“Oh,” Tina said, a little sullenly, when she saw me. “I thought you were Frances.”
I stepped back. “I can get her.”
Tina considered. “No. Don’t. She always takes Janelle’s side, anyway. Can you close the door? I don’t want anyone to hear us.”
I shut the door, bursting with importance. Tina had chosen me as a confidante. She shifted over, making room for me on the sofa. The windows looked down on the back of the property, where Tina and her late husband must have been building a pool before he died.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Tina said tearfully.
“About what? What’s happened, Tina?”
Tina picked at a loose thread in her sweater. She didn’t seem to want to answer. “I have to attend this conference in Aspen this weekend. I’m supposed to do a mock therapy session. It’s all part of my work experience. Janelle was supposed to come with me and help me practice and just be there for me.” Tina covered her face and wailed, “She promised me.”
I was glad Tina was covering her face so she couldn’t see the bafflement on mine. That was what she was so upset about? “Can’t you go without her?”
“I have to speak in front of a bunch of people who will be judging me, and I’m terrified. And… and there’s just a lot about this trip that will be hard for me.” Tina used the cuff of her sweater to wipe away her tears. “It’s a long story. But she knows it. And she’s just abandoning me anyway.”
I was still confused. “Why isn’t she going anymore?”
“Because she’s married.”
“Won’t her husband let her go?”
Tina gazed down at the ragged hole in her backyard with a bitter laugh. “He doesn’t even know about me.” She drew her thighs to her chest and made herself into a tight little ball. “We loved each other, Ruth.” She glanced at me over the ledge of knees bashfully, waiting to see how I would react.
I was thunderstruck. I was elated. I was devastated, and I was angry. My face took her along for the ride, so I could tell she had no idea what was going through my mind. But you’re not sick, is what I was thinking. You’re young and beautiful, wealthy and educated, loved, respected by Frances, a therapist for twenty-five years. Is it possible to be thatand not be sick?
“I’ll go with you,” I declared boldly. I pictured telling my mother that I was going away with the woman who lived in the Spanish mansion: payback for picking on me earlier. She would be oozing with nosy questions, but she would have too much pride to ask any of them. It was the perfect revenge.
“We have to fly,” Tina said cautiously. “It’s far.”
“I know.” I rolled my eyes as if I’d been to Aspen a thousand times.
“Company would be nice,” Tina said to herself, cheering some as she gave my offer serious thought. “You really don’t mind?”
I grinned. “I’m due for an adventure.”
Pamela
Aspen, 1978
Day 12
I asked Carl to come with us to Colorado, telling myself it had everything to do with getting justice for Denise and nothing at all to do with the way he had looked up at me from the corner of her bed. Like what I had to say was not just interesting but important.
It was four years before the release of the Meryl Streep movie Sophie’s Choice, before the title took root in the public consciousness, but when the police asked me if I wanted to press charges against Roger, that was very much my predicament. A prosecutor could easily argue that the presence of a weapon—the Swiss Army knife—met the criteria for aggravated kidnapping, a felony charge that could carry a life sentence.
Though it would be a service to the women of Tallahassee to put him away for life, a felony charge was sure to only bolster the police’s theory that this was their guy. And what would happen when the press got ahold of the news? When the public heard about it? A twenty-eight-year-old man who had spent a year in an institution, falsified his transcript to pose as a college freshman, and dated the girl who was murdered first. Roger looked so good for it that I sometimes wanted to believe it. I’d have to remind myself: But you saw him. And yes, for a second you thought it was him. So maybe it was him. No. Stop this. You saw him and it wasn’t. That was the obstacle course my mind laid out every time my head hit the pillow. Sleep, the unreachable finish line.
I asked Sheriff Cruso for the weekend to think about what I wanted to do. When I called Carl, it was my attempt to have it both ways—Roger prosecuted at the felony level and the media on my side.