At the city jail, the prisoner gave his name as Kenneth Raymond Misner, twenty-nine, of Tallahassee. Though he carried Misner’s identification papers and a number of stolen credit cards, the real Kenneth Misner, a former FSU track star, soon came forward.
By Friday morning, detectives had developed a hunch that their prisoner was The Defendant. Two hours later, FBI agents arrived with Wanted posters and fingerprints. Two hours after that, Pickell and Sheriff Cruso had shown up at my door.
References were made to the fact that The Defendant was indeed in Tallahassee during the month of January, when the FSU slayings took place; and that some of the other crimes The Defendant was sought for also involved blunt weapons, sexual assault, and strangulation.
One of the investigators said there was evidence that The Defendant had rented a room in an apartment complex in Tallahassee, known among FSU grad students as The Oak. They were combing through it for evidence now. I sat down hard, my kneecaps turned to taffy. Read that again. The Oak. The hairs at the base of my skull were bristled, painful quills.
The Oak was two blocks away. All this time, he had been my neighbor.
RUTH
Issaquah
Spring 1974
One thing you did that always made me angry.
CJ and I started sneaking around after we kissed at my brother’s wedding. At first it was only letters and trinket gifts, addressed to me at Eastern State, where I’d returned the day after the ceremony. No matter that CJ was married to another woman—Dr. Burnet was as proud as a father giving away his own daughter at the altar. Here was proof that I’d never been a lesbian to begin with, that I’d only been acting out my anger at my father for failing to protect me from my overbearing mother. Textbook, Dr. Burnet declared.
With Dr. Burnet’s blessing, I was discharged a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday. I was too embarrassed to return to school, to spend the year I’d missed lying about where I’d been. Instead, I got a job as a cashier at a pharmacy, and on my lunch breaks, CJ would come by in his Grand Prix and make drugged-sounding promises to me in the back seat before ejaculating. He was going to leave his mess of a wife as soon as I turned eighteen, and then we would start a family and be together forever. CJ and the wife were barely speaking at that point, sleeping in separate rooms on the nights she didn’t pass out drunk in the driveway, but he was concerned about what his parents would think, what his wife’s parents would think, if he initiated a divorce to be with a seventeen-year-old girl. Neither of us worried about my family. My mother was acting like she’d had a biopsy and the result had come back benign. Relieved. Grateful. She had a whole new lease on life.
I was in no rush for CJ to leave his wife. The idea of it left me ridden with anxiety about the future. Would he propose right away? Did I really want to say yes? To CJ? We’d known each other since we were kids, and I cared about him like a brother, maybe even more than my own brother, who had betrayed me without thinking twice about it. I found the sex thrilling at first. The way CJ gripped my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him, the way my name trembled on his lips—like he was checking to make sure I was still beneath him. I wanted to do it again and again, to bask in his uncertainty that he could really have me. In my family, everything revolved around the emotional temperature of my mother. No one had ever treated me like I was the silver ball of mercury in the thermometer’s glass chamber.
So why, then, did I start awake in the middle of the night, heart flapping in the trap of my chest, at the thought of marrying this man who adored me so much? I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me it was because of Rebecca.
Growing up, Rebecca was my best friend, a skinned-kneed, scraggly-haired runt of a girl. But sometime around the fifth grade, we were playing two-hand tag with my brother and a bunch of the neighborhood kids when I noticed that she had spawned breasts. Heavy ones that bounced around in her sweater when she ran. The same boys who used to charge us with no mercy, who used to laugh when we climbed to our feet, chewing dirt, suddenly started going easy on her, handling her with the gentle hands Rebecca would later remind me to use while holding her newborn. More and more, Rebecca emerged from the game the last one standing, the boys too smitten to touch her.
My brother, who for so long wanted nothing to do with the two of us when we were in the house, started finding excuses to drop by my bedroom when Rebecca was over, and Rebecca, in turn, stopped wanting to play with the door locked. We were getting too old to play like that anyway, she told me. It was babyish; unhygienic.