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Holly shifted in her seat, looking to Elizabeth, then back to Walter. Elizabeth realized that Walter was using the knowledge gleaned from the book, although expressing it in his own words. Elizabeth had understood that he liked the book. He had stolen that library copy, after all. But she had not realized until now that Walter took the text literally, that he believed it was like the directions on cake mix, simple and foolproof. Say these things, and you’ll get a girlfriend. She wanted to tell him: She’s only a middle-schooler. She wanted to say: She doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. Instead, she looked out the window, at the green-and-gold blur that was Virginia in the first week of autumn.
She found herself thinking about being little, five or six, and longing to order the hundred plastic dolls offered for a dollar in the back pages of some comic, probably Betty and Veronica. A hundred dolls for a dollar! It seemed too good to be true. It probably was, her mother counseled her. The dolls would be tiny and cheap. But it was Elizabeth ’s dollar, she could spend it as she chose. She sent away for the dolls and they arrived, even smaller and cheaper than her mother had prophesied. But her mother did not say, I told you so, or, Let this be a lesson to you. She said: Let’s make a doll tree. They tied curling ribbons around the dolls and hung them on the boughs of a potted ficus. That night, when her father came home, he had burst into laughter. Strange fruit, he spluttered, strange fruit. Then: Inez, you have clearly found your niche, working with the criminally insane.
After a brief, baffled moment, her mother had started to laugh, too, then explained the joke to Elizabeth. They had played the song for her on her father’s stereo, pulling the record out of a thick five- or six-album set of which her father was inordinately proud, one with a watercolor of a woman with a flower in her hair. They had talked to her about the history of the South and civil rights. They were kind and thorough and respectful. But the thing was: Elizabeth had loved that tree. It was beautiful to her, and it made her sad when her father’s reaction transformed it into a morbid joke, a joke that overtook her original joy, squashed it beneath the stories of lynchings and the civil rights movement. Walter was like Elizabeth at age six, seeing what he wanted to see. True, he was a grown man, and he should have known better than to believe a silly book. Still-she felt protective of him, in that moment, sorry for him.
YOU FELT SORRY FOR HIM?
The Virginia prosecutor snapped those words back at her, the way an impatient parent or teacher barked in the face of an obvious lie. That was odd, because this prosecutor, as opposed to the Maryland one, had always been kind and careful with her. The Maryland one had been exasperated with her from the start.
But this was the first time they had gone over the day in such detail. They had been talking for hours, and Elizabeth, now known as Eliza, was tired.
“Not exactly sorry. But I understood what was going on inside his head.”
“Then you must have felt even worse for Holly.” The young lawyer was nodding, encouraging her. “Because you knew exactly what she was going through.”
“Yes,” she said, wanting to please him. Then, after a quick glance to her parents, “No.”
“You didn’t feel bad for Holly.” Repeated in a flat tone, as if that would make her aware of how ridiculous she was. “You didn’t understand what was happening to her.”
“I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t know her.”
“But she started to cry. And you knew what you felt when Walter took you.”
“Yes, but-”
The prosecutor cut her off. “That’s all you have to say. That she was crying, that she seemed upset, that she realized things had taken a bad turn. You see, Elizabeth ”-in court, she would still be Elizabeth -“the details that matter are the ones that show Walter kidnapped Holly and took the contents of the cash box. So let’s just focus on that. He didn’t let her go when she asked, right?”
“Right.” Holly was pretty even when she cried. Mister, mister. Please just let me go, mister. My daddy will pay you, mister.
“And he took her money?”
“He asked for it and she gave it to him.”
“But this was after she had asked to be let go, right? How much time had passed?”
“An hour? Maybe more, maybe less. The clock in the truck was broken. Walter always said the cobbler’s children went barefoot and a mechanic’s car was never as nice as the ones he worked on.”
The prosecutor showed no interest in Walter’s insights.
“So he takes Holly’s money.”
“Yes, to buy us hamburgers.”
“Right. Still, it was Holly’s money and Walter took it from her. By force.”
“Yes, I guess so. I mean, he took the box from her and she didn’t want to give it up. He didn’t have to fight her or anything, but he did have to kind of peel it out of her arms.”
The prosecutor nodded. “Right, he took the money and then-?”
“He gave it to me and sent me into the McDonald’s to buy the food because he didn’t trust Holly to behave if we went through the drive-through lane.”
The silence that filled the room reminded Eliza/Elizabeth of a verse they had sung in middle school chorus, the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” This silence, like the one in the poem, was dark and deep. Not lovely, though, definitely not lovely, anything but lovely. She heard, literally heard, her mother swallow. Heard-not saw, but heard-her father take her mother’s hand, the tiny intake of breath made by the prosecutor. She could suddenly hear everything. The hum of the fluorescent light, the water cooler gently burping out in the hallway, her own hands moving back and forth along the thighs of her black cotton pants. Brushed cotton twill, pleated, worn with a high-necked shirt fastened with a brooch, an outfit modeled after one she had seen in a movie.
“Could you repeat that, Elizabeth?”
“He gave me the money and sent me into McDonald’s to buy the food.” She was proud of how consistent she was, how she said it, word for word, almost exactly as she had said it before. That was very important in these things. But the prosecutor did not seem proud of her.
“And you-”
“I ordered three Quarter Pounders. Walter didn’t like pickles, so I had to wait for his to be made special. And I had to make sure I knew which were the Diet Cokes and which was the regular Coke. Walter drank regular Coke, but he thought girls should drink Diet Coke because soda can make you fat if you’re not careful. We just guessed that Holly would eat the same things we did, because she wouldn’t say what she wanted. And I had to make sure to get enough ketchup packages. They never give you enough, only two little measly ones, and they can be grudging if you don’t ask right.”
“Grudging?”
“That was Walter’s word, I guess. I took it back to the car and we drove a little ways until we found a place where we could eat, hoping the fries didn’t get cold. Holly didn’t want to eat hers, though, so Walter did, picking out the pickles. I don’t know why he couldn’t do that with his own sandwich to begin with.”
“ Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
“When you went into the McDonald’s-why didn’t you tell someone what was happening?”
“What do you mean?”
“That you were kidnapped, that your kidnapper had another girl in the car?”
No one had asked her this before, but then-no one had gone over this part of the day in such detail. When she was rescued, the questions had been quick, mercifully so. How was she? What had he done to her? Had he-? She was the one who told them about Holly, the scream in the night, the campsite in the mountains, the landmarks that she could remember. And for weeks, months, that had been enough. But now they were preparing for Walter’s trial and everything-everything-had to be discussed in great detail. She had to tell the story the same way, in her own words. She thought she was doing that.