But as I listened to those girls pick out the polite chauvinism in that tinny clip, I wondered if maybe it was time to fish my name out of the footnotes; unstitch the lie of him.
PAMELA
Issaquah, 2021
Day 16,145
Tina parks on the shoulder of the road, by an unremarkable Issaquah hillside.
We set off along the old dirt logging track, fern variety packs strapped to our chests. Overhead, the branches are mottled with tear-shaped buds, signs of spring after a gray, rainy winter in the Seattle area. The conditions have created the ideal soil environment for the plants to thrive, according to the manager of the nursery section at Lowe’s.
At the first lookout point, I ask if we can stop and take a breather. Tina has changed over the years, and not in the obvious ways most of us do—white hairs in weird places, a skepticism for the current noise on the radio. She’s become a hard-core mountain biker, her body gristly and tanned around the shape of her spandex. She’s one of those people who knocks out the advanced biking trail at dawn and unwinds at dusk with a cigarette and two fingers of bourbon.
“Good?” Tina asks.
“Sure,” I gasp, wondering what the hell my spinning classes are doing for me.
We come upon a dozen roses, too pink to be from Tina, wilting in roughly the spot where Ruth was left in July 1974. Tina and I don’t acknowledge them, but I have to assume Rebecca has been here.
I drop my backpack and drag open the zipper. Inside are two folding shovels, root stimulant, garden shears, a can of smoked Blue Diamond almonds, and not enough water.
“I’ll start here,” I say, indicating one of several copper markers planted seemingly at random in the glade.
Tina works a hand into a mannish canvas glove and sets herself up at another marker in this haphazard but precise design.
* * *
When the news of the Lake Sammamish disappearances first hit the papers in 1974, Tina received a call from a woman named Gail Strafford, who at the time headed up the Forensic Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee. She had met Ruth at the medical conference in Aspen and relayed for Tina the conversation they’d had outside her hotel room door—about Gail’s field of work, which was being used to help narrow down the timeline of Caryn Campbell’s death. Gail was stricken to hear that Ruth had gone missing less than five months later, that foul play was suspected in her disappearance too. If there was ever anything she could do to help, Tina should not hesitate to reach out.
Gail Strafford is retired now, but she sent a team here, to this slight hillside in Issaquah, and over the last few weeks, they have conducted extensive testing on the area where The Defendant confessed to dumping Ruth’s remains. They succeeded in zoning a medium-sized radius where the ground showed dynamic changes to the nutrient profile of the local ecosystem. They tagged locations and told us to plant any sort of hardy, shade-loving fern. In six months, they’ll come back and assess the reflectance of the plant’s foliage, which has been found to take on a reddish cast from soil containing human remains, even in places where a body decomposed decades ago.
* * *
For the next few hours, the two of us dig shallow holes, loosen the roots on a half dozen cinnamon ferns, pack them tight with native soil, spritz with root stimulant, ration our bottled water, and start again.
We site the last plant in the direction of the fading sun, and Tina leans hard on her shovel and closes her eyes. Her lips are moving silently around words I recognize. I carry you like my own personal Time Machine, as I put on my lipstick, smile, and head out to the party.
It’s a line by one of her favorite poets, a woman named Donna Carnes, whose husband went out for a sail in San Francisco Bay and has not been seen since. I love it too. How many parties have I gone to over the years, and laughed, and had a good time, while still managing to hold Denise close?
Something shifted for me after we got that guilty verdict. It was a bit like going to the chiropractor for a stiff back and regaining full range of motion. Long before my mother told me about the four days I went missing in the Florida swamplands, I’d sensed there was a part of me that was mislaid. I’d gone on a pilgrimage to Florida State to find it, not understanding why I needed to be there, only that I did. I’d cleaned and straightened and organized in an attempt to bring order to my surroundings because inside, I was in turmoil. I’d stayed home on nights when I should have gone out because kicking up my heels and having a few beers at a party did not feel fun for me the way it did for others my age. This was the wellspring of shame—the feeling that I was different, that I was somehow wrong. In the days and weeks after the trial ended, that conviction softened, then sloughed in phases, as life revealed to me that I’d been exactly who and where I needed to be, that I was the only person on the face of the earth who could have sent Denise’s killer to the electric chair.