“He used a hair spray bottle on her!” I roared, only because Carl had made it clear he was not amenable to reality, to the truth. I wanted everyone to know—Lynette upstairs, the woman out on the street walking that good dog, the neighbors to the left and to the right—that Carl was devoid of dignity, of humanity.
Carl cowered behind the kitchen counter, saying sorely, “This case is getting national attention. And it’s all going down right here in my backyard. I have interest from a publisher for a book. I… This is what people want to hear about, Pamela.”
I saw, so clearly, the copy of Helter Skelter in Carl’s bag, placed mistakenly in my room during that trip to Colorado. It had become a sensation, thanks to the prosecutor-turned-author’s firsthand access to the case. The cold coffee churned in my stomach. He’d been planning this all along.
That woman—Lynette—was standing at the threshold to the kitchen. She saw my agonized expression, saw the worried way Tina was looking at me, and her face softened sympathetically. “I am so sorry,” she said, sounding like she meant it. “Um, Carl. He’s asking for you. Normally, I would tell him you left for work already, but he can hear all the voices, and he’s getting agitated.”
“I’ll be right up, Lynette,” Carl said stiffly. Lynette retreated up the stairs while Carl stood unmoving, his head hung and hair in his eyes. “My dad. He’s not well. So I’ve got his care to worry about, the house, all our bills. I’m sorry,” he said, holding my gaze finally, as though having a sick father justified what he’d done to us. “Really, I am. But people are fascinated with him. What would you have me do?”
“You can go to hell,” Tina said ruthlessly. She grabbed my arm and pulled me out of there.
* * *
In the car, Tina watched as I stabbed at the ignition with the key. I finally landed one of the blows, then nearly took out Carl’s mailbox when I hit the gas in reverse. “Fuck you!” I exploded at the gearshift.
“Get out,” Tina said. “You shouldn’t be driving right now.”
I released my seat belt, and we passed each other around the front of the car. Tina turned the key, put the car back in reverse, and bulldozed Carl’s mailbox cleanly to the ground before driving off at a leisurely Sunday speed.
One day soon, Carl would secure the exclusive interview with The Defendant he so unilaterally sought, and in a few short years, he would publish a briefly bestselling true-crime novel that was adapted into one decent television movie of the week and one very bad straight-to-videotape production. There were other, better books turned into movies with other, better actors. Occasionally over the years, I would catch Carl on some obscure hour of a morning talk show, hawking a rerelease of his book that supposedly contained explosive new material. Carl always seemed like the guy the booker scheduled because they couldn’t get the guy who wrote the blockbuster. Still, Tina and I read and watched everything Carl did, hoping for some sort of update on the Lake Sammamish disappearances. But Carl couldn’t answer for it. No one could. Eventually, her hopes dashed one too many times, Tina called a moratorium on all things Carl and Lake Sammamish. There would be no knowing for her, and she needed to find a way to accept that so she could grieve it and carve out some semblance of a life for herself.
So when the missive landed in my mailbox—You may not remember me, but I have never forgotten you—I kept it from Tina. It was embargoed content until I could tell her it was time to hope again.
February 12, 2021
Dear Pamela,
You may not remember me, but I have never forgotten you, nor the night, forty-three years ago, when I called you at The House to offer what little assistance I could. I would not be surprised if your brain overwrote my memory, as that’s what healthy brains do in traumatic and stressful situations. I know this because I work in the science of memory disorders.
I am writing with what may be important information or what may be the confusions of a man suffering from neurodegenerative demise.
In 2017, the journalist Carl Wallace came to me in the early stages of dementia. The disease has progressed considerably since then, and, as you may know, a common response to memory impairment is paranoia. Carl has taken to accusing me, with increasing aggression, of being you. He believes you are posing as his doctor in a plot to steal his research. He alternates between threatening to kill me and fits of terror, sure that I am the one planning on killing him. At the start of our treatment, I did share with him that I was an alumna of the sorority house that he wrote about in his book. I believe that’s how he came to conflate me with you.