Bright Young Women(77)

Denise and all the others in Washington, Utah, and Colorado just so happened to be part of a particular victim pool, at a particular moment of comprehension in the field of criminal and social sciences, at a particular moment of media interest. But that flashpoint in history, as most flashpoints tend to be, is detectable only now, with the benefit of hindsight.

So: what Carl’s editor thought had promise was not a story about an assailant who was still classified by dull governmental nomenclature but a story about a cover-up. We were post-Watergate, and headlines about corruption and calls for transparency sold big at the newsstand. However, his editor said, we couldn’t go around making litigious claims. He would run the story if and when The Defendant was arrested and charged. To say we were all disappointed and frustrated was an understatement, but Carl did take a copy of the container list to Sheriff Cruso, who asked if he could hold on to it. This, the slightest sign of interest, buoyed me for a few days. Then nothing came of it, and I began to envision a life in which the case was never solved, not because there weren’t any leads but because of pure human arrogance. Hopelessness turned to vengeance. I imagined ghoulish scenarios where Sheriff Cruso’s wife became The Defendant’s next victim, where he came to me a broken man, ruing the day he decided to focus on Roger instead of listening to me. My mind had become a bleak and unrecognizable place.

One week passed indeterminably, then half of the other. At The House, we moved from the floor of the rec room and into our beds, figuring that we were scared no matter where we closed our eyes, so we might as well be comfortable. Denise’s roommate that quarter was a girl named Rosemary Frint, who had been away on a ski trip the night Denise was killed. She was matter-of-fact about returning to room eight—all her clothes were there, and she liked the proximity to the bathroom—but I would have felt like a captain abandoning ship if I’d let her sleep in there alone. I offered my balcony bedroom to Robbie’s roommate, who was less keen on returning to her old accommodations, and I slept in Denise’s bed with the new linens, where, if I lay on my right side, I could be eye to eye with her print of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. Denise had been staggered to learn that I lived only thirty minutes outside of New York City and I’d never gone to see the real thing hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. The first time she came to visit me, we took the train in and went straight to the fifth floor, where the original still hangs in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries. I was surprised by the diminutiveness of the piece—the world-famous work was just a couple of inches wider than a page in the legal pads I used for note-taking in class. Denise broke down the composition element by element for me, tourists and schoolchildren gravitating, like she was an erudite museum guide.

The landscape, she told me, was what Dalí saw outside the window of his single-room shack in Portlligat, a small fishing settlement in Spain. We were looking at the Mediterranean Sea and the Serra de Rodes mountain range, rendered hyper-realistically in order to ground the surreal story taking place on the shore. Over the years, I would think about that contrast in relation to the mundane realism that filled my day-to-day life while the story around me continued to unfold in horrific and inexplicable ways.

On Thursday, February 9, shortly before nine in the morning, I was forty minutes into a lecture on proposed reform efforts to the Florida grand jury at the same time a seventh grader named Kimberly Leach was giggling through a set of fifty jumping jacks in gym class at Lake City Junior High, about an hour and a half east of Tallahassee. Remembering that she had forgotten her prized denim purse in her homeroom class, she asked for permission to run back and retrieve it before the light rain turned heavy.

While I was scribbling down the difference between accusatorial and inquisitorial, Kimberly was rushing back to gym class with her purse tucked under her arm. While I was punctuating elect more responsible prosecutors with a question mark, Kimberly was turning to see who had called out to her to slow down before she slipped on the wet pavement. I likely raised my hand to answer the professor’s question about what organized-crime figureheads feared the most about grand juries (the promise of immunity from witnesses) at the same time Kimberly screamed. One of the teachers heard it from the second-floor ladies’ room, but she had started her period and was trying to get herself cleaned up and sorted. By the time she’d flushed and buckled her belt and gotten over to the window, there was nothing to see, and she thought perhaps it was just one of the middle schoolers dappy about the upcoming Valentine’s Day dance. Next door, they were gluing paper lace to paper hearts, threading them to make a party banner for the gym’s entrance, where the next day, Kimberly’s classmates would scuff up the floors dancing in their dress shoes.

The Persistence of Memory is most famous for its depiction of melting clocks, Denise told the crowd that day in the MoMA. Timepieces are meant to be sturdy, solid, orienting us in the world in a reliable, man-made way. But look, Pamela, she said, gesturing, see how Dalí’s clocks are soft and pliant? Time is illogical, subjective, was the interpretation. What feels like forever for one may feel like a blink of an eye for another, Denise said, laughing in this sort of astonished way.

It astonishes me too, that while I sat there in Eppes Hall, internally groaning for the professor to wrap it up—by a certain point, he was only echoing the arguments from the reading—Kimberly must have been wishing for a stay as The Defendant slowed to a stop alongside a rural dirt road deep within the Suwannee River State Park. He would have been terrifying to her from the moment she laid eyes on him. Gone were the head-to-toe tennis whites, the plummy voice, and the handicapped act, the pleas to compliant young women for help, which we’d been conditioned since birth to answer the same way he’d been conditioned since birth to expect a woman to take care of him. By the time he snatched his final and youngest victim, he was operating in a desperate and brazen state. I think often about the forces that allowed his abominable last act to occur, how, if not for the corrupt everyday men in the Colorado legislature insisting on The Defendant’s extradition for reasons other than justice, Kimberly Leach would be fifty-seven years old today. An age so young it is one year younger than Sandra Bullock.