After Her, page 9
When we got there, she had cookies on a plate, and Kool-Aid, already poured, with colored plastic bendy straws of the sort I’d always wanted us to buy, but that our mother said were a waste of money.
She was very pretty—slim, with dark hair that hung down her back in a way that the hair of our friends’ mothers never did. In the car on the way over, my father had instructed us not to ask Margaret Ann if she had kids.
“It’s a sore spot for her, girls,” he told us. “Margaret Ann doesn’t have any children.”
She had a doll collection though, arranged in a glass case in her living room, and a music box that played the song from Dr. Zhivago, she told us, and a lemon tree with real lemons on it, and a little dog that looked like a combination of two breeds that never should have gotten together, with patchy fur that probably clogged up her vacuum cleaner. Patty kept that dog on her lap the whole time we were over at Margaret Ann’s, naturally.
“This one’s got your eyes, Tone,” Margaret Ann said, as we seated ourselves around the table, nodding in my direction. She knew without asking that our father liked three scoops of sugar in his coffee.
We played cards, and I won, though it seemed to me that Margaret Ann might not be trying. She wanted to give us manicures and brought out a little silver tray with four different colors of nail polish. I would have liked to have her put some on me, but I didn’t think it would go over well with our mother.
“No nail polish,” I told Patty. She looked disappointed but did not argue.
“You girls can each pick out a doll,” she told us. We’d been studying them closely already, in the cabinet. Close enough that Patty’s breath had fogged up the glass.
This time the offer was too good to resist—even for Patty, though she was not generally a doll lover. “You take your time deciding,” Margaret Ann said. “Choose whichever one you want.”
She and our father went into some other room for a while then, and I could hear music playing there, a smoky-voiced woman, singing slow. The choosing was hard and took a while. I couldn’t decide between a Spanish dancer with gold shoes that came off and a shepherd girl who came with a tiny miniature sheep. Patty liked the baby, even though I tried to talk her into a different one, so we could trade doll clothes. After, we got to turn on the television and watch cartoons. We sat on a mauve-colored love seat with needlepoint pillows and watched two whole shows before they came out and my father told us it was time to go. When we left, Margaret Ann hugged us for a surprisingly long time.
In the car on the way home, our father took a deep, slow drag on his Lucky.
“What did you think of Margaret Ann?” he said.
“She’s okay.”
“Not as pretty as Mom,” Patty said, though we all knew this was untrue.
“She likes you two a lot,” he said. “It probably made her a little sad seeing two great girls like you and not having her own little girl. But happy too, that you came over.”
“She’s nice,” I said. The fact that this was so confused me and made me feel disloyal to our mother, who never made Kool-Aid.
“We might start seeing a lot more of her soon,” my father said. “If that sounds okay with you two.”
Patty had taken the diaper off the doll she’d picked out—taken it off, put it on, taken it off again about a hundred times in the car. This was the early days of Velcro, I think. She’d never seen it before. I was wondering what our mother was going to say about the dolls.
“Next time, maybe she can get us ice-cream sandwiches,” Patty said. “We never get those at home.”
I was right of course. Our mother spotted the dolls right off when we came in the door from our visit, even though I’d been planning to stuff them under the bed, quick. Uncharacteristically, she had been waiting on the steps for us.
“Go to your room,” she said. “I need to talk with your father.”
We weren’t supposed to hear them, but we did.
“I draw the line at this, Anthony,” our mother said. “Do what you want but keep my children out of your shenanigans.”
“I need to move on with my life,” he said. “You need to do that too. I want to marry Margaret Ann.”
Scarier than words were our mother’s silences.
“Make that choice and your daughters will never get over it,” she said.
Our father had never seemed afraid of anything before. But he was afraid of our mother. Even more so, afraid of losing my sister and me.
I CALLED HIM UP THE next morning, at the number of his apartment in the city, but he wasn’t there, and I knew now why he never was. He was at Margaret Ann’s. I understood now: he was with her when we were not, which would mean he was with her most of the time.
I got my father’s answering machine, but I was ready with my message.
“If you ever have any kids, besides Patty and me,” I told him, “I will never speak to you again.”
Chapter Eleven
The Sunset Strangler had done wonders for my social standing. When the invitations to Alison’s started that June, they were sporadic, but pretty soon it was an unspoken understanding that I’d meet the other girls at the pool most afternoons—and often, after, we’d go over to one of their houses. We’d play the radio (still “My Sharona,” every twenty minutes, in rotation with Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” and Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy”). We read one another’s horoscopes and tried on makeup, but we always ended up talking about the murders. When we did, I now felt the obligation—burdensome, at times, but also an interesting challenge for a girl like me, who planned to be a writer when she grew up—to come up with some new and chilling scrap of inside information about the crimes, known only to a handful of homicide detectives, and myself. (And the assembled group of girls, all of them sworn to secrecy.)
“He put lipstick on her mouth,” I said. “After he killed her.”
“He left a dead kitten next to her. Also a live snake.”
“He said he’d turn himself in if Olivia Newton-John came to San Francisco and went to bed with him.”
I WAS GOING TO THE pool almost every day now, and nearly always, after that, I’d head over to Alison’s house with the other girls. Not always, but sometimes, Teddy Bascom stopped by, and though he paid little attention to me, just being in the same room with him was enough.
“I think he likes you,” Alison told me. I couldn’t get those words out of my head, not that I wanted to.
My sister stopped going to the pool with me. “What’s the point?” she said. “You don’t talk to me when I’m there.”
“I just thought it would be good, making some friends,” I told her. “You could do that too.”
But we both knew she wouldn’t. Patty spent her afternoons without me practicing basketball shots or cutting out pictures to paste in her scrapbook of “Favorite Dogs.” Our neighbor Mrs. Gunnerson had hired Patty to play Candy Land with her retarded daughter, Clara. She let Clara win.
Patty had sharp words about the type of person she believed Alison Kerwin to be, and—though she said nothing on this score—I knew she had a low opinion of Teddy Bascom too. She had watched him on the basketball court and said he was a dirty player. Always elbowing kids on the court, and hogging the ball when he should have passed, to make the glory shot, or talking about his karate dojo and some tournament he went to, where, according to him, a talent scout had said he should come down to Hollywood and get some head shots made. He could be the next Bruce Lee.
Still, my sister did not give up on me. When I came home now, from Alison’s house or hanging out with Teddy, Patty was always out there on the curb waiting for me.
“I can’t believe you want to spend all that time with those dumb kids,” she said. “Can’t you tell they’re just a bunch of jerks?”
Patty had asked if I thought any reason existed for Alison being interested in being my friend, besides our father’s sudden visibility on television as the head of the homicide investigation. I had conceded there probably was not. As for Teddy Bascom, thoughts of him now occupied a significant portion of my waking hours, though when Patty asked me if I thought he was a nice person, I had similarly conceded that no, he probably was not.
Still, that summer I lived for my visits to Alison’s house. To ensure that my invitations there would continue, I was now regularly making up things to tell her and the others who came over to the Kerwins’—purportedly inside information about the murder investigation gleaned from my detective father, though in fact I barely ever heard from him these days.
“The guy left a Care Bear at the scene of the crime,” I told them. “With all the stuffing pulled out.”
“Before he left the crime scene, he peed.”
“He drank her blood.”
I SPENT MY AFTERNOONS THAT summer pretending to be a cool and popular thirteen-year-old, but when I returned home and got back with Patty, we were weird, crazy girls again the way we used to be, and even at the time I recognized that the ideas my sister came up with, of things for us to do, and the adventures we cooked up together were invariably more interesting than the activities of Alison and her friends.
Point-blank my sister put the question to me: if being a popular girl meant sitting waiting for nail polish to dry, or listening to Teddy Bascom describe every move he’d made at some karate tournament in Vallejo, and being unpopular left your days open for swinging by a vine off the branch of a madrone or doing cartwheels down a mountain, or hanging out with your sister in the old truck body with a bag of Fritos, writing stories in your notebook and then reading them out loud to her—and making her laugh so loud they could probably hear her all the way down the mountain—then what was so great about being popular? Or so terrible, if you weren’t?
But I chose Alison—a girl who shoplifted nail polish and drew mean cartoons of the boy in our class with forceps dents on the sides of his head, a girl who could be depended on to make fun of my sister. Almost every day now, I went over to her house. Usually one of the mothers drove me home from these afternoon get-togethers—those pretty, normal-seeming mothers, who didn’t go to the library all the time or smoke in their bedrooms, or hang out in their bedrooms at all (because they were in the kitchen, making dinner, like normal mothers).
When I got home, my sister would be waiting on the steps for me. “I thought you’d never come home,” she said, as I came up the walk. She never acted mad. Just happy to see me.
“Suppose we took the bus to the Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday and dropped bottles off the side with messages in them?” she suggested. Or we could put up signs around the neighborhood, offering our services as clowns to entertain children at birthday parties. We could buy a couple of helium balloons and let the helium out in our mouths and make phone calls to people. (What we’d say was a minor detail, still to be worked out.) We could send in an application to Supermarket Sweepstakes—a TV show in which teams of contestants raced around a store, throwing food items in their cart, with the goal of racking up the highest total at the cash register. If we got picked, we’d get enough groceries that our mother wouldn’t have to worry about food bills for a year, not to mention the prize money.
And of course, there was always the mountain—off-limits according to our parents since the murders began, but that kind of thing never stopped us before. Every few days, we took our tin can up there and lit our little fire, and my sister sang her song, and we closed our eyes and chanted. I kept hoping for a vision. But we never stopped looking for hard evidence too.
“Suppose we snuck out with flashlights this weekend after Mom goes to sleep and camped out someplace near where he got the girls last time,” Patty said.
“And then what?”
“We could bring your camera and take pictures.”
“What if the murderer was there? What if he saw us?”
“We’d be quiet.”
“Mom would kill us.”
“So?”
“That would be ironic,” I said. But the real reason I couldn’t do a stakeout with my sister was because I’d been invited to a sleepover at Alison’s. I wasn’t just friends with the popular girls now. I was one of them.
“You never used to be this way before,” my sister said. “What’s happened to you?”
“You don’t understand what it’s like,” I told her. “You just aren’t a teenager yet.”
“If you’re this big teenager all of a sudden,” she said—with a tone in her voice I could not remember hearing from her before, that could only have come from how deeply abandoned she must have felt that summer, by the person she loved most in the world—“why don’t you even have your period yet?”
There it was. My big, shameful secret and the question I asked myself daily. I could have said something back, about her teeth, but I didn’t.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. She looked stunned and horrified. In all our lives, I could not remember my sister saying a mean thing to me, though I’d said many to her.
But that was the question all right, as burning to me as the identity of the Sunset Strangler: The fear that I would never become a woman. The terror that I would.
Chapter Twelve
In late August, we had another heat wave. Karl Pollack had come home from work early and was sitting on the grass with his shirt off, watching Karl Jr. running through their sprinkler. The Gunnersons were barbecuing, and farther down the street, Mr. Marcello was washing his car.
I was sitting on the front step flipping through the back-to-school issue of Seventeen—filled with all the clothes Alison would be wearing this fall, and that I would not. Patty was dribbling her basketball in the driveway. That’s when we spotted Mr. Armitage’s dog, tearing down the street from the cul-de-sac with something in her mouth that looked like a chicken leg, or maybe a shoe.
A second later, there came Mr. Armitage, in pursuit. He wasn’t much of a runner, so he was out of breath—the distance ever widening between the little dog and his own panting figure.
Somewhere around Helen’s house, the dog disappeared, leaving Mr. Armitage standing there clutching his chest. For a moment, I thought he might burst into tears.
Two years had passed by now, since Patty and I had made our last entry in our scrapbook, and since then neither of us had paid much attention to the comings and goings at his house, except for my sister’s occasional observations about his dog, and our mutual agreement that for whatever reason, Mrs. Armitage appeared to have moved out.
“I need your help,” he said, still panting hard. Because he’d kept to himself so much, it was the first time I’d ever heard him speak.
“I just opened the door for a moment to carry out the trash and Petra got out,” Mr. Armitage said, still panting. “I have to watch her like a hawk. She doesn’t know her way back home.
“It’s those coyotes I worry about,” he said. No need to explain.
Patty didn’t have to think about what to do then. She was off. She shot across the street, headed in the direction of the trail, the direction of the dog. Too fast for anyone to remind her we weren’t supposed to go up there. Now Mr. Pollack jumped up, as well as Mrs. Gunnerson. But Patty was gone.
Even without the motivation of catching a fugitive dog, my sister was a fast runner, but that day she flew. Five minutes later—less, probably—she was back, holding Petra in her arms.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Mr. Armitage told Patty.
“I could feel her heart beating against my chest while I carried her,” Patty said, handing the dog back to Mr. Armitage, though I could tell she wanted to keep holding her.
“I knew she was scared,” my sister said. “She wanted to get home, she just didn’t know how.”
“I want to show my gratitude,” he said. He had taken out his wallet, and was extending a ten-dollar bill. Not what Patty would ever want, for rescuing an animal.
“Maybe I can take her for a walk sometime?” she said.
“Nobody has ever walked Petra but myself,” Mr. Armitage said, with no mention of his absent wife. “But why don’t you come over to my house tomorrow, and I’ll fix root beer floats and peanut butter cookies. Then we can talk about it, and Petra can get to know you better. It might be good for another person to spend time with Petra, now and then, and maybe she could get a walk in while I’m off at work, if you were interested.”
My sister was, of course.
“We’ll need to discuss this carefully,” he said. “This little pup means everything to me.”
NEXT DAY, PATTY WENT OVER to the Armitages’ house, to get to know Petra better. And Mr. Armitage.
Although our original enthusiasm for compiling information about our neighbor had long since waned, the prospect of my sister actually gaining access to his house (and to Mr. Armitage himself)—combined with the growing mystery concerning the whereabouts of Mrs. Armitage—inspired me to revive our investigation into “The Mysterious Life of Albert Armitage.” As occupied as I’d been lately thinking about the Sunset Strangler, and Teddy Bascom, the Armitage case appeared to offer a greater prospect for resolution. Unlike the Sunset Strangler investigation—where police tape and barricades had made it impossible to get close to the scene of the crimes—this one was unfolding, or had already, right on Morning Glory Court.
The Polaroid photographs I’d taken of Mr. Armitage, before losing interest in our project, had failed to enlighten us about his inner character. Beyond the photographs, the fact that he preferred white stones to grass, and owned a dog, the only hard information we’d gleaned about our neighbor had come from the refrigerator magnet of the ballroom dancing school where he taught, that he’d given to my babysitting clients, the Pollacks. But now, with my sister having made direct contact, it seemed as if we might finally get to the bottom of things in the most direct manner—by simply putting some questions to him.
