about your daughter. We’re taking good care of her. We’re taking care of each other.” This was something I’d seen stressed in televised interviews with the university’s director of psychological services—students relying on each other not only for safety but for comfort. Dennis choked up when Stuart said good-bye. He wanted to be the man protecting his daughter.
A day passed with no news—no leads on the killer, no new victims—and then another day passed, and then it had been a week. Five thousand students had left campus. There was a lot of nonsense in the Gainesville student paper, the Alligator—Margo sent us a copy—linking the murders to Ted Bundy, who had been executed a year earlier. (The theory went: Bundy was born on November 24 and executed on August 24 at the age of forty-two; the Gainesville murders started on August 24 and happened in a neighborhood off State Road 24; the second murder was on SW 24th Avenue, and so on.) I ran into Kathleen Beck at the grocery store—her twins had come home and were enrolling in classes at the University of Miami so they wouldn’t fall behind. Kathleen seemed confounded when I told her Margo was still in Gainesville, so I rushed to reassure her. “She’s not off campus anymore,” I said. “She’s in a dorm with a bunch of kids—half of them are boys.”
“Boys?” said Kathleen. “She lives in an apartment?”
“Not anymore,” I said, but then I ran out of patience with Kathleen, and said good-bye. That evening, Gloria called—she’d called daily since the murders—and after I’d reassured her that yes, Margo was still insisting on staying on campus, and still being very cautious, Gloria said, “You know, with all the hubbub I’d forgotten what I wanted to ask you.”
“Yes?” I was putting away groceries, leaving out ingredients for a stew. I had a bag of black beans in my hand.
“Eleanor Everest said she saw you the other day at the beach with a man.” I put down the beans. The tone in Gloria’s voice was one I’d never heard from her before: not accusing exactly, but stumped and oddly intimate, as if she were saying: Come on, you can tell me. “Someone with dark hair,” she said. “She didn’t recognize him.”
I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was deciding whether to lie, or how much.
“Was that you?” she said. “Are you not working anymore?”
“Actually, it was me,” I said. My voice was loud and unsteady. “I’m still working—I’m working more, in fact, as of this week—but I’ve been playing tennis at the Biltmore this summer”—Gloria knew this—“and after practice one day a few of us went to the beach. It was just so hot . . .”
“Who was the man?” said Gloria.
“My coach, Jack.” And then it occurred to me that the best lie was a stretching of the truth. Don’t deny, embellish. “There were—let’s see—four of us? Plus Jack. The women are wild about him, but he’s married—and so are they, to be honest.” I used a gossiping tone, as if I were as interested in the tidbit as she might be. “We’ve gone to lunch together a few times, several of us girls, and that day someone—I don’t remember who—invited Jack along. We ended up at the beach.” The story was fine, depending on when exactly I’d been spotted by Eleanor Everest: was it while we were standing at the car, closest to the road—this was most likely, I thought—or in the brief moment when we’d stood together at the shoreline, where we would have been recognizable only by people on the sand? I didn’t recall there being anyone close by. A betrayal of Dennis was a betrayal of others, of Gloria and Grady and Bette, and even Marse. I felt a little sick, lying to my mother-in-law. I felt lesser for it, and I suppose I was.
“Eleanor said you were picnicking—I thought maybe Dennis had played hooky. Maybe you should do that sometime, kidnap him from his office in the middle of the afternoon. That would be pretty, wouldn’t it? Take slacks for him so he doesn’t ruin his suit, and a nice fruit salad.”
“That would be nice,” I said. “It’s a great idea.” It was something I vowed to do, in that moment—sweep by his office in the middle of the day and abscond with him to the beach—and also in that moment, as Gloria said something about how they used to go to Key Biscayne as a family when the