“I don’t think you’re delusional at all,” I said to Shirley. “I think you would much rather everyone believe your daughter ran away. Because if her name is connected to all this, people might start digging. And they might find out that she was living her life in a way that you find shameful. So you would rather never know what happened to her, or learn where your own daughter is buried, than risk people finding out that she wasn’t ‘perfect.’ What kind of mother is that?”
Shirley blinked at me, speechless, and burst into tears. Or at least she pretended to, bringing her hands to her face and making all the requisite boo-hoo noises. She did this long enough to realize I wasn’t going to take back what I’d said, to comfort her and tell her I didn’t mean it, that she was a mother and therefore sacrosanct. When I did nothing but let her blubber on, she dropped her hands and focused her dry, flinty eyes on me. “I’d like to leave now,” she said with a courageous wobble to her voice, as though we were keeping her there against her will when she was the one to seek me out.
Tina opened the door for her, swept her arm in an exaggerated half circle. You can see yourself out. “Well!” Shirley tutted. She straightened her blouse and regarded me in a way that let me know how profoundly disappointed she was in me. “For once, a reporter was telling the truth. You are completely under her spell. Good luck to you, young lady.” She rocketed out the door, her face a livid shade of purple.
Tina and I stared at each other for a long time after Shirley left, incredulous but also not. There should be a word for that. How very little people can surprise you. I suppose the word is jaded, but that’s not what I am. Because on the other side of this is someone like Tina, who taught me not to be surprised that people can be so good you will miss a week of work, drive through the night, and put yourself in harm’s way for them. Some people are your black swan event.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 2021
Day 15,826
Carl is wearing a T-shirt that says Make Orwell Fiction Again, and despite everything he did to us, I am unbearably sad, picturing him designing the item on Redbubble from one of the community desktops in the Internet room at the assisted-living facility where he now resides.
“When I arrived in Seattle,” Carl said, referring to the day we parted ways in Aspen, “I spoke to as many people as would speak to me about the case. And I heard a rumor.” He held up a single finger, Holmes-like. “Actually, it was more of a theory.”
It is one o’clock on a Thursday, and Carl is cogent. His best hour is immediately after lunch. Sundowning is setting in earlier and earlier, and it’s taking Carl longer to shake off the morning fog, as evidenced by our first encounter during the previously safe hour of eleven a.m. I was released from Tallahassee Memorial with no sign of a concussion or internal bleeding, and the stitches in my lip will dissolve in two weeks. My injury pales in comparison to the brain bleed one of the aides suffered recently after Carl threw a chair at his head. That was when Dr. Donnelly started requiring Carl’s visitors to sign a waiver.
“What was the theory?” I ask benignly, interested but not desperate. The moments that Carl comes up for air are infrequent, and they can turn on a dime, as I experienced firsthand. If Carl detects anything threatening or impatient in my tone, the Carl who has information that he’s concealed from us for four decades will go, and I may never see him again.
“The theory,” Carl projects in this strange speaker’s voice, as though he is not talking to me but, rather, giving a talk, of which he did many in the decades after his book was published, “had to do with the interrogation tapes that Seattle made when they came to Utah to interview him after his first escape.”
Carl means Colorado, not Utah, but Dr. Donnelly advised me not to correct him. I nod, urging him on. “I remember seeing the interrogation tapes on the container list you showed me.” On the day I kissed you, I do not add but cannot stop myself from remembering with a wave of fresh shame.
Carl snaps his fingers and points at me. Exactly. He sips the coffee a staff member made him. Iced, so no one ends up with third-degree burns. “There was a theory,” he continues, “that he confessed on those tapes.”
“Why would he confess?” I wonder indifferently, though my heart is about to beat through my skin.
“Oh,” Carl muses, as though it could be any number of things. He is building anticipation, enjoying my audience. I am in agony. Finally, “Utah [Colorado] had the death penalty, but Washington did not. And you know. After that first escape, he was in a bad way. He’d spent a week trying to survive in the mountains without shelter or food or sleep. His strategy was to bait the Seattle detectives, give them something that would make them want to muscle in and extradite him. Save him from the Caryn Campbell trial, which he was almost certain to lose after the escape attempt. Guilty people don’t try to escape. He knew the prosecution would use that against him if the Caryn Campbell case went to trial, and it would end with his neck in a noose.”
I raise my eyebrows. Murmur, “That makes a lot of sense.” And it does. Carl doesn’t say anything for a spell, and I look over to see that he’s staring angrily at the door to the visitors’ lounge. There is no one there. It’s just us in the khaki-painted room with the red-striped club chairs and the tan couch with the matching red-striped pillows. This is what’s called luxury senior living, though the facility looks like a four-star hotel built in the early aughts and left untouched ever since. But then—
“Seattle PD didn’t like that,” Carl says, and the memory attached to this statement revives his mood. He turns his focus back to me, beaming as he remembers his hard-bitten journalist days. “The pressure from the public to get him back from Florida was already so intense. Seattle was just trying to keep a lid on things long enough that they could hand down their own indictments, and all of that takes time, if they wanted to get it right, that is. Not rush things just for the sake of saying they did something, like the other jurisdictions did. But I’m not letting it go, and they realize they have to give me something.” Carl’s pupils have dilated; his cheeks look like mine after a morning workout—flushed with accomplishment. “One of the detectives suggests I go out and talk to the mother of one of their victims. That mother—” Carl whistles with wide eyes. What a piece of work. “She tells me she doesn’t even think her daughter is a victim.” He makes a disbelieving expression. He is sharing all of this with me in the present tense, as if he is on Shirley’s doorstep right this moment. “It’s obvious she’s covering for something. But then—” Carl cuts out abruptly, like someone’s pulled his plug.
I can’t help myself. “But then what?”
Carl brings his fists up to his ears, like he can’t bear the judgment in my voice. “They catch him. And everyone wants to talk to him, get his story.” He blinks at me, childlike and full of regret. He has hardly any eyebrows left, but his eyes are still that mineral shade of green.
“How did you get it out of him?” I prod gently.
Carl cups his hands around his mouth and confesses in a whisper, “I wrote to him. I said”—he scrutinizes the empty doorway again—“I had evidence to support his innocence in one of the crimes he was accused of, and he put me on the visitors’ list right away. And from there, we developed a sort of friendship, and…” Carl is back to speaking in the past, as though he needs distance from the person who did this. His eyes are flicking to the door and back to me, to the door and back to me. “Please,” he begs me, and he cowers in abject terror.
I angle my shoulders to the side and slightly away from him, assuming an unthreatening stance, as Dr. Donnelly advised if I felt like he was starting to go.