Читать книгу Don’t Look Back - Laura Lippman - Страница 13

Chapter Seven

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 million 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 boat 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.

‘Mom?’ Albie’s voice seemed to be coming from the kitchen. ‘Are we going to have lunch?’

‘Soon,’ she called back from the desk in the family room, still looking at her photo, trying, and not for the first time, to see herself as Walter had seen her. She looked nothing like his two known victims, tall blondes. She understood why he had taken her, but why had he let her live? He claimed he had been planning to let her go when he started driving toward Point of Rocks, but was that just a story he told after the fact? It didn’t matter. They had found Holly’s body at the bottom of a ravine; they had already dug up Maude, the Maryland girl he had attempted to bury in Patapsco State Park.

It occurred to Eliza, truly for the first time, to try her old name in an Internet search. Paging Dr Freud, Vonnie would have said with a snort. But Eliza’s identity had been so entrenched as Eliza Benedict by the time the Internet became a part of daily life that she had never stopped to think about Elizabeth Lerner. It was a common enough name that multiple Elizabeths popped up, in family trees and press releases and blogs. The first reference she found to herself was taken from that book. Ugh. Murder on the Mountain was a disgusting quickie churned out by Jared Garrett, a bizarre cop groupie who had followed Walter’s story with what even a teenager could see was an inappropriate fascination. There was an excerpt on Google, and her name leaped out from the leaden prose.

A boyish girl who looked younger than she was, Elizabeth testified that Walter did not attempt sexual congress with her for several weeks, but that she was, ultimately, subjected to his advances. Curiously, he left her alive. Walter clearly considered Elizabeth different from his other victims, although he himself has refused to explain the relationship, other than to remark once, in an interview with state police: ‘She was good company.’ Asked if she was a hostage, Bowman said: ‘I didn’t demand ransom, did I?’ His answers did little to deflect curiosity about the true nature of the relationship between the two.

‘What are you doing, Mom?’ Albie leaned against the door-jamb, hands in pockets. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his mother’s activities, merely bored enough with his own life to try to engage her.

‘Nothing,’ she said, erasing the cached history and closing the window. She wouldn’t want Iso’s prying fingers to wander into any of these Web sites. ‘Are you hungry? What do you want for lunch?’

‘Those sandwiches that Grandmother makes?’ he asked hopefully. Peter’s mother made elaborate sandwiches from deli roast beef and dark bread, chopping cornichons and putting them in brown mustard, then adding horseradish and a judicious sprinkling of salt and pepper.

‘I might not have everything Nonnie has, but I think I could make a fair approximation,’ she said, taking a quick mental inventory of the refrigerator’s contents, calculating that butter pickles would approximate the experience Albie craved, which was more about the chopping and mixing, making an exciting ritual out of something mundane. Albie loved productions, and with a child as easily pleased as Albie, it seemed a shame not to try to meet his expectations. Especially now, when everything and anything she did antagonized Iso. ‘Mom, you’re breathing too loud,’ she had said the other day in Trader Joe’s. ‘Loudly,’ Eliza had corrected, then felt awful for using grammar to one-up her daughter. Not that it had worked.

Albie put his hand in hers, as if the walk to the kitchen were a journey of miles. She wished it were, that he would stay this age for three, four years, then be nine for a decade or so, then spend another ten years being ten. But onetime graduate student of children’s literature that she was, she knew there was no spell, no magic, that could keep a child a child, or shield a child from the world at large. In fact, that was where the trouble almost always began, with a parent trying to outthink fate. Stay on the path. Don’t touch the spindle. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t pick the rose.