when Eliza told him about the phone call the next morning as he prepared coffee for the enormous travel mug he toted to work each day. (She had been asleep when he arrived home, and although she roused when he slid into bed next to her, she hadn’t wanted to attempt a serious conversation so late. Besides, they had fallen in the habit of using Peter’s breakfast, that quiet lull after the children had left for school, to catch up.) ‘Who’s his lawyer? That should be easy enough to find out.’
‘You’ll be late,’ she said.
‘This is worth being late for.’
Within five minutes on the computer and another five on the telephone, Peter was demanding to speak to Jefferson D. Blan ding, an attorney with a nonprofit in Charlottesville. Eliza couldn’t help being thrilled by the way her husband came to her defense. It was one of the qualities she had admired in him, even when they were nothing more than friends. Peter took charge of everything and everyone, not just her. He didn’t have to be the boss, but when certain situations came to a head – a disagreement with someone over a bill, a contractor who refused to do what he had promised, a mix-up at an airline ticket counter – Peter took over. He was forceful without being rude, intent on finding solutions, as opposed to venting his anger in a bullying way. In England, this part of him had become a little muted, so it was particularly exciting to see it engaged again, and on her behalf.
‘He was actually very nice, once he understood why I was calling,’ Peter said. ‘I got the sense that he was even a little horrified, although he put it on the woman. He said she’s well meaning, but in over her head.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Barbara LaFortuny.’
‘No.’
Peter laughed. ‘Yeah, and he swears it’s her real name. Sounds like a stage name for some exotic dancer.’
Eliza thought about the voice on the phone, the vinegary rasp. ‘How old a woman?’
‘I didn’t ask, but I had the sense she’s in her forties or fifties. She was a schoolteacher in Baltimore city and she was attacked on the job several years ago, by a student with a knife. She won an undisclosed settlement from the system because the school had refused to remove the kid from her classroom despite repeated warnings. You think that would tilt her toward victims’ rights, but instead she became an advocate for prisoners. Got interested in conditions in state prisons, then began looking at the death penalty. Somehow came to befriend Walter.’
‘She made a point of telling me she wasn’t one of those women. You know, the kind that fall in love with an inmate.’
‘No, she’s not in love with him. But she’s grown obsessed with trying to get his execution stayed. More so than Walter, according to his lawyer. He said it’s possible she’s acting alone, without Walter’s knowledge.’
Eliza shook her head. The letter’s style, its cadences – those had been pure Walter.
‘She wouldn’t have known me, by a photo. And I don’t see how she could have learned my married name. Walter wrote that he saw the photo, that he recognized me.’ I’d know you anywhere. ‘Is this woman, Barbara, black?’
‘It didn’t occur to me to ask. Why?’
‘She didn’t sound black. But a Baltimore city schoolteacher and . . .’ Her voice trailed off from embarrassment.
Peter smiled, shook a playful finger at her. ‘Are you racial profiling now, Eliza? Assuming a woman with an unusual name has to be black?’
‘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
