YOU FOUND ME IN MILPITAS. I had taken no pains to obscure my location, since I usually don’t have a lot of people looking for me, but, for you, the process of finding me had been long and arduous, and the human cost of that process was reflected in your first letter. You spent most of your first two pages on this theme: how you had written to me at my mother’s house, because finding that address had been easy enough: the public library still kept old phone books, you said, and it had them all; all the various little local ones, anyway. Los Osos and Avila Beach, and San Luis Obispo. You had looked up my last name for the year Jesse died, and there it was, the same name as the one on the cover of the true crime book about the woman who killed your son.
“The woman who killed my son”: this was the phrasing you used, heralding the first of your long asides, to which I would grow accustomed over the course of our correspondence, and in which, I would learn, though not as quickly as I ought to have learned, you would often give voice to your truest thoughts and feelings. I say that I didn’t learn this quickly enough because by now, for me, after half a life at this work, I would usually recognize it as a familiar dynamic. We bury the things we need to say under a flood of narratives, counter-narratives, details, and clarifications. People slip hard truths into casually dropped interjections and conditional clauses. Detectives know this, too; it’s something they go over in their training. Watch for the thing the suspect says that he doesn’t notice. Watch for the part he assumes you agree with him about, and exploit that. It’s free.
But I was taken by surprise when your first letter came through the slot in the front door of my rented house in Milpitas. I’d been in there for the better part of a year, assembling the story of Derrick and Angela and Seth and Alex, of the fortress they’d built that went wrong. I spent a lot of time on the floor, which is part of my process, trying to get close to the places where my subjects lived, and I was burrowing down deep into my dreamscape when a manila envelope, stuffed fat enough to require a little manual help from the mailman in pushing it through the slot, squeaked in past its own midway point and then landed with a thud a few feet away from where I was sitting.
I assumed it was a galley. People send me books; I don’t imagine that my blurbs sell many books, if any—“Chilling … A grisly look into a mind on the far side of the mirror”—but agents and publicists insist that they’re useful, and I want to be a good sport. I’d developed, by then, a practice of looking at galleys as soon as they landed on my desk: I’d know within a chapter or two if it was a good fit or not, sometimes just from the cover letter alone.
So I went over and retrieved your envelope from the floor, and I saw the hand-lettered URGENT with asterisks on either side of it underneath the Milpitas zip code, and I felt the heft of whatever lay within, waiting, presumably, for my approval to help it on its way through the world: but it wasn’t that at all.
But it was you. You had found me. “At last,” you said. There were several other addresses to which you’d sent the same letter, or a version of it; when you didn’t get an answer, or when your letter came back marked Addressee Unknown, you concluded that I didn’t realize you were looking for me. You drew this conclusion, you said, because you remembered our conversations from the mid-seventies, and you trusted your instincts now in a way you wished you’d known to trust them when you were a young girl: and your instinct then had been that I cared, about you and about your son, and about the truth of the murders in Morro Bay that had so captivated the national news media for a cycle or two. You believed that I would want to know how my book had affected the people in it who were still living: who had, daily, to deal with the ripple effects of the events and outcomes upon which, you said, I had built my reputation. I’m paraphrasing here.
What you said was: You made your money off this, but I need for you to know what it has been like.
I had already begun redecorating the living room when I read your words that day: the moment I read them has imprinted itself in my mind. I wasn’t quite sure who you were, yet—I’d seen your last name on the return address, but I’ve written several books, and all of them have necessarily involved telling several stories at once. Perpetrators, victims, commentators, bystanders—a whole chorus whose various melodic strains I sift through to find a theme. So you could have been anybody, really, but your point, in part, was that you were not just anybody.
You were Jana Perez now, though I had known you under the name Jana Larson, and you didn’t feel right saying that I owed you anything, but, at the same time, you felt it was fair to say that I owed you a hearing, because I had done so well writing about the woman who killed your son.
Maybe it was my environment that made me receptive to your letter, which I might otherwise have put into a pile of things to be dealt with when I had time: the pile where the galleys often go, the pile where the pitches for movies whose directors haven’t found a source of funding yet end up. Maybe it was something more. But I sat and I read, and, sensing something immense beneath your patient detailing of the pain with which, you said, you would live forever—not anger, but not not anger; not resentment, but grievance, something with a fair claim on the space it sought to hold—I asked myself several questions.
What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?
* * *
WHAT OTHER BOOKS MIGHT I HAVE WRITTEN about the murders of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp? Would those books have been made into movies, or gone quietly into a single paperback printing after their initial run?
Who were my readers? What did I really know about them, about what the stories I sought out and brought into the light did for or to them?
Why did I always flinch when somebody asked me to write a sequel?
This was not the first time I had asked myself these questions, or questions like them. They were familiar friends, after a manner of speaking. Take that any way you want—as an indictment of my character, as a complicating factor. As nothing.
What had I missed in Morro Bay?
* * *