None of her friends lived close by. They lived on the other side of Frederick Road, in the kind of houses where Elizabeth ’s mother would not be caught dead, to use one of her favorite expressions. I would not be caught dead living there, I would not be caught dead shopping there, I would not be caught dead going on vacation there. Finally, Vonnie had said: “Do you get much choice, about where you’re caught dead?” and it had become a family joke. They had started naming the places where they would be caught dead. Still, their mother was pretty serious in her dislike of modern things. She had wanted to stay in the city, in their town house, which was almost right downtown, on a pretty green square built around the Washington Monument. But, about the time Vonnie turned fourteen, Elizabeth ’s father had seen a chance to build a practice in the suburbs, where more parents were inclined to seek help for their children. And could pay for it, too, no small consideration. Roaring Springs was a compromise, thirty minutes from her mother’s job at Patuxent Institute, not even ten minutes to her father’s office in Ellicott City. It was his daytime proximity that gave Elizabeth her freedom on these summer days. But it wasn’t much of a freedom, when one was alone, with all these rules.
She tracked back to the park and began walking along the stream known as the Sucker Branch. If she followed its banks, she would come out at Route 40, not that far from Roy Rogers, maybe a mile or so. At least, she thought she might come out there. She wasn’t allowed to walk to the Roy Rogers because it was a hangout, and her parents believed that being idle was what got most kids in trouble. But they liked the idea of her being outdoors on summer days, so if she explained that she was simply following the stream and found herself there by accident and she was terribly thirsty after the walk, that would be okay. If they asked, and they might not even ask. She would go to Roy Rogers, see if anyone was there. If no one was around, she could still get a mocha shake, maybe some fries. Then-she was resolved-she was going to throw it up, she would learn how to throw up today. Her worries over her body were secondary; she didn’t need to lose weight, only the potbelly, if she really did have one, and she still wasn’t sure. What she needed was something to tell her friends when they were reunited as high school sophomores in two weeks. She wanted to have something to show for her summer. Unlike Claudia, she didn’t have a boyfriend. Unlike Debbie and Lydia, she wasn’t daring enough to shoplift, and she had no interest in her parents’ booze. She had to do something in these final weeks of summer that counted as an achievement, and learning how to throw up was her best bet.
Following the stream, high in its banks after the weekend’s heavy rains, turned out to be much harder than she expected. Mud sucked at her boots, and when she came to the spot where she needed to cross, she couldn’t. The unusually deep water covered the rocks she had planned to hop across, and it was moving quickly. She paused, uncertain. It seemed a shame to turn back, after making it this far. She thought she could hear the traffic swooshing by on Route 40. She was close, very close.
Then she saw a man on the other side, leaning on a shovel.
“It’s not so swift you can’t wade through,” he said. “I done it.” He looked to be college age, although something told Elizabeth that he wasn’t in college. Not just his grammar, but his clothes, the trucker’s hat pulled low on his forehead. “Just go up there, to where that fallen tree is. The water won’t go above your shins, I swear.”
Elizabeth did, taking off her boots and tucking them beneath her armpits, so they were like two little wings sticking out of her back. Zebra-patterned wings with stilettos. He was right, the current was nothing to fear, although she worried that the water itself was dangerous, filled with bacteria. Luckily she’d had a tetanus shot just two years ago, when she stepped on a rusty nail. And the man was nice, waiting to help her scramble up the banks on the other side, taking hold of her wrists. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, maybe five seven to her five three, and his build, while muscled, was slight. He was almost handsome, really. He had green eyes and even features. The only real flaw was his nose, narrow and pinched. He looked as if the world smelled bad to him, although he was the one who smelled a little. B.O., probably from shoveling on such a hot day. His T-shirt showed sweat stains at the armpits and the neckline, a drop of perspiration dangled from his nose.
“Thank you,” she said.
He didn’t let go.
“Thank you. I’m fine now. I can stand just fine.”
He tightened his grip on her wrists. She tried to pull away, and her boots fell, one rolling dangerously close to the water. She began to struggle in earnest and he held her there, his face impassive, as if he were watching all of this from a great distance, as if he had no part in holding her.
“Mister, please.”
“I’ll take you where you’re going,” he said.
7
ELIZA HAD NEVER GOOGLED HERSELF What would have been the point? Eliza Benedict was not the kind of person who ended up on the Internet, and the story of Elizabeth Lerner was finite, the ending written years ago. Peter was all over the Internet-most of his work behind a pay wall, but nevertheless there-represented by almost a decade’s worth of his own words, probably more than a mil-lion when one included his Houston Chronicle days. And since taking his new job with the venture capital firm, he was even more omnipresent in this shadow world: a source, a personage, someone to be consulted and quoted on these new financial products, which Eliza didn’t understand. She didn’t even understand the term “financial product.” A product should be real, concrete, tangible, something that could be bagged or boxed.
However, Eliza knew, even before Walter had written her, that she showed up at Peter’s elbow in the occasional image, especially now that Peter had crossed over to the dark side-his term-and they had to go to functions. That was her term, but it made Peter laugh. “You couldn’t call that a party,” she said after her first foray into his new world. “And they didn’t serve dinner, only finger food, all of it impossible to eat without dribbling. No, that was truly a function.”
Sitting on their bed, Peter had laughed, but his mind wasn’t on the party, or on what to call it. “Leave your dress on,” he said. “And those shoes.” She did. But even Peter’s admiration for her that night hadn’t been enough to send her searching for her own image, despite the knowledge that they had been photographed repeatedly. She hated, truly hated, seeing photographs of herself. A tiresome thing to say, banal and clichéd, but more true of her than it was of others who professed to feel the same way. Her photographic image always came as a shock. She was taller in her head, her hair less of a disordered mess. She and Peter looked terribly mismatched, like an otter and a…hedgehog. Peter was the otter, with his compact, still hard-muscled body and thick, shiny hair, while she was the hedgehog. And not just any hedgehog, but Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Even dressed up in expensive clothes, she gave the impression that she had just been divested of an apron and a bonnet, a happy little hausfrau who couldn’t wait to get home and put the kettle on.
Which, in a way, was pretty close to the truth.
The dress that had excited Peter wasn’t a sexy dress, not really, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she normally wore, and that was novelty enough. The shoes had been a London splurge, a ridiculous thing to buy there, given the exchange rate at the time. Vonnie could have picked up the same shoes in New York for almost half the price and brought them to Eliza on one of her business trips. Eliza had purchased them to save face when she was snubbed in a Knightsbridge boutique, the kind of shop where the clothes appeared to have been tailored in defiance of the female body. The shoes were not visible in the photograph in Washingtonian magazine, but the dress-emerald green, with a bateau neck-was. She studied it now. This was what Walter had seen, this was how he had found her. Did she really look that similar to her teen self? She had been almost eighteen the last time she saw him, and although she had filled out since the summer he had kidnapped her, she still looked younger than her age. Even now, ten pounds over her ideal weight, her face remained thin, her jawline sharp. Maybe that was all he needed to spot her. That, and the shortened first name, which wasn’t much of a mask when someone knew the real one.