A sunny day in May, 1954. Nothing especially noteworthynot at the moment, anyway. But watch. Listen. Because what happens in the next hour or so will leave people talking for long years afterward…
Evelyn Daye Tappley was just about the best mother of her generation. At least, that's the impression you got if you talked to any of her Junior League friends. If poor seven-month-old David had so much as a sniffle, Evelyn would cancel all her social engagements, even those including any senators or governors her well-connected husband might have invited to the mansion that night. And as for know-how about raising her one and only child… Evelyn could quote you chapter and verse from Dr Benjamin Spock's bestseller, Baby and Child Care.
Wealthy as her background washer Ohio family made one of the early fortunes in steel, just about the time Mrs Woodrow Wilson was secretly taking over the White HouseEvelyn had seen both her younger brother and sister die from influenza in the terrible epidemic of 1931. She was not about to let a similar fate befall her own child.
On that sunny day in 1954 Evelyn hired two extra workmen to help her seed and plant her half-acre garden on the eastern sweep of the grounds. She left David in the capable care of his nanny, a stout Irishwoman named Margaret Connally. Margaret had been David's nanny since he was brought home from the hospital. Of all the threats to young David, Margaret was perhaps most afraid of kidnappers. No wealthy person in the United States had ever forgotten the sad fate of the Lindbergh baby… But thus far in his life, the only thing young David had had to contend with was a predisposition to diaper rash, which often left him irritable late at night after he'd soaked himself while sleeping.
The morning of 5 May went just fine…
Early in the afternoon, Margaret Connally decided to bring The Little One, as she inevitably referred to him, outside to enjoy the sun. She herself would sit several feet away in a rocking chair enjoying lemonade and a few pages of the new Agatha Christie paperback she was reading. Evelyn approved of this. Margaret deserved a midday break, and this way she could relax while still keeping an eye on David in his playpen.
Scamper the tabby kitten swatted at the netting of the playpen as David sat in his sailor suit, playing with a gray rubber mouse that squeaked when he pressed it between thumb and forefinger. Scamper always resented being kept outside the playpen.
After her afternoon Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be (her Dublin mother having taught her to pray hard even when things were going well; that way God would be even more kindly when things suddenly went badly), Margaret then settled into The Body in the Library. She was pleased to find that this was set in a small English village, village mysteries being her favorite kind.
At the same time Margaret began reading, another creature, unseen at this moment, entered the grounds. It had spent the morning in the rocky wooded slopes to the west of the estate. At dawn it had sated itself with a fieldmouse. It was not hungry now, it was merely exploring. The heavy rains of the past few weeks had caused many animals to seek lower lands.
The afternoon wore on…
Margaret was very much intrigued with her new Agatha Christie. It was perhaps the best Miss Marple story she'd ever read, especially the daring (for Christie) portrait of the immoral dance-hall girl, for whom Margaret felt great pity.
Scamper hissed and cried as soon as he saw the timber rattler that had eased itself through the netting of the playpen on the far side.
The snake, coiled directly in front of David now, was the color of urine, with dark blotches over its scaly, glistening skin.
That was when, having belatedly recognized Scamper's cry Margaret looked up from her book and saw the serpent in the playpen just as it uncoiled and lashed out at The Little One, its fangs striking him in the chest.
Margaret screamed
Evelyn had just started working on her tomato plants when she heard the scream. She had no doubt what it signifiedthat something horrible had happened to David.
Years later she would remember the expression on the face of the workman who swung around to look at her. The scream seemed to have chilled him deeply. He appeared to be paralyzed.
Evelyn took off running.
She saw all this in the next few moments: Margaret hurling her paperback at a huge slithering rattlesnake that was hurrying to escape the playpen
David falling over on his face, sobbing
Scamper jumping up perhaps half a foot in the air as the frantic timber rattler hurried past him
Then Evelyn was reaching into the playpen and lifting her wailing infant into her arms.
And then she was running for the house as a gray-uniformed maid appeared in the back door.
'Call an ambulance! Hurry! Hurry!' Evelyn shrieked.
It was one of those ironies that only the darkest gods in the universe could take any pleasure in.
The ambulance arrived within minutes. The passage to the closest hospital was untroubled. One of the doctors on hand knew, from his Army training at Fort Hood in Texas, exactly how to treat young David.
The injection was given.
The Little One, calmed now, seemed fine. He was put in a private room, assigned round-the-clock nurses.
The doctor, pleased with himself and rightly so, smiled a great deal and invited Evelyn and her husband down to the cafeteria for some coffee. The importance of the Tappley family was not lost on him.
They were three steps from the cafeteria when the doctor's name was called, in a rather frantic way, over the public-address system.
He took off at a trot back the way he'd come.
The Tappleys were only a few steps behind him.
The doctor was joined by two others and they worked without pause for the next hour and a half.
Uselessly.
David had survived the snakebite itself just fine. But he was one of those rare humans to have a violentand in his case, fatalreaction to the vaccine…
STATEMENT: OF PETER TAPPLEY
By the Tuesday of that week I was in pretty bad shape. I didn't even go home. I just kept thinking about the previous Friday night, wondering what had happened exactly. If anything had.
I looked through the ads and found a place in a tranquil old Chicago neighborhood called Edgebrook. It reminded me of how my mother always described her upbringing, where you had a backyard that met a wooded area filled with wildlife. But in Edgebrook you didn't need to be rich. I took a small apartment on a three-month lease, which the landlady was adamant about. 'I run a respectable apartment house,' she said. 'Not a motel.'
I was still counting the hours it had been since I'd taken a drink. A hundred and four. The crying jags were pretty had by now, as were the shakes. But I wasn't hallucinating, which was a very good sign. No delirium tremens. I ran a low-grade fever and had severe headaches. I was having prostate pain, too, a lot of it sometimes, as if somebody were jabbing me with an ice-pick every few minutes. Sometimes emptying it helped. But I couldn't get an erection. That was a sure sign of the panic state I was in.
Late in the afternoon, as I lay on my bed looking out the window, I saw a fawn come to the edge of the woods. She was so thin and frail and spindly of gait that I wanted to run out and pick her up the way you would an infant. And then disappear into the woods with her. She would teach me the ways of the shadowy forest, and there I would live for ever, not quite man, not quite beast, and then Friday night would not matter to me anymore.
I stayed three days in the room without eating. Mostly I sweated and slept. On the second day I was able to masturbate but the prostate relief was only temporary. There wasn't even any pleasure in it. Sex was not something I cared to think about at the moment.
I'm not sure when the idea came to me. But I knew right away that it was the only idea that could get me out of my predicament.
In those days, 1979, back before the police were as strict about handguns as they would later become, finding a pawnshop willing to sell you a weapon on the spot was not very difficult. I went down to Maxwell Street, that little hymn to the Third World that the good citizens of Chicago never care to acknowledge, an open-air market of scabrous disease and harsh and myriad foreign languages, and the quick sad cunning of people who live out their lives utterly without joy. I found a gun inside of twenty minutesa. 221 Remington Fireball, a weapon far more powerful than I needed.
I went through the phone book looking for delivery services: there was one just a few miles away. I drove over, parked two blocks past the large cinderblock warehouse, then walked back. The place was laid out simply enougha small office up front, a huge receiving and dispatching facility in back, with perhaps half a dozen bays for truck repair. This was 8:30 in the morning. Some drivers were just getting started for the day. I walked to a far door and then hurried inside and over to a truck that had just been loaded. I stayed in the deep morning shadows, looking around to see if anybody in the big echoing warehouse had seen me. Apparently not. I snuck aboard the truck and hid in the back.
Fifteen minutes later, the truck driver climbed in, heavy enough that the truck tilted to the right when he did.
I let him get a couple of miles from the warehouse and stop at a light before I hit him. I got him with the butt of the Remington right on the crown of the head. He slumped over immediately. He hadn't seen me at all. I dragged him into the back of the truck and hit him again to make sure he stayed out. I took his place in the seat and drove to an alley four blocks away. I went in the back and bound, gagged and blindfolded him with stuff I'd brought along. He was still out. I took his uniform off and put it on. The sleeves were too long so I rolled them up. Same with the trouser legs. I then drove back to Maxwell Street where I bought a large steamer trunk with a sticker that said WORLD'S FAIR 1939. The interior of the trunk smelled like 1939, too.
The address I wanted was over in Montclare. By now it was raining, which would be helpful. A guy in a service uniform was anonymous enough; a guy in a service uniform in the rain was virtually invisible. Nobody would pay any attention.
I was still hoping that nothing had happened, that it was all just panic and fantasy.
By the time I pulled up behind the two-story white apartment building, the truck driver had come awake and started muttering beneath his tape. I went back and hit him once more and once more he was blessedly silent.
I opened the rear doors of the truck and took down a dolly. Then I reached up and pulled down the steamer trunk, using the dolly to transport it inside the building and up the dusty carpeted stairs to apartment 6B. The hall smelled of cigarette smoke and long-dead sunlighta scent that had traveled millions and millions of miles.
I knocked and there was no answer but then I hadn't really been expecting any.
I snugged my leather gloves even tighter and then went to work with two of the picks a felonious friend of mine had once given me to hold as collateral on a two-hundred-dollar loan. The picks never failed me, but the friend had: I never saw him again. Within thirty seconds I was opening the door and pushing dolly and trunk inside.
There is something almost sexually intimate about being in somebody's residence when you're not supposed to. You are walking around in the echoes of their secrets, the thingsbeliefs, desires, longingsthey whisper only to themselves, that nobody else will ever know.
For a long and almost giddy time, I sensed that the apartment was empty and that I had therefore been worried about nothing.
No, I hadn't actually come back from a tavern with a woman and then, just as we were making love, cut her throat. No, it had all been a terrible nightmare. Yes, I'd been here but I'd gone home and nothing bad had happened. She hadn't answered her phone in the following days simply because she'd been called out of town. Simple explanation. Sane and Simple. Unlike the shadowy fantasies of my imagination.
I followed the smell to the bedroom, the odor redolent of the sickly-sweet smell of pigpens on the hot summer days when we used to visit my uncle's farm.
She was sprawled naked across the bed. There was red from her blood and yellow from her urine and brown from her feces on the otherwise white chenille spread. Her skin was the blue of deep and abiding bruises, and a curious buff-blue film covered the whites of her brown eyes. Her legs were spread and her sex looked lonely and vulnerable, exposed that way. Blood had sprayed across the white wall behind her.
Getting her in the trunk took twenty-five minutes and in order to do it, to fit her inside properly, I had to break both of her arms and one of her legs. Thunder rumbled across the gray mid-morning sky as I worked, and rain slid down the dusty windows, sealing me into a melancholy I didn't need.
When I was all finished, when I'd made certain that every inch of the trunk's exterior was clean of her fluids, I hefted it onto the dolly and exited the apartment, locking the door behind me. Then I took the trunk down to the truck. I had to give our friend the driver another slam across the back of the head. He was going to have one terrible headache later on.
There was a point on the river, twenty miles to the east, where a stand of second-growth trees gave a man some protection from curious eyes.
I got her to the river's edge, the chill filthy water lapping as far up as my knees, and then I took hold of the trunk-handle and dragged her as far out as I could, careful not to step off into some unseen hole on the murky bottom and drown.
The current was fast. The water was murky all the way down. In moments, the trunk sank without trace. Perfect.
I drove the truck back to the city, dressed the driver in his clothes once more then left him in the blind and empty alley. Probably wouldn't be found for awhile.
Back in my room, I slept for the next two days. I awoke feeling pretty good. I took a long and steamy shower, put on fresh clothes, packed up all my stuff into the leather briefcase I carried, and left the key behind on the dresser along with a note that said: I've decided to patch things up with my wife. I've enjoyed my stay here. Thank you.
Everybody likes a happy ending, even crabby landladies.
There was going to be an execution and it was going to be a good one. The prisoner was rich, handsome and only thirty-two years old. You couldn't ask for more excitement than that.
The morning of the execution, a long, expensive mobile van pulled up to the prison gates. It was a gray and rainy day.
The gates swung open but the van remained still.
Two armed guards in black rain ponchos appeared and began walking around the van, checking every inch of it. Finished with the exterior, one of the guards knocked on the side door and went inside. He reappeared five minutes later. Presumably, he had checked the inside as assiduously as he had checked the outside.
More than one hundred reporters watched the guards do their job, though exactly what that job was, the reporters didn't understand.
To whom did the van belong?
What were the guards looking for?
Would the van ultimately be allowed inside the high gray walls of the institution?
The last question was answered soon. The guards, apparently satisfied that the van was not carrying any kind of contraband, waved it inward. The gates closed immediately. All this was overseen by two other poncho-clad guards toting shotguns.
The reporters went back to their own vans and trucks and cars to wait out the rest of the long day.
Only the protestors were dutiful. They had been marching with their picket signs since just after dawn.
ONLY GOD SHOULD TAKE A LIFE
– was typical of the placards they carried. For some reason, all the protestors, at least half of whom were clergy of one kind or another, were fat. And that gave them a certain pathetic, almost comic look as they strode up and down the parking lot adjacent to the institution in their dark, bulky rainclothes. They looked like a species of animal that had been neither clever enough nor strong enough to survive.
The printing on their placards began to run with rainwater. One of them read:
ONL G D CA JUDG A SOUL
Many of the reporters had taken to betting. A thirty-two-year-old rich boy like Peter Emerson Tappley was probably going to get a reprieve. True, all the lower courts had ruled against Tappley. And true, the Supreme Court had decided just this morning not to grant a stay. But Governor Edmondseven given the tight race he was in against a very tough law-and-order candidateowed the Tappley family a lot. Some said he even owed them the Governor's mansion. So the bets were that he'd draw it out as long as possible and then say, at the very last moment, that he'd wrestled with his soul (the Governor actually said things like that) and concluded that there was enough evidence to grant a stay.
Maybe Peter Emerson Tappley really hadn't raped and cut up those three women seven years ago.
An hour after the van entered the prison grounds, a pool was started. People bet on various times that the Governor would order the stay.
The ritual for execution was unvarying, even for a prominent inmate like Peter Tappley. He was given the breakfast of his choice (oatmeal and wheat toast with strawberry jam and a large glass of orange juice and two cups of coffee) served to him in the privacy of his death row cell.
Then he was moved down the hall to a special visiting room where he began receiving a succession of guests, all emerging from the expensive van that belonged to his mother.
First came his sister Doris, who spent half an hour with him; and then his beloved mother. White-haired, handsome and matriarchal as ever, Evelyn Daye Tappley spent three hours alone with her son. She even shared a few bites of the club steak he was brought for his lunch. It was quite good, actually.
In the afternoon, Doris came back, joining her mother and brother. There was a great deal of tension, as one might expect, but there were more than a few smiles and laughs as they all remembered long-ago days when (or so it seemed) the sun had always beamed, the sky was a beautiful cornflower blue, and life was filled with puppy dogs and croquet games on the lawn and dips in the family pool. Tears merged with laughter, and Evelyn and Doris seemed to be constantly hugging Peter.
All this stopped at 3:07 p.m., when Jill Coffey was let into the room by a guard.
Jill, dark-haired, blue-eyed, pretty in a casual and freckled way, was Peter's wife. Or had been up until the divorce two years ago, just at the time Peter began exhausting the last rounds of his appeals.
The Tappley family ceased talking.
They all stared at Jill.
'It wasn't necessary for you to be here,' Evelyn said.
'I wanted to be,' Jill told her.
She knew how much they despised her, and always had. For one thing, while her father had been a prominent banker in a small downstate Illinois town, Jill had hardly been the social equal of the Tappley family. For another, she had not hesitated to tell Peter how much she disapproved of his family.
'I don't want you here,' Evelyn said.
'Mother,' Doris said, embarrassed. 'She has a right to be here if she wants to be.'
Jill had always felt that Doris was her secret friend. Doris could never be demonstrative about this because her mother would get angry, but during the roughest spots in Jill's marriage, Doris had always been there to comfort her. Jill and Peter had lived in the family mansion ninety miles due west of Chicago. Doris was an inmate in the same prison. She still lived there, though her nervous little husband had moved out long ago.
Evelyn was too angry to control herself. 'If she'd been a decent wife to my son, he wouldn't be here today. I blame that damned job of hers'
Doris blushed, her angular but pretty face touched by tiny red spots on her cheeks. Even for Evelyn, this was an irrational outburst. Both Peter and Doris had fought Jill's determination to keep taking photography assignments in
Chicago. To satisfy themEvelyn felt that a woman who worked was unseemly, overlooking the fact that she herself commanded an empire, and frequently put in twelve-hour days six days a weekJill had quit for nearly a year but she missed the work too much to stay away from it any longer. And as soon as she'd started taking assignments again, driving in from the mansion to Chicago a few days a week, her marriage had gone into a steep decline. Peter had been so threatened by her job that he became impotent.
And apparently, about the same time, he also began stalking and murdering women.
'I don't want you here,' Evelyn hissed. 'You wait out in the hall till Doris and I are finished.'
Jill looked at Peter and Doris. As usual, they were clearly intimidated by their mother.
Peter especially seemed resentful of Evelyn. But he nodded quietly, a somewhat frail man now, the old handsomeness gaunted out of him, in a prison uniform as gray and cold as the rainy sky outside.
'I'll be back,' Jill said to Peter.
She waited forty-five minutes in the hall. A guard brought her bitter black coffee. The assistant warden showed up once and asked her if she wouldn't be more comfortable in the lounge. She thanked him but said no.
The prison was an echo chamber of hard harsh noises, gates slamming shut, prisoners shouting at each other, footsteps marching down vast hollow corridors. In some ways, the noises frightened Jill as much as the walls themselves, as much as the armed guards in the towers. In prison, there would be no true silence in which to think and be alone. Ever.
Evelyn made a point of ignoring Jill as the assistant warden led the two women from the visiting room.
A guard took Jill in, shutting the door behind her.
Peter stood at a barred window, staring out.
'It's a good day for it, anyway,' he said, turning back to her and smiling. 'I mean, I'd be really pissed off if the sun was shining and everybody was outdoors having a good time. If I have to suffer, they should suffer, too.'
She said nothing. Just watched him.
The room was small. Dusty. It contained an overstuffed couch and two overstuffed chairs. Two empty Diet Coca-Cola cans sat on the floor next to the couch. The floor had been waxed, but more than anything the room smelled of strong disinfectant. She was sure this would be the dominant smell of the prison.
'Any particular reason you came to see me?' Peter enquired, his grin making him suddenly handsome again. She remembered what it had been like to be in love with him. He'd been a lot of fun, he really had. God, she'd loved him so deeply and truly it had been almost painful. And it had certainly been scary. Neither before nor since, had she been able to give herself to a man with such abandon. 'You didn't bring me a cake with a file in it or anything, did you?' he went on.
She smiled. 'Afraid not.'
His grin faded. 'Evelyn still thinks there's going to be a reprieve.'
He'd always called her Evelyn as a way of proving to himself that he had some distance on her.
'But there isn't,' he said. 'The public likes the idea that a rich guy is going to get fried. They think it proves that this is a democratic country, after all.' The smile again, sad this time. 'What a way to prove it, huh?'
He hadn't mentioned the women he'd killed. He never did. That was how she'd known, in the days following the police first coming to the mansion and questioning him, that he was a sociopath. He felt no guilt for what he'd done, merely a kind of ironic anger that he'd been caught. Ted Bundy had been very much like that.
'Why have you come, Jill?'
She'd known he would ask this. She wished she had an answer. 'Oh, I suppose because we were in love once, and had such high fine dreams together for our future, and because you'll always be a part of meeven after everything that happened.'
'The women, you mean?'
She nodded. Could he just once say how sorry he was for what he'd done?
He said, 'You know, I never would've killed them if you hadn't gone back to work.'
She waited for the grin. He had always been good at mocking his mother. Wasn't he mocking her now, her absurd notion of somehow blaming Jill for the murders?
'You went bitch on me, Jill. Just like a woman.'
They were standing barely inches apart. He took his finger and jabbed it angrily at her breastbone. 'You had to have a job. Had to get back into the Chicago thing. How many of those guys were you screwing on the side, anyway?'
She didn't know what to say. But that was all right, because he wasn't done.
His face was a mask of rage, of dark frantic eyes that bulged, of lips frothy with spittle, of cheeks flushed with crimson.
'When I was cutting those women up, I was thinking of you, Jill. I really was.'
The grin again, but this time she saw the insanity in it.
She started backing toward the door.
Preparing herself to call out for the guard in case he wasn't looking through the observation window.
'I could've saved myself a lot of hassle, couldn't I? I should've just killed you. You were the one I wanted: you and all the guys in Chicago you used to shack up with.'
She'd always known he was jealous. But not like this.
He sprang.
She was shocked by both his speed and strength as his hands took her throat and he slammed her back into the wall.
She had time for a single, muffled scream.
He went to serious work on her. She could feel the anger increasing in his iron hands and fingers.
And then the door was bursting open.
And two guards were grabbing him.
And tearing him away from her.
And one guard was bringing his wooden baton down hard across the back of Peter's skull.
And another guard was leading her, dazed and shocked and terrified, from the room to the assistant warden's office around the corner.
She didn't see Evelyn or Doris again that day.
After a long, rambling and apologetic speech from the assistant warden, she was taken out the back way, put into the rear of a panel truck so the press couldn't see her, and driven back to her motel.
There was a bar adjacent to the motel. Though she was not especially fond of alcohol, she had two very stiff drinks of whisky and then went back to her room, taking a turkey sandwich and a small bag of potato chips with her.
Without quite knowing why, she spent several minutes checking the locks on the doors and windows.
She had this image of Peter. She'd never known how much he hated her, how much he'd wanted to kill her.
But checking the locks…
Did she think he was going to somehow escape prison tonight and come kill her?
She took a long, hot, relaxing shower.
When she was toweled dry and ensconced in her favorite pink cotton pajamasshe had never forgotten her sweet mother's advice that dark-haired girls always looked good in pinkshe slid between the covers, clicking on the TV remote as she did so.
She hoped there was some kind of mindless comedy on tonight. She needed that kind of escape.
She wished she'd never come up here now.
She wished she'd never seen Peter as she'd seen him just a few hours ago.
This was how she'd remember him. For ever.
The motel didn't have cable, just the three networkswhich meant that she didn't have much choice as to programing.
She ate her sandwich and half the chips, and occupied herself with a rerun of a wooden romantic comedy.
But at least no women were being ripped apart in it.
At least no sociopath's face was filling the screen as he screamed the word 'bitch' over and over again.
She drifted in and out of sleep several times.
Thunder woke her.
Thunder had always scared her. As a child, she'd seen a Disney movie in which a little girl was lost in a vast and terrifying forest. Thunder and lightning had stalked the girl like the wrath of a dark and disapproving god.
A moment of disorientation: a motel room that still managed to look like 1958 right down to the pressed-wood blond furnishings.
Where was she?
Who was she?
Peter's face. Shrieking at her.
His hands. On her throat.
Guards racing in
Homely, familiar images now: the potato-chip sack on the night-table next to her; her rain-speckled tan suede car coat hung to dry over the back of the desk chair; a bit of brown paper bag sticking up from the small waste-can to the left of the front door.
Her eyes moved to the dark TV. She needed some human contact, even if it was secondhand.
She found the remote and thumbed it to ON.
A newsman standing in front of the prison. Night. Rain. The reporter huddled beneath his umbrella, speaking into the microphone in his right hand. He wore a trench coat and looked suitably grim, especially under the stark TV lights.
'Unless there's a last-minute reprieve, Bev, the execution is scheduled to take place just about one hour from now. At midnight.'
An off-camera voice: 'Michael, why don't you tell our viewers how a prisoner is prepared for execution?'
The reporter nodded. 'Well, there really isn't anything remarkable about it, Bev. Most of the day, the prisoner spends with his loved ones. Then, after they're escorted out, the chaplain comes in and remains for some time with the prisoner. And then the prisoner is showered and shaved for the execution.'
'I'm not sure what ''shaved" means in this context, Michael.'
'Well, execution by electrocution means that electricity is conveyed into the body at specific points. They shave an area on the prisoner's left knee, so the electrode will fit nice and tight, and then they shave a five-inch circle on the crown of his head so the metal cap will fit. By the way, he's given special trousers with the left seam cut from cuff to knee so they can place the electrode with no problem.'
'Then he's ready to be executed?'
'Just about. They take him to the execution chamber and sit him in the chair and get him ready and then the assistant warden comes in and reads the prisoner the death warrant. And then the assistant warden makes a final call to the Attorney General to see if there's been a last-minute reprieve of any kind. And if not… Well, if not, Bev, the prisoner receives approximately two thousand seven hundred volts AC and five amperes of electrical currentand he usually dies within a few minutes.'
'Usually but not always?'
'Well, there was a case last year in New York where the electrodes weren't fitted snugly and it took the prisoner more than twelve minutes to dieand he was crying out for help all the time. I'm told it was a pretty grisly'
'Hold on, Michael. They're telling me something in my ear.'
The camera held on the trench-coated reporter. You could hear the protestors chanting off-camera.
Then: 'Michael, we've just been informed that the Governor's officeand this is official as of 11:07 p.m. will not (repeat: will not) issue a stay of execution. So Peter Emerson Tappley will be put to death in the electric chair tonight in, according to the studio clock, just fifty-three minutes.'
Jill thumbed off the TV.
Sat there unmoving in her frivolous pink pajamas in this ancient, worn motel room that smelled of cigarette smoke and mildew, and whispered of loneliness and adultery.
Soon now, it would be over, the life of the man she'd once loved so much but hadn't really known at all.
Not a word of remorse for what he'd done: that's what bothered her most.
Not a single word of remorse.
She went to the bathroom.
When she came back, she found a Honeymooners rerun and made a singular effort not to look at her little portable alarm clock.
She didn't want to know.
She didn't want to mark his passing.
Ralph Kramden said, 'Honey, you're the greatest!' just as she heard somebody on the rainy drive outside let out a cowboy yelp. 'Yahoo! Fry, sucker, fry!' She hadn't wanted to stay in this rundown place but it was the only accommodation she could find. All the decent motels had been commandeered by the press.
'Yahoo!' somebody else shouted.
They were celebrating.
They sounded drunk, and absolutely delighted.
The Boogeyman was dead.
She did not sleep well, waking several times to the eerie shifting shadows, and the eerie shifting silence, of this battered old room.
She rose early, packed and checked out.
Just as she turned away from the registration desk, the desk clerk said, 'Oh, I forgot. Somebody dropped this off for you.'
A fancy buff-blue envelope. She recognized the author at once. Evelyn Tappley.
Jill didn't open the envelope until she was in her car.
There was a handwritten note in the middle of the elegant blue page:
I hope you're happy, you bitch. You'll pay for what you did to my son, I promise you.
Evelyn Daye Tappley.