1985

THE HAIR RIBBON, WALTER THOUGHT when he read the Baltimore papers two mornings later. That goddamn Madonna-inspired hair ribbon. When had it fallen off? Had she been sly enough to drop it on purpose when he pulled her into the truck? He had remembered to grab her boots, thinking she would need shoes, and those would have to do until he could get her more practical ones. No matter. Searchers had found the ribbon, and then they had found the grave. The paper, running a day behind events, said the body had not yet been exhumed, but as soon as it was uncovered, they would know it wasn’t her. The body had probably already been unearthed and identified, while he sat here with scorched coffee and runny eggs.

He was in a truck stop in western Maryland, near the fork where one had to choose whether to keep going west, toward Cumberland, or head north into Pennsylvania. East, toward Baltimore, was out of the question. Head north, head north, head north, his brain told him, then west. But his truck had West Virginia plates, and it was a funny thing, one didn’t see them much on the open road, away from his home state. And he had been looking for those blue-and-gold plates, he realized. True, they probably weren’t quite as rare on the Ohio Turnpike, but he was still reluctant to go that way, in part because he had never been that way. He wasn’t adventurous, he realized now. He thought he had yearned to travel, to see places far beyond where he grew up, but now all he wanted was to go home. Only he couldn’t. Not with her, and maybe not at all, ever again. What would he tell his parents about the time he went missing? Whatever he did with her, he would have to answer a lot of questions.

Elizabeth was flipping through the selections on the mini-jukebox set up on the table. Just thirty-six hours into their acquaintance, as he thought of it, she had already learned to speak when spoken to, not to yammer away about every little thing in her head. She had good manners, actually. This morning, she had ordered scrambled eggs and an English muffin, but accepted without complaint the fried eggs and wheat toast that came in their place. The waitress was a knockout in training, with flame-colored hair and a terrific figure, and Walter could tell she was used to not getting things right and facing no consequences. He had wanted to call her back, dress her down, but Elizabeth had said, “No, I’m fine.” It was clear from how she nibbled only the whites around the yolk that she wasn’t fine, but he admired her niceness. The waitress, all of nineteen or twenty, looked through him. Did she think Elizabeth was his girlfriend? Or that he was her father? Brother and sister, he decided. That would be the most believable play, the simplest.

The smarter move, he knew, would be to kill her. Kill her, get rid of the body-don’t even bother to dig a grave this time, just leave her somewhere inaccessible, there was still plenty of wilderness out here-and go home. Tell his folks he’d been on a fishing trip, had some car trouble, had to wait for a part, didn’t want to call collect and couldn’t afford to dial long-distance because he was saving every penny to pay the mechanic in cash. There was nothing to connect the girl back in Patapsco State Park to him, or any other girl. This girl was the only one who could hurt him.

Yet there was something about her, struggling to choke down her eggs, that reminded him of someone. She’s like me, he thought. She’s polite and nice, she does her best, and people don’t hear her, don’t pay attention.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

She was in the habit of thinking before she answered him. He realized this was partly because she was weighing everything she said, intent on pleasing him. That was good.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“Well, how old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“That’s too young for a boyfriend.” He knew that he had attempted to go with girls her age, or not much older, but there was fifteen and then there was fifteen. She was the first kind.

“There was a boy, at this camp I went to last summer, and we were kind of boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t really count at camp because you don’t make plans.”

“What do you mean?” He honestly didn’t have a clue what she meant, and he hoped her answer might shed some light on one of the many things that baffled him when it came to women.

“Well, at camp, there’s a schedule. No one can invite you to go anywhere-to a movie, or the mall, or even a McDonald’s. So you sit on the bus together, or swim together, and you hold hands”-she blushed at this. Maybe he was wrong, maybe she had done more than he realized. “It’s not a date, and it ends when camp ends. He called me, once, but we didn’t really have anything to talk about. I wrote him letters, and he never wrote back.”

“Yeah, I see your point.” He didn’t, not really, but he didn’t have anything to contribute, so he wanted to move on. “Look, what would you do, if I just got up right now, paid the check, went out to my truck, and started driving?”

Again, she did not answer right away.

“ Elizabeth?”

“I guess I’d ask the people if I could use their phone, make a collect call, and I’d call my parents, tell them where I was.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Sort of. Not exactly. But the people here, they would tell me, right?”

He looked around. “Lower your voice,” he said. “I’m serious.”

She flinched. It was amazing how easily he could control her. He liked it.

“I’d call my parents collect,” she whispered, “and then I’d wait for them to come get me.”

“What’s my truck look like?”

“Red.”

“Make? Model?”

She needed a second to understand that question, then shook her head. “I haven’t noticed.”

“License plate?”

“I haven’t paid attention.”

She was a shitty liar. “ Elizabeth.”

She hung her head, whispered the plate numbers.

“Look,” he said, “I have to keep you with me.”

“I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “If that’s what you need me to do, I’ll do it.”

“No, you would tell. Because you think it’s the right thing, and I can see that you’re the kind of person who tries to do the right thing. Like me. The thing is-I didn’t really do anything. It’s just that, no one’s going to believe that. This girl, she tried to get out of my truck while it was moving, she fell and hit her head.”

It sounded plausible to him, now that he had said it. It absolutely could have happened just as he said, and who would believe him? It was so unfair.

“But no one’s going to believe that, right?” He saw that Elizabeth didn’t believe it. Her face was interesting that way. Some people would call her an open book, but Walter didn’t think that expression was quite apt. An open book, glimpsed, was only words on a page, and you couldn’t make out the whole story. Her face was like…fish in an aquarium, all her thoughts and feelings on display, but moving kind of lazily, not in a rush to get anywhere.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” he tried, and this had the virtue of truth, or was at least more in the neighborhood of truth, but he could see she was still dubious. “I’ve made some mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. People just don’t listen, you know? Girls. They don’t listen. They’re in too much of a hurry, all the time.”

“We read this book, Of Mice and Men, in seventh-grade G-and-T English,” she began.

“G and T?”

“Oh, um, gifted and talented. But it’s my only G-and-T class.” She was embarrassed to be caught bragging. She hadn’t realized she was bragging at first, but now she was owning up to it. That was important. “Anyway, there’s a man in it, he doesn’t mean any harm, but he’s really strong, and when his hand gets tangled in this girl’s hair, he’s just trying to calm her down, but he breaks her neck.”