He worked his way down in a zigzag pattern, using branches to keep himself steady. He was in okay shape for a man of his age, although he had a paunch he couldn’t seem to shrink. The paunch was noticeable because he was, had always been, a string bean. The belly had come out of nowhere when Mary was sick. It was as if he had his own tumor growing inside him. “Oh, look at you, jealous as ever,” Mary teased. “It was just like when I was pregnant with Bobby Junior and you had all the cravings.” For every pound Mary lost during her illness, he gained one. It was like he assumed he could give the weight back to her when she got better. Only she never got better, and he was stuck with the weight.
He reached the bottom of the hill without falling, no small thing. Glancing back at the bluff, he realized that returning to his car would be even tougher. But he probably could walk alongside the stream and come out on Windsor Mill Road, get back to his car that way. His time was unmonitored now, except by him. Every night, he wrote down his hours as if he were still on the clock, burning a little at the thought of the overtime he wouldn’t be paid, no matter how long he worked.
It wouldn’t have been easy, getting a body here in 1986. Four-wheel drives were not as common then. People would have noticed a truck or a Jeep-the people on the bluff above would have heard it; others would have seen the lights, assuming it came in at dark. And if the body had been carried down from Talbot Road-that would have been tough, too. Yet the juxtaposition of Bambi’s childhood home and the body of her husband’s onetime girlfriend-hard to chalk that up to coincidence, even in a dumping ground as popular as Leakin Park.
The dog had found little more than bones. Sandy knew that from the file, the autopsy. Bones, but the cause of death, a bullet to the head, had been easy to pinpoint. No casing, though. Nothing but a purse, a purse that looked like leather, but wasn’t, so it had held up to the elements. Inside there was a billfold with $385, her ID, an earring without a mate, a lipstick. Normal lady stuff.
He walked north. At least, he thought it was north. He wasn’t a nature boy, although a lot of people projected that on him, thought he had arrived here on a raft, paddling himself across the Keys. He could understand how kids, his term for everyone under thirty, confused his arrival with the Mariel boat lift, which they knew from Scarface, the Pacino version. But Sandy had no excuse for people his age, who should know a little history, for Christ’s sake. Yet it was easier, always, to let people think whatever they wanted to think. He preferred being lumped in with Scarface to the inevitable questions that followed when people heard where he was from. You’re Cuban? With that hair and those eyes? Is that why they call you Sandy, because of the hair?
His hair was blond, for Christ’s sake. Who calls a blond Sandy?
He walked for what felt like forever-going slowly, because someone weighed down with a body wouldn’t make good time-but it was only ten minutes or so by his watch when he found himself opposite a group of white buildings. Another abandoned Baltimore mill, this one renovated for business space. Okay, that was a possible lead. When had it been redone? Did anyone have offices here in 1986? He took out his pad, wrote a note to cross-check the history of the site. Still, it was a long way to carry a body, and it would have meant fording the stream. Man, someone really went to a lot of trouble to make sure that Julie Saxony wouldn’t be found. And that was probably the takeaway, more so than the proximity to the childhood home of Bambi Gottschalk. Julie wasn’t supposed to be found. Definitely not right away, maybe never. Why?
Because the longer she went without being discovered, the more convinced people became that she had gone to join Felix, wherever he was.
People, he thought. People, not cops. No cop, looking at those dormant credit cards, the lack of bank activity in the weeks before she disappeared, would have assumed she was a runaway. He had read the massive file twice and he would have to read it several more times before he could keep it all in his head, but one detail stuck out now: She had her car serviced on July 1. Who has her car serviced on July 1 if she’s running away on July 3? Maybe if she had been planning to take the car, part of the way. But her car made it only as far as Pikesville.
He worked his way back to his car, deciding to take the hill, after all. Harder going up a muddy hill, and he did slip once, dropping to one knee. But the mud would dry and brush off. The key was to be patient enough to let it dry, not to worry it and rub it into the fabric. Lift the dirt with a straight edge, let dry, then scrape.
Mary had taught him that.
September 15, 1960
It’s not going to fit in the nursery, not with all the other stuff you have in there.”
Ida Gottschalk, hands on hips, had squared off against an almost life-size baby hippo that was standing in the middle of the living room, an awkward guest who didn’t realize the party was over. Ida had taken against this hippo, which was really very cute, from the moment it was unwrapped. Bambi assumed that her mother had seen the yellow tag in its ear, Steiff, and deduced it was German made. Her mother hated all things German.
Bambi just hoped her mother never found out that the hippo cost $200, which would be far more damning in her eyes. Two hundred dollars. They didn’t pay that much in rent. Assuming they paid the rent every month, and Bambi was beginning to suspect that Felix was casual about what he considered the small stuff, which included, alas, their household bills. At least, she hoped that unpaid bills were the source of the strange phone calls that made talky Felix become monosyllabic. “Yes.” “No.” “Soon.” The sales slip for the hippo had been in the bottom of the elaborately wrapped gift box and Bambi had quickly crumpled it, appalled that a clerk from Hutzler’s could be so inattentive that she would forget to remove it.
Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a clerk who had left the slip in the box. Maybe Bambi was meant to see how much Felix had spent. And then what? Was Bambi supposed to brag about it in a mock-exasperated way? Oh, that crazy doting dad. Or had Felix assumed someone else would open the gift and that the gossip about his extravagance would spread among Bambi’s friends and relatives?
“It’s not going to fit into this nursery,” Bambi told her mother. “But we won’t be here forever. Felix is looking for a house.”
“You’ll be here at least nine more months,” her mother said, tying an apron over her dress, which was very stylish, a little too fancy for a party such as this. Bambi’s mother, plain and bone thin, had always bought the best she could afford when it came to clothes. “You signed a year’s lease in June.”
“Leases can be broken.”
Her mother rolled her eyes at this sacrilege. Bambi knew what she was thinking: A lease can be broken at a cost, but what kind of idiot would take on such an unnecessary cost? My son-in-law, the show-off, that’s who.
Ida was proving to be the one woman, the one person, Felix could not charm. She may have been nonplussed upon meeting him, but she didn’t stay that way long. “I’m not buying what he’s selling,” Ida liked to say. She said it a lot. She went about saying it at the wedding reception, where everyone thought she was being droll. Even Felix thought so. Only Bambi and perhaps her father understood the stark literalism of her mother’s statement. In Ida’s view, Felix was after the Gottschalk fortune, a laughable concept. The Gottschalk “fortune” was about as substantial as the add-a-bead necklace that Linda had been given by her father the day she was born. Felix had no interest in his in-laws’ wholesale greengrocer. He wasn’t even particularly interested in them, although he complimented his in-laws lavishly, behaving like a guest in their home even while living there for the first five months of his marriage to Bambi.