“It’s at the forty-seven-minute mark,” a third voice chimed in. “I’m a total creep for knowing that, but I’m in so deep.”
“Dude, who isn’t?” said the girl wearing a navy Drew University sweatshirt. I had by then feigned a glance at the line to the bathroom, located behind them. There was a new documentary out, expensively done, and so many people had watched it, myself included, that I was worried the banner with The Defendant’s face might never disappear from the homepage on my television screen.
“There!” cried the interloper, just as I reached the register. Absurdly, I placed an order for a Venti Chai Latte while Judge Lambert famously told The Defendant that someday soon a current of electricity would pass through his body until he was pronounced dead by the warden, and that he should, even more absurdly, take care of himself.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” The Defendant replied, a degraded quality to his voice, what happens when you take a new video of an old video and throw it up on YouTube. I inserted my credit card into the chip reader, a technology that, just like Judge Lambert’s empathy for me and my deceased sorority sisters, did not exist in July of 1979.
“I say that to you sincerely,” Judge Lambert reiterated in a paternal tone. “Take care of yourself. It’s a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity that I’ve experienced in this court.”
I entered a custom tip amount. One dollar, every time, because twenty percent of my order is eighty-one cents and that is a worse tip than no tip at all.
“You are a bright young man,” Judge Lambert continued solemnly. One of the girls muttered “ass-munch” and was loudly shushed by her friend. “You’d have made a good lawyer, and I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don’t have any animosity, and I want you to understand that.”
“Ew. ‘Partner’?”
“Nice for him that he doesn’t have any animosity. What about the families of all the girls he killed? Do we even know their names? Or anything about them?”
“Of course we don’t. Meanwhile how many movies do we already have about him? And this time he’s played by Zac Efron?”
“He wasn’t even that hot. Those beady little eyes.” There was a vibration of lips, and I knew the girl behind me had shivered the way you do when something or someone gives you the heebie-jeebies.
I wanted to turn around and tell the girls to watch what had preceded Judge Lambert’s tender farewell speech. I wanted to tell them how The Defendant asked and was granted permission to address the court, and how he had shrilly protested his innocence for thirty-four minutes (I kept time). If you had placed him on a street corner in dirty rags, people would hurry past with their heads bent, strenuously avoiding eye contact with the madman, and yet to that asinine performance the judge responded soft-heartedly, knighting The Defendant some kind of savant. I wanted to tell these girls that they were still being manipulated, because the documentary filmmaker had omitted The Defendant’s gobbledygook from the episode, or perhaps he had just not dug deep enough to find it, or worse, didn’t understand why his thinly veiled idiocy mattered to the story. What was worth their ire was not an old man in an old video clip grieving for the ruined future of a potential protégé, it’s that there was never anything to grieve. The Defendant flaunted his true nature with audacious displays of ineptitude time and time again, and I wanted to tell these girls, I wanted to tell everyone in that Starbucks, that they should be irate that effort and money had gone into dusting off the story and telling it again for a new generation, only for the filmmaker to wear the same blinders as the men who wrote the headlines forty years ago.
“What’s the name?” the barista asked me, black Sharpie poised an inch from the cardboard cup.
“Pamela,” I said, and stepped aside. The girls ordered a bunch of iced things with extra foam, though it was February and barely forty degrees outside. They couldn’t have been any older than Denise, forever twenty-one. My daughter used to beg me to take her shopping at that store but I could never bring myself to go inside because of the name.
It’s my daughter who pointed out that while there have been documentaries before, what’s different about the latest addition to the canon was not its faint art-house aesthetic—it’s the social media of it all, the women on Twitter and Instagram who are so unitedly over this shit they got handcuffs on the Oscar-winning movie producer and a grabby senator out of Congress in the middle of his term. It’s a climate that assigns more value to my side of the story too. Not that I responded to any of the interview requests, not even the ones from the good people at the good places. The risk was still too great that the media might buy and sell my story for parts, treat it as a garment to be tailored to The Defendant’s specific measurements.
But as I listened to those girls pick out the polite chauvinism in that tinny clip, I wondered if maybe it was time to fish my name out of the footnotes; unstitch the lie of him.
PAMELA
Issaquah, 2021
Day 16,145
Tina parks on the shoulder of the road, by an unremarkable Issaquah hillside.
We set off along the old dirt logging track, fern variety packs strapped to our chests. Overhead, the branches are mottled with tear-shaped buds, signs of spring after a gray, rainy winter in the Seattle area. The conditions have created the ideal soil environment for the plants to thrive, according to the manager of the nursery section at Lowe’s.
At the first lookout point, I ask if we can stop and take a breather. Tina has changed over the years, and not in the obvious ways most of us do—white hairs in weird places, a skepticism for the current noise on the radio. She’s become a hard-core mountain biker, her body gristly and tanned around the shape of her spandex. She’s one of those people who knocks out the advanced biking trail at dawn and unwinds at dusk with a cigarette and two fingers of bourbon.
“Good?” Tina asks.
“Sure,” I gasp, wondering what the hell my spinning classes are doing for me.
We come upon a dozen roses, too pink to be from Tina, wilting in roughly the spot where Ruth was left in July 1974. Tina and I don’t acknowledge them, but I have to assume Rebecca has been here.
I drop my backpack and drag open the zipper. Inside are two folding shovels, root stimulant, garden shears, a can of smoked Blue Diamond almonds, and not enough water.
“I’ll start here,” I say, indicating one of several copper markers planted seemingly at random in the glade.
Tina works a hand into a mannish canvas glove and sets herself up at another marker in this haphazard but precise design.
* * *