Her thoughts took another obsessive turn. Scottie McRae was all she could think about.
“Aren’t you feeling at all relieved?” asked Gavin one night after work. They were sitting on the large fire escape outside of their bedroom window, wrapped in blankets, watching the sunset, sharing a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “He’s behind bars. He confessed. Those rednecks on the jury are going to give him the chair. He’s going to die in the Florida state pen. There’s no way that guy’s getting out of prison alive.”
“I guess I should be relieved,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen his face, it’s all I can see, you know? I see his face and I think, That face is the last thing Ginny saw. It seems weirdly familiar to me, like I knew him. And I just feel like I’m there, in that apartment, all over again.”
On the evenings when she decided to take a long amble home down Madison Avenue past the jewel box stores that sold precious objects to the precious people she avoided at work all day, she would walk through the canyons between towering skyscrapers manned by bored security guards whose revolving doors exhaled indistinguishable men in important suits and women in snug pencil skirts and white sneakers. She would watch them scatter off to Metro-North trains and buses at a very important pace, wondering how many of them had lost someone too soon. Whenever she wasn’t distracted by work or Gavin, or Ian’s pills, or long runs along the Hudson, she would try to piece together the details of what happened in Gainesville.
She was fixated on the duffel bag. Why did that detail stick with her? Betsy hated to admit it, but McRae had what people might describe as a sympathetic face, handsome even. He had a strong jaw and a delicate nose, and eyebrows that turned down at the corners, slightly, so he wasn’t likely to be pegged as a murderer or an armed robber at first glance, though he was both several times over. His eyes were what gave him away eventually, though. They were hollow and haunted. The look of them made her so sick she could never stare at his picture in the newspaper for long.
Of course he found Gainesville, she thought. The town was flat enough to suit a bike without gears, easy enough to navigate, big enough to absorb strangers in its daily routine without anyone noticing. And the sun’s glare hid everybody’s flaws for a while. There was a revolving door of people showing up for the party. How many times had Betsy turned away random guys just like him when they stumbled into the bagel store, drunk and desperate, asking for food? Maybe he was one of them? He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. It had been two and a half years since she left Gainesville, and she had filled her brain with new scenery, as many distractions as she could, in an effort to erase those memories. Now she was struggling to recover them and it brought out a certain recklessness in her. Every night, she fell asleep wondering how many times she could be in a room with a murderer and still make it out alive.
PART 3
CHAPTER 16
NUMBER 79
August 27, 1995