After her, p.22
After Her, page 22
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.
AFTER HIS MEETING WITH ALBERT 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.
IT 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.
A man got out. Then two more men. One of them my father.
“I know you’re in there, Rachel,” my father said. My real name, which he hardly ever called me, except when he was mad, which was almost never before now.
“I’ve come to take you home.”
I had never seen him this angry before. And he didn’t even know the part about stealing Jennifer Pollack’s loaded gun.
“Get in the back,” he said, indicating the jump seat in the ATV. “Just off the top of my head I’m estimating that you’re grounded for the next hundred years, but it could be more.”
ONE MORE THING HAPPENED ON the mountain that day. I was seated in the back of the ATV, with my father a little ways off, talking with the other officers. (No sign of Mr. Armitage—and the realization had come to me that there never would be. And that Mr. Armitage was not the killer after all. I’d got it wrong.)
I wasn’t crying, but the thought had also come to me that this was probably the lowest moment in my life, and the fact that I’d be grounded forever (an experience I’d never known before, for one day even) was far from the worst of it.
In case my activities hadn’t made enough trouble, a reporter had also shown up on the scene, which required my father to do some explaining. Even before today, the press had been touting the position of many citizens that the Marin Homicide Division, under the direction of Detective Anthony Torricelli, had mismanaged the investigation. Now here was Detective Torricelli himself, out on the mountain, chasing after his teenage daughter when he should be looking for the killer. Why was an investigation of this importance being entrusted to a man who couldn’t keep his own children under control?
I could see my father speaking with the reporter now. See her writing in her notebook. See my father shake his head.
Judging from the angle of the sun, and the light hitting my face, it must have been approaching four thirty or five by this point. I could feel the sweat under my arms and the sweat on the backs of my thighs where they pressed against the plastic seat cover on the ATV. I was tired and thirsty, and my underpants were soaked with blood. I wanted to go home and see the one person I could imagine who wouldn’t hate me by now. Patty.
This was when it happened: sitting there under the still-hot sun, waiting for my father in the back of the vehicle, I felt the familiar sensation of a vision coming to me.
I recognized the signs: the tightening in my chest, the dryness in my mouth, and the change in my breathing, almost as if the space I occupied no longer contained enough air. I felt hot at the same time as the chill came over me, and that sickening warmth between my legs, coming from the place I didn’t even want to name.
Here was the killer, in my head again, and not just in my head. Inside my body was how it felt. More than that even. It was as if he was right there.
Remember me?
Did you think I’d dress up like a girl? What kind of pussy do you take me for?
You know the only good kind of dog in my book? A dead one.
Whoever this was talking—the killer, faceless again—I knew he was sweating. Like me, he occupied some hot outdoor place as he spoke to me. The part of me that registered his feelings now felt the sun as it beat down on him, same as it did on me. Sweat on his neck too. His shirt stuck to his chest. He wanted a Coke.
Through his eyes, I saw dry grass. Dirt. California poppies. Owl pellet: a little lump of undigested mouse fur, containing the bones of whatever other creature the owl had consumed the night before. The same thing Patty liked to stop and examine on our rambles. I could smell wild fennel and eucalyptus bark.
If he saw these things, and smelled them, he was here on the mountain.
Ooh my little pretty one. Pretty one.
I could make out the sound of those walkie-talkies again, though whether it was me hearing this, or him, remained unclear. Not words, just static. I could make out a clearing—with a stage, and stone seats around it. I recognized this as the amphitheater where, for so many summers in the past, Patty and I had snuck in to watch production numbers from those Broadway musicals. “Do-Re-Mi.” “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” “Seventy-six Trombones.” “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”
Looking up, I caught sight of a group of crows overhead. A murder of crows was the term. (Seventh-grade vocab list.)
I knew he saw them too. The same formation.
But it was the next thing I saw that would have made me cry out, except the breath had left me.
It was a skinny girl slumped in the back of an ATV, wearing a red sweatshirt—face to the sun, and squinting, with a book bag in her lap that didn’t fully conceal the red stain seeping through the crotch of her shorts. A girl with a look on her face as if she’d just laid eyes on something terrifying.
Which I had: him, seeing me.
Same girl that was on the news, he was thinking. Cop’s kid.
No tits. Like the jogger. But it might be time to send this spic cop a reminder as to who was in charge here.
Him.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The way my punishment worked (punishment, a new concept in our family), my father had arranged it that as of the day school got out, I would have a job down at police headquarters—the only place he knew, he said, where he’d be sure I’d stay out of trouble. Sweeping the floors for fifty cents an hour. Six hours a day. There was no argument from my mother.
There turned out to be many rooms at the precinct in need of sweeping. As soon as I’d gotten through the last of them, it was time to start over again. These police officers were a dusty group.
School let out. Every morning, I now rode the bus to police headquarters, where my broom was waiting for me.
As awful a consequence as this was, coming just at the start of vacation—with the rain finally gone, and my bicycle calling, and my notebooks filled with half-written stories—it may have been worse for Patty. She had her basketball of course (though no practices in summer, or games) and her job walking Petra. (On this front, the small piece of good news was that Mr. Armitage—though he must surely have deduced the identity of the author of that anonymous letter—did not appear to hold my sister responsible for my own dark and baseless suspicions about him, or the potentially dangerous actions I’d undertaken as a result of them.)
Still, this left hours when my sister was on her own, instead of having adventures with me, as we’d done every other summer of our lives. The mountain was off-limits, the rec center occupied by all my former friends, now enemies. All that was left for Patty to do was listen to records and shoot baskets and think up tricks to teach Petra, who was a very slow learner. She had a hard enough time with “roll over.”
For me, the hours of sweeping left my mind free to think about what was happening on the mountain. The awful pictures of murder victims, in their last moments of life, no longer came to me, as they had all winter and spring. (As with our television, service appeared to have been disconnected—with nothing on the screen now but snow.) But the absence of pictures was almost worse. I knew the killer was out there, and based on that brief and terrible moment on the mountain, when I felt his presence so close that the same crows had circled over both our heads, I believed that he was watching me.
I had tried once to help my father capture the killer, and that had been a disaster. He’d never listen to anything I said now on this subject, even if I had anything to offer, which I didn’t. All I could do was push my broom back and forth, with the knowledge that the Sunset Strangler was out there looking for another victim.
He had killed women in other places besides Mount Tamalpais, of course. (Point Reyes. Muir Woods. Tennessee Valley and Bolinas.) But I believed he had returned to the mountain, if only to convey to the police officers pursuing him the message that he was smarter than all of them.
If my father had once seemed to possess magical powers, it appeared the Sunset Strangler was the magic one now. I had felt his presence on the mountain that day my father came to get me in the ATV, and I believed he was there now, though how he continued to elude discovery was difficult to fathom—knowing the numbers of officers who patrolled the mountain and trails and monitored every parking lot where hikers left their cars before setting out to hike.
One law enforcement officer missing from the mountain now was my father. The day after he’d brought me home, the San Francisco Chronicle ran its story in which their reporter revealed to the greater San Francisco Bay Area the news that Detective Anthony Torricelli, head of the entire Marin Homicide Division—and the officer whom the people of Marin County had entrusted with responsibility for apprehending the Sunset Strangler—had spent his Saturday (accompanied by two other officers, and in an official police department vehicle) out on the mountain intercepting what the reporter called “a teenybopper sting operation” set up by Detective Torricelli’s own thirteen-year-old daughter.
The photograph that ran on the front page had shown me huddled in the back of the ATV in my red sweatshirt (the bloodstains in my shorts thankfully not visible) and my father, in his leather jacket, looking not so much angry as defeated. The two additional officers—whose energies could have been better spent elsewhere, as no one needed to point out—stood on the sidelines, by the truck body. Hands in their pockets. Looking as if they’d rather be just about anywhere else, which no doubt was true.
The reporter had done some legwork for this story. She had evidently solicited the observations of a group of my classmates from school. One of whom—Alison Kerwin—had volunteered that I used to come over to her house a lot, but she had to stop inviting me when bottles of nail polish kept disappearing. Alison’s mother had made the observation that it had appeared to her—from times I spent with their family, and occasions when she’d driven me home after—that my parents seemed not to offer much in the way of supervision.
“She’s a child of a broken home,” Mrs. Kerwin had said. “We all felt sorry for her. We even invited her to join us for Thanksgiving. But you can only help a person so much.”
There had been one other comment about me in the article, though this one was attributed to “a young person who asked to remain anonymous.”
“She’s an okay kid, I guess,” the anonymous young person had said. “But it had me weirded out the way she was always, like, taking her clothes off and stuff.”
He had to fend me off sometimes, he said, I got so aggressive. But luckily, he knew karate.
FIRST THING THE FOLLOWING MONDAY morning, my father had been called in by the chief of police, who delivered the news: effective immediately, Detective Torricelli would be relieved of his duties overseeing the investigation of the Sunset Strangler killings. At the request of his superiors in Sacramento, by noon that day he was instructed to turn in all materials in his possession relating to the Sunset Strangler case, to be taken over by a Special Forces team and a group of FBI agents from Washington.
My father was reassigned to an office up north in Novato, to oversee a case involving a car dealership that appeared to have engaged in fraud in the sale of a half-dozen stolen vehicles that had been brought in over state lines.
“I went to bat for you on this one, Tony,” the chief told my father that day. “What happened the other day could have been the end of your career, but I told them you’d keep your nose clean from now on.”
It had been the chief’s advice to my father that he should go home and spend some much-needed quality time with his kids. “So long as I don’t hear word one about you and that daughter of yours getting anywhere near this investigation, your pension’s safe,” he said.
“One more prank like this last one, and I’ll be asking for your badge.”
I HAD TO BELIEVE MY grounding wouldn’t last forever, though I knew better than to ask for the specifics of my sentence. But I had no doubt, even then, that my father loved me more than anything—and I even knew that at its core, his anger that day had not come from the fact that I had jeopardized his case and wrecked his twenty-year career. He was angry because I’d put myself in harm’s way.
