She stood at the front door, the piece of paper in hand. Once through the slot, it couldn’t be taken back. But what could be taken back in this world? Nothing, really. Apologies, trials, even executions, didn’t change that. The past could not be undone. Bones healed. Everything else stayed broken forever. She has suffered, too, Terry would say during the trial, glancing at Inez Lerner, but Trudy wasn’t convinced that the lines etched into her face were anything but evidence of a woman who didn’t take care of herself and, by extension, didn’t take care of her daughter, who had failed to take care of Trudy’s daughter. Trudy hated Inez Lerner on sight. The hippieish clothes, the graying hair, the two bangles she wore on her wrist, which once, just once, clacked together in the courtroom, loud as a gunshot, making everyone jump. Why are all your children alive? she wanted to scream. What makes you so special? Inez Lerner had not loved her children more, or watched them with more care. Holly had been at the foot of the driveway, not in a park. Holly had been raising money to buy a wig for that unfortunate girl who had lost her hair during chemo, not wandering around aimlessly, just looking for trouble. Even today, she felt the childish complaint rising in her throat, the hot tears of frustration: It isn’t fair.

Trudy missed Holly every day. Every day. And now she was looking at a shabbier version of the life her daughter might have had. House, husband, children, dog.

She put the letter in the slot, feeling as if she had launched a message in a bottle, something that had no chance of reaching civilization, much less the person who needed to read it. Logically, she knew it was there, waiting for Elizabeth Lerner to come home, that it would strike her as cruel-a bucket of water propped on a door’s upper ledge, a rug over a hole in the floor. Yet to Trudy, her note felt insubstantial and flimsy, capable of disappearing without a trace.

That’s because what she really wanted to do was strike a match and burn the place to the ground.

35

NORMALLY, WALTER LIKED TO TALK to his lawyer. Blanding was kind and intelligent. He raised Walter’s game. He also made Walter feel like he was part of a larger world. He wasn’t all-business, far from it. They talked about current events and discussed, within ethical limits, the other men that Jeff represented here. Today, for example, Walter told Blanding again how happy he was that the kid, the grandma killer, had gotten a stay. It wasn’t a lie. He was happy for the lawyer. He was happy, in principle, even if he didn’t care about the individual involved.

Still, even with that conversational tidbit, Walter had found it trying, talking to Jeff, because he had something to hide. Are you sure this is a good idea? Is there something you’re not telling me? Walter had come to be a little conceited about his own intellect over the years, especially after repeated intelligence tests showed he was above average. Not genius, or anything extraordinary, but definitely above average, and that had given him confidence that he could hold his own in any conversation, maybe even control them. But it was one thing to control what he said when he communicated with Elizabeth, another to lie to Jeff, with whom he had always been scrupulously honest. Jeff trusted him. He had never asked why Walter had written Elizabeth and arranged to have her on his phone list, or even questioned Walter’s story about seeing her in the magazine. (Lawyers didn’t even have to know who was on their clients’ phone lists, but Walter had told Jeff so it wouldn’t look like he was hiding anything.) Still, Walter had never lied to his lawyer before and he felt bad, misleading him now. But if he told him everything-no, he would never allow Elizabeth to come see him.

“I mean, I think it’s wonderful that you want to apologize to her in person,” Jeff said. “But how it ends up making you feel-well, it depends on what you expect, going in.”

I expect she’s going to keep me from going to the death chamber, buddy. “What do you mean?”

“Well, she might withhold the, I don’t know, emotional experience you expect. I mean, if you want forgiveness or absolution-I don’t think you’re going to get that. She’s nice enough-”

“She always was a nice girl.”

“But she’s pretty firm in her insistence that people not forget that she was a victim, too.”

“She was,” Walter said. “She’s entitled to feel that way.”

“Okay, that’s easy for us to discuss in the abstract. But I want you to think about what it will be like, to be face-to-face with her, through the glass, and to hear her say that she won’t forgive you, that she can’t forgive you. That might make things a lot harder.”

Things. That was Jeff’s way of saying this was real, that Walter was going to die this time. Twenty-plus years, a literal record on Virginia ’s death row, if not in other states. Twenty-plus years, and he wasn’t even fifty yet. Who wouldn’t do what he was doing, in his situation? Who wouldn’t fight for his life?

The girls-the girls had fought, struggled to breathe. He had felt terrible, doing what he did to them. But if they lived, they would have told, and that seemed so unfair. It wasn’t his fault. It had taken him a long time to get to a place where he realized that it was possible to feel remorse without accepting the labels that society put on things. He was sorry that he had to kill those girls, but it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t stupid enough to say that out loud, even to Barbara, although he had confided in her a few details no one knew. To Jeff, he talked only about the remorse, his belated understanding that no one should take another person’s life.

But if he had come to that realization all on his own, why couldn’t the commonwealth of Virginia have the same epiphany? That was the true unfairness of things. He agreed: It had been wrong to kill those girls because it was wrong to kill, always. Always.

He decided to put Jeff on the defensive, make him be explicit: “So this is it, huh? No chance this time of anything stopping it.”

“There’s always a chance, and you know we’ll cover it from every angle. Appeal to the Supreme Court, ask the governor for a commutation.”

“Be straight with me.”

A pause. “It’s hard to see any other outcome at this point.”

If only you knew! It was hard not to brag to this earnest young man, a top-flight thinker, about the plan Walter had concocted. It was hard not to tell him that his discovery of Elizabeth ’s picture, while a coincidence, had happened after months and months of Barbara trying to get a lead on her. (At one point, she had even called her mother and sister, claimed to be an old friend, but they had been appropriately skeptical. He liked Barbara, surely he did, but that voice! You just couldn’t imagine a girl like Elizabeth being friends with someone who had that voice.) He knew that Jeff wouldn’t approve of his tactics, but he would be pleased with the result, downright proud of him. Jeff put him in the mind of Earl, the mechanic back at his father’s place, the one person who seemed to realize that Walter had something to offer. He wondered what had happened to Earl, if he had gotten out of the Marines alive, if he had ever opened up his fix-it business. Did he know of Walter? He hated to think of Earl, reading about him in the paper all those years ago, believing he was a monster, lower than low.

“I understand,” he assured Jeff.

“It’s just-it would be awful if this meeting didn’t bring you the peace you expected.”

“I can deal with that, Jeff. It’s not about me. It’s about her.” A beat. “How did she strike you?”

A pause on Jeff’s end. “Nice.”

“You said that already. That’s one of those say-nothing words.” Nice was ice with an n butting in front of it, making it even colder and more colorless. Nice was nothing.