“Is that what you want?” Vonnie asked. “I’m doing this for you.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to see him, but-if there are other girls, don’t their parents and relatives deserve to know?”

“Deserving is a tough word. Yes, it would probably be better for them to know. And better for others to stop pinning their hopes, as it were, on Walter Bowman. But it’s not your responsibility, E. Don’t shoulder this burden if you can’t.”

“I can, however. I can do this, and I should.”

“Then I’ll keep calling.”

Vonnie, now turning her attention to politicians, was cagey. She didn’t tell anyone what Eliza might accomplish in her visit until she made it to the top of the food chain, the governor’s chief of staff. Instead, she kept telling everyone that these were special circumstances. Eliza wasn’t even sure to whom she was speaking when she finally said, “Look, there’s something else you should know.” It might have been the governor himself. All Eliza knew was that Vonnie said “Uh-huh, uh-huh” many times over, scribbled a few notes, and spent lengthy intervals on hold before saying good-bye in her terse way.

“You’re in. But there are a few ground rules. Security in the facility itself is different, which is why this is such a big deal. You won’t be speaking to him through glass, but bars. They’re going to have the deputy put masking tape on the floor, and you cannot cross that line. Get me? You cannot come within arm’s reach of him, or the deputy will physically drag you away and it will be over.”

“So not an issue. Anything else?”

Vonnie paused. “They also want us to record the conversation.”

Us. Eliza liked the sound of that first person plural, actually. “Is that legal?”

“If it isn’t, that’s their problem. I could take notes anyway. I have a pretty competent shorthand. The final thing is, they want us there first thing Monday, as soon as he’s had breakfast. That gives them a full day to deal with whatever Walter tells you.”

“Deal?”

“The way I understand it, let’s say he confesses to you about, I don’t know, even as few as four murders. In each case, they want to be able to go to the families, tell them what’s happened, then have the families agree that they’re comfortable with the fact that there won’t be actual court cases, even though Walter’s confessions aren’t legally binding. Feel me?”

“Vonnie, you sound ridiculous when you use that ghetto argot.”

“Thanks. The point is, they can’t have a glory-hog prosecutor coming forward and declaring that he wants to try the case. Which may, in fact, be Walter’s real agenda, Eliza. He probably thinks that these twenty-third-hour confessions start the clock over. And this is a complicated issue for the governor. He’s anti-death penalty, personally, and has fought the expansion of the death penalty while in office. But he’s a lame duck, and he doesn’t like to interject himself into these cases. Yet if some grandstanding prosecutor from outside Virginia insists on a trial, he’ll have no leverage over that person. He’s already reaching out to governors he thinks might become involved.”

“As you said, Walter could be counting on this. But what if he’s lying simply for the hell of it? What if he confesses to things he didn’t do and then he’s executed? Is that fair to the families involved?”

Vonnie sat on the soft, fluffy, inevitably overdecorated bed. The room was even more quaint than their famed one in the Martha Washington Inn. Used to five-star hotels, Vonnie had been sneering at every item in the room-the pillows, the crockery, the embroidered samplers on the wall-since their arrival. But now she put her arm around Eliza, something she hadn’t done-well, ever.

“Presumably, he’s cagey enough not to overreach. In total, according to the governor’s people, there are eight missing person cases, from 1980 to 1985, that he conceivably could be linked to, based on geography and opportunity. If he claims anything off that list, then they’re going to decide he’s disingenuous and let this whole thing drop, very quietly. Eliza-you have to sign a confidentiality agreement with the state in order to have this meeting. Frankly, it pisses me off. They have no right to do this. But given that you’ve never wanted to speak about any of this, I didn’t think I was wrong to give that up.”

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. So that’s what it was all about. Vonnie wasn’t wrong, but Eliza felt a strange surge of anger. She had chosen to be silent all these years, but that was her prerogative. How dare someone else impose that condition on her? She felt as she had when she was fifteen, going on sixteen, and all the various adults-prosecutors, judges, even her parents-kept insisting her story was hers to tell, yet instructed her in how and when to tell it.

“Okay, so I sign a confidentiality agreement. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. At least I’ll be telling the truth when I say I can’t speak of it.”

“One more thing-”

Vonnie’s voice sounded dire, but Eliza couldn’t imagine what else she had to impart.

“They wanted to know if you want to be a witness.”

“God, no.”

“That’s what I thought, but I didn’t answer for you on that score. Said okay, conditionally. Look, let’s go to that Caribbean place for dinner if it’s open on Sunday. Go out for dinner and see a girly movie, something you’d never see with Peter or the kids.”

They managed the dinner, but the multiplexes of Richmond were short of the kind of female-bonding experience they desired. They settled for a Batman movie, in what Eliza still thought of as a dollar house, although it cost five. She found it appalling-not because it was loud and violent, and not because it was hard to see, or imagine seeing, the pain in the young actor who had died before the movie’s release, but because in Batman’s world everyone was a vigilante or an amoral opportunist. Each person thought he was right. But wasn’t that true of the less-stylized world in which Eliza now lived? Even Walter, for all his talk of change and redemption, probably had rationalizations for what he had done. But that was the one thing he had spared her. He had never spoken of anything he had done, not even the undeniable fact of Maude’s death, or Holly’s. Why was that?

Because, Eliza admitted to herself, he planned to leave her alive. That was his advantage over her, as much as his strength and brutality. He had decided that he wouldn’t kill her. What might she have done with that knowledge? Could she have saved Holly, after all? Did she have power then that she couldn’t glimpse or fathom? Did she have any now? Less than twenty-four hours ago, only a few people knew what Walter had promised her-or so she believed. Had she walked into a trap? Was she once again making her way up the Sucker Branch, about to stumble on something that she would be better off not seeing, not knowing, wandering too far from the path?

At any rate, it was too late to turn back.