No One You Know Page 9

  And in the process I might do something for my parents as well. A decade before, they had divorced. I think they had finally given up any hope of trying to be happy together. The crack that opened between them in the aftermath of Lila’s death had grown wider year by year. At some point they had begun taking separate vacations, my mother spending as much time as she could alone at the Russian River. Eventually they came to a mutual agreement that their marriage could not be salvaged. On the night the divorce was finalized, my mother came over to my apartment for dinner. “I think if there had been something official,” she said, “an arrest and a conviction, then we might have been able to get through it. When it comes down to it, this whole business with Peter McConnell is nothing more than a story in a book. Maybe it’s a true story, but it’s not justice. No one has ever paid a price for what happened to our baby.”

  When she was having trouble making sense of a problem, Lila used to turn the piece of paper she was working on upside down. “It helps to see it from a new perspective,” she would say. “This way, I have to concentrate on each number, each symbol. It’s like having a second set of eyes with which to view the same picture. Sometimes a completely different angle is all I need to break through.”

  Over the years, I had become so accustomed to Thorpe’s picture of Lila’s death that it seemed like the true picture. Now, I had to admit that I’d been lazy to accept Thorpe’s story. Grief had blinded me to logic. If Thorpe was at fault for writing a deeply flawed book, I was equally at fault for believing it without putting it through any sort of rigorous test. After my strange encounter with McConnell in Diriomo, everything looked different, as if the page had been turned upside down.

  Fourteen

  OUTSIDE GREEN APPLE BOOKS, THE WOODEN gnome stood sentry. Inside, I took the creaking steps to the second level. Between Frank Thistlethwaite—The Great Experiment: An Introduction to the History of the American People—and Grant Uden—Hero Tales from the Age of Chivalry—I found Andrew Thorpe. That cover: my sister’s face, ghosted over the Golden Gate Bridge. On the back jacket of Murder by the Bay, above several complimentary endorsements from other writers, was a photograph of my old teacher, looking serious but good-natured in a dark sweater and glasses. The photo had been taken outdoors, so that his wavy hair blew back from his face. Hands on his hips, staring confidently into the camera, he looked like the kind of man you would trust to tell you a story, the kind of man who would get all his facts straight. The odd thing about the photograph was that, by the time I knew Thorpe, his hairline had already begun to recede. This photograph had obviously been taken years before the book was published, probably when he was in his early twenties. The man who stared out at me from the jacket was, indeed, the same man, but in a very different manifestation. The man in the picture was an optimist, while the man I knew, the one who wrote the book, gave off a very slight but unmistakable air of disappointment bristling with nervous ambition.

  Next to Murder by the Bay was a paperback copy of Thorpe’s second book, In Step with a Sadist, about the kidnapping and torture of the wife of a prominent Sacramento businessman. The jacket bore the same photograph of Thorpe as a much younger man. There were two copies of his third book, Runner Up, Runner Down—the story of a journalist who had been assassinated in broad daylight during a marathon in Dubai—same photograph yet again, as if he had never aged. There was a fourth book stamped with his name, although this one had a title I’d never seen, Second Time’s a Charm. It was a remaindered first edition, priced at $4.95. According to the jacket copy, it was a memoir of marriage, a love story, a message of hope for lonely men. Think you’ll never find love? So did Andrew Thorpe. Then he found Jane, the woman who would give him a second chance at happiness.

  This photo must have been more recent; Thorpe had gone a bit pudgy in the face, and no attempt had been made to hide the fact that he was balding. The picture had been taken in what looked like a home office. He sat behind a desk, hands poised on an old electric typewriter. I figured the typewriter must be a prop, probably calculated to make him look like a romantic figure. When I knew him, he wrote everything on his computer. On the desk, to the left of the typewriter, were two wooden bookends carved to represent the bow and stern of a boat.

  “It’s an allusion,” I had said, when I gave him the bookends at the end of spring semester, just five months after Lila’s death. “To The Odyssey.” It was one of his all-time favorites.

  “You didn’t have to get me anything.”

  “I know. I just wanted to thank you.”

  He looked surprised. “What for?”

  “You’ve been kind. You’ve been a good listener.”

  “It wasn’t kindness,” Thorpe said. “I happen to enjoy talking to you.”

  Standing in the aisle at Green Apple, looking at an older, happier Andrew Thorpe, I was surprised to discover that he had kept the gift.

  Down the street at Blue Danube café, I began reading. I couldn’t bring myself to start at the beginning, with Thorpe’s detailed description of how Lila’s body had been found. Instead, I skipped ahead to chapter four, “First Love.”

  When Lila was eleven years old, Thorpe wrote, she discovered horses.

  This much was true. I remembered it well, and it was my account, only slightly altered, that appeared in the book. It happened when she was ten years old, spending her first weekend—indeed, her first night—away from home at the innocuously named Girls’ Adventure Camp in Sonoma County. Lila was crying when we drove through the gate. When we pulled up in front of the clubhouse, she clung to her seat belt and vowed not to get out of the car until she was safely home in the city.

  It was tall and lanky Sara Beth, the counselor for the Chipmunks Cabin, who finally coaxed Lila out of the station wagon by bringing an old mare named Spice up beside Lila’s window. Sara Beth gave Lila an apple, and Spice ate it right out of her hand. That was all it took. When we went to pick her up Monday morning, all she could talk about was Spice.

  After that, Lila took riding lessons in Golden Gate Park once a week. For her thirteenth birthday, when they knew the horse thing wasn’t just a fad she’d grow out of, our parents finally acquiesced and bought her a quarter horse named Dorothy. Dorothy was chestnut brown, with white patches above her hooves that looked like socks and a white stripe running down her face. My parents rented space for her in a stable in Montara, about thirty-five minutes down the coast. Montara was a small town comprised of newish wooden houses marching up the hills from a long stretch of golden-sand beach. Behind the houses were hundreds of undeveloped acres shaded by redwoods, and a couple of small farms. The stable where Lila kept Dorothy was in a clearing about a mile back from Highway 1; on clear days, I could stand on top of the riding ring gate and see cars passing on the winding, rickety highway, and beyond them, the famous waves of Montara State Beach.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Lila said to me once, not long after she got Dorothy. We were sitting on the fence of the riding ring, waiting for her riding teacher. Dorothy was huffing and stomping, kicking up great clouds of dust that made me sneeze. “I’ve decided that we can share her,” Lila said, swinging her legs back and forth so that her boots tapped out a rhythm on the fence. “Not forever. Just until Mom and Dad buy you your own horse.”

  “I don’t want my own horse,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I disliked the feel of dust under my fingernails, and although I could appreciate Dorothy from a distance, the coarse feel of her fur made my skin crawl. Lila looked at me as if she’d just discovered that I was adopted.

  She kept riding through high school. When the stable in Montara closed down during Lila’s senior year, she began boarding Dorothy just north of Petaluma, about an hour and a half drive from the city. The new place was a pasture attached to an apple orchard. The owners also kept half a dozen milking cows, a few ostriches, and a pig. There was no riding ring, and that suited Lila just fine. When she wanted to ride, she loaded the saddle onto a golf cart and took off thro
ugh the fields. When she spotted Dorothy in the distance, she would whistle and call her by name, then saddle up on the spot. It would be way past dinnertime when she got home, tanned and exhausted and smelling of horse.

  The summer before her final year at Berkeley, my parents and I were shocked when Lila announced one evening over dinner that she was giving up riding altogether. “I have to get serious about math,” she said.

  “Why not do both?” my mother said. “You love riding. You should always keep something in your life that you do purely for pleasure.” My mother knew what she was talking about. Although, by that time, her law practice took up most of her energy, she always found a few hours a week for gardening.

  “I’ve made up my mind,” Lila said. “I have to focus. All the great mathematicians in history have made sacrifices.”

  A few days later, she placed an ad in the Chronicle and in the Sonoma Index-Tribune. She drove out to Petaluma several times during the next couple of weeks to meet with prospective buyers. One afternoon, I went with her. We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, past the Marin Headlands. Eventually the highway became less crowded, and the buildings gave way to gently rolling hills dotted with cattle and baobab trees. Lila turned off onto a dirt road, and we made our way slowly over the bumps and potholes until we came to a long gravel driveway. At the end was a big white farmhouse, the kind of house I would have loved to live in, with a wide porch and dormer windows, and a couple of rooms off to the side that looked as though they had been haphazardly nailed on. To the left of the house was a potato patch—long rows of dry brown dirt, with an occasional swatch of green sprouting up from the mounds.

  I followed Lila to the fenced-in pasture. We could see Dorothy out in the distance, grazing beneath a Joshua tree. When Lila whistled, Dorothy perked up her ears and came running. Lila rubbed Dorothy’s muzzle and talked quietly into her ear, while Dorothy just stood there, blinking calmly. I wondered if Lila talked to Dorothy in the way she’d never really talked to me, if she shared her deepest secrets with this silent creature. A few minutes later a car came up the driveway. It was a father and his ten-year-old daughter, who lived in the city. Lila helped the little girl up onto Dorothy’s bare back.

  “She’s spirited,” Lila told the girl. “If you’re firm with her, she’ll respect you. She doesn’t like carrots, but she goes nuts for apples and blackberries. She’s also a fan of Cheerios. She likes when you sing in her ear. If she’s testy, you can usually calm her down with a Simon and Garfunkel song.”

  I recognized that look in the little girl’s eyes, the look Lila had gotten when she saw Spice all those years ago. The man said he’d come by our house the next day with a check.

  After they left, a guy came walking toward us from the farmhouse. He was big and handsome and full of swagger, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He looked somewhat tired and unwashed, like he’d been out partying all night.

  “Hey, William,” Lila said.

  “Hey there, Lila.”

  “This is my sister, Ellie.”

  William reached out to shake my hand, and his grip was so tight it hurt.

  “We met once before,” I reminded him. He seemed confused. “When the car broke down a while back. You gave us a hand with the jumper cables.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Lila said. “I’d forgotten.”

  “Good to see you,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t remember me. He was chewing on a sprig of mint. He turned to Lila. “Sold her yet?”

  “I think so. The kid who was just here fell in love.”

  When William was out of earshot, I said, “He’s cute.”

  “You think?” Lila said, looking at his back as if it was something she’d never considered. “I don’t know about that, but he’s good with Dorothy. I wish he’d buy her. At least I would know she was in good hands.”

  That afternoon, Lila rode Dorothy one last time. Then she bathed her, moving her soapy hands in circles over Dorothy’s thick fur. She put her mouth close to Dorothy’s ear and said softly, “Good girl.” Finally, she gave her an apple and hugged her around the neck. I wondered if Dorothy realized that Lila was saying good-bye.

  As far as I know, Lila never saw Dorothy again. She rarely talked about her. I wondered if she would be the same way with me. If I died in a car accident, or broke my neck diving into a swimming pool and was in a coma for the rest of my life, would she adjust as easily to my absence as she had to Dorothy’s?

  From then on, Thorpe wrote at the end of the chapter, there were no distractions. Lila had only one true passion, one devotion: math.

  At home that night, I went back to the beginning. It was strange to read the book again after so many years, strange to see Lila before me on the pages, alive and real, riding her horse, or sewing, or sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, working through a mathematical formula. It was Lila as I had known her, as I had described her. For all the liberties Thorpe had taken with my sister’s life, there was no denying that he had captured her essential spirit, her personality: the way she walked, the way she held her head when she spoke, her turns of phrase.

  With McConnell, on the other hand, he had gotten it all wrong. Looking into McConnell’s eyes, Thorpe wrote, one had the impression of having met a man without an ordinary conscience, a man who might be capable of anything. There was a kind of cruelty in his eyes, a hardness in his speech.

  I knew this to be false. I had been struck by the softness of McConnell’s eyes, the gentleness of his voice. I couldn’t reconcile the man I’d met in Diriomo with the character in the book, could not believe the picture that Thorpe had painted of McConnell as a heartless, calculated killer.

  Still, I came away from the book with no answers, no clue as to who else might have been involved. It was as though Thorpe had put every bit of his energy into making a case against McConnell, quickly and categorically eliminating everyone else. Why had he done that? What did he have to gain?

  Fifteen

  ANDREW THORPE’S WEBSITE WAS A MULTIMEDIA affair, complete with flash graphics, background music by a local band called Sugar dePalma, podcasts, and video clips. He was running a couple of contests, including a “name the villain” contest, whereby one lucky winner would name a character in Thorpe’s first novel, which was currently in progress, and a “first draft” contest, the reward for which was the original, handwritten draft of one of Thorpe’s books. As the Thorpe I knew had never handwritten so much as a memo, I imagined he’d probably hired some poor sap to copy an MS Word file out by hand. The most popular contest appeared to be the one in which the winner would get to visit Pelican Bay State Prison with Thorpe. “Enjoy a one-on-one conversation with Johnny Grimes, the subject of Blood in the Valley—the riveting tale of the gruesome murder of two Yahoo employees,” the website promised. The book had just been released two months before, and, judging by the slew of reviews and reader comments on his website, it was getting a lot of attention.

  I clicked on the events page and saw that the San Francisco Ladies’ Bureau would be hosting a luncheon with Thorpe that Thursday. The ticket price of $85 included a light lunch, a glass of chardonnay, and an autographed copy of Blood in the Valley. I called and made a reservation. The woman who took my call was very enthusiastic. “Good timing,” she said. “We only have a couple of spots left. Have you read the book?”

  I confessed that I hadn’t.

  “It’s brilliant. You’re going to love it.”

  AS I MARKED THE DATE OF THE LUNCHEON IN my calendar in red ink, I thought back to a strange night I’d spent with Thorpe, just months before he told me he was writing the book. By then, I had moved on to higher level English courses, but we still met frequently for coffee or lunch. One afternoon over the phone, he asked me offhandedly if I’d like to have dinner at his place. From the way he phrased the invitation, I assumed he was having a small dinner party.

  The apartment was on the third floor of a twelve-unit building at the top of Dolores Park. When Tho
rpe opened the door, I saw that he had forgone the usual blue jeans and sneakers and was dressed instead in a black oxford with pinstripe slacks and loafers. It was an odd look for him, and he seemed uncomfortable in the clothes.

  “Smells good,” I said.

  “It’s lasagna, my mom’s recipe. It needs another half hour in the oven. Want some wine to start?”

  I followed him into the small, spotless apartment. There was no one else there. I was surprised to realize that it would just be the two of us.

  By the time the lasagna was ready, we were into our second bottle of wine. I was drinking faster than usual out of nervousness, and he was drinking considerably more than I was. He didn’t have a dining room, so we sat on the sofa with our plates on the coffee table, a black-framed, glass-topped affair that screamed bachelor pad. Over the course of the night, the wine took the edge off our nervousness, and he kept touching my arm, patting my leg, and brushing up against me. By the time we finished our dessert of strawberry cheesecake, which came from the freezer and hadn’t entirely thawed, I understood there would be no good way to extricate myself from the evening. He put his arm around me, pulled me closer on the couch, and said, “Promise me you’ll never take one of my classes again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you’re my student, I can’t do this.” Then he kissed me.

  I was still grateful for his friendship, for the way he had helped me through the long months since Lila’s death. If I had allowed myself to dwell on the fact that he was eleven years my senior, I might have been more reluctant—but I was drunk enough to brush the age difference aside. I went to bed with him because I could think of no terribly good reason not to, but even as we were undressing in the dim light of his bedroom, I realized I would not do it again. Over the course of the evening, he had undergone a subtle transformation. The outfit, the coffee table, the incense that he lit on the bedside table, all served to cast him in a different, somewhat pathetic, light. Prior to that night, I had known him only in a certain context. When the curtain parted and I glimpsed his private life, I couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for him. After that, he asked me over to his apartment a couple more times, but I declined. I was grateful to him for not pressing the issue, for following my lead in acting as if it never happened.