Death_Drive_73.txt

She must have done something to make him angry, but she couldn't figure out what. Just fifteen minutes before, she was the light of his life. His muse, he had called her. Now he wouldn't even look at her. She leaned her head against the window, staring at the passing farmland.
"Where are we going now?"
He didn't answer. He just pressed his foot down on the gas until they were speeding faster than she thought anyone could down a dirt and gravel road. There were times when it felt like none of the wheels were touching ground, followed by bumps so violent her head almost hit the ceiling.
The car smelled of burnt hair and cigarettes. The visor on the passenger side was completely torn off and the sun was directly in her face. It was like they were driving directly into a giant ball of fire and there was no relief from the blinding rays. Even closing her eyes didn't help. The brightness flared through her eyelids like they were made of wax paper. Were her eyes okay? She closed them and touched her eyelids with her fingers. It stung. Were her retinas burnt?
Keeping her hand over her eyes provided a small amount of relief. But as soon as he saw what she was doing, he reached over and moved her hand back to her lap. "Don't," was all he said. His voice was deeper and his tone was sharp. Her stomach began to gurgle and she leaned against the window once more. There was a strange feeling in her chest, as if her heart were squeezing between the bars of her ribcage to escape.
She couldn't even see the houses and barns they passed, just blurs of red and brown. Why did he need to go this fast? Maybe he was angry she hadn't thanked him "properly." Maybe he was expecting something in return that she hadn't given him. He was blowing off steam by trying to travel at the speed of light.
She edged closer to him on the bench seat until their arms were touching. She placed her left hand on the inside of his right leg. She started caressing it. Rubbing up and down.
He lifted his right arm and smacked her across the face with the back of his hand, nearly knocking her unconscious.
Little points of light swirled in front of her eyes. A metallic taste filled her mouth and nose. She put her hands to her face and they came away bloody. The sun boiled in front of her with shimmering intensity, a giant red blob.  Everything was turning red.
The realization of what was happening to her rose up in her as a scream.
He told her to shut the fuck up and hit her again. This time she did pass out.
***
Kathy Aukerman's eyes only skimmed over the article and moved on the first time she saw it: a girl's body found under the Seventh Street Bridge, the second in two months, hidden in the river reeds amid clumps of styrofoam and greasy napkins and torn pantyhose.
It was something that had happened to someone she didn't know, in a part of town she seldom had any reason even to pass through. The bridge, guarded on either end by twin concrete lions on the verge of crumbling to rubble, was the portal to a no-man's-land of salvage yards, dive bars, and run-down warehouses that eventually spilled out onto shabby stretches of seemingly unused farmland. Whatever happened there happened in a world she was happy to avoid thinking about.
She had forgotten about the first girl almost immediately, if it registered with her at all. But she began hearing this new one's name, Diane Vergara, repeated more and more by reporters and neighbors and friends, and at some point, she flashed back to the day last September when the brown Mercury Monterey station wagon cruised up beside her by Der Wienerschnitzel on McHenry Avenue and the handsome blond man behind the wheel spoke to her with a flirtatious, charismatic lilt.
You know, you could be a fashion model. Have you ever considered it?
Of course she had.
I can imagine a gorgeous photo set of you posing by the Tuolumne River, when the light there is just right, just as the sun is getting low in the sky.
She wasn't sure what had made her run. Though she craved the attention she was getting in that moment, and she could instantly imagine how good she might look sprawled bankside on a patch of clover in a peasant blouse, little beads of sunlight clinging to her hair, an alarm had gone off in her head and started her heart pounding. Something wasn't right.
The more she thought about it now, the more convinced she became.
The blond man in the brown Monterey was the same man who had murdered Diane and the other girl.
Of course she had no evidence, no real reason to believe it, but she believed it nonetheless, and she soon found herself looking over her shoulder wherever she went. Every time she saw a brown station wagon, the little hairs on her arms stood up. Her mind began taking scary trips. She would imagine accepting the stranger's offer instead of fleeing, getting in and riding next to him on the wide bench seat, maybe making small talk as they headed toward the river: she would tell him things about herself, and he would be a good listener. At what point would she have sensed something was about to go wrong? Would they even have made it to the river? Would he have taken some pictures to make it look good, congratulating her on her beauty, then driven back to his place on some false pretense where  she would find herself trapped, subdued, worse? Or would he have slipped a plastic bag over her head while they were still in the car, holding her down as she thrashed and choked? In one fanciful scenario, he would murder her, impractically, at the very river's edge, like in an old ballad.
All of these might-have-been scenarios ended with the unthinkable, unknowable moment of her own death. It was upsetting and endlessly fascinating. Sometimes, she was not fully herself, but Diane Vergara—she was Diane, Diane was her. She began to feel connected to the murdered girl in a way that made her feel out of control of her fate, like they were two cards in the hand of the same poker player. Diane got played. Kathy was safe, for now. So was Brenda. That was all that mattered.
Kathy's sister Brenda was the same age as Diane. Class of 1973. Three years older than Kathy. Kathy wondered if Brenda would also have run from the man in the Mercury. She hoped so. Otherwise what happened to Diane could happen to her.
She decided to stay close to Brenda, to keep her safe.
***
"Did you see what Sandra Billings was wearing today?" Brenda asked from across the dining table, getting her face ready for a scornful laugh.
"No," Kathy responded. Kathy usually didn't see people outside of her grade during the school day. The only class she had with students in other grades was theater, and Sandra Billings wouldn't touch the door knob to the theater classroom with a rubber glove.
"Well, it was basically a bullet bra," Brenda said, squeezing the laugh out through the three b's. "I thought she was going to poke somebody's eye out. It was so embarrassing. I don't know where she would have even gotten such a thing. A box of her mother's old underwear in the attic? If I was going to choose something old of Mom's to wear, it would definitely not be her underwear."
Brenda kept grinning. Her tan skin made a beautiful contrast with her white lipstick and her stick-straight blond hair parted in the middle. Kathy didn't understand why Brenda wasn't more upset about Diane. Maybe she didn't follow the news that closely, but it was all anyone in town could talk or think about. Wasn't Brenda worried? She was the pretty one, after all. At least that's what their grandmother told them every chance she got. If Kathy was freaked out, Brenda ought to be doubly freaked out, because she was, you know, the pretty one.
"What did the boys think?" Kathy asked in a tone meant to show that she didn't care, though she did kind of want to know.
"They dug it actually. But all the girls thought it was embarrassing, so we gave her shit for it. I mean, we can't just have men dictating what's attractive, Kathy. Women's lib, remember?"
Kathy stared at Brenda, one eyebrow raised, but didn't say anything. She took a deep breath and rubbed her forehead a bit before looking back down at her newspaper. At Diane's perfect eyeliner and long, luxurious hair. Just like Brenda. Well, just like everybody these days. Kathy took her pencil from behind her ear and pushed the tip softly into her scalp, drawing a line from front to back. Then she used the pencil to flip the newly moved hair over, ensuring a nice straight side part.
Someone rapped out "shave and a haircut" on the front door, and Brenda got up to answer it, probably hoping her boyfriend Mark was standing on the front porch to surprise her. Instead, it was her uncle Albert holding a paper grocery sack. Al was a reasonably good-looking, sandy-haired man in his late thirties whose midsection was just starting to spread. His hair was styled but looked like he'd forgotten to comb it that morning, which was how it looked a lot of mornings. He wore a polo shirt, untucked, with rumpled chinos and no jacket, even though the January air was damp and cold. You might guess that he was a country club member who got drunk and fell asleep on the golf course overnight.
"Oh, hi," Brenda said in a flat, disappointed tone. She turned around and walked up the staircase. She didn't say another word to her uncle. She didn't invite him in or even make sure the door was closed and locked behind him after he entered. Kathy didn't understand it. She loved her uncle Al. He always came with treats and surprises for the girls. Brenda used to love it, but now she thought she was too grown up to enjoy things anymore, Kathy figured. Fine, that meant more presents for her. Kathy invited him in and kissed him on the cheek. After getting two ginger ales out of the fridge, she sat across from Al in the kitchen where she had been sitting with Brenda before.
"Did you hear about the other girl?" Kathy asked him.
"What other girl?" Al's mustache twitched a little as he turned toward her.
"They found another dead girl down under the Seventh Street Bridge. I didn't know her, but it's just, scary. I don't know."
"This is the second girl they've found?" Al asked. He screwed up his eyes in concern.
"Yes! Haven't you been following the news? The first one was younger. Closer to my age. The girl they found yesterday was a senior, like Brenda."
"Did Brenda know her?"
"No. Neither of us did. She went to Davis." Kathy stared at the floor and drew circles with the balls of her feet. She then proceeded to fall face-first onto the dining table where she was sitting. She tried to breathe but it felt like her windpipe was the size of a coffee straw.
"Let's do something to get all those nasty violent thoughts out of your head, Kath. I brought your favorite," he said, reaching into the grocery bag and pulling out a slender box. Most of the lid was taken up by a photo of an old fashioned cannon sitting on a map of the world and, on the right side, at a right angle, big red capital letters set against a white background shouted: RISK. "Do you want to play?"
"Far out, man."
***
Every year on Valentine's Day, Mary Aukerman prepared a special meal of homemade tomato soup for Kenneth Aukerman. It was a recipe she had found in a magazine years ago, a "traditional" dish that for her evoked the romantic comforts of marriage. In the illustration that accompanied the recipe, which she had clipped and stored in a kitchen drawer, an aproned woman set a steaming bowl on the table in front of her smiling, strong-jawed husband, whose spoon was already raised in anticipation. Two little girls peered over the checkered tablecloth. Kathy and Brenda had always seen a happy reflection of their own household in this depiction. When they were little, they sometimes argued over which daughter in the picture each of them were. Really, they were nearly identical, but so were Kathy and Brenda, especially when they were that small.
The girls shared in the meal, of course. Their mother made a production of it, using nice bowls handed down to her by her own parents, setting the table with candles and flowers, playing soft music on the living room stereo: Mantovani, or Liberace. Ken received it all in a spirit of warm enthusiasm. He liked the pomp, decor, and attention. He liked having his family arranged around him, dressed up and pleasant. And Mary loved that he liked it. The girls liked it too. What was not to like? Their mother would flutter and fuss around the table, making sure everyone had everything they needed, keeping everything perfect, just like the lady in the magazine.
This year, while Ken was still at work, Mary assigned Brenda the task of going to the store as soon as she and Kathy got home from school. She still needed several ingredients for the soup. She needed all the ingredients, really—everything except dried basil, of which she had plenty. The truth was that she had been distracted and had almost forgotten about the holiday altogether, and the kitchen wasn't even clean yet. She needed her daughter to help her out of the woods. Kathy asked Brenda if she could come with her, and was mildly surprised when she shrugged in agreement.
Mary's new Ford Pinto Runabout was yellow and shiny and only a couple of months old, still awash in new car smell. The family had never needed two cars before, but now that Mary had gone back to work, doing bookkeeping part-time at the Mode O' Day frock shop, it was a necessity. Kathy thought the Pinto was the greatest thing ever. She loved the look of it: it was cute, sleek, modern, but also humble and unpretentious. It had a personality that she thought matched her own. A part of her felt like it was her car, but she was still fifteen, five months away from taking her driving exam. Brenda was the one who was old enough to drive, and she thought she was invincible behind the wheel. Kathy felt on edge and shaken on the passenger side. Brenda had already been in two accidents since getting her license. Kathy wasn't surprised, given how many times Brenda had to retake the driving exam before passing. She just hoped the third accident wouldn't happen in their mother's brand new baby. Dad would have a fit.
"Where are we going?" Kathy asked as Brenda started heading east instead of northwest to McHenry Village shopping center, where the supermarket was.
"I'm going to get Mark, cheese weasel. Where do you think?"
"Mom didn't say you could do that." Kathy regretted the words as soon as they exited her mouth.
"Oh, I'm so sorry I disobeyed your precious mommy, Kitty Kath." Brenda leaned forward in her seat, excited by the idea of conflict, her glossed-up lips curled into a malicious smile. "Do you want me to take you home so she can change your diaper and put you down for your nippity-nap?" she said in her stupidest baby voice.
Kathy glared at her sister, but decided not to fight with her. Brenda shoved a Led Zeppelin 8-track into the Pioneer player that Al, who was assistant manager at House of Sound, had installed for Mary, along with a pair of top-of-the-line speakers, as a "car-warming present." When Mary protested, saying she didn't even listen to music that much, he told her that he got a great deal with his employee discount, but everyone suspected he hadn't really paid a dime. Kathy and Brenda sat saying nothing while the music lumbered on, until they pulled up in front of Mark's small tan house with brick siding that came halfway up the exterior walls. Mark came jogging out after two honks of the horn.
Mark was tall and muscular. He was a starter on the Downey High basketball team and wore his letterman's jacket even in the summer. His light brown hair was cut into a shag that went past his shoulders, like David Cassidy. Kathy approved of the hair, because she approved of David Cassidy, but according to her, Mark was too macho, too musclebound.
When he got to the car, he stopped and stood in front of the passenger side door, staring at Kathy. Kathy leaned her seat forward, but he just kept standing and staring.
"What?" she finally asked.
"Get in the back, dumbass," Brenda ordered.
"Why? Why can't he get in the back?"
Brenda ripped Kathy's glasses off her face and tossed them in the back haphazardly. Kathy moaned and smacked Brenda lightly on her right arm before climbing in between the front seats and settling herself in the back. Mark got in the front and immediately shoved his tongue down Brenda's throat. Kathy tried to avert her eyes, but was curious enough to sneak a glance or two. He was so gross. Kathy didn't understand why Brenda seemed to enjoy it.
When they arrived at the supermarket, Mark got out to let Kathy out of the back. Then he grabbed the shopping list from Brenda, placed it on top of Kathy's head, got back in the car, and shut the door. Her sister and the muscle man started eating each other's faces again. Kathy headed for the store's sliding glass doors, resigned to doing the shopping all by herself. This was why Brenda hadn't put up a fuss about her tagging along.
Getting fresh tomatoes, milk, and olive oil didn't take long; what did was talking to her old neighbor Mrs. Henderson, who cornered her in the dairy section.
"Kathleen! How are you, how is your family? Oh my goodness, you're practically a woman!"
"Oh, yeah. Everyone's good. Um, I had a growth spurt last fall." Kathy looked down at herself. She did look quite different from the last time she saw Mrs. Henderson, which must have been—what?—when she was in sixth grade? Kathy was surprised she was even able to recognize her.
"And how is your beautiful, beautiful sister? What is she doing these days?"
Kathy's blood boiled a little. She wanted to tell Mrs. Henderson that Brenda was outside French-kissing a troll. That she was a slutty idiot who treated her like garbage.
"She's good. You know, graduating in the spring, so, we're all excited about that."
"How nice," Mrs. Henderson sighed. "I've been thinking about her often lately. You know, the news." Her features drooped with concern. "She's such a beauty! I hope she keeps herself safe."
"We do what we can," Kathy said, a little more icily than she intended.
Mrs. Henderson put her knobby hand on Kathy's left shoulder and rubbed it for a couple of seconds. Her age-spotted skin was thin like tissue paper, and she was wearing three bejeweled rings that looked like they might fall right off of her bony fingers. "You know, sometimes we feel jealous of others for the gifts God has given them, but we all have our little blessings. Just think of all the things your sister has to worry about that you don't. It is a blessing. Truly."
"Okay," was all Kathy could think to say. Had Mrs. Henderson actually been paying enough attention to pick up on her irritation, or was it just obvious to everyone that Kathy must resent having such a beautiful, beautiful sister, seeing what an ugly creature she was herself and all? Good thing she had her own little blessings, whatever those were. She said goodbye as pleasantly as she could and headed for the checkout line.
Mark and Brenda weren't kissing any more when she got back to the car. They were screaming at each other. This was how it went with them. Mark got out of the passenger seat without saying anything and let Kathy crawl in the back. Mark and Brenda were silent for the entire ride home, staring straight ahead at the gray winter streets and sky. Kathy didn't dare ask what was going on. She knew Brenda would just scream about it being none of her business. When they arrived at home, Mark got out to let Kathy out, then climbed back in as she walked away. She heard the fighting resume as she reached the porch of the house. The silence was a relief after she shut the door behind her. Different from the frigid silence in the car, which constantly threatened to give way to massive explosions. The silence in the house, with its warm browns and maizes and splashes of bright buttery yellow, was soft and comforting and seemed to promise it would remain so.
***
Later that night Kathy and her father watched Sunset Boulevard on television after her mother went to bed around eight o'clock, complaining of a migraine. They had all had the tomato soup together, but that was the extent of the Valentine festivities. It wasn't unusual. Ken and Mary weren't the most romantic couple. Her father fell asleep in front of the living room television most nights anyway. This was normal. Physical affection between her parents actually kind of made her feel weird when she pictured it, which she tried not to do very often.
"You know, all of these photos that decorate the house are real old pictures of Gloria Swanson in her heyday. I mean, this story is really about her, in a way." Kathy's dad sighed slightly as he rested his chin in the palm of one hand while reaching for his bottle of Tab with the other.
Kathy knew. He told her that every time they watched this movie, and this must have been at least their fourth viewing. Her father was tall and thin, with a full head of fair hair she didn't believe she had ever seen not neatly styled and combed. He crossed his legs as he sat, just like Kathy. Sometimes they would switch which leg was on top and which leg on the bottom simultaneously. When that happened, her father would usually lift an invisible skirt with his hands and start doing the can-can like a sexy French lady. It cracked her up, but seemed to irritate her mother.
"And Max was really a director," Kathy added.
"That's right!" Her dad seemed proud that she knew. Or maybe just relieved to learn that she had actually been listening all these years, retaining information he shared with her.
"What were real silent movies like?" she asked. "I mean, I've seen little short comedy things at Shakey's Pizza and stuff, but I can't imagine sitting through hours of only images on a screen with no talking. How could they make them exciting? How could they make them thrilling or sad or romantic or scary?"
"Oh sweetie, I wish I could show you. I will once I retire and open up that movie theater." Ken was a division director at the offices of the Modesto Irrigation District, a position he occupied with bored diligence. "I'm not even going to screen anything made after 1950."
"Sounds like a real moneymaker," she responded, immediately feeling bad.
"It's not about the money. It's about the art," he said, using his hurt feelings as a stylistic flourish. "And going back to what you were saying before, silent films had a different acting style. They conveyed emotions differently from how movies do these days. And they weren't really silent, Kathy, they had musical accompaniment. Theaters used to have big organs in them and a live organist would play along with the film. And the films were exciting, and sad, and romantic. And scary! Nosferatu was one of the first Dracula movies, and it was very creepy."
"I've seen pictures of that one," Kathy said. Her friend Andrea's little brother Scottie had stacks of monster movie magazines, and sometimes he would shove them in front of their faces when they were trying to do homework. Andrea got annoyed and said they were gross, but Kathy secretly thought they were kind of interesting. "The vampire guy doesn't look like Dracula at all. He's bald and his ears are all pointy. His mouth is disgusting."
"One of the creepiest movies I can ever remember seeing was from that era. Ir's at least part silent," her father continued.
"Really? The scariest movie you ever saw?" Kathy didn't try to hide her tone of disbelief.
"Yes! It was called "M." Kathy's father ran his fingers through his own hair, then shook away what appeared to be residual fear from this viewing experience.
"Seriously? What was it about?"
"A child murderer, played by Peter Lorre. Remember him from Casablanca?"
"Yeah, the one with the freaky voice." Kathy constricted her vocal cords and tried to sound oily. "What right do I have to think, huh?"
Her father laughed. "Very good! Anyway, his character is a psychopath who can't stop killing. And no one knows who he is. All that identifies him is Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King.' He whistles it as he hunts little girls."
"Sounds like a real bone-chiller, Dad." Kathy tried to continue to poke fun at her father with her tone, but her stomach sank when she heard the words "hunt little girls." Why would someone do that? If you really wanted to show off your skill as a hunter wouldn't you go after the strongest of the species? Not the defenseless? But then she remembered. It was about sex. It had to be. Everything else in the world seemed to be.
Kathy stayed silent long enough to prompt her father to ask her if she was okay. She knew she had just dropped off in the middle of a conversation, but no words were coming up for some reason. Her mind wasn't exactly blank, but it wasn't doing much. She felt frozen in place, pretending to watch television while her brain failed to pay attention.
"I just remembered that I have a science test tomorrow. I think I should probably go upstairs," she said as her father opened a second bottle of Tab. She walked over to the entryway and picked up her backpack from the pile of shoes and coats that took up half the room all winter.
Her father did a middling job of hiding his disappointment. "Okay, honey. You're going to miss the best part, you know."
Kathy widened her eyes and lifted her eyebrows. She inhaled through her nose and fixed her teeth in a hysterical grimace. "No one ever leaves a star—that's what makes one a star," she stage-whispered before jetting up the stairs. She could still hear her father giggling after shutting the door to her bedroom.
***
During the second week in May, Downey High gave its students a series of standardized tests. They claimed they wanted "to see how students retain information over the year," but nobody ever heard anyone talking about the results. No one had ever been held back because they failed the test, or had even seen their score for that matter. Some were convinced it was all a sham, a way for teachers to take a break. No one fought it, though, as they would only test the students for four hours before setting them loose at noon to raise hell around town.
Since Kathy's first period class was science, she had to spend those four hours in her least favorite classroom: the room that reeked of formaldehyde and had dead animals in jars on the shelves, the lair of the infamous Mr. Gilligan, who looked like an undertaker and irritatingly gave Kathy an A- on her research project last semester.
Kathy was one of the first to reach the end of the test booklet. She stared at the clock above the specimen cabinet: eleven thirty-one. No, two. She grabbed a novel from her book bag (not Silas Marner, her current English assignment, but A Wizard of Earthsea, which she was close to finishing for the second time) and tried to distract herself until the gaunt, low-voiced man up front said it was all right to leave.
The bell rang loudly at noon and students bolted from their seats like dogs being released from a kennel. A blond boy with plaid pants almost knocked Kathy to the floor on their way out of the classroom. When Kathy met up with Andrea Carelli and Kevin Lang, they were ready to party. The problem was that all three of them were fifteen, with only the bus to get them to and from school. Kevin offered to ask his older brother Jimmy to give them a lift back to Andrea's place, and both girls told him to do so immediately. Neither of them wanted to hit Brenda up for a ride, as she was somehow more obnoxious than usual lately. Kathy figured she was stressed about prom or boys or whatever girls who look like her get stressed about. Staying away was usually the best strategy.
The three freshmen rode in the back of Jimmy's pickup from Downey to Andrea's house on Bodem, kitty corner from the cemetery. Jimmy was an erratic driver (he apparently didn't understand the concept of slowing down for speed bumps), so the three of them each clung to the sturdiest thing they could find to hang onto. When they reached Andrea's, they thanked him as they hopped out, but Jimmy didn't acknowledge their gratitude. He just sped off. Jimmy too had afternoon plans.
They all got comfortable in Andrea's bedroom. Kathy and Kevin laid perpendicular to each other on the floor, Kevin's head resting on Kathy's stomach. Andrea sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the record player and put on the latest Elton John album for about the four hundredth time. Almost as soon as "Daniel" started, however, it was nearly drowned out by shouting from the living room.
What the hell, Rosemary? I thought we talked about this. I don't like coming home to the house looking like this. My god, I work all day to support this family and you can't even manage to keep the house from smelling like a rotting corpse?
This was the downside to hanging out at Andrea's. Someone was always fighting with someone, whether it was her parents or little brothers or all of them at once.
Jesus Christ, Marty, do you ever think about all the things I have to do during the day? And now all the kids are home so early—
Look, Rosie, you do your job. I do my job. You need to do your job or I've fucking had it. I'm out of here. I've said it before. And I mean it.
Drawers slammed and a glass broke and the screaming continued. The first side of the record came to an end without being heard. It was impossible to listen to anything but the yelling match, even though Kathy and Kevin knew it embarrassed Andrea terribly. Kathy squished Andrea's green shag carpet between her toes. When she looked down at her feet they were covered in cat hair. She shook it off and used Andrea's antique roll-top desk to leverage herself into a standing position.
"We should go for a walk," Kathy suggested. Her friends nodded and started putting on their shoes.
"A walk to where?" Kevin asked.
"I don't know, just around." Kathy didn't understand why other people didn't get the appeal of just wandering sometimes."Do you need to have a destination?"
"Yes?"
The three headed out the front door and started walking west on Morris. It was hot, probably ninety degrees or higher. Kathy was wearing long jeans and a brown t-shirt, and she could feel the sun transferring heat into her heavy clothing.
"So where are we going? Kevin asked again.
"Let's try to make it to Enslen Park. Maybe we'll run into some of our old friends who go to Davis now." Kathy didn't know if she could handle the journey herself. She already wanted to jump in every swimming pool they passed, and they'd only been walking for five minutes.
As hot as it was, Kathy saw something just as they passed High Street that gave her a chill. Parked in the driveway of a little chalet-style house was a big brown station wagon. A Mercury Monterey, just like the one the man had been driving that day back in September when he stopped and asked if she wanted him to take her picture. Was it the same car? Was this his house? She tried to shake it off and kept walking.
A couple of blocks down, Andrea tripped on a tree root bursting out of the sidewalk. She was lucky Kevin was there to catch her, because Kathy didn't even notice. She was too focused on the car that was passing them going in the other direction. Another brown Monterey! Or was it the same one? But it was going the wrong way.
"Kathy, come on," Andrea said once she and Kevin were a good distance from where Kathy had stopped.
As she turned, she thought she caught a glimpse of blond hair on a man's head inside the open window. Just in her peripheral vision. She didn't even know if she really saw it. She tried not to let it register. Kathy raced forward to catch up with her friends, feeling like the roots were eyeing her now, poised to reach out and grab her, pull her into the shadows sticky with sap.
***
They were dying from the heat by the time they were nearing the park, so they stopped in the little grocery on the corner of Morris and Sycamore and bought large Icees. The three of them trudged with red and blue cups in hand the last half a block. It seemed like every teenager in Modesto had settled on the park. It was a zoo. A cloud of smoke hung over the park like the fogs around Brigadoon. The air smelled of tobacco and marijuana, making Kathy nervous that her presence here might get her in trouble with the police. But if she was going to get in trouble, so was everyone else. She figured it was worth it.
Their favorite spot was taken—a thick cluster of tall bushes on the northeast corner that formed a cave—so they settled for a grassy spot on the other side of the park, just across the street from Graceada Park, in view of the tennis courts. Kathy always thought it was weird that the two parks were right next to each other. Shouldn't parks be more spaced out?  Wouldn't it be easier to just make it one park? They all sat cross-legged in a circle. Kathy leaned back and stared at the cloudless sky. She could feel the skin on her face burning in the hot sun. Kathy never could tan. She would just burn. Always either lily white or beet red.
"I wasn't expecting so many people from Downey to be here," Andrea complained. "Did you guys see anybody we know from Davis on our way in?"
Kathy and Kevin shook their heads. The three remained quiet for a few minutes. After making an irritated sound, Andrea got up and announced that she was going to go try to bum some grass off a cluster of teens who were smoking in the middle of the baseball field. There were about eight of them: one, a burly boy in a jersey, held a large snake that writhed around his arms and shoulders.
"I would rather not get arrested if the cops show up here," Kathy said. Andrea grunted and stormed off. Kevin and Kathy watched her as she approached the stoners on the diamond. She stood there talking for a lot longer than they expected. At one point, she ran her hand along the snake's rippling body, to Kathy's revulsion. Nothing much else happened. It was like watching a boring television show with no sound.
"I heard that John and Liz broke up again. Apparently she found out that he got to second base with Anne Lombardo at summer camp last year." Kathy stretched her hands out in front of her as she spoke.
"She broke up with him for something that happened almost a year ago?" Kevin's tone was judgmental. "Jesus."
"Well they were technically together at the time, Kev."
"But they're always breaking up and getting back together," Kevin argued.
"Yeah, that's probably why he thought he could get away with it." Kathy turned her head to see Andrea jogging back toward her and Kevin, a very slender joint in her hand. "I don't want any." Kathy wanted to make that clear before Andrea started pressuring her.
"Fine. More for us." Andrea gave Kathy a proud smile. She pulled a butane lighter out of her bra and lit the joint on fire as she inhaled. She passed it to Kevin, trying not to let any of the smoke exit her lungs. "Here."
Kevin inhaled slowly and deeply. After holding the smoke in for about four seconds, he exhaled smoothly, curling his lips into a small o. He didn't cough at all, unlike Andrea, who was still hacking her lungs out after Kevin exhaled his second hit. "What took you so long over there?" he asked Andrea.
"Oh, this one guy was being a complete asshole," she explained. "He was saying really gross things about Diane Vergara. It was pissing me off."
"What did he say?" Kathy asked.
"He was talking about the best way to rape and kill a girl—like, how to do it and not get caught. He also said that Diane was begging for attention—the way she dressed, the way she did her hair. He... he said he was surprised the killer didn't get to her sooner."
"Holy shit!" Kevin exclaimed. "Was it the guy with the snake?"
"No, he was nice. He gave me the joint."
"Jesus," Kevin continued. "What did everyone else say?"
"Some of the other guys laughed. Nobody really had anything to add. Except me. I told him he was disgusting."
"Andrea!" Kevin yelled. "What the fuck? What if he's the killer? What if you just pissed him off?"
"Which one was it?" Kathy interrupted.
"The one with the long dark hair."
"That's not the killer," Kathy said assuredly.
Kevin and Andrea stared at her for a moment before looking at each other. They both furrowed their brows.
"How the hell would you know?" Andrea asked.
Kathy stared at the ground for a few minutes before answering. She helped an overturned beetle back to his feet. "Because I saw him. I mean, obviously I can't be sure, but I'm pretty sure."
"What? when?" Kevin and Andrea were starting to freak out.
"Back in September, there was this blond guy in a brown car pulled over next to me as I was walking down McHenry." Kathy didn't want to say that she thought she might have just seen him again, as they were walking to the park. That seemed almost crazy. "He told me I could be a model and asked if I wanted him to take pictures of me down by the river. I ran in the other direction as fast as I could." Kathy closed her eyes and tried to breathe. The asshole on the baseball diamond's comment burned in her brain. He wasn't the killer, she was sure. At least kind of sure. But he could be a killer.
"Okay, that's super creepy, Kath. But that doesn't mean you saw the killer. He could have just been a pervert. Or maybe he was a real fashion photographer." Kevin scraped little curly flecks of wax off his Icee cup with his fingernail. When he looked up he noticed that both of his friends were looking at him like he was an idiot. "Oh my god, what?"
"Well, he definitely wasn't a fashion photographer," Andrea concluded. "So that means it was either a pervert or the killer. But I don't know. There are a lot of perverts out there."
For some reason it hurt Kathy's feelings that Andrea concluded so quickly that the blond man wasn't a real fashion photographer. But of course he wasn't. Why would someone like that want to take pictures of her?
"Obviously I don't know for sure," she said to her friends. "But I know that Diane wanted to be a fashion model. I just think if somebody pulled over and said to her what they said to me that she would have gotten in the car with them. I don't know. I just have a weird feeling."
They all sat in silence for nearly five minutes. About fifty feet away, some older guys—dropouts, probably—had pulled up to the curb in a Dodge Charger, got out, and sat on the grass as the Edgar Winter Group blared from the speakers in the open car doors. The guy who had been driving began loading the enormous bong he held between his crossed legs. Another guy with a shaggy red afro and a big thick poncho passed around cans of Coors. They all looked very purposeful, though they weren't really doing anything and there were no signs that they had any actual plans.
Kathy's own stoned friends seemed distant, as though they were on a different dimensional plane. Kathy was feeling a little spaced out herself and was starting to wonder if she had gotten high off their fumes when she felt a hard kick on her lower back. She lifted her chin and saw Brenda standing above her.
"You gotta come with me, shit stain. Mom needs us to help her clean the house before her Junior League coffee klatch comes over tonight."
"Seriously?" Kathy whined. She was having an afternoon alone with her friends, and even though no one was communicating with anyone else, she wasn't ready to be torn away from their fellowship.
Brenda grabbed Kathy by the arm and dragged her to her feet. Andrea and Kevin watched in a daze as the sisters crossed the park and climbed into the shiny yellow Pinto parked on the street. They really looked almost identical from afar. Kathy the light version and Brenda the dark version, both of them with long, straight hair parted down the middle.
***
On the evening before Brenda's high school graduation, Kathy and Brenda's maternal grandparents Ward and Irene took the whole family out to eat in celebration. They went to Perry Boys Smorgy in McHenry Village. They always went to Perry Boys Smorgy. What was it about this place that old people loved so much? It was the only place they ever went with either set of grandparents. It was the only place they ever offered to take them.
Brenda stared down at her buffet plate, which she had sprinkled with green beans, cucumbers, and iceberg lettuce. Kathy sat down next to her sister, looked at it, and snorted. Kathy's own plate was heaped with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and three dinner rolls. She managed to tuck a few green beans in there as well.
"Yeah. You should be on a diet," Kathy said. "It's unacceptable if your waist is bigger than eighteen inches around. You're a fat cow." Kathy ripped a big greasy piece of drumstick off the bone with her teeth like a wild animal, then shook the meat hanging out of her mouth in Brenda's face.
"God, stop. I'm just not hungry, okay? Shut the fuck up." Brenda swore at a much lower volume than she said the other words. "This is supposed to be my party. Don't be mean to me."
"Fine. Sorry." Kathy was a little surprised by her sister's downcast manner. Brenda was usually the one that was "mean." Brenda had taught Kathy to be mean.
"So, Brenda will be going to Modesto Junior College in the fall," Ken said nonchalantly, shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth. He was having the roast beef, drenched in thick brown gravy to help the dryness.
"What?" Their grandfather said with both surprise and anger in his voice. "What happened to UC? I thought you were applying to Berkeley."
"I did," Brenda said softly, keeping her eyes on her green beans.
Everyone remained quiet for a few minutes. Pieces of the puzzle started coming together for Kathy. This was why Brenda had been such a nightmare lately. Actually, Brenda had also applied to Santa Cruz, which was her real first choice. Kathy picked up on the way Grandpa Ward had neglected to mention this, and she knew it was because he thought Santa Cruz was a "hippie school," where all the students did all was run around naked and stoned, crying about wars they "couldn't possibly understand." For that matter, this was pretty much his opinion of Berkeley as well, but, he had to concede, at least they actually assigned grades there. Furthermore, Kathy knew that Brenda thought much the same thing about Santa Cruz—only, in her case, this was why she wanted to go. She'd been talking about it for years. She must have been devastated not to get in. Kathy felt oddly angry on Brenda's behalf. How dare they reject her sister?
"Well, at least we get to keep our beautiful girl nice and close!" their grandmother said, trying to pull everyone out from under the dismal mood that was descending on them.
"That's right! This is going to be good, sweetie." Ken put his arm around her. "It'll be better financially too. You can just live at home, get a job, and save up to go to Santa Cruz in two years."
Brenda nodded, but her facial expression didn't change. Everyone resumed eating and some of the tension in the room began to melt away.
"So, you see Dean is pointing his finger at Nixon now?" Ward blurted out to the air in front of him. "He's mad he got fired, and he's trying to take the president down with him." He had the gruff voice of a midcentury farmer. He'd lived in Modesto for almost forty years at this point, ever since the bank had foreclosed on his family's Oklahoma farm.
"It looks like Nixon is doing a perfectly good job taking himself down," Ken answered, visibly flinching a bit at what must have been a kick under the table from Mary.
Ward either didn't hear Ken or pretended he didn't. "First the peaceniks tie his hands in Vietnam, and now his own men are hanging him out to dry. It's damn near treason!"
Kathy felt a surge of solidarity with her father. "We should never have gone into Vietnam in the first place."
Her grandfather bristled visibly. He looked crushed, actually. "Oh, Kathy, don't tell me that high school has turned you into one of those radicals. Some of the things that come out of those people's mouths is downright treason."
"Um, I don't think it was high school. I think it was a bunch of my friends' older brothers getting murdered. And becoming murderers." Kathy regretted the words a little as they left her mouth. She knew it wouldn't help keep the familial peace. Her mother was giving her an icy stare.
But her grandfather didn't say anything. Nobody said anything. Everyone just finished dinner and stood up, ready to walk to the parking lot. Both grandparents hugged Brenda before getting in their big Buick. Grandma Irene hugged Kathy, but Grandpa Ward just waved and got in the car. It made Kathy feel guilty. Or angry. She couldn't really separate the feelings.
When they got home Kathy and Brenda went straight to their bedrooms. Kathy laid on her stomach and buried her head in her big yellow smiley face pillow. She was in slight gastric distress, as she was frequently after Perry Boys Smorgy. She dozed off for a few seconds before being woken by the ring of the telephone down the hall.
"Kathy! It's Andrea!" she heard her mother yell. Kathy pushed herself into a standing position and stepped out into the hallway. She walked over to the telephone table and yelled at her mother to hang up after picking up the extension.
"Kathy, guess where I went tonight with Greg?" Greg Wendell was a boring guy she hung out with sometimes, but never when Kathy or Kevin were around. Kathy had almost wondered if  their relationship was a fiction until she had seen them kissing behind the gym one time.
"Where?" Kathy asked.
"The Seventh Street Bridge. Well, we just walked over it, but we peeked underneath a little too. My heart was racing a million miles an hour. We want to do it again tomorrow night. Maybe even explore a little more. You have to come." Andrea spoke quickly and quietly.
"Why do I have to come?"
"Because you saw the killer!"
"So?"
"I don't know. Maybe we can find some new evidence or something. Just say you'll come. C'mon," Andrea pleaded.
"This is fucked up."
"Kathy! C'mon."
"Maybe. I'll call you tomorrow after the graduation. I'll let you know."
It was the strangest call Kathy had ever gotten from Andrea, and that was saying something. Once she'd called, panicked, because she'd accidentally burned off half her hair with a curling iron. Kathy felt chilled. Not cold really, just chilled. She figured she'd probably bail on Andrea tomorrow. She couldn't force her to go somewhere she didn't want to go.
Brenda's graduation was easily the most boring two-hour event Kathy had ever had to sit through. She spent most of the ceremony with her feet on the back of the seat in front of her, braiding the strands of denim that were fraying off the holes in her jeans. When Brenda's name was finally called, Kathy stood up and applauded, but quickly returned to her seat. Her parents and grandparents were doing an inordinate amount of whistling and shouting. Her grandfather hooted and pumped his arm as he shouted, like he was cheering on his favorite football team. Kathy felt too embarrassed to go on living.
Worse, they couldn't just leave once Brenda had her diploma in hand. There were still two student speakers to sit through. Vera Stromberg went on for seven whole minutes, but Kathy figured if she were class valedictorian she would probably want her few minutes in the spotlight too.
"I'm telling you to run," Vera said to her classmates. "No student from Downey will miss the starting gun, because I'm here, telling you to run."
Kathy snickered, and was immediately shushed by her mother. She looked around—none of the adults seemed to realize that the valedictorian was alluding to a song teenagers were getting high to in vans.
The chaos after everything concluded was worse than the ceremony itself. There seemed to be hundreds of people trying to get through the same door at the same time. Kathy felt as if she were drowning. She was finally able to come up for air as she broke free from the crowd just outside the north exit. The parking lot was a mess too. Kathy wasn't looking forward to her mother's inevitable anger behind the wheel.
"Is it okay if I just walk down to Kevin's?" Kathy asked any adult who might be listening.
"Not yet. We have to wait for Brenda to meet us out here so we can take pictures. We need the whole family, so hold your horses." Kathy's father looked sharp—dandyish, even—in his brown jacket and plaid pants. He usually wore a pocket square, but couldn't with this sport coat: the collar was too large. The edge almost met the seam that held the body and the sleeve together. There wasn't even room for a pocket.
"Congratulations, beautiful girl!" Grandma Irene said to Brenda as she met the family in the parking lot. "You were the prettiest one up there, you know."
"Thanks," Brenda said in a tone Kathy couldn't quite read.
"Kathy, go find someone you think is competent to operate a camera to take a picture of all of us together," Mary ordered. She sounded as eager to get everything over with as Kathy.
The only familiar face in sight was Everett Greeley, who was busy taking a picture with his own family. She waited until they were finished, then approached him to ask him to be their photographer. Everett leapt at the opportunity. He'd followed both Kathy and Brenda around like a puppy since third grade. If she had asked him for his shoes, he would have pulled them off in a heartbeat.
"Groovy, groovy. Groovy!" Everett said after snapping a few shots. Brenda surprised him and everyone else by getting sentimental for a minute, giving him a big hug and kiss on the cheek and making his entire life. Kathy guessed Brenda must have forgotten that he was also headed for MJC in the fall.
Kathy was nearly a block away before her parents even finished giving her permission to walk to Kevin's. "Please be home in time for dinner!" she heard her mother shout. The sun burned her bare shoulders even though she had rubbed SPF 15 on them that morning. She felt alone in the glaring brightness and heat, more than she usually felt when walking by herself, like she was on display, alone for everyone to see, and she didn't like to think who might be watching.
A truck full of fresh grads had decided to drag Coffee Road after exiting the parking lot. They were driving at about the same speed Kathy was walking, so it was difficult for her not to stare. There must have been at least ten kids in the bed of the truck, all still draped head to toe in their robes, except for the one who rose to his feet, took a bow, and flipped his up, exposing his bare buttocks underneath.
The other boys in the truck laughed. The girls booed and threw things at him, mostly caps. It grossed Kathy out. When she graduated, she wanted to keep her cap as a souvenir. The idea of it coming into contact with some stupid guy's hairy butt nearly made her gag.
When Kathy arrived at Kevin's house on Lucern, she didn't have to knock; the door was wide open. She walked in and sat on the floor of the living room with her two friends, who were hovering over a newspaper.
"What are you looking at?" she asked.
"It's the first article about Diane in the Modesto Bee. My mom kept it for some reason," Kevin explained. Kathy looked closer and saw a pair of striking eyes staring back at her from the article on the floor.
"You guys are getting obsessed."
"Maybe we should be," Andrea said. Kathy wasn't sure what she meant. Maybe that they should be informed for their own safety? Or did she think the police couldn't do their job?
Kathy looked again at Diane's picture. She looked somehow like the fact of her death had reached back and tinged her bright eyes and wide smile with a premonitory sadness, as though she could make out the horror awaiting her in the distance of the future but not quite bring it into focus. "Doesn't it kind of make you feel sick to think about it this much, Andrea?" Kathy just assumed it was having the same effect on everyone.
"Not really. It makes me angry. Fired up." Andrea used the palms of her hands to push herself to her feet. She stood still for a moment with a businesslike expression, like an army captain making sure her troops were in line, then took the newspaper and rolled it as tightly as she could before sticking it in her purse. "You guys ready to go over to the bridge?"
Kevin jumped to his feet and nodded. Kathy begrudgingly stood as well. This was going to be a bit of a trek, and Kathy didn't have her bike, since she had walked over from Downey.
"Hey, Jimmy!" Kevin beckoned, "Is it okay if Kathy borrows your bike?"
Kevin's brother poked his bespectacled head out of his bedroom doorway. "Sure," he said. "Where are you guys going?"
"We're going to go creep ourselves out at the Seventh Street Bridge, you wanna come?" Andrea answered in a slightly flirtatious tone. It was no secret that she was into Jimmy, who she claimed looked like John Lennon.
"Oh, you can't go over there. It's all blocked off. The bridge and river road and that whole area."
"What?"
"Yeah. I drove by about twenty minutes ago. The entire police department is out there." Jimmy didn't offer any more information. His head slid back into his bedroom like a snail's into its shell.
"Cops? Oh my god, do you guys think they found another body?" Kathy's stomach felt as if it were being nailed to the floor.
"I don't know. Should we go over and see?" Andrea didn't even have a chance to get all the words out before Kathy smacked her on the arm.
"Are you stupid? Why would we do that?" Kathy felt like her ribcage was collapsing in on itself. She wanted to do more than hit Andrea's arm, but she didn't. "I think I want to go home."
"Oh my god, don't be such a pussy," Andrea complained. "It's not like the killer is over there right now waiting to snatch us up. This is the safest time to go."
"I really doubt we could get anywhere near there, and if the cops found us sneaking in we would be in serious shit," Kevin added.
Andrea paced around the room before telling Kevin he was right. "After they're all done. Then we see what there is to see."
Kevin nodded, but Kathy just stared. She rested her back against the sofa leg as Kevin put one of his brother's record albums on the turntable. It was an instrumental interpretation of Lord of the Rings by some Swedish guy. Kathy closed her eyes and tried to pretend this weird, slow, jazzy, oddly soothing music was the only thing that existed. Just waves traveling through space. Nothing else.
Nothing to be afraid of.
________________
The Modesto Bee                                                                             Sunday, June 3rd 1973
***
Modesto City police officers were again called to the Seventh Street Bridge Saturday after receiving an anonymous phone tip around 6:00 a.m. Eighteen-year-old Modesto resident Nancy Dunn was found stabbed and strangled to death beneath the bridge. There was also evidence of sexual assault. She had not been reported missing.
Investigators state that Nancy's parents had left her in charge of her younger siblings while they travelled to the bay area for the weekend. Both of Nancy's brothers slept at a friend's house Friday evening and didn't know anything was wrong until they were contacted by the authorities on Saturday afternoon.
Ligatures possibly used to bind the victim were found in the surrounding area. Law enforcement asks that citizens be on the lookout, and recommends that young women travel in groups or pairs.
The sheriff's department has stated that they do not believe the victim was killed where she was found. They are actively pursuing suspects and searching for the crime scene where the murder and sexual assault occurred.
Nancy Dunn graduated from Modesto High School in June of 1972 and had plans to move to Los Angeles to pursue modeling and acting. A candlelight vigil will be held for Nancy at Modesto High School Wednesday, June 6th.
***
The city didn't enforce an official curfew after Nancy Dunn's death, but the cops acted like it had. They became more involved in the lives of teenage girls than they ever had been before. They didn't want them out after dark. They didn't want them going anywhere alone. They didn't want them dressing in "a suggestive manner." Kathy got to know most  of them by name, a familiarity she didn't relish. She missed playing night games in the summer air amid the whirring of crickets. She missed the warm wind in her hair as she chased after her friends playing flashlight tag.
Formerly a free agent, Kathy was now tethered to Brenda. She felt like a small child. Her whole life, whenever she had asked her parents if she could walk to a friend's house, they had given her permission without batting an eye. Now she couldn't go anywhere unless it was in the passenger seat of her parents' car, with either one of them or Brenda at the wheel.
***
Kathy and Andrea convinced Kathy's dad to drop them off at the library at around 11:30 on a Tuesday in mid-June. The girls had to convince him not to stay and watch over them. They told him over and over again that nothing bad could happen at a public library, and he either started to believe it or got sick of their interminable begging. Either way, they made it to the library. They were without adult supervision. Adults that they knew, anyway.
They were there for one reason: to do as much research as they could on what was going on. Kathy tried to act like it was no big deal in front of her parents, telling them they needed to relax and not think about "the horrible things in life," but on the inside, she was always thinking about him. The man in the Monterey and the three young women he ripped out of existence. She was crumbling. Brenda actually had a connection to Nancy—they were in ballet together back in second grade. It wasn't much, but it was enough to freak Kathy out. To make her feel like nobody was safe. Like this really could happen to anyone.
Kathy and Andrea had learned the name of the first victim on Sunday, when the Bee published an article about all the girls who had been murdered. They had known she existed, but had missed all the articles about her after she was first found. Karen Rose Murray. Kathy couldn't get the name out of her head. Karen was fifteen, like Kathy. She was homeschooled. She lived on a farm out in Ceres with her parents and grandparents. Neither Kathy nor Andrea knew anyone who knew her. It was like she was a secret person. She didn't go to school. She didn't hang out at any of the local teen hotspots. The girls felt desperate to learn something more about her, though neither of them could articulate why. They just wanted to know what happened. How she ended up where she ended up.
"Come over here," Kathy whispered. "I think I found the article from when she was first found. Oh my god, it says here that she was found naked. Were the other girls found naked?"
"I don't know. It didn't say anything about it in the paper."
"I wonder if they were clothed, or if the paper just declined to publish the details out of respect. But why would they show Diane and Nancy's families more respect than Karen's? I bet they weren't naked."
"We have absolutely no way of knowing." Andrea took the paper from Kathy and read the article. "This is different though. It's weird. The articles about Diane and Nancy talked about their hopes and dreams. Karen's article just talks about her body. Like she was a dead animal somebody found on the side of the road."
Kathy scowled and pulled her long mousy brown hair into a bun and secured it with the pencil she had been holding in her mouth. "Maybe they were written by different reporters and somebody with more empathy wrote the later articles." She looked down to find a byline. "Herman Mulroney. Who is that one written by?"
"Katherine Holloway."
"Well, that explains it, I think. I mean, women care more about victims and their families and stuff than men. He probably wanted to report just the facts." Then she added in her attempt at a Jack Webb voice, "Ma'am."
"Or he's creepy." Andrea arched her eyebrows knowingly at Kathy.
"Maybe. Who knows? Everyone in town probably seems creepy if you tell the story right."
Andrea nodded. The girls went back to shuffling through papers. Andrea made a unpleasant squealing sound when she looked down and saw that her hands had been blackened by the newsprint. Kathy shushed her, though the woman sitting at the circulation desk didn't look like she cared.
"Oh, here's another girl!" Kathy said. Her breathing went shallow as she stared at the picture. "But she was thirteen."
"Do you think it's the same killer?"
"How would I know? I hope so. I'd prefer to think there's only one psycho walking around town and not a whole bunch." Kathy continued reading. "It says here that she was killed in her own house. The killer stole all the valuables in the house before leaving."
"So, a robbery gone wrong."
"So wrong that you kill a junior high schooler? Why aren't more people talking about this? I mean, it's like we're not even safe in our own homes." Kathy started to hyperventilate a little. "It's got to be a different killer. The guy who killed Diane and Nancy didn't ever go in their houses." She tried to take a deep breath but her lungs didn't like the oxygen. She looked at the paper. Donna Johnston looked a lot older than thirteen.
"Actually, didn't the police say they don't know where they were killed?" Andrea asked. "That they were just dumped under the bridge?"
Kathy and Andrea stared into each other's eyes. Kathy didn't know what she wanted to think. Which was scarier: having two madmen on the loose, or one out-of-control psychopath who couldn't stop killing? She folded her arms on the desk in front of her and buried her face in them. "What would it be like to look at the Sacramento papers? Or Stockton, or San Francisco? Do you think they just have murders all the time everywhere?" Kathy's voice was muffled by her arms.
"Probably. I think this is just what some humans do. They hunt each other, just like other people hunt animals." Andrea walked up to the woman sitting at the desk and bluntly asked her if they had any books on criminal psychology. Kathy, embarrassed, buried her head even deeper, till her forehead was touching the cold desk beneath.
A few minutes later, Andrea came walking back with a book called The Mind of a Murderer. She checked out the book and told Kathy they should split. Kathy stared at the cover of the book in her friend's arms. Manfred Guttmacher, M.D.  How could he really know anything about what happened in somebody else's mind? Or was he a murderer himself and could give a first-hand account?
"Let's go," Andrea insisted. "If I have to smell library any longer I'm gonna puke."
***
When the Downey High Marching Band came prancing down the street in the Fourth of July parade, the town went nuts. It was like they were cheering war heroes who had just saved them all from obliteration at the hands of  some powerful enemy. The actual war heroes, even the ones from World War One, eighty years old and missing half their limbs, elicited nowhere near as loud a roar when they hobbled by. The Downey band was a legend in its own time. They were champions. "The best high school band program west of the Mississippi!" people would say. Big deal. It certainly brought the school prestige, but Kathy found it a little unfair. All the band kids had been on the band track since sixth grade. If you got interested in music after that, too bad for you. You were already too behind to catch up with those on their way to the Downey Marching band. Kathy didn't understand why they didn't offer classes for kids who just wanted to learn a little more about music. Or beginning classes for people who might decide they want to start playing the saxophone as a junior. The way it is then, you'd have to start young or it was too late. You missed your shot.
Kathy, Andrea, and Kevin had secured good positions on the steps of the post office, where they could see everything. The very best spot was across the street: an ancient Civil War cannon with two wooden seats, one on either side of the barrel, which was aimed directly at the post office. It looked a little like the cannon on the Risk box. Kathy often wondered about the people who managed to sit there every year: did they get up at three in the morning and camp out? They always looked smug and satisfied.
It was a big, bright, hot extravaganza. Flags everywhere, majorettes, vintage cars, the Blue Angels overhead, floats that ranged from bare flatbeds full of local politicians to impossibly elaborate recreations of historical and storybook scenes—and the constant smell of horse shit. There had to be several hundred horses in the parade, it seemed like, and they would drop mounds of manure behind them every few feet, like they were doing it out of spite, and every once in a while a street cleaner would come along with its jets of soapy water and big brushes whirring and for a minute the smell would get much worse, and then die back down to merely terrible until it built up again and the next sweepers came through.
The cops marched by next, and Kathy wasn't surprised when they got even fewer cheers than the military personnel. Everybody had to be thinking the same thing, right? If these guys were all out here celebrating America's birthday, who was out there patrolling the streets making sure more girls' bodies didn't get dumped under the bridge?
They all looked so proud in their clean dress uniforms. Kathy knew a few of them from around town, but she couldn't recognize them in the parade. It was impossible to tell them apart. The younger ones, anyway. It was like mustaches and mirrored sunglasses were part of the uniform. And every mustache was the same: they all looked like Mark Spitz, especially framed by the long hair with gentle curls that krept out from beneath their caps.
Two motorcycles drove on either side of the men. They carried a long banner in front of them that said "Modesto Police Department: To Serve and Protect." The serve and protect part was written in fancy calligraphy letters and Kathy wondered which policeman's wife was drafted into making it for them. She couldn't imagine any of these guys being capable of it themselves.
Kathy could feel the part at the top of her head becoming more sunburnt by the minute. She leaned over, shook her hair out with her head upside down, then threw her chin back, sending her hair up and over to the back of her head once more. The woman behind her made a displeased sound as she was whipped in the face by Kathy's hair. Kathy apologized and tried not to look at the woman for the rest of the parade.
"I wonder if I'll ever do anything that would qualify me to march in a parade," Andrea said as she stared at the baton twirlers with their shiny white knee-high boots.
Kevin started laughing and Andrea slugged him on the arm.
"What do you mean? Something heroic? Or you want to twirl batons?" Kevin asked, clueless.
"It would be cool to be a hero," Kathy mused.
"You mean a war hero that gets praised for blowing people's brains out? Yeah, that sounds really terrific, Kathy." Andrea seemed annoyed.
"Hey—don't act like that to me. You know how I feel about stuff." Kathy glared at her.
"Well, if they ever throw a parade celebrating my accomplishments, I highly doubt it will happen on the Fourth of July. And it definitely won't be because of some state-sponsored violence I committed," Andrea said with a derisive laugh.
Kathy stared at Andrea's cheek. It was all of her she could really see considering their close quarters. A large pimple with a big white head throbbed as if it were going to explode and Kathy nearly asked if she could pop it for her. She didn't know why she wanted to.
"What do you mean? Like the parade the Munchkins had when Dorothy killed the Wicked Witch?" Kevin asked.
"Maybe a little. But hopefully it won't be because people are happy I'm dead." Andrea wiped the sweat from her brow with the bottom of her t-shirt.
Kathy had never really thought about it before. If she were to become well known, what did she want it to be for? She had no idea. Something good, though. She didn't want to be remembered for a bad choice or a mistake.
It was already a hundred degrees outside when the last straggling parade participants had marched out of sight and the crowd was breaking up. The smell of manure was unbearable by now: it had baked into the asphalt. All the street cleaners managed to do was generate hot clouds of toxic stench with their wet spinning brushes. Kathy and her friends ran to escape it like everyone else.
***
A week later, Brenda got a job scooping ice cream at Swensen's. Swensen's was in Ulrich Shopping Center, a place that made Kathy sad, though her earliest memories of  it were happy ones. It was the former site of a tiny zoo, a little island in the middle of the parking lot with an assortment of exotic animals: some monkeys and turtles, a multi-colored host of parakeets and cockatiels, a big-beaked (and foul-mouthed) mynah bird, and a beloved adult female chimpanzee named Lulu. The zoo had opened when Kathy was in kindergarten, and since then, it had been her favorite place in town—until last year, when it closed down after Lulu died of poisoning. The rumor around town was that some teenagers had given her LSD. Kathy's heart, along with many others, was broken. The deserted zoo was a depressing reminder of a cruel and senseless death. It had been a joy, and now it was a drag.
But the shopping center was still a popular gathering place for teens, and for this reason there was now a constant police presence. As Brenda put it, it was "crawling with pigs." This gave Kathy's parents peace of mind, so it was an approved place for her to hang out while Brenda was working. Brenda was always at arm's reach, as long as Kathy stayed in view of the ice cream parlor, which was easy, as the center was a big square and you could see all of it from anywhere else in it. And despite her sad feelings, or maybe in some way because of them, Kathy now found herself drawn to the island on which the zoo had been. There was a bench there where she could sit and read, and it almost helped a little to be near Lulu's old home. It was like visiting a loved one's grave.
The cops were usually swarming the place, keeping watch over all the young girls, but today was different for some reason. Kathy was in almost complete solitude as she sat on her bench reading an article on "Black Fashion and the Soul Train Look" in the Creem magazine she had just bought at the Save-Mart. Finally, however, the pleasant lack of police came to an end, as Officer Dave crept up in his cruiser.
Officer Dave liked to be thought of as one of the "hip" cops. He didn't harass the pot smokers as much as many of his colleagues, and he had a knack for learning everyone's name. On the other hand, he always seemed far too interested in Kathy and Brenda's whereabouts and business.
"What have we been telling you, Kathy? Pairs! You're just sitting here by yourself?" Officer Dave took his cap off and ran his fingers through his sweaty blond hair.
"Brenda is right over there in Swensen's." In fact, she was in plain view through the window about forty feet away, leaning over in her quaintly striped uniform to gather the ingredients for someone's banana split.
"You're alone, Kathy. You're not safe."
"Really?" Kathy raised one eyebrow.
"Yes! Drop the attitude! I know you're aware of the danger."
Kathy stood up. "You really think I'm not safe? Sitting here, in a public place with a policeman hovering over my every move?"
Officer Dave was quiet for a couple of seconds before telling Kathy she had a good point. "You still need to change the attitude though. And it shouldn't be my job to babysit you."
"But isn't it, kind of?" Kathy was feeling a little confrontational. "You're supposed to serve and protect and keep the peace and shit. There's a madman murdering girls on the loose. I'm pretty sure it's your job to protect us."
"Kathy! You need to show me some more respect. If you really want us to do a good job keeping you safe, maybe you shouldn't be a little bitch to someone who's trying to help you." Kathy winced a little. There was the cop. It was scary, but inside she felt a wicked satisfaction: she had annoyed him into dropping the Officer Friendly mask for a second. He had handed her a little bit of power.
"I'm sorry. I'm about to get my period and I'm kind of irritable," Kathy lied. She hoped her frankness would make Dave a little uncomfortable, and it seemed to work, judging by his uneasy expression. "I respect you. I'm grateful you're here."
"Good," he huffed. "You should be. And I think you should be more careful what you wear. You don't want to be on display for this guy." Kathy looked down. She had on an old Oakland Raiders t-shirt and a pair of jean shorts. She wasn't sure what else she was supposed to wear in 95-degree weather. Dave put his hand on her shoulder and started pushing her toward Swensen's. "I want you to stay in there with your sister unless you have someone else to buddy up with out here, okay?"
"Okay."
Brenda seemed irritated to have Kathy in the ice cream shop with her, as if her presence somehow made Brenda less cool. As though she could look any more square than she already did, dressed up like she was in a bad production of The Music Man. Kathy just sat there reading until 4:30, when Brenda's shift ended. Ken pulled up in front of the shop almost the instant the clock changed from 4:29, as though he thought it would be a fatal mistake to leave his daughters alone for even a second after Brenda punched her clock.
"How was everything today?" he asked, obviously expecting a more interesting answer than they could give.
"Nobody was there. Officer Dave made me sit in the shop with Brenda. It was stupid," Kathy said. "He just intimidates me. He told me I wasn't safe even though I was standing there next to him, a policeman."
"That man seems way too interested in you girls," Ken said. "Maybe you should just stay home tomorrow, Kath. Or we can go over to Al's!"
"So I just get to deal with Officer Krupke by myself?" Brenda said, irritated.
"I doubt you'll have to interact with him much if you're working. And it's a safe place for you to be. Nothing bad is going to happen to you working in a store in Ulrich Shopping Center." He put on his sunglasses as he made a left turn toward home. The glare was blinding.
Kathy just covered her eyes with her hands, pushing on her eyelids until there was nothing but darkness. It was comforting.
***
Ken had Wednesdays off, so, as he suggested, he and Kathy drove over to visit Al at his bachelor's pad on Tully Road near the JC. He lived in one of those fairly new but already rickety complexes that were mostly carport. His apartment was a sunny corner unit, though, and it looked out on some grass and trees.
Kathy always wondered why her dad wanted to spend time with Al. The two constantly bickered and insulted each other, not unlike her and Brenda. Kathy often thought that if she had the choice, she wouldn't choose Brenda to hang out with. But here her dad was, choosing his brother. Choosing to spend time with someone who called him "princess" and "faggy." Kathy figured her father felt some sort of blood obligation. Like he needed to stand by his brother no matter what.
It didn't matter that much to Kathy, though. She loved Al. He always spoiled her and made hilarious jokes, though sometimes at her father's expense. Kathy knew it was all in good fun. There had only been one time where Kathy had actually felt angry with him, and that was when her dad had gotten so embarrassed by something Al said he turned as red as a bantam hen. Kathy didn't like seeing her father feel that way.
"Al!"  Kathy's father beat on the door. "Al! Are you awake? It's Ken and Kathy! I told you we were coming over." Kathy's dad gave her a knowing look and shook his head, obviously disappointed in his brother.
A few minutes later, the front door creaked open and Al stood before them, finishing fastening the zipper and button on his jeans. "Oh, sorry. I must've overslept. Come in." His living room was almost tidy, other than a couple of beer cans on the folding card table on which he ate his meals and rolled his joints. Most of his other furniture involved gnarled wood in some way, and much of it was draped in scratchy-looking afghans.
"Do you want a beer?" Al asked his brother.
"It's eleven in the morning, Albert."
"Oh, sorry. Do you want some gin?" Al jumped backwards as his brother reached forward to give him a little smack on the arm.
"What are we actually going to do, though?" Kathy asked her father. "Did you get me to agree to spend the whole day with two boring adults who have no plans?"
"No!" her father squealed. "This is going to be a great day," he insisted. "Maybe we could go to a movie together." Ken sat on an ugly brown chair that Albert's cat had almost destroyed. He only sat on the very edge, obviously trying to make sure his brother's filth didn't transfer to his nicely tailored suit. "Ooh, what about James Bond? I can imagine liking that."
"I bet you can," Al said.
"I don't care about spy movies," Kathy told the brothers. "What about Battle for the Planet of the Apes? Is that still playing?"
"I don't think so, sweetie. And you saw that one at least twice." It was true, she had, even though it was by far the most low-rent entry in the franchise. The gorillas were the worst: they were clearly just wearing full-head rubber masks like the ones you could buy at Woolworth's for Halloween. "You should try Live and Let Die," her father continued. "Have you ever even seen a James Bond movie?"
"No, but I don't like the way that guy talks. I mean, is it a speech impediment or what?" Kathy leaned back and let Al's orange tabby cat crawl up onto her chest. She petted him for a few seconds before he was startled by nothing and clawed her in the chest.
"Oh, but it's a new actor, Kath! Roger Moore. Don't you at least want to see how he is?"
"Well, I guess if Uncle Al wants to see it, I'll go. I'm outnumbered." Ken jumped out of his seat from what Kathy could only interpret as excitement. He circled the room doing a little dance.
"I'll go, but only if you promise not to get a boner when you see Roger Moore." Al jumped backwards as his brother reached forward to hit him again.
"Hey," Ken said in a more serious tone. "Don't talk like that around my little girl." His hand barely missed Al's arm and smacked nothing but air.
"Ken, I'm sure she hears way worse at school and around town."
"And from Brenda," Kathy added. Three three of them laughed like they were peers. Not like a child and her caregivers.
"I'm starving. Are we going to eat before the movie? Kathy rose to her feet and stretched her arms in the air. Her uncle poked her belly button, pointing out that she had exposed it by stretching.
"Let's get takeout. I'll call Fast Eddie's and we can all go pick it up and bring it back here," Al suggested. They were just a couple of blocks from Fast Eddie's MOAB (Meal on a Bun), which had pretty good sandwiches. Ken nodded but Kathy asked if she could stay behind and watch TV. She explained that the bitchiest girl in her grade manned the cash register up front. Any encounter was bound to end in tears for someone. Usually Kathy.
"Okay sweetie," Ken told her. "But you can't leave the apartment. And we're locking the doors."
"Fine."
The two men put their shoes on and walked toward the front door, side by side. Kathy was surprised by how much they looked alike from behind. Almost like twins. One light and one dark.
#################











Kathy had always wanted to have the freedom to snoop around her uncle's place. It seemed so foreign. So different from the safe little nuclear family environment she lived in. A big framed picture of a shiny red Corvette hung as the centerpiece of Al's apartment. It made her father cringe, but Kathy found it interesting. She didn't understand what Al did with himself all the time, without a family and all. Maybe this time alone would give her a chance to learn more.
Kathy's first stop was the bathroom cabinet, where she found a small bag of marijuana and a large box of condoms. Kathy closed the cabinet as she gasped. She didn't want to think of her uncle having sex. Al sure had a lot of different brands of aftershave, and none of them smelled particularly good. Hai Karate, Mandom—was this stuff meant to attract women? Next to the toilet was a wicker basket crammed with magazines. Kathy summoned up her courage, and instantly regretted it. This was worse than the condoms: on top was an old issue of Look, underneath that a couple of recent Playboys, but even further down some well-worn copies of Chick and Sex World and things with long German titles, which for some reason made them seem even dirtier. Right on the covers were color pictures of naked people doing things that made Kathy want to scrub her whole body clean just for seeing them.
In the living room, Kathy flipped through Al's records, which were stacked against the wall next to the table that held a turntable and a twelve-inch black and white TV. There was a lot of Herb Alpert and The Sandpipers and New Christy Minstrels. She was a little surprised at how tame his tastes were. She expected at least some Marvin Gaye or Ray Charles, considering how smooth he tried to come off.
Lying on her back, Kathy turned onto her right side and stared at the bottom shelf of Al's bookcase. It was filled with identical photo albums—navy blue with a plastic coating. Kathy took the first album from the shelf and saw the word "Family" written on the cover. Inside she found pictures of her father and Al when they were kids. Photos of her grandparents when they were young and beautiful. She thumbed through the last few pages and saw some images of her parents' wedding. Then some pictures from a funeral she couldn't identify.
The next album on the shelf said "Brenda and Kathy" on the cover. This one contained what she figured must have been every picture of herself ever taken. Every picture of Brenda too. Pictures that she didn't even remember being taken. Kathy felt irritated as she flipped through and determined that Brenda never really went through an awkward stage. Kathy seemed to be perpetually stuck in one.
The next few albums were dedicated to cars and sports and various vacations, and Kathy was just about to lose interest when she saw that one album, whose cover read "Company Picnic," had another album tucked into it backwards. She pulled it out and read the title: "Girls."
Kathy hesitated for a moment, not quite sure why. The images from the magazines in the bathroom were still fresh in her mind. Would this be something private? Something gross? She opened the album anyway, but dropped it immediately.
She nearly had a heart attack when the first image she saw was the striking face of Diane Vergara.
She sat on the floor and pulled the album close to her. She looked at the first page again. It was the first article the Modesto Bee had published about Diane.
Police recovered the body of eighteen-year-old Diane Vergara beneath the Seventh Street Bridge on Saturday after an anonymous call was made to the Modesto Police Station. She had been reported missing the afternoon prior. Diane was a senior at Grace M. Davis High School.
Detectives state that they believe Diane got into a car with a stranger, based on information from local witnesses. Diane was stabbed and strangled, but authorities have yet to release any more information about the state of her body when it was found. Detectives do not believe the crime occurred near the bridge. "She was killed somewhere else and dumped here," Officer David Howard told the Modesto Bee.
Diane had dreams of moving to the city to pursue a career as a fashion model. Services are yet to be announced, but the Bee will publish the details when they become available.
***
There were little pieces of lined white paper with notes written on them stuck on top of the article with scotch tape. Kathy couldn't quite make out the handwriting on all of them, but one of them she could be sure of. It said, "eyes cut out" underlined three times. Kathy felt sick. She wanted to close the album, but she couldn't. Something made her turn the page.
The next page looked almost identical to the first, but it was Karen's eyes staring back at her this time.
Sheriff's deputies were called to the Seventh Street Bridge on Sunday, following an alarmed call from a passerby. Beneath the bridge they found the naked body of Karen Rose Murray, posed with her arms crossed on her chest. Karen was fifteen years old.
Law enforcement removed the body from beneath the bridge, which they now confirm is cleared for public use. They are asking for friends of Karen's to come forward to help piece together what happened between when she went missing on the 24th, and when her body was found on the 26th.
Unidentified strips of linen were found beside the body. Police are unsure if the strips have anything to do with the crime. If you have any information, the Modesto Police ask that you please phone or come by the station.
***
The word "naked" was underlined in the first paragraph. A white piece of paper taped to the top said "naked no eyes." Goosebumps covered Kathy's body. She had to steady her breathing to ensure she didn't throw up all over her uncle's carpet. She was successful. She wasn't successful in obeying the voice inside of her that kept telling her not to turn the page, though.
The face she saw next wasn't familiar. The paper even looked different. After a quick look in the corner, she realized she wasn't looking at the Modesto Bee. It was the Stockton Record. She skimmed the article about the fourteen-year-old victim. Her haircut looked a lot like Kathy's. Sarah Beckmann was found naked, with her arms crossed on top of her chest. In this article, Kathy found a note similar to the ones she found on the previous pages. This one said "Nude and posed. Eyes. Call Dave's second line: 526-6982."
Kathy slammed the album closed as she felt footsteps shaking the flimsy stairs that led up to Al's apartment. As fast as she could, she picked up all the albums and shoved them onto the shelf. She quickly tried to straighten the records she went through as well. She was winded by the time the door was open, but she was sitting on the couch, unsuspiciously.
"Hey! Sorry we took so long. Some girl got into an argument with the cashier," Ken explained as he set the food down on the table.
"See? I'm glad it wasn't me."
"I definitely see. Yes, honey."
Kathy couldn't concentrate on lunchtime conversation. She couldn't concentrate on the movie either. She spent the entire time nearly hyperventilating, thinking about the implications of the information she had just learned. Why did Al even have that album? Were the victims' eyes removed? How would Al know? How would he know unless he did it? But he didn't. She knew that. She had seen the killer and it wasn't her uncle. She would have recognized her own uncle. Unless that wasn't the killer.
Kathy closed her eyes tightly and tried to picture the face of the man who asked to take pictures of her last September. As hard as she tried, nothing would come into focus. Her heart started pounding. Would she even be able to identify him if she saw him on the street?
What about Al? Should she ask him about it? What about the girl from Stockton? Was she killed by the same killer? And again, how would Al know?
"What did you think, sweetie?" Ken's voice seemed to echo louder than any of the sounds in the movie. In fact, Kathy had barely realized the movie was over until he said that.
"It was okay, I guess."
"I loved it," Ken proclaimed. "What was your favorite part?"
Kathy couldn't remember any part in particular, except that some of the characters were black and wore the same kind of cool clothes she had been reading about recently in Creem. But even this barely registered. She almost felt as if she had seen the movie blindfolded with earplugs. "What was your favorite part, Dad?"
"Well... probably when James Bond ran across the backs of those alligators."
"Yeah. That was my favorite too." Kathy stared at Al but quickly looked down at her feet as he tried to match her gaze. She felt paralyzed. All she had to do was follow her father and she would eventually get to a place where she could breathe. Holding on to that knowledge helped her from crumbling right there in front of the concession stand.
***
When Kathy got home, she ran upstairs, grabbed the telephone from its table in the hall, and took it into her room. She made it as far as her bed before running out of cord, so she dialed Andrea's number and waited for her to pick up, then left the cradle in the middle of the floor and took the receiver into the closet and shut the door. The receiver cord was stretched so tight that all the curls were out of it.
"I think the killer cut the girls' eyes out," she told Andrea. "And I think he's working all around the valley, not just Modesto."
"What the fuck are you talking about? Where did you hear that? You're making stuff up."
"No, I found something weird at my uncle's."
"What, like porno?"
"No! Well, yes, that too." She suppressed a queasy shudder. "But after that, I found a scrapbook on his shelf with all the newspaper articles about all the victims. He had all sorts of notes pasted inside. On every picture he had a note that said 'eyes cut out.'"
"How would he know? Kathy, do you think he did it? Why would he even have a scrapbook like that?" Andrea sounded somewhat winded, like she was forgetting how to breathe properly.
"There's another girl in Stockton too. He had an article about her in there. She was killed back in April."
"I think you should call the cops."
"I'm not going to call the cops! I saw the guy, remember? I talked to him. I would have known if I was talking to my own uncle."
"Unless that wasn't the killer, Kath. I don't know why you're so sure."
"I just am, okay? And I know my uncle. I don't know what's going on with him, but I don't think it's anything sinister. What is freaking me out is that the girls had their fucking eyes cut out!"
"Jesus Christ. How much information about the murders do you think the cops have and are just not telling us?"
"I don't know. You were right back before Nancy Dunn, though. We should go over there." Kathy had to make sure her hand stayed on the part of the receiver that the cord plugged into. It was stretched so tight she was afraid it might come loose.
"Right about what? Going to the Seventh Street Bridge? I don't think I was, Kath. I think we should just stay out of it. For our own safety, you know? I kind of started losing my enthusiasm for the whole Nancy Drew thing back when we were ready to head over there but couldn't because of, you know, the dead body."
"But think about how much we don't know," Kathy argued.
"Think about how much we don't want to know, Kathy."
Kathy was quiet for a while. She understood where Andrea was coming from. She made concessive sounds and politely ended the phone call, but something kept buzzing inside of her. Something that wouldn't let her rest. She felt vulnerable. At risk. Nothing felt comforting anymore.
She tried to shut her eyes and sleep, but she found herself becoming more physically aware of her eyeballs than she had ever been. She could feel and picture their orbed shape, the way they swiveled around in their sockets, the way they were tethered to her brain on little braided strands of nerve and sinew. The way they were still staring straight ahead behind their shut lids.
When she did finally fall asleep, Kathy dreamed she was driving. Driving her parents' station wagon, only it was also the blond stranger's brown Mercury. Driving through the steel arch downtown that said WATER WEALTH CONTENTMENT HEALTH, down Seventh Street and across the Lion Bridge, down Highway 99 toward Merced. She had urgent business there, though it wasn't clear what it was. San Francisco-style Victorian houses lined the roadway all the way there. Soon, she pulled up beside a large, flat, grey building that looked like Davis High, but she knew it wasn't. She knew that this was the prison where they kept everyone who ever hurt a little girl. Or killed one. There were searchlights coming from somewhere over the prison swirling in all directions. She tried to get out of the car, but the doors wouldn't open. They were all locked from the outside and no matter how hard she pulled, she couldn't get them to budge. She was trapped. She knew she would suffocate in here. She felt something lumpy and hard like gravel in her mouth and spat it into her cupped hand. She looked at the wet pebbles and realized they were her own teeth. She tried to scream but more teeth kept coming loose, crowding her mouth and threatening to choke her. One of the searchlights found the front window of the car and bathed the interior in a cold grey glow. She could see her own face caught in the beam, terrified, tears streaming down her cheeks. A voice was squawking through a loudspeaker, a megaphone. She strained until she could make out the words it was repeating: You're alone. You're not safe.
***
Kathy woke up on the morning of July 30th with one goal in mind: find someone to take her to the DMV. She didn't think about presents or cake or parties. She wanted that license in her hand as soon as she could get it. When she closed her eyes she pictured herself behind the wheel of their shiny yellow Pinto, cruising down McHenry. Or their station wagon. It didn't really matter as long as it had wheels and moved.
The day was hot and sunny and the visibility was perfect. A great day to take a driving exam. Most of the cars driving around Modesto looked as bright and shiny as the day they were purchased. The whole town felt idyllic, like a big technicolor movie set. Even a gleaming ambulance that shrieked down Fourteenth Street, finned like a manta ray, was a reminder that help was on the way, that someone was in control.
"Good morning, Miss Aukerman," said the man from the DMV in a short-sleeved blue shirt with three pens in its pocket. He was holding a clipboard and his hair was neatly parted. He neither smiled nor frowned.
This is in the bag, thought Kathy.
"Guess who passed everything on the first try?" Kathy boasted loudly as she walked into her house. "Brenda? Brenda?"
"We're in the kitchen, sweetie," Ken yelled from the next room.
Kathy walked into the kitchen with her arms spread like Jesus on the cross, soliciting applause. "I got it!"
"Congratulations, Kathy. I knew you'd do a good job." Ken rubbed his daughter's shoulders encouragingly. The bulbous double Windsor knot around his neck felt like some sort of growth or tumor to Kathy as he hugged her from behind.
"Nearly perfect score on everything. First time!" Kathy raised her eyebrows and glanced toward Brenda, who wore a slight scowl. "How many times did you have to do the driving exam, Bren?"
"Shut up. Let's see it." Brenda pulled the laminated rectangle from Kathy's grasp. "Oh my god, you look like Golda Meir. Why does your hair look so weird?" Brenda started laughing in Kathy's face.
Kathy ripped the license back out of her sister's hand. "It's a bad picture," Kathy admitted. "But that doesn't mean I can't drive." She stuck her tongue out of the mocking smile she was flashing her sister. "They only don't let you drive if you fail."
"Shut up. I passed eventually, didn't I?"
"But how many times was it again?"
"Girls, please!" their mother yelled at them from the dining table. Kathy had hardly noticed she was there. "Be civil to one another." She popped a pill into her mouth that Kathy couldn't identify from afar.
After a long silence, Kathy finally asked the question she felt had been looming over the room since the moment she walked in. "So, which car can I borrow?"
"You want to go out by yourself? I don't know, Kathy." Ken adjusted the pin on his lapel so it was right side up.
"What? You think I'm going to get murdered driving around in a car? Listen, I promise to just run over any bad guys I encounter."
Kathy's dad laughed but it seemed like her mother wasn't even listening anymore. "Can she take the Pinto, Mary?"
"Oh, sure," Mary said in a breathy voice. She was looking at yesterday's Parade magazine but didn't appear to be focused on anything in particular. She held a glass full of ice cubes. The glass had big yellow flowers on it.
"Yes!" Kathy did a little dance around the room before her father informed her that she needed to run some errands for him. And drop Brenda off at Mark's. And he wanted to know where she was going and when she was going to be where.
"Relax, Dad. I'm a new driver. I'll just be practicing, really." Kathy seemed to give her dad some reassurance with this statement, but she wasn't sure why. She didn't care either. She just wanted to be out there. Pedal to the metal.
"Don't get in an accident on your first day!" Brenda said snottily as she climbed out of the car and started walking toward Mark's house. Mark came outside and the two immediately started swapping spit. Mark put his hands in the back pockets of Brenda's jeans. Kathy stared for a little while before realizing that she didn't have to. She was mobile. Free to roam.
At first she just drove up and down McHenry with the windows rolled down so she could feel the wind in her hair. She listened to the radio until the third time KFIV played "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," then she shut it off. She just couldn't take it anymore.
She took the little money she had and drove over to Dairy Queen. Kathy had always thought their Brazier food smelled so good, but she'd never tasted it before. Every time she'd gone with her family, her father insisted they were "there for dessert," and would only let her order ice cream. Kathy ordered a hamburger and onion rings. She loved the taste of the greasy deep fried batter. She ate it in the Pinto in the parking lot, too embarrassed to be seen eating alone. But she was enjoying her solitude. It seemed like the first time she had known real freedom. No one ordering her anywhere—every destination was determined by her. She gazed absent-mindedly at the intersection of Fourteenth and H Streets, where she had seen the ambulance earlier. She wondered if it had gotten where it was going in time. Had a child been hurt in a car accident? Or had an old man suffered a stroke getting out of the tub? She would likely never know.
Kathy drove back to Downey to see if anyone was hanging around. It was a ghost town. She drove some figure eights in the large parking lot and thought about how she was foolish to think anyone would be here. School was set to start in less than a month. Kids were going to be as far from there as possible.
Kathy wasn't sure why she didn't immediately pick up Andrea and Kevin at the beginning of her drive. Being by herself felt more liberating, but she soon grew lonely and pointed the Pinto toward the big box of screaming that was Andrea's home. Andrea's little brothers were playing cowboys and Indians in the front yard. The youngest one had a dirty blue jay feather taped to the back of his head.
Kathy honked her horn three times and soon Andrea was standing on her front porch, giving Kathy the round of applause she had thought she deserved at home. Andrea jogged over to the bright yellow car and hopped into the passenger seat next to Kathy.
"This is amazing. I knew you could do it," Andrea wrapped her arms around Kathy's neck. Kathy was the first of their friend group to get her license, so this wasn't just a big deal for Kathy. It meant they were all mobile, so long as Kathy was game. The world had become a lot bigger overnight.
The two girls drove over to Kevin's house, where Andrea forced the six-foot-two fifteen-year-old to climb over the the front seat and squeeze into the tiny seat behind his friends. Kathy could feel his knees pressing hard against the back of her seat.
"Where do you guys want to go?" Kathy asked her friends. Both of them responded with a shrug.
"Ooh, we should go do donuts on the Downey football field," Kevin suggested.
"No! I'm not doing anything we're going to get arrested for. Especially in broad daylight." Kathy thought for a moment. "What about going over to the bridge? I mean, this seems like the safest time of day to do it, right?"
"The Seventh Street Bridge? Kathy, What the hell? A few months ago you were the one scolding me for getting too obsessed. Now it's like all you think about." Andrea rested her feet on the dashboard. "What are we even going to find there anyway? The cops have scoured the area."
"Well, it's my birthday. And I'm the one in control of the vehicle, so...."
"I think we're headed for the bridge, Andrea," Kevin said with raised eyebrows and a smirk.
Andrea didn't put up much of a fight after that. Kathy knew it was because deep down, Andrea was just as curious and obsessed as her.
They didn't approach the bridge from Seventh Street. That would have been too obvious. Kathy took a side road and parked the Pinto in the parking lot near the picnic tables by the north side of the river, where they could walk over and approach the bridge from beneath.
It seemed so normal in the light of day. Not even creepy.  Just a bunch of litter caught in a small forest of cattails. Soda bottles. Cigarette packs. Strands of clothesline. Why didn't the cops take this stuff? Couldn't it be connected to the murder? Or was this all litter that had accumulated since they moved Nancy's body?
The longer they stayed in the hot shade of the bridge, surrounded by all that meaningless refuse, the more an unpleasant, degraded mood fell over the group. It felt a little like hanging out in the restroom of a bus station. "Let's go look at the lions," Kevin suggested.
The three hiked up a narrow, weedy path from the riverside and approached the lions face on after making a sharp left. The bridge was relatively busy. Cars zoomed up and down Seventh Street like it was the Autobahn. Kathy felt more unsettled at the top of the bridge than she had in the area below, even though she knew the victims were found beneath. The lions were crouched like sphinxes on the big cement blocks that terminated the railings on either side of the bridge. Kathy approached the one on the right side of the road and stared into its face. It was deformed. Jagged. Like something had taken a bite out of it before it started to crumble. How could anything take a bite out of a lion? Especially a lion made of stone. Its broken mouth was open in a permanent snarl, and the missing pieces gave it a beak-like appearance from a certain angle.
"There's nothing here, you guys. This is pointless," Andrea complained.
"What would you rather do, Andrea?" Kevin asked from atop the lion, which he was now straddling like one of those coin-operated rides at the supermarket.
"I don't know, but this is just morbid and boring. There's nothing here. The cops took all the crime-related stuff away." She turned around and started heading back down the river road towards the trailer park. Back the way they came. Kevin and Kathy soon followed after looking at each other and shrugging in acquiescence. Andrea was right.
After taking her friends for a quick ice cream cone at Swensen's, she dropped them both off back at home, knowing her parents had additional birthday plans. She felt a little grimy from being under the bridge, but overall this had been a great day. She had never felt so free before. She could go wherever she wanted, do whatever she wanted, without the watchful eye of a parent. This was big.
***
After killing three young ladies in the Modesto area in the past year, the "Lion Bridge Killer," as police have dubbed him, has sent the city of Modesto into a frenzy. Citizens have no doubt noticed an increased police presence, especially in areas of town frequented by young women. This offender has sent this sunny central California town into a state of paranoia, with parents rarely letting their daughters out of arm's reach.
Police released new information Monday after an "onslaught of rumors were getting out of control," according to officer David Howard. The public has been terrorized for the past couple of weeks by rumors that the killer had removed the eyes of of his victims.
"The eyes were indeed removed. We're not sure how the information got out. We wanted to protect the public from this kind of brutality. We were also hoping we could use it as a detail that only the killer would know. But the cat's out of the bag now," Detective Robert Sorenson told the Modesto Bee on Monday. Sorenson hopes that coming clean with the public will discourage additional rumors.
Karen Rose Murray, Diane Vergara, and Nancy Dunn were all teenagers from the Modesto area who were found slain beneath the bridge in the last year. The families of the victims along with the city of Modesto are offering a $1500 reward for any information leading to the capture of the Lion Bridge Killer.
***
"Did you read this article in the Bee today?" Kathy whispered into the telephone receiver that she had again pulled all the way into her bedroom closet.
"No, did something happen?" Andrea asked.
"Well, the police are confirming that the victims' eyeballs were removed. Did you tell anybody that I told you that?"
Andrea was silent for a few seconds. "Well, yeah. I mean, I guess I didn't realize it was a secret. I told Jimmy. Are we supposed to be keeping secrets from him? I also told Barb McKenna. She said she was going to hitchhike to the Bay and I wanted to scare her out of it."
Kathy's heart began racing. "Jesus, Andrea. What exactly did you say?"
"Just that their eyes were cut out. What else would I say?"
"You didn't tell them how you found that information out?"
"No," said Andrea, irritation rising in her voice. "What is your problem? What does it matter?"
Kathy held the phone between her knees for a second as she caught her breath. Andrea obviously didn't understand that what she was doing could create trouble for Uncle Al. "Just don't tell anybody about Al's scrapbook. It doesn't mean anything. He's not the killer and I don't want people thinking he is."
"Kath, I'm looking at the paper here, and the cops say it was something only the killer would have known. Why would your uncle have notes about it? What if he is the killer and you're trying to protect him?"
"He's not! I saw the killer!"
"Oh my god." Andrea couldn't have sounded more exasperated.
Kathy was fixing her eyes on her old yellow rubber raincoat that hung by a loop on the back of its neck from a hook on the opposite end of the closet. With its open hood facing her, its sleeves hanging stiffly at its sides, and the boots that matched it facing out from the wall beneath, it looked like a person without a body imploring her. "Just try not to be such a blabbermouth, Andrea, please? I'm thinking he actually might be working with the police or something. I think he had all sorts of notes pasted in there. Some of them were police phone numbers, I think. Just give me a chance to figure things out."
"Kathy, I love you. Please don't be stupid."
"I love you. And you need also to not be stupid." Kathy couldn't help but feel stupid having worded it that way. "Just try to relax and let me deal with my own family right now, okay? I'll definitely let you know if I really think something isn't right."
"You promise?"
"You know I do." She caught herself holding three fingers up in the Girl Scout promise gesture, though no one was there to see it but her raincoat—a faceless, eyeless hood of darkness staring back at her.
***
In Kathy's dream that night, she became aware that the dark was a substance like air or water, and that it took the form of a dry sea atop which she was always drifting as though on a raft. She could see clearly the line that marked its surface. It was level with the bottom of her bedroom window, with the top of her bed. It rendered her walls transparent so she could see it stretching out in all directions for an eternity, a black ocean. Out of the dark a shape gathered and approached her supine body. It was the beak-faced lion from the bridge. It was concrete still, but supple and breathing. Kathy could feel its cold breath on her like a draft from a cellar. It had come to her of its own will, she understood. It floated above her, resting its weight on her frame just enough to make her feel the awfulness of its mass. She could not move at all. The lion's eyes were empty holes, but they looked at her. She felt terrified in a quiet, muffled way that was hard to tell from calm. Something ancient and terrible was commanding her submission, and it was so elemental, so powerful, that the question of whether it was friendly or meant her harm was irrelevant. It had the inhuman neutrality of an angel. Maybe it was an angel. Of death? This too seemed beside the point. In this sea of dark, life and death were all the same.
As the lion crouched atop her, she felt its breath merge with her own. It had a voice, she realized, soft and loud at once, neither animal nor human. The voice was addressed to her, but she was not just herself; she was also all the dead girls from under the bridge, maybe all the dead girls who had ever been. The voice was somehow part of the weight that was crushing her. It was both urgent and impassive. Was a response required from her? Was a response even possible?
She felt that if she could align the lion's voice with its face, things would fall into balance. But its face was an absence. It was a window into a deep, lonely space. Did the voice come from there? She could hear the shapes of meanings, but no words. She looked deeper into the lion's non-mouth. She had to look. The weight was insufferable. Her body was being pushed down into all the dead spaces of a million years. She tried to shut her eyes, but knew they were already shut and it made no difference. She defied the dark and stared at the lion as hard as she could. It had a face after all. It was the face of Diane Vergara, smiling. Then it was Brenda's. Then it was her own face, screaming silently, and then she heard herself screaming aloud, as she sat upright, drenched in sweat. Through her bedroom window, two pale streetlamps shone.
She lay back down, panting, and closed her eyes again. She knew if she opened them too soon, she would still see the lion crouching above her.
***
Something happened in August that sent the city of Modesto into yet another frenzy. Not a frenzy of panic over dead girls with missing eyeballs like in late July; no, this was the kind of excitement that comes when somebody hits the big time. Like when your next door neighbor grows up to be Marilyn Monroe.
George Lucas, born and raised in Modesto and an alumnus of Downey High, had made a film about his little town that made the world go crazy. Everyone was obsessed. American Graffiti took place in Modesto in 1962, and it was almost as if the town tried to revert back to that year after the movie came out. Back to the swinging sixties when there was no madman on the loose.
Kathy had a hard time getting into the movie. It was all just cars. Pretty shiny cars, but cars all the same. The only part that really caught her attention was the part where two of the characters were out in the woods and started talking about the "Goat Killer," a maniac who supposedly dismembered his victims and switched their body parts around. Kathy began magically to pay attention during that part. She heard every word. For the rest of the movie she mostly stared and couldn't believe all the young girls getting into cars with men they didn't know. She hoped that didn't catch on again, if what she was seeing in the movie was how it really happened.
Big cultural changes were like a smack in the face as soon as the film came out. For one thing, you couldn't go anywhere without hearing "At the Hop." And Kathy quickly learned that she couldn't drive down any of the big streets with her windows rolled down anymore without guys in other cars—some of them even wearing leather jackets—calling her "baby" and revving their engines.
It bothered Kathy a little that everyone in town seemed to cling to the movie so tightly. It seemed almost as if this was their way out, a way to stop focusing on the murders and go back to being a perfect little central California town obsessed with bitchin' hot rods and cruising and drive-in waitresses on roller skates. It helped them forget.
As the beginning of school grew closer, Kathy spent more and more time on the road. Usually in the Pinto, which was essentially her car now, as her mother was practically bedridden all summer. Kathy didn't know what was wrong or if she should be worried. This was just always the way her mother had been. Distant. Sickly. Aloof.
At least it gave Kathy the chance to have her foot glued to the gas pedal for nearly the entire month of August. At first she just stayed in town. She explored streets that were too far to reach from her house on foot. She took her friends to the drive-in on a regular basis, and after a while the Pinto's interior took on the permanent smell of popcorn. One night they went to a second-run showing of Last House on the Left, and that was a mistake. The ad in the paper was a little black box with white letters that read:
TO AVOID
FAINTING,
KEEP REPEATING,
IT'S ONLY A MOVIE
...ONLY A MOVIE
...ONLY A MOVIE
...ONLY A MOVIE
...ONLY A MOVIE
...ONLY A MOVIE
...ONLY A MOVIE
But it wasn't only a movie. The girls in the film were just like the real murdered girls, and their horrible deaths loomed over all the parked cars in full color, their blood-drenched nude bodies four stories high. Kevin had started to whine as Kathy started the car and peeled out of the lot, but he gave up protesting pretty quickly. She and Andrea weren't having it.
After Kathy got more comfortable behind the wheel, she started venturing out of town, heading toward Turlock or Oakdale and back. It felt right to be moving. To be moving fast. To be moving fast in a little metal box where no one else could touch her unless invited in.
The week before school started, Kathy felt particularly listless. She never wanted to be home. She never wanted to be anywhere. Only between places. She thought obsessively about how she could get back into her uncle's house by herself to peek at the rest of the pages of his scrapbook. It was pretty fat. What else was in there? Kathy considered just asking Al about it, but doing that would reveal that she was snooping in his private things. She didn't know how he would react, and not knowing scared her for some reason, though she remained firm in her belief that her uncle wasn't involved in the crimes.
After dropping Brenda off at Swensen's on Thursday, Kathy got on Highway 99 heading north, not really sure where she was going. She passed Salida and Manteca and suddenly she was halfway to Stockton, where she knew she would head straight for the county library.
Kathy got lost for nearly a half hour after failing to exit 99 at the right place. By the time she made it to the center of town, the sun was in the middle of the sky, beating down and burning her through her car windows.
"I'm looking for recent issues of the Record? From the last year or so?" Kathy followed the librarian into a section filled with periodicals.
"In here," the librarian said. She opened a small closet filled with stacks of newspapers. It was dark. The librarian reached up and pulled a chain that hung from the ceiling and a dull, flickering light bulb slowly began to burn.
After thanking the elderly woman, Kathy realized that her job was going to be more difficult than she had anticipated. Many of the papers were out of chronological order, like someone had just shoved them there any old way. Kathy was lucky to find a small stack from April that was ordered consecutively. It only took her a few minutes to find the article about Sarah Beckmann she'd seen at her uncle's.
Sarah was pretty. She looked like Brenda, in a superficial way. A Marcia Brady. Kathy had much more time to read and stare at the words in the article than she did when she was snooping. "Raped." That wasn't a word she saw in any of the Modesto Bee articles. They didn't even report the girls being found naked, except for Karen. Were the Modesto girls raped like Sarah? Kathy felt as if there was no way she could ever know. She didn't even know why she wanted to know, but it made her feel sick that she didn't.
"Naked and posed" was a note she had seen several times in her uncle's scrapbook, and it certainly described the way the article said they found Sarah. Ankles crossed. Arms crossed and resting atop her chest. Kathy wet the tip of her finger with saliva and traced the article, stopping every once and a while to add more spit. Once a dark grey rectangle bordered the article, Kathy ripped it from the rest of the paper gently, making sure not to tear any of the text. When she was finished she folded the article into quarters and stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans.
Kathy went through a few more issues of the paper. It was incredibly boring. Nothing ever seemed to happen in Stockton, so many of the pages she pored over were filled with information she found completely useless. "Woman Complains about Tree" was one that actually made her laugh out loud, prompting the librarian to shush her from the main room.
Then Kathy picked up a paper from early June. A picture of a young girl was on the cover with a headline that read "No Sign of High School Student After Three Day Search." She read the article carefully. Susan Erickson never came home from her field hockey practice at the field behind her school, just 100 yards from her home. Susan looked like Brenda too. Stick-straight blond hair with striking eyes. Kathy tried to find any updates about Susan in the messy piles surrounding her, but she came up empty. She eventually decided to go further back, see if she could find anything interesting from the beginning of the year. In an issue from March she found an article about a girl who had "barely escaped her rapist." Kathy almost tore that one out too, but something inside told her the dead were the ones that needed her attention.
Then Kathy's heart nearly stopped. October 28, 1972. Mary Louise Preacher was found naked and posed beneath the Gaunless Bridge in Stockton. She had been raped and her clothes were folded into a neat stack beside her body. This had to be the same guy. Kathy was sure of it. It seemed so distinctive. Were the Stockton Police and the Modesto Police working together to find this guy? Did they even know they should be?
Self-conscious about the way her bottom looked with so many newspaper articles shoved in the back of her jeans, Kathy pasted a smile on her face and headed for the exit of the library, back toward the wall. She felt paranoid, but nobody seemed to be paying attention. What would happen anyway? It was just newspaper after all.
On her way back to Modesto she felt confident about one thing: that her uncle was not the killer. That he was trying to help, to point out that this madman was striking everywhere. The same thing she was going to try to do. She needed to talk to Al. She wasn't afraid anymore. She was armed with information and she felt certain that they shared the same goal.
Karen, Sarah, Nancy, Diane, Mary—their names swam in Kathy's brain. Every once in a while Carrie, the thirteen-year-old killed in the robbery, or Susan, the missing girl, would pop into her head. Even the girls from the movie at the drive-in. She couldn't take anymore. Dead girls everywhere. Was she to be a dead girl someday too? She didn't want that. She wanted to die a woman.

The night before Kevin's brother Jimmy left for UC Davis, he was given permission to host a party at their home. Not a party, a get-together. Just a small gathering with a few of his closest friends while his mother visited her sister in San Jose for the weekend. Just appetizers, stimulating conversation, and party games in a quiet, safe environment.
That's not what happened, though. By eight o'clock there must have been seventy people at the Lang house, spilling into the backyard and driveway. Kathy, Jimmy, and Andrea had been hanging out in the living room since mid-afternoon. When Kathy looked up now it was like she was in a different house from the one she had entered earlier. The regular lights had been replaced by candles and lava lamps and, in the kitchen, a frantically pulsing strobe. The air was thick with tobacco and pot smoke. Everything seemed darkly adult and unfamiliar in one of the most familiar places in her life.
One of the conditions on which Jimmy's parents allowed him to have the party was that he would be responsible for Kevin, and Kevin used what little sway he had to convince Jimmy to let Kathy and Andrea be there as well. It probably didn't take much convincing, Kathy figured: two extra teenaged girls were undoubtedly a draw for Jimmy's male-heavy friend group. Still, Kevin and the girls were the youngest guests, the rest comprising a combination of Jimmy's recently graduated cohort from Downey and some of their older friends who were already going to MJC. Kathy couldn't remember the last time she and Brenda had been at the same party. She felt grown up and vulnerable all at once. There was nobody to babysit her here—certainly not Brenda, who was treating her like a stranger, like she was a dweeby infant who could only embarrass her. On the other hand, it wasn't like she and Mark ever came up for air long enough for them to actually interact with anyone besides each other. They were glued at the tonsils in a huge beanbag chair in the darkest corner of the living room.
Acid rock was thundering from the stereo. Andrea picked up the album cover, which had an illustration of a nude woman posed in a symmetrical design, arms outstretched, with what looked like liquid lightning spurting from her fingertips. She scrunched up her nose. "What the hell is Hawkwind? Kevin, you should put Elton John on," she ordered.
"Nope. Jimmy said we're not allowed to touch the stereo."
"Who cares? This stuff is ridiculous." Andrea made a move to lift the needle on the record, but jumped as Jimmy himself crept up behind her and grabbed her arm by the elbow.
"My party, my music," he told her sternly. He looked at her like he might actually hit her. Andrea backed down immediately. Kathy couldn't quite read the emotion on her face: embarrassment? indignation? Whatever it was, it wasn't the same enamored expression she usually wore in Jimmy's presence.
The space rock continued to drone. Kathy stood up and headed for the bathroom, where she was dismayed to see about six people waiting their turn outside the door. She queued up, though it was usually her policy never to wait in line to use the restroom. She had no other choice.
The man in line in front of her turned around to face her. He must have been at least fifteen years older than anyone else at the party. His hair was long and blond and he was wearing sunglasses inside.
"Hey little mama, you need to cut in front of me? Having lady issues?"
"Thank you." Kathy wasn't having lady issues, but she wasn't going to pass up a chance to get to the bathroom faster.
"You wanna know how I could tell?"
"What?"
"It's because your nipples are all pointy. I bet they're red too. If you don't want people to see, you should wear a bra, honeycakes."
Kathy got out of line immediately and tried to find her friends as fast as possible. Who the hell invited that guy? Did everyone just agree that he was welcome? She felt a dull pain in her stomach. Did the killer ever crash parties like this?
She tracked Andrea and Kevin down and they decided to move to Kevin's bedroom, where they thought they might be able to take a breather from the older partygoers for a few minutes. The doofus that spilled beer all over the carpet at the beginning of the party had really polluted the environment. The house reeked, though at this point you couldn't tell if the beer smell was coming from the carpet or from people's pores.
"Whoops!" Kevin opened and shut his bedroom door in one motion.
"What?" Andrea asked, annoyed.
"People are in there."
"What are you talking about? What people?" Kathy opened the door to see a pair of white buttocks lying on top of a sexy pair of legs with painted toenails on the bed. She shut the door almost as quickly as Kevin did. "Okay. Different plan. Back to the living room?"
The three walked back to where they had been sitting for hours before the party began. To the place where they always hung out at the Langs. Kathy settled into her spot on the floor. She liked the way the green shag carpet complemented the color of her blue jeans.
"Ooh, I know! We should get Kathy stoned!" Andrea acted as if she had just had the greatest idea in human history. They had tried to do this before, but Kathy had always refused to let her guard down. "What do you say?"
"Fine." Kathy was surprised as the word came out of her mouth.
Andrea ran into the kitchen and came running back with a small, poorly rolled joint in her hand. She practically shoved it into Kathy's mouth as she sat down.
"Okay, I'll light it. All you have to do is take in the smoke and hold it a few seconds before letting it out."
Kathy finished coughing about five minutes after inhaling the smoke. Her esophagus burned like she had swallowed molten lava. She sat for a few minutes and tried to feel. She observed the sensations in different parts of her body, scanning it from head to toe. "I don't think it's doing anything," she finally said.
"It will," Andrea answered in a sage tone.
Apparently some of the other partiers had decided that the music was too noisy. Kathy could see Jimmy trying not to sulk as his friend Wolfe picked up a new album, slid the record reverently out of its sleeve, and placed it on the turntable. He positioned the needle carefully, as though he were a surgeon preparing to incise his patient, and the roar of Hawkwind was replaced by contemplative acoustic guitar, twangling gently in an almost Indian way. Kathy recognized the singer's voice as the melody began: Van Morrison. She didn't know this song, though. He was singing something about love and tears and water, and then he was just making soft growling sounds, and then repeating the same phrase over and over: listen to the lion. A shiver went down her back, but there was also something warm and calming in the music. The candlelight flickered on the walls in perfect rhythm, and the lava in the lava lamp by the stereo undulated like a belly dancer. Andrea and Kevin were talking to each other, but she couldn't hear anything other than the song. She wasn't sure exactly when it started seeming to her like it had been on for hours. It sounded like it was coming from under the earth, out of a well that had so much beauty and sadness in it that it could never be emptied. Had it been playing forever, and she just hadn't been able to hear? What if it stopped? She realized at one point that she was crying.
and we sailed and we sailed
all the way from Denmark
all the way to Caledonia
"Oh my god." Andrea's voice was stunned and delighted, as though she had found a little bag of gold coins in her path. "Kathy, you are stoned!"
***
A while later, when the party was winding down, Kathy slipped out quietly to the backyard to get some fresh air. She was still buzzed, but a little more aware of her surroundings. At first she thought she was the only one out there, but then she saw a group of guys talking and smoking in the shadows under the fig tree in the far corner. She identified one of them as the creep from the line to the bathroom. He was laughing and swigging beer from a longneck bottle as he spoke to the others. He made big gestures with his arms, like he was describing a fish he had caught. The other guys mostly stood silently, either out of respect, she thought, or because they were drunk, or they were wondering who had invited this burn-out. The dynamic changed in an instant, and the creep was clutching one of the other guys' shirtfront. The guy waggled his hands close together in front of him in meek deference, saying "no way, man, no way, not me, brother!" The creep laughed and let him go, and everything went back to how it had been, just like that. They continued to stand there amid the stench of the rotten figs that covered the grass. Then Kathy saw the creep's head turn directly toward her, saw his smile go broad and fierce, one gold incisor glinting. He raised first one hand, then the other, and pointed them at her chest from across the lawn, making trigger-pulling motions. "Little mama! Let it all hang out." The other guys looked at her and said nothing.
***
Mary Aukerman glided down the hallway like a ghost in her white nightgown toward Kathy's open bedroom door, holding a Virginia Slim in one hand and a TV Guide in the other. Her eyes were sleepy, unfocused. She leaned her head in the doorway and asked Kathy, who though it was late in the morning had only just woken up a few minutes before, if she would go to the store to get some things for dinner. She didn't appear to notice that Kathy was nearly as out of it as she was. She was just glad she now had someone who loved to drive so much she never had to run an errand again.
Despite feeling trashed after last night's party, Kathy needed little prodding. Any chance to use the Pinto was welcome. She started heading to the supermarket, but then considered that it was only a quarter till noon, and her mother wasn't going to need the groceries for a few hours yet, so she decided just to drive up and down McHenry for a while. The main drag, she thought to herself. Even in the bright light of of a late Sunday morning, the street seemed still to vibrate with the energy of the previous night's parade of crazed revelers.
Every weekend night, the mature and reasonable residents of Modesto knew to stay off McHenry if at all possible, as it was then the domain of the cruisers, with their manes of greasy hair and their bulging arms dangling out the sides of their muscle cars, sometimes brazenly holding—or tossing—open containers of alcohol. The ritual was unstoppable. Their thudding 8-tracks played Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath and, with aggressive vigor in the past few months, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sometimes you would see squirming girls being physically transferred from the window of one moving car to another. And all the while, drowning out the stereos and  revving motors, came the shouts and hoots and howls of the young men, calling to other cars and to people on the side of the road.
Kathy hated the whole spectacle, but the screaming most of all. It was a naked display of power, fueled by a mixture of lust and rage. If you were male, having it directed at you meant that you were being shown your zeta place at the bottom of the animal hierarchy of the strip, and that you should stay there if you didn't want your ass kicked (though you would often get it kicked no matter what); if you were female, it simply meant that you were prey. Kathy didn't understand why so many girls seemed fine with that.
In the day, however, the buzzing of the thoroughfare was tonic to Kathy. She loved the wideness of it, the stores full of fast food and waterbeds and electric guitars. Most of all, she loved being a driver among other drivers, part of the purring flow of traffic. Occasionally she would see a neighbor or teacher or family friend driving next to her, and take a modest but satisfying pleasure in waving and smiling, as if to say, now I am a citizen like you with the full rights and privileges thereto attaining. And just now, at the corner of McHenry and Morris, out of her peripheral vision, she spotted a familiar chassis one car ahead of her on the right waiting for the light to change, and she prepared herself for the possibility of just such a gratifying moment. But her anticipation curdled into a sick rush of adrenaline as she saw that it was a brown Mercury Monterey.
Almost as soon as she saw it, the light changed, and it was lunging ahead, so she couldn't see the driver clearly—just a brief glimpse of blond hair. She switched lanes to be two cars behind it once she was clear of the intersection. Her insides were screaming for her to stop, but Kathy felt the urge, no, the need, to follow the brown car. She didn't know what good could come of it. She just needed to see where he was going. Make sure he wasn't on his way to do it again.
She followed the car down McHenry past Morris and Stoddard and Minnie's Polynesian bar and restaurant, hesitated when it turned left onto Scenic, but eventually turned herself, finding herself right behind the Monterey's bumper as her buffer vehicle had continued onto Johnson. She still couldn't see well enough through the back of the car to get a good look at the driver. The car eventually turned left on Coffee, like it was headed to Downey High. Kathy felt certain this had to be him. He had to be on the hunt. Why would he be driving around the high school?
The Mercury turned right on Locke Road before getting to the high school, and Kathy turned right along with it. Soon, it began to slow. The turn signal started to blink. The car pulled into a driveway and a middle-aged woman climbed out of the driver's seat and walked around to hoist a chubby toddler up out of the back seat.
Kathy drove away as fast as she could, panting, her body limp.
***
Something made her head straight to her uncle's apartment. She tripped and nearly fell between the wobbly slat steps that led to his front door. She knocked gingerly with the tips of her knuckles, but after a few minutes with no response she began to beat on the door with the side of her fist. Still nothing. She kicked the bottom out of frustration and it made her big toe throb. She sat on the steps and cradled her face in her hands.
What was she expecting to get out of this interaction? She was so nervous she nearly puked over the side of the railing, but then found that resting her head on the cool metal soothed her stomach.
"Kathy?" Her uncle opened the door in his pajamas. "What are you doing here? Where's your dad?"
"It's just me."
"Oh, okay. Um, c'mon in, hon." It was like she had woken him from winter hibernation. Like he was so far from consciousness when she arrived that he was still having a hard time finding his way back to reality. His blond curls were unruly and he didn't smell pleasant, but she didn't let that distract her.
She walked over to the bookcase and reached behind the scrapbooks up front to find the album that was on her mind. "Girls," she read on the cover. This was the right one. She walked over to Al's sorry excuse for a dining table and slammed it down in front of him. She raised her eyebrows at him and lifted her hands in a questioning motion without saying anything.
"You snooped around when we left you here to go to Fast Eddie's. I knew it. Did you take some of my weed?" he added with a raised eyebrow of his own. "I knew I hadn't smoked that much."
"No! Jeez." Kathy felt irritated. "But yes, I did snoop around, and I'm sorry. I have to ask you about this. This... this is weird, Al."
Al was silent for a while. It made her nervous. She wanted to look away, but she forced herself to keep meeting her uncle's stare. He wasn't getting out of this.
"Kathy, I've always been interested in investigative work. Frankly, the police in this town aren't cut out for what we're up against. They don't understand a lot of things. This is a collection of things I hope will help them understand."
Kathy rested her elbows on the table and covered her face with both hands. She tried to take a deep breath, but couldn't draw much oxygen through the tiny cracks in her fingers. She looked up to find her uncle going through his own scrapbook, looking at the handwritten notes he'd pasted in there himself. "How did you know that stuff?," she asked. "You know, about the eyes?"
"My old high school buddy Dave Howard is on the force. He doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut. Well, sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't. It's unpredictable and it actually pisses me off most of the time." Al stared straight ahead as though he had forgotten he was having a conversation with someone other than himself.
Kathy sat in silence. She already knew that Al and Officer Dave were friends, so that made sense. She debated whether she should tell her uncle about her interaction with the killer. Was that even the killer? She felt too unsure to bring it up.
"What about the girls in Stockton?" She asked.
"What about the girls in Fresno? Or Sacramento? The police in different counties don't know how to communicate with each other. And it kind of seems like they don't want to."
"Fresno? Sacramento? What are you talking about?"
"Did you not look through this whole thing?"
"Well, you guys came home, so...."
She reached for the album but her uncle pulled it out of her grasp.
"I don't think you need to fill your head with all of this, Kath. You should find something else to occupy your mind. I mean, keep paying attention enough to stay safe, but...." Al got up and returned the album to its place on the bottom shelf of his bookcase.
"Al, please." Her pleading was ineffective. She began to feel unwelcome, but Al's tone softened after he walked to the kitchen sink and splashed his face with water.
"You want me to give you a lift home?" he asked, shooing her from the apartment.
"I have the Pinto," she explained on her way out the door.
She didn't know if she felt better or worse than when she arrived. Her uncle seemed to be hiding things, though she still felt pretty certain it wasn't anything sinister. As she climbed into the driver's seat, she decided she should go to Fresno as soon as possible. Tomorrow. If Al was right and the police weren't working together, she didn't see how they could possibly catch a madman who was always on the run.
***
Kathy got home just in time to see a tall thin man exiting her front door. He was well dressed and very polite. He smiled and tipped an invisible hat to Kathy as she passed him on the walkway. She thought she had seen him somewhere, but couldn't put her finger on it.
In the kitchen, Ken was sitting on a barstool, reading Variety.
"Who was that leaving just now?"
"My buddy Colin. You've met him. He teaches film at JC."
Kathy couldn't remember meeting him. Maybe her father was getting her confused with her sister. Though he did look familiar.
Ken was more chipper than usual this afternoon. He asked Kathy if it was okay if he put on the West Side Story soundtrack and she said yes. They were the only two people home. Soon they were dancing together to all the songs. Ken loved that movie. He knew all the words, all the steps. He was a Jet all the way.
***
When Kathy was through dancing, she went upstairs and sat at the desk in her bedroom and pulled out a sheet of the canary yellow stationery her grandmother had given her last Christmas. She started writing names and dates.
Modesto
Karen Rose Murray (November 26, 1972)
Diane Vergara (January 22, 1973)
Nancy Dunn, (June 3, 1973)
Stockton
Louise Preacher, (October 23, 1972)
Sarah Beckmann, (April 13, 1973)
Susan Erickson (Missing?)
***
The first day of school was a bummer. Kathy mostly stared at her feet as she walked along the hallway to her locker and from class to class. The floor was dirty already. It had to have been spotless all summer, but the minute the doors were opened to teenagers, the place became a garbage dump.
Kevin and Andrea acted like they were still hung over from Saturday's party. Kevin couldn't keep his eyes open during English, and his nodding was contagious. Mr. Benet's monotone voice could lull even the worst insomniac into a peaceful slumber. He didn't seem to mind. He was a robot going through the motions, teaching whether anyone was listening or not.
Girls weren't parading around in their bras and panties getting ready for gym class like they had in previous years. Everyone was a little more modest and reserved, which confused Kathy. It wasn't like the killer was peeping at them in the locker room, right? All the same, the girls acted as though they felt like they needed to hide their bodies because they couldn't escape the feeling they were on display.
Kathy got picked last for volleyball. She didn't understand why. Not that she cared: someone had to be last, right? Better her than some poor soul who would go home and sob into her pillow over it. She got to be the setter, which was her favorite position. She loved throwing the ball high in the air and smacking her fist against it as hard as she could. It was like punching someone. She would think of people she hated. The harder she hit, the better.
She showered, but still thought she smelled funny for the rest of the day. She had science last period, and somehow she had ended up in Gilligan's class again this year. At least her B.O. didn't bother her much during that hour; everyone's nostrils were filled with the strong, stomach-turning smell of science education.
After the last bell rang for the day she met up with Kevin and Andrea in the courtyard, where they always met to hang out or say goodbye and get on their separate busses.
"Oh my god, we have no classes together," Andrea complained. "What a drag."
"Well, Kevin and I have English together." Kathy said, looking on the bright side.
"But I just get to be alone all day," Andrea whined and made a sour face like she had chugged a quart of lemon juice.
"Do you guys have any homework?" Kevin asked.
"Just that 'about me' essay for English. And I have to read a chapter for science." Kathy knew Kevin was about to ask if they wanted to study at his place, but she wanted to be alone. On the road. She didn't want to read about atoms in a cramped room that still smelled of beer. "My bus is going to leave," she said. "My mom needs me home as soon as possible. I'll see you guys tomorrow." Good. She didn't have to say no if she escaped before they could ask her to do anything.
The bus was already moving as Kathy approached it. She had to run and wave her arms over her head to get the driver to stop.
"Please try to be on time, miss." The burly driver's words were polite but his tone was unfriendly, scolding. Kathy apologized and made her way down the sticky middle aisle. She found a seat near Brian Jenkins, whose hair was curlier than she remembered. He wore a paisley button-down shirt with a large collar and blue corduroy bell bottoms. She recognized the outfit as one she had seen on a mannequin at Penney's. Brian scooted towards the window as she sat down. Uh oh. Her body odor was bothering other people too. She pressed her arms as close to her sides as possible, trying to create a barrier between her stink and the outside world. She didn't know if it helped.
She focused on her smell for so long, she almost didn't notice that the bus was not on the familiar route it had taken every day last year. They were on Roseburg, crossing McHenry, headed straight for Davis High territory.
After a few twists and turns she looked out to see that they were parked in front of a little brown modest ranch house with a perfect front lawn. A slight girl with long dark hair bumped her elbow as she walked down the aisle to get out. She didn't quite look her in the eye when she apologized. Kathy caught a whiff of green apple off her. Gum? Hard candy? Kathy had always hated that smell, but it was better than her own B.O., maybe. She watched out the window as the girl ran for her front door. A lawn sprinkler made a wet spot on one leg of her blue Dittos. Kathy kept staring as she unlocked her front door and went in. Why would the bus come over here? Who was this girl? What made her so special that the school board would change its zoning just for her?
***
The next day at lunch Andrea tossed tater tots at Kathy until she stopped staring across the room at the new girl. Kathy had noticed during second period that the girl was in her math class, but she failed to catch her name.
"What is your problem?" Andrea finally said. "Is there a guy over there you like? Oh my god, are you staring at David Johnson?"
"God, no." Kathy almost pushed Andrea off her stool. "Do you guys know anything about that new girl? With the brown hair?"
"I was wondering about her too," Andrea added.
"That's Annette Vergara," Kevin whispered for some reason.
Andrea and Kathy stared at him across the table, trying to process what he had said.
"Vergara?" Kathy asked.  Kevin responded with a big cartoonish nod. Kathy's internal organs fell out onto the floor. Luckily she was able to pick them up and put them back into place before anyone noticed. "Do you know anything else?"
"Not really. I just heard that her parents thought Davis would be too much for now. All of Diane's friends and whatnot," Kevin said as he shoveled apple sauce into his mouth.
"That makes sense," Andrea said, stacking her empty tray on top of Kathy's.
"Hey, did you ever read anything in that criminal psychology book you checked out back at the beginning of the summer?" Kathy didn't know what brought it to mind.
Andrea laughed. "I actually forgot about it and got a late fee. My parents were pissed."
Kathy only nodded, continuing to stare at Annette until Andrea lifted her up off her seat  by the elbow so she could no longer see.
***
On Saturday Kathy woke her mother early to ask if she could take the car. She had plans that involved a lot of driving and a lot of newspaper. Permission was granted, naturally. Before she was even aware how long she had been driving, she was nearly fifty miles from home. There was nothing on either side of Highway 99 to look at most of the way there. That was okay. The blandness of the scenery only helped her keep her eye on her goal.
What brought people to the Central Valley? It wasn't what most people thought of when they imagined California. Kathy guessed that most people pictured girls in bikinis playing beach volleyball all day. They didn't understand how much of the state was just dust and crops. You had to drive for ages to reach an ocean from here. She would move away when she was old enough. Someplace exciting and busy. San Francisco, or LA, or New York. Did the east coast have so many dead girls in the news all the time?
As Kathy took the exit into Fresno she couldn't help but feel grateful she lived in Modesto. The air was dirty, heavy with a smell she couldn't quite identify: a little like the stench of canneries in Modesto, but with a touch of rubber or mechanical grease or decayed pork. A slim man with stained coveralls began washing her windshield when she stopped at the corner of M and Fresno Street. All she could do was thank him—she didn't have a dime on her. She saw the disappointment on his unpaid face as she drove away.
The Fresno Library was empty. The doors were unlocked, but Kathy couldn't find anyone to assist her. Luckily, everything was labeled with big signs and arrows pointing the way, and she found the newspaper records without any problem.
Fresno did a better job of keeping their newspapers in chronological order than Stockton. Still, she didn't know where to start. She hadn't had a chance to peek at the articles about the "girls in Fresno" her uncle mentioned. Unlike when she went to Stockton, here she was equipped with almost no information: no names, no dates. Her only option was to dive into the heap of gray and black newsprint and see what she could find. The Fresno Bee. What exactly did bees have to do with journalism? She decided to start in the summer of 1972.
She thumbed through a bunch of articles about how the Supreme Court had abolished the death penalty. Pages of nonsense in the letters to the editor about the "threat of the women's movement" and how young people were a disgrace because of their lack of patriotism. Obituaries. Wedding announcements. Ad after ad after ad. One story about a team of bank robbers who were captured by police because they forgot to fill the gas tank in their getaway car. Then finally, she got to October.
The Fresno Bee                                                                          October 14, 1972
Investigation is continuing today in connection with the two teenage girls that were reported missing Saturday. The pair were last seen a few blocks from the high school on the corner of Harrison Avenue and Peralta way, speaking to someone in a dark-colored vehicle.
Anne Marie Stewart is fifteen years old. She stands 5'4" and weighs 120 lbs. Collette Smith is seventeen years old and stands around 5'8". She weighs approximately 145 lbs. Both girls were last seen wearing Fresno High School cheerleading uniforms. Any information about the girls' whereabouts should be immediately reported to the Fresno Police department.
Search teams are scouring the San Joaquin Valley, and volunteers are welcome. If you are interested in helping with the search please call 555-2323.
Were these the girls her uncle was talking about? Or were they just runaways who happened to resemble some of the Modesto victims? She didn't know, but she thought the description of the person in the dark vehicle seemed pretty consistent.
When Kathy went to use the restroom she was nearly hit in the head by the men's room door. A tall man in cowboy duds apologized a little too profusely, saying he didn't know anyone was behind the door. She mumbled something friendly-sounding about the door's poor design before using the restroom and returning to her stack of papers. He was the only other person with her in the whole library, as far as she could tell.
She searched every story of every day, looking for news about Anne and Collette, but there was nothing. The papers even stopped mentioning the need for search party volunteers after a while. They just faded into darkness.
She stumbled upon another story from March of 1973. A body found, naked and posed. This article kept no secrets. It didn't censor anything on anyone's behalf. The words "raped" and "strangled" stood out as though they were highlighted, as did the sentence "The victim's eyes were removed." Kathy read further. Lisa Struthers went to Fresno High with Anne and Collette.
She left the library with newspaper articles shoved in her pockets, as no one was there to stop her. This was becoming a habit. She didn't really consider it stealing, so she didn't feel bad about it. She did feel a little disturbed that her collection was beginning to match her uncle's in size.
The car beside her in the lot was parked almost too close for her to climb into the Pinto. She somehow managed without dinging either vehicle. Inside, it was an oven. The steering wheel burned her hands. As she looked to her left she was startled to notice the car next to hers wasn't empty. The cowboy from the bathroom incident was sitting in the driver's seat with sunglasses on, staring at her. She tried to give him a little wave, but he didn't wave back. He just stared. At least she thought he was staring. She didn't really know if there were any eyes behind those lenses at all.
***
The drive back up to Modesto was more eventful than the drive down. First, when Kathy was about three miles out of Fresno, a hulking semi nearly sideswiped her coming off a ramp onto 99. It was like he saw her and didn't even care. She was still shaking a little another five miles farther when she passed a couple of police cruisers and an ambulance on the shoulder surrounding a Mustang with a crumpled hood. There was smoke curling out of the engine and broken clear and orange glass on the road from the shattered headlights and turn signals. A young man leaned against the driver side of the car holding a cloth to his head as a patrolman talked to him. The cloth was soaked with blood. So was the man's shirt. Kathy had to concentrate to keep from swerving. She couldn't help but imagine that the truck which had almost run into her had caused this wreck, even though it had obviously happened well before the truck would have passed this spot, and the damage to the hood didn't match any logical scenario involving a vehicle traveling in the same direction as the Mustang.
Kathy's nerves were pretty well settled by the time she was passing Merced. Somewhere about halfway between there and home, she saw a girl standing by the side of the road waving her thumb. Son of a bitch, Kathy mouthed almost audibly. What kind of idiot would risk hitchhiking with however many psycho killers were on the loose in this area? A sense of duty slowed her car and made her pull over about forty feet past the young woman.
"Thanks!" the girl sang as she hurried into the Pinto, tossing a dirty duffel bag in the back seat. She was about Brenda's age, maybe a year or two older. She wore a tie-dyed skirt and a Grateful Dead skull shirt. Her long frizzy hair was so blonde it was nearly transparent. But what freaked Kathy out were her eyes: they were all pupil. It was like she had two empty black holes in her face.
"Where are you going?" Kathy asked her.
"Tacoma, eventually," the girl answered. For some reason she had both hands on the dash. She had at least one gaudy ring on every finger.
"I'm just going to Modesto."
"Far out, man. I know some laid back Satanists in Modesto."
"Um, okay, cool." Kathy was feeling a weird mixture of dread and protectiveness.
"I'm like, broke, but do you want a tab of acid?"
"No, thank you." Kathy couldn't stop staring at the girl's dirty but pleasant face. "I'm sorry, but I have to ask, do you watch the news? Aren't you scared to be out on the road alone? An awful lot of girls have been murdered around here lately."
The girl smiled widely in a way that struck Kathy as infantile. She ran her hands through her wispy yellow hair. "I don't worry about murder. Murder is just like a shortcut of fate, like cancer or a car wreck."
Kathy flashed back to the big truck, then to the bleeding man and his Mustang. "A shortcut of fate?" She knew at once that she wasn't going to get a satisfying explanation, but it was just too crazy a thing to say for her not to ask.
"Fate is what you get, you know? It's what's going to happen no matter what. Dark acts like murder seem horrible to people who haven't figured out their destiny yet, but they're woven into it from the beginning. The person who murders even thinks they're doing evil, so they fuck up their souls and get hung up in their bad karma for millennia sometimes, but fate itself is just... fate. It's not something you can change. For all effects and purposes," and she pronounced those words, for all effects and purposes, very deliberately, like she was impressed by her own eloquence, "it's like it's already happened. It's sewn into the fabric of time and existence."
Kathy was dumbfounded. She had a real head case in her car. She figured the best thing was probably to keep conversation to a minimum, but her brain wouldn't let her keep quiet. This ninny was going to get hurt. It was only a matter of time. "I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Sure, none of us can tell what's going to happen to us, but that's no reason to tempt fate. There's no reason to rush into death."
The girl pointed to the fields they were passing. It was a hot, bright day, but the foothills to the west cast a shade across the landscape that made everything seem murky and forbidding. "Death is already all around us, and it always has been. We're made out of it. There are countless dead folks in the ground right there around those trees." She indicated a cluster of scrub oak a few hundred yards off the highway.
"What? How do you know that?" Kathy didn't know why she kept engaging this weirdo.
"I can hear them singing. Their energy reaches up through the roots and soil and grass. They're Indians and settlers and outlaws and babies and old old men and ladies. Everybody dead is all part of the same song, and it's always being sung. You can hear it if you turn on to it. You sure you don't want to drop a tab?"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
"What's your name, anyway?"
Kathy thought about it for a second. No need to use her real name. "Diane."
"Far out, my name is Dandelion."
***
When Kathy got home her father was playing the soundtrack to Funny Girl so loud that it seemed odd he was the only one listening.
"Kathy!" He turned down the stereo and confronted her with an exaggerated sigh of relief. "You need to let me know when you're going to take off for the whole day."
"I was just with friends. Sorry, I lost track of time."
"Well, I'm just glad you're okay." He sounded a little breathless. Maybe because he'd been dancing to the music. "Hey, you remember my friend Colin? He was over here not too long ago?"
Kathy nodded.
"Well, he teaches Brenda's film appreciation class at JC, and on Thursday they are going to be screening M."
"What's M?"
"It's that movie I was telling you about. Maybe you don't remember. It was a few months ago. You were telling me about how old silent movies weren't scary and I told you that this was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen?"
"I remember that."
"Anyway. I think we should go with Brenda and watch. You would love it. I'm positive. You inherited my taste in film."
"Go to class with Brenda?"
"I'll be there too. It'll be just like going to a movie."
"A silent movie."
"It's not really silent. In fact, it has a lot of dialogue for a film of the period. But the creepiest parts only have music. Just a whistle."
"Okay."
"You'll come?"
"Yeah."
"And you'll let me know from now on when you're going to be gone so long?"
"Yeah, Dad."
"I'm so lucky to have you." Her father wrapped his arms around her. "I'm so lucky to have a daughter that's so smart. These other parents need to worry about their girls, but I got lucky. You're sharp. Nobody needs to worry about you." She smelled vodka on his breath.
She furrowed her brow as she wrapped her arms around her father to return the hug.
***
Andrea flicked a match against her thumb, starting a flame. She used it to light the Virginia Slim hanging out of her mouth. Kathy hated the smell. It reminded her of her mother.
"Whoa—how'd you do that?" Kevin asked Andrea.
"My dad taught me. Cool, huh?"
"Your dad knows you started smoking?" Kathy asked her, surprised.
"Oh yeah, he doesn't care." Andrea inhaled deeply and intentionally exhaled the smoke too close to Kathy's face. "You wanna try?"
Kathy shook her head. If she was going to start smoking, it certainly wasn't going to be the same brand as her mother. The three stood on the patio just outside the doors to the high school in the designated "student smoking zone." There was another smoking area for the teachers. Most of them were still annoyed that they couldn't just smoke inside anymore. Stuck in their ways when times had changed.
Kathy didn't want to smoke, but she didn't mind being surrounded by it. If she hadn't come with Kevin and Andrea, she would be sitting in the cafeteria, all alone. Here she was surrounded by friends. She tried not to think about the Surgeon General's warning on the side of the pack in Andrea's hand.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kathy spotted Annette Vergara, crouching low and sitting with her back against the building. Her hair covered most of her face. She looked almost like a child—small and quiet. And all alone.
"We should ask her to come smoke with us," Andrea insisted. "It doesn't seem like she's really made any friends yet."
Kathy nodded and began walking over to the girl. Her heart raced a little. This person's life had been completely changed by the man Kathy couldn't stop thinking about. Was it right to reach out to Annette while all those horrible details about the murders were swimming around Kathy's brain?
"Do you want to come hang out with us? You're Annette, right? I'm in your math class. I'm Kathy." Kathy reached her hand out and when Annette grabbed ahold to shake it, Kathy pulled the crouching girl to her feet. She didn't let go. She dragged Annette over to where Kevin and Andrea were standing. "Annette, this is Andrea, and this is Kevin. We don't bite, I promise."
Annette giggled quietly, but didn't say anything. She just stood in place, her eyes glued to the ground. Kevin and Kathy looked at each other and shrugged, unsure of how to engage the girl. She seemed fragile, like a chick out of its nest. What topics were safe? What would make her comfortable?
"So, how do you like Downey? Better than Davis?" Andrea tried to break the ice, but Annette only shrugged in response. They continued to stand in silence for what felt to Kathy like ten minutes, but in reality was only about fifteen seconds.
"Do you like music?" Kathy asked.
"What do you mean?" Annette questioned back.
"Well, what records do you listen to and stuff?"
Annette thought for a moment, and finally said that she liked The Beatles. Kathy was thrilled to have such deep insight. Did she like ice cream too? What about puppy dogs?
"I play the trumpet." Annette offered more information without being prompted. "But not here. I didn't make the band here."
"Those jerks are so stuck up," Kevin responded. Kathy and Andrea nodded. Downey band geeks were intolerable. So what if they were acclaimed and decorated? That didn't give them the right to be assholes to everyone else.
The bell startled all four of them. Kevin and Andrea headed off to the art department while Kathy and Annette started walking in the opposite direction towards math class.
"Do you like music?" Annette turned the question around on Kathy.
Kathy smiled and nodded. "Well, I like the Beatles too, but lately I've been more into Stevie Wonder and Billy Preston, and I also totally dig Gladys Knight, Eddie Kendricks, and soul stuff like that." What else? She certainly wasn't going to mention that she still found reasons not to turn the dial when Donny Osmond came on. "Oh, Van Morrison. He's really deep. Anyway, we should hang out more. You know, outside of school. You should come with us to the park tomorrow."
Annette flashed a smile and for the first time made direct eye contact with Kathy.
"Okay." Her voice wasn't much louder than a mouse's squeak. She seemed excited that Kathy and her friends had invited her in. Had she had trouble making friends before? Or did she change after what happened to her sister?
Kathy stared at her throughout math class, noticing how connected her earlobes were. How the hair on the back of her head would fall forward when she tucked the hair in her face behind her ear. Kathy didn't learn any math. Her mind was somewhere far away where none of it mattered. She could not be penetrated. A wall of stone covered her head, blocking any information from reaching her actual brain.
Kathy picked up Kevin and Andrea before heading toward the Vergara house. When she got there, Kathy ordered Andrea to get in the back seat. Annette was their guest, after all. She should get to sit the farthest from danger if the back of this Pinto decided to go up in flames.
"John Morris and Barb McKenna made it with each other in the boy's locker room," Kevin offered out of nowhere.
"How do you know?" Kathy asked. It was useless to pretend she wasn't interested.
"Everybody knows. Well, John told all the guys in the locker room earlier."
"Do you think he was telling the truth?" Andrea looked very skeptical. "I'm pretty sure Barb would have told me."
"Unless she's afraid you'll think she's a slut," Kevin added.
"Oh, she's not afraid of that," Andrea answered. The car was silent as the other three teenagers tried to decide exactly what that meant. Kathy pulled up to the curb at Enslen Park and opened the door.
The leaves on the sycamore trees were just beginning to turn a buttery yellow, but the heat was still relentless. Kathy took off her brown knitted cardigan and placed it underneath her as she took a seat on the grass.
Andrea pulled a pre-rolled joint out of her pack of Virginia Slims and took a deep hit. Kathy was surprised. She hadn't realized that the pack of cigarettes her friend had been carrying around with her all week secretly contained illegal drugs.
"Want some?" Andrea passed the joint to Kathy, and to Andrea's surprise, Kathy took it and inhaled deeply. Andrea stared at Kathy with her mouth open for a few seconds before giving her a congratulatory pat on the back. "I think you're officially a stoner, Kath."
Annette and Kevin also filled their lungs to capacity, and Andrea had a disappointed look on her face as the joint made it back to her. More smokers in the friend group meant less pot for Andrea. Kathy figured she hadn't realized that until this very moment.
Before long, all four of them were on their backs, appreciating the feel of the grass against their skin and tripping out on the deep and expansive blue sky. Kathy closed her eyes. The light penetrated her eyelids and she stared at an uncomfortably bright orange hue for a few seconds before turning on her side.
In this position all she could see was Annette. Her dark hair twisted between the blades of grass beneath her. Her mouth was close, and Kathy couldn't help breathing in the odor of her green apple candy, but she didn't mind it so much this time. It was kind of nice. Delicious, in fact. She had never found that smell anything other than nauseating before. Maybe it was the drugs.
"How many people in our grade do you think have actually had sex? Like real sex?" Kevin asked.
"I don't know, Kevin. I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about it." Kathy tried to get the words out without sounding rude.
"Me neither," Annette joined in.
"God. Fine." Kevin was obviously disappointed that the girls weren't as interested in the sexual escapades of the student body as he was.
Kathy forgot to notice whether he took offense to her answer. She had already forgotten he had asked a question in the first place. Her mind was worlds away, retreating to a safe corner of childhood. Tears started spilling out of the corners of her eyes.
"I don't know, like ten percent?" Andrea finally gave Kevin the answer he was looking for. She always was more interested in that sort of thing than Kathy. Kathy couldn't help wondering if Andrea was part of that ten percent herself. She wasn't sure if it was something she'd share with her or not.
"Are you okay, Kathy?" Annette asked softly, almost as if she were whispering right into her ear.
"Yeah, I just... do you guys remember Lulu?" More tears started to flow from Kathy's eyes.
"Don't think about it, Kath," Kevin instructed.
"Oh my god," tears started spilling from Annette's eyes as well. "My uncle would take Diane and me to visit her at least once a week back in elementary school."
"I just can't believe people." Kathy sat up and pulled her legs toward her chest. She rested her brow ridge on her kneecaps. A wave of intense guilt flooded her body. What was she doing? She was reminding a girl in mourning about the death of a beloved defenseless animal that apparently played just as big a role in her childhood as it did Kathy's. She didn't want Annette to feel sad anymore, but how could she not after all that had happened?
The sophomores walked Annette back to her house, concerned that Kathy was too stoned to operate the Pinto. Annette had to be home by exactly five o clock—no exceptions. Her parents had threatened her by saying they were not afraid to call the cops, even if she was only late by a few minutes. Kathy understood where they were coming from. Frankly, she found it surprising that they let Annette leave the house at all.
"I'll see you at school on Monday! Thank you!" Even trying to raise her voice to be heard while running to the front door, Annette's volume was not much louder than a wood mouse. She turned toward them one last time before going inside, her smile framed by her dark hair. Kathy could hear three distinct locks latching a few seconds after the door closed.
***
That evening Brenda was in a particularly bad mood. The sound of Kathy's voice drove her insane, though Kathy wasn't sure why. She wasn't saying anything rude or provocative. She wasn't nagging her or asking to borrow clothing. She was just existing, which was apparently the most annoying thing in the world to her sister.
"Can you not put your elbows on the table? And if you must, can you please keep them in your, you know, area?"
Kathy tried to make herself smaller, to take up as little of her sister's space as she could. Normally, she would fight back, but Brenda's rage seemed stranger than usual. Scarier. Kathy obeyed.
"Let's all just try to relax and be kind to one another, please," Ken said, setting down his spoon full of peas in a way that announced his irritation. "Kathy, how are you enjoying your civics class?"
Kathy shrugged in response. So far all the teacher had done was force them to memorize constitutional amendments. "Why?"
"I just wanted to know what's going on in your life. I loved my civics class in high school. It helped me figure out where I stood in society. Who I was. I know your Uncle Al got a lot out of it as well. That's one of the things that first sparked his interest in law."
"Al sells stereos," Brenda said, confused.
"Oh that's not what he really wanted. And not where he wants to stay."
"What did he want?" Kathy asked.
"Well, he wanted to be a cop like his buddies from high school. A whole bunch of those turkeys make up the force now. Anyway, that all went to hell when he got picked up for selling drugs."
"Kenneth!" Kathy's mother acted as though her father had said the most scandalous thing imaginable.
"They're practically adults, Mary."
"I am an adult," Brenda clarified.
"Anyway, that was years ago. Just after he got out of the service. It hit him pretty hard."
"Well, he seems fine now," Brenda said without emotion.
Kathy got the same feeling in her stomach that she got when she heard about kids who would run off to Hollywood only to come back in despair. She hated it when people couldn't live their dreams.
"So he made one mistake and they never let him try again?"
"Well, it was a felony, Kathy."
Kathy knew that her uncle had probably made dozens of mistakes. Hundreds even. She knew for a fact that he had drugs in his apartment right now. She still felt he deserved a second chance for some reason. Maybe because she knew he did his research. He possibly knew more about the killer than any of those bumbling cavemen on the force. Maybe they needed him.
***
On Thursday night, Ken drove Kathy and Brenda to Brenda's film class at JC. It was clear that Brenda wasn't thrilled with the arrangement. She didn't protest, but she was withdrawn and silent the whole way there, and when they got to the classroom, she parted company with her family and sat on the opposite side of the room next to Everett Greeley, who had been saving a place for her a little too zealously. He had put his backpack and about six textbooks on the seat beside him, and when she approached, he scooped them all up eagerly and shoved them underneath his own seat. Had they planned to sit together in advance? How had Everett swung that? She didn't look displeased with the arrangement, Kathy decided. They whispered back and forth like they both had something to say.
Ken's friend Colin entered the room, and conversation dwindled to a murmur before ceasing entirely. Many of the students straightened up or even leaned forward in their seats. Kathy wasn't used to seeing a teacher command this much rapt attention. He was striking, for sure. He was wearing a Nehru jacket! Kathy couldn't decide if it was dashing or corny. Maybe both. He opened class with some wrap-up business from last week, fielding a couple of questions about Buster Keaton and montage. Then he spoke for nearly twenty minutes about German expressionism, and another five or ten minutes about the development of sound technology. Would they ever get to the film? The students—especially the ones in the first couple of rows—seemed to be eating it up, but Kathy had a hard time paying attention. Still, she wasn't bored, exactly; she was fascinated by Colin, his slender elegance, his graceful hand gestures, his habit of posing with one foot propped up on the arm of an empty seat while lecturing. Her father stared in fascination as well.
At last the movie started. Her father hadn't told her the film was in German. You could usually tell if a film had subtitles by its title, but M didn't provide much information. She squinted at the screen to read the subtitles while she cleaned her glasses with her t-shirt.
The children on screen were playing a game like Eenie Meenie Miney Mo—a small child stood in the center chanting about how the killer was going to "chop up" whomever her finger landed on. Surprisingly morbid for such little kids. An adult woman started screaming at her to stop, to not think of such horrible things, but she went on playing anyway.
As the camera began following a little girl playing with a toy ball, Kathy could tell that this child was to be a victim of the killer her father told her the movie was about. She had imagined him having desires much more like the killer they were facing in Modesto. She was wrong. This guy was after babies. He gave her candy and compliments and the scariest human-shaped balloon Kathy had ever seen. What the hell kind of coward was this guy? Enticing five-year-olds with toys and then slaughtering them? It seemed like the easiest thing in the world. Even the Modesto killer had enough courage to pick on someone at least close to his own size. This was disgusting and pathetic and downright upsetting. Her father was right. They didn't need dialogue for this. They could tell the story with images—a balloon in telephone wires, a mother waiting atop an empty staircase, and finally, her toy ball rolling from the woods alone. Kathy knew she was gone. They didn't have to say a word.
After the first five minutes the film became incredibly heavy with dialogue. Why did her dad put this in a category with silent movies? These people wouldn't shut up.  Kathy fought to stay awake through the middle, and barely succeeded.
The ending scene grabbed Kathy by the heart and dragged her in. Babies were being killed. The police were not stopping the killer. Something had to be done. People had to take it into their own hands. She stared at Peter Lorre's terrified face and tried to understand why this group of vigilantes didn't just blow his head off. They gave him a defense attorney, for Christ's sake.
After the movie ended Colin turned on the lights in the classroom and reminded his students that their written responses to the film were due at their next class meeting before letting them empty out of the room. Kathy felt all sorts of different things.
"What did you think?" her father asked. "Creepy, right?"
Kathy nodded with her eyebrows raised and her eyes wide. "What the heck was going on at the end? If you're going to bypass the law and take justice into your own hands, why would you give a defense attorney to a freak who's killing five-year-olds?"
"Well, what if they didn't catch the right guy? Shouldn't he get a chance to defend himself?"
"Everyone knew he was the murderer. They should have just put a bullet in his brain. There's no defense for what he did."
Colin walked up to Kathy and Ken after he finished collecting papers from students. He had a goofy grin on his face.
"What did you think, Kathy?"
"Scary. And boring. And beautiful. It was weird."
"What did you think was beautiful?"
"The way the camera told the story. The light and the shadows. Everything about the way it looked was beautiful and creepy all at once."
Ken gave Colin a proud smile and Colin nodded his head, smiling at Kathy but looking at Ken.
"The end was messed up though. What's the point of vigilantism if you're going to give the killer the same rights the cops would?
"Hi Kathy! How's Downey?" Everett Greeley was standing on her left, his thick glasses fogged up from his own breath.
Kathy turned and was happy to see him. "It's a freakshow. As usual, you know." They both laughed.
Kathy, Ken, Colin, and Everett probably would have stood there discussing the film for hours, but Brenda wouldn't allow it. She wanted her ride home. She had other homework to get to.
"I can drive you, Brenda!" Everett offered.
Brenda looked at Kathy, then back at Everett and declined. "Thanks Ev, but," she turned to Ken, "Daddy, please. I'm hungry." She made large puppy dog eyes at her father, who then shrugged at Colin and started gathering his things.
Kathy was almost out of the classroom when she looked back and saw that her father and Colin were still standing where she had left them. Colin whispered something in Ken's ear and they both giggled. Kathy motioned for him to come along, and Ken came jogging, a genuine smile still on his face.
***
Brenda was lying on her bed with her knees up and her hands folded on her ribcage. Kathy stood in the doorway and addressed her sister's shins. "So, how's Everett liking JC?"
Brenda stared at Kathy like she had just asked what kind of underwear she was wearing. "How should I know?"
"You guys seemed pretty friendly in class last night. I dunno, I thought maybe you'd compared notes about stuff."
"We were just talking about film homework. Anyway, mind your own fucking business."
Kathy considered pushing further, but thought better of it. "Do you have any magazines I can cut up?"
"What? No! Why do you want to cut up my magazines?"
"I mean ones you're done with. I have to make a collage for art."
"Ask Dad. Don't touch mine." Brenda hooked the door with her foot and slammed it in Kathy's face.
Kathy headed down the hall to her parents' room, where she hoped she might be treated with a little more dignity.
"Mom?" The room looked empty at first. Too dark for eleven in the morning. But then Mary was standing in front of her, still in her filmy nightgown. Did she ever get dressed any more? What was the last time she went to work? She looked at her daughter waiting for her to speak. Kathy felt like she was rehearsing a line for a play: "Do you have any magazines I can cut up for a school project?"
Her mother blinked once or twice like it was a hard question, then gestured to her right. "All those stacked beside the dresser are ones I was going to throw away. You may have them." As Kathy stooped to pick them up, her mother added, "But please don't leave a bunch of little scraps of paper everywhere. You're almost an adult. Don't leave messes like a child."
Kathy nodded and left with a tottering stack of magazines in her arms. She walked to her bedroom and spread them out on the floor in front of her as she sat cross-legged. She had Cosmopolitans from April 1966 and June 1968, one issue of Mademoiselle from last year, and about a million Ladies' Home Journals. She started thumbing around in them, trying to find something that caught her eye. There were endless pictures of beautiful young women with dark straight hair parted in the middle. Soon there was a stack of them on the carpet, little paper dolls. Kathy had started cutting them out almost without knowing she was doing it. From an old spread about Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet Kathy cut out three pictures of Olivia Hussey and mutilated them slightly. She glued them all together on the page—the eyes from one picture, the mouth from another.
Something that seemed oddly ubiquitous were the ads for porcelain dolls. Every few pages Kathy would stumble upon another little piece of brown cardstock, advertising some creepy doll with eyes that seemed slightly too sunken. Some of them were envelopes, all ready to go. All the customer had to do was fill it with a check and they'd get their doll in four to six weeks. Kathy cut their heads off of their bodies. She pasted the heads onto the stomachs of some of the young women she had already glued to the poster. When she took a step back she was startled by how unsettling she found her own work. She wanted to stop. It could be finished. She decided it was.
With the glue already in her hand, she figured she might as well do some more organizing. She walked over to her desk and opened the drawer filled with the folded-up newspaper articles she had stolen from libraries around the Valley. She reached in and pulled out the article about Annette's sister. They really did look almost identical, though she didn't know what Annette would have to say about that. People told Kathy that she and Brenda looked like twins all the time and she thought it was bullshit.
Kathy's grandmother had given her a journal for her sixteenth birthday. She went and got it from her desk drawer, where she had thrown it almost as soon as she had torn off the gift wrap. She opened the empty book with the shiny red velvet cover and wrote "Diane Vergara" on top of the first page. She unfolded the article about Diane and stared into her striking yet sad eyes before turning the article over in a swift motion and rubbing the back with the red rubber nub of the mucilage bottle. She pressed into the journal, trying to make the top and the bottom of the article line up perfectly with the lines in the diary. It wouldn't. The tear lines were too uneven. She should have brought scissors with her to the library.
On the next page, she did the same thing, this time with the article about Karen Rose Murray. She tried to get it to stick smoothly by rolling her pencil up and down on the article, but the filmy mucilage dried so quickly it was futile. The newsprint wrinkled and leaked bits of glue from the edges like crusty snot.
Sarah Beckmann. Lisa Struthers. Nancy Dunn. They each got their own page, their article pasted in the middle. There was plenty of room to write notes too. After Nancy, Kathy began to paste the articles about the missing girls. The ones she didn't know were dead or alive. They could have been killed by this guy, but they also could have just run away to ditch their lame families. Susan Erickson. Anne Marie Stewart. Collette Smith.  She didn't know what to do with her article on the thirteen-year-old, Donna Johnston. Something inside told her that it wasn't the same killer. Kathy gave her her own page anyway.
"Kathy!" Ken hollered from downstairs.
"What?"
"If you want the car tonight you're going to need to give Brenda a lift to Swensen's."
Kathy closed her diary of dead girls. She certainly wasn't going to give up her claim to the Pinto for the day. She braced herself for Brenda's inevitable abuse.
It wasn't inevitable, though. In fact, Brenda didn't say a word until they were almost there. She looked pale. Almost sick.
"Do you have any money?" Brenda asked her as they pulled into Ulrich Shopping Center.
"I don't think I have much, maybe like four bucks? Why?"
"Can I have it?"
"No! You have a job! Jesus. Don't mooch your kid sister's piggy bank money."
"Kathy, please." Brenda looked Kathy directly in the eye as they sat idling in the Pinto in front of Swensen's. Her eyes were wet. She didn't look angry. She looked desperate. Kathy gave her the money.
"Are you okay?" Kathy finally asked her. Brenda didn't answer. She just said something Kathy had never heard exit her sister's lips before.
"I love you. I'm sorry." Brenda shut the car door and walked into the ice cream shop, the bow on the back of her pink and brown uniform swaying as she walked. Her long blond hair almost got caught in the doorway as she entered the shop.
***
Annette had told Kathy the night before that running took the pain away. That once you get to a certain speed and level of exhaustion, you can't feel anything. Only the wind. Your mind can't think or worry or fall into sadness. So the next morning Kathy rose as early as she could to go jogging with Annette. She had never liked getting up that early. Or vigorous exercise in general. But Annette said it helped her. Kathy figured she would give it a shot.
Kathy picked Annette up at 7:30 and they headed straight for the high school track. Annette had a fancy pink sweatsuit with matching sweatbands around her forehead and wrists. Kathy felt drab and silly in her Downey regulation gym clothes, but Annette didn't seem judgmental about it.
They started out slow, but it didn't take Kathy long to realize that Annette was in much better shape than she was. She tried to keep up. She didn't want to embarrass herself. Her lungs burned and she felt like she was dying after the first few laps.
"Do you need to take a rest?" Annette asked.
"Only if you do," Kathy responded, obviously winded and hacking up mucus.
"Let's go sit in the grass for a while."
Kathy was thrilled by the suggestion, but she tried not to show it. She shrugged and turned off the track, walking side by side with Annette. The grass was slightly damp and both girls soaked their clothing as they sat down. Neither of them minded. Especially Kathy. She just wanted to be off her feet as soon as possible.
"Do you like Christmas carols?"
Kathy wasn't sure how to respond or why they were talking about Christmas carols the week before Halloween. She tried to read Annette's face, hoping she could find the right answer, but looking at her eyes framed by all that loose dark hair almost made her forget the question.
"Why?"
"Oh, I just think they're nice. They're always happy, no matter what. There's a certain spirit, you know? Maybe if people listened to Christmas carols all the time it would feel like Christmas all the time."
Kathy hated Christmas carols. She hated how department stores and radio stations started playing them non-stop the second Thanksgiving was over. She tried to imagine feeling the opposite way. She understood. Annette's life was a nightmare. Christmas was a celebration of joy and love. Of course she wanted to feel that every day.
"I like 'Frosty the Snowman,'" Kathy lied.
"See! That's what I'm talking about." Annette had the barest touch of a Mexican accent, giving her voice a warm lilt. "They don't even have to be religious or anything. Just happy. Jolly."
Kathy nodded and asked if she'd like to hang out at her house for the rest of the day. Annette acted overly excited, like it was the first time anyone had ever invited her over. The two of them sang along to the Jackson Five on their way back to the Aukermans'. Kathy was pleased that Annette knew so many of the lyrics. Evidently this was happy music too.
At first, Kathy couldn't quite pin down what was wrong with her driveway when they arrived. Then she realized that it was the police car in it, where she had intended to park. She caught her breath, passed the house, and flipped a u-turn down the block. She parallel-parked on the street on her way back. She looked at Annette, who looked paler than usual. Kathy didn't know what to feel. She got out of the car. She looked at the police car, at her house, at the front door, which, she now realized, was open.
She kept looking at the car, then the door, back and forth.
Then she knew.
She knew, without anyone telling her, that Brenda was gone.
***
Her own coughing fit woke her up, although it was difficult to make a distinction between the conscious and the unconscious world. Opening or closing her eyes provided exactly the same amount of information: none. Either way, there was only darkness. Her instincts told her to scream, but she convinced herself not to. She had no idea where she was. What if screaming gave away her location? Then he would be able to find her.
She screamed anyway when she realized, after a short period of confusion and disorientation, that he certainly already knew where she was—in chains. Chained to a wall.
Two leather bands were fastened so tightly around her wrists that she had no feeling in her fingers. It felt like the dentist had just numbed her hands. She felt pressure and a sensation that the mass of her hands was present, but that was all. She wondered what color they would be if she could see them in the light. Probably purple.
She screamed again, louder this time. She used her diaphragm to project, like she'd been taught in drama class. There was no response. She felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen. She manipulated her binding until she could touch the place where it hurt with her fingers. It was wet. She could feel a small gash where blood was actively spilling out. She tried to put pressure on the wound with her hand, but the numbness made it difficult to move. She felt like there were two pieces of ham tied to the ends of her wrists. Completely useless.
"Help me!" she screamed as loudly as she could. It didn't seem loud enough, so she tried harder. Her throat ached afterward. She heard the sound of a match lighting, and the darkness opened into a little cave of light. She saw that there was another person sitting just inches from her on the floor.
She screamed again, more hoarsely this time.
He lit a cigarette, took a long draw, and exhaled with a sigh.
"Will you, please, shut, up? My god." His voice was low and sharp.
She could only see the face of the smoking man clearly. The glow of his cigarette made a dimly glowing mask of his nose, cheeks, and chin. But soon flashes of intense white light started coming out of nowhere. There would be a few in a row, followed by clicking. It was almost like strobe lights she'd seen at parties, only slower and more unpredictable.
She tried to make things out each time the lights came back.
She was in a small room with a low ceiling. The floor was concrete. Her feet were bare on it.
She was naked. No, she was wearing just underwear.
There was blood all over her body.
She knew she was going to die here.
***
Kathy was still standing by the Pinto, her knees trembling, when her father came running out of the house toward her. His eyes were filled with worry.
"Kathy! Did you take Brenda somewhere this morning?"
"No. You don't know where she is?" The wobbliness in her knees was joined by a spinning sensation and a rush of heat to her face. She thought for a moment she might pass out.
"She didn't come home last night. At least we're pretty sure she didn't. I got a call from the manager at Swensen's telling me that he found the store unlocked this morning. That Brenda didn't follow the closing procedure."
Chills took over Kathy's body and she felt the sudden need to stretch her muscles beyond their ability. She bit the inside of her lower lip until it stopped hurting. Then she bit down harder and intentionally ripped out a small chunk of her mouth tissue. It hardly bled at all. She looked to the right and saw Officer Dave sitting in her living room across the coffee table from her uncle.
"This is Annette," she said after it occurred to her that nobody knew this person she had brought into the house. Nobody acknowledged the introduction. They were all busy. Kathy shrugged at Annette who simply shook her head in response as if to say, I'm not the one you should be worried about right now.
Kathy's mother was sitting by the phone with Brenda's address book in hand. She was talking to Carol Rogers, who had gone away to college in San Francisco.
"Oh. Well, okay. Sorry. Goodbye." Mary hung up and cradled her face in her hands.
"What was that?" asked Kathy.
"Carol says she hasn't heard from Brenda since September. They apparently had some kind of falling out. That young lady does not know how to speak appropriately to a worried mother." Mary dabbed away tears with the heel of her hand and Ken rushed over to her side.
"Mary, she's fine. It's only been a few hours. Don't let the bad thoughts in."
Kathy watched her parents embrace. It wasn't something they did very often. Now they were clinging to each other for dear life. A dark blue stain grew larger and larger on her father's shoulder where her mother's face rested.
"What did Mark say?" Kathy asked her parents.
"We can't get ahold of him. We've called his house probably twenty times." Mary dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief she had pulled out of her husband's coat pocket.
"I can drive over there," Kathy offered. Her mother sandwiched Kathy's right hand between both of hers and nodded, a glimmer of hope in her eye. "At least the police aren't dropping the ball." Kathy felt more confident with a cop car in the driveway.
"Actually, Dave's only here because Al asked him to come over. The police refuse to list her as a missing person until she hasn't been seen for twenty-four hours." Her mother let out another couple of sobs. "She's an adult."
Kathy bristled. "But there's a psycho killer out there looking for girls just like Brenda. Doesn't that kind of make this a special circumstance?"
"They say she has the right to get up and leave and never come back. At least Dave cares. We're lucky your uncle has friends on the force. Otherwise we'd be on our own."
"Well, of course Officer Dave cares. He has the hots for her." Kathy shut her mouth. Maybe that wasn't the right thing to say to her mother in her current state. Her father walked over and grabbed her shoulders from behind.
"Why don't you take your friend and go bang on Mark's door. Call us from there if that's where she is. Actually, call us from there either way." Ken pushed Kathy's back a little, moving her toward the door.
"Okay." Kathy's insides felt like Jell-O. She stared at Al and Officer Dave for a second before grabbing Annette's arm and heading out the door. They were playing cards. How was that going to help? Was she the only person going out to actively search for her sister?
They were mostly silent on the short ride over to Scenic. Annette hung her head, retreating into her big mane of dark hair. Kathy bet it felt safer there.
"Has she ever stayed out all night before? You know, just cruising with her boyfriend or something?" Annette's voice was quiet.
"Well, yeah. But my parents don't know that. She used to sneak out after they went to sleep, but that was in high school. I assumed she stopped doing that after girls started turning up dead." Kathy paused. She didn't know if she was being insensitive. "But she would always be home before Mom and Dad got up. No exceptions. She was prompt." Kathy pulled the Pinto into the driveway next to Mark's father's pickup. "I'll be right back."
Kathy forgot to start gently. She began by thumping the side of her fist against the door as hard as she could. She was taken aback when Mark's mother, a dead ringer for Donna Reed, opened the door scowling.
"Excuse me!"
"I'm so sorry. I'm just, scared. Is Brenda here? Have you seen Brenda?"
"Brenda's not here." She turned her head and shouted for her son. Mark came jogging around the corner as though on cue.
"Have you seen Brenda?" Kathy's question sounded more like a plea.
"We split up last week. She dumped me." He was wearing a wounded look. "She didn't tell you?"
"No. And she's gone. Oh my god, Mark, she's gone." Kathy leaned her forehead against the burly jock's chest.
Mark's expression abruptly changed to one of concern. It was the first time Kathy had ever seen him concerned about anything. He pulled her gently off of his chest, ran into the next room for a minute, and came back with his shoes and jacket on. "Where have you already looked?"
"This is the first place I came."
Mark nodded. He hopped into his truck and ordered her to follow him in the Pinto. Kathy obeyed. It didn't take her long to figure out where they were headed.
Mark parked his truck sloppily on the side of Seventh Street and Kathy pulled up behind him. She looked at her friend. Annette's face was impossible to read. Was she fine? Upset? Angry? Sick? Kathy had no idea. "Stay here," she said forcefully while looking directly into Annette's eyes.
She had to run to keep up with Mark, who was almost under the bridge already. There appeared to be even more litter than last time she was here, which she thought was impossible.
Mark darted over to a pile of blankets and rags tucked beside a load-bearing cement column. He frantically picked at them until something beneath started moving, causing him to shriek like a five-year-old girl. A bearded face finally emerged from all the cloth, and Mark stood up without apologizing. With a tree branch in hand, he scoured the area, running back and forth through the forest of cattails.
"She's not here!" Mark's voice sounded so relieved he was nearly choked up. "If she were here that guy would have seen, right? I mean, the other girls were found right away. She's not here."
He wrapped his arms around Kathy, something she never imagined would happen in a million years. His embrace made Kathy feel small and surprisingly reassured.
"Do you know other places to look?" Kathy asked.
"Definitely. You look your places too. I'll call your house if I figure anything out."
Kathy nodded at him. As she turned to walk back to the Pinto, she saw that Annette was standing uphill from her, staring into the dumping ground below. She had no idea whether Annette had been here since they found Diane, and her stomach started to twinge with pangs of guilt. She grabbed Annette's hand.
"She's not here. Let's go."
Kathy drove back home to tell her parents that Brenda had broken up with Mark and he didn't know where she was. She also needed to let them know he was on the case and out looking for her. She didn't know what to talk about on the drive. She felt terrible for taking her friend to the spot where her sister was found naked and dead.
"When Diane was missing, nobody was panicked," Annette finally said.
"I'm so sorry."
"No—it was good that we didn't have to go through this. We just hoped she had run off. The bad part came later."
Kathy didn't know what to say other than "sorry," and she didn't want to say it again. She had already said it too many times.
"Maybe this is the bad part for you and the good part will come later," Annette said, a glimmer of hope in her eye and a half smile on her face.
"I hope so." Kathy teared up as the words came out. Annette embraced her as the Pinto idled in the Aukerman driveway.
When Kathy told her father what she had found out, he started screaming at Officer Dave, insisting that he knew she didn't run off with her boyfriend.
Dave met his rage coolly. "Well the girl said they broke up, didn't she? Maybe she has a new boyfriend."
"I think I would know," Kathy said.
"Really?" replied Dave, matching Kathy's snotty tone. "You think your adult sister just tells you everything about her life? She didn't tell you she dumped Mark, did she?"
Dave's words were like daggers in her stomach, but she knew he was right. Brenda didn't tell her anything. Kathy had no idea even where to start searching.
"Look, Kathy. I'm on the case." Dave patted Al on the back a couple of times. "I would do anything for this guy right here. He's practically a brother—making Brenda my niece too. I know there are other guys on the force who feel the same way. You don't have to worry."
Kathy didn't feel reassured in the least. She grabbed Annette by the arm and headed upstairs to her bedroom, where they wouldn't be infuriated by stupid pigs.
"Kathy, don't you think there's a good chance she did run away? That she's just blowing off steam somewhere? We know she's not under the bridge. I would feel hopeful at this point." Annette rubbed Kathy's back as they sat side by side on the bed.
"Yeah. I mean, I guess. But what about the shop? Why wouldn't she lock up? It seems like she had to be taken forcefully, right?"
"Not necessarily. Maybe her boss chewed her out or something and that was her way of telling him to fuck off."
Kathy thought a while. Yes, it did sound like something her sister would do. But why would she take off without telling anybody at a time like this? She knew everyone had gone killer crazy.
"I feel like she would have told someone. Especially after everything that's happened."
"Maybe she did."
"Like who?"
"I dunno. Her friends."
"But my mom's been going through her address book. Somebody would have said something."
"Maybe they'd be more likely to talk to you than an adult."
Kathy wasn't sure about that. Most of Brenda's friends treated her just as poorly as Brenda did.
"Come on. Who's her best friend? Let's go there." Annette pulled Kathy to a standing position.
"She's been so glued to Mark for so long I don't even know anymore. Um, I guess maybe Melissa Carlisle?"
Mary was long finished with Brenda's address book. Kathy yanked it off the kitchen counter and stuffed it in her purse on the way out. She might need it for more than just Melissa's address.
On the way to Scenic, Annette started poking around the glove compartment without asking. She found the Neil Diamond tape Al had given her mother when he installed the stereo. She shoved it into the slot and soon the two teenagers were blasting "Sweet Caroline" with the windows down. Kathy understood what Annette was doing. If you played music loud enough, you couldn't hear your own thoughts. She was trying to protect Kathy from her own brain.
Melissa hadn't seen Brenda and seemed irritated that everyone was giving her the "third degree" as she called it. Apparently Mark had been there just minutes before, and she had spent a long time on the phone with Kathy's mother that morning. Melissa suggested that they visit Allison Miller, and Allison suggested that they ask Olivia Courtney.
A hired gardener was clipping the massive hedges outside Olivia's stately faux-Colonial house, which looked down on the shady, leafy depths of La Loma Park from the side of a hill. The sloping lawn on either side of the stone steps leading up to the house was a dark emerald green, mowed so smoothly it looked artificial. Ionic columns stood on either side of the front door, making Kathy feel like she was about to enter the Acropolis. She rang the bell and a Hispanic woman in uniform opened the door.
"Is Olivia here?" The words came out in a rush and Kathy had to repeat them.
"Oh, si, Miss Olivia. Come."
The woman led them into a tidy parlor with white carpet and polished antique furniture.
"Tu cabello es bonito! Me encantan tus rizos!" Annette said to the woman, causing her to break her stoic decorum slightly with a blush and a smile.
"No! No! tu eres joven y hermosa!" The woman tried to shoo Annette's words away with her hand as she left the room.
"What did you say to her?" Kathy had to know.
"I just told her she had pretty hair. That I liked her curls."
Kathy smiled, admiring Annette's own pretty hair as she gazed at her.
"Are you guys looking for Brenda?"
Annette and Kathy looked up, almost startled. Kathy had seen Olivia before, last year at school. She and Brenda were pretty tight before Brenda and Mark became attached at the mouth. She was beautiful. Her long red hair waved into a perfect curl at the ends, and her bell bottoms matched the stripes on her blouse. Really, Olivia just matched. She looked like one more expensive, custom-made accessory to her big rich house.
"Yeah."
"I don't know where she is. Like I told your mom and Mark, I saw her yesterday afternoon over at Ulrich Shopping Center. She didn't tell me about any plans or anything but she did seem upset. She kept talking about being 'sick of bullshit.' I'm not sure what that meant. That's all I know." Olivia had said this to so many people it sounded rehearsed at this point. She stood there as though she were being patient, one hand on her hip.
"Can I have María Luisa get you anything?"
"We're only hitting places people have already hit. This is pointless." Annette whined as they climbed into the Pinto.
"What am I supposed to do? Just sit around and do nothing when my sister is in danger?" Kathy was shocked by her own tone. She wasn't angry at Annette. She was just angry. She wasn't sure how to apologize.
"When was the last time you remember seeing her?" Annette asked, deep in thought and unbothered by Kathy's agitation.
"Well, I dropped her off at Swensen's yesterday."
"Did she seem normal?"
"Not really. She seemed sad. She asked me for money. It was weird."
"Kathy! Why didn't you tell me that a long time ago? She asked for money? She probably needed it because she was running away." Annette's eyebrows were raised toward the ceiling, almost pleading with Kathy to calm down and think logically.
"But she doesn't have a car."
"Maybe she hitched."
"That doesn't make me feel any less worried. The killer...." Kathy stopped herself. She wasn't sure what details Annette knew about the murders.
"The killer what?"
"I'm pretty sure he gets girls to get into his car with him."
"That doesn't mean she got into his car, Kathy. Breathe and stop assuming the worst."
***
Kathy couldn't believe it took her so long to think of Everett, seeing how they had been so friendly in the film appreciation class. It hadn't occurred to anyone else either, as he wasn't even in Brenda's address book. She looked up the Greeleys in the white pages next to the kitchen telephone and dialed the number. Everett's mother answered. She told Kathy that Everett was on a weekend trip with his Young Democrats group. She wanted to talk more, but Kathy had to cut the call short: a clown car's worth of men in blue uniforms had begun marching into the Aukerman residence.
The number of hours since Brenda was last seen continued to pile up. Kathy's mother made a casserole that only police officers ate. No one related to Brenda had any appetite at all. In fact, Kathy hadn't eaten all day. Her brain wasn't sending any signals that she needed nourishment. She ran on adrenaline alone.
"You need to sleep. You'll feel much worse if you don't sleep," Kathy's mother told her, her own voice close to drowsy.
"I'm not tired."
"Take this." Mary placed a small white pill in Kathy's hand. "It will help."
"What is it?"
"It's something for when you feel... like this." Mary took a large sip from the tumbler of vodka in her hand.
Kathy popped the pill in her mouth and downed it with a lukewarm can of Tab she had left sitting on the table earlier. When she got to her bedroom, she already felt a little dizzy. She laid down on the bed and closed her eyes. It was like a portrait of Annette was painted on the inside of her eyelids. She couldn't see anything else, no matter how hard she tried. That wasn't true. Brenda's face popped up a few times, but in those instances Kathy used Annette to make her go away. Brenda's face sent a chill down her spine too cold to shake. Annette was warm. It was okay if she couldn't see anything else.
***
A pain through her side. Liquid spilling from every orifice in her body. Not just any liquid. Blood. Empty pockets. Empty sockets. All Kathy could smell was a dull metallic odor. Rust. You're alone. You're not safe. None of you are ever safe. You should know that by now.
Dark faceless figures swarmed Kathy. Not faceless—eyeless. No big open empty holes where they should be, either. Just smooth skin. They hadn't been removed—they'd never been there in the first place! Of course, why hadn't she realized it earlier? She had to tell Brenda. Make sure she wasn't scared. Make sure she was still okay.
Kathy opened her eyelids just enough to realize she was a long way from reality. She tried to move her body but couldn't. A million needles stabbed her in every pore as she remembered that her sister was missing. Gone. That part wasn't the dream. If only that were just part of the dream.
It took every muscle in Kathy's body to turn onto her side. Her brain sent signals that her muscles ignored at first. She felt glued to the mattress, like an elephant was lying on top of her. Gravity had twice its normal pull. She opened her eyes again. 11:30. Wait, 11:30? How could she have slept that long? She had gone to bed around 10:30. Had she really slept for eleven hours? Kathy thought about the pill her mother had made her take last night. Even though horrifying images haunted her dreams, it probably would have been worse had she not been able to sleep. She was groggy but grateful. She got to skip out on living through hell for a few hours.
After finally dragging herself away from the mattress, she threw on the same jeans she had worn every day this week. She didn't bother brushing her hair. What if there was news? She couldn't waste a single minute.
She was greeted by a group of about five policemen as she started walking down the stairs. She recognized Dave and a few other officers who had made her life miserable last summer. But they were just doing their job then. Kathy sighed. Maybe if they had kept doing it Brenda wouldn't be missing.
A couple of stereotypical-looking cops sat at the Aukerman breakfast table. They both looked familiar. The one with freckles and hair the color of raw liver rode with Dave sometimes, and the one wearing his sunglasses in the house—well, she had seen him somewhere. All cops blended together. They were helping themselves to the family's milk and cereal. It was okay. Kathy still didn't have an appetite anyway.
Ken looked like he hadn't slept all night. Evidently Mary didn't share her drugs with him. Or he declined to take them. Either way, he looked like a wreck. Kathy had never seen him so disheveled. He was always the height of fashion; to see him like this was upsetting.
Her mother, on the other hand, was sharp as a tack and obviously well rested. She had the most energy Kathy could remember her having in a long time. She came off like the boss as she stood in front of the policemen, trying to order them to search in various places. Her eyes were bright, but worried. Her pupils dilated slightly. Kathy began to wonder if she was on speed.
Her shoulder hurt, like she had slept on it in a terrible position. She sat on a rubber-top barstool in front of the counter and grabbed the side of the wall. Twisting her body in the opposite direction, Kathy felt shooting pains race through her back as she stretched. They were good pains. The kind of pain you need in order to feel relief.
"Is there anything I can do?" Kathy felt a sudden surge of energy.
"You should just try to relax, Kathy. We've got it under control." Officer Dave had a piece of parsley between his teeth.
She couldn't help but think that he was wrong. The situation was far from under control. Chaos and confusion had plagued the police for months. His words were not reassuring. If anything, they made her more impatient to get out and start searching.
"What about the bridge? Did somebody check the Lion Bridge today? Should I go back?"
"We have undercovers dressed as hobos in the area. She's not there." He paused. "What do you mean go back?"
"Well, Mark and I searched there yesterday morning."
"You can't do that." Dave puffed himself up and raised his voice the way he did. "What if you had stumbled on something horrible, Kathy? If something terrible has happened, do you really want to be the one to find her? You should protect yourself from all of this negativity. Distract yourself by playing with your friends."
Playing with her friends? Did Officer Dave think she was ten years old? That everything would feel better if she went off and played jump rope and hopscotch with Andrea? She tried not to show her irritation. Officer Dave was just doing his job. He was trying to protect her.
"Okay. Well I'm going to go hang out with friends, then."
Officer Dave nodded.
"Can I take the Pinto?" she asked her mother. She knew she probably didn't even need to ask anymore, but she figured a show of respect couldn't hurt right now.
Mary showed her approval with a wave of her hand. She was on the phone.
"Wait," Ken interrupted. "Where will you be and how can we reach you?"
"Call Andrea's. If I'm not there try Kevin's."
Kathy's father embraced her tightly as she tried to walk out the front door. She could feel his muscles flex as he squeezed her tighter and tighter. She felt paralyzed again, like she had in bed, but she had more initiative now. She kissed her father on the cheek before forcing her way out of his arms. "Help Dad get some rest," she whispered to her mother on her way out.
Kathy didn't drive toward Andrea's or Kevin's. She wasn't sure where she was going. She just needed to be moving. All over town, there were trees awash in brilliant colors, but her attention fell on the ones that were starting to look naked and dead. They looked frozen in place and utterly helpless.
She stopped by Graceada Park and watched from the car as a little boy in a blue windbreaker, all alone, turned the merry-go-round with both hands until it was spinning as fast he could make it go. When it began to slow down, he would push it again. Dry leaves floated through the air. After a couple of minutes, the boy turned in the direction of the car and stared. He was about a hundred feet away, she figured. Finally, he ran in the opposite direction. Kathy turned the key in the ignition and sped off. Her heart was racing a little. Why did she feel like she had been doing something wrong?
Soon she found herself heading toward Seventh Street. Toward the concrete lion that couldn't defend itself from getting a bite taken out of its face. She didn't want to go there. She knew the police had people stationed in case the killer returned to his favorite spot. It didn't matter. There was a big magnet in her chest pulling her toward the bridge. She had no control.
The area was deserted, save a couple of homeless men she saw talking to each other near the river. Brenda wasn't here. If he put Brenda here everyone would know already. It was the middle of the day. Kathy felt weak for not being able to resist the magnet that drew her here. She needed support. She needed Annette.
Two different drivers honked at her in anger as she drove back through town. She kept getting distracted. First by her own thoughts while she sat at a stoplight, picturing her sister's face with big dark holes in place of her beautiful eyes. Kathy didn't know how long it had been since the light turned green, or since the driver behind her had started leaning on his horn. At least ten seconds, judging by the look on his face as he passed her and hung his middle finger out the window.
Once the image had formed in her brain, she couldn't erase it. She had to pull over. She saw more every time she closed her eyes: Brenda's nakedness, stab wounds, ligature marks. She opened the door, afraid she was going to throw up, but nothing happened. She closed the door and considered that you usually had to have food in your stomach in order to throw up. She pressed her palms hard against her eyeballs and rubbed until all she could see was snow—like after network television had gone off the air for the night. She concentrated on taking deep, regular breaths. She needed not to be alone anymore. She needed to get to her companion.
The second distraction came when Kathy saw a brown station wagon idling in the right turn lane. She couldn't get a clear view of the driver. It was a Mercury, though. She cut across traffic without thinking about it, almost colliding with the car coming up behind her. She barely noticed the honk this time. Her heart was pounding hard, and she couldn't tell how much of it was because she had just almost gotten in an accident and how much was because of the possibility that the killer was in her sights. She didn't bother trying to maintain a buffer car between her and the station wagon. She drove so close she was nearly touching its bumper at times. The driver was a man, she was pretty sure. She followed him all the way out to the boonies, like they were headed for Oakdale. He finally turned down a long dirt road surrounded by walnut orchards on all sides. Kathy couldn't follow him there. What if it was someone dangerous? What exactly was she planning on doing? Ripping out his hair? Scratching him with her fingernails? She watched as the car disappeared down the lonely road before she turned around and started heading for Annette's house.
What was she going to do if she found herself in that situation again? What if she had the killer at her fingertips? Her brain couldn't accept the idea that she might become a victim herself. She could only find solace in imagining herself the hero. She needed something that could make her one. A weapon. A gun. Something that would make her just as scary and dangerous as him.
Kathy tried not to picture Annette's sister the way she had pictured her own, even though she knew that was exactly how she was found. To let this image into her mind seemed disrespectful. Respect didn't deter her from picturing Brenda that way, though. Brutal images flashed through her mind like a slide show of some hellish vacation. One image after the other. Click. Click. Click.
When she arrived at the Vergaras' little ranch-style house on June Drive, Kathy got out of the Pinto and walked to the front door, expecting to be greeted by Annette. She was startled when Mrs. Vergara opened the door. She was in a housecoat and her hair was uncombed. She looked ill. Kathy was reminded a little of her own mother. Whereas Mary Aukerman typically looked sleepy and distracted, however, Mrs. Vergara's eyes were sharp. They shone with joyless vigilance.
"Can Annette come hang out with us?" Kathy didn't know why she said us. She knew Annette's mother could see she was all alone just by looking.
"Annette!" She shouted without turning her head. She took a couple of steps closer to Kathy. "Your sister is missing," she said, almost accusingly.
"Yes." Kathy felt a lump in her throat.
"You're afraid."
It wasn't a question. Kathy nodded.
"Don't let fear defeat you. You have hope. Hope is the most precious thing you can have. You can't imagine. Find courage in your fear. Use it. Use it to help you search for your sister." Annette's mother was very serious. She was holding Kathy's arm now. "Annette!"
Annette came jogging down the hall, wearing a butterscotch polyester dress with white collar and cuffs. Her hair bounced as she moved—everything in a calming rhythm.
"Be safe searching. You're doing the right thing. I know it's hard." Annette's mother embraced Kathy and tears fell from the corners of her eyes. Kathy returned the embrace, moved in a way that was a little unsettling. It was like Mrs. Vergara knew something about her that she was only just starting to recognize herself. Annette kissed her mother's cheek before walking away with Kathy and getting into the yellow Pinto.
"Did you check the bridge this morning? I was thinking you would call me earlier. I sat by the phone all morning." She managed to say it so it didn't sound like reproach.
"My mom gave me some pill last night that wiped me out. I slept for eleven hours."
"That's probably good. You need rest and this is a really hard time to do that."
"Yeah. Anyway, I did go over to the bridge. There was nothing. The cops at my house told me that they have undercover officers stationed in the area anyway."
"But sometimes it feels better to see for yourself." That calm, soft voice.
The two had arrived back at Kathy's place. She wasn't sure why she drove back there. Maybe she just knew she needed to be close to family.
The first person they saw was Officer Dave. "I don't know if it's a good idea for you girls to hang out here," he said in that authoritarian voice of his. "Maybe it'd be a happier scene at her house, Kathy." He jerked his head toward Annette as he said her.
"No. I want to be with my family."
"I can guarantee my house would not be happier," Annette added. It seemed only at that moment that Dave realized who Annette was. Kathy watched him trying to decide if it was permissible for the two girls to be consorting.
"Well, you two should go upstairs at least. This is a stressful environment." Dave's mustache made a rustling sound as he scratched it.
"Hey Dave, we need to question her, right?" one of the other officers said from the living room.
"Oh, right. So it's good you're here. You girls go upstairs and play and I'll let you know when we need you."
Kathy made a minimal effort not to roll her eyes. The two started up the stairs and Annette mouthed the word play with an amused expression on her face. It was hard for Kathy to hold back a laugh. She wished she didn't have to. It was the first time she'd felt like laughing since this all started.
Kathy buried her head in the heap of throw pillows that covered her bed. She tried to control her breathing. Inhaling. Exhaling. She started to wonder if her body would remember how to do it on its own after she stopped monitoring it. She sat up. Annette was across the room, inspecting a little ceramic cat that Kathy had made in sixth-grade art class. She held it in her hand like a toy, making it scamper across the desktop. Then she picked up a trophy Kathy had won on the La Loma Junior High field hockey team.
"You play field hockey?"
"Not anymore."
"Me neither."
Annette walked over and sat next to Kathy on the bed. Her hair was frizzier today and she kept smoothing it down with her hand, obviously self-conscious about her appearance. Frizzy or not, her hair looked lovely against her bright polyester dress. Kathy tried to read her facial expression, but had begun to realize that trying to do that was usually fruitless. Annette was so beautiful and full of life that Kathy was sometimes troubled not to be able to detect more of the pain she must be feeling about Diane. Had she found a way to turn it off? Or was she emotionally numb from the trauma? Her eyes sparkled, but at the same time there was something dark and hollow behind them. A space where things were missing.
"How are you feeling, Kathy? Seriously. I want you to spill your guts. Let it all out. It will help." Annette met Kathy's stare.
"I feel, I don't know. Destroyed. Ruined. Sick. You don't want to hear this. Doesn't this just bring up bad memories?"
"I want you to do it for you. Don't think about me."
Kathy placed her smiley face pillow over her eyes and mouth before she began to sob uncontrollably. "I keep seeing her when I close my eyes. Naked. Dead. Her eyes ripped out." Kathy let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a scream. It was loud and made her feel better for a couple of seconds.
"I see something kind of like that when I close my eyes too." Annette looked at the floor.
Kathy felt a piano's weight of guilt fall on her from the sky. She knew Annette said just to let it out, but this couldn't be good for her, could it? Kathy hugged Annette and they both buried their eyes in each other's shoulders. Kathy cried a river, but didn't make a mark on the man-made fibers in Annette's dress. Her own shirt was soaked. After a few minutes of non-stop weeping she decided to stand up and jump up and down a couple of times. Try to shake out the jitters.
"Yes! Get your heart rate up. You'll feel better. Do you want to go for a jog?" Annette's eyes were still wet.
"I have to get questioned by the fuzz, remember?"
"Oh yeah."
Kathy felt better after the cry. It felt like she had been holding something in, but she hadn't really. She wasn't lying or holding back any information. It was just raw emotion. And apparently you let raw emotion out by flooding your eyes with water and letting a ton of snot drip out of your nose. The human body was a curiosity.
"Let's think of some productive things we can do. We could cook! We can make sure your mom and dad eat. They'll function much better. They won't be as likely to fall apart at any little thing."
Kathy hadn't eaten in hours. Maybe since yesterday. It was hard for her to believe food would help. It seemed like she would just throw it up. Her body would reject it. Kathy and Anne sat on the bed cross-legged. Facing each other. Annette took both of Kathy's hands in hers.
"You have all this emotion. You can turn it into strength. You need to keep reminding yourself that she's not under the bridge. Diane was by this point." Annette looked down at their hands for a moment, then looked Kathy in the eye again. "You have hope. Keep telling yourself that. Hope is still alive, and you, Kathy Aukerman, are strong."
Kathy felt a lump rise in her throat, but she swallowed it. Annette was right. She was strong. Maybe she needed to be strong for the rest of her family. The girls were quiet for a while. They just stared at one another, almost in a trance. Annette leaned forward and rested her right hand on the back of Kathy's neck. She drew Kathy's head closer and soon Annette's lips were on Kathy's lips. Kathy was taken aback. She hadn't been expecting this. Was this even allowed?
Kathy leaned back and stared into Annette's eyes. They were vibrant. Alive. Kathy wrapped her arms around Annette and kissed her even more passionately. It was like all the lights came on on a big Christmas tree in her chest. Everything was warm and bright. When she finished kissing her she laid her head on Annette's shoulder. Chills raced down her spine as Annette rubbed her back. Not the kind of chills she got when she thought about the killer. These were good chills. Safe chills. Comfortable.
A knock on the door brought both girls to their feet. They were on opposite sides of the room within seconds, afraid of getting caught doing what they were doing. Kathy opened the door to see Officer Dave standing in the hallway. He and another cop entered her room without asking.
"So, we're gonna need you to answer some questions. Annette, how 'bout you go downstairs for a little while, sweetie, okay?" Officer Dave seemed extra condescending to Annette, which was crazy, as Kathy thought she had seen him at his worst. Annette rose to her feet. She headed downstairs, closing the door behind her.
"This is Officer Daniels."
Kathy gave the freckled cop a little wave hello. She remembered him from Enslen Park during the summer.
"You were the last one in the family to see your sister," Officer Daniels said.
Kathy wasn't sure if that was a question or a statement. She said yes just in case.
"How did she seem? Did she mention anything about plans she had?"
"No. She was normal. I dropped her off and she called me a butthole for teasing her about her uniform. Just like every day."
"Does Brenda usually share things about her life with you?"
"Not really."
"So her behavior was just like any other day?"
"Yes," Kathy lied. Brenda never asked her for money, and she certainly didn't ever tell Kathy she loved her. Or say sorry for anything. But Kathy kept that information to herself. If they knew that, they would look for her like she was a runaway. That was the last thing Kathy wanted. There was a madman on the loose. She couldn't give them an excuse to slack off and just wait for her sister to come back. She had to do everything in her power to keep them looking for her like she was in immediate danger.
"Do you think your sister would walk out on her job without notice? Would that be in her character?"
"No," Kathy lied again. Brenda had the work ethic of a hobo on a freight train. "I was shocked when I heard about the shop being left open." Unexpectedly, tears started creeping from the corners of Kathy's eyes.
Officer Daniels sat next to her on the bed and wrapped his arm around her. "You gotta have hope, kiddo. Don't assume the worst."
Kathy didn't like having a cop on her bed. She stood up and paced the room. The corner near her bookshelf still smelled of green candy apple and she stood there and took in the smell she used to despise.
"But what if someone forced her out of the store? Abducted her? Do you guys have anything yet? Any sort of trail or clue or hint that she didn't just vanish into thin air?"
"Well some of her friends said she'd been depressed lately," Dave chimed in. "And the whole breakup with the boyfriend was a recipe for disaster."
"What are you saying?" Kathy looked him in the eye.
"That she took off, Kathy. Hopefully she'll be back." Officer Daniels took in a deep breath through his mustache-covered nostrils. "Now I don't want to scare you, but I need you to answer this question as honestly as you can: has she ever seemed suicidal to you? Has she ever mentioned wanting to hurt herself?"
Kathy stared at Dave with her mouth open. Did he think she had run off to take her own life? He didn't know her sister at all. He should not be investigating the disappearance from this angle. She felt hot. Anger raised her body temperature by at least a degree.
"No. Brenda was happy. She loved life. There is some freak out there right now looking to hurt girls just like her. I can't believe you're even considering suicide. It's an insult. And an injustice to Brenda."
"Settle down, honey." Officer Daniels tried to rub her shoulders. "We're just covering all the bases for the investigation, you know?
"Okay."
"Last thing on the list for you is about Mark. You saw Mark Fielder yesterday, right? Since Brenda went missing?"
"Yeah. He went to the bridge with me yesterday morning. He's been out canvasing all the hangouts. Trying to find clues."
"We haven't been able to reach him today. Have you seen him today?"
"No." Kathy didn't understand where this was leading. Brenda obviously didn't run away with Mark, right? Why did they need to see him today anyway? Did they think he was covering for her? Or did they think he hurt her? Or did they just want to gather information? Kathy tried to think like a cop but decided to stop after picturing Mark beating her sister to death with a tire iron.
"Well, I think that's probably it for us. Remember to eat. Get plenty of rest. It's hard, but it will help." Officer Daniels gave her one last pat on the back. Then he and Officer Dave closed their notebooks, walked across the room, and paused in unison for a fraction of a second to take in the giant David Cassidy poster on the inside of Kathy's door before opening it and leaving.
Kathy followed the policemen downstairs. She wanted to retrieve Annette. Continue their activities from before—if that was what she wanted. Kathy was surprised to see Annette sitting next to her mother's mother on the couch as she came down the stairs. They were talking and laughing. Kathy had never made her grandmother laugh. She wondered how on earth Annette could possibly have done it, especially in this tension-filled house.
"Hi, Grandma." Kathy hugged her grandmother from the side with one arm, allowing the old woman to stay seated. "Do you want to finish what we were working on before?" She looked Annette straight in the eye.
"Oh, yeah. We should. For school tomorrow." Before Annette stood up she gave Kathy's grandmother a far sincerer hug than Kathy had just moments ago. They had only met minutes before. Kathy was in awe. Annette was a charmer. She could make anyone comfortable.
"We have homework," Kathy clarified to her grandmother.
"Good. Keep yourself busy! Occupy your mind!" Grandma Irene hollered in her Oklahoma twang as the girls climbed back up the stairs.
After Kathy closed the door, she walked straight over to Annette and wrapped both her arms around her waist, almost lifting her from the ground. She leaned in and kissed her gently. She could feel Annette's warm breath pushing out toward her at regular intervals. It felt so different to be this close to someone. So comforting. Something so rare that she'd never thought she'd ever experience it herself. But that was when her mind was closed and locked. Everything was different now. Every window in Kathy's skyscraper of a body was wide open, and the cool breeze felt like heaven compared to the tension downstairs.
The two sat side by side on the bed in silence for a while, Kathy resting her head on Annette's shoulder. Her thick dark hair obstructed Kathy's vision.
"I know this is a stupid question, but can you think of anything that might make you feel better?"
Kathy laid on the bed. "Just hold me," she said.
Annette climbed over Kathy so she was lying closest to the wall. She spooned Kathy from behind, gently caressing her upper arm as Kathy went through intervals of feeling fine and crying her eyes out. When she cried, Annette would squeeze her tighter. It felt better. Secure. Like she wasn't going to spontaneously combust.
After lying there for what seemed like hours, Kathy heard the doorbell ring. She heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and soon, a gentle knocking on her bedroom door. Kathy and Annette jumped to their feet, again trying to stand as far as possible from each other. Kathy turned the doorknob slowly, hoping there weren't cops on the other side. In the hallway she saw Andrea, tears in her eyes. She embraced Kathy, almost knocking both of them to the floor.
"Are you okay? Oh my god, Kathy, I was wondering where you were and why you weren't calling me and then," she stopped to inhale deeply. She had been speaking too quickly to breathe. "I heard. Oh Kathy, I'm so sorry." Andrea buried her face in Kathy's shoulder as the two girls hugged. "Why didn't you call me?" she lifted her head to say. "I don't know why you would want to be alone at a time like this."
Kathy backed up. Andrea walked over to the bed and sat cross-legged, facing the door. It was only then that Andrea realized she and Kathy weren't alone in the room. That their new friend had been there all along—watching their intimate moment of grief. The look on Andrea's face turned from concern to confusion.
"Oh, hi," Andrea said. Her tone was strange.
"Hi."
The three girls sat in silence for forty-five million years. At least that's what it felt like to Kathy. She felt all sorts of emotions at once: guilt, grief, shame, and a fiery new feeling she didn't have a name for. The way Annette made her feel.
But Kathy knew that Andrea had always been there for her. Not to call on her in her time of need was a serious oversight. Kathy knew she would be hurt if the situation were the other way around and Andrea didn't contact her. She felt kind of like apologizing, but deep down she didn't feel like she had any obligation to anyone but her family in a crisis like this. Her world was crumbling. No one could judge her for how she was "supposed" to react. Nobody had been through this. Except Annette, of course. Andrea was a smart girl. Kathy thought she ought to be able to see that.
"Is there anything I can do?" Andrea finally broke the silence. "Does anyone need anything? Can I bring people stuff from the market or something?"
"I don't know. We should ask my mom." Kathy opened the door so the three could go downstairs. "She would know much better than I would."
Pleasantries and condolences were exchanged in the living room. Kathy's mother thanked Andrea for being willing to help, but told her that the family had everything under control. Kathy didn't understand why she said that. Her father looked like he was coming apart at the seams. Grandma was crying. The cops had big sweat stains on their uniforms. Brenda was gone. Nothing was under control.
Her mother suggested that she take her friends home. It was getting late, and the family needed to eat dinner. Kathy agreed.
"I have my bike," Andrea clarified.
"You could leave it here."
"No, I'll just ride it home." Andrea waved at all the cops and worried faces in the room before backing out.
Kathy felt guilty, though she tried to convince herself not to. She shouldn't be thinking about anything but Brenda. She shouldn't be worried about friends being jealous of each other or about romance. Brenda. Brenda was her number one priority.
Annette only hugged Kathy before getting out of the car. Kathy wanted more. She wanted to feel the comfort of someone's soft lips on hers, but she understood this wasn't the place. Annette's parents could be watching, for Pete's sake. Kathy understood, but she still felt disappointed.
A stack of pizza boxes sat on the counter when Kathy arrived back home. She took a novelty Mickey Mouse plate from the cabinet and filled it with two slices of plain cheese and two slices of mushroom and sausage. Grandma Irene was gone. There were fewer cops now. Only about three. The sun had gone down. Kathy figured they were just out patrolling for anyone who might have Brenda.
She had already practically swallowed two slices of pizza whole before she walked over and sat next to her father on the sofa. His skin was a gray color. His suit was wrinkled and had a couple of stains on it. This was not the man she knew.
"It's been too long, Kathy. The longer she's gone, the more likely that she's, well, gone. Understand?"
"Don't say that, Dad."
"We may never know anything. At least the Vergaras know where their baby is. What if we never find out what's happened, Kathy? What if we're forced to live in this hell for the rest of our lives? I see her when I close my eyes, Kathy. I see her lying dead and broken." His voice cracked and his eyes welled up with tears.
"Dad, you really should get some rest. Have Mom give you a pill."
"I don't like taking pills."
"It will help, I promise."
The two walked upstairs and straight into the master bedroom, where Mary Aukerman was covering her face with cold cream in the mirror of her wooden vanity. Kathy didn't know if her mother had ever had anything to eat. Her skin was as pale as the cream she was smearing on it, so Kathy thought it unlikely. She hoped she was taking care of herself. The last thing they needed was to have somebody in the hospital right now.
"We need pills." Kathy spoke bluntly.
"Really, Kenneth? I'm so glad. You need to get some rest."
Mary pulled a prescription bottle from her bureau drawer and the three stood in a circle as she shook three pills from the container. She dispensed two of them into Kathy and Ken's open hands, reserving one for herself. It felt strangely ritualistic to Kathy, like they were witches or druids performing a spell. She and her parents popped the pills all at the same time. Mary passed around her glass of water so her husband and daughter could wash the medication down.
Kathy wrapped her arms around her parents. "I love you. We're strong." She turned around and started heading for the door. "Good night."
Hours passed and she felt nothing. Maybe she felt something, but not what she wanted to feel. It had been the longest day of her life and she just wanted to fall into unconsciousness, but Brenda's dead and mutilated body was the subject of choice for her brain tonight, and no matter how she tried, the darkness wouldn't leave her. The deep, deep darkness of two sockets devoid of jiggly, wet, beautiful eyeballs.
Lions. Eyes. Cuts. They flashed through her mind like the credits for a television show. She thought she might throw up a couple of times, but she didn't. Her stomach wanted the pizza. It wasn't letting go.
Finally, Kathy found a small space on her pillow that smelled of green candy apple, launching her into a completely different emotional state, one that was safe and comforting, not scary and hopeless. She clung to it. She knew that scary and hopeless was her reality, but comfort would help her sleep. And before long, it did.
***
Kathy opened one eye to look at the bright red alarm clock on her bedside table. 10:42. The pill had made her sleep late again. It was hard to move, but not quite as hard as the day before. She actually felt like getting up rather than sleeping away her teenage years.
She sat up in bed, sitting in the same spot where she had been swept off her feet the day before. She thought of Annette and felt a sharp, almost physical ache. She felt warm and happy and sad all at once. The sadness took over before long, but Kathy's post-drug mind took a while to understand why. She just kept feeling lower and lower until she remembered: her sister was gone. Maybe forever. She fell backwards, just missing hitting her head on her headboard. Her eyes leaked slightly. Waking up and realizing it wasn't a nightmare was becoming too regular an occurrence.
Kathy pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a La Loma Junior High Glee Club tee shirt. She looked both ways as she opened the door, unsure whom she might find on the other side. Her house had been full of strangers for days. Nobody was in sight, though. It was strangely quiet. She walked over to her parents' bedroom and turned the knob slowly, making as little sound as possible. Inside she saw two big heaps on her parents' bed, one of them snoring quietly. Kathy never woke up before her parents. She worried about her mom. This was too unusual.
Kathy walked to her mother's side of the bed, positive that if she and her dad each took one pill, her mother likely said what the hell and took several. Kathy crouched down and put her hand in front of her mother's nostrils, hoping to feel a cool rhythmic breeze. Nothing. Her heart started racing and she scooted closer to the bed. She would try with one finger. She bent all of them except her index finger, tenderly moving that one to the space between her mother's nose and upper lip. Kathy sighed in relief as she felt the cool air come shooting out of her mother's nose and onto her finger. Mary opened her eyes and gasped as she moved backward.
"Kathy! What are you doing! My lord!" Mary covered the top of her nightgown with the paisley coverlet on the master bed. "What?" She looked at the clock. "Oh my goodness, Kenneth, get up! It's nearly eleven!"
Kathy rose to her feet and took a few steps backwards away from her parents' bed. "Sorry. I was just worried you were dead."
"Kathy! What on earth?" Mary ran her fingers through her own hair. "Have you been downstairs yet? I assume they would have woken us if they had any news."
"I haven't been."
"Well Ken, hurry up and put on some pants so she doesn't have to go down alone!" She stood up and put a housecoat over her nightgown. She started running a brush through her hair as she sat at her vanity stool.
Kathy's dad was already almost dressed before her mother even started ordering him around. Her mother was more lucid than usual after waking up. Kathy figured this was what her mom was like sober. Weird.
Uncle Al and a couple of policemen were seated around the dining table. One of the officers was on the telephone.
"Right. Okay. 11:30. You got it."
"Everything's set up?" Al asked the cop who had just hung up the phone.
"Yup. Channel 5 will be here for their live news at noon broadcast."
The media. Cops talking about the media. That meant it was really real. Kathy fought a wave of panic. What was their plan? Were they going to say "Please, Mr. Murderer, give us our daughter back?" She didn't know whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. Last spring a self-defense teacher had come to Downey and given a special presentation. Kathy remembered that woman saying that if you were attacked, you should keep saying your name over and over again. To talk about your family. It helped remind the predator that you were human. Maybe her mom and dad were hoping to remind the killer that Brenda was human. But she had been gone so long now. Kathy thought about her father's words from the night before. The longer she was gone, the more likely it was that she was really gone.
"Okay, so I'll get a shower and get dressed then," said Ken. "Should the whole family be there?"
"Definitely," Officer Dave answered.
"Okay, so you go put on something nice, Kathy. We'll take you to school afterward."
Kathy gasped. He couldn't be serious. "I am not going to school! What are you thinking?"
"You have to get back into your regular routine at some point, Kath."
"It's only been a couple of days! I'm not going. You can't make me go. You realize everyone will just be staring at me, whispering about how my sister is probably dead in a ditch, right? I need to be here. Helping. We need to find Brenda. All I care about is Brenda." It was the most firmly she had ever spoken to her father, and he was obviously taken aback. He didn't offer a rebuttal. Kathy relaxed slightly when she realized he wasn't going to push it. Uncle Al patted her on the back as she stood up to go put on "something nice."
***
Kathy stood at the door of her closet and felt unsure about what kind of outfit would be appropriate. She didn't want to look like she was going to a fancy party or something. Tragedy had struck their family. What did you wear when your world was falling apart? Was anyone watching the news thinking, "Gee, that family is too disheveled, they should look nicer when their daughter's body might be lying under a bridge?"
Kathy grabbed a smooth button-down shirt with yellow polka dots from the closet and slipped it on. She decided to accent the dots with a yellow skirt and sweater vest. Looking in the mirror, Kathy thought something still seemed off. She combed her hair as she usually did, and it fell into place with a part in the center of her head. She took a comb from the drawer and tried to change the location of her part, but stopped. She liked it in the middle. She wasn't scared of looking like the dead girls.
She looked decent enough, according to her standards, though her father might disagree. By the time she made it downstairs she was surprised to see him already shaved, showered, and dressed. She didn't know how he had done all that in the time it took her to put on an outfit. He walked toward her. His suit was dark, like he was ready to go to a funeral. Kathy couldn't help but notice the mood contrast between her outfit and her father's. He was somber and sophisticated while she looked like she was about to perform with the freaking Brady Bunch.
"Okay, that'll do," her father said, looking her up and down. He didn't seem to have an issue with her sunny yellow threads.
Officer Dave seemed oddly put-together for someone who had been assisting a worried family for three days. Almost happy. Dave asked Al to retrieve a bag from his patrol car and Kathy watched as he obeyed. She couldn't help but think about how he must feel climbing into to the white car adorned with red and blue lights. Did he pretend for just a moment that it was his? At least the cops trusted him enough to let him help.
Nobody said anything to Kathy about what to say on television. The police mostly gave instructions to her parents. She deduced that she was just supposed to stand with them, looking sad. That seemed right. You didn't usually see teenage girls on television making public appeals for their sisters to come home.
When the news van pulled up in front of the house, Officers Dave and Daniels escorted her family to a spot in the center of the front lawn. They had her mother and father stand in the center, sandwiched by Kathy on the left and Al on the right. Kathy had never seen a television camera before. Staring into the center felt strange, like she was looking into a bottomless pit. If she looked deep enough she could see her own face staring back at her, dark and sunken.
"All right, this is it—and 3, 2, go!" The cameraman got quiet as a young woman who smelled like hairspray started saying something that sounded memorized.
"I'm standing here at the house of the  Aukerman family, who haven't seen their eighteen-year-old daughter Brenda since she vanished under suspicious circumstances from her job at Swensen's Ice Cream Parlor last Friday." The woman held a long, skinny silver microphone like Gene Rayburn's on Match Game.
Kathy's mother started sobbing as the words exited the reporter's mouth. Kenneth wrapped his arm tightly around her waist, and she cried into his shoulder.
"With the recent string of deaths attributed to a man police are calling the 'Lion Bridge Killer,' the Aukerman family is understandably distraught. This is much scarier than a teenager simply running away. Mary, is there anything you would like the public to know?" The reporter shoved the microphone into Kathy's mother's face.
"We just need our baby back. Please. Brenda, sweetie, if you're listening, we love you and need you home. Please. If anyone has her, you need to know how special and loved our daughter is." Mary couldn't continue. She buried her face in her husband's shoulder and sobbed.
"Please. Help... help me bring my baby girl home. Brenda, I love you, baby," Her father said into the skinny silver stick.
"You heard it here on Channel 5 first. Another girl, ripped from a loving family who desperately need her back. Let's hope Brenda comes home safely, and that police don't have another Lion Bridge murder to investigate. You heard Mr. Aukerman, Modesto. Let's bring Brenda home. This is Sally Windgate, Channel 5."
It was over in the blink of an eye. The camera crew were there, and then they were gone. They had only been on camera for a total of what, twenty-five seconds? Both of her parents had cried, so that certainly made an appeal to humanity. Kathy tried to be pleased. It was good. Any captor would have to realize Brenda was human after that.
Kathy didn't end up going to school. Her parents continued to sit in the kitchen with the police, and she asked Al to come up to her bedroom with her so they could talk in private. No one else could know about what she was going to show him.
"What?"
"You have to not tell anyone."
"What?"
Kathy thrust her red velvet journal into her uncle's hands.
"I need to know the rest of the names."
He flinched visibly when he realized what he was holding. He seemed disturbed, which confused Kathy. It was the exact same thing he had at his house, after all.
"What is this?" he asked.
"You know what it is. You have one too. Yours is more complete. You need to help me figure out who I'm missing."
"I don't think this is healthy. Especially right now, Kath." Al clutched Kathy's journal to his chest with both hands. He had changed out of his Sunday best and was now wearing a baby blue t-shirt with a cartoon picture of a monkey in a barrel. It was a little too tight for him, and it made him look both large and vulnerable.
"What if this guy is running all over California killing girls and county police departments don't communicate enough to know it's the same guy? Every town thinks they have their own killer when it's really just the same guy."
"Believe me, I understand, and agree. But I don't think this is the right time to talk about it." He held the journal up as if it illustrated his point.
Kathy felt frustrated, but she understood. He didn't want her to have to write Brenda's name on the top of one of these pages. It was too horrible to imagine. Too close.
"You have girls in here I don't have," he said after thumbing through a few pages. "Jesus Christ."
"I do?"
Al nodded, still squinting at the book.
"Well, who do you have that I don't have?"
"I think there's only one. Kathy Baker up in Sacramento."
Kathy fell into her uncle's arms and began weeping. She didn't know if it was all the stress or if it was because the Sacramento victim shared her name.
"I don't want Brenda to be a news story," she cried.
Her uncle hugged her. "Me neither. I'm so sorry, sweetheart." He stood up and brushed himself off. "You should get your mind on other things. Where are your friends?"
"They're at school."
"Oh yeah. Well, at least come down and be with your mother and father during all this. It might feel better."
Kathy followed him out her bedroom door and down the stairs where she sat in between her parents on the living room sofa. Officer Dave sat next to the phone, playing solitaire on the glass coffee table. Her mother was biting her nails. Her father stared at the same page of newspaper for forty-five minutes. It didn't feel better.
***
The doorbell rang around a quarter to five, and Kathy got up to answer it. Annette, Andrea, and Kevin were all standing on the front porch. Kevin's mother's station wagon was parked in the driveway—he had just gotten his license last week. Annette cradled a big casserole dish in her arms. Kathy invited all of them in, and her mother fussed over how sweet it was for Annette to bring dinner. Kathy did think it was nice, though she hated anything with tuna in it. She had been hoping for pizza again.
Andrea stood directly in front of Kathy to address her. "You should have been there at lunch today, Kathy. It was insane. Janice Claremont started shrieking that Barb McKenna had stolen her boyfriend, which was crazy, because why would Barb be interested in John Keane, right? Anyway, she stood behind Barb at lunch and kept kicking the back of her legs until Barb stood up and turned around. When she did, Janice reached up and ripped Barb's hoop earring right out of her earlobe. There was blood everywhere. It was disgusting." Andrea seemed more excited than disgusted.
"Then what happened?" Kathy asked.
"She had to be escorted off campus by the cops."
Kathy was a little surprised she hadn't heard this gossip yet, as cops had been coming and going from her house all day. She thought one of them would have thought to tell her about a violent incident at her own school. But maybe they figured she didn't care. And while it was a nice little distraction to be shocked over the story, she didn't care, really. It was nothing. People got hurt. Sometimes it was shocking, but they were fine. Your world changed permanently when somebody was dead. Gone.
But maybe she wasn't. Maybe Brenda was out there, doing fine. Maybe she just ran because she hated it here. Hated her family, all of them. Couldn't stand to look at their ugly faces for another second. Which was worse? Death or abandonment? Death. Definitely death.
When the 5:30 news broadcast came on, everyone in the house stood around the family's 22-inch color television set Uncle Al had gotten them from his "TV guy." Kathy had always wondered if it was hot, but now that she saw the way her uncle hobnobbed with the fuzz, she began to doubt it.
Channel 5 rebroadcast the Aukerman family's plea for Brenda to return home. Kathy didn't like the way she looked on television. It was kind of like hearing your voice on a recording. In your own head, you have certain perceptions about how you look and sound. Kathy realized her perceptions were wrong as she stared at herself on the television screen, a blurry yellow seven-inch blob.
Annette stood beside her as they watched the broadcast. She rested her hand on the small of Kathy's back. Everyone was in front of them, nobody could see. Annette's hands felt cold, which was like heaven. Kathy's whole body was burning from the stress. Annette's hand cooled and relieved like Aloe vera.
"Did they have your family do anything like this, Annette?" Kathy's mother asked out of the blue. Kathy felt furious. Why in God's name did she think it was a good idea to bring up this poor stranger of a girl's recent tragedy?
"No. I mean, we didn't really know anything was wrong until we knew she was dead. You know, until after they found her under the bridge."
A wave of silence swept over the Aukerman house. Nobody was quite sure what to say or how to react. Kathy could tell her mother was embarrassed she had asked the question.
"No, it was actually not as stressful. We didn't go through this period of waiting and not knowing. We just went straight to being sad."
Kathy wanted to reach out and pull Annette closer to her. Hold her tight until her muscles gave way. Kathy was surprised by the way Annette could talk about the situation. Kathy could hardly picture Brenda's face without choking up. Annette could talk about her sister's body and not shed a tear. Maybe she was just strong. Or maybe that part of her died when Diane died.
Kathy thought about what the rest of the evening would hold. She predicted she would just stay here, feeling this way until her mother gave her something to make her feel something different. She would just stay here every day for the rest of her life, waiting for her pill.
The teenagers continued to gossip until Mary politely suggested that it might be time for them to start heading home, as it was a school night. Kathy felt a sharp pain in her chest. Her mother was taking away her teddy bear. Her security blanket. It was fine if Kevin and Andrea left but couldn't Annette stay? Just for a little while? Until Kathy fell asleep?
She watched from the porch as the three piled into the blue station wagon with wooden panels across the doors. Kevin didn't use his turn signal at the corner. Kathy wondered what kind of score he got on his driving test. Probably still higher than Brenda.
Kathy trudged up the stairs and changed from her yellow polka dots into a grey flannel nightgown. She tied her hair back with a rubber band, then washed her face with cold water. The hair by her ears got slightly wet, even though she was deliberately trying to keep it dry. She dried her face with a monogrammed towel that hung from the rack. BCA. Brenda Charlotte Aukerman.
She laid on her bed, staring at the ceiling. When they were younger Brenda used to tell Kathy stories about how the different lines on the textured ceiling were actually a map—a map of the stars that could lead you to Neverland. Brenda always had a thing for Peter Pan.
Kathy rolled onto her stomach and started sobbing into her pillows. She almost fell asleep, but caught herself. She didn't know why she didn't let herself drift into unconsciousness. Nodding off was a good thing—it meant she didn't need drugs to sleep. She kept her eyes open, though. She couldn't handle the horrifying prospect of once again waking up in the morning and realizing it wasn't all a nightmare.
Kathy laid in the same position for almost forty minutes. She moved when her toes began to tingle. As she put weight on her foot, she felt the stabs of ten thousand little needles jabbing her at lightning speed. She limped over to her desk where she sat and flipped open her dead girl journal. She closed it immediately after seeing Diane's face on the first page. She wanted to make the book more complete. She wanted to give Kathy Baker her own page. She didn't know how long Kathy had been gone. When she was killed. Where she was found. How old she was. But she felt the need to write her name on the top of the next blank sheet of paper in the journal. She turned the page and stared at the empty whiteness of the page after Kathy Baker's name. Her eyes played tricks on her. She could see Brenda's name at the top. A future article from the Modesto Bee. Her sister's eyes staring back at her from a picture: a memory of a person reduced to a fading image on newsprint.
She closed the journal and walked out into the hallway. She turned the knob to Brenda's bedroom, something she had learned long ago she wasn't supposed to do. It didn't matter now. She stepped in and was shocked by its state of disarray. The pigs had definitely been snooping around in here, and they didn't bother to clean up after themselves. Kathy straightened the comforter on her sister's bed. She set an overturned laundry hamper upright and started placing Brenda's dirty clothes back inside. Kathy smelled the skimpy orange dress that Brenda usually wore to parties. It reeked of cigarettes, weed, and body odor. She brought the dirty dress to her eyes and cried into it until she could regain her composure.
Kathy kept straightening the room until it was more tidy than Brenda had ever kept it. When she was done, she found it somehow more disturbing than when it had been a pigsty. She smacked herself in the face a few times, trying to get her mind to move somewhere else. She knew it didn't really matter how the room looked. She went back into her own.
***
A familiar noise far away caught Kathy's attention. The distinct sound of a key in the front door, turning the deadbolt. Kathy jumped to her feet. Who would be using a key to get in? Especially at a quarter to ten? She and her parents had been inside for hours.
"Brenda!"
"Brenda?"
Kathy could hear her parents making sounds she could only describe as little screams. She ran to the top of the stairs where she could see her mother and father practically tackling Brenda to the ground.
"Oh my god, sweetie, we were so worried."
"My baby."
Her parents hugged and kissed Brenda, then each other. Tears crept from Kathy's eyes. She ran down the stairs, giving her sister the biggest hug she had ever given her. The biggest hug she had ever given anyone.
The buzzing and sounds of relief went on for a few more seconds. Officer Dave was already on the phone with the station. What had started as a feeling of relief and excitement soon changed to anger. Ken was the one to initiate the unpleasant part of the homecoming.
"Where the hell have you been? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay." Brenda was obviously unprepared for the reception she was getting, both the ecstatic greeting and the abrupt shift to interrogation. Her eyes darted back and forth as though looking for an escape route.
"Where were you?" Mary pleaded. The expression on her face was almost crazed. She couldn't hold her mouth straight.
"San Francisco," Brenda said, looking at the floor.
"What? Why? With who? Why didn't you tell anyone?" Brenda was bombarded by questions from everyone.
"I just, I just needed to get away for a little while."
A V-shaped vein popped out on Ken's forehead. "Are you serious? We've all been sick with grief. Mourning almost. Are you fucking kidding me?"
Kathy jumped. Her dad didn't say fuck in front of his daughters. Especially not to them. And not in anger. Mary tried to calm him down. She insisted that everyone should rejoice in the fact that Brenda was safe. Anger could be saved for another time. They had their baby back.
Her words got to Ken. He started to cry and nod. He took Brenda in his arms and cried into her long blond hair. He kissed her forehead. Then her cheek. He grabbed her and the four Aukermans walked upstairs as a family unit. All the chicks were in the hen's nest. All was good. They could sleep peacefully.
Except Kathy didn't feel peaceful. A million fire ants had crawled from her pores and were stinging her skin. How dare Brenda? How dare she put everyone through this? Kathy closed the door to her room but collapsed onto the floor right beside it. What was she thinking? Everyone thought she was dead. Had she really thought she could just waltz back into the house like everything was normal? Was she that stupid that she didn't understand how her loved ones would react in this situation? There was a mad killer on the loose. Kathy had searched under the Lion Bridge multiple times expecting to find her sister's dead, naked, eyeless body. No one should ever have to do that. How dare Brenda?
She had no idea what it was like to close her eyes and see her own sister without any.
Kathy was drowsy. Her mother had already given her another pill around 9:30. Sleep seemed inevitable but she fought it. Not consciously—it was adrenaline. She felt such an intense combination of relief and anger that it was impossible to feel sleepy. She stood up too fast and all she saw was darkness for about three seconds. Her chest was heavy. She heard Brenda's bedroom door knob turn and footsteps walking into the hallway.
When Kathy exited her room, Brenda was already in the bathroom they shared. Kathy just stood in front of the door waiting. The toilet flushed. The sink ran for about half a minute. Brenda was startled to see Kathy waiting for her.
"What?" Brenda asked as Kathy stood there staring into her eyes.
"Don't act like you don't know."
"Don't know what?"
Later, Kathy couldn't remember the moment she decided to do it. All she could remember was the feeling of curling her fingers into her palm, jabbing her own hand with her own nails, she curled them so tight, and then her fist moving faster than she knew it could move, though another part of her brain was witnessing it in slow motion, and then her knuckles landing against Brenda's face. She felt skin. Bone. Hair. The side of her sister's eyeball.
Brenda fell to the floor and Kathy straddled her, pinning her arms down with her knees. She hit her sister again, this time with an open hand, leaving a big red imprint of it on the side of her face. Brenda screamed in pain.
"How dare you?" Saliva flew from Kathy's lips. "Do you realize I was out there looking for your dead body? Your naked, eyeless dead body? Every fucking day you were gone. What is the matter with you?" Kathy hit her again in the same place and Brenda screamed louder. Kathy leaned backwards as her sister grabbed a fistful of hair from the back of her head and pulled as hard as she could. "Fuck you. Fuck you for doing this to us!" Kathy said in more of a scream than a shout. Her face was hot. Her head hurt. She looked down at her sister's earrings and remembered the lunchroom incident she had heard about earlier that day. It would be so easy just to rip through the ear tissue.
Kathy's father grabbed her from behind. He lifted her by her armpits, but she managed to give Brenda a swift kick to the stomach before being pulled completely away.
"Stop! Stop!" Mary screamed from the bedroom doorway.
"Go to your room," Ken ordered Kathy. The words were a furious, sharp, staccato.
From inside her bedroom, Kathy could hear her parents babying Brenda. She could hear her sister crying, which made her start crying too. Everything felt like a blur. She was overcome by anger and exhaustion. She laid in a fetal position on the shaggy rug that covered a red Kool-Aid stain stretching across most of the carpet beneath. When she closed her eyes she saw her sister's face, much like she had when she was missing, but this time she saw her actively being hurt. Attacked. And it was by her own hand. She was the one who made Brenda bleed.
She looked down to find her own hand bloody. At first she didn't know if it was her blood or Brenda's, but the pain helped her come to the realization that it was her own. Her knuckles throbbed. All four of them were red, but the skin was broken on the knuckle of her middle finger. She sucked on the wound for a second before stopping in disgust. Her sister's eyeball had just touched this part of her skin. Now she was putting it in her mouth. She felt gross. She imagined that the killer might do some perverted thing similar to this when he was hurting his victims. Touching their eyeballs then licking the taste off his skin. Did he remove them before or after they were dead? What if he sucked on them afterward?
But Kathy hadn't put her hand in her mouth because she wanted to taste eyeball. She had wanted to taste blood. Her own blood. She wanted to soothe her own wound. She wasn't a pervert like him. But she did hurt girls. She hurt Brenda. She wanted to hurt Brenda and she did. If she behaved like that, what made her better than the killer?
Kathy crawled on her hands and knees toward her bed. She fell the first time she tried climbing up on it. It was a struggle. Finally, she summoned enough strength to hoist her body up onto the mattress where she could melt into the comfort of her blankets and throw pillows and stuffed animals. The back of her head hurt where Brenda had yanked out her hair. The attack played on repeat in her mind. Sometimes it would change. Sometimes she had something sharp in her hand and the attack produced far more blood than it actually had. Sometimes Brenda was able to escape her blows and run to safety. Sometimes she was not, and everything went much too far until Brenda was a limp, torn, lifeless doll.
For several hours, or maybe only minutes, Kathy wasn't sure if she was asleep or awake. Her thoughts led her in circles, through what seemed like puzzles and mazes, only the questions and clues made no sense, and there were no solutions or exits. She felt completely out of touch with reality. She was in a grey nighttime world where good and evil kept trading places with each other: a policeman hiding a body, a killer giving someone a ride to safety, a dead body getting up and laughing. No, those were just dream images, her mind hallucinating. She was awake still, and she knew the difference between good and evil. Except maybe good wasn't even in play here. Maybe there were only degrees of evil. Maybe she was evil. She wasn't good. Not any more at least, right? She hurt people. Would someone punish her? Did she want them to? She couldn't even decide how she felt about it. She was unraveling, and it was scary. She was so scared. But at the same time, it had felt... not good exactly, but she wasn't sure what else to call it, to let loose on Brenda. It was a relief, in the same way her mother's pills had provided relief for sleeplessness. In this case, it was more like relief for powerlessness. She was strong. She could do things. That did feel good. But now she felt sick, lost, trapped in a bad dream. Maybe she was dreaming. But this sleep was dark and uneasy, a dim room filled with faint chatter. Was it her own voice? Or was it coming from the shadows around her, from the indistinct people slumped in chairs there? Her family. No, her friends and Annette. Or they weren't people at all, but cloth dummies with white faces, white eyeless faces. The dead girls, and she was one of them. She turned to herself to speak, and woke in a sweat.
***
Each and every single little girl will do what they're told or else they'll never grow old. Wait, what was it? It wasn't exactly that, right? That was too stupid. But if they said so, Kathy felt like she had to stay in line. Last time she jumped out it didn't work out well.
She opened her eyes. She realized that she was once again confusing dream with reality. She was trying to answer a question in her head that didn't exist in real life. Her hand throbbed. She sat up, though her body felt like it was the weight of a big navy submarine. She almost fell to her knees as she walked over to her dresser. Why did she feel this way? Oh right, the pill. Kathy gasped, remembering that she had forgotten Brenda was missing. Then the aching in her head and knuckles brought her back up to the present, inducing a wave of relief mixed with regret.
She looked into the mirror above her dresser. She was a mess. Had she even bothered to comb her hair when her sister was gone? She couldn't remember. She decided she probably hadn't, and then remembered that she had, for the TV news appearance. Either way, beauty had been pretty far down on her priority list. She needed a shower and to brush her teeth. It had been days since it had seemed important to take care of herself. Even now she felt a peculiar twinge of anxiety for resuming the practice, like she was deserting a post. But the watch was over, and she figured others would want her to clean up anyway.
She was hesitant to leave her room, uncertain what the consequences of last night's incident would be. But the hallway was empty. No one was around. She had the bathroom all to herself. The clock on the wall read 11:30. No wonder there hadn't been a fight for the first shower.
After cleaning herself up, Kathy walked downstairs wearing her old blue jeans and a clean purple blouse she found hanging in her closet. Incredible how her mother found time to do laundry during this mess.
All three of her family members were sitting around the kitchen table. Kathy froze as they turned to look at her. Brenda's eye was black and blue. Her nose was bruised and she had scrapes near her eyebrow. Kathy stood as still as she could. She didn't know what to do. What to say. She felt like an embarrassment and a menace all at once.
"Come sit down," her mother ordered in a cold voice.
Kathy obeyed. Good little girls do what they're told.
"What do you have to say for yourself?" her father asked.
Kathy tried to apologize to her sister, but the words sounded strange coming out of her mouth. Like she was too aware of her own position and what she needed to do to get things back to normal. She felt like she was teetering on the fence between good and bad again, even though she had fallen to the bad side the night before. Her family had pulled her up to give her a second chance. She wondered if that was their idea or Brenda's. She looked at Brenda, but it was like looking at a dime store mannequin. She didn't seem angry, or forgiving, or anything.
"Ken, tell Kathy the plan."
Her father leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers interlocked. He lowered his voice, even though they were the only ones around. "You didn't attack your sister, okay? Everyone is going to assume this injury happened during Brenda's disappearance, and that's what we're going to let them think."
"But Officer Dave saw her last night and she was fine."
"Al's got Dave under control. Kathy encountered a violent driver when she was hitchhiking to the bay. She had the smarts to get away. Nobody in this house hurt anybody else in this house, okay?"
Kathy had to think for a moment to figure out who her father was reminding her of, the way he was talking and positioning his body. Then it occurred to her: a newsclip she had seen of one of the accused Watergate conspirators.
"Okay."
***
Kathy missed school that day, just as she had the day before. Brenda didn't go to JC either. Everyone just stayed cooped up in the house. Her mother took a nap at one and didn't wake until five. Kathy didn't see her sister for most of the day. It wasn't that different from when she was missing, except she didn't feel a gaping hole in her chest anymore. Kathy read. She listened to records. She stared into the faces in the red velvet journal she now kept hidden in her desk drawer.
By Thursday, everyone in town had gotten a good look at Brenda's injuries. Everybody found it so shocking—being attacked while hitchhiking. "That poor girl. Stupid, but poor," they would say.
"Don't get into cars with scary men." Kathy found herself blatantly making things up at school, at times almost forgetting she was lying.
"So, did he try anything with her? Is that how it started?" Barb McKenna's voice asked from the swarm of teenagers around Kathy's table at lunch.
"Well, I wasn't there, but from what I understand, he tried to rape her so she kicked him in the groin. Then he punched her in the face and kicked her in the stomach. She was able to run when he wasn't looking and got picked up by another driver. A nice lady from Lodi."
Some of those things had happened. There had been both a punch to the face and a kick to the stomach, Kathy just altered the details of who did what. Of course she edited herself completely out, as instructed by her father.
Annette was, as always, hard to read when Kathy got back to school. She seemed happy for Kathy and her family, almost overly so. Kathy wondered if on the inside she was crushed—had she wanted them to bond over their dead sisters? Was she jealous and confused about why the Aukerman girl came back and Diane didn't? Was she just trying to hide all of that emotion by being overly supportive and excited? Kathy had no idea. Maybe her enthusiasm was genuine. Either way, Kathy enjoyed being around her. She wasn't only soothing in time of crisis. She was soothing all the time. All Kathy needed was to be near her.
***
"What are we going to do for Halloween?" Andrea asked as Kathy drove her three best friends around on Saturday evening.
"We should dress up and scare the shit out of little kids. It'll be hilarious," Kevin suggested.
"Veto," Kathy said, giving Kevin a disappointed look. "You've been watching the news. They're saying people are putting razor blades in candy. You want kids to be more scared than they already are?" Kevin turned his head to look out the window and said nothing. This was what he usually did when his suggestions were rejected.
"Caroline Watts is having a party," Andrea suggested.
"She hates me. You know that," Kathy reminded her after a silence just long enough to be uncomfortable.
"Oh, come on. That stuff was a million years ago. She doesn't care about that anymore."
"Yes she does. And well, even if she doesn't, I do."
Kathy gave Annette a look as if to say I'll tell you about it later. Kathy wanted the information to come from her, not from gossip. She tried to keep her eyes on the road, but kept glancing at the passenger seat every chance she could get. She wanted to reach out and hold Annette's hand, stroke her hair. But she couldn't. Not right now, at least.
"Kathy almost killed Caroline during a junior high field hockey practice," Kevin blurted out, his head still turned to the window.
"Shit," Kathy said to herself quietly. That was the last way she wanted it worded in front of Annette. And it didn't describe the situation at all. Nobody was hoping for loss of life during that fight, at least on Kathy's side; she couldn't be sure about Caroline. "Drop it, Kev, okay? Andrea's right, it was a long time ago. We should go to her party." Kathy tried to act as the voice of reason even though every cell in her nervous system was running around in circles, positive the end was near.
"Do you dress up?" Annette asked in her quiet voice.
"Well, I think so," Andrea said. "I bet there will be a bunch of people dressed up and a bunch of people not dressed up. Kids our age can't seem to decide which is cooler, I've noticed."
"Are you dressing up?" Annette asked her.
"I think I'm just going to wear my bathing suit and be Malibu Barbie."
"You're going to walk around all night in October in just your bathing suit?" Kathy asked.
"It's not supposed to be cold," Andrea argued.
Kathy thought about making her friend feel ashamed for wanting to do something she herself considered slutty. She didn't. What did it matter to her if Andrea was slutty?
"What are you going to be?" Annette asked Kathy.
Nothing came to mind. She shrugged her shoulders. "Do you have any ideas?"
"We could go downtown and just see what they have. Maybe we can get some rubber masks or something."
The very best Halloween gear was at a little magic and novelty shop on Tenth Street that sold impressive stage costumes and realistic latex masks, but they cost a fortune. They went there first anyway, just to look, and to laugh at the plastic vomit and dog crap in the glass display case in the front of the store. Then they moved a couple of doors down to Woolworths, where Kevin found a rubber Fred Flintstone mask that had obviously had problems on the production line. It was deformed and ugly and exactly what he was looking for. And he got it for 50% off.
Down the street at Kress, Kathy bought a green flannel shirt and a red wig, and Annette bought a yellow sweater and some circular glasses. They had decided to dress up like Peppermint Patty and Marcie from Peanuts. It was Annette's idea: she found the wig and the shirt and everything fell into place from there. Kathy was happy to hop on board, especially after Annette whispered to her that she thought Marcie was in love with Patty.
After shopping they drove to Enslen Park. Their favorite spot, in the bush cave, was unoccupied, but it looked and felt like a crypt in the evening gloom. Kathy could hardly see her friends in front of her. She could feel Annette's hand resting on hers though, and it was too dark for any of their friends to see, so she wasn't in a hurry to vacate the hideout.
Andrea and Kevin got into some sort of argument about Elton John, but Kathy and Annette didn't pay much attention. It was getting dark earlier and earlier, and Kathy felt grateful for it. It was easier to hide in the nighttime. Finally, however, Andrea and Kevin insisted that they leave the blackness of the cave and sit out in the open. There, the girls stared at the stars while their friends continued to bicker. The sky was clear and the evening was chilly enough to need a jacket. Kathy watched as a subtle breeze swept through Annette's long dark hair, which was illuminated by the cigarette she was lighting.
Kathy felt a sensation race through her body she hadn't felt since the two had been alone in her bedroom. It was a soft surge of electricity that darted from the top of her skull to the tips of her toes, followed by an ache—an ache in her chest she knew could be settled only by holding her friend as close as she could. By feeling her heartbeat and knowing she was alive.
"What time is it? My mother wants me home by nine," Annette asked.
Kevin tried to read his watch from ten different angles. He finally lit a match and held it above his wrist. "8:24," he answered.
"We can hang for a few more minutes," Kathy insisted. She laid back on the grass and stared at the constellations she used to be able to identify in middle school. She still knew a few. Sitting up to educate Annette about astronomy, Kathy got distracted. A car parked along the street started its engine and turned on its headlights, which lit up the car parked in front of it: a brown station wagon.
Kathy was sensitive to such sightings in general, but what made this one particularly alarming was that she could see someone inside, sitting alone, with the car turned off. Was this person staring at them? Just pulled over by the park, watching kids? Kathy grabbed Annette's hand and brought the two of them to their feet. "Actually, we should probably go now," Kathy said.
"Why?" Andrea asked from the ground.
"I just think we should go. I have a bad feeling."
Annette gave Kathy a concerned but confused look. Kathy didn't know why she wasn't more specific. She didn't know why she didn't just say, "That man in the car over there is making me uncomfortable." Maybe because she thought the others would try to dissuade her? It didn't matter. With Annette's hand still in hers, she started walking toward her Pinto.
Kevin and Andrea ran to catch up after Annette and Kathy were about thirty feet away. She was their ride, after all. Rather than driving to Annette's, Kathy slowly circled the park, hoping her friends wouldn't notice the detour. She turned onto the street where the station wagon was parked, and stared into the window as she passed by. A solitary man sitting in the dark with sunglasses on stared back at her. She pushed her right foot down to gain some speed and tried to get to Annette's as soon as possible.
After dropping her friends off at their homes Kathy drove all the way back to the park. She didn't understand why she couldn't convince herself not to. It didn't matter anyway; the station wagon was gone, along with the man inside. She began her drive home.
Then the wagon—at least what she thought was the same wagon—appeared in front of her out of nowhere a few blocks later. She followed it. Closely. There were no other cars around, so it was hard for her not to make herself conspicuous, but she couldn't let this one get away without seeing where it was going. It was a Mercury, she saw when it passed under a streetlight. She also noted the license plate: 327 NDL. They drove down Morris Avenue across McHenry, turning on Coffee and then down Scenic. They passed the golf course, driving farther and farther east, until the wagon turned onto an unmarked dirt road without warning. Kathy began to turn, but when she did, the car sped up, going from zero to sixty in... however fast a Mercury could do that. Once it was a good distance away, the wagon turned off all its lights and vanished into darkness. Kathy could hear it still speeding invisibly down the road.
***
"I need a gun. A handgun, preferably," Kathy said matter-of-factly as she stood on her uncle's welcome mat.
"What? Get in here." Al looked both ways outside his door before yanking Kathy in and slamming it behind her. "You don't need a gun."
"Yes I do. I'm not going to kill somebody or do anything dangerous. It would be for protection. You know, from the killer."
"There hasn't been a murder in months, Kathy."
"I think he's out there again, though. I think I saw him last night."
"How the hell would you know if you saw him?"
Kathy took a deep breath. "Last year, I was walking down the street and this guy in a brown Mercury pulled over and started talking to me. He told me he thought I could be a model and said that he'd like to take some pictures of me down by the Tuolumne River. I'm positive it was him. I've been positive ever since... well, ever since Diane was found. Really."
"That could have been any run-of-the-mill pervert."
"I know it was him, Al. I mean, you've read about the girls. Almost every single one of them had modeling aspirations. Modeling aspirations, Al. What do you think is the easiest way to lure a girl with dreams like that into a car?"
Al thought for a while. He walked over to his bookcase and grabbed his scrapbook from the bottom shelf. He brought it over to the kitchen counter and started thumbing through it, skimming the articles, for information on modeling aspirations, Kathy figured. Why couldn't he just trust her word? He had to check for himself?
"But you said that happened a year ago, Kath? Why do you want a gun now?"
"I saw him again last night. I mean I think it was him. Who else in a Mercury Monterey would sit in his car by the park in the evening with no lights on, staring at kids?"
Al raised his eyebrows in surprise. "What did you do?"
"We got the hell out of there." She left out the part about how she followed him all over town. She didn't want her uncle to think she was an idiot.
"So, he didn't follow you? Why do you need a gun, Kath?"
"I just want to keep us safe."
"Us?"
"You know, my friends. My sister. Teenage girls. Us."
Al looked at Kathy as if he were about to cry. He pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her, consoling her and insisting he would keep her safe. This was not a good sign, Kathy thought. She was probably going to have to seek weaponry elsewhere.
"Let me look at this for a minute," Kathy said, grabbing his scrapbook from the counter. She turned the pages until she found the girl she hadn't seen before: Kathy Baker from Sacramento. She didn't want to have to make another trip up north to steal newspaper articles from the library. She copied down every word in the article Al had pasted into his scrapbook into her journal. She even drew a picture in the middle and wrote the text around it like newsprint. She wasn't a gifted artist, but she still managed to catch what she thought was the essence of Kathy's picture. It reminded her of the victim. That was what mattered.
By the time she was finished, she had less than two hours to get ready for the Halloween party and pick up Andrea, Kevin, and Annette. "I wrote the license plate down. You should ask Dave about it." Kathy handed a scrap of paper to her uncle before heading out the door.
She raced home and put on her green flannel. She had to do a lot of adjusting to get the wig just right. Using her sister's eyeliner, she dabbed little dots on her cheeks to mimic Peppermint Patty's freckles. Nobody would know who she was, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that Annette knew.
When they picked up Annette, Kathy was astonished by the way she had somehow shaped her hair to look just like Marcie's. It was as if Charles Schulz himself had come over to style it for her. Even so, people probably wouldn't know who she was supposed to be. But again, it didn't matter. It was all a part of their little private joke.
By the time they were headed to Caroline's house, trick-or-treaters were out en masse. It was dark, and little witches and Batmans would sometimes dart across the street, so Kathy drove slowly. Children walked together in clumps or by themselves, some holding battery-powered plastic pumpkins that glowed orangely, some guided by parents or older siblings. Annette pointed out one little girl all on her own, her costume nothing but a white sheet with holes for eyes, dirty pink ballet slippers poking out at the bottom. She held a plain brown paper bag for receiving candy. Kathy thought it was the saddest thing she'd ever seen.
On the street where Caroline lived, nearly every house had decorations. Some front yards had been transformed into elaborate scenes where cauldrons steamed with dry ice and thick white webbing was strung between picket fences and fake gravestones. Hidden speakers crackled with diabolical laughter and tinny thunderclaps. From one tree branch, a hanged man swung, his face a cheap monster mask. Ghoulishness was everywhere, and the neighborhood children were drunk on it. Their squeals of pleasure echoed from lawn to lawn. Kathy felt a pang of nostalgia, and caught herself wishing they were all a little younger so they could join the macabre throng, going from door to door together in the perfect overcast gloom, breathing the first fireplace smoke of the season, filling their baskets with sweet offerings. She looked down one of the cracked sidewalks and saw the little ghost girl rounding a corner, trudging onward like a wind-up toy.
Kathy had been a little worried about whether she would be welcome at the party, but if Caroline was pissed at her showing up, she managed to hide it. She greeted them at the side door smiling broadly, wearing a Raggedy Ann outfit. She complimented Andrea on her Barbie "costume," then turned to Kevin and just stared for a second before laughing. When Kathy and Annette, who were bringing up the rear, stepped up to be received, she put her hands to her face and said delightedly, "You're Peppermint Patty and Marcie! That's terrific!" Kathy looked at Annette and smiled. She wasn't sure if she felt gratified or disappointed.
The door opened onto the kitchen. The first thing to catch Kathy's eye was a big batch of frosted Halloween cookies with skulls and bats and whatnot on them. An uncontrollable craving came over her. This must be what heroin was like, she thought, after inhaling about six of them. Annette finally had to pull her out of the kitchen to get her to stop eating and socialize.
This party was different from the blowout Kathy had been to earlier in the fall. Caroline's parents were there. Her father had transformed their garage into a haunted house for trick-or-treaters. Andrea almost wet her pants when a cardboard cutout of a goofy-looking, green-faced witch sprang out at her as they entered. It gave everyone a good laugh. A big serving tray of spaghetti marked "GUTS" sat on the kitchen counter next to a stack of bowls, untouched. Kathy couldn't decide if nobody was eating it because they would rather have sugary treats on Halloween, or because their stomachs were turned by the label. There were also tumblers filled with peeled grapes under a sign that said "EYES." Kathy couldn't believe the tactlessness of it. She shoved down a small wave of panic.
Annette and Kathy found the most remote, out-of-the-way corner of the living room to sit in. It didn't really matter. Caroline's house was small. They were all in close quarters, no matter how they tried to distance themselves.
Caroline's mother, who was supposed to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, with her hair in pigtails and her blue prairie dress much too short at both ends, kept trying to insert herself into the festivities. Flirting with the cute boys, dancing in front of the stereo to "Bang a Gong." It was humiliating. For Caroline, at least. Kathy found it pretty amusing. She thanked God it wasn't her own mother.
"You girls want a drink?" She had approached Kathy and Annette holding a tray of bright red beverages, stewardess-style. Fly the slutty skies.
"What is it?"
"Vodka and cranberry juice. I'm calling them 'Blood Shots.'" Mrs. Watts had a crazed look on her face, accentuated by her pigtails, which jutted out unevenly. Kathy declined. Annette downed hers in one gulp.
Was this real? This forty-year-old woman just thought it was okay to jiggle around tarted up like a porno actress, serving alcohol to sixteen-year-olds? If Kathy's parents had actually known Caroline's, they probably never would have let her come to this party in a million years.
"Do you think anybody is really putting razor blades in Halloween candy? I mean why would someone do that? They just want to hurt random kids whose parents are too lazy to check their candy? What's in it for them?" Kathy couldn't see who was talking.
"The pleasure of hurting," an adolescent male voice said, in the distance. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he had just gotten off the phone with someone putting razors in candy. "They enjoy it when people suffer."
Annette put her finger under Kathy's chin and brought her face toward hers. Kathy thought for a moment she was going to kiss her, right there in the middle of the party. But she didn't. She took a handkerchief from her purse and poked Kathy's face with it. Her painted-on freckles must have smudged. Or she had frosting all over her mouth from pigging out on cookies. Kathy caught a whiff of sickly-sweet green candy apple as she stared into her friend's eyes. She wanted so badly to kiss her. To bury her face in her beautiful hair.
"It's like the killer." Kathy saw who was talking this time: Barb McKenna. "He just does it because he likes it. He gets off on it, you know, sexually."
"That's gross."
A boy's voice: "Well duh. Of course he does. He picks the hottest girls in town. Who wouldn't get off with Di Vergara as a victim?" Some girl made a disgusted sound and some other boy laughed.
Kathy squeezed Annette's hand, closed her eyes, and shook her head. She tried to talk to her about the Partridge Family. Anything to divert their attention from the conversation happening around them.
"See, if you're smart, you're okay." Kathy couldn't see who was talking again. "The girls who got killed, let's face it: they weren't the brightest crayons in the box. No offense. If you're smart, you can get away. Like Brenda Aukerman—she escaped."
What was this person saying? That the victims were idiots? And did they think that Brenda had escaped from the Lion Bridge killer himself? Had the rumors really gone that far? Kathy didn't know what to say to Annette.
"I'm going to the bathroom," Annette said, using Kathy's shoulder to bring her to her feet.
"Okay. Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'll be right back."
Kathy waited in the corner for fifteen minutes. She listened as her classmates blathered on about how they would fight off the killer if they were under attack. Most of them vastly overestimated their own strength and speed, Kathy thought. She looked over to the kitchen and saw that Andrea was making out with Greg Wendell. She wasn't surprised. They hooked up all the time when they couldn't find anyone better.
After a while, Kathy began to worry. She walked toward the bathroom, but nobody was inside. She looked in the kitchen, in the bedrooms, even in the coat closet, without finding a trace of Annette. Kathy's heart started racing. What was going on in Annette's head? Was she upset by the conversation? Did she just need some air? Was she annoyed with Kathy for some reason?
Kathy walked out the front door where she was met with a downpour of heavy rain that soaked her wig and clothing instantly. Nobody was hanging out in the yard. Why would they be in this weather? Kathy felt familiar feelings return. Feelings of sorrow, anxiety, and dread. The same feelings that plagued her when Brenda was missing.
Kathy started down the road, looking everywhere she could for Annette. It was almost impossible to see. Even if it weren't dark, she wouldn't be able to see her hand in front of her face, the rain was so heavy. Every pair of headlights that passed seemed suspicious. Ominous. Was it a Mercury? Was it a station wagon? What else would a little-girl killer do on Halloween besides go hunting?
After she had circled the block her brain went into an all-out panic. She knew he was out there. What if he came here because he was looking for Annette specifically? Because he loved Diane so much, and this would be the closest thing? Kathy started coughing and running at the same same. She didn't care about her own respiratory distress. She had to find her person.
A red pickup truck sped by Kathy and splashed a puddle of water straight onto her, soaking her even more thoroughly than she already was. She was cold. Crying. She thought she might throw up.
"Kathy!"
She turned her head and saw Annette standing about a half block down Rossmoor Way. Her heart leapt out about forty feet in front of her and she had to keep running to catch up with it. She couldn't tell if the cool water on her face came from her eyes or the sky. Annette jogged too, though not as vigorously as Kathy. When they met Kathy wrapped her arms around the girl and kissed her so hard she thought their faces might fuse. She backed up and stared at her. Annette was soaked too. Her clothes, her hair, but not her eyes. Unlike Kathy's, her eyes were dry as a bone.
***
Kathy drove south on Friday evening a little after four, down Seventh Street, past carnicerías and Mexican repair shops, toward the Lion Bridge. When she approached it, the northernmost lions greeted her with their mouths agape, their manes fringed with fiery golden highlights in the glow of the sun, which was already setting. On either side beneath her as she drove across the bridge, the sluggish Tuolumne stretched out like a big dirty gutter. The ripples on the water caught the sunlight in blinding little novas here and there. When she reached the other end, she kept going. She could see the southern lions in her rear view mirror. From that angle, they looked like they were laughing at her.
A few blocks past the bridge, she pulled into a parking lot attached to a run-down store with a torn awning with faded block letters on it that read FORTRESS GUNS & SUPPLIES. A dim neon sign in the window said OPEN. She looked to either side after she parked the car. On her right was an big blue pickup truck. At least, she thought it was blue; it was so muddy she could barely tell. She didn't understand how an automobile could get so dirty. On her left sat a Harley Davidson motorcycle parked at an angle, trying to take up an entire parking space. She felt a dull ache in her guts. She was scared to go inside, but she couldn't bring herself to turn around and leave either. She walked through the heavy glass and metal door, and a noisy bell jangled.
A giant deer's head on the wall was the first thing to meet her eye. Could deer really get that large? Maybe it was a moose? No. Moose had long, rounded faces. This looked like a deer head. A middle-aged man sat behind a long glass display case that doubled as the cash register counter, writing something down in a ledger. He looked kindly at first glance, but upon closer inspection, a meanness showed in his cheeks and mouth, like he was holding a silent grudge against the whole world, and it was straining to find a voice. Kathy scanned the display case. There were knives and special belts and handguns of different sizes. On the far left end, there were several small, dainty handguns that seemed like they would be easy for her to hold. One had a white handle and was kind of pretty. She pictured herself holding the pretty little revolver with the pearly handle. She imagined it tucked into the leg of a sexy pair of wild west garters. This made her smile a little. Then she imagined holding it to the forehead of the man who pulled over and tried to get her into his car last year. Her smile got larger for a moment, then went away.
"Can I help you?" How long had the storekeeper been staring at her?
"How much is that one?"
"That piece is one ten."
"Jesus. A hundred and ten dollars?"
He shifted in his seat. There were grease stains on his sportshirt. Maybe even a couple of pieces of food. He looked her up and down, and she didn't like it. "You know, here's a little fact for you to consider before we go any further: under the terms of the federal law that was passed a few years back, I can sell shotguns to teenagers but you have to be twenty-one if you want to buy a handgun." He seemed to find this mildly amusing, though you couldn't exactly call what he was doing smiling. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-two." Kathy said without hesitating. The man looked at her skeptically.
"I think I'm going to have to see some identification."
Kathy turned around and started heading for the exit, defeated.
"What does a little girl like you need a gun for anyway?" He made the words "little girl" sound obscene.
"I'm just scared." Kathy turned around and looked him in the eye. "Of the killer. We all are. I just want to be able to protect myself and my sister, you know?" She tried to sound as sweet and innocent as she knew how. She had the impression that might appeal to this guy.
The greasy man stared at her for a few seconds before telling her he he knew someone who might be able to help her out. He put his hands on the counter and used them to help him hop over to where Kathy was standing. He grabbed Kathy by the arm, and she wanted to scream. Instead, she let him lead her to a wooden door in the back of the shop. There were nails sticking out of it in random places. Had it been boarded up at some point?
"Go downstairs and talk to my son," he said, opening the door to reveal rickety stairs going down to the basement. "I'm sending someone down, Dwight! She's cool," he yelled.
"Your son?"
"I suspect he'd be interested in helping you out."
Kathy looked down the dark stairway. For a moment she considered turning around and running for the front door. This was too much like a scene from a horror movie. Had she blindly stumbled upon the killer's place of employment? Would he be down there waiting for her with a hatchet? Was he a misshapen monster who brought his victims to his father so they could torment them together in this dungeon? But despite all these horrible imaginings, something propelled her onward. She couldn't stop now. She needed a gun.
She stepped carefully down a splintery staircase, dodging a dangling string attached to a bare light bulb, until she reached the concrete floor of the unfinished basement. Bare insulation stuck out in tufts between 2x4s on the walls. Even without drywall or paneling, the room had plenty of posters and artifacts affixed to the walls. The first one Kathy saw, against the back of the room, was a giant flag with a swastika printed on the front. It nearly knocked the wind out of her.
Looking around, she realized that there was Nazi memorabilia everywhere. Propaganda posters, military gear, even a framed picture of Adolf Hitler. There were rows of folding chairs arranged facing the back wall, like you would set up for a meeting or for some sort of orator.
A pimply-faced, skinny, ginger-headed boy was seated at a table off to the side. He was writing things on index cards and putting them in little plastic boxes. He looked up at Kathy and stopped sorting cards, but he didn't say anything.
Kathy looked him dead in the eye. "What can you do for me?"
"This will be a private sale. Anything we do down here has nothing legally to do with the business upstairs." His voice was serious, deeper than his father's. He had the officious gravity of an IRS auditor.
"Okay."
"What are you looking for?"
"Something small. Something that can fit in my hand easily."
The boy reached under the table and rummaged through some boxes. When his head reemerged he was holding the same little white revolver Kathy had her eye on upstairs. She didn't know how she was going to pay for it; she only had sixty dollars, and it took her over a year of allowance to save that.
"That's what I want."
"One seventy-five.
"What? Upstairs your dad said one ten for the same piece." Even as she was freaking out over her lack of funds, she was a little proud of herself for haggling in the dealers' lingo. "I can't afford that." She couldn't afford it either way.
"The higher the risk, the higher the price. You think the cops are okay with me sitting down here selling guns to kids?" Already Kathy could tell that the young and sweet routine wouldn't work on this kid. It was clear he had no interest in her as a sex object. None he would admit to, anyway.
Kathy looked down at her feet. The gray of the concrete was nearly the same color as her shoelaces. The laces had started out white. Shaking off the repulsion she felt at her own shoes, she reached into her purse and pulled out all the cash she had.
"What can I get for this?"
He counted it and frowned. Shaking his head, he told Kathy that he didn't have anything in her price range.
"What if I give you all this right now, then come in and give you any money I make for the next little while until it's paid off?"
"We'd have to do it with interest. And this could really be a loss for me. I'm thinking about 25% a week."
"Fine." Kathy wouldn't have cared if he said 100% interest that accumulated every day. She wanted the pretty little white thing in her hand.
"Okay, I'm going to need your name and number."
She gave him her real telephone number, but after another glance at all the Nazi gear, she told him her name was Kathy Sorenson. She didn't want the whole deal to go south just because her last name ended in "-man."
Kathy was in her car in a matter of seconds. She couldn't stay in that place a second longer. She couldn't believe she had let herself conduct business there in the first place. She felt gross. Dirty. She put the gun in the glove compartment and felt a settling sensation in her spine. Regardless of how vile that experience had been, now she was armed.
***
When Kathy got back across the bridge and into town, she immediately started heading east toward Scenic, where she had followed the brown station wagon the evening after they left the park. The sun had fully set by this hour. The farther you drove, the fewer street lamps illuminated your path. Kathy was left with only the headlights of her Pinto to light the wide open spaces around her.
She drove past it at first. She had to pull over and do a U-turn to get back to where she could turn onto the service road the Monterey had sped down the other night. The gravel was rough. She bounced in her seat as she made her way down the slim strip of gravel. She didn't understand how the Monterey could drive so quickly on a road like this. Going slightly over twenty-five miles an hour made her jump up and down so violently she was practically hitting her head on the ceiling of the car.
The road seemed so desolate. Nothing in sight. And it seemed to go on for miles. Kathy didn't understand why it was even there. Nothing surrounded them. Nothing she could see in the dark, anyway. After a mile or so, she came upon a farm lit by a single porchlight and a wan glow from behind its windows, so you could just barely see an old barn that seemed to be falling apart. The road continued, and after a minute, an eerie glow appeared on the horizon. She approached the glow, and soon she saw it was coming from a well-lit installation with what looked like top-of-the-line technology in immaculate condition: vented bins and tanks connected to each other by elaborate ducts. But it was deserted as far as she could tell, and it was surrounded by chain link fence. She continued into what quickly turned back into darkness. She passed maybe three more farms before she decided to turn around and head back. What good was this doing? She had no idea if the killer lived out here. He just drove over here. One time. If that was the killer at all. What was she looking for? A station wagon? She certainly wasn't going to find one in this light. Many of the farms were far from the road too. She couldn't see what kind of cars were parked there unless she turned down private drives, and even then they might be locked away in garages or barns.
Kathy's foot brought the car to a stop slowly after she turned back onto Scenic. She opened the glove compartment. Felt the revolver in her hand. Was it loaded? She didn't know. She didn't even know how to tell. They couldn't just sell people loaded guns, could they? Of course this deal had been under the table.
Kathy twirled the spinning thing in the middle she was pretty sure held bullets. All of the holes were empty. She wasn't as safe as she thought, though she guessed the mere sight of a firearm might be enough to scare someone off, loaded or unloaded.
Kathy drove back toward Downey High and home, but changed her route. Instead she crossed McHenry. Twisted and turned through suburban lanes until she saw Annette's house in the distance, the outside lamp off. She pulled over a house or two away and just stared. Her nightmarish thoughts from the other night resurfaced. What if the killer did have an interest in Annette? She was the closest thing you could get to Diane, after all.
Kathy sat and watched. Lights turned off and on, and every once in a while she could see figures moving through the house. She was a little too far away to identify them, but the smallest one had to be Annette. She wondered how Annette felt here. Did she feel safe? How often could you really sense things going on outside? Did she feel like someone was watching her? After all, someone was.
After holding her new white killing machine in her hands again for a little while, Kathy figured she'd better head home. She didn't want her parents to worry. She didn't want them to have to feel like they did when Brenda was gone ever again. The traffic was heavy. Cars were out now in full force cruising McHenry, making it nearly impossible to turn where she needed to go. She finally managed to find an opening in traffic after nearly ripping her own hair out of her head.
When she got home she left the gun in the glove compartment, tucking it first inside a folded manila envelope that held some old receipts. She couldn't bring it into the house—what if someone stumbled upon it? She was the only person who ever had business in the glove of that Pinto. That was where it would stay.
Kathy looked through the pages of her dead girl journal as she laid on her stomach, her head facing the foot of the bed. She wished she could know more. Did the police really know more than her? If they did, they weren't being very public about it. Often she could only see the force as a bunch of bumbling buffoons, kind of like her uncle. She worried she was the expert on the case. She did have girls in her journal Al didn't have in his, after all.
She flipped back to the first page with Diane's face on it. She was so similar to Annette that Kathy couldn't stop staring. It brought her comfort. The same striking dead eyes that had filled her with terror for months now made her long for the one she loved. She closed the journal and put it back in the drawer. She needed a picture of Annette, she thought. Looking longingly at her dead sister was definitely creepy, and Kathy knew it. Maybe she would bring a camera when they went to Roller World on Friday night.
***
Annette didn't have to rent skates from Roller World like the rest of her friends. She had her own. White patent leather with bits of stylish fringe that stuck out slightly from the seams. Kathy felt nervous. She didn't have much experience roller skating, and she didn't want to look like a wobbly baby deer in front of Annette, who somehow seemed graceful no matter what she was doing.
The skating rink was dark inside. Black lights illuminated psychedelic wall art in the pinball arcade area. The speakers blasted Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" and Kathy sang along goofily to Annette while poking and tickling her in the abdomen, distracting her from putting on her skates.
"Oh my god. Come on, you two." Andrea sounded irritated. Like she'd been holding in frustration. Kathy put on her skates faster.
Annette stood up and glided her way onto the smooth round floor where everyone was skating in a circle, counter-clockwise. Annette did a fancy spin and the colored lighting in the rink shone on her like she was an Olympic figure skater. The sixty or so people skating around her didn't even exist.
"Come on!" Annette skated toward Kathy, grabbing both of her hands and leading her on to the floor. Kathy felt clumsy. Her balance was so uncertain that the breeze of passing skaters threatened to knock her to the floor. It was much smoother and more slippery than she'd expected. Wouldn't it be safer just to skate on something soft?
Annette skated backwards, holding both of Kathy's hands to guide her. Kathy wanted to stay close to the side so she could hold onto the railing, have something there to grab onto if she fell that wouldn't fall right along with her. Annette insisted they skate closer to the center. She could skate backwards better than most people could skate forwards. Kathy would be safe as long as she held tight to her girl, she decided.
And I'll be with him—oh you know I will. Kathy pointed at Annette. On that midnight train to Georgia. The girls sang to each other as they circled the gigantic room again and again. I'd rather live in his world, than live without him in mine. Kathy liked this DJ. Some of them would only play grinding hard rock, which was fine once in a while, but she wanted to feel a funky beat sometimes. This guy was good: she didn't know what she'd hear next.
"I need a cigarette," Annette said as she led Kathy off the skating floor. The carpet was harder to skate on. Kathy realized why they weren't skating on something softer. Annette propped herself up on her tiptoes, walking on her front brakes. She looked ridiculous but seemed quite comfortable doing it.
People who wanted to smoke had to go to a little alcove that looked like a holding cell, or an interrogation room. There was a smudged window looking out on the rest of the rink, and a filthy carpet. From what Kathy could tell, this was where the cool kids hung out. She took a seat and Annette sat right next to her, so close that their upper legs touched from hip to knee. Annette lit a Marlboro Light. The smell of smoke was a striking contrast to her usual candy apple smell, but somehow the scents fit perfectly together. Each one made the other smell more pleasant.
Kathy looked at the bench across from her to see a familiar face. A familiar nose and chin, at least. It was the man who had commented on her breasts at Jimmy's party. Did he just come here to smoke and watch young girls skate? Kathy felt nauseated. He was wearing loafers. This guy was definitely not here for the same reasons other people were.
"Hey I know you," he said.
Kathy swore under her breath.
"I've been watching you two out there. You're havin' a little too much fun, am I right?"
"What?" Annette asked.
"You can't hide your little girly romance from me. Don't worry, though. It's groovy." He grinned and flicked his ashes right on the carpet.
Kathy tried to get up to leave, but Annette pulled her back down, insistent on finishing her cigarette.
"How old are you two? Fourteen? Fifteen? We should call you the 'Dyke Tykes.'"
"We're sixteen," Annette told him. "Kathy will be seventeen in July."
Kathy didn't understand why Annette was engaging with this pervert. What was she going to get out of this conversation? Nothing but harassment, that she could be sure of. Did Diane engage with strangers like this too? Just let them right in? Kathy felt guilty for even thinking about it.
"Well, any time you girls need something to make you feel a little more mellow—more relaxed—let me know. Or if you want to go the other way, I can help you there too." The man took off his sunglasses and Kathy was shocked by the beautiful color of his big blue eyes. "And I accept all forms of payment, if you know what I'm sayin'."
Kathy pulled Annette's cigarette out of her mouth and extinguished it for her. She grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her out of the smoking room. She didn't care if Annette was done. They were getting out of there.
"I'm around if you want me!" The man said as the door closed behind him. Kathy felt tremendously freaked out. He didn't like the way that man was looking at Annette. The way he must have been watching her when she spun out on the floor. What he must have been picturing in his mind when he said "all forms of payment." Kathy wanted to barf.
They headed for the skating floor, and the slippery feeling under her wheels made Kathy feel uneasy again. But Annette was there to grab her. They faced the same direction this time. Both skating forwards, counter-clockwise with the rest of the skaters. This was Kathy's favorite place, she decided. Everyone was holding hands with their skating companions. She and Annette could hold hands all they wanted and nobody would bat an eye. It was perfect.
The lighting in the rink changed depending on what song was playing. Sometimes it was quite dim, causing a few collisions. Other times the lights had a strobe-like effect, which made Kathy feel as if she were watching her life on 8mm film. She could only see what was happening with frequent black pauses in between. Annette's eyes looking into hers, then darkness. Annette smiling at her, then darkness. A little kid she almost tripped over, then darkness.
Rainbow colors filled the room as a dreamy rock ballad started playing, rich with jangling guitars and romantic harmonies. Annette whispered to Kathy that she loved this song. Annette increased her speed and Kathy had to work to keep up with her even though they were holding hands. The velocity caused Kathy's hair to flow behind her and it felt freeing. Annette would skate vigorously for about twenty feet then just let the two of them glide for a while. One hand in Kathy's and her other outstretched to feel the air moving through her fingers.
Grabbing hold of Kathy's arm, Annette swung her into the center of the rink. The crowd circled around them and moved quickly. The air was cool. Kathy wanted to pull Annette toward her and hold tight. Absorb her body heat. Annette took both of Kathy's hands and told her to "do as I do." She leaned the wheels of her skates on their edges and started moving in a circle. Kathy began spinning too, but they didn't gain speed until she too leaned back on the edges of her wheels and let the laws of physics take over. She felt like they were flying. Moving faster than they would ever need to, no matter who was after them. Kathy felt the song down to the wheels of her skates, like it was controlling her movement, their movement, as the lights glowed and the room spun.
Baby let's pretend that tonight could live forever. They whirled into oblivion. If we close our eyes and believe, it might come true. The music and the moment became fused together forever in Kathy's mind.
"Um, hi!" Andrea said in an irritated voice as Kathy and Annette skated off the floor.
"Hi," Kathy said in return.
"Did you two forget you came with us? It's like you ditched us the minute we got here." Andrea had her familiar scary scowl pasted on her face.
"I'm sorry! We just got caught up in the fun," Kathy tried to explain.
"Uh huh."
"Andrea, what? I'm sorry. We won't ditch you again."
"Yes you will."
"What?"
"You've done nothing but ditch me since you met her." Andrea gave Annette a mean look.
"That's not true. We're all always together and we break off into pairs and it's just like it's always been."
"This is not how it's always been."
Kevin stood next to Andrea nodding, though he obviously had nothing to add. He probably wouldn't have even noticed them separating from the group if Andrea hadn't complained about it. Man, did those roller skates make him tall.
"I'm sorry. I'll try to be better. You know I've had a hard couple of weeks. I'm not myself. Can we just drop it?" Kathy gave Andrea a reassuring rub on her upper arm.
"Okay. Just," she started whispering, "just remember who's been there for you all these years."
Kathy felt guilty. Andrea was obviously still upset Kathy hadn't contacted her when Brenda was missing. She was envious of the bond she shared with Annette. But there was no way Andrea could understand that bond. How would she even try to? Wouldn't telling her about her romantic leanings make her feel uncomfortable about how close their relationship had been all these years? It could be disastrous.
Or maybe she knew exactly what was going on and she was jealous. No, that couldn't be it. If Andrea were interested in women she probably wouldn't stoop to the level of making out with Greg Wendell as often as she did. She didn't know what Andrea would do if she knew the truth. And she had no idea if the truth was obvious to her friends or not.
Kathy kissed Annette long and hard before Annette climbed out of the Pinto to head up the driveway and into her house. No one could see. It was pitch black and the car windows were slightly tinted anyway. Kathy had trouble letting go of her hand and letting her out of the car. She wanted so badly just to take her home with her and never let her out of her sight. Kathy circled the block before coming back down Annette's street and again parking a few houses away. She examined all the cars in the area, making sure none of them were brown Mercurys. An hour this dark could be the perfect time to snatch Annette, if that's what he wanted. But it was okay. Kathy was there. At least until eleven, when her parents were expecting her home. She was there, and she had her weapon at the ready, even if it had no bullets.
***
"Hello?" Kathy raced to the phone every time it rang these days. It could be Annette. Or it could be the Nazi gun dealers she owed money to. Either way, she thought it best that she be the first to answer the phone. She kept kicking herself for giving the boy at the gun shop her real phone number. She made up a last name, why did she tell the truth about how to contact her?
"Can I speak with Kathy Sorenson?"
"This is she." Thank God her father hadn't answered the phone singing "Aukerman Residence" as he usually did.
"It's been over a week. You're overdue on your payments. Your debt stands currently at $143.75."
"Wait, I thought we started at one fifteen. That's almost thirty dollars more."
"Yes. We went over this when we made the sale. Twenty-five percent every week. You've accumulated $28.75 in interest."
"Oh." Kathy almost swore into the phone, but she wanted to keep her status as the scared little girl the shop owner's father couldn't turn away. Bringing out the potty mouth now wouldn't help things.
"I'm going to need the interest, minimum, immediately."
"Okay, so I just bring it by the store, or what?"
"Yes. You bring it to the store you took merchandise from you haven't paid for yet. That's how business works."
Kathy felt embarrassed, but hadn't really been sure. This had all been so under-the-table. She didn't know if she needed to leave the money in a briefcase inside a phone booth downtown or something. You know, to throw off the cops. She realized just then she was being ridiculous.
"I'll come by this afternoon."
"Good." The gun boy hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Kathy wondered what he would do if she didn't pay. Would he hurt her? Her family? Really? She pictured the boy's pimply face and thought she could probably kick his ass herself. But that wouldn't be good. Then she'd have angry racists mad at her. She needed a way to get some cash.
She didn't dare ask her parents. They would never understand. She didn't want Annette to know she had the gun, so that was also a no-go. Andrea. Andrea might work. Though $143.75 was probably more than her dad made in an entire week. If she could help Kathy out it would have to be some sort of fluke. Like if Andrea had a secret inheritance or something she hadn't told her about.
Kathy showed up on her doorstep without calling first. Andrea's youngest brother Jason opened the door. He was dressed in his Halloween costume from last week: a policeman's uniform with a tiny badge and a little nightstick in his hand. All he needed was a mustache and some sunglasses and she wouldn't be able to tell him from the rest of the guys on the force.
"Excuse me, officer," Kathy had a tone in her voice like she was talking to a toddler, even though Jason was about seven. "Is Andrea here?"
"You know I'm not a real officer! Don't be stupid." He ran back into the house and started screaming Andrea's name. Kathy watched as he disappeared into the messy kitchen.
Andrea came to the door soon after, and seemed awfully pleased to see Kathy there. Kathy by herself. No Annette.
Andrea led Kathy back to her bedroom. The screams of a young boy came from behind one of the bedroom doors, but it didn't seem to alarm Andrea. Little boys made plenty of weird noises whenever she visited this house. So did Andrea's parents.
Kathy flopped onto the bed and tried to pretend she had no real reason for being there, as though the pleasure of Andrea's company were enough of a draw on its own.
"What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving?" Kathy asked while flipping through Andrea's new issue of Circus, which had a long-haired rock musician with a mustache and glittery shirt on the cover. Kathy didn't recognize him, but he reminded her a little too much of the creepy guy from the roller rink and Jimmy's party.
"Same as usual. All my dad's brothers are coming over. My mother and I are going to drown in testosterone. I'm not looking forward to it."
"Bummer. We're just going to one set of grandparents in the early afternoon and the other in the evening. Just like always." Kathy struggled to find words to say that didn't have to do with everything going on in her head. She pushed down her fear of being in debt. Her longing for Annette. She pushed everything down until she had a sharp little pain on the lower left side of her abdomen.
She tried to talk about Elton John. High school gossip. Last night's episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Finally, she felt like she had stalled long enough. She had to take the plunge. If she didn't do it now her insides might be painted all over the walls in a few seconds. She could feel the explosion coming.
"Andrea, I need help."
"What? With what? Are you okay?"
"I need money. I owe some money to some scary people. I need... oh my god, Andrea, I need like a hundred and fifty bucks. I don't know what they're going to do."
"What? How did.... What do you owe them for? Who are they?"
"I needed a gun."
"A gun?" Andrea looked horrified.
Kathy nodded and sat up on the bed. She told Andrea the story about the gun shop and the basement deal, trying to convey as much fear as possible. "Is there any way you can help me?" Kathy knew she could see the desperation in her eyes.
Andrea looked at her bedspread, the window, the lamp in the corner—everywhere except at Kathy. "That's why you're here."
Kathy stared blankly.
"You're here because you needed money. You didn't come here to hang out. You were just going through the motions."
"What are you talking about?"
"You don't care about me anymore," Andrea said bluntly. "You haven't given a shit about me since somebody prettier came along."
"That's not true."
"Kathy, you didn't even call me when your sister was missing. There's a mad killer on the loose and you didn't call your best friend when you thought your sister was in danger." Andrea paused. "But maybe you did, you called your new best friend."
"No."
"Kathy, don't treat me like an idiot. She's all you care about anymore. When was the last time you thought about picking up the phone to talk to me? That hasn't happened in months."
She was right. Kathy had been so obsessed with Annette that it almost made her forget Andrea existed. Andrea had always just been there. Annette was someone who rolled in and swept her off her feet without warning. She simply didn't feel the same way about Andrea as she felt about Annette. But she couldn't try to explain. Andrea wouldn't understand. She would only be hurt.
"Kathy, I don't have any money, okay. And if I did, I don't know why you think I would give it to you." Andrea inhaled and exhaled deeply. "I dig that this is really, really heavy. You need real help. Talk to your folks or Al or something. I don't want you to get hurt. And I'm worried, because you've been behaving very strangely. I think maybe we should take some space from each other." She led Kathy to the front door. "You should come back when you're actually interested in spending time with me instead of using me to help you get out of debt with fucking Nazis." She began to close the door. Kathy saw tears forming in the corners of her eyes. "Oh, and don't think I can't see what's really going on with you two. Everyone can." The door shut and Kathy heard the deadbolt turn a second later.
***
Kathy's stomach burned like acid was eroding the lining of her intestines. How did people get money fast? Maybe she could sell her body on the street. Pfffft. No, she could never bear that. She needed to think clearly. There had to be someone who could help her. Someone who actually might be able to pay off her debt. Help her cut ties with these weirdos permanently. But she couldn't ask her father. He hated guns. He would probably give her the money, but he would almost certainly take her weapon away from her. She needed it.
Without much thought Kathy found herself sitting in the parking lot of her uncle's apartment complex. She beat her forehead on the steering wheel a few times. This was stupid. Al would just tell her parents. Or would he? Maybe he would agree to keep it secret between the two of them. She didn't know, but she also didn't have any options. She turned off the engine and walked up to the front door.
"What's the matter?" Al could tell Kathy was in distress just by looking at her.
"I need help," Kathy said quietly.
Al got a determined look on his face, walked over to his coat closet and grabbed a baseball bat. "Let's go," he said to her.
"No! No. I need money. I owe some people money. I'm scared."
The expression on his face changed. "How much could you possibly owe someone? You're a kid."
"143 dollars."
"Jesus, what for? Are you on drugs? Jesus, Kathy."
"No. I... I told you I needed a gun. I got one. I just couldn't really afford it."
"You needed a gun that expensive? That's a lot of money, Kathy."
Kathy had given much more thought to the look and size of gun than she had to the price. She felt foolish. She swallowed her feelings and tried not to start crying.
"I told you that you shouldn't have anything to do with guns anyway. What were you thinking? Who did you buy from?"
"Do you have to know every detail?" Kathy's sharp tone surprised even her. "Do you have the money? Can you help me or not?"
"Yeah, I'll help you." Al's demeanor softened. He squeezed Kathy's shoulder. "Let me get my wallet." After heading into his bedroom Al came back into the kitchen with a big wad of cash in his hand. He handed it to her, all twenties. It was sixteen dollars and fifty cents more than she needed. She would give him the change after she went to the store.
She wrapped her arms around Al and gave him a kiss on the cheek. "You have no idea what this means to me. I can't thank you enough."
"Don't think this is coming without strings attached," Al told her. "You owe me. And if you have a gun, I want you to let me show you how to use it well and safely."
"Okay. I'd appreciate that."
Al kissed her on the forehead before she turned around and walked out the door. She realized when she approached the Pinto that she had left it unlocked. She rushed inside to make sure nothing was missing. The stereo was intact. All of her 8-tracks were there. Most importantly, when she gripped the envelope in the glove she could still feel the pistol inside. She hadn't had a reason to worry. Worrying over nothing seemed to be a constant in her life lately. But this gun business wasn't nothing. It was scary. She needed to take care of it right now.
The light inside the gun shop was off when Kathy parked her car facing the storefront. The neon OPEN sign in the window was off too. She banged on the door but nothing happened. She knocked harder and the shop owner finally emerged from the basement door. He wasn't happy.
"We're closed."
"I know. I just... I have business with your son. I have the money to pay off my debt."
"Oh!" He looked surprised. "Okay, come in. Come downstairs."
As Kathy headed downstairs, she could hear a radio playing a country song about red necks and white socks and blue ribbon beer. There were a whole bunch of people in the basement, many of them sitting in the folding chairs she had seen last time she was here. They were all men, except for one leathery-looking woman in a halter top who sat against the wall spitting tobacco juice into a Pepsi bottle. Some of the men had beards and baseball caps, some were clean-shaven with crew cuts. Every single one of them was staring at Kathy the second she walked in. So was the tobacco juice lady.
The pimply gun boy came walking toward her and she shoved the money toward his chest. He took it and made a big show of uncrumpling the eight twenties and turning them so they were all facing the same direction and right side up as he counted them.
"Okay. You can go."
"You owe me $16.50."
"No, your interest has been accumulating over the week."
Kathy didn't argue with him. It wasn't worth it. She hurried up the stairs, careful not to meet any Nazi gazes. When she got outside she ran to the car, though it was less than ten feet away. She sat in the driver's seat and locked the door. She was short of breath. Terrified really, although no threats had been made. Everything had gone smoothly, considering. Everything had worked out. She still couldn't breathe. It was all too overwhelming.
She nearly had a heart attack when someone began rapping on the driver's side window from the outside. Looking up, she saw her uncle. She motioned with her finger for him to go around, and she unlocked the passenger door. Al climbed in and started yelling at her.
"Are you fucking kidding me? Here? You bought a gun here? On credit? You're in way over your head, Kathy. I'm shocked by you."
"Did you follow me here?"
"Absolutely I did. I was going to kick the ass of whoever was selling firearms to my sixteen-year-old niece. I changed my mind once I saw where we were headed. I'm not that stupid."
Kathy's face was red. Her whole body felt hot. She worried that Al would take away the one thing that was making her feel safe and powerful.
"Let's get started on your target practice. Follow me in your car."
"Where are we going?"
"Out off of Bangs Avenue a ways. I know a good place."
Kathy followed her uncle's car out of the parking lot, past the bail bonds and pawn shops, back across the Lion Bridge, back toward his place, and farther down Tully out toward the farmland on the northern edge of town. She had to remind herself more than once that it was Al ahead of her. Tailing the Mercury had become such a habit that Kathy couldn't help but feel she was pursuing a predator, trying not to lose him as she always kept his car in sight.
"Well, the first problem is that you don't have any bullets."
"I know."
"Now you tell me. What is this, a .38? Let me go inside and see what Chuck has."
"Who's Chuck?"
"This is his property. He's on the force. I'm sure he has some ammo in the barn." Al ran to a somewhat dilapidated red wooden barn and came back outside with a box of bullets. he took the revolver from Kathy and spun the spinny bullet thing in the middle with his thumb. He loaded the bullets one by one. Al showed her how to hold it correctly. How to steady herself. How to close one eye for better aim. After a few minutes of that he walked over to the barn, picked a Coors can up off the ground, and set it up on a ledge atop a nearby fence.
"Okay, try hitting that."
Kathy pointed and pulled the trigger. She was startled by how forcefully the tiny weapon bucked in her hand. Like a little cannon. She missed the beer can by about five feet.
"You've got to manage your recoil. Watch me." Al hit the beer can on the first try. He tilted the gun back slightly after firing and it didn't blow him off his feet. Kathy wanted to try again. "Let me set up some more targets," her uncle offered. He ran over to where the can had been and placed about four more that he got out of a nearby trashcan on the ledge.
"Did you ever ask Dave about those plates?" Kathy asked.
"Oh, yeah. He said they were stolen from a junker. Plates that haven't been registered in fifteen years."
"Well, that's suspicious, right?"
"I don't know. Could just be somebody trying to avoid registration fees." Al lit a cigarette as he spoke.
"Huh." Kathy tried to hit the can again. She missed, but not by as much, and she didn't lose her balance this time.
"Steady. Pull the trigger slowly."
This time Kathy hit the can. She couldn't contain herself: she jumped in the air and squealed like a teeny-bopper at a Beatles concert. Al hugged her.
"I knew you could do it. But you've got to be safe, Kath. You have power now. Remember it's for protection only." Al gave her a look.
What a strange thing to say. Did he think she was just going to go around shooting people who pissed her off? She wasn't a crazy person.
***
Local families are on high alert again after the body of thirteen-year-old Peggy Sue Walton was found beneath the Seventh Street Bridge. Authorities were alerted by a transient early Saturday morning. Peggy was a seventh-grader at Roosevelt Junior High School.
With Miss Walton being the youngest of the recent murder victims so far, the Modesto City Police Department has decided to enforce a 9:00 curfew for girls under eighteen. Walton was sexually assaulted and her face was disfigured in a manner similar to the other victims. Police are warning young women not to get into cars with strangers and reminding them to stay in pairs or groups when traveling outside of their homes.
Information about services for Peggy Sue will be announced in the Modesto Bee as soon as that information is made available by the family. "She was just a child," Marie Walton, Peggy's mother, commented to the Modesto Bee. "The other girls were older. We didn't even think we needed to worry about her being in danger."
As the number of victims continues to pile up, Police are accepting tips of any kind. If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Peggy Sue Walton, please call 524-5656.
***
Annette didn't come to school the day after Peggy Sue Walton was found. Kathy worried all day. She couldn't pay attention to anything except the death penalty debate in civics class. She didn't understand how anyone could argue against capital punishment the day after a seventh grader was found raped and murdered under a bridge. Somebody had to pay, right? Justice couldn't truly be served until the killer felt the kind of pain he had inflicted on all the girls. Kathy didn't speak up during the discussion. She was afraid she might start crying in front of everyone.
In science class Kathy stared at the clock, the second hand taking twice the usual amount of time to circle the sixty tiny little lines printed between the numbers. It was hard not to be bothered by the stench of death in Mr. Gilligan's classroom. At least what she thought was the stench of death. Maybe it was just the stench of formaldehyde.
A dead frog floated in a jar filled with fluid on the shelf next to Kathy's desk. She couldn't help but look at it—its orange and black markings, its limply dangling limbs, its black eyes that were now so flat and empty it was hard to believe this thing once hopped and swam and ate feasts of flies.
"Miss Aukerman," Mr. Gilligan said in his monotone drawl, "eyes on the board, please. This is going to be on the exam."
Kathy took the bus home, barely registering the scattered mocking cries of "I am not a crook" coming from everyone who had seen the President's speech on Saturday. The moment she got home she ran into the kitchen and grabbed the keys to her mother's Pinto. She took off without asking if she could borrow it. Her mother never said no, and she was probably taking her afternoon nap now anyway. She usually passed out right after getting home from her part-time job at Mode o' Day.
Kathy drove to Annette's house and banged her fist on the front door. She stepped back and felt a little embarrassed she had knocked so hard. She knew it wasn't Annette who was found under the bridge. She didn't know where her sense of urgency was coming from.
"Can I help you?" A tall dark man Kathy had never seen before answered the door. He seemed annoyed she had knocked so hard.
"I'm looking for Annette. She wasn't at school today. I brought her her homework," Kathy lied.
"She hasn't been feeling well. Thank you very much for thinking of her. Her room's just down the hall." He sounded dignified. Almost overly polite, Kathy thought. All this time, and Kathy had never stepped inside Annette's house before. Or seen her father. He pointed her toward a tiny corridor with shag carpeting.
The house was strange on the inside. Some rooms were immaculate and looked like they could be in a spread in Better Homes and Gardens. Other areas had newspapers stacked nearly to the ceiling, like they'd been keeping them for decades. Pictures of Diane hung above their fireplace. It had become a shrine to her. She was beautiful. Kathy had only seen the one picture previously.
Kathy knocked gently on Annette's bedroom door. Annette opened it a few seconds later and gasped. She wrapped her arms around Kathy's neck and touched her forehead to hers before pulling her into the room and shutting the door.
"I was worried about you."
"I'm okay. It's just been a weird day," Annette explained. After a long pause she looked Kathy in the eyes and said "I'm glad it wasn't Brenda," before burying her eyes in Kathy's shoulder.
Kathy didn't know what to say. She didn't want anyone to be dead. "Me too" finally worked its way out of her mouth.
Annette's room was small, only half the size of Kathy's. It looked a little like a prison cell or a dorm room, the way the bed was tucked tightly in the corner against the wall, with only a narrow area to walk around in between it and her tiny desk and dresser. She hadn't been kidding about liking the Beatles: pretty much every inch of wall was taken up with posters, some of them overlapping so they would all fit. A particularly big sad-eyed face of George occupied the center of the wall next to the bed. Annette had a small stack of albums, mostly Beatles. There was also Jesus Christ Superstar, some Carpenters, and, tucked in the back, frayed from years of handling, The Sound of Music. Kathy put Sgt. Pepper on the little player atop the dresser.
For nearly an hour, the two girls talked hardly at all. They laid on their stomachs and looked at models in beauty magazines and drew mustaches and armpit hair on the pictures. Annette always kept her hand close to Kathy's. Usually holding it, sometimes resting hers on it, and sometimes just making sure it was near.
When they were out of magazines and had played both sides of Sgt. Pepper and one side of Rubber Soul, Annette rose to her feet. She took Kathy's arms and pulled her to a standing position too. Once they were at the same level, Annette put her hands on both sides of Kathy's cheeks. It was soothing to Kathy, like holding her head up had been a burden and she hadn't realized it. Annette pressed her lips against Kathy's. Kathy grabbed Annette's face in like fashion and kissed her back. Neither of them heard the doorknob turning.
"What the hell? What is going on in here?"
"Daddy, we were just..."
"I can see what you were just. Annette, what's wrong with you? You," he pointed at Kathy, "get the hell out of here. We don't need your perverted influence on our daughter right now. She's very vulnerable. You're taking advantage. Get out."
"Daddy, Kathy is my friend."
"Leave now."
Kathy grabbed her things and was out of the house before Annette could plead with her father again. What were they thinking? They should have locked the door. Did Annette's parents just come barging in without knocking all the time? What kind of privacy is that to give to a teenage girl?
Kathy's blood was boiling. She felt furious, embarrassed, and ashamed all at once. Was she taking advantage? Had she taken this sweet little vulnerable girl in mourning and forced her into deviant acts? No. No! They were in love. Kathy knew that. Nobody else could possibly understand it, though. Girls weren't allowed to be in love with each other. It wasn't natural. Kathy was a pervert. She knew it and she felt the heavy, heavy shame that came with knowing it. Her face was wet with tears. Love? Who ever heard of two girls being in love?
Kathy drove to the east side of town where she had seen the station wagon turn off its lights and vanish into darkness. She drove slowly down the dirt road, looking down the long driveways for brown station wagons. She couldn't find any.
***
Kathy's mother wouldn't let her take the Pinto on Saturday unless she dropped Brenda off first. She had a new job. She wasn't welcome at Swensen's anymore. They probably would have let her keep her job there had she made up more lies like she did about the rest of the incident. She should have said she was forced out of the shop at gunpoint. Instead, when her boss asked her what happened and why she left the store unlocked that evening she responded, "I did?" It took her three weeks to find a new job.
She was now working the perfume and jewelry counter at Penney's. She seemed to enjoy it more, though her father wouldn't stop lecturing her about blowing her entire first paycheck on merchandise from the counter. Brenda liked pretty things. Kathy imagined it was hard for her to leave everyday with nothing while rich ladies paraded their purchases around like French aristocrats. She needed to learn to be more frugal, though, if she wanted to go to UC Santa Cruz next year.
The two sisters hadn't spoken much since the fight. They went through the everyday motions of being civil to each other around the house, but there was a wall between them now. Kathy hated it, but knew it was what she deserved. Sisterly bonds weren't formed by ripping each other's hair out on the bathroom floor, and they certainly weren't formed by punching.
"I like that barrette. Annette has the same one. It looks so beautiful on her dark hair. But of course it looks beautiful on your blond hair too. It's just a really," Kathy paused, "really nice barrette."
"Thanks."
"Did you see the preview for that new movie, The Exorcist? Kevin thinks it looks scary, but I don't know. It seems stupid."
"No."
"Are you ready for your finals?
"Kind of."
Kathy couldn't think of any more conversation starters. She wanted to talk to Brenda about Annette. About how Annette's father thought she was a pervert and how she thought she might be too. About feeling like her heart was going to fall out of her chest and hit the floor like an anvil. She didn't have the courage. She had no idea how Brenda would react. She was only giving one-word answers as it was. Brenda wasn't exactly offering the big open sisterly arms she needed, and maybe she never would again. Maybe that stopped forever when Kathy's fist hit the side of her eye. Before the fight, she picked on Kathy, but the love was still obvious, at least to her. Now Brenda was an enigma. Kathy had no idea what was happening in her sister's head, but she could feel that things would never be the same.
"Thanks," Brenda said curtly as she got out of the car.
"Don't forget to come home!"
Kathy watched Brenda's head to see if she would turn and glare at her, but she didn't. She just marched through the glass doors into what had become, since last night, a winter wonderland of styrofoam snow and big empty gift boxes under pink and blue plastic trees. Penney's was ready for the holiday shopping season. The cheer spread out into the streets, where huge garlands of tinsel woven with lights were strung from street lamps and building tops. Tenth and J Streets, where Penney's took up nearly a quarter block, and where the glimmering tinsel magically arched up over the intersection into the shape of a Christmas tree, was the center of the yuletide shininess, but it radiated outward to illuminate the whole downtown. The jingling of Salvation Army bells and piped-in carols  accompanied the twinkling of the lights. O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie, the hushed recorded voices warbled from hidden speakers. Kathy could see Brenda through the picture window, past a playful reindeer tableau, setting up at the perfume counter. She was talking and laughing with another employee. She looked happy.
Kathy picked Annette up a few blocks from her house, out of her father's sight. The two had started making up elaborate lies to hide from him. Tonight Annette was going to see the Modesto High School production of Carousel with a boy in their class named Earl Richards—at least that's what she told her dad. She and Kathy were actually going to go get stoned in the park then run around the track at Downey. It was one of their favorite things to do. After running they would fall on the grass in the middle of the track and close their eyes. Kathy could see stars and colors and sometimes a vast darkness that sucked her in. She liked it. It was comforting. And beautiful.
Lying on the grass, Annette turned toward Kathy, who was on her back with her eyes closed. "Do you really think somebody could kill four girls and just not feel anything?"
"There's way more than four. But yeah, I think a psycho could do that and still sleep like a baby at night. They just don't have feelings."
Annette paused before answering. "What do you mean there's more than four?"
Kathy didn't mean to let that slip. It had been her policy not to talk about the killer in front of Annette or anyone in her family. Annette had brought it up this time, though. Kathy panicked. She didn't want her to know how much she knew about the case. How it had consumed her thoughts since the day they found Annette's sister. Since before they ever met.
"My uncle says girls have been killed in Fresno and Stockton." Kathy tried to give her as little information as possible.
"How does he know?"
"He's an amateur sleuth." Kathy flinched at how ridiculous this sounded. "At least that's what my dad says. He wanted to be a cop but couldn't because he got in trouble for drugs, but he still hobnobs with the them."
Annette thought for a few seconds. "Why didn't the police tell my family about the other victims?"
"I don't know if the Modesto cops even know about those murders."
"But your uncle thinks it's the same killer? How would he know? He can't convince the police?"
"He seems pretty sure."
Annette was pale. Kathy wrapped her left arm around her and tried to change the mood. What could she do? The last thing she wanted was for Annette to feel afraid. Or creeped out by how much Kathy knew. She didn't want this nonsense in her sweetheart's head. She had to get out of this pit fast.
"You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm tellin' you why," Kathy did her best Michael Jackson vocal impersonation, "Santa Claus is comin' to town."
Annette broke a smile. "Oh yeeeah," she sang like Michael.
"Santa Claus is coming to town, Santa Claus is coming to tooowwn," they sang together as they walked to Kathy's Pinto.
***
Andrea didn't sit with Kathy, Annette, and Kevin at lunch anymore. She sat with Barb McKenna and the other girls on color guard. Every once in a while Kathy would catch Andrea staring at them and then looking away immediately. It felt wrong not having her there, but Kathy was too busy to dwell on it. She was trying to figure out how to keep an eye on Annette when she wasn't allowed to visit her house. Reason told her that when Annette was inside, she was safe, under the watchful eye of her parents. But Kathy panicked when she was out of her sight. She couldn't take it.
She'd become obsessed with the idea that the killer was going to come back for Annette. That Diane wasn't enough for him. Kathy needed to be with her to protect her.
On Thursday Annette came home with Kathy on the bus. Her parents thought she was staying late to watch the girls' volleyball game against Davis. Her father wouldn't come looking for her. Kathy worried, but Annette said she was positive.
In Kathy's bedroom, Annette told Kathy about her mother's dreams of being an Olympic figure skater, and about how she forced both her and Diane into lessons starting at the age of three. She talked about how she liked gymnastics better than figure skating, and both girls reminisced about watching Olga Korbut flip around on the uneven parallel bars in last summer's Olympics. Annette told Kathy about how she learned the basics of trumpet from her grandfather, who was a band director. About how she cried when she learned she didn't make the Downey marching band.
Kathy told Annette how embarrassed she felt when she had to get glasses in the fourth grade. How she bled through her pants in gym class the first time she got her period. She told Annette how much she loved field hockey and why she really quit.
She kissed Annette on the forehead before going downstairs to make a snack for the two of them. Why were the cupboards so bare? Her mother had neglected to do the grocery shopping, probably because Kathy always had her car. Kathy spread some peanut butter on some Ritz crackers and arranged them like a smiley face on her mother's fine china. She was careful as she walked up the stairs. Her grandmother had given her parents that china as a present for their tenth anniversary. Grandma would be pissed if she broke it, though Kathy couldn't quite understand why. What made some plates better than others? The material? The craftsmanship? Why did it always seem like the most expensive things were the most fragile? Wouldn't people want to pay more for an unbreakable plate?
When Kathy walked back into her bedroom she saw Annette standing there with her red velvet dead girl journal in her hands. Annette was flipping through the pages.
Kathy dropped the plate.
"What is this?" Annette asked in her quiet voice.
"It's just a record I'm keeping."
"Why? Why would you want to be reminded of these things?"
"I... I don't know." And she really didn't. Maybe knowing the details about the girls and their deaths made her feel safe. Prepared in some way. She didn't know how to respond.
"There are a lot of girls in here. You think the same guy killed them all?"
"I don't know."
"Why is Diane's picture first? You have all the other girls in chronological order except Diane is first. Diane wasn't killed first, Karen was."
"Actually, Louise Preacher was—if you look at the dates in the book." Kathy didn't know how to answer Annette's question. She certainly couldn't say "I like to have her picture first to remind me of you." Annette would run screaming out the door. Kathy continued, "Diane was the first one I learned about."
"Why do you keep this? Why do you want this?" The look on Annette's face was one Kathy hadn't seen before. A mixture of confusion, disgust, and anger? She couldn't tell.
"It just reminds me to keep myself safe. I'm so sorry. It's stupid. I'll throw it away."
"Your girlfriend's sister's murder isn't enough of a reminder?"
"Annette, I'm so sorry." Kathy was still panicking, but in one corner of her heart, there was a little happy leap. She called herself my girlfriend. Kathy kissed her gently on the lips. "Just put it out of your head. It's in the trash."
Annette's face still looked funny. She insisted she didn't understand. That it wasn't understandable. Kathy tried to change the subject, put on a record, anything to move on from this moment. Annette's face didn't change. It hadn't even changed by the time she dropped her off at school, where her dad was to pick her up after the volleyball game she would claim to have watched.
Kathy was worried, though Annette's kiss before she got out of the car was slightly reassuring.
"I love you," Kathy whispered.
"I love you too," Annette answered. Her voice was shaky and slightly higher than usual. Kathy worried that she was only saying it because that was how she felt before she found the journal. Now she would have time to think about it and change her mind. She would leave Kathy behind, Kathy just knew it. She had blown it. She took off her glasses and started sobbing onto the steering wheel as Annette walked out of sight.
***
Modesto police responded to a call Wednesday alerting them to a strange smell in the alley behind Dunlop's department store in McHenry Village. Inside an industrial dumpster, they found the body of seventeen-year-old Sharon Matthews, who had been reported missing on Monday.
"It looked like a store mannequin with its legs hanging out of the dumpster," Officer Charles Pooley told the Modesto Bee. "When we we approached, we realized what it was. It was the worst thing I've ever seen."
The Modesto Police department has declined to comment on the condition of the body or whether they believe this murder is tied to the Lion Bridge killings that have terrorized Modesto for nearly a year now.
Services for Sharon Matthews will be held at the First Baptist Church on 1301 12th Street Saturday at noon. The family has indicated that all are welcome.
***
After reading about Sharon Matthews, Kathy started carrying her gun in her purse with her wherever she went. When she walked alone, she would keep her right hand tucked inside the purse, gripping the gun's handle tightly. Every man she passed was a threat.
She thought she knew what the Lion Bridge killer looked like, but this new case suggested there was more than one murderer out there. Maybe all men fantasized about hurting women. Some could keep their desires in check, but others obviously couldn't. She tried not to think about what was going on in a man's brain when he looked at her. Or at Annette.
She kept Annette closer than ever, even running across the school between periods to ensure she got to each class safely. Kathy carried her purse around school but nobody knew what was inside. She felt scared and powerful, and usually a little sick to her stomach.
Everything her teachers said went in one ear and out the other. Her mind was far, far away from schoolwork. When she shut her eyes, she pictured Annette's lifeless body, so she tried to keep them open most of the time. They felt red and sore.
"I have my mom's station wagon. Do you want a ride home?" Kevin asked as he, Annette, and Kathy headed out of the school's south entrance.
The girls accepted. The bus was full of stupid boys making disgusting comments and throwing trash at each other. They would make insensitive jokes about the murders that made Kathy want to cover Annette's ears with her hands.
##################












What Kathy had forgotten was what a rotten driver Kevin was. She didn't know if it was him or the car's alignment, but he couldn't drive in a straight line to save his life. Kathy kept her hand in her purse, holding the gun to make sure it didn't explode when Kevin would inevitably drive over every curb he turned past.
"Are we all going to Kathy's?" Kevin asked.
"No, I have to go to the dentist," Annette informed him.
Kathy wasn't in the mood to spend time alone with Kevin, so she lied and told him her mother was having company over and she needed to help her tidy up. Kevin didn't seem too disappointed. He never did really. He had no clue that he was a third wheel when he was hanging out with Kathy and Annette. Why would he?
When Kathy got inside she went to her bedroom where she took the cut-out newspaper article she had in her pocket and pasted it into her red velvet dead girl journal. She hadn't gotten rid of it. She just couldn't. She was a liar. She lied to the girl she loved.
Kathy took the Pinto out around seven just for a drive. She was sick of being stuck. She needed to move. It was harder to catch somebody when they were on the move. She drove east on Scenic once more, out to where she had last seen the Monterey. Then she headed north out of town on McHenry and west on Bangs Avenue, near where her uncle had taught her to shoot. She had seen the wagon around here once too, though it had been months and months and she couldn't quite remember which dirt road it had turned down.
After failing to find the killer out on the prowl, Kathy headed to where she thought she was most needed. She parked three houses from Annette's, but made sure she was in a spot where she could keep her eye on the front door. She had to protect her. If someone was obsessed with hurting young, beautiful girls, Annette would be one of the first girls on his list, right? She was everything. Sweet, charming, beautiful, smart. She had to be the ultimate prize.
But not while Kathy was there. Nobody would get anywhere near her so long as she was there, armed and ready.
After an hour or so a knock on her driver's side window scared the bejesus out of her. She looked left to see the face of Officer Dave. What time was it? She was probably getting busted for breaking the curfew.
"What are you doing?" he asked her.
Kathy unwrapped her fingers from the gun in her purse. She moved both of her hands and set them at the base of the window.
"I'm so sorry. I'll get home. I know about the curfew."
"No, Kathy, what are you doing here? The Vergaras called the department because a suspicious person was sitting in a car, watching their house."
Kathy hadn't realized how creepy her behavior must have seemed until Dave put it that way. She felt so embarrassed she thought her skin might melt off. She didn't know what to say to him.
"I got in a fight with Annette, and I wanted to say sorry, but I've just been sitting here, unable to muster the courage," Kathy lied.
Dave seemed to accept the story. He slapped the top of her car twice with his palm and told her to get home before he called her parents about breaking the curfew.
Tears poured from Kathy's eyes on the drive home. Being banished from her post was physically painful. How could she be positive that her sweetheart was okay? If she wasn't in sight, how could she ever know if she was in danger?
***
It was astonishing how many people didn't watch the news or read the paper. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Kathy saw dozens of girls and women out walking alone, from Kindergarteners to nursing home residents. Why didn't they understand that it wasn't safe anymore? Maybe it never had been safe. Maybe there had always been men lurking in the darkness, and these women weren't going to let them force them to hide. But things were out of control. So many girls' lives had been taken in the past year. People just seemed stupid.
Even Annette wasn't immune to forgetting girls were under attack. She would suggest Kathy meet her places that were way too far from her home to walk to alone. It made Kathy furious. On Wednesday she saw her walking by herself toward the spot in the center of Ulrich Shopping Center where they planned to meet. Kathy raced toward her and grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her. "You're alone. You're not safe!" she reminded her before embracing her so tightly it was hard for either of them to breathe.
"Are you okay? All the color has gone out of your face," Annette said as they sat on their favorite bench outside Swensen's, sipping hot chocolate from paper cups with plastic lids.
"Yes. What do you mean?"
"You look ill."
Kathy stared down at her hands and they didn't look like her own. It was like the blood had been drained from her body, leaving her a cold blue shell.
"I'm just cold. Come here." She motioned for Annette to sit closer to her and the two stared into the parking lot as they sat side by side. They held hands, but hid them beneath the scarf resting on Kathy's lap.
"It is getting pretty cold. Should we go somewhere?"
"Let's just drive around," Kathy suggested. It was hard to kidnap and murder someone who was in a moving vehicle. Kathy thought it might be just the relief she needed.
They listened to a Raspberries 8-track they had picked up at Thrifty Drugs. It had their song on it, the song they skated to at Roller World, "Let's Pretend." The song that sent Kathy twirling into bliss every time she heard it.
They didn't go anywhere in particular. They drove around the high school and through residential streets, looking at the houses adorned with sleighs and angels and gleaming golden stars. She drove past Andrea's where she could see her family sitting around the dim light of a television set through their front window. She drove a couple of blocks down and showed Annette the house where she had lived until her family moved in fourth grade. Before long, their time was up. The curfew was being heavily enforced, and Annette's father was one of the people enforcing it the most. She dropped Annette off a few houses down the street from hers, but followed her closely with her eyes until she was safely inside her house. Kathy drove around the block and parked on the other side of the street, the Vergara house in full view.
She turned off the engine. Turned off her headlights. She felt invisible, which was good, since she didn't want Annette's dad to call the cops again. The bad part of it was that she couldn't see much. She wished she could shine her headlights straight at the house so she could see any potential predators on the prowl. She couldn't shake the fear that the killer would come around for Annette. Why wouldn't he? She was the most perfect, loving, beautiful....
Kathy was distracted by what looked like a male figure walking down the street. This was it. A surge of adrenaline made it feel like she was floating outside her body, her head and shoulders much higher in the air than they actually were. She pulled her revolver out of her purse and grasped it tightly. She had only seen the figure for a moment, and now it was gone. She didn't know where to look—where could he be hiding?
Kathy had what felt like a minor heart attack when she heard the subtle knocking on her window. She unrolled it, praying that it was a cop busting her for breaking curfew again.
"You? What the hell are you doing here? It's been you that's been sitting out here watching us? What's the matter with you?" Annette's father's face was red and Kathy could see a large vein pulsing in his neck. "Is, is that a gun?"
Kathy let go of the weapon, letting it fall on the seat. "No, no, I'm just trying to protect Annette. I want to make sure she's safe."
"Get the fuck out of here. First you try to corrupt my daughter with your filthy sins and now you're waiting outside my house with a gun? If you're not out of here in the next three seconds I'm calling the cops!"
Kathy stared at him blankly for half a second before starting the car and speeding away. Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it. Louder than the tape in the stereo or even her own thoughts. She drove straight home and raced to her bedroom where she collapsed, crying into her throw pillows. She tried to pinch herself. Punish herself. She couldn't feel anything. She fell asleep in her clothes.
***
Annette didn't come to school on Thursday, which didn't surprise Kathy too much. It did surprise her when she didn't show up on Friday, though. At lunch, Kathy used the pay phone to call the Vergara house. It rang and rang and rang until Kathy had to gather her books for class.
Nobody knew anything about where she was. Kathy worried that she was gravely ill, lying in a hospital bed with her family by her side. That's why there was nobody at her house to answer the phone. Every part of Kathy's body ached. No, it stung. It was hot and uncomfortable and Kathy wished she could just slide out of it altogether.
The bus didn't go by Annette's on the way home. Why would it? She wasn't there to drop off. Still Kathy was disappointed. She wanted to sneak a peek at her house to see if she could tell what was going on. It was okay. Kathy could take the Pinto as soon as she got home.
She drove down Annette's street, trying to move slowly and keep as much distance from the house as possible. She didn't need Mr. Vergara calling the cops on her.
It was unusually still. No cars in the driveway, no lights on in the house that she could see. She moved closer and the quietness of the house gave her the courage to park right in the driveway. She didn't know what she was going to do. She just needed to see Annette. She needed to know she was safe. She walked up to the door and knocked gently.
After nobody answered, she knocked harder, eventually banging on the door with both her foot and the side of her fist. Nothing. Finally, she peeked inside the front window. It was empty. The furniture was gone. All she could see was a dark empty room with orange shag carpeting.
She walked around the side and climbed on top of a bush to look into Annette's bedroom window. It was the same. Completely empty. No sign that any Vergara had ever set foot in that house.
She was gone. They just left. They moved. Kathy had no idea where they had gone. All she knew was she would probably never see Annette again, and it was all her fault.
***
It felt like her jaw was going to break off and fly against the wall. He just kept hitting her, in the same spot, with every muscle in his body. After he finished he reached down and shoved his finger into her tiny stab wound, making her scream.
"I told you to shut up!" He hit her jaw in the same place again.
She didn't mean to let it out. She knew how much he hated screaming by now. But the pain was unbearable. Screaming was all she had.
She reached out in front of her. There was nothing. He seemed to be gone for the time being. Though she knew he would come back. He always came back.
She knew he was going to be the last person she would ever see.
He pulled her to her feet when he came back. He took her right wrist and untied the binding. She felt a swell of hope as he took her left wrist and did the same thing. She tried to take a few steps forward. Was he letting her go? Was it all over?
She continued to walk, though she couldn't see anything in front of her. She walked toward where she usually heard the cellar door squeak when he came and went. She took five steps, and he didn't stop her. She reached her arms out in front of her and picked up her pace.
Then she was on the floor. Her bottom half was, at least. Her head and shoulders were being held tightly to the man's chest. A wire across her neck made it impossible to scream. She could feel the skin on her throat breaking. The wire penetrating her protective coating. She tried to look up, to see the face of the man who was doing this to her, but she couldn't see anything. Just darkness.
She could feel blood pouring from her neck, but it didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. She reached her arms up and tried to claw at the man's face, but it was no use. He had her pinned so tightly she couldn't get her hand up high enough.
And at once he let go.
The rest of her body slid to the ground and it almost felt like she was up to her neck in a swimming pool before darkness faded into darkness.
***
Kathy was always in the car now. She couldn't stand not moving, not patrolling. The Pinto became part of her body—she could feel every speck of gravel she rolled over as sensitively as if she were walking on it with bare feet. When she laid in bed she still felt like she was moving, her blood sloshing as she went over speed bumps, and it helped lull her to sleep.
Sleep was her other main pastime: if she wasn't at school or on the road, she was unconscious. It was hard not to pass out after the big, long crying jags that took her over every few hours. She didn't talk to anyone about it. She didn't talk at all.
"Kathy, are you planning on taking the car?" her mother shouted from the master bedroom.
Kathy walked down the hall and spoke at a normal volume. "Yes."
"What do you need it for? I'm supposed to take your grandmother to Pat Garrison's wake. Grandpa is out of town for his VFW retreat."
"Can't you just take the station wagon?"
"Your father needs it. He's going to his chorus rehearsal."
"Okay. Take it."
Kathy felt frustrated, but she knew the car wasn't hers. She was grateful she got to take it as often as she did. She just hoped her mother drove sober. It was increasingly rare for her not to have had a few drinks by this hour.
Kathy grabbed her suede coat with the long fringe and set out on foot. She didn't know where she was going. She didn't care that she was alone. So what if she got murdered? What did she have to live for anyway?
But she wouldn't get murdered. She felt sure of that because of the small, delicate item in her purse that could put a hole in someone's brain. She kept her hand in her purse as she walked, trying to make it look natural.
She walked for blocks. She passed Downey High, made a few turns, and stood in Andrea's driveway for a while. She didn't have the courage to ring the bell. She knew she was in there, but probably wanted nothing to do with her. Kathy had lost her best friend and her girlfriend. She was completely alone. Her own sister didn't love her anymore. Who loves somebody who beats the shit out of them? Another crying spell seized Kathy and she continued down the street, the cold air stinging her wet cheeks.
She walked and walked without paying attention where she was going. She mostly stared at the concrete sidewalk, trying to keep her eyes open because when she closed them she saw things that were unbearable. Annette lying dead in a ditch. Rotting eye sockets so empty you could see right through to the brain. Maggots and other larvae feeding on the decomposing flesh, and for them it was the greatest feast of their lives.
She almost went home but finally found herself outside the Lang residence. Kevin was someone she still had on her side, right? She hadn't burned any bridges here. She wasn't alone. She had Kevin.
She walked up the stairs and rang the doorbell. Jimmy answered the door. It had only been a few months since he had gone off to college, but he looked like a completely different person now. He was bigger, his body had grown into his big-brained head. He looked almost muscular and had a mustache.
"Jimmy! How are you? How's UC Davis?"
"Fantastic! I feel like it's really where I belong, you know? High school was so profoundly anti-intellectual. I was suffocating. I was begging to be challenged, but the whole system was set up to avoid any kind of challenge, especially to the accepted order of things. The environment at Davis—everyone's just there to learn, you dig it?"
Kathy hadn't been prepared for a whole speech. She thought Jimmy seemed sophisticated and pompous at the same time. She congratulated him on finding a place where he felt like he belonged and asked to see Kevin. Before Jimmy even finished calling his name, Kevin came walking around the corner. "You want to go for a walk?" Kathy asked.
"Okay." Kevin rushed forward and grabbed Kathy's arm, not even giving her time to say goodbye to his brother. He barely missed Jimmy's nose with the door when he shut it behind him. Kathy figured some sort of sibling rivalry thing was going on. She didn't really care. At least it was a distraction.
"Everything okay there?"
"He's just an asshole. You heard the way he was talking."
"Hasn't he always been kind of like that?"
"He's way worse now. I don't know why he just doesn't come right out and say he thinks I'm a moron. He treats me like one. And the way he talks, like he thinks he's so smart... I don't know, he just sounds like a queer."
Kathy flinched, then tried to change the subject. She tried to milk him for information about Andrea, but it was soon obvious that Andrea had been avoiding him as well. Kathy had thought it was just her, but apparently Andrea was far too cool to hang out with either of them anymore.
Kathy kept her fingers wrapped around the gun in her purse as they walked. It was exhilarating knowing she had something lethal in her grasp while the person beside her had no idea.
When Kathy got home she put on "Let's Pretend" and cried. Every time her and Annette's song ended she moved the needle back (she didn't have an 8-track player in her room, so she had scraped together a dollar for the 45) and let it torture her again.
She had started sleeping with the gun under her pillow at night. It was good to have it always at the ready, she thought. As she was about to tuck it away, she held it in front of her and looked at it. She thought about how easy it would be to place it in her mouth and escape the lonely hell that was now her life. She rubbed the barrel between her fingers. Even stuck it in her mouth for a second. She took it out, her fingers trembling. She didn't have the courage. Yet. She might soon.
The key turned in the front door. Kathy ran down and embraced her father when he came in, which took him by surprise. She wanted to curl up and be a little baby in her father's arms, with nothing to worry about because nothing was yet understood. Her tears came and wet his shirt a bit.
"Are you okay, honey?" Her father asked, pulling her off him slightly.
"Yeah," she lied.
"You're crying on my shirt, Kathy. What's going on?"
She sobbed even harder into her father's shoulder. He rubbed the back of her head gently before dragging her over to the sofa and forcing her to sit down. He ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water.
"Take a big gulp," he directed Kathy, handing her the flowered tumbler. "What is going on, sweetie?"
"Annette's gone." Saying the words felt like spitting out razor blades.
"What do you mean gone?"
"She's just gone. They moved or something. Their house is empty. I didn't even get to say goodbye." Kathy's voice broke and she was weeping again before she could finish the sentence.
Her father wrapped his arms around her and caressed her back lovingly. It was a tight embrace. The same kind he gave her when she was nine and Geoffrey, their aged Dalmatian, had to be put to sleep.
He let go and looked her in the eye. "She was special to you, wasn't she?"
Kathy nodded and watched as her father's eyes flooded with tears. They embraced again and he told her that he understood her feelings more than she could possibly know. But she did know.
He pulled her off the couch with both hands and led her up the staircase to bed. He tucked her in just like he had when she was little and sat on the bed beside her for a while waiting for her to fall asleep. She felt better when she was with her father. He always made her feel safe. Loved. He was something to live for.
***
Kathy was able to take the car the following evening. The days were getting so short she barely had any time to drive in the daylight that was left after school. She didn't go anywhere in particular. She listened to her Raspberries 8-track and began sobbing each time she heard the first few notes to "Let's Pretend." It made it difficult to see, especially with all the Christmas lights. Everything in front of her was a big yellow blur. She had to pull over to regain her composure. It wasn't safe to drive if she couldn't see.
After blotting her eyes with some Kleenex she looked up to see a brown Mercury Monterey passing her on the left.
She turned the key in the ignition and followed it.
She tried to be smart. She kept both hands on the wheel and left her gun in her purse on the floor. She tried to keep a buffer car between her and the wagon, but it became harder the farther north they drove on McHenry, as the stores thinned out and they entered the dark expanse of orchards on the top edge of town. It was like he knew she was following him, so he was leading her as far from civilization as possible.
He turned left on Bangs Avenue and Kathy followed. They were the only ones out here. There was just the long straight stretch of road ahead of them and the perfect rows of walnut trees on either side. It was like a filmstrip on an endless loop. The license plate was different this time. 143 AFS.  But somehow she still felt positive it was the same car she had followed before. The small horizontal dent on the left side of the rear bumper looked the same.
Once they were about a half mile off of McHenry, the Monterey picked up speed. Kathy accelerated to keep up with it, and soon they were going almost seventy. She could no longer see the glow of town in the rear view. They were in the void. Kathy's heart was pounding, but she didn't feel afraid. She felt unstoppable, plugged into a surging current.
Then the Monterey began to slow back down. The speedometer dropped to sixty, then fifty, then forty. It kept slowing. Was he going to turn? Kathy expected him to disappear down the darkness of a side road again, but he didn't. And he was still slowing down. They were only going twenty-five now. She was having a hard time hanging back instead of speeding forward and ploughing into his rear bumper.
About the time she realized how strange it was that they were crawling like snails, the driver slowed even further. He was stopping! What the hell? Kathy came to a stop as well. He was about fifty or sixty feet ahead of her.
No, he wasn't stopping after all.
He was turning.
She watched the beams of his headlights sweep across the trees on the left side of the road and continue around to slide onto the hood of the Pinto, onto the windshield. Once the car was facing her, its brights came on, blinding Kathy like a light from the heavens.
Her heart was racing faster than ever and she realized that her underarms were soaking wet. The Mercury was barreling straight toward her. She stepped on the gas and swerved, passing the wagon on the right just in time to avoid being hit. She hoped she could lose the driver in the time it took him to turn around again. She drove faster than she ever had before. She didn't need to look in the mirror to know he was still bearing down on her; his brights were flooding the interior of the Pinto.
When he struck her rear fender, she screamed.
After a few seconds that seemed like hours, the intersection of Bangs and Prescott loomed ahead. A blinking red light hung in the middle of it. When she reached it, she turned left without stopping, almost without slowing down. Her tires screeched. The smell of burnt rubber filled her lungs.
She was still screaming when she realized that he had not turned after her. She didn't slow down until she reached Standiford, and even then she was going over the limit.
Her parents had always told her if she felt unsafe to drive straight to the police station, which was what she did. She parked on the street outside the downtown station attached to the jail, and at last everything seemed still. She didn't feel like she was being pursued anymore. She had succeeded in escaping, but her chest ached because she knew that wasn't really what she wanted. She wanted to come face to face with the man and blow his brains out. Instead she was running like a scared kitten.
Kathy sat next to the police station for a good fifteen minutes, just to be sure the coast was clear. Through a thin glass window by the front door she could see the police going about their duties, carrying files, answering phones. It looked lonely and pointless. It reminded her of a painting of people in a diner at night she had seen in a magazine.
After she was sure she wasn't going to shake to pieces anymore, she drove home and locked every door in the house. She thought about asking her parents if she could sleep with them, but then remembered she wasn't seven years old.
***
"Al was telling me that when he and Dad were little, they never got gifts for Christmas. Grandma and Grandpa couldn't afford to buy them presents until after World War II," Kathy told her sister as they loaded bags from Penney's into the trunk of the Pinto. Kathy took advantage of Brenda's employee discount and did all of her holiday shopping there. The whole family did, actually.
"That just seems odd. Al seems like he had to have been a horribly spoiled child."
"What do you mean?"
"You know, he just thinks he can have whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He gets all those fancy electronics from his 'guy,' but you know they're hot. He thinks he should get to have all these things he can't afford just because he 'deserves' them. He thinks he's entitled to everything."
"Wow."
"What?"
"Why do you hate him so much? He loves you."
Brenda slammed the trunk closed and climbed into the driver's seat. She held out her hand, waiting for Kathy to give her the keys.
"I'll give them to you if you tell me what you're talking about," Kathy said, settling herself in the passenger seat.
"You already know what I mean."
"I don't, actually. I love Al."
"Kathy, remember when Al took me and my girlfriends up to Tahoe last summer? I mean the summer of '72?"
"Um, I think."
"Well, Carol Rogers hasn't spoken to me since that trip."
Kathy tried to figure out what her sister was hinting at. Had things gotten violent? Was he acting like a jerk? Kathy stared at Brenda with a puzzled look on her face.
"God, Kathy. Uncle Al made it with Carol Rogers in the cabin he rented up there. She was sixteen. He was thirty-seven."
Kathy felt instantly sick. "Against her will?"
"No, but she felt super weird afterward and blamed it all on me. He bought us all a bunch of liquor, so people weren't exactly using their best judgment."
"That's gross."
"Yup."
"Maybe it was just a mistake. Maybe he got too drunk too."
"He was sober when he bought vodka for a bunch of teenage girls, Kath."
Kathy felt like she needed to apologize to Brenda. Like she felt somehow responsible for her uncle's behavior. She had been defending him after all.
"He's just a creep," said Brenda. "Everyone has creeps in their families. You just have to learn how to deal with it and how to protect others from their stupid behavior."
Kathy didn't know what to say. She wasn't exactly surprised. Al had always been a horny toad. There was that pile of pornography in the bathroom of his apartment. Didn't all men have pornography, though? Maybe Playboy and things like that, but some of those others gave her a sick feeling. Their covers had weird stickers and felt pen markings on them, she reflected, and then wondered why she had landed on that detail, considering how gross the pictures themselves were. She still loved Al, she thought. He was a pervert, so what. Wasn't she a pervert too? A chill raced down her spine. That wasn't right. Kathy wasn't a pervert like that. She would never dream of getting the girl she loved drunk and taking advantage of her. She made sure always to show her respect and adoration. She used to make sure. Her throat tightened and she fought back tears.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"Don't worry about it too much. If he makes you uncomfortable, stay away. But it seems like you two have a great relationship. He's your uncle. You love him. Don't let me ruin that." Brenda turned right against a red light despite the sign directly in front of her face telling her it was illegal to do so. Kathy didn't say anything.
"I'm just sorry, Brenda. I'm sorry for everything." The tears won the battle, and Kathy broke down sobbing. It seemed like she couldn't go ten minutes without breaking down sobbing these days.
"Kathy," Brenda put her hand on Kathy's knee and looked her in the eye. "It's okay. Everything's okay."
Brenda's words reassured Kathy for a while. When they got home she laid on her bed, staring at the ceiling for a long time. What did it really mean for everything to be okay? That statement was never true. No matter what, there was always someone suffering in the world. Every second, right? Someone was grieving or hurting or dying. It was impossible for everything to be okay.
Kathy looked inside her red velvet journal. She read each word in every article again, hoping to find an answer or missing piece. She didn't. It just filled her head with more death. The dreadful questions that came with the murders hardly even turned Kathy's stomach anymore. She would think about whether he removed their eyes before or after killing them, and her thoughts didn't make her flinch. She just felt a deep longing to know. To understand. To feel a little bit of the suffering these girls experienced.
***
In the days after Christmas everything seemed bleaker than ever. Gray overcast skies and dead fir trees out for the garbage man were all Kathy saw when she looked out her window. She wanted to leave the safety of her room, but didn't at the same time. There was nobody out there for her anymore. No sunshine. No happy embraces and secret kisses. Kathy played with her revolver as she laid on the floor. She imagined targets on the ceiling and pulled the trigger on the unloaded gun to take them down.
Brenda had been more than civil to Uncle Al at Christmas dinner. Almost nice to him. Kathy couldn't understand it. Nothing had been said in Al's defense to change her opinion of him. Yet she acted like she genuinely wanted him to have a happy Christmas. Kathy, on the other hand, felt like she was short with everyone and had a bad attitude on Christmas day. She wasn't nice to Al or anybody else. Probably because no matter how hard she wished, she could never have what she really wanted for Christmas.
***
"I need to go to Sacramento."
"Why?"
"I just need to go to the library up there. I don't want to go alone. Will you come with me?"
"Okay."
Kathy got off the phone with Kevin and hopped in the Pinto to go pick him up. He wasn't the greatest traveling companion, but he was all she had left at this point. Kathy and Kevin had tried to visit Andrea the day before, and Kathy thought it was going well when they were invited in. But once they were inside, everything was different. Andrea wouldn't sit next to Kathy. She recoiled at the slightest touch. Andrea was always across the room and when Kathy would move to be closer to her it was almost like she was running away. Like Kathy had some sort of terrible contagious disease. She knew after they had been there for a while that things would never be the same. Andrea was disgusted by Kathy. Scared of her. You couldn't be friends with someone you were afraid of.
***
"Do you think I could get a senior girl to go to Cotillion with me next month? Like, maybe if she wasn't very pretty or something?" Kevin asked as the two drove up Highway 99 at seventy miles an hour.
"Honestly Kevin, I think if you went out with somebody you didn't think was pretty, you would inevitably end up telling her that, and it would hurt her feelings."
"I would not."
"I think you should just go for the girls you're attracted to, Kev."
"They'd never want me."
Kathy didn't know what to say because he was kind of right. She didn't want him to feel bad, though.
"You just have to be patient and you'll find the right girl."
Kevin moaned and leaned back in his seat. Kathy shoved the 8-track all the way into its slot and turned up the volume.
"Oh my god," Kevin said, irritated. "Can we please not listen to The Raspberries? My head is going to explode. I honestly would rather listen to Neil Diamond than this one more time."
"Fine. Put it on." Kathy started to tear up immediately when he did. She remembered how Annette had used "Sweet Caroline" to try to drown out Kathy's bad thoughts when Brenda was missing. She tried to pull her tears back into their ducts. This wasn't something she could talk to Kevin about.
When they got to the library, Kevin followed Kathy toward the periodicals.
"Are we looking for killer stuff again?"
"Yup." Kathy was surprised it had taken him so long to ask what they were doing here. She knew exactly where to look this time, since she had copied the article about Kathy Baker word for word out of her uncle's book. She had decided it wasn't enough. She needed the real article in her journal. A real picture of her. Her crude drawing wasn't enough.
She had brought scissors this time. She didn't even bother looking around to check if anyone was looking. She cut the edges of the article perfectly, folded it, and put it in her back pocket just like the other articles she'd stolen. She thought she was finished and ready to head back home until she saw the front page of the paper from last Saturday.
Paulette Beard had been missing since December 18th. She looked like all the rest of the victims, but Kathy couldn't find any more information on her. She was still missing, it seemed. Maybe she was just a runaway, like Brenda. Maybe she had a horrible abusive home and needed to get out. Or maybe a bad man got to her. She didn't know. She cut the article out and kept it just in case.
On the way home Kevin asked Kathy if she believed in soulmates and she said yes. They listened to Neil Diamond and tried to count out-of-state license plates as they drove. Kevin told Kathy that she looked beautiful in the light of the sunset. Kathy was flattered. He was usually pretty stingy with the compliments.
Once they got back to Modesto Kathy started driving toward the Lang house.
"So you're just gonna drop me off at home now?
"Uh huh."
"Okay. You can come in if you want."
"I need to get back."
"Oh."
Kathy pulled into the driveway and put the car in park for just a moment. She reached back to get a tissue from the back seat and as she turned, Kevin's face collided with hers. Lips on lips, and then his tongue stabbing its way into her mouth.
"What the hell?" She pushed him off of her.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought... I thought you...."
Kathy shook her head while keeping an utterly confused expression on her face.
"Oh, my god, I'm so stupid." Kevin smacked himself in the face.
"Kevin! Don't. We're friends, okay? We're friends."
"But I thought you...."
"No. We're friends."
Kathy gave him a pat on the back as he left the car. She felt disgusted and guilty at the same time. She didn't want Kevin to have hurt feelings. She just didn't understand how he could have misunderstood their interactions so badly. She had sent no signal to him whatsoever. She thought she had a sign on her head that said "I am only interested in women." Kevin obviously couldn't read.
"I'll see you later, Kev." She tried to sound friendly even though she knew something had been ruined. She would never feel quite as comfortable around him again, and she knew she would feel guilty about feeling that way. She swore under her breath as she drove away.
Now she was really, really alone. Who was she even going to eat lunch with when school started up again? She had no one. She cried over what she thought was Kevin, but soon realized she was just crying over Annette again. If Annette had never come to Downey, everything would be just as it always was.
***
Instead of going home, Kathy drove down McHenry, watching the cruisers act like maniacs and trying not to get hit by the drunkest ones. She threw the Neil Diamond tape in the back seat and put "Let's Pretend" back on. It wasn't making her cry anymore. It was making her angry. Furious, really. She wished she knew where all the boxers in town trained so she could punch to her heart's desire without hurting anyone. But no, she wanted to hurt someone. Someone in particular.
She kept her eyes peeled for the Mercury, but it didn't appear. Maybe he was hunting somewhere else tonight. Fresno or Sacramento or even somewhere out near the ocean. Her stomach sank. How could the police ever catch someone who moved around so much? She had seen television programs where police argued with each other about whose department should take the responsibility of investigating a crime. She shuddered to imagine what might happen around here. All the bridge victims were found within city limits, so they were all being investigated by the Modesto Police. But what if a girl was found just outside of town? Would it go to the Stanislaus County sheriff? How much did the county and city departments communicate with each other? Kathy felt positive that the Modesto police had no idea how many victims there really were. Neither did Stockton. Or Fresno. Or Sacramento. It was going to take somebody on the outside. Somebody who wasn't barred by rules and regulations. She wrapped her fingers around her gun inside her purse.
The fuel gauge was low, so she pulled over to Ray's Gas Station on the corner of McHenry and Standiford, an outpost that marked the farthest edge of civilization in Modesto. In fact, there was no other man-made structure around it as far as the eye could see, just fields in all directions. Gas had soared to fifty cents a gallon since October, which Kathy knew had something to do with the war in the Middle East—it would take five dollars to fill up the tank. There was only $2.75 in quarters left in the little box her mother kept under the passenger seat, so that would have to do for now. Good thing the Pinto got over twenty miles a gallon.
Just as she was replacing the gas nozzle after fueling, a yellow Barracuda pulled up behind her. The car had two little slits in the hood that made it look like an animal flaring its nostrils. The driver door opened, and what stepped out but the most revolting man alive? The blond guy from the roller rink and Jimmy's party immediately spotted her and strutted toward her, the lower half of his body crammed into the tightest pair of jeans in existence. He also wore a leather vest that had been crudely embellished with a leather-burning tool: it read HOT on one breast and SHIT on the other. Kathy bet he had burned the words in himself. She darted into the Pinto and locked the door. He crouched down by window and tap-tap-tapped on it with one knuckle. She could see her appalled face reflected in his mirrored glasses. Not knowing what else to do, she leaned over and rolled down the window a few inches.
"Hey little mama, we're running into each other everywhere these days," he said, smiling in a way that he may have imagined was friendly, but looked like he meant to devour her whole.
"Lucky me."
"Oh, we could both get lucky if the cards are right. But where's your pretty girlfriend? Two's company, but three's a party, right?"
Kathy had to restrain herself from spitting in his face.
"Don't talk to me about her. In fact, don't talk to me at all." She started to roll the window back up, but he blocked it with his elbow and leaned in further.
"Whoa, whoa, no need to get all hot under the collar! Look, I'm easy—real easy. What do you say you park over there until I have a chance to gas up, come with me, and we'll share a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill under the moonlight? Tres romantic."
Kathy couldn't feel her body. She wanted to scream, to flail and rend and spit. Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles threatened to pop out of the skin on her hand. She opened her mouth to shout something, and was shocked by what she said instead.
"Romantic, huh?" She found herself fluttering her eyelashes and curling her lips into a wicked smile.
"Little mama, I invented romantic. Can I tell you something?" He adjusted his face into an expression of sincerity.
"What's that?"
"I'm familiar with heartbreak. I've had my share, and I'll be honest, I've caused my share. It's pointless to try to lie to you, am I right?"
"You are so right."
"Baby, I can see heartbreak all over your face. It's a special kind of look. It hurts me to see it." He put his hand on his chest like he was having a tiny heart attack. "I know from experience that the best cure for heartbreak is to get back in the saddle." The leering smile returned and displaced the sincere expression for a moment. "I will make it my personal mission to mend your heart." This time the hand approximated a soldier's pledge.
Kathy maintained her smile and, although it repulsed her, touched his hand. "Why don't you go ahead and fuel up. I'll wait for you."
For a second his face went blank. He hadn't expected it to work so easily. But he nodded and grinned and performed something like a male chauvinist curtsy, with a little courtly hand-twirling gesture. She pulled up to the edge of the station and shut off the car. Her heart was pounding so hard her head hurt. She stared off into the darkness and breathed, trying to still her tremors.
When he had finished filling the Barracuda, he pulled it up next to the Pinto. He got out and walked to the passenger door, swinging it open wide and waving her an invitation to enter.
She left the car, her knees shaking, and got in.
"Well, little mama, my chariot is at your service. Where would you like to go?"
"I need to ask you something first."
"Shoot."
"You know I'm sixteen, right?"
The creep's smile widened. "Don't worry, darlin', you don't look a day over fourteen."
"So you're okay with that?"
"Well, I won't tell if you won't."
"One more question."
####################










"Ask me." He was starting to fidget. Impatience was setting in.
"Are those jeans for real? Or do you have a sock shoved down there?" She nodded toward his groin.
He looked like he was either going to laugh or hit her. "Baby, I am as real as it gets, all over. Every inch. Know what I'm saying? Why don't you check for yourself?"
"Okay." And in one swift motion, her hand darted into her purse, retrieved the pistol, and jabbed it into his crotch. He yelped in pain, and was poised to fight her off, but he thought better of it.
"Sweetheart, calm down. What the hell are you doing?"
"Last question: what the fuck is wrong with you?"
He tried to move his hands toward hers to pull them away from his crotch.
"Touch me and I'll shoot your balls off." She jammed the gun in harder. He squealed again.
"Okay, okay!" He raised his hands in an attitude of surrender.
"You're a disgusting pig. Do you have any idea what it feels like for a girl when a some scary guy—a guy way older than you—comes up to you and starts talking about your nipples and your periods?"
"Take it easy."
"Do you know what it's like to be out with someone you love, having a nice time, and have someone like you come slobbering all over you, being obscene?"
"Honey, I am sorry. I obviously misread the situation. If you could just—"
"Misread?" She raised her voice. "Misread? How? I'm pretty sure you're illiterate, you piece of shit!"
"Just stay cool, baby, please."
"I don't care about being cool any more. I don't care about anything, not what happens to me, not what happens to you.  I want to make you hurt. I want to see you bleed." She listened to herself. She sounded crazy. She was scaring herself. It felt like freedom.
"Look, little ma—"
"Oh yeah. Call me little mama again."
"Stop! Don't! I'm sorry!"
A swirling fury entered her eyes that she knew he could see and understand. She shoved the gun harder and pulled the safety. It made a little click. "You ready?"
"No!" He was crying, and then a dark stain spread across his lap.
Kathy stared for a second, then pulled the gun away and put the safety back on. "Disgusting." She shook her head as she got out and went back to her car.
"You fucking dyke bitch!" he wailed. He started to get out, but then remembered that his pants were soaked in urine. He continued to shout with his lower body in the car and his head out the window, hands clutching the roof of his Barracuda. "I'll kill you, dyke! I'll cut your tits off!"
She waved the gun at him, watched him duck back inside, then drove away, the gun sitting on the passenger seat beside her.
***
Sunday was gloomy, with overcast skies and the sounds of fast winds whipping their way around the valley. Kathy stayed in her room and pasted the articles she had stolen about Paulette Beard and Kathy Baker into her journal. She read both of them again slowly.
"It's just not something I can handle. I don't know what I'll do," Paulette's mother had said to the Sacramento Bee. "She's everything. She's our world."
Kathy closed the journal and opened her desk drawer. She took out the psychedelic floral stationery she had gotten for Christmas. The journal contained information about each of the girls, but it wasn't in the right order, as Annette had noted when she was surprised to see Diane on the first page, so Kathy decided to make a chronological master list. She had tried to do this before, but ended up throwing it away. She wrote the name of the first victim.
Mary Louise Preacher (October 23, 1972)
***
Then the second, then the rest.
Karen Rose Murray (November 26, 1972)
Diane Vergara (January 22, 1973)
Sarah Beckmann (April 13, 1973)
Kathy Baker (April 28, 1973)
Nancy Dunn (June 3, 1973)
Peggy Sue Walton (November 12, 1973)
Sharon Matthews (December 6, 1973)
***
Then the missing girls.
***
Anne Marie Stewart
Collette Smith
Susan Erickson
Paulette Beard
***
Kathy didn't crumple the paper and throw it in the trash this time. She stared at the names until her face burned. Until she could feel their pain and hear their screams. Her eyeballs felt sore and loose and like they might fall out of her head altogether. Nothing was right. Nothing was being done.
How could a town just abandon its young women?
How could they let girl after girl after girl get murdered or go missing and just continue on like it was normal? Sure, people would get worried and paranoid after a victim was found, but each girl faded into the town's memory faster than their families could possibly have predicted.
Kathy thought about Sharon Tate and how the media never shut up about the Manson murders. What did it take to get that kind of attention? Did you have to be a movie star for people to care if you were murdered?
We have piles of girls. Enough to fill a classroom. Enough to build a basketball team. How can the world, let alone Modesto, just keep on turning when there are rotting teenagers buried beneath us?
Kathy felt more sure than ever that traditional justice was not going to work in this situation. And even the man she had hung her hopes on, her uncle Al, didn't care all that much about keeping young women from being harmed, as she had learned from Brenda. It was Kathy who would have to do something. No words. No defenses. Just justice.
Kathy grabbed her gun and hid it in her purse. She walked downstairs and was ready to open the front door when she became aware of her mother sitting in the kitchen. She was just outside the circle of light created by the funnel-shaped lamp hanging over the table, wearing a sheer flowing housecoat over her nightgown. She held an empty highball glass in one hand and a Virginia Slim in the other.
"I'm going out," Kathy told her.
"Remember the curfew," Mary reminded her. Kathy was nearly out the door before she spoke again. "Kathy, do you think I'm an undesirable person? Am I unattractive?"
"What? No! What do you mean?" Kathy walked back toward her mother.
"It's sometimes just hard to tell when you live a life like mine. Sometimes I feel like I've lost my identity."
"Lost your identity?"
"I used to feel like a beautiful, powerful woman. Nothing makes me feel that way anymore."
"You're beautiful, Mom." She really was, in a drawn, defeated sort of way.
"Sometimes I just have to ask, you see. You know, I could be Liz Taylor and your father wouldn't give a hoot."
Kathy spoke before she had time to think about what was tactful. "Actually, I think he would be really excited about that."
"He wouldn't care, you know, in the way I'm talking about."
Kathy knew. She nodded.
"But you know what? I'm the luckiest woman in the world. I have my beautiful girls and they're both here, breathing under my roof. The Vergaras' and the Dunns' lives aren't even worth living. Bev Dunn spends ninety percent of her day crying or unconscious. I'm lucky. I'm so lucky." Mary started to tear up.
Kathy nodded some more before her mother pulled her into an embrace.
"You be safe now. Don't speed," she said, patting Kathy on the back in the direction of the door. "Have fun, baby." She drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled a long plume of smoke.
***
Kathy drove straight to the Vergara house, where everything was still empty. The house didn't appear to be for sale—just abandoned. Maybe they would come back someday. Maybe they were keeping it and were going to come back once they caught the killer. Kathy hoped, but deep inside she knew it wasn't true. They were gone for good.
She thought about Annette's mother and what it must have been like, growing a person inside of you, raising that person to near adulthood only for them to be slaughtered like some sort of animal. To think that the little baby you once held in your arms was now decaying in the ground beneath you. Kathy punched the steering wheel, accidentally making a honking sound.
Kathy went to the Seventh Street Bridge for no reason she could put into words. The lion with the deformed face gazed at her with its dead eyes as she passed it. They looked utterly blank and all-knowing at the same time. She drove across the bridge, turned around in the driveway of a lock shop, and went back across in the other direction, greeted by the southernmost lions, who looked on her as coldly as the first two. She endured a moment of panic in which she envisioned a scenario out of The Twilight Zone: an infinite loop of bridge with no other side—just pitiless statues ushering you into a limbo of passage over and over. The Van Morrison song echoed in her head: listen to the lion, listen to the lion. Was the song a clue that fate had sent her? Was the answer to the mystery here, in these stone sentries? But what could these lifeless statues tell her, regardless of what they had witnessed? Or what would they deign to tell her if they could? They were guardians of the underworld, and it was their duty to keep the secrets of the dead. Whatever they knew, whatever they might have to say, it was not for human ears.
Kathy was letting the car drive her at this point. Her hands moved the wheel as though receiving signals from a hidden transmitter. Before long she was approaching the other side of town, and it wasn't until she was nearly there that she realized she was driving to the lot where Al had taken her for shooting lessons. The property that belonged to his friend Chuck, the cop. It didn't take her long to reach the road Al had led her down. Whatever invisible beacon was guiding her seemed infallible.
The sun was beginning to set, but she thought she could still get a few minutes of valuable practice in. She parked her car in the foxtails and dandelions just off the dirt road and walked toward the fence where there were already cans sitting as targets, waiting to be shot.
It took her three tries to shoot down one can. She reached into a box of ammunition she had bought a few weeks earlier at Valley Sporting Goods and reloaded her gun. The next time she hit the can on the first try. Excited, she walked over to the wastebasket and retrieved more cans. She set them on the fence, but when she walked back to where she wanted to shoot from, the light was significantly dimmer. She could hardly see the gun in her hands. There were no street lamps. No house lights. Just rural darkness.
She was about to climb back into the Pinto, but was distracted by a car driving down a dirt road from the north with its headlights shining brightly. It was like there was a spotlight on her for a second. She couldn't see who was driving or even what kind of car it was.
The car drove toward the small house on the property and came to a stop. The engine and the headlights turned off all in one moment. The driver got out of the car and walked into the house, turning on the porch light on his way. That had to be Chuck. Kathy wondered if she would feel better and not so paranoid if she just spoke to a policeman off the record. Learned about what they were doing to keep girls safe. She started toward the house. It was about a hundred yards away, and it seemed to grow larger with every step Kathy took. It was a small cottage from the view of the shooting range, but up close, she could tell there was more to this house than met the eye. It seemed too large for its design, like they took floor plans for a much smaller house and just doubled the size.
Kathy kept walking at her usual pace until she reached the point where she could see the parts of the yard the porchlight was illuminating. Big black garbage bags crammed so full they were almost bursting, several different kinds of axes sitting on the porch, and most importantly, the brown Mercury Monterey that was parked on the side.
She stopped in her tracks. She couldn't tell what kind of car had been coming down the road in the darkness, but now she saw that it was a car she knew. The plates were different every time she had seen them before, but not this time. She read the same 143 AFS that was on the car that turned around and drove straight toward her two weeks ago. A horizontal dent on the side of the bumper warped the chrome slightly.
She had to run. Her body told her that was the only option. She started toward her car, but a few yards in she could see a tall, dark male figure in the distance, slightly illuminated by a lit cigarette. Kathy turned and started running in another direction. She figured she had to be invisible in this darkness. Nothing on her was shiny or glowing. She didn't have anything that was on fire. She could get away without being seen. She felt sure. Then she hit a fence face first, running at full speed.
It took her some time to gather herself. The impact knocked the fear out of her for a moment, until she realized there was a wet substance covering her face and hands. It was too dark to see what it was, and she wasn't about to use her lighter to investigate, but it was obvious within seconds that it was blood. Her nose ached and blood poured from her nostrils like Niagara Falls. She wiped her hands on the weeds beneath her, then tried to use her hands to hold the injury and stop the bleeding. She tilted her head back and blood flooded down her throat. She coughed, which was a mistake. It was so empty out here. Had she alerted the killer to her location? She tried to move forward quietly, crawling on her hands and knees.
It was impossible to see anything. The only source of light for miles was the tiny single-bulb light that hung above the house's porch. Someone could be standing right in front of her with a knife and she wouldn't know.
A rustle in the bushes near where she had been shooting prompted her to move forward with more efficiency. She didn't know why. She had no destination. No plan. Still she crawled quickly, searching with her hands for anything that could be useful to her.
He must have seen her, right? He was the one operating the spotlight as he drove down the dirt road. He knew she was there. He had undoubtedly seen her car. She nearly vomited the blood in her stomach as her brain raced to find a solution, any solution. She couldn't just be out here blinded in the wide open air. Anything could happen, even if it was only by accident.
On the back of the house was a big metal door. It was close to the ground and slanted upward. This was the only place she could go, she thought. She could hide in the cellar until daylight—then she would be able to defend herself. She was useless in the dark. Especially with blood gushing out of her nose.
She felt the whole door with her hands, trying to find the latch. When she found it, her heart sank: it was secured with a heavy padlock. Frantic, she clutched at the door and pulled. On the first tug, she could tell that the wood into which the latch was screwed was soft and rotten. Trying to be as quiet as possible, she kept yanking at the door until it gouged its way out of the wood with the lock and latch still firmly attached. It swung open to reveal some steps leading to a black patch of nothing.
She hurried down the dark steps and tried to shut the door quietly. She failed. It creaked like the Tin Man needing his oil can. A sound came out of her that was part gagging, part sob, though it only came out once. She tried to breathe through her mouth. Breathing through her nose made a slurping sound that was far too noisy. She couldn't get much oxygen through there either.
As she walked forward, she felt something cold brush against her forehead. Her hand went up automatically to swat it, and she felt a lightweight chain hanging from the ceiling. She pulled her hand away, and as she did so, the chain swung around her wrist, and just before she realized that she had broken it, a dim light bulb lit the room with an unsettling glow. She looked up and fell to her knees, scraping them against the concrete floor.
In front of her was a wall of photographs. Diane Vergara was staring her in the face.
Kathy knew she was exposed in the light she now had no way of turning off, but she couldn't stop looking at the wall. The pictures were set up in lines and columns. Diane's pictures were all lined up on the third row down. First, shots of her by the river wearing a Mexican cotton dress. Real modeling shots. She looked stunning. Her face in this first picture was drastically different from the third picture, which Kathy could only assume was taken in this very cellar. In that picture she was crying on the floor with her hands bound, wearing nothing but a pair of cotton panties.
The next picture chilled Kathy so deeply she thought she might pass out. She hadn't realized it at first, but Diane was dead in the picture, posed like she was still living, but eyes as blank as a porcelain doll. She didn't have eyes in any of the pictures after that.
Across from her on the other side of the cellar were two heavy-duty chains affixed to the wall. There was a small leather band at the end of each one, approximately the size of a teenage girl's wrist.
The smell was unbearable. Kathy stared at a large bloodstain on the concrete, then turned around to look at the wall behind her. It was familiar looking. It reminded her of science class. But there weren't frogs and snakes and pig embryos in these jars.
There were eyes.
Each had its own bottle, and the pairs sat side by side on the shelf. Kathy didn't faint, or throw up. She only stared. And they all stared back. Every girl on her list.
She tried not to cough, though it was hard to breathe through the stench, especially with a broken nose. She turned to look at the pictures again. There was lovely Nancy Dunn, posed like Wonder Woman next to one of the lions on the bridge her body would be found under just days after the photo was taken. There were dead pictures of Nancy, too. In one of them, she had flowers shoved in her eye sockets.
There were a couple of close-up shots of genitalia and Kathy couldn't tell if the girls were dead or alive when they were taken. Which were they when they were raped? Kathy hoped they were dead. Dead people don't feel anything.
Clank.
The metal door opened from the outside. Kathy scurried to hide behind a freestanding eyeball shelf.
"Kathy?"
She tried not to breathe.
"There's no point, Kathy, I know you're down here."
She peeked through a thin slat in the shelf. It was the man who had asked her to take pictures by the river. And she had to come to the conclusion that that man was her uncle's friend—Officer Chuck. She remembered him sitting in her house when Brenda was missing. He never did take off his sunglasses.
"Kathy." He sounded impatient.
Kathy pulled her revolver out of her jeans and aimed as best she could in the dim light of the cellar. She couldn't remember how many bullets were in the chamber. Two? Three? She squeezed the trigger. After the explosion nearly knocked the gun out of her shaky hand, she heard the bullet hit about three different surfaces.
"Oh, you don't want to try that in here, Kathy. It could ricochet and come back to get you!"
She fired again. This time the bullet bounced off two walls before breaking one of the eyeball jars.
"Damn it!" Chuck scurried to pick up the one eyeball he could find. He seemed almost tender in his concern for its welfare. He cleaned dust off of it with his finger before placing it in a new container full of liquid he grabbed off the shelf. Absurdly, lyrics from a Led Zeppelin song ran through Kathy's brain:
I saw a lion, he was standing alone
with a tadpole in a jar.
What should she do? He was distracted. This would be the perfect time to take more careful aim and shoot him dead, but she couldn't stop staring. She was paralyzed. As he was screwing the lid of the jar tight, abruptly, and without her brain's consent, she pulled the trigger again.
Click.
He looked up and smiled. He knew exactly where she was.
She had a few more bullets in her coat pocket, but there was no time to reload. Hyperventilating, she shoved the gun in her pocket with the bullets and started running toward the other side of the room where there was a staircase to the entrance of the house.
Chuck grabbed her around the middle as she passed him.
"Really?" He seemed surprised she had been so stupid.
Kathy struggled and nearly got away four or five times. She screamed at the top of her lungs, although she knew nobody could hear her. Nobody was around for miles. And they were in a concrete cellar. No sound was traveling anywhere.
He tackled her to the ground and pinned her arms to the floor. He started tugging on her pants as he moved his nose around, sniffing every inch of Kathy's face. He bit her on the neck, breaking the skin. She screamed harder and used all her strength to try to push him off of her, but she couldn't. He was too strong.
"I'm gonna just have to get right to business with you, huh? There aren't going to be any live pictures of you for the contrast wall."
Contrast wall? Was that what he had named his horrible photo project?
Kathy determined in that instant that no picture of her was ever going to be up there, dead or alive.
She spat blood in his face, making him recoil in surprise. He loosened the pressure that his left knee had been exerting on her right leg a tiny bit, and she was able to wriggle it loose. She brought her knee up into his crotch as hard as she could, which was enough to cause him to double over and lose his grasp on her. She squirmed out from beneath him, trying to keep her pants on, as he had already unzipped and unbuttoned them.
She ran as fast as she could. Up the stairs. Through the door. She locked it behind her. What was she doing? Now she was in a killer's home. The door. Where was the door? She looked through the house as she walked, which was mostly empty except for a few very old family photos that hung on the wall. It was cold and smelled of burnt hair and cigarettes.
Finally, she saw it. The front door. Leaving was actually an option. She wasn't going to die here. She sprinted forward but fell backwards after someone behind her nearly pulled her hair out of her head. Chuck straddled her belly and slapped her across the face with an open hand.
Kathy screamed and tried to grab at him. Scratch him. Do anything that might distract him for even a millisecond so she could get away.
"I'm finished with this, Kathy," Chuck said, shaking his head. "I'm done with you following me. I'm done with the games. This is none of your business and it never should have been." He covered Kathy's mouth with his hand, and reached for what looked like a Swiss army knife attached to his belt.
Kathy started trying to move her arm to grab the gun from her pocket, but then she remembered the chamber was empty. She wriggled as hard as she could. Chuck leaned down and licked her face from chin to forehead on the left side. She could feel his tongue on her eyeball.
Kathy wasn't sure what happened next. Something startled him. A sound? Something he saw? He raised his body up part way, almost to a standing position, and without hesitation, she shoved herself forward with every muscle she could move and swung through his legs to the other side. She ran. She didn't take time to look around anymore. She just ran out the door. Into the darkness. She had no idea what was in front of her or behind her. She just ran.
She had to stop. She was coughing too hard. Her airways were completely blocked by blood or mucus or whatever was coating her sinuses. She felt invisible in the dark, but thought her constant hacking would surely lead Chuck straight to her. She had to pick up the pace, even though she could barely breathe. When she felt herself run into a bush, she crouched and hid behind it, trying to clear things up by blowing her nose into her t-shirt.
Bam.
Bam.
She knew that sound by now. What was he doing? Was he just firing to send the message that he was armed and after her? All he had earlier was a knife. Maybe he wanted her to know about his upgrade. That had to be the case, because if he was actually shooting at her, he was doing a terrible job. It was pitch black, but Kathy could still tell that neither bullet had come anywhere near her.
The rough weeds around the bush poked Kathy whenever she tried to get closer to the ground. She wanted to sink into it. Create some sort of cave or shelter where there was none. At least she had the brittle branches of the bush in front of her to protect her. But that was like defending yourself with a pillow for a shield.
Kathy pulled her revolver out of her pocket and gripped it tightly. She fished the bullets out too. There were three. Her hands were surprisingly steady, and she was able to insert the bullets smoothly into their chamber. She didn't know if she could do any better than him, but she was going to try. If she was going to shoot, she had to be sure. But how could she ever be sure in this darkness?
She peeked around the bush and her heart nearly stopped as she saw a large male figure moving down the steps of the dimly lit porch. Now he was walking straight toward her. How did he know which direction to go? Had her noisy breathing given her away?
His pace was slow at first but gradually picked up as he moved closer to her. Kathy could only see his silhouette, backlit by the porch lamp. He somehow seemed even bigger than he had before. The silhouette began to fade into the blackness as he moved closer to her and farther from the light of the house, and Kathy decided this was her only chance to aim with any accuracy. She rose to her feet behind the bush and pointed the gun in front of her. She knew bullets wouldn't ricochet back this time. She squeezed the trigger slowly, just like her uncle had shown her.
The sound of the man falling to the ground was loud. Kathy had no idea if he was dead or injured. She crouched back down behind the bush and tried to breathe quietly. She strained her ears to pick up any possible sound around her. The sound of crying. Or crawling. She waited and listened, but didn't hear anything.
After what felt like about five minutes she mustered the courage to rise to her feet again. She could see the porchlight in the distance. No figures in front of her. She took a step.
"Hello?" She felt like an idiot as the word exited her mouth. There was no response. She said it again, and still nothing. "Chuck?" she tried to address him by name, but that didn't get a response either. She walked forward. Her pace was slow and careful, and things became slightly more visible as she got closer to the house. Finally, she saw the body of a man, heaped in a pile on the ground. She took a few steps toward him, then knelt beside him as she tried to turn him over. He was as dead as a doornail. She had succeeded. She used the butane lighter she had in her pocket to shine some light on his face. She wanted to see where exactly she had hit him.
But as she brought the flame close to his head, she did not see the face of Officer Chuck.
It was her Uncle Albert with a hole right between the eyes.
***
Kathy let out a tormented scream without thinking about it. She vomited a bit of blood onto the cold dirt ground. What was happening? How was the man lying in front of her her uncle? It made no sense. There was no logical explanation.
Unless, she thought, unless the shots she heard coming from the house weren't Chuck at all, but Al shooting Chuck? Had Al seen her car parked on the property and stumbled upon his friend's murder chamber, prompting him to shoot him? Maybe Chuck was lying dead inside of the house. There was no way to know without checking to see.
The fear that he might actually be in there waiting for her to return made her hold back. She cradled her uncle's head in her hands and and caressed his hair as tears streamed from her eyes. More fluid starting pouring from her nose, and she couldn't tell if it was blood or mucus. It didn't matter. She had murdered her own uncle. Murderers shouldn't get the luxury of wondering whether something is blood or mucus.
After about five minutes, she was able to stand up. She took one step toward the house, then another, this one slower. She slowed even more as she came into the light. Each foot felt like it weighed six tons. Moving one forward after the other seemed almost impossible.
The door was halfway open. Kathy kicked it with her foot and stepped in. There, in the middle of the floor, a man laid on the carpet. He had two bullet wounds: one in the center of his chest and one in his eye, which was now a mangled ruin. She was right. Her uncle had shot him. It dawned on Kathy that that must be why Chuck had risen, startled, when he was pinning her down. He had to have seen or heard Al.
She paced the room, kicking the body in the middle of the floor a few more times just to make sure he was really dead. What had happened exactly? Kathy tried to go through the order of events in her head, hoping to make sense of it. When did Al arrive? Did he know she was there? Of course he did—he had to have seen her Pinto parked down by where they did target practice. But then what happened? Did Al come in through the cellar, like her, and discover Chuck's horrifying dungeon of torture? Did he shoot his friend after the shock wore off from learning he was the murderer?
Or did Al come through the front door? Did they quarrel? No. This wasn't over an argument. He only would have done this if he had just learned Chuck was the killer, and especially if he knew that he was trying to kill her. He must have walked the same path as Kathy that night. It was the only way to explain everything, she thought. That's why both men were dead.
"Maybe Chuck mentioned that he was after me?" Kathy felt shocked as she heard the words. She only meant to think them. But what did it matter anymore? Everyone around her was dead. She could talk as loud as she wanted.
Kathy walked back outside and over to the body of her uncle. She knelt beside him and shut his eyes. She didn't know what would happen next. Would she go to jail? Would the police think she murdered both men? Or would she be considered a hero? Would there be a big parade for her in town, like when Dorothy killed the Wicked Witch? She had no idea what happened to a person in a situation like this.
She caught herself thinking they should honor her. Award her for having the courage to take down the killer. But then she remembered—she didn't take down the killer. She took down her own uncle. She killed the guy who killed the killer. That wasn't heroic at all.
The air was cold, but she didn't want to leave her uncle's side to find comfort in the house of a murderer. But what else could she do? She couldn't just lie in the cold with a dead body all night—she'd die. Or at least get sick. She tried to pull her uncle by the arms, thinking it might feel safer if his body were in the house with her. She wasn't strong enough. He wouldn't budge. She finally set his arms by his sides and decided to go in alone.
If she wanted answers this was her chance. If she went back into the cellar she could take her time and look at every photograph. See exactly what happened to each girl. She began walking toward the cellar door but stopped. She didn't need all the evil in his head to transfer over to hers. Why did she need or even want to know? Hadn't she seen enough?
Walking back into the room with Chuck's body, she wished she had a paper bag to breathe into. Her heart raced and her mind spun. She felt a lump in her throat but no more tears would come. What would her father do? What would he say? She had murdered his baby brother. So many things would be right now that the killer was dead, but at the same time nothing would ever be right again. She had destroyed her own family.
She walked into Chuck's kitchen and picked up the avocado green telephone receiver. She dialed the number for the police.
***
Kathy sat in a cold room in the downtown police station and told Officer Dave and Officer Daniels about what had happened. She went through every step she had taken, making sure they understood she genuinely thought she was shooting the killer in the dark of night. She tried to explain what she figured must have happened with Al. She told them the figure she saw over near her car smoking a cigarette had to have been Al, even though in her mind it seemed like the killer was moving around her at light speed. Chuck had to be in his house at that point. That was what had startled her out of running away in the beginning.
She told the officers about what she saw in the cellar. All the things they had probably heard already from other cops who were out searching the crime scene. She told them that Chuck tackled and chased her and tried to rip off her clothes. She told them everything she could remember.
"What made you want to turn back in the beginning?"
"Well, when I walked up to the house I could see the killer's car parked beside it."
"How did you know that was the killer's car?"
"I've been following him."
"What? Why would you do that? Why didn't you just leave it to us? We're professionals," Officer Daniels argued.
"You weren't ever going to get him. He was one of you. I had to take justice into my own hands."
"So you went there planning to kill him?"
"Yes. But again, I didn't. Al did. He's the hero."
Kathy could barely look at her family as she emerged from the interrogation room. Her father's face was red and wet. Her mother looked mortified. Brenda had a more severe version of the same look she always got on her face when something went wrong: annoyed, distant, puzzled. She shook her head in little trembly movements from time to time, as though she were trying to work out a difficult equation and not getting anywhere. Kathy caught a glimpse of her own face in a nearby mirror and was shocked by her hideousness. Her face was smeared with blood. Both eyes were black. The left lens of her glasses had a large crack from top to bottom. Dried blood flaked off the bite mark on her neck.
Mary pulled Kathy into her embrace as she neared them. Mother and daughter buried their faces into each other's shoulders and wept. Ken rubbed her back and Brenda rested her head on her mother's shoulder.
"Let's take you to the hospital and make sure you're okay," her mother insisted.
Kathy knew what she meant. She didn't want to get an infection from the bite on her neck. But still, there was no way for the people at the hospital to tell whether she was okay. She was certain she'd never be okay again. She'd murdered. She was a murderer. She'd killed her own flesh and blood.
***
The police conducted a few more interviews, issued a strong recommendation that Kathy get psychological counseling, and then let the matter rest. There was initial concern about the possibility of a manslaughter charge, but apparently no one wanted to prosecute a sixteen-year-old girl who had accidentally discharged a gun in the wrong direction while fleeing the psychopathic killer cop who had just assaulted her. Nor did they press charges for illegal possession of a firearm. The gun was sequestered in the police evidence room, tucked in a drawer from which no one had any interest in ever seeing it removed.
Kathy's parents pulled her from school for the rest of the year. She was fairly heavily sedated for the first few weeks of 1974, and she found it hard to keep track of the passage of time. Some days she felt like it had been months since the incident, and other days it was as though it had just happened. Ken, shell-shocked, took a month's leave of absence from work himself. Mary doted over him, catering to his every need. She fixed him meals, watched movies with him, pretended to share his interest in showtunes. Ken received her ministrations in a daze, not quite sure how to respond. Brenda became similarly attentive to Kathy, making sure she was distracting herself with games, books, music, whatever was available.
Andrea and Kevin dropped by after a few weeks. Andrea brought Kathy a big stuffed dog with a satin ribbon around its neck. Kevin tried to amuse her with gossip, most of which she could barely follow through the fog of her medication. Andrea seemed to be making an attempt to patch things up, but Kathy sensed it was only out of pity. Their interactions felt empty. Andrea was still making sure to keep a distance between Kathy and herself—at least six feet. Kathy couldn't tell if she was afraid of catching her perversion, or of being in the presence of a murderer. She guessed she could take her pick. Kathy fell asleep before her friends were able to say goodbye.
***
Kathy and Brenda sat on Kathy's bed flipping through magazines. Their conversation had been light: comments on fashions and bands and funny things that had happened in Brenda's classes. With no preamble, Kathy set down her magazine and looked at Brenda.
"Al saved my life. He gave his life for me."
Brenda didn't say anything. She just reached out and put a hand on Kathy's shoulder.
"But really, he didn't give it," Kathy continued. "I took it." Her tone was matter-of-fact, like she was announcing that she was going to buy a new pair of shoes.
"Kathy."
"I wanted to be a hero. Instead, I shot one. If I hadn't made the killings into my personal vendetta, Al would still be alive. Chuck Pooley was right when he said the whole thing was none of my business."
"Jesus, Kathy, don't say that. He wasn't right at all. He was a monster. He killed so many people."
"Al warned me not to get a gun. And when I got one anyway and owed money for it, I got the money from him. I got Al to pay for the gun that I killed him with."
"You are a hero, Kathy. You have to know that. If you hadn't gone out there, Al wouldn't have found out Chuck was the murderer. He'd probably still be putting girls under the bridge."
Kathy looked at her with her eyes open wide.
"You cared more about those girls than any of those cops did," continued Brenda. "You figured it out. You. When it comes down to it, the killer is dead because of you."
Kathy didn't say anything. She went back to turning the pages of her magazine.
***
Kathy's therapist Dr. Shaughnessy was a lean woman in her thirties with long brown hair and huge glasses who wore very wide bell bottoms and a patchwork tunic. Her office was thick with ferns. A terrarium made out of a gigantic glass bottle took up one whole corner. She had a chrome peace sign on a chain around her neck and a poster on her wall that said
War Is
Not Healthy
for Children
and Other
Living Things
After listening to Kathy speak for a half hour or so, she wrote in her pad intently, glancing up and smiling every few seconds.
The whole time, Kathy was thinking there was no way this woman could possibly understand what she was going through. Nobody could. Well, other girls who had murdered their uncles might, but Kathy didn't know any of them.
Dr. Shaughnessy talked about the "process of self-forgiveness" and it was hard for Kathy not to laugh in her face. Why did she, of all people, deserve forgiveness? She thought she deserved to be in prison, but the state wouldn't pursue the charges. She would sometimes almost shout at the doctor, insisting on taking the moral high ground. She was a murderer. She went there with the intention of committing murder, and she did.
She deserved nothing. Certainly not forgiveness.
***
Ken and Mary sat at the dinner table, drinking coffee and sorting through the Sunday paper. Funny Girl was playing on the stereo, and Mary was singing along at a moderate volume to "Don't Rain on My Parade" while clipping supermarket coupons. Ken smiled as he inspected a large ad from the Franklin Mint on the back page of Parade. He tossed it aside with a little shake of his head.
Kathy laid on the sofa, half-watching a Star Trek rerun with the sound off. An evil doppelganger of Captain Kirk was holding a little dog with a horn on its head. The dog had long blond hair that matched the shiny gold stripes on evil Kirk's collar.
Brenda came strutting down the stairs modeling the short orange jumper she had just finished sewing herself from a McCall's pattern. Kathy lifted herself up to survey it. She applauded and told her that it looked terrific and that she should get some go-go boots to go with it.
The doorbell rang. Ken got up to answer it. From the couch, just out of view of the entryway, Kathy heard her father ask someone if he could help them, and a woman's voice replied, saying her name was Ruth Murray. She hoped she wasn't intruding, but she wondered if she could speak to Kathleen Aukerman.
"What is this regarding?"
"My daughter is Karen Rose Murray. She was killed last year with those other girls." The words came out of her like shards of glass from a cut.
"Oh. Oh, I'm so sorry." He couldn't find anything to say next.
Kathy lay stone-still, her heart beginning to race.
"Is Kathleen your daughter?"
"Yes, yes she is."
"I talked to some people who told me things about what happened. They said that she was the one who figured out the fellow who done it, and that she went to where he did all the things he done to them." Her voice was cracking.
Ken responded in a tone that held equal measures of sympathy and suspicion. "Who spoke to you about this?"
"I heard it. Maybe it's not true. I don't mean to cause any trouble. I just wondered, if it was true, if she seen things, if I could ask her—if she knew about what happened to my Karen. If she seen things at his place like they said."
Kathy was petrified where she laid. She clutched at the throw pillow under her head.
"Mrs. Murray, I am so deeply sorry for your loss. I am. But our daughter is in a fragile state right now. It would be too upsetting for her to revisit these... to  go into...." He had no way of talking to this woman about what Kathy shouldn't go into.
"I understand. I apologize. I don't want to cause trouble," she said again. "I just had to know if my Karen—" Her voice gave out entirely to pathetic sobs.
Kathy felt her mind being dragged back to Chuck Pooley's cellar. She hadn't had time to focus on the pictures of Karen Rose Murray. Other than Diane Vergara and Nancy Dunn, the photos had been an undifferentiated blur of atrocity. A few details stood out, but they were interchangeable from victim to victim: modeling shots, girls crouching naked, empty eye sockets. There was no way she could reconstruct which was which. And of course the eyeballs in the jars were all the same: eyeballs in jars. The ones that went sliding on the floor when her bullet hit the jar could have been Karen's, or anyone's. And how would she ever tell the girl's mother a thing like that? How could she possibly answer any of the questions she was asking?
She listened to her father trying to explain to the woman why he couldn't help her, why he had to ask her to leave, even though they were all so very sorry. He was on the verge of tears himself, Kathy could tell.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she kept saying back to him. "I'll go. Please just tell your daughter that Christ our savior has a special place for her in heaven. Tell her thank you for finding that man."
Kathy went to the front window and peered to the side. The woman wore shapeless work clothes and her short hair was flecked with grey. She was in her fifties or sixties, or possibly her forties. It was hard to tell the natural aging process from the ravages of poverty and hard labor. Kathy drew a deep breath and ran back through the living room to the entryway. She came up behind her father and addressed the woman.
"I'm Kathy Aukerman, Mrs. Murray."
Ken reached out to grab her shoulders. "Kathy. Maybe you shouldn't—"
"It's all right, Dad." She stepped in front of him. He hung back but remained in the entryway.
"God bless you, Miss," said the woman. She held out her hands for Kathy to take them in hers.
"I mean, I don't have a lot of information. I didn't see much. It was dark and most of the time I was just trying to get away from... him." She couldn't bring herself to hold the woman's hands. Ruth Murray was gaunt, skeletal. Her eyes were sunken and dark. Kathy felt guilty for being afraid of this grieving lady.
"I heard there was pictures. That he put up pictures on the wall of the girls he killed, showing what he done to them."
"Yes, but I only saw them for a second," Kathy lied. She had seen all too clearly what he had done to Diane and Nancy. She felt a twinge of guilt in her stomach. "I had the chance," she took a deep breath, "I had the chance while I was sitting there waiting for the police. I could have gone back to the cellar and looked at everything, but I didn't. I couldn't." Kathy started sobbing and the woman rubbed her shoulder lightly. "I just couldn't have those things in my mind. I'm sorry." Kathy collapsed into a crouching position and sobbed harder. "I'm so, so sorry."
Behind the woman, a pickup truck was parked at the curb. A man was sitting behind the wheel, but Kathy couldn't see him clearly.
"Is that Karen's father?" Kathy asked, cradling her face in her hands and resting her elbows on her knees.
"He didn't want to come," said the woman. "He drove me because I said I had to know. He said there was no point in knowing, but—she was our daughter." She clasped her hands together and folded them in front of her breastbone, like she was praying.
Kathy just nodded. She didn't know what to say. She felt a hand on her shoulder pulling her up, and then her mother was in front of her addressing the woman.
"Why?" Mary practically wailed at her. "Why would you want to know these things? What possible good can it do? And what good does it do to bring it to our house, to make my daughter have to talk about it? I have to ask you to leave."
"Ward was right. We shouldn't ought to have come. I'm sorry, Ma'am. I'm sorry, Miss. God bless your family." And she turned and walked to the truck and got in.
Mrs. Murray's husband turned the key and the beat-up old truck began to move away from the curb. It was so old it was no particular color, just a dull blend of steel and rust and washed-out paint flecks. Kathy was seized by an urge to call out to them, to go away with them in their gloomy coach and live in their world of unfixable sadness that matched hers.
Mary led Kathy back into the house, with its hues of goldenrod and buttercup and bright white. Barbra Streisand was singing "Who Are You Now?" and the smell of oven-warm pecan muffins wafted from the kitchen. Kathy felt worse than ever.
***
Kathy lost all interest in the Pinto for the first few months after the incident, but as time passed, there were invariably more and more reasons she needed to use it. She needed things from the store, she had to get to her appointments, she just wanted to get out of the house. Late in spring, when the weather was just starting to get hot, she drove to Dunlop's in McHenry Village to buy some shorts and sneakers for summer, and when she was done shopping she was about to go home, but instead she decided to turn in the other direction.
She headed downtown, went all the way across the tracks, got on Maze Boulevard heading west, and kept on going until she reached Paradise Road on the farthest fringes of the outskirts of town.
This, she remembered, was where the hot-rodders in the days of American Graffiti had done their drag racing: a long strip of nothing in the middle of more nothing. It hadn't been on her circuit when she was pursuing the Mercury. She had never had any reason to come out here. The smell of hay and wet grass blew in through the open windows of the Pinto. It was mid-afternoon, and the air was bright and clear, and shape-shifting clouds of blackbirds swarmed overhead. There was no one else in sight for miles.
She stepped on the gas and gradually pushed the Pinto to its limit. She didn't even bother to check how fast she was going; she just soared down the road letting the pastures and marshy fields rush past her, feeling the power of the little Runabout. It felt like she could keep driving forever, like her speed would eventually push her through a hole in the sky at the horizon line. Past the tethers of gravity. Beyond the illusory straightness of the road, which was bound to the curvature of the earth, and onto a truly straight path through space, an infinite line that would not just double back on itself, but carry her to a truer limit, one that escaped limitation or definition.
The Raspberries 8-track still sat in the glove compartment, but she hadn't played it, or the 45 in her room, since December. There had been no cards, letters, or phone calls from Annette. For all Kathy knew, she could be in Nova Scotia or Buenos Aires.
Now, all of a sudden, Kathy wanted to hear "Let's Pretend" again. Recklessly, she reached over to the glove, fished the tape out, and popped it in the player. The Pinto weaved a little, but kept on its rocketlike course.
The song didn't make her sad, or angry. It was just pure sound, an enhancement of the velocity that she imagined was carrying her to the end of the vanishing point. Every time it broke into the chorus, the harmonies seemed like wings that promised to lift her into flight.
***
At first it was just a distant speck, and then, rapidly, it grew into a large dark shape in the road in front of her.
She had to screech the brakes in order to slow down enough to swerve around it. She pulled over and backed up slowly.
It was a sheep. A big black sheep, lying in a pool of blood that had seeped from its fractured skull. It had been hit and the driver hadn't stopped to pull it off the road.
Kathy got out of the Pinto. She walked over to the sheep. She kicked it gently a couple of times. It was very dead, in the early stages of stiffness.
She looked around. The only sign of humanity in sight was a farmhouse up ahead on the right. If it were any farther away, she wouldn't be able to tell it was a farmhouse. Did the sheep come from that farm?
She leaned down, grabbed the sheep by its hind legs, and started to drag it. It was hard to move, but she was able to haul it away from the middle of the road, leaving a streak of blood behind it. She pulled it over to the shoulder, meaning to leave it there.
But it wasn't right somehow. A lonely ditch so far from everything. It would start to rot before anyone ever came across it. It might stay there forever, until it was a skeleton. Someone had to find it. Someone who knew it.
She bent over once more to take its woolly ankles in her hands. She dragged it toward the Pinto. She looked at the hatchback, then looked at the sheep. It was the biggest sheep she had ever seen. It didn't seem possible that it would  fit it in there behind the back seats, and even if it did, blood would get all over everything. The car would be ruined. She didn't think she could lift it in anyway.
Kathy started dragging again, shuffling backwards. She had to stop several times before she figured out a way to hold the feet over her shoulder and swing her body around so she could walk forward, lugging the body behind her.
She aimed herself at the tiny farmhouse in the distance, and began trudging slowly toward it. The weight of the dead beast was almost unbearable, but she kept moving, little by little, the trail of blood behind her slowly growing longer and longer, like a red ribbon on the narrow stretch of sun-baked tar.
***
Epilogue: 2019
You can ask anybody who lived in Modesto in the early seventies, they'll tell you the story. It was complete and utter bedlam. The city was turned upside down by the murders committed by the now famed "Lion Bridge Killer," Charles Elliot Pooley, born on December 25th, 1935. His mother died in childbirth, leaving him in the care of his father, who was relatively financially secure thanks to the gas station he owned and operated. The two lived in a one-room shack affixed to the side of the station until Charles was twelve and they could afford to move to one of the many new suburban tract housing developments after the war. His father remarried just before they moved, and from all accounts, Charles had a tumultuous relationship with his stepmother. There were reports of her abusing him both physically and sexually. In high school he developed interests in both photography and law enforcement, which led him to his eventual career: Modesto City police officer and crime scene photographer. His expertise in methodological crime scene photography took him all over the Central Valley and even sometimes into the Bay Area to give local departments lessons on the best practices in the field. It was on one of these trips that he committed his first murder: Mary Louise Preacher in the fall of 1972.
He killed teenage girls once a month or so, with what experts have called a "cooling-off" period in between. He killed at least nine girls all together, from as far south as Fresno to as far north as Sacramento. Not one of them had reached their twentieth birthday. In fact, Peggy Sue Walton had just turned thirteen.
All the girls were found naked and posed, their eyes removed. Every Modesto victim was found beneath the Seventh Street Bridge, earning their murderer the moniker "the Lion Bridge Killer," because of the stone lions that greet drivers at each end of the bridge.
Just before New Year's Eve in 1973, sixteen-year-old Kathleen Aukerman was attacked by Pooley when she stumbled upon his property and discovered the cellar where he had captured and slain his victims. She fought like hell and tried to shoot him several times, but missed. Her uncle Albert Aukerman, who happened to be an old high school friend of Pooley, also ventured onto the property that night. He was able to save his niece's life and bring down the murderer. That night, he succeeded in bringing to an end all the senseless killing of young women that had plagued the valley for over a year. Tragically, his own niece shot him by mistake just minutes afterward.
This is the story you would have heard if you talked to a Modestan at any time in the first two decades after the incident. Then, in 1994, a reexamination of evidence revealed that seven of the victims had semen from two different men present on their persons when they were found. Three of the girls had three different profiles present.
Everyone was in shock. We thought he had been taken down that night twenty years before, but it turned out that there were actually three Lion Bridge Killers. We only stopped one.
Law enforcement gathered swabs from Pooley's estranged daughter to confirm that his DNA was actually present, and it was. At every single crime scene. But detectives had no idea where to turn to find the sources of the other profiles. Even as the years went by and CODIS (the FBI's Combined DNA Index System) expanded its breadth, there were still no hits. Nothing. Either of the unidentified men could be walking next to me on the street, at any time, and might have been for years. Those of us who remembered the terror of the seventies felt it once again. Scarier still, one of the profiles was tied to additional rapes around California that occured long after the death of Charles Pooley. We were terrified.
That was until January, when I was approached by detectives in Modesto asking to swab my cheek. I let them, of course. I had nothing to hide. They wouldn't tell me what it was about, but I tend to cooperate with law enforcement when it comes to things like this.
But then a few weeks later they told me that my DNA brought up a hit in their system. That my paternal uncle's semen was present at seven of the nine crime scenes.
All her life, Kathy drowned in guilt. We tried to tell her she was a hero, but she wouldn't hear it. She was always insisting that she ruined the family. That Al was the true hero.
Kathy passed away last year at the age of sixty-one after battling metastatic breast cancer that she had first been diagnosed with in the nineties. My sister died without ever knowing that she really was the hero. That our uncle was one of the murderers. That she had taken down a serial killer.
***
Law enforcement had their theories about the third person involved, but it was a hit through GEDmatch, an online genomics and genealogy database, that led them to the culprit. Retired police officer David Howard was taken into custody in May. His semen was not only present at two of the Lion Bridge killings, but at the sites of five rapes and two additional murders that happened between 1979 and 1986. Law enforcement used familial DNA to trace the family line back to Howard after a granddaughter had her DNA tested for ancestry. Howard has yet to enter a plea, and many fear that he'll die in county jail before he ever sees trial. The public has urged the state to move quickly with the case, but public defense attorneys are burdened by thousands of pages of discovery. Officials have stated that we may not get to trial for four years, when Howard will be eighty-eight years old.
***
My uncle, Chuck Pooley, and David Howard had all been friends since high school. I remember them and other policemen hanging out at my uncle's apartment when I was a child. It's baffling to me to imagine the conversations these three must have had before they started their killing spree. How do you bring up your violent desires to rape and torture teenage girls to your friends? Would they just talk about it casually, the way my friends and I talk about our favorite television shows? I don't know how it all started and I most likely never will. No one will. Howard hasn't said a word, and I'm pretty sure he'll keep his trap shut until he's in the ground.
After high school, all three men served overseas. They were slightly too young to fight in Korea, but they all served at military bases in Asia during the mid-fifties. Investigators know that Pooley and my uncle served in the same unit. People have speculated about the possibility that their crime spree might have started there, but again, the great likelihood is that anyone who could possibly be a witness is now deceased, and we'll never know what happened. We do know, however, that Howard could not have been involved with anything the two of them might have done over there. He served at a different base. It's unknown if he committed any crimes on his own during his enlisted years.
When the three friends returned to the states, they all wanted to join the Modesto police force. Unfortunately for my uncle, a drug dealing charge he incurred soon after returning home meant that his dreams were over. Howard and Pooley served and protected while Al sold stereos.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must say I'm not altogether surprised by the results of the DNA testing. I loved my uncle, but there was always something off with him. The summer before my senior year in high school, he escorted me and a bunch of my friends on a vacation trip to Lake Tahoe, where he committed statutory rape on one of my friends. We didn't talk about it that way back then, of course. He was just a creepy uncle. Not a predator. Little did we know.
After my uncle died we had to clean out his apartment. He had an enormous collection of pictures, in part because his best friend the photographer was constantly taking them. There was one scrapbook entirely devoted to me and my sister, and another filled with articles about each murder victim. In the scrapbook of me and Kathy, I saw every photo ever taken of me. He had them all. He had some I didn't even remember being taken. I don't know what he did with those scrapbooks while he was alive, but thinking about it now is like looking under a rock. It makes my skin crawl and turns my stomach.
Kathy discovered my uncle's victim scrapbook months before he shot Pooley. He convinced her that it was part of his own unlicensed private investigation into the murders. She followed his lead and created her own scrapbook with articles about the murder victims. She kept it her entire life. It's mine now, and I don't know what to do with it. To let go of it would be to let go of a memory, but that memory was of my sister at her sickest. At her most obsessive.
In fact, Kathy and I both experienced the onset of mental illness during the summer of 1973. In a manic episode, I broke up with my boyfriend and hitched to the Bay Area, worrying the entire City of Modesto. My family nearly fell to pieces. It was the stupidest, most reckless thing I'd ever done, but I didn't understand how to deal with my illness yet.
Kathy wasn't manic depressive like me. She was obsessive compulsive. She had paranoid personality disorder, and she struggled with those demons until the day she died. She couldn't let go of that journal of dead girls, and now, neither can I. I stare at the pictures in it from time to time, trying to imagine what Diane Vergara or Kathy Baker would have been like as adults.
Some of the girls in my sister's journal were not actually victims of the Lion Bridge Killer, or rather, Killers. For example, she had an article in there about Donna Johnston, who we now know was killed by another serial killer in the area, John David Peirce. Anne Marie Stewart and Colette Smith were never found. Nobody knows what happened to them. And Susan Erickson was killed by her own fiancé.
They called my sister paranoid, but how could you not be paranoid when you were so acutely aware of how many girls in your area were going missing and being murdered? Kathy had a strong fear of men her whole life. It was difficult for her to wrap her mind around the idea that some men out there weren't fantasizing about hurting women. She constantly suspected that the worst possible thoughts were going through the minds of men with whom she interacted—even ones she had known for years.
But again, why should she have thought any differently, especially considering what she went through that cold night at the end of 1973? There were and are bad men out there. Lots of them. Not just the ones she was chasing either, but men she didn't even know about.
But why were there so many serial killers in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s? I've seen arguments that the streak of terror can be attributed to lead poisoning: that many people born before the advent of unleaded gasoline were poisoned to the point of becoming homicidally violent. This theory would certainly conform with the fact that Charles Pooley spent most of his childhood ten feet from a leaded gasoline pump.
It's also possible that a certain genetic predisposition, when aggravated by abuse, can play a role in the making of a serial killer. We know that Pooley was abused during several periods of his life. There are accounts of his stepmother forcing him to clean the floor in the nude during puberty, insisting that any item of clothing he wore would only resoil the floor. He would spend hours scrubbing those floors, cleaning spots he knew were already clean simply because his stepmother demanded it.
I can't say anything about Howard's childhood, but in regard to my uncle, my paternal grandparents were some of the kindest, most nurturing people I ever knew in my life. My father never spoke of any unpleasantness in the home growing up, and unfortunately, it's too late to ask him now. All I know is that both my dad and my uncle loved them. To my knowledge, there was never the slightest intimation of abuse. I don't even think they were spanked. Based on the available evidence, Albert Aukerman had an idyllic mid-century American childhood.
But family aren't the only people who exert an influence on your life. For many teenagers, what their peer group thinks and does is far more important than what's going on with their parents. And who was my uncle hanging around? Chuck Pooley. It's difficult for me not to wonder what their relationship must have been like. What kinds of things Pooley must have shown my uncle. What ideas he put in his head.
At least that's how I imagine it happening. Maybe my uncle put the bad ideas in Pooley's head. I'll never know. Men dead for forty-five years keep secrets extraordinarily well.
Another major question pertaining to this case is what these three men were up to in the 1960s. If Pooley indeed started killing in Asia, why would he wait until 1972 to start killing again once he got back to the states? What filled his head in the meantime? Schoolwork? What would he and my uncle do for fun back then? I don't have any answers.
I can't say that I saw my uncle demonstrate any notable difference in behavior after the Lion Bridge murders started. He was the same as always—hazing his big brother like a schoolboy and showering my sister and me with treats and gifts. My father spent every Tuesday night with him, and he never suspected a thing. The man was participating in an all-out killing spree and wore none of it on his face. He didn't carry it with him. He was a sociopath. He didn't care about the women he was hurting. It seemed to the rest of my family and me like he truly cared about us. On more than one occasion he performed actions that suggested he would risk his own well being to protect us. But sociopaths know how to lie to make people around them think they have normal emotions when they really don't. We never suspected a thing. Even after Kathy shot him.
My sister obsessed over one question all her life: why do men want to hurt women? Why do they fetishize the young and helpless? We used to have long conversations about rape culture and about how many young men enter puberty already associating sex with violence. About how it will be impossible to pull ourselves out of the hole into which we've dug ourselves if we continue to let our children be indoctrinated by the sickest parts of a culture that has devalued, disrespected, and murdered women since its inception.
Kathy started working for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children shortly after it was founded in the mid-eighties. She did great work there. She brought abducted children home, helped bring down pedophiles, and organized searches for young people who had gone missing. It was the same thing she started doing in 1973, but she was finally organized and salaried. Her career there lasted until her retirement in 2011.
My sister and her long-time partner Sharon were finally wed in 2013, after spending several decades together. I asked Sharon if she wanted to comment for this article, and she asked me to make sure the world knows that my sister was a hero. I hope I've accomplished that here. She devoted her life to making sure young women were safe. I don't think anyone would argue with me about this, except for Kathy herself.
If Kathy could send a message to the world, I know that message would be to teach your children to respect and acknowledge other persons as living beings with value. She believed that when people respect each other, nobody has to worry about being in danger. If people respected each other, young women would be able to walk down any street all alone and still feel, and actually be, safe.