Don’t Look Back. Laura Lippman

      That was okay. Eliza didn’t consider it work, either, because she enjoyed it too much. It was the thing at which she excelled. She wasn’t one of the smarmily perfect mothers, packing ambitious lunches, never falling back on prepared treats for classroom parties. But she was more or less unflappable, rolling with things. In fact, she liked a bit of a crisis now and then – the science project left until the last minute, lost homework, lost anything. Nothing remained missing when Eliza began searching for it. She knew her children so well that it was easy for her to re-create those absentminded moments when things were put down in the wrong place. She was aware, for example, that Iso took out her retainer while watching television, so it was often found balanced on the arm of the sofa. She understood that dreamy Albie lived so far inside his own imagination that anything could become part of that world. His knapsack might be found perched on the head of the enormous stuffed dog his aunt Vonnie had given him, creating a reasonable facsimile of an archbishop, although Albie was probably aiming for a wizard.

      She was on her hands and knees, looking under the bed for Albie’s missing trainer – sneaker – when the phone rang. Albie had been forced to wear his sandals to school, which he didn’t mind until Iso teased him about it, and he had walked the five blocks to school as if heading to the guillotine, sniffling and wailing the whole way. Eliza had promised she would find his shoes before day’s end, perhaps even bring them at lunchtime. She snagged the shoe, marveling at how far it had traveled from its mate, which had been discovered in the first-floor powder room, then dashed for the phone, a habit she couldn’t quite break. Even when the children were in the house, present and accounted for, the ringing phone taunted her with the possibility of an emergency. Strange, because if there were an emergency, it would be much more likely to arrive via the chirpy ringtone of her cell phone. Got that one right, she congratulated herself, picking up the phone in her bedroom.

      ‘Is this Elizabeth?’ a woman’s voice asked.

      Reflexively, she almost said no.

      ‘Elizabeth Benedict?’ the woman clarified. But those two names were never paired, ever. It must be a telephone solicitor, working off some official list, perhaps one gleaned from the county property records? But, no, she used Eliza on all official documents except her driver’s license and passport, had since her registration at Wilde Lake High School in 1986. Did call centers have access to MVA records?

      ‘Yes, but please put me on your do-not-call list. I don’t buy things over the phone, ever.’

      ‘I’m not selling anything.’ The woman’s voice was husky, her laugh a throaty rasp. ‘I’m the go-between.’

      ‘Go-between?’

      ‘The person who passed that letter to you, from Walter. He wants to add you to his call list.’ Again, that raspy laugh. ‘Not to be confused with the federal do-not-call registry.’

      ‘Excuse me?’

      ‘He’s allowed to make collect calls to up to fifteen people. Of course, he doesn’t have anywhere near that many. Just his lawyer and me, as far as I know. He can add you without his lawyer’s knowledge. But you have to say it’s okay. Is it?’

      ‘Is it—’

      ‘Okay.’ The woman was clearly getting impatient. ‘And telling me isn’t enough. You’ll have to make an official request, via the prison. Then there’s paperwork. There’s always paperwork.’

      ‘I don’t . . . no, I don’t think so. No.’

      ‘It’s your decision,’ the woman said, and then promptly negated that obvious fact. ‘But I think you should.’

      ‘Excuse me, but who are you?’

      ‘A friend of Walter’s.’ She rushed on, as if forestalling a question she was asked all the time. ‘I’m not one of those women who moons over an inmate, one of those wackos. I’m opposed to the death penalty in general, but Virginia is where I’ve decided to focus my interest, especially since Maryland has a de facto moratorium. I’m a compassionate friend to several inmates. But Walter’s my favorite. Do you know that Virginia is second, nationwide, in terms of the raw numbers of people executed? Texas is first, of course, but it has a much larger population. And if you knew how the appeals process was structured here—’ That laugh again. She was one of those people who used laughter as punctuation, no matter how inappropriate.

      ‘If you really know Walter—’

      ‘I do,’ she shot back, apparently offended at Eliza’s use of the conditional.

      ‘I mean, I assume you know his story and mine. Which means you know he’s not someone I’ve been in contact with, ever.’

      ‘Do you think he deserves to die for what he did?’

      ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. He was sentenced to die for the murder of Holly Tackett, and her parents made it clear that they approved of the death penalty. I wasn’t consulted.’

      ‘Wasn’t your mom a Quaker?’

      ‘Grandmother,’ she said, unnerved by this piece of information. Was it something she had told Walter? They talked a lot, during the weeks they’d spent together, but she had been careful not to reveal much. Even at the age of fifteen, she had been shrewd enough not to encourage Walter’s envy and resentment, and she had recognized, if only in the wake of her capture, that her family was eminently enviable. She had avoided telling him that her parents were psychiatrists, for example, much less that her mother worked with the criminally insane. She described her home as average, an aging split-level on the south side of Frederick Road, the better to throw him off the track if he ever made good on his threats. She had no memory of discussing her gentle grandmother, who attended the Quaker meetinghouse in North Baltimore and thought the girls should attend the Friends School, despite the distance from their house. She had even offered to pay their tuition.

      Later – after – that option had been raised again, sending Elizabeth-now-Eliza to Friends, perhaps having her live with her grandmother during the week. But Eliza was the one who vetoed it. She wanted to go to a larger school, not a smaller one. She needed to be someplace where being new wouldn’t attract as much attention.

      ‘I bet your grandmother wouldn’t want Walter to be executed.’

      ‘This conversation is . . . unsettling to me,’ Eliza said. ‘I’m sure you can understand that. I’m going to need to let you go.’

      It occurred to her that she was being kinder to this woman – why hadn’t she offered her name – than she would have been to a telephone solicitor.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, with a sincerity that robbed Eliza of any self-righteousness she might have felt. ‘I get carried away. Walter would be the first person to tell you that. He’d be mad, if he knew that I had upset you. It’s just – there’s so little I can do. For him. Putting him in touch with you, it’s one of the rare times I could do him a solid.’

      Do him a solid. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that phrase.

      ‘He would be angry at me, for pressing you. That’s not his way. He would love to talk to you. But he would be the first one to say that he doesn’t want to bother you.’

      ‘Does he want to talk to me about something in particular?’

      ‘No,’ the woman said. ‘He feels bad. He knows he’s going to die. He accepts that. He’s been on death row longer than anyone in Virginia. Did you know that? He’s seen other men come and . . . go. I think he started to believe his turn would never come, but his case was so unusual. As you know.’

      Eliza wasn’t sure that she did know the ways in which Walter’s case was unusual, but she refused to be drawn into this conversation.

      ‘Could I have your name?’ she asked the woman.

      ‘Why?’ Suspicious, skeptical. Eliza wanted to laugh. You call me, on Walter’s behalf, you make it