The check came and Barbara LaFortuny picked it up, although she seemed surprised that he didn’t offer. But he had come down here on his own dime and he sure hadn’t chosen to eat vegan. What did she expect? And now she had brought him to some park. What could she possibly have for him here?
“Athletic field number nine,” she said, stopping the car.
“What about it?”
“It’s at the top of this hill. I have to stay here, because she knows my car, my face. It’s not a face people easily forget.” She laughed at her own lopsided visage, as if it were a delightful joke. “But you can probably walk up and get close enough to see her.”
“Her?”
“Elizabeth Lerner. Although, of course, that’s not the name she uses now. But go on, take a gander.”
“What name does she use now? How did you find her?”
She smiled. “We’ll save that for another day. I just wanted you to know how much we can give you, if you’re patient.”
“We?”
“Walter and I.”
“How can Walter have any influence over her?”
“As I said, they’re talking.”
“Will I be able to recognize her?”
“Look for the redhead, with the redheaded son and a rather ugly dog. Her daughter is number seventeen, I believe. Doesn’t look a thing like her. If anything-well, you’ll see.”
He felt ridiculous, trudging up the long drive in his loafers and work clothes. If he were one of these parents, he’d make him for a pedophile. Yet the parents, almost all mothers at this time of day, paid him no mind. The drive was on an incline and he was puffing and sweating by the time he arrived at field nine. A quick sweep-no one. Wait, there was the redheaded boy and dog, romping along the sidelines.
And there she was. He would not have recognized her in a crowd, or without the expectation of seeing her. She was curvy, whereas the teenage Elizabeth had been straight up and down, with no shape. (He had speculated, too, that Walter might have confused sexual leanings. Walter hadn’t liked that, but it was fair, given what Elizabeth looked like and how he had made her dress. And it was consistent with the other evidence.) But there was something else that was different about her, something that took him a moment to diagnose.
She looked happy. Wind ruffling her hair on this pleasant October afternoon, eyes trained on-which one? Oh, the little beauty, long-legged and lean, not at all like her mother, at least not like any version Jared ever saw. The daughter-the daughter looked more like Holly Tackett than she did like her mother. Not in the coloring, but in her grace, her long-limbed body, her ease with herself. Out of her soccer uniform, in street clothes, she would appear much older than she was.
Elizabeth wasn’t one of the more vocal mothers, but she was clearly proud of her daughter. And when her son came running up with the dog, his small grubby hand thrust forward to show her something, she inspected his offering with grave interest.
Jared watched her for a little while longer, hoping that her husband might arrive, or that the game might end and he could, discreetly, follow her to her car. With a license plate, he wouldn’t be dependent on Barbara LaFortuny. He could get a name, an address, a phone number. Perhaps he could ask some other parent about the team, figure out where it was based, how to get the roster. But, no, that would invite attention. If he had his camera, he could pretend to be a photographer, but photographers did not dress like auditors, as he did, being an auditor. No, better to keep his distance. For now.
He remembered the one photograph he had managed to take of Elizabeth, back in the courthouse hallway, camera held hip level. “Hey, Elizabeth,” he had called, and she had looked back, for only a split second, which was all he needed to grab the shot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the damn school photo, which had been used on her missing posters. She looked startled, wide-eyed, even a little guilty. They had used it on the cover, with Walter’s mug shot and a heartbreaking photo of Holly Tackett between them.
His train slowed for the approach to Philadelphia. He couldn’t wait to get home, to get on the Internet. He must not write about this yet. But it would be fun tonight to sit in his study and read the other bloggers, to imagine their envy and astonishment when he broke this story. How had Walter found her again? Perhaps she had found him.
32
“OCTOBER GIVETH AND OCTOBER TAKETH away,” Peter intoned the next morning. Golden autumn had been replaced by a dark, lashing storm, almost monsoonlike. Eliza felt she had no choice but to drive Albie to school. She struggled with this, on principle. Was she being overprotective? Hadn’t she walked to school in driving rainstorms? And Albie was used to the wet because of England. But this was the kind of downpour in which visibility dwindled to nothing, and she could not bear to think of dreamy Albie walking along the streets in his slicker, which was nowhere near bright enough. If she had her way, Albie would wear a bright yellow coat and hat like the little girl on the Morton salt box, but even Albie had enough fashion sense to choose dark navy. Besides, it was touching how much Albie cherished the novelty of the ride to school, especially when Reba automatically piled in. Apparently Reba understood that the walk to school was not about her. It had a purpose, a mission, and if she was in on the nice days, she should go along on the dreary ones, too.
Yet the moment they dropped Albie off, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the day felt freshly scrubbed, an enticing invitation to do something, anything, outdoors. Eliza, who had no shortage of tasks at home, believed she was heading there when she pulled out of the school’s driveway. Somehow, she found the Subaru nosing east and north, toward Baltimore. She did not take the highways, preferring the secondary roads, the very ones on which she had learned to drive, skirting close to her parents’ home and even detouring past her old high school-although it wasn’t her school, the windowless octagon that she remembered more or less fondly. That hopelessly small structure had been demolished back in the 1990s and replaced with a handsome brick-and-glass rectangle that allowed light to pour in from every angle. She continued along Route 40, little changed to her eyes, although the Roy Rogers had been replaced by a Church’s Fried Chicken. The road dipped, as it always had, and all the trappings of the suburbs fell away as she descended into the section that was bordered by the state park. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and they glistened in the sun. She parked in the lot and let Reba out. She didn’t have a leash, but she knew the dog would stay close to her, even in a novel environment, full of new smells.
They walked, following the spindly waterway that was the Sucker Branch, even after hours of heavy rain. She told herself she couldn’t be sure where she was, not really. There were no landmarks, and she hadn’t been here since August 1985. It would be impossible to pinpoint the exact place where she had seen Walter, tamping down the earth with his shovel.
That is, it would have been impossible if it weren’t for the plastic spray of flowers tucked at the foot of an old oak tree.
A coincidence, she told herself, then Reba. “It’s a coincidence.” Reba looked as if she were considering this information. The bouquet was bedraggled; it had been out in the elements for quite some time. It might be trash, for all Eliza knew, something tossed here, not left in memorial. Who would have trudged into these woods to leave a plastic nosegay at a site where Maude had spent barely a day? Eliza tried to remember what she knew about Maude’s life. She had attended Mount Hebron High School. She had been on her way to work at an ice-cream parlor on Route 40 and gotten a ride with Walter. She was tall and thin, one of two children whose divorced mother was just scraping by. This was all from information that filtered out during the trials. Walter never spoke of what he had done, except in the most general way.