was.’ But she was not melodramatic that way and she had no doubt that she had, in fact, been rescued. ‘It was pretty anticlimactic. He ran a red light and just started babbling to the police officer. It turned out that a clerk in Piggly Wiggly had seen us in the store that morning, thought we looked odd, and called the police.’
‘What did she notice that no one else had seen all that time? Were you never in public?’
She did not want to lie to Peter, or mislead him, but nor could she tell him everything. ‘It’s funny, what people don’t see. He had cut my hair – god, he had given me this horrible haircut, it made me cry – and while I didn’t look like a boy, which was what he intended, I certainly didn’t look like the photo of me that was circulating. And I was scared of him, I didn’t mouth off or try to do anything to draw attention to us.’
‘You know what?’ Peter had said.
‘What?’ she had asked, fearful. She honestly could not imagine what would happen next, given that she had confided in only one other person, back in high school, and that had ended badly.
‘I think you need more coffee.’ He didn’t signal the waitress, who was busy with another table, but got up and grabbed the thermal carafe from behind the counter, filled Eliza’s mug. She knew, at that moment, that Peter would always take care of her, if only she would let him.
That had been their pattern for almost twenty years now; they were solicitous of each other, dividing their duties between the world at large and their home. Peter fought the battles beyond the house, while Eliza tried to make sure that the windows were always closed and locked, their alarm system in working order. They were a team.
Over time, of course, she had told him more, in greater detail. Peter never wondered why she was the lucky one. He took it for granted that she was, and he was glad for it. ‘We don’t ponder why lightning strikes where it does,’ he said once. Later, after a London-based magazine had asked him to file dispatches from New Orleans on the first anniversary of Katrina, he had written beautiful passages about the levees, human-designed and maintained systems that had failed spectacularly. He described how arbitrary water was, destroying one neighborhood while leaving another relatively intact. He never said as much, but Eliza believed he had written those words for her, that it was a sonnet of sorts, more proof that Peter understood. Walter was a natural disaster made catastrophic by human failures. She had been on one side of the levee, Holly on the other. Don’t ask why.
Now, packing up his briefcase, getting ready to go, Peter said: ‘The lawyer, Blanding, told me that Walter’s phone list is up to him, but his visiting list is another matter. It would be almost impossible for you to visit him. But Walter might ask for that, eventually. And if you were interested, it could happen because of who you are, your status.’
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