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But Eliza had never told the story of her own volition, and to use the parlance of Peter’s future career, she buried the lead: “When I was fifteen, a man kind of abducted me,” she began. “He thought I had seen something he had done, that I could identify him. Which was fu
Peter had not rushed in with questions. This would be his trademark as a reporter, in the years to come. Peter, Eliza had heard his colleagues say, was the master of the pause, silences that seemed designed to be filled with confidences.
“I was with him five weeks. Actually, thirty-nine days. Five weeks, four days. One day shy of the flood in the Bible. I never thought forty days and forty nights was that long, when I was in Sunday school. I’d think, ‘It’s only a little more than a month.’ But it can be a really long time.”
The waffles had a rich blueberry sauce on top. Eliza, who normally cleaned her plate, began mashing the tines of her fork into them, flattening them, eliminating their grids.
“Toward the end, he took another girl. But that sparked a huge manhunt, and the police found us. But not before she died.”
“She died,” Peter echoed. “You mean-he killed her?”
Eliza nodded. “It wasn’t the first time, although no one knows how many girls he killed. He was burying a girl when I stumbled on him, in the park that ran near our old house. Some people say he may have killed as many as a dozen girls in the years before he was caught.”
Eliza waited, almost holding her breath. Peter did not ask: “Why didn’t he kill you?” Instead, he asked: “How were you rescued?”
She almost said: “I’m not sure I was.” But she was not melodramatic that way and she had no doubt that she had, in fact, been rescued. “It was pretty anticlimactic. He ran a red light and just started babbling to the police officer. It turned out that a clerk in Piggly Wiggly had seen us in the store that morning, thought we looked odd, and called the police.”
“What did she notice that no one else had seen all that time? Were you never in public?”
She did not want to lie to Peter, or mislead him, but nor could she tell him everything. “It’s fu
“You know what?” Peter had said.
“What?” she had asked, fearful. She honestly could not imagine what would happen next, given that she had confided in only one other person, back in high school, and that had ended badly.
“I think you need more coffee.” He didn’t signal the waitress, who was busy with another table, but got up and grabbed the thermal carafe from behind the counter, filled Eliza’s mug. She knew, at that moment, that Peter would always take care of her, if only she would let him.
That had been their pattern for almost twenty years now; they were solicitous of each other, dividing their duties between the world at large and their home. Peter fought the battles beyond the house, while Eliza tried to make sure that the windows were always closed and locked, their alarm system in working order. They were a team.
Over time, of course, she had told him more, in greater detail. Peter never wondered why she was the lucky one. He took it for granted that she was, and he was glad for it. “We don’t ponder why lightning strikes where it does,” he said once. Later, after a London-based magazine had asked him to file dispatches from New Orleans on the first a
Now, packing up his briefcase, getting ready to go, Peter said: “The lawyer, Blanding, told me that Walter’s phone list is up to him, but his visiting list is another matter. It would be almost impossible for you to visit him. But Walter might ask for that, eventually. And if you were interested, it could happen because of who you are, your status.”
She didn’t think she was interested, she was pretty sure she wasn’t interested, but she couldn’t help wondering what Peter had said on her behalf. “What did you tell him?”
He looked surprised. “That it was up to you, of course. It is. I assume you don’t want to see him, but maybe you do. I’ll tell you this much: I’d be more comfortable with you going to see Walter, with security all around, than with you meeting up with this Barbara LaFortuny person. She’s the one who scares me.”
He kissed her temple, said, “Off to make the doughnuts,” and headed out to another one of his twelve-hour days. Eliza no longer really understood what Peter did for a living. She knew what venture capital was, and she knew that Peter had been recruited, in part, for the lucidity of his prose and his ability to explain complicated investment tools to the most unsophisticated investors. But she didn’t really know what he did, much less why it paid so well, and that was a little terrifying. Their old friends, almost all in the newspaper world, were taking buy-outs or pay cuts, getting laid off, and her family was thriving. Again: Don’t ask why.
She drifted over to the computer, entered the name “Barbara LaFortuny.” For an activist, she was suspiciously inactive, leaving few traces of herself in the public sphere, although there was a Baltimore Beacon-Light profile available only in abstract; she would have to pay to read the entire article. She wasn’t that interested, and it was a relief to discover how low her threshold was: She wouldn’t pay $3.95 to find out more about Barbara LaFortuny. But her fingers continued to wander, plugging the name into the images file and recoiling at the one photo that showed up: a woman with three-quarters of her face swathed in bandages. Amazing, the power of an image compared with words. Peter had stood here not five minutes ago and explained that this woman, Walter’s champion, had been a victim of a knife attack. But the horror hadn’t truly registered.
This was why Eliza seldom spoke of the rape. Words could not convey what Walter had done to her, the depth of the betrayal, more brutal than the act itself. And there was no photo, no image, to show the damage he had inflicted. Eliza was not inclined to be competitive about suffering; after all, there were at least two dead girls always at the ready, eager to inform her that she was, in fact, the lucky one, and a whole cadre of possible victims behind them. But she couldn’t help feeling a little superior to Barbara LaFortuny. Just a little. A line from a poem came to her, something about the people who never got suffering wrong. Yet in Eliza’s experience, everyone, even most victims, got suffering wrong. That’s why it was better never to speak of it.