Black Out_A Novel

27

“He was gone most of the time,” Gray said of his father. “And when he was home, he was this brooding presence. Sullen, staring at the television or angry at my mother for something she’d bought or had done to the house while he was gone. I hovered around him, wanting and fearing his attention. Occasionally I’d get these quick pats on the back or we’d try to play catch or build a tree house, something that fathers and sons might do together. But it was never quite right. We always walked away feeling like we’d failed at something indefinable. We just couldn’t connect, not really. Not ever.”

He used to spend time talking to me like this, even when he thought I might not be able to hear him or that I didn’t care. He’d sit in my room at the psychiatric hospital in New Jersey where he’d admitted me as Annie Fowler and talk. I’d stare off into space, not responding. I wasn’t exactly catatonic, but I’d sort of lost my will to exist. I didn’t speak, barely ate, just stared at the window in my room watching the leaves fall from the trees, the clouds drift past. I didn’t know why he’d talk to me, a stranger, like this. What does he want from me? Why doesn’t he just leave me here?

“My mother was just so damned sad, all the time. She was clinically depressed, I realize now. But then, she was unsupported, didn’t even know she needed treatment. She never recovered from the loss of her daughter, my sister who I never knew. I suppose my father never recovered, either. Maybe that’s what happens to you when you’re born to parents who’ve lost a child. You just never fit somehow.”

He’d talk, sometimes for hours, as though he’d been holding it in all his life, waiting for some silence where he could safely release the words. Maybe, in a way, I was his first safe place, someone in no position to judge him for his sins and loss of faith.

“After high school I joined the navy. Everyone was pleased, proud. But I just wanted to get away from them. It seemed like the right thing to do. It was what my father did. I had no idea what I was doing, not really. Maybe I’m more like my mother than my father. I wasn’t cut out for the things that lay ahead.”

I found myself listening even though, during that time, I hated him. He was six feet of muscles and hard places, scars and dark looks. I found him ugly, too harsh around the eyes and mouth. He smelled strongly of Ivory soap and sometimes alcohol. I couldn’t decide whether he was the person who’d rescued me or destroyed me. He’d killed Marlowe, the first person I’d ever loved. He’d saved me from a killer, brought me to this hospital, and stayed with me, came every day with books and magazines, candy and little gifts that sat in an untouched pile in the closet by the bathroom.

He told me how a few years after the First Gulf War he was honorably discharged from the Navy SEALs. He left sick with rage and disillusionment with the military and the government. He was angry at his father for pushing him into a career he was never sure he wanted, angry at himself for not knowing any other way to live. He drifted from New York to Florida, drinking too much, doing some odd private-investigator work here and there.

“I’d done and seen some truly heinous things,” he told me. “They didn’t seem to have any meaning or purpose. Nothing good ever came from the bad, not that I could see. It was making me sick back then. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, how long I could carry all the baggage I had.”

I cooperated with my admittance to the hospital and with my name change because I knew I didn’t have any choice. It was that or prison. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go; I knew that neither of my parents would help me. But more than that, I was eager to be rid of Ophelia and the things she’d done—what I could remember, anyway. Gray and I were alike in that respect, coming to terms with past deeds that seemed right at the time but under the glare of reality revealed themselves as dead wrong.

“When I found you, I thought maybe you were the one who makes all the wrong things right,” he said one night about a month after I’d been in the hospital. “I thought, if I can do right by her, maybe it gives meaning to everything else.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said, finally answering him. I didn’t want to be his penance. I didn’t want to be the one who made things right for him. “That’s not the way life works. There’s no balance sheet.”

“No?” he said, sitting up in the chair where he’d been slouching. “Then how do we move on from our mistakes?”

“We don’t get to move on,” I said, resting my eyes on him for the first time.

He leaned his head back and gave a mirthless laugh. “So we just languish in regret until we die?”

“Maybe that’s what we deserve,” I said, turning away from him again.

He let a beat pass. Then, “I hope you’re wrong.”


Tonight I stay far enough away from Gray’s car that he can’t see me but close enough not to lose him. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Someone like Gray instinctively knows when he’s being tailed. Maybe that’s because he’s usually doing the tailing. Takes one to know one. And, of course, if he sees my car in the rearview mirror, he’ll know right away that it’s me. I’m not sure how I’ll explain myself, since I have no idea what I’m doing.

He’s moving fast, crossing the causeway and pulling on to the highway. He’s not stopping at the police station. He’s headed into the city, which seems odd. I never thought to ask him how he knows where Harrison lives. He has his methods.


“I was in a bar in the East Village once, a place called Downtown Beirut. You know it?” Gray asked me one night at the hospital. Our relationship had improved by this time, but I didn’t answer. I almost never did. I don’t think he minded. He knew I was listening.

“A real dump, the biggest dive you ever saw—what a shithole. I used to drink there a lot. Just find a corner and pound them back until I could barely get myself home to my apartment on First Avenue. It wasn’t every night that I’d get drunk like this, only when I couldn’t sleep, when it was all too much with me. My mother passed after I was discharged, a stroke. I blamed my dad. I blamed him for almost everything. Sometimes my anger felt like a physical pain in my chest. You ever felt like that?”

Yes, I’d felt like that, for most of my life, in fact. But I didn’t say so. That night he’d brought flowers—daisies, if I remember correctly—and some doughnuts in a box. They both sat untouched on the table beside me.

“Anyway, I was sitting there one night, well on my way to oblivion, when an old wreck of a guy, an aging biker covered with tats and a mess of long gray hair, pulled up a chair.”

I heard him shift in his chair, crack his neck.

“I told him I wasn’t looking for company. He told me he wasn’t looking for company, either. He was looking for his daughter. A friend we had in common told him I could help.”

I turned to look at Gray. He was sitting in the same chair he’d been sitting in most nights for a month. His feet were up on the windowsill, his head back as if he were talking to the ceiling. He wore jeans and a black sweater, army-issue boots. His jacket, a beat-up old denim thing, was on the foot of my bed. He had a big scar on his neck; his hands were square and looked as hard as boulders.

I think I saw him for the first time that night. Outside my window it was snowing, fat flakes glittering under the streetlamps, tapping at the window like cold fingers. I saw the strong line of his jaw, his full red lips, the snaking muscles of his shoulders and arms. He took his eyes from the ceiling and fixed me in their cool gray stare. I felt a little shock at their lightness; there was something spooky about his gaze.

He knew he had my attention and kept talking. “The old guy said, ‘I’ve failed this girl in every way a father can fail his daughter. I left her for the wolves, you know. If I fail her now, nothing else in my life means much. I got some money if you got some time and need the work. My buddy said you have a talent for finding people who don’t want to be found.’”

“My father,” I said, incredulous. Gray nodded.

“I had the time and I needed the work,” he went on. “He asked me to fix Marlowe Geary and take care of you, whatever that meant.”

“He paid you?”

“At first, but after a while we became friends. It became more than a job to me.”

“I know. You were looking to atone for your sins.”

He shrugged. “That was part of it. Yes.”


I see Gray pull off the highway before the downtown exits and into the slums that surround the city. I follow him through a neighborhood where the streetlamps are shot out and bulky forms hover in doorways and huddle on corners. Houses are dark, but the blue light of television screens flickers in windows. I stay back far, about one turn behind, following more on instinct sometimes than on being able to see his car. Where is he going? I know for sure Harrison doesn’t live here.

The residential neighborhood yields to an industrial area, warehouses with gates drawn, the highway up above us now. I can see he’s headed to the underpass. I stop my car and watch through the overgrowth of an empty lot as he, too, comes to a stop. We both sit and wait.

My cell phone rings then. I can see from the caller ID that it’s Detective Harrison. I watch the display blinking on the screen and wonder why he’d be calling me if he were meeting Gray. I don’t answer. After a minute I hear the beep that tells me he’s left a message. Keeping my eyes on Gray’s car, which is still idle, hidden partially in the dark, I access my messages.

“More food for thought,” Harrison says. “How much do you really know about your husband?”

As I sit in the dark and watch a white unmarked van pull up beside Gray’s car, I think, Good question.


I was in that hospital for over two months before it was decided, by some criteria to which I was not privy, that I could leave. If the doctors who helped me knew who I really was or had any idea that I was wanted in three states, no one ever let on. It wasn’t until much later that I learned I was there by an arrangement Drew had made. A contact of his owned the private hospital.

On the afternoon that Gray took me out of there, I still couldn’t remember much of what happened to me. The night Marlowe and I left the ranch was a dark blur, a series of disjointed images. I vaguely remembered going to my father for help. Everything else that came after was a black hole that pulled me apart, molecule by molecule, if I spent too long trying to think about it. The doctors diagnosed me as having experienced a fugue state, for lack of anything better to call it, brought on by the prolonged trauma of my terrible childhood and the event of my stepfather’s murder. They told me that I left myself behind that night when I got into that black sedan with Marlowe, that Ophelia ceased to exist and a new girl took her place.

So who am I now? I remember wondering as Gray shouldered the bag filled with the things he bought for me and we walked through the automatic doors into the cold parking lot. Am I Annie Fowler or Ophelia March or someone else entirely? Two and a half years of my life were gone.

I got into the black Suburban and wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. I was shivering, from cold, from fear. On the day I left Frank Geary’s horse ranch, I was seventeen, nearly eighteen. On the day I left the hospital with Gray, my twenty-first birthday was just three months away.

Gray turned on the heat, and we sat for a while in the car. I was scared. I didn’t know who I was or what I was going to do with myself now. But I stayed quiet. I couldn’t afford to show any weakness.

“I know a woman, a friend of my father’s,” he said after a few minutes. “I’m going to take you to her, and she’s going to help you pull your life together, okay?”

“Where?”

“Florida.”

He was staring straight ahead, not looking at me. I watched a muscle work in his jaw. My body stiffened. I thought he was done with me. He’d saved me, and now he didn’t need me to feel better about himself. At some point during our visits, I’d stopped hating him, started seeing him for what he was, the first good man I’d ever known. And now I thought I was losing him.

A few weeks earlier, Gray gave me a letter my father had written. It was to be our last communication for a long time. Ophelia was dead; there would be no phone calls or visits—in other words, not very different from when Ophelia lived. My father wrote how Gray had tracked me and Marlowe for two years, gave over his whole life to looking for me.

“There’s a lot of things about that time he’ll need to tell you,” my father wrote. “But I think along the way he fell in love with you, Opie. Don’t hurt him too bad.”

Sitting in the car with Gray, I hoped it was true. But I couldn’t think of one good reason Gray would love me. I was a mess of a girl with nothing to offer.

“Where are you going?” I asked, examining my fingernails, bracing myself for his answer.

“I’m coming with you,” he said quickly, looking ahead and gripping the wheel. Then he added softly, “If you want me to.”

I felt relief flood through my body. I lifted my eyes to him, and he was looking at me.

“Was that a smile?” he asked with a little laugh.

“Maybe,” I said, letting it spread wide across my face. It almost hurt, it had been so long.

“I’ve never seen you smile before,” he said, putting a hand on my cheek. His touch was surprisingly gentle. I put my hand to his, and we sat there like that for a minute. In that moment he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

“What are you going to do down there?” I asked.

“My father has a company that’s doing some good in the world. There’s a place for me there.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise. “But you don’t really get along, do you?”

He gave a slow, careful nod. I could see he’d given it some thought. “We’ve had a lot of really hard times—we might always have problems—but we’re working on it. He came through for me—for you.”

On the radio David Bowie crooned sad and slow with Bing Crosby about the little drummer boy.

“It just seems important now to put all that anger behind me,” he said suddenly. He moved closer to me. “To make a place, a home for you—for us. I mean, look at me, forty’s right around the corner, and I don’t even own a futon.”

He kissed me then, and the warmth, the love of it, moved over me like a salve. It did seem important, critical, to make a safe place in the world.

“There’s something you need to know, Gray.”

“What’s that?” he said, pushing the hair away from my eyes.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

It should have been a bombshell, but—oddly—the words landed softly on both of us. He held my eyes. I couldn’t see what he was feeling. Those gray eyes have never revealed anything he hasn’t wanted them to.

Out the window the parking lot was full of dirty cars, covered with salt and snow. I thought he’d hate me then, for loving Marlowe Geary as I had in spite of everything he’d been and everything he’d done to me, for carrying his child.

“I’ve never been with anyone but him,” I said. I hated my voice for cracking then, and the tears that seemed to spring from a well in my middle. I closed my eyes in the silence that followed, shame burning my cheeks. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. When I turned to him, he leaned in and kissed me again. I reached for him, clung to him. I would have drowned if not for him.

“Let me take care of you,” he said. It sounded like a plea, a prayer he was making. I nodded into his shoulder. I didn’t have any words. Then he pulled away and started the car. He seemed a little awkward for a second, as if he were uncomfortable with the charge of emotion between us.

“I won’t give her up,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. I didn’t know the sex of my child, but I hated saying “it.”

I saw his body stiffen. “I’d never suggest that. Never,” he almost whispered. He turned from the wheel and took my shoulders.

“Listen to me,” he said, with so much passion that I released a little sob. “I’m going to take care of you.” He’d been so even, so unflappable up to this point, I hardly recognized the man beside me. Maybe he was drowning, too.

“I’m going to make a home for you and for that baby.” He looked down at my belly. “Whatever it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

We drove for two days and finally wound up at Vivian’s place on the beach. She and Drew were just dating at the time, so I lived alone with her. Gray took an apartment nearby. He wanted me to have some time to get to know myself, to get to know him.

“We’ll date,” he said. “Like normal people.”

Vivian took me into her house and treated me like her daughter. She cooked for me and stayed up late listening to me talk. She offered me a sort of kindness that no one else ever had. As I got my GED and started taking classes at the local college, my belly grew bigger. Gray and I dated. It was the happiest time of my life.

I suppose some people would have considered ending the pregnancy. But it didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve never once thought of Victory as Marlowe Geary’s daughter. She has always been mine and mine alone.


I watch as Gray gets out of the car with a black duffel bag. He puts the bag on the ground and leans against the vehicle. I feel as though I have lost every ounce of moisture in my body. A heavy man emerges from the white van and walks slowly over to Gray. He wears a long black raincoat, which fans behind him in the wind. His head is enormous over wide shoulders. He looks the approximate size of a refrigerator.

They shake hands, briefly. Even in the dark and with the distance, I recognize him. It’s Simon Briggs, the man who went to my father looking for Ophelia. They exchange a few words. I see Gray shake his head. I watch Briggs lift his palms. I can tell just from the way he’s standing that Gray is not happy. Finally Gray turns the bag over to him. They exchange a few more words. Then Simon Briggs turns and walks back toward his van.

As Briggs reaches for the handle to open the door, I see Gray lift his hand from his pocket and raise a gun. I draw in a hard breath and grip the wheel. With a single, silent shot, Briggs’s head explodes in a red cloud and he crumbles to the ground. Gray walks over to the body and fires again, retrieves the duffel bag, and walks calmly back to the car and gets inside. His vehicle rumbles to life, and he drives away with as little hurry as if he’s just picked up a carton of milk at the convenience store and is heading home.

I sit there for a minute, allowing what I’ve just seen to sink into my mind. I run through the possible reasons Gray might have shot Simon Briggs beneath an overpass and can only come up with one that makes sense: Gray had arranged to meet Briggs for a payoff but decided he’d be better off dead than rich. He wouldn’t have told me he planned to kill Briggs; he wouldn’t have incriminated me that way. I feel something like relief, and yet it doesn’t quite take. It’s the handshake that keeps me wondering. How much do you really know about your husband?


Gray and I were married by the time Victory was born. I think I fell in love with him in the parking lot of the psychiatric hospital when it was clear that he accepted me for everything I was. He knew Ophelia March; he loved her. I knew he would take care of me, that with Gray I’d always be safe. Maybe that’s not really love, but it passed for that. His name is on Victory’s birth certificate; he’s her father in every way that counts. No one—not Drew, not Vivian—knows that Victory is Marlowe Geary’s child. We both agreed everyone would be better off never knowing, including Victory. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a kind of betrayal.

Maybe because of that, there were terrible black patches during the pregnancy where I was consumed by fear that Marlowe had returned for me and for his daughter. I wouldn’t take the medication I was supposed to because of the baby, so I was buffeted by my hormones and the rogue chemicals in my brain. There were blackouts and terrible migraines. Once I woke up on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City, with no idea how I’d gotten there. One of my fugue states, as the doctors called them, a sudden flight from my life. Where was Ophelia going? I wondered, as I got off the bus in Valdosta, Georgia, and called Gray. Did she know things Annie Fowler, soon to be Powers, had forgotten?

After I disembarked from the Greyhound that night, I sat in a diner and waited for Gray to come get me. I was nothing but trouble. I don’t know why he loved me. On the way back to Florida in the Suburban, I asked him, “Why do you do this? Why do you always come for me?”

“I do well in crisis mode,” he told me. “Besides, I didn’t chase you all over the country to let you go now.”

It reminded me of all the things my father said I didn’t know about the years Gray trailed me and Marlowe. I’d never asked, mainly because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know. That night, less than a week before our wedding, when I was five months pregnant, suddenly I needed to know.

“My father said that he paid you at first, and then you wouldn’t accept any more money.”

He shrugged. “At a certain point, I wasn’t working for him any longer. I was looking for you.”

“Why?”

He just stared at the road ahead, and I wondered if he was going to answer me. I’d pieced some things together from newspapers, what I could bear to read.

“I caught up with you for the first time in Amarillo, Texas,” he said finally. “There’d been a liquor-store robbery a few miles east of there a day before. The girl working the counter had been tortured and finally killed. I heard about it on the radio, thought it might be Marlowe Geary. That’s what he did—tortured, killed, and robbed. He cut a bloody gash across the country, leaving at least nineteen young women dead.”

I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true, though I’d read this much. I don’t think I could have witnessed these crimes and done nothing, but the truth was, I didn’t know for sure.

“A few weeks earlier, a witness, a stock boy Geary left for dead in the back room, said he saw you. He was badly wounded, unable to help the girl Geary was torturing. All he could do was listen to her screams, thinking he was about to die himself. He said you were virtually catatonic, that you sat in a corner and rocked, gnawing on your cuticles. That Geary led you out when he was done. You went with him like a child.”

I covered my face in shame. I hated to think of myself this way, weak and in a killer’s thrall, just like my mother.

“Up till then I wasn’t sure. Your mother said you went with Geary willingly. But your father said when you came to New York that you weren’t right, you weren’t the girl he knew. He said it was like you were under some kind of spell. It makes sense, knowing what we know now about your mental state.”

“I knew enough to go to my father.”

He shrugged. “Even your subconscious was hoping he would save you.”

“I was always hoping for that,” I said.

“Well, he took his time, but he came through in the end. More or less.”

“Less.”

“Anyway, in Amarillo, after stopping at every shit motel in the area, I saw a car matching the description of the vehicle Geary was last seen driving. I sat and waited. After a few hours, Geary got into the vehicle and drove off. I should have called the cops right then, or taken him myself, but at that point all I was thinking about was you. I suppose I was obsessed, maybe not thinking clearly anymore.”

Gray told me how he found me in the corner of the hotel room, just sitting there rocking. The television was on, and I stared at the screen. My arms were covered with bruises, my lip was split. I was so thin he could see my collarbone straining against the skin, the knobs of my elbows. For a second he wasn’t sure I was the girl in the photograph he carried in his pocket.

“I pulled you to your feet and was moving you to the door when Geary returned.”

He told me how he and Marlowe fought, tore the room apart.

“Marlowe knocked me unconscious with a lamp by the bed. When I came to, you were long gone. I didn’t catch up with you again until nearly a year later in New Mexico.”

“You’re leaving something out.”

“No.”

“I can handle it.”

He sighed. Then, “You shot me. In the shoulder. Though you were probably aiming to kill me and weren’t strong enough to handle the gun.”

I thought of the star-shaped scar on his shoulder. I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember shooting him. But there was nothing there.

“I don’t remember,” I said, looking out the window. I should have felt worse about it, but I couldn’t connect at all to the memory. I felt bad that he’d been shot, but I didn’t feel guilty. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he said. “It wasn’t you.”

He put his hand on my leg. And I rested my hand on his. Three days later we were married on the beach at Vivian’s house. I remembered Drew standing on the edge of it all like a gargoyle. Who could blame him? I’d tried to kill his son.


I lose Gray because I sit stunned in my car for too long. I don’t know what to do: try to catch up or just go home? I find myself driving back to the underpass where Simon Briggs is facedown on the concrete. In a moment of monumental stupidity, I exit my car and walk over to the body. There’s a terrible ringing in my ears as I reach him.

A dark pool of blood is growing from beneath him. His van is still running. And in a flash that feels like a blow to the head, I remember where I’ve seen him before. I lean against the van. Another bad motel somewhere out west. I had just come out of the shower, was wrapped in one of the tiny, cheap towels. He was sitting on the bed, smoking a big cigar. He was a dirty guy, stains on his clothes, something black under his nails. I saw a bit of wax in his outer ear. I’m sure he smelled, but the stench of his cigar covered it up.

“I’ve got no problem with you,” he said, as if continuing a conversation we’d already been having. “It’s him I need. Help me, I’ll give you ten percent and turn my back while you run.”

But that’s all I remember. The memory fades into nothing. Did I help him? Did I get away from him somehow? I look down at his body now. The stillness of death is unmistakable. My rational mind is screaming for me to get out of there. But something stronger compels me to move toward the cab of the van. Traffic races above me, the tires on asphalt sounding like whispering voices. The driver’s side door is wide open. On the passenger seat, a cardboard box of cheap cigars, a purple lighter in the shape of a naked woman’s body, an empty can of diet soda, a half-eaten Philly cheese steak. The inside of the vehicle reeks of onions, stale smoke, and body odor. The world will be a cleaner place without Simon Briggs.

Beneath the detritus I see a large, worn manila envelope bulging with its contents. I want it, but I don’t want to touch anything in the car. I snake my arm in carefully and grab the edge of the envelope with my fingertips without touching anything else. As I lift it carefully, the garbage littered on top of it falls to the floor of the van.

The envelope is thick and heavy, and I don’t pause to peer inside, just move quickly back to my car. I slide the envelope under the passenger seat, start the engine, and get out of there. As I pull back on to the highway to start toward home, I wonder why Gray didn’t search the van. He knew that Simon Briggs was looking for me, that Detective Harrison was all over me, but he left everything there for the police to find. It doesn’t make any sense.

My cell phone rings. It’s Detective Harrison again. This time I answer.

“What do you want, Detective? Is it money? Just tell me what you need to leave me alone and it’s yours.”

“Yesterday it was money. Today I’m not so sure.”

I’m driving too fast. I change lanes carelessly, and the Toyota behind me honks in protest. I lift a hand.

“Cell phones kill,” says the detective. “Did you know that you’re just as impaired driving while talking on one as you would be if you got behind the wheel drunk?”

I’ve given up talking. He’s one of those guys, the ones who won’t get to the point until they’re ready no matter what you say. He’s running an agenda; my presence in the conversation isn’t necessary.

“Let’s get together,” he says then.

“Really,” I say, angry now. “You know what? F*ck off, Detective.”

“No. You f*ck off, Ophelia.” He leans on the name hard.

My stomach bottoms out. “Have you lost your mind?” I say. “Do you even know who you’re talking to? Or are you blackmailing so many people you’ve lost track?”

He doesn’t even play the game, just tells me where to meet him, a rest stop about twenty miles south of where I am. I have no intention of meeting him. I’d have to be insane to do that.

“I have to get home,” I tell him. “I’ll be missed. I have a family, Detective.”

He issues a nasty little laugh. “Let me tell you something: You don’t have anything unless I say you do.”

He ends the call. I hold the dead phone in my hand. Desperation and panic are eating an acid hole in my center. I try Gray on his cell phone and don’t get an answer. I hang up without leaving a message. After driving a few more miles, my mind racing through my various options, I exit the highway and make a turn, get back on, and head south. I’ll meet him, I tell myself. I’ll give him what he wants. Then he’ll go away. Just like Gray said. Why Gray didn’t go to see him, why he wound up killing Simon Briggs instead, I don’t know. There’s no time to think about it. I just need to finish this and get home.


As far as I know, my mother still lives on Frank Geary’s horse ranch in Central Florida. She believes I’m dead. I know from my father that she blames me for everything that happened to Frank, to her. She has turned the farm into a safe house for women in love with death-row inmates. She helps them lobby for new trials, conducts letter-writing campaigns for the examination of old evidence with new technology, comforts them when the worst happens. She even has a website, freetheinnocent.org.

A couple of years ago, I saw her on a talk show, defending herself against the families of murder victims. She looked old and worn, all her prettiness gone. I felt nothing when I saw her, except a slight nausea that she could have devoted so much time and feeling to this cause when she never showed a fraction of that love or concern for her own daughter. She wears a picture of Frank in a locket around her neck.

“He was an innocent man who died for crimes he didn’t commit,” she kept repeating. She made a weird rocking motion, seemed edgy and unstable. Even the other people on stage—a woman dating a death-row inmate, a death-row appeals lawyer, the wife of a man wrongly convicted and executed—stared at her, leaned their bodies away in an effort to distance themselves.

The show itself was sensational garbage, designed to create conflict among the participants. Families of victims were grouped on the other side of the stage—the mother of an abducted and murdered girl, the husband of a woman who was raped and murdered in their home, the sister of a young man who was the victim of a serial killer. Things started out well enough but naturally devolved into bitter tears and screaming matches. The audience jeered.

Eventually the questions turned to me and Marlowe. I watched with rapt attention, though I knew I shouldn’t. I just couldn’t turn it off.

“Do you think it’s something genetic or something learned?” the host asked my mother, a barely concealed look of disgust on his face. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with murderer Marlowe Geary?”

“I believe Marlowe Geary was innocent of the crimes he was accused of committing, just as his father was,” she said, jutting her chin out and blinking her eyes oddly. “He never had a trial. He was tried and convicted in the media.”

“The evidence is overwhelming,” said the host, a gray-haired man with a chiseled, heavily made-up face.

“Evidence lies,” she said, staring directly at the camera. “We all know that.”

About a year after Frank died, new DNA technology proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had killed at least two of the women he went to jail for initially—a local waitress named Lauren Miter and Sadie Atkins, a motel maid. Their families never stopped lobbying to prove Frank’s guilt and finally succeeded. I knew it must have been cold comfort, but maybe that’s better than nothing. I wondered about Janet Parker. She didn’t need technology to prove that Frank had killed her daughter. Her body knew, and the knowledge wasted her.

I have often wondered about the other women, a suspected thirteen in all. Women who went missing in a twenty-mile radius around the Geary home whose bodies were never found. What happened to them? Did they all die at the hands of Frank Geary?

“You didn’t answer my question,” the host said when the audience quieted down. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with Marlowe Geary?”

“I won’t speak ill of the dead. But my stepson was a good, good boy. I knew him to be gentle and kind. Ophelia was a very troubled young girl, headstrong and unhappy.”

“So what are you saying?” asked the host, incredulous.

“If he did anything wrong, she might have been the corrupting influence,” my mother said, widening her eyes and looking straight at the camera again.

I was stunned by the injustice of her words, the absolute delusional world she lived in. But still I couldn’t turn off the television. In the oddest way, it was good to see my mother, a comfort to hear her voice. We love our parents so much, even when we hate them, even when they abuse and betray us. We want so badly to be loved in return. If they only knew their power.

The show ended with a solitary man onstage, a representative from an organization dedicated to counseling the victims of violent crime and their families. He was a small, frail-looking man with a silky drift of strawberry-blond hair and sparkling green jewels for eyes. His voice wobbled slightly as he spoke in vagaries about how victims have to face down their fears rather than wallow in them. The techniques of his organization, he said, were “experimental and controversial but highly effective.”

“When we’re victimized or when we lose someone to violence, it changes the way we see the world. It opens a hole in the perception of our lives, and it seems like every bad thing, every monster, can enter through that opening. Facing the fear that’s left after you or someone you love has been victimized is the hardest thing you’ll do. But if you don’t do it, the fear will kill you slowly, like the most insidious cancer, cell by cell.”

He wouldn’t be specific about the organization’s techniques but offered a website: nomorefear.biz. I jotted it down, but when I visited it later, there was only an error page.

For three days following, my mother’s words ate a hole in my gut. I couldn’t eat or sleep, unable to rid myself of the sight of her, used up and unstable, blaming me for Marlowe’s crimes. I made a few more attempts to visit the website, but it was down every time.


For some reason I’m thinking about this as I pull off at the rest stop. The air is charged with bad possibilities as I drive down the access road and the highway disappears from my rearview mirror. I see Harrison’s SUV parked beyond the restrooms, in the farthest corner of the lot. I wonder if there’s anyplace more desolate and menacing than an empty rest stop in the middle of the night.

I come to a halt at a distance from his vehicle. I’m not going to pull up to him. I’m not going to approach his car. I’m going to stay inside with the doors locked. If he wants to talk, he’ll have to come to me. I sit and wait, expecting him to call me on my cell phone. A minute passes, then five. Finally I find his number on my phone and call him. His voice mail picks up.

“Hi, you’ve reached Ray.” His voice is bright and chipper, like a high-school cheerleader’s. “Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.”

I have a low opinion of Detective Harrison, and it’s getting lower. He’s taunting me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Eventually, I can’t take it anymore. I pull up alongside his vehicle. He’s sitting there, smoking a cigarette. He turns as I come to a stop. He rolls down his window.

“I wasn’t sure how desperate you were,” he says. “Now I am.”

“Spare me the foreplay,” I say. “Just get to the point.” The smell of his cigarette makes me want to smoke, even though I haven’t in years.

He gives me that neighborly, “I’m nobody” smile he seems to have perfected. I see that his whole nice-guy aura is a persona he cultivates to put people at ease, to relax them. Like his voice-mail message, for example—friendly, disarming, not stern and professional, not likely to scare away the skittish.

“I read that you watched while Marlowe Geary killed those girls. That witnesses saw you watching, doing nothing. What does that feel like?”

I don’t answer him, just take the blow. I did ask him to get to the point. I guess the point is that he knows everything.

“How do you live with yourself?” he wants to know. Now I hate him. I find myself wishing that it was him and not Simon Briggs under that bridge. Or maybe both of them. I hate the way anger causes a mutiny of the body, the dry mouth, the trembling hands.

“You’re awfully self-righteous for a dirty cop,” I say.

He pulls his face into a mock grimace. “Ouch.”

I rub my eyes hard, but it’s no use, the pain in my head is ratcheting up.

“So you go from Marlowe Geary to Gray Powers. From killer to cop, or whatever he is. Actually, they’re not so different, are they? They just kill for different reasons, kill different kinds of people. I wonder what this says about you.”

But I’m not listening to him. I’m watching a young girl approach us. She is emaciated and pale as death today. Her hair is dirty and hanging limply. Her arms are covered with bruises. She walks slowly, almost dazed, but she’s looking right at me. Detective Harrison turns to follow my gaze, puts his hand inside his jacket.

“What are you looking at?” he asks.

I know he can’t see her. She is shaking her head at me in disapproval. She thinks I’m weak, foolish. If it were up to her, Detective Harrison would already be dead.

“I’m starting to wonder about you, Ophelia. I’m concerned about your stability.”

There’s a ringing in my ears now. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, she’s gone.

“I have money,” I say. “A lot of it. Just tell me what you want.”

“It’s not about money anymore,” he says with a dramatic sigh. “At least it’s not about your money anymore. Let’s just say this: Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten. And do you know how many enemies your husband has? How many people would like to see him suffer? Do you have any idea about Powers and Powers, the things they’ve done?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, and more than that, my head is going to implode. I feel his eyes on me, and when I meet them, I’m surprised to see the man I saw that first night, the one I liked.

“You know what?” he says, incredulous. “I don’t think you do know what I’m talking about. I really don’t. Because when I look at your face, I don’t see the person I read about. What’s wrong with you? How did you let your life wind up like this?”

I close my eyes again and rest my head back. The pressure of the seat against the base of my skull feels good. I have a millisecond of relief.

We’re both still sitting in our cars, speaking through the open windows. The streak of white hair over his ear looks silver in the moonlight. “You’re one to talk,” I say. “Look at you. Blackmail? You don’t seem like the type.”

He shrugs. “Like you, I’ve made some bad calls.”

“So why don’t we just help each other out? I give you what you need to make a clean start; you leave me and my family alone.”

I sound cool and practical, just as Gray would sound in this situation, I imagine. And I do feel calmer than I have in hours. I watch Ophelia. She’s standing right beside Harrison now on the other side of his window. I can see her breath fogging the glass. He’s staring straight ahead, oblivious to her.

“Let me think about it,” he says. Suddenly he seems tired and sad, as if he’s taken on an enterprise he no longer has the will or the strength to finish. He puts his hand to his eyes and rubs hard. He’s conflicted, I think. Part of him wants to be the good cop, the hero. He hasn’t lost that part of himself. It hurts him to be so corrupt, to do such an obviously wrong thing. That’s why he delivered his self-righteous speech at the mall, to make it all okay for himself.

Ophelia turns and walks away, slowly fading like a fog that’s passing. I can hear her laughing. The headache and the ringing in my ears start to fade.

“I was seeing a doctor,” I tell him.

“Yeah?” he says, glancing over at me. “Good. You need one.”

“He disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“His office, everything in it, was just gone the last time I went there.” I leave out the part about his horrifically bloody murder. I don’t feel like getting into all that.

He cocks his head to the side, gives me a quizzical look. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I was just wondering. Would you have a way of finding out if he was ever actually there? Or if he is who he told me he was?”

He looks at me with something like concern on his face. He’s trying to decide how crazy I really am.

“What was his name?” he asks, his tone surprisingly gentle. Detective Harrison is a complicated man.

“Dr. Paul Brown.”

He writes it down in a little book he takes from his dash. He asks for the address, and I give it to him.

“I’ll look into it,” he tells me. “In the meantime, are you sure you’re safe at home?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I remember the question he asked on my voice mail: How much do you really know about your husband?

That wolfish smile again. “Sometimes the people we know least of all are sleeping in our beds.”

“You must be thinking about your wife,” I snap. “What does she know about you? Not much, I bet.”

He doesn’t like that—too close to center. His face takes on that dark expression, the one that frightens me. He starts the engine of his car. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait,” I say, sorry for my smart mouth. “Who else is looking for me?”

He rolls up his window and pulls away, leaving me alone to watch his car merge onto the highway and disappear. I wonder if he’s trying to unnerve me, make me think there are other people after me, that my husband is not who I believe him to be so that I’m more vulnerable to his blackmail. Or maybe he’s just a sadist. Or maybe he’s telling me the truth. I look for Ophelia in the darkness, but she’s gone.


I return to the house. It’s dark, quiet. Esperanza has gone to bed. I peek in on Victory, and she’s sound asleep with Claude under one arm. The colored fish from her night-light dance around the room. Gray is not back from his deadly errand. And I wonder where he is, what he’ll tell me about his night when he gets home. I consider calling my father but decide it would be reckless and pointless. I go to the bedroom, close the door, and wait—for Gray, for Marlowe, for Ophelia, whoever comes first.

As I wait, the memories start their parade. I can’t stop them. I lie down on the bed, the sheer force of their relentless march exhausting me. The articles say I watched as Marlowe tortured innocent girls, that I stood by and did nothing as he murdered them—convenience-store clerks, gas-station attendants, hotel maids. It’s true, without being the whole truth.


We traveled at night, stealing a new car every few days from roadside diners and rest stops along the highway. We stole mostly old junkers with empty soda cans on the floor and plastic Jesuses on the dash, pictures of toddlers tucked in the visor, piles of cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Each car had its particular aroma: cigars or vomit, bad perfume or sex. As Marlowe drove, I rummaged through the glove boxes, trying to figure out whose day we’d ruined, whether they had insurance and would be able to afford another car.

By the end of the second week, what little money we had was nearly gone; we’d had nothing but soda and vending-machine junk for days. We were hungry, our bodies starving for nutrients, and I was starting to feel desperate. We’d spent two nights in the car. When I managed to sleep, my dreams were wild, chaotic, punctuated by my mother screaming and the sound of gunfire, the smell of burning wood. The rest of the time, I moved through a kind of haze of fatigue, hunger, and fear. This is a nightmare, I’d tell myself. It isn’t happening.

I’d been in a kind of half sleep when we pulled up at the gas station. The clock on the dash read 2 A.M. I knew we didn’t have any money. I thought he was stopping to use the restroom. Then he pulled a gun from the duffel bag.

“We need money,” Marlowe said.

I stared at the gun. Its shape seemed natural in his hand. “What are you going to do?” I said with a laugh. “Rob the place?”

Marlowe rolled his eyes. “We’re fugitives,” he said sharply. “We’re wanted for murder. Robbing a gas station is nothing.”

I felt like he’d slapped me in the face. “We didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “Janet Parker killed Frank.”

“You let her onto the property, Ophelia,” he said nastily. “That makes you an accomplice.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Yes,” he said, pulling something from the duffel bag. He handed it to me. It was a Florida newspaper. RUNAWAYS WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN CONNECTION TO THE MURDER OF FRANK GEARY, the headline read.

“No,” I said again. The reality of our situation, of what I’d done, was settling into my body. Marlowe moved to get out of the car, but I grabbed his arm. “We’ll go to my father in New York. He’ll help us. We don’t need to do this.”

“We’re not going to make it to New York,” he said, pushing my hand away. “We’re out of gas. What do you think will happen then?”

“We’ll steal another car.”

He swept his hand around the empty gas-station lot. “Do you see another car?” he spit. “In a mile we’ll be stranded by the side of the road.”

I let go of a sob that had been dwelling in my chest. “I did what you told me to do!” I screamed through a sudden wash of tears. “I saw you talking to her! You planned everything with her! I just did what you told me to do!” It felt good to scream and sob, to release all my anger and fear.

Marlowe got very quiet in response. He lowered his voice to a whisper and moved his face in so close to mine that I could smell his rancid breath.

“I did this for you, Ophelia, to save you from Frank,” he said. “You wanted me to rescue you, to take you away? Well, I did that. All of this has been for you, you ungrateful little bitch.”

He had his hair back in a ponytail, and long strands were escaping. The dark circles under his eyes made him seem ghoulish. I turned away from him, my gut churning with fear and guilt and shame.

“Do you want me to go to jail? Do you want to go to jail?”

“No,” I managed, all my anger exhausted.

“Then fill the tank, get in the driver’s seat, and shut your f*cking mouth,” he said. “Keep the engine running.”

He got out of the car then, and I watched him stride toward the building. I pulled the car over to the pump and did as I was told, keeping my eyes averted from the store. I didn’t want to see him hold a gun to someone. I didn’t want to see the fear on that person’s face. And I didn’t want to be the person who was waiting outside while he did that. When the tank was full, I got back into the car. As I sat there, “New Year’s Day” by U2 played on the radio; I sang along, with the harsh lights above me revealing all the ugliness of my situation. I almost put the car in gear and drove. It was another of those moments when if I’d acted differently, things might not have broken apart the way they did. I was still me in that second. I could still have saved Ophelia. But I didn’t.

I never thought to wonder why Marlowe didn’t bother to cover his face, or why he didn’t consider it an issue that I waited in plain sight with the car under the lights. When the shots rang out, I felt the vibrations in my bones. I sat there for a second, gripping the wheel, and felt any hope I had for my life drain from my body. Even then I could have run, gone to the police and taken my chances. Instead I got out of the car and walked through the glass doors of the gas station’s store.

Marlowe was behind the counter, taking money from the register. All I could see was the top of her head, her long golden hair soaking up the pooling black blood on the white linoleum floor.

“What happened?”

“Go back to the car,” he said quietly, not looking at me. “Now.”

I did as I was told. I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time. More than an hour. He came out finally, carrying bags filled with food—Twinkies, cans of pop, candy bars. When he got into the driver’s seat, nudging me back over to the passenger side, he presented me with a Snickers bar, my favorite, and that wide, charming smile that used to thrill me. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said sweetly, leaning in and kissing me gently on the cheek. I clung to him, my lifeline, my only hope, even as my mind screamed, What did he do in there? “I know you’re scared. I am, too. We’ll go to your dad.”

“What did you do, Marlowe?” I finally managed to whisper into his hair. I felt his body go stiff, and he pulled away from me quickly.

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you,” he said, turning on the ignition.

I’d fallen into a hole, a slick-walled abyss, and there was no way for me to climb out of the darkness that was closing in around me. I look back on this as the moment when I started to fear him more than I loved him, when the part of me that still wanted to survive started to hate him. But I was too lost to know the difference.

“No one else will ever love you like I do,” he said darkly as we pulled onto the highway.

I’m not sure how many more women and girls there were. I remember flash details—garishly red lipstick, a turquoise barrette, a flower tattoo, sparkling pink nail polish badly applied. I hear a nervous giggle, a cry of terrible pain. These things stay with me.


When Gray comes home, I’ve moved out onto the balcony to listen to the Gulf, trying to remember more. He comes outside and sits next to me. For a second, my past and present mingle.

“I think our problems have been eliminated,” he says. He doesn’t reach for me or turn to face me. He is just a dark figure beside me, staring out at the sea.

“What happened?” I ask, dreading his answer. He doesn’t respond right away. Then, “Let’s just say I took care of it.”

“Gray.”

“Trust me.”

I think of my conversation with Ray Harrison at the rest stop, how tired and discouraged he seemed. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he decided to take what Gray offered and walk away. Or maybe he was planning to work other angles as well.

“Did Harrison tell you there are other people looking for me?”

He shifts lower in his seat, puts his feet up on the railing. “There’s no one else looking for you.”

“He told me there was.”

“When?”

I release a sigh, knowing he’s not going to be happy. “I saw him tonight. He called me and asked me to meet him. I did.”

“That was stupid, Annie.”

We sit in silence. I want to tell him that I saw him kill Simon Briggs. But I don’t. I’m afraid. Afraid that he did it, afraid of why he shook Briggs’s hand. I’m also afraid he didn’t do it, that I imagined the whole thing. I’m suddenly very cold, though the night air is mild and slightly humid. I walk back into our bedroom. Gray follows, takes me by the shoulders, and spins me around.

“We’re okay,” he says. “Trust me. All the threats have been neutralized.”

This is the language he uses when he’s afraid, these passive military phrases: Threats have been neutralized. Our problems have been solved. But I don’t see fear when I look at him. His eyes are flat, cool; his mouth is pulled into a grim, tight line. In the dim light of the room, the scars on his face look darker, nastier.

“What about Briggs?” I ask. I’m hoping here that he’ll say something true, something that grounds me. I want him to tell me he killed Briggs. But he doesn’t.

“He won’t be a problem,” Gray says quietly.

I feel the slightest flicker of fear at his words. I walk toward the bed. He doesn’t move to follow me. I remember that he thought Briggs was working for someone. Even if he’d killed Briggs, wouldn’t that person still be looking, and wouldn’t Briggs’s death be a red flag that he’d gotten close? Suddenly I recall the envelope that I stuffed under the seat of my car. I never looked inside.

“What were you thinking, Annie?” says Gray. “Where did you meet him?”

“At a rest stop by the highway. He said, ‘Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten.’”

“He’s wrong. It’s over.”

“What about the person who followed me on the beach? The necklace I found in the sand?”

“You said yourself you’re not sure what you heard, who that might have been. It could have been anyone, or even Briggs trying to unnerve you. And there must be a million of those necklaces around, Annie.”

Can it be this easy to explain away?

“Trust me, Annie. We’re okay.” He kisses me softly on the lips and pulls me into a tight embrace. I can feel his relief, his love for me. I do know my husband—I don’t care what Harrison thinks.

I want so badly to believe Gray that I actually start to. When he releases me and looks into my eyes, his face comes into focus and the room around me starts to seem like my bedroom again, not a place where I’ll be sleeping until I flee my life. I don’t care whether Gray has killed Briggs or not. I know he’ll never tell me if he did. For a minute I can believe that Detective Harrison won’t come sniffing around again, that the person on the beach was Briggs or some teenager playing a prank. I’ll walk with Victory on the beach tomorrow and then take her to school just like any other day. In a week all of this will be a fading memory, like the car accident you just narrowly avoided that leaves you shaken and glad to have survived.

Gray’s hands start roaming my body, and I come alive inside. My relief and the strength of his body, the warmth of his skin against mine, awake a deep hunger. His lips are on my neck and then my collarbone as he peels away my shirt and goes to work on my jeans. I am tearing at his clothes as he pushes me gently onto the bed. When he’s inside me, he wraps his arms around me so that I can feel every inch of his body against mine. He whispers my name over and over, soft and slow, like a mantra. “Annie. Annie. Annie.” Somewhere beneath the heat of my desire, I find myself wishing he’d call me by my real name. I wish he’d call me Ophelia. Even though I’m making love to my husband, I feel suddenly so lonely.

Afterward, as he’s drifting off to sleep, he whispers, “I can’t lose you, Annie. Stay with me.” I don’t know why he would say that. Does he sense that Annie is coming apart and drifting away? I ask him what he means, but he’s already sleeping.

I close my eyes. When I open them again, Ophelia is sitting in the chair by the fireplace. She’s laughing.