No One You Know Page 5

  There were times when I wondered if, in describing my flaws in relentless detail, in using me to create a character to fit the story he wanted to tell, Thorpe had somehow altered the course of my life. The Ellie he put on the page was uncertain, unanchored, incapable of finding her way. Did I take his words too much to heart?

  But there was one part of the story even the author couldn’t have foreseen.

  Nearly two decades after the fact, in a South American café, the villain of Thorpe’s book stood before me, tall and soft-spoken, nervous as a schoolboy, saying, “Do you know who I am?”

  Gazing into Peter McConnell’s dark eyes, I had the same impression I’d had the first time I saw him outside his office at Stanford—the sensation that his face was comprised of perfectly ordinary features which, put together, added up to something memorable.

  “Yes,” I managed to say.

  “May I sit down?”

  This was not part of my story, not part of the plot of my life as I saw it. My sister’s murderer would not simply walk up in a café and ask to join me. I must have nodded again, or perhaps answered in the affirmative, because Peter McConnell proceeded to sit down in the chair opposite me, lay his book on the table, lay his hat on top of the book, and place his large hands palms down, on either side of the book and hat, as if he did not know what to do with them.

  “How did you find me?”

  I was disappointed in my voice, which came out weak and uncertain. All the anger I had silently directed toward this man in the past, all the disgust, remained locked somewhere inside me, in a place I couldn’t, at this crucial moment, quite reach. All that came was my astonishment, which must have been as obvious to him as the sound of Maria’s footsteps in the kitchen.

  “I didn’t. You found me.”

  “I’m just here for work,” I protested. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the fact of his presence, trying to make sense of how he could have shown up here, of all places, from out of the blue. “I’ve been coming to this village for years,” I added.

  I had given up looking for Peter McConnell a long time ago. My travels to the coffee regions of the world—Huatusco, Yirgacheffe, Poas, Sumatra—were, if anything, an attempt to leave that part of my past behind, to erase it, as much as possible, from the geography of my life. Although I still considered San Francisco home, I spent a good deal of my time elsewhere, among people who did not speak my language, landscapes that looked nothing like my hometown, places where I would not be reminded of Lila. I felt at ease wandering among the coffee trees, feeling the mist of a foreign climate and smelling unfamiliar earth. At home, I was always nervous, always looking over my shoulder. Abroad, I found a kind of peace.

  “I know,” he said. “I’ve seen you in the past.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s a small town. You stand out. The first time was almost five years ago. You were at the outdoor market. I was going to say something, but then it started to rain, and you hurried away.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. It occurred to me that perhaps he had followed me here, that he planned to do to me what he had done to my sister. It felt surreal, as if I had dreamt him out of thin air. I looked to Maria—for confirmation of his existence or, absurdly, for some kind of protection, I’m not sure. But she just smiled.

  “You said ‘the first time.’ There were others?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  He paused for a moment. “Three.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “For the past seventeen years.”

  I found myself staring at Peter McConnell’s hands, at his long arms. These were the hands, according to Thorpe, that had killed my sister, the arms that had carried her into the woods and left her there.

  “I came to Nicaragua because of the book,” he said. “My wife, Margaret, didn’t believe what Thorpe wrote, of course. But it was too much for her. It didn’t matter that she knew I wasn’t a murderer, everyone else thought I was.”

  I wanted to add, “You were, you are,” but McConnell kept talking, in a steady, unrelenting rhythm, as though he had something to say and did not plan on stopping until he was finished.

  “Margaret and I held it together for a little while,” he continued. “Not for us, it had been over between us for a long time. We only made an effort to stay together because of our son, Thomas. He was three years old when the book came out. We picked up at the end of the summer semester and moved to the Midwest, where Margaret’s parents lived. We had hoped to leave the media circus, the suspicions, back in the Bay Area. By then the police had already questioned me twice, and they had no evidence on which to charge me, but that didn’t matter. As far as most people were concerned, I was guilty. Even in Ohio, we couldn’t escape that book. It seemed like everyone in my wife’s hometown had read it. In a way, I don’t blame Margaret for cutting me out of her life. She had Thomas to think of—she was afraid of what it would do to him to grow up under that kind of microscope, with that kind of stigma. And then there was Lila, of course. Margaret knew that I would never get over Lila.”

  McConnell talked with the urgency of a man who had not spoken to anyone in a long time. It struck me as strange that he would be defending his wife to me. I kept wondering how this was relevant. His wife, their son—it was just a minor side note, I thought, to the larger story: what he had done to my sister.

  “I used to follow you,” I said. “After I read the book, I went to Stanford and found your office. You had hours posted on the door. I was afraid to be alone with you, but I wanted to see you, to put a face with the name.”

  “My picture was in the paper.”

  “More than a face, I guess. I wanted to see you up close, in person. So I waited in the hallway outside your office one Monday. I wore a big hat and sunglasses. I felt ridiculous. You had the door shut. There was a line of students waiting. I kept hearing Lila’s name. It was obvious they weren’t all there to talk to you about class. It was more like they wanted to be a part of the action. One boy actually wanted you to sign Thorpe’s book. I was furious. Lila was dead, and here they were treating you like a celebrity.”

  As I spoke, I tried to keep my voice steady, so as not to betray my fear. “After a couple of hours you finally came out. The first thing that crossed my mind was that you weren’t what I expected. The way you looked, the basic physical description—yes, Thorpe had gotten that right. But everything else—the way you moved, the way you spoke—he’d gotten it wrong.”

  “Of course he did. He never met me.”

  “What?”

  “I know,” McConnell said. “In the book, he gave the impression that he spent a lot of time interviewing me, but we actually spoke only once, on the phone, for five minutes.” He rubbed his thumb back and forth over the bill of his cap; the cloth in that spot had faded to a pale purple. “What did you expect?”

  “I expected you to seem more, I don’t know, dangerous. I thought there would be something about you—” Here, I stopped, surprised to hear myself saying these things to him. I remembered distinctly thinking that there should be something obviously off, something in his eyes, maybe, or his bearing, that marked him as a murderer, but there wasn’t.

  “You took the train back to the city,” I continued. “I left my car behind and followed you. You ended up at Enrico’s in North Beach. I got a table and watched you eat. After that I didn’t go to Stanford again, but every Monday I went to Enrico’s. And every time, you were there—spaghetti with prawns in marinara sauce, ice water, followed by espresso. You were always alone, always working, scribbling away in your notebook, as if the world was invisible to you. I always wore a hat and sunglasses, but I expected that, one day, you would recognize me.”

  McConnell shifted in his seat. His face in the candlelight was striking. I could see now what Lila would have seen in that face—the interesting angles, the depth of the eyes, the enormous pupils, the flat, honest width of the mouth. “I did,” he said.

/>   “You did?”

  “Of course. Lila had shown me pictures—some of you together in Europe, another of the two of you on the beach, pictures from childhood. And there were the photographs in Thorpe’s book. But even if I hadn’t seen pictures, I would have known.” His voice grew quieter, and his gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth, my neck. I looked toward the kitchen for Maria, but I could neither see nor hear her.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.

  “I assumed you would approach me one day. I would have liked to talk to you. For several months before Lila died, I saw her constantly. Aside from the time I spent with my son, she was the best part of each day. I loved talking to her. More than that, I loved listening to her. Then she was gone. You looked so much like her, I wondered if you sounded like her, too. I wanted to hear your voice. But you just sat in a corner, watching.”

  “I kept planning to confront you,” I said, “but I never could work up the nerve. Even in that setting, with all those people around, I couldn’t be sure how you would act. And then one day, you were gone.”

  There had been a time, a period of years, when I looked for Peter McConnell everywhere, and because I was looking so intently, on a number of occasions I thought I saw him. On the street, I would catch a glimpse of a profile and hurry toward the man, only to realize it wasn’t him. Or I would see a movement in a museum, a tilt of the neck or a certain gesture of the hands, and sidle up beside the person, who would invariably end the illusion by turning his face toward me.

  After a strange, unsettling year of sex and alcohol following Lila’s death, I had spent my twenties in a series of brief relationships, never willing to truly commit. At the time I told myself I was too busy, but I later realized that the problem was Peter McConnell. I had created a sort of personal mythology around him. He had done such enormous damage to my family, had taken on such absurd proportions in my mind, that no one could make me feel the depth of emotion he elicited. It was hatred I felt for him, and when hatred goes deep enough, no affection can compare. For love to take hold there must be available space in the mind and heart; I was so eaten up with anger toward him, I could not make room.

  “Why did you do it?” I said quietly. This was the question I had been asking myself for almost half of my life. I had long since given up hope that I might find the answer. It didn’t occur to me, at that moment, to believe his claim of innocence. I had believed far too long in his guilt to simply let that conviction slip away.

  I waited. He sat there staring alternately at his hands, and at me. Maria emerged from the kitchen, carrying a jar filled with insects. She went over to the windowsill, where her Venus flytraps sat, opened the jar, and shook it gently over the plants. Finally, McConnell said, “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It wasn’t me.”

  Eight

  STRANGE THINGS WERE RUMORED TO HAPPEN all the time in Diriomo—ghosts dancing in the churchyard, candles spontaneously igniting, music from unknown quarters drifting through deserted streets—but until that night, they had never happened to me.

  “I don’t deny that I was the most likely suspect,” McConnell said, looking directly into my eyes. “But that doesn’t make me guilty.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t glance away.

  “You were having an affair with my sister.”

  “Yes, I admitted that to the police.”

  “Only after they already knew. Only after the book was published. In the beginning, you told them nothing.”

  “It was on Margaret’s bidding that I decided not to say anything. As angry as she was about the affair, she was terrified of what would happen if the suspicion was cast on me. In hindsight, of course, I knew how stupid my decision was. But under the circumstances, I didn’t think I had the right to deny Margaret anything.”

  “You had dinner with Lila the night she disappeared,” I said. “After the book was published, a hostess came forward who placed you at Sam’s Grill together.”

  “I don’t deny that.”

  “And you left the restaurant together.”

  “We did.”

  “You walked her to the Muni station at ten p.m.”

  He nodded.

  “That makes you the last person to see her. And the hostess said that she looked upset when you left the restaurant. That morning, before she left home, she’d been crying.”

  McConnell nodded again.

  “Well?” I felt the old anger simmering up again. “Everything was going well in her life. She’d just gotten all that attention for the paper she presented at Columbia. She was a shoo-in for the Hilbert Prize at Stanford. Everyone knew she was on her way. You were obviously the source of her distress—it couldn’t have been anything else.”

  “Do you remember what Thorpe proposed as my motive?” McConnell asked.

  “He said you were breaking up with Lila that night at the restaurant, and she threatened to tell your wife about the two of you.”

  He looked at me in silence.

  “What?” I said.

  “Tell me, does that sound like something Lila would do?”

  He was right. Although I wasn’t about to confess this to McConnell, that part of Thorpe’s argument had always nagged at me. It simply wasn’t in Lila’s character. She would never have told McConnell’s wife, nor would she have threatened to do so. Over the years, I’d tried to sweep my discomfort with this detail away by telling myself that I didn’t really know Lila as well as I thought I did.

  “Were you breaking up with her?”

  “Quite the contrary. A few days before, I had come clean with my wife.”

  Maria emerged from the kitchen and pointed at a clock on the wall. It was two a.m. “Cerrado,” she said.

  “Just a few more minutes,” I pleaded. I wasn’t ready for this conversation to end. There was so much more I wanted to ask.

  “Cerrado,” she said again, indicating with her hands that it was time for bed.

  “Por favor,” I said, but it was no use. As McConnell and I stood to go, Maria smiled and winked at me. She must have believed she was doing me a favor, sending me off into the night with the handsome American.

  Moments later, McConnell and I were standing on the dirt road in front of the café. He was wearing the baseball cap again, pulled low on his forehead. The effect was to make him look younger than he was. He had been seven years Lila’s senior; that put him at about fifty. The book that he had been reading in the café was tucked under his arm. I had glimpsed the title as we got up to leave: Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle.

  The village was silent, deserted. The white buildings shone in the moonlight.

  “You shouldn’t be wandering around alone at this hour,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”

  If I hadn’t been so frightened, I might have laughed at the absurdity. “You can’t be serious,” I said, looking back at the closed door of the café. “Anyway, I do it all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  I reached into my bag, feeling for my tryer. It’s a basic tool of the coffee trade, a long, scooped metal object with a sharp point on one end and a small cylinder on the other, which tapers into a handle. To take a random sample, you jab the sharp end into the burlap coffee sack, and beans slide along the stem into the cylinder. With one hand, I slid the tryer out of its leather case.

  My hand shook, my pulse sped up. I’d spent so many years believing McConnell to be a monster, capable of the most terrible crime. But I’d also spent that time wishing I could confront him, wishing I could discover the truth, however painful, about Lila’s death. I didn’t want to be left wondering, for the rest of my life, about the end of hers. At that moment, what I wanted was to keep talking, to make McConnell tell me everything. My desire to know what had happened to my sister was even greater than my fear.

  The dust rose around our feet as we walked down the narrow path to the main road. Each time he moved closer, I inched away. “If it’s true that you weren’t breaking up with her,
why was she so upset?”

  “You know what kind of person Lila was. The entire time we were together, she felt horribly guilty. She hadn’t wanted me to tell Margaret about us, didn’t want to be responsible for all that. I tried to make her realize it wasn’t her fault, it was mine, and that my marriage had been over long before I met her.”

  We arrived at an intersection, where a small white church sat sentry. A life-size Virgin Mary with a broken glass eye gazed out at us from a roadside altar. The gravestones in the churchyard looked like giant slabs of white soap in the moonlight.

  Suddenly, McConnell reached out and grabbed my elbow, pulling me toward him. I jerked out of his grasp and took two steps back. I pulled the tryer out of the bag and held it in front of me. I was trying to find my voice, wondering if anyone would even hear me, when he pointed to a long snake lying in the path a few inches from his foot. The snake was still, its body covered with dark green diamonds.

  “It’s a fer-de-lance,” he said quietly, stretching his arm toward me. “Give me that.”

  I had no choice but to trust him. I handed him the tryer. He grasped the handle with his right hand, and with one swift, powerful motion, brought the sharp end down a few inches from the snake’s head, severing it from the body. The long green body slithered and shook for a moment, then lay still. The yellow mouth gaped open.

  McConnell stood, visibly shaken, and wiped the tryer on his pants before handing it back to me.

  “If it bites you, you bleed to death internally.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “It’s okay,” he said. He stepped over the dead snake and looked back at me. “If you want, I’ll turn around right now. You should be all right from here.”

  I hesitated for several seconds before joining McConnell on the path. I looked back at the snake, then at him. We continued down the road, my heart beating wildly.

  “Why Lila?” I asked. “You must have known how inexperienced she was. If you wanted to cheat on your wife, why couldn’t you have found someone else?”