The doctor’s blood on the pink shirt. The fetus in the grave. Aurora’s DNA.
All connected. Science that could help free Terrell. If Lydia is telling the truth, the blood on that shirt links them all. The doctor not only fathered Lydia’s daughter, but the child of a murdered Black-Eyed Susan.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” Lydia sounds plaintive, just like she did at ten and twelve and sixteen. “I have three years of research about the doctor out there in the shed. Colleges he taught at. Girls who disappeared while he was there. Circumstantial, but it ties up pretty nicely. And we’ll get them to drag the lake, of course. And I’ll let them interview me but I’ll be too devastated to share everything.” She’s giddy with her Lydia-ness. “I showed up for a reason, Tessie. The last-minute stay will be a fantastic way to end my new book. Even if they kill him, I’m a hero for trying. The book’s all about the other surviving Black-Eyed Susan. Me. I tell it like a modern feminist fairy tale. You’ll love it. The point being, the monster gets it in the ass.”
“I’m beginning to think you are not with the historical society,” Effie says.
Lydia is sticking her fork into a piece of Effie’s cake. It’s almost to her lips.
I don’t stop her.
For the first time in a long time, I feel hope. Like a cool wind has whistled my head clean.
The monster, 1995
October third, nineteen hundred and ninety-five, 1 P.M.
Cheers to O.J., who just walked out of court a free man.
It’s our final session. Tessie’s got that telltale flush in her cheeks. She’s upset.
Her itty-bitty scar stands out on her tan like a new moon in a sky of freckles. No makeup covering it up today. I like that. A sign of restored confidence. The nuclear emerald eyes are sharp and focused. That glorious copper hair is pulled back flat against her skull like she’s about to run a race. The muscles in her face are taut and purposeful, not a limp bag hanging off bone like the first day she walked in here. She’s still biting her nails but she’s painted them carefully with a lovely lavender polish.
I want to tell her so many things.
How I intended to tear her apart, but it was much, much more thrilling to put her back together.
How Rebecca was both a flippant lie I told a lazy reporter and a metaphor for everything. Rebecca is the ghost who kept me company on the worst night of my life. She is every wife and daughter I will never have and every special girl who sat down in my class, lifted her eyes, and did not glimpse her fate.
I want to tell Tessie that sometimes-many times-I am sorry.
I want to finish that story I started about the sad boy who walked to a lonely house after school and turned on the heat.
Tessie had been worried about that boy, I could tell. When she’s sad, her face always crinkles prettily, like origami.
That boy’s mother always left a horrible surprise for him to find while she was at work. A dead baby bird on his pillow. A live water moccasin in the toilet. A cat turd in the Twinkies box. Gags, she called them.
The Saturday night that he put twenty crushed pills into his mother’s cheap red wine, she fell asleep on page 136 of Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier. She pronounced it doomayer, like the fat clod she was.
He had plumped up her pillow, flipped on the air conditioner to high in the middle of winter, and read the whole book before he called the police and told them she’d been suicidal for months.
“I saw you with her.” Tessie is taunting me.
I want to put my hand on Tessie’s knee to stop its jackhammering.
I want to place that well-thumbed book in her hand.
I want to tell her that red flowers, not yellow ones, had a special meaning for Rebecca.
I want to tell her that very soon, I’m going to run my finger over the butterfly tattoo on her hip. The one just like Lydia’s.
Epilogue
Imagination, of course, can open any door-turn the key and let terror walk right in.
– Lydia, age 16, reading In Cold Blood under the bridge in Trinity Park, waiting for Tessie to finish her run, ten days before the attack, 1994
Tessa
One at a time, the pieces have come forward, like shy girls stepping up to dance.
Lydia admitted to a cold-blooded killing and to a relationship with the doctor, but never to planting the black-eyed Susans in her back yard or at my old apartment or nestled by my grandmother’s dead tomato vines or under the bridge that roared like an ocean.
If that’s true, the doctor planted flowers exactly once, the first time. The wind and a death penalty nut were responsible for the rest. I allowed a diabolical gardener to live in my head for more than a decade. Like the Brothers Grimm, I ascribed power to an ordinary, innocent object. Oh, the hell that can be wrought from a hand mirror. A single pea. A one-eyed flower.
I remembered the T-shirt Merry was wearing, one morning while I watched Charlie eat Frosted Cheerios out of a yellow cereal bowl that used to be my mother’s. Welcome to CAMP SUNSHINE, the shirt read, except the dirt and the blood obliterated everything but the SUN. S-U-N. My desperate mnemonic device naming the mothers of those girls was just a brain chip gone haywire. A survival tool, Dr. Giles says.
Dr. Giles tries to convince me every other session that the Susans in my head weren’t real. I’ll never believe her. The Susans are about as real as it gets. I used to lie awake at night imagining my mind as my grandfather’s house, with passageways and dark rooms seeking a candle and Susans sleeping and waking in all of the many beds. Now the moon is pouring like melted butter through those windows. The floors are swept. The beds are made. The closets emptied.
The Susans have flown from my head, but only because I kept my promises. That was my grandfather’s one survival tip if I ever found myself trapped in a fairy tale. Keep your promises. Bad things happen if you don’t.
The bones of the two other Susans in that grave have been officially identified as Carmen Rivera, a Mexican foreign exchange student at University of Texas, and Grace Neely, a cognitive studies major at Vanderbilt. The earth’s code turned out to be remarkably accurate. Eight other unidentified girls in morgues in three states have been linked to Lydia’s meticulous research.
To my relief, Benita Alvarez Smith does not peer out of any picture lineup except the one in her church’s directory. Lucas tracked her down for me. She’s a happily married mother of two in Laredo who’s meeting me for coffee when she’s in Fort Worth next month to visit her parents.
The best part, of course, is Terrell. Lydia’s encyclopedic research set Terrell free. That, and the DNA match between her shirt and the fetus, created enough reasonable doubt for a state court to halt the execution and release Terrell six weeks later. I was worried that three days wouldn’t be enough time to brake the Texas death train. Bill declared that, on Death Row, three days is an eternity.
So now Terrell is tearing out hearts on talk shows, reassuring people about a purposeful life, God, forgiveness, all the things that should not fall out of the mouth of a man who was the innocent victim of a racist system. Off camera, Terrell confines himself to one room, keeps the shades drawn, sleeps best on the couch, so far unable to wean himself from claustrophobia.