“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 Golden autumn had been replaced by a dark, lashing storm, almost monsoonlike.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 She continued along Route 40, little changed to her eyes, although the Roy Rogers had been replaced by a Church’s Fried Chicken.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.
“He must have said something,” the prosecutor had insisted. Baltimore County was known for the ferocity with which its state’s attorney sought the death penalty in all applicable cases, and the Howard County attorney had happily ceded the case to him, saying it was almost certain that Walter had killed Maude here, just over the county line, not where she was taken. But they couldn’t prove it was a capital crime if Maude had gotten into Walter’s car willingly, and he said she had. And there was no evidence of rape. The assumption was that Walter used a condom, unusual but not unheard of, although this did not explain the lack of trauma to Maude’s body. There were a lot of gaps in the case, and they leaned on Elizabeth to fill them in.
He must have said something about Maude, the prosecutor said.
No, Elizabeth told the prosecutor, Walter had offered varying stories about the girl whose grave he had dug-she fell out of the car, she fell in the park and hit her head. But he spoke vaguely about other crimes he might have committed, and that was only in order to scare Elizabeth to do whatever he asked her to do. “‘I’ve done some terrible things,’ he would say. ‘I didn’t want to do them. I was left with no choice. But I will do what I have to do.’”
In the end, Walter was convicted of murder in the first degree and given a life sentence. He had already received the death penalty in Virginia, so it didn’t really matter. The Maryland prosecutor had spun the whole experience as a saving to taxpayers. Maryland would be spared the cost of Walter’s appeals, and the cost of his maintenance over the years, yet justice had been done. The prosecutor said.
Eliza and Reba kept walking, inhaling the dense, wet smells of the woods in autumn. The leaves would have been thicker, in summer, it would have been harder to see as far as she could today. If she had been able to spot Walter from a distance-no, she wasn’t supposed to think that way.
Eventually the path led back into the old neighborhood, her mother’s Brigadoon. It was unchanged, almost as if it had slumbered through the past two decades. Although they probably had cable now, Eliza thought, noting a small satellite attached to one roof. She walked among the stone houses, assigning each one its past, astonished at how much she remembered. The Sleazaks had lived there, old man Traber there. (She had been stunned to learn from his obit, which her mother clipped for her a few years ago, that this stereotypical crank, the original get-off-my-lawn guy, was actually a well-regarded society painter.) The Billinghams’ door was still scarlet, a scandalous choice back in the 1980s, when the community board debated if the color might prevent the neighborhood from being included in the National Register of Historic Places, a status it had long coveted.
The primary difference, Eliza deduced from the cars, was that the neighborhood’s residents were more prosperous now, or more inclined to flaunt their wealth. Her mother wouldn’t have cared for that. And she wouldn’t have liked the fact that a woman in a BMW slowed when she saw Eliza and Reba, regarding them with frank suspicion. She drove past them, turned around, and came past again, rolling down her window as she pulled abreast of them.
“Can I help you?” she asked Eliza. “Are you looking for someone?”
“Just taking a stroll down memory lane. I lived here, as a child.”
Eliza pointed to the house where she had grown up, the house she had never fully appreciated until her family decided to leave it. Could they have stayed? Were they wrong to cut themselves off from their pre-Walter life? Hers was not such an unusual name. Media exposure was not as intense then. She wasn’t Patricia Hearst. If she told this woman her maiden name-that quaint term, yet also literal in her case-the woman would probably evince no recognition. Who remembers names, anyway? The runaway bride, the girl killed in Aruba, the girl killed in Italy-they made headlines, yet Eliza couldn’t name one of them to save her life.
“Well, it’s almost impossible to buy here now,” the woman said. “Houses are sold before they even go on the market.”
“Even since the mortgage crisis?”
“Houses here never lose their value,” the woman said. Eliza felt like a blasphemer for suggesting that Roaring Springs could be touched by anything as commonplace as the world economy.
“What do they go for these days?”
Judging by the look on the BMW driver’s face, Eliza had progressed from blasphemer to merely classless. The woman lowered her voice:
“I heard that the Mitchells got almost $500,000.”
The number was at once laughably low, relative to what Peter had paid for their house in Bethesda, and shockingly high. Eliza’s parents had paid no more than $40,000 for the house in the 1970s and felt like robber barons when they sold it for $175,000 in 1986. We could have lived here, Eliza thought. The commute would have worked out. Iso and Albie would have attended her old schools, walked down Frederick Road to the Catonsville branch library, eaten gyros at the old Greek diner, although Maryland ’s gyros were thin pleasures when compared to the falafels they had known in London.
They could have walked along the Sucker Branch, too, wandered into the park. Did parents still allow children to do such things? No, probably not. But that detail did not derail Eliza’s fantasy. She had never blamed the location, the park. No, the problem with this spasm of nostalgia was that she was longing for her children to reclaim the territory she had ceded, Elizabethland, the realm of her pre-fifteen-year-old self. And if they wandered back into her past, she would have to tell them everything about the girl that she used to be. As far as they knew, there was no home between the Lerners’ early years in Baltimore City and the house they owned now. An entire chapter of the family’s life was missing, and Eliza’s own children had never noticed.
“That much,” she said to the woman in the BMW, widening her eyes in what she hoped would appear to be wistful awe. In some ways, it was. She and Reba turned around and headed out of the neighborhood. She had a feeling that the woman watched her go. That was okay. It was good to be vigilant. She wouldn’t deny anyone that right.
Passing Maude’s temporary grave again, she stopped and examined the bouquet. So sad, but then-what did the parents of the missing do? What territory did they mark, what did they visit? I’ll tell you things, Walter had promised. Things I’ve never told. But was it her obligation to listen?