I'd Know You Anywhere Page 0,6

trying to show him how to smoke pot. She said he was doing it wrong, but he was doing it wrong on purpose, wanting to keep his wits about him. He didn’t believe in drugs or alcohol, but if he needed to pretend in order to spend time with this girl, Kelly, Kelli, whatever, he would. He found himself wishing she wore a two-piece. A one-piece, that wasn’t going to come off easily, it wasn’t something you could slip a girl out of, bit by bit. He knew he had to take it slow, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. She was lying on her stomach, on a long flat rock. He blew on her neck, thinking of Claude’s brush. She wrinkled her nose, as if a bug had landed on her. He tried to give her a back rub, but she shrugged his hand off. “No,” she said. His hand returned, not to her shoulder blades this time, but between her legs. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t.” But she wasn’t quite as bossy and superior now. He tried to be sweet, kiss her neck, stroke her hair. He knew from magazines that foreplay was important to girls. But things just didn’t go the way they were supposed to. It was only later, when she was crying, that his mind began to catalog the possible outcomes—she would be his girlfriend, she would tell her parents, she would tell other girls, she might even tell the police, she was never going to stop crying—that he realized he had only one option.

“HOW’D YOU GET SCRATCHED UP, Walter?” his father asked at dinner that night.

“Stopped to relieve myself on the side of the road, walked right into one of those prickly bushes along the highway,” he said. If someone had seen his truck parked out on Route 118, that would explain it.

“Sure took you a long time to find that fan belt.”

“Like I said, I had to go all the way to Hagerstown, and they didn’t have one either. I ordered it.”

“Coulda sworn Pep Boys in Martinsburg said they had what I wanted in stock.”

“Nope, wrong size. People in those places, they’re just ignorant. No work ethic, no interest in customer service.”

That was all his father needed, and he was off to the races about the death of the small businessman.

By the weekend, the local news was full of stories about the missing girl, Kelly Pratt. She’d never get a chance to change her name now, Walter realized. A week went by, a month, a season, a year. He thought of her as Kelly Brat. He had showed her who was boss. It could have been nice, she shouldn’t have taken him down to the river to smoke pot, the pot was what screwed him up, he probably wouldn’t have been her first, and her just fourteen, according to the news stories. Slut. Druggie. The very fact that they never found her, that he didn’t get caught, that the police never came to speak to him, that no one came forward to say that they had seen Walter Bowman’s pickup parked on the hill above the river that day, that they never even searched near that part of the river—all those things proved he had been right to do what he did.

He found himself taking long drives on his days off, looking for other girls who might need a ride.

3

“HA—HA,” PETER MARVELED. “He actually wrote ‘ha-ha.’

“If it were an e-mail, if he had access to a computer, he probably would have put an emoticon there, the one that uses a semicolon to wink at you.”

Peter held the letter at arm’s length, although he was not the least bit farsighted, not yet. He was actually a year younger than she was. He inspected the letter as if it were a painting, an abstract portrait of Walter Bowman, or one of those 3-D prints that had been popular for a time. Examined up close, it was words, in that furious, fastidious purple ink. At a distance, it melted into a lavender jumble, an impressionistic sketch of heather-colored hills.

Peter had arrived home at seven-thirty that evening, early for him these days, but Eliza had waited until the children went upstairs to tell him about the letter. She might have been able to reference it covertly, using a familiar code: the summer I was fifteen. Over the years, this had been used to explain any number of things. Her need to leave a film that had taken an