Chapter Twelve
Twelve
The sun was sharp the day Elsie first met Margot and Beverley.
She held a palm to her eyes, cowered in its shade, felt as if the rays might slice her skin.
She wore a new silk blouse for the occasion, something she’d never normally choose, and the tiny buttons at the back of her neck scratched terribly, as if the outfit knew it didn’t belong on her.
She’d rolled the sleeves back in a vain bid to cool herself down, and her freckled forearms had already started to redden.
Her English complexion would never get used to the California heat.
She glanced nervously at her shoes as she stood on the doorstep of what she knew was Beverley’s house, the house Bev had described in the letters they’d been exchanging for months.
As soon as Beverley opened the door—with that wide, beautiful face, those swimming-pool eyes, that thick head of blond hair—she felt frumpy.
Bev’s house, too, was beautiful, filled with the sorts of products Elsie could never afford herself: a Sony TV, a pink Bell Princess telephone—the one with the light-up dial that seemed unnecessarily showy.
She was led through the hallway to the kitchen, passing a living room filled with mustard furniture and that print of the beautiful Chinese woman that all fashionable people seemed to own.
She practically balked when she saw the striking red-haired woman who must have been ten years older than her and Beverley leaning against the kitchen counter, a cigarette held to scarlet-painted lips.
The smoke curled around her like something from those movie billboards you saw on Rodeo Drive.
The woman lowered the cigarette and flashed a white smile.
The kitchen clock ticked loudly above their heads. Elsie had been stunned.
This was not what she had expected the women—who had experienced exactly what she had experienced—to look like. In her mind, they were meek and apologetic. Women you wouldn’t look at twice on the street. Women who could be trampled by men, conned, deceived. Women just like her.
Beverley poured Elsie a drink, and the afternoon slipped into evening in a haze of Chardonnay and vodka cocktails.
Elsie was not used to drinking cocktails.
She spent her evenings with Dickens and Archimedes’ tangrams. So her thoughts soon felt fluid, dizzy.
They ate food that Bev had prepared—a frozen Sara Lee lasagne—no one commenting on the fact that it was hugely overcooked, and they discussed their lives, their husbands, their unique and horrific shared experience.
Elsie had to pinch herself on more than one occasion; things she had always concealed, things she had never dared share with anyone, were being splayed and dissected as if the women were chewing over the latest episode of Naked City.
She was struck by the intimacy of it all.
Until then, her past had been a secret stored against her skin, hidden from sight, a private responsibility.
In meeting them, she would have to cut herself open, show the blood.
Margot, Elsie felt, was overloud and, if she was honest, a bit obnoxious; she certainly didn’t seem as affected by her husband’s crimes as the gentler Beverley, who seemed so poised, so put together, but whose childlike vulnerability slipped out now and then.
Bev seemed to flinch whenever Margot derided their husbands.
“They’re animals,” Margot had quipped plainly, dabbing the corner of her mouth with a pinkie finger.
“Well…”
Margot widened her eyes at Beverley. “What do you mean, well…?”
“Henry was a good father,” Beverley countered hesitantly. “He doted on Benjamin. He bought him Christmas toys, made him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hawaiian punch.”
“Hold on.” Margot held up a palm, and Elsie marveled at the familiarity between the women, their ease, their comfort in challenging each other.
“Does tossing a ball in the yard with your son excuse you from slitting girls’ throats?”
Elsie bristled, expecting Beverley to react in horror. Instead, Beverley continued calmly. “What I’m saying is that I believe he could have been both things at the same time: a dangerous man”—she opened a hand—“and a good father.” She opened the other next to it, like they were balancing scales.
Margot blew a raspberry. “That’s stupid.”
Elsie had watched, entranced by the interaction, as Beverley had tilted her head patiently and replied, “And what did Dr. Garvey say, Margot?”
Elsie would later discover that the women had been seen by the same psychologist after their husbands were arrested.
Margot rolled her eyes and parroted, in a crisp British accent, “ ‘You are to ban the word stupid from your vocabulary.’ ” She took a drag on the cigarette she was holding loosely between her fingers. “But sometimes it just fits. Okay, not for you, Bev, but it does for some of the wives.”
The wives? Elsie was intrigued to hear women, presumably women who’d been through what they’d been through, discussed like this.
“Like that Harbinger woman. She genuinely is an idiot.”
“Who’s that?” Elsie dared to ask.
“Do you not remember?” Margot blew out smoke. “She flat-out refused to believe her husband was a killer. She launched an actual campaign to protest his innocence, told the press the cops had got the wrong guy.”
“Well, what’s so wrong with that?” Elsie glanced between them, unsure of what she’d missed. “She was being supportive.”
“He ended up taking a plea deal,” Margot said bluntly, “to avoid the chair. He admitted to twenty-five murders. Twenty-five! He used to make her call him on an intercom if she wanted to enter the garage.”
“But if she didn’t know—”
“She found a bloodstained mattress at their house!” Margot screeched.
“No, it wasn’t a bloodstained mattress,” Beverley countered. “It was no carpets. He’d had the carpets taken up.”
“That’s right”—Margot pointed at Beverley enthusiastically—“because he’d killed a load of women on their best carpet.”
“Oh.” Elsie felt foolish.
“That’s not even a smoking gun, is it? That’s a gun held to your head while someone says, Just in case you hadn’t noticed, honey, I get a kick outta killing people on your shag pile.”
“I heard she got a letter from one of the victims’ mothers, empathizing with her.
” Beverley seemed to know what to say to calm Margot, Elsie noticed, to distract, to steer the conversation in a different way when things got heated.
“She was deceived,” Bev continued. “She genuinely thought he was a good man, not a monster.”
Monster. It was an interesting term. Elsie was never sure that it fit for Albert, either, although she supposed there were plenty of people who would level the term at him, and not just because he killed those girls.
It was in a high school classroom that she had first met him.
He was standing beside the chalkboard; she was straight backed at her desk in the front row.
She heard some of the other girls snicker.
His sweater-vest had soup stains on it and his stomach slightly overhung the waistband of his trousers, but something in his eyes intrigued Elsie—the steady gaze, the expression that told her he knew the girls were laughing at him but he would never trouble himself to care.
He had taught English literature, Elsie’s favorite subject, and she found herself even more attentive in his classes than she had been in others. She was excited, she realized, for him to know what she was capable of, to know that her mind was suited to the subject, that she had a way with words.
So when he tossed her first graded essay on her desk and she saw a large C scrawled across it, she found herself reeling from shock.
I think you can do better, he’d written below.
So she found herself with one goal: to get an A from Albert Moss.
It became her sole focus; it consumed her, and she tweaked her essays every week in the hope that he’d finally be satisfied, that she would impress him.
D. See me, the next paper read.
There was no way she’d got a D. She’d never got a D in her life.
“You didn’t get a D,” he’d said with a wry grin when she hung back after class. “I just wanted the opportunity to talk with you properly.” Elsie had glowed as if a furnace had been lit inside her.
From that day on, she always hung back after English literature.
They’d discuss Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Zora Neale Hurston. “You see,” he said one day, leaning toward her so the hairs on her arm lifted as if each one were reaching for him, “everyone else might call you odd, but forget them. This is why you’re special. Your brain is remarkable, Elsie.”
Remarkable. Elsie had clung to the word and rolled it around like a precious marble. She tried to ignore what he’d said about others finding her odd. She’d certainly never got that impression herself, but he must see what’s going on in that classroom better than she could.
He brought her a book one day, held it out to her.
“It makes me think of you,” he’d said. He seemed flustered as he stepped in closer; Elsie noticed the raggedness of his breathing.
She took the paperback and turned the cover over.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She knew the book.
Knew it had been banned. Knew just what sort of content it contained.
There was a small part of her then that wanted to hand it back, to leave the room.
But here was someone who saw her for who she really was, what her mind could achieve, when everyone else, she was now sure, saw her as out of place.
He reached his hand toward her and brushed the skin of her cheek. “My English rose,” he whispered.
“Not all women who are duped are stupid,” Beverley concluded in her argument with Margot. “Think about ten years ago. Women were treated very differently then, seen and not heard.”
“You think it’s any different now?” Margot asked. “The way we’re supposed to behave?”
“I don’t know.” Beverley flopped back in her chair. “But in the fifties, women weren’t supposed”—she raised her fingers in quotation marks—“to ask what their husbands were getting up to. Therefore, they were easier to dupe.”
“And now? What’s their excuse?”
“I truly think some of them choose not to see what their husbands are capable of, even if it’s a subconscious decision.”
“Why would you do that, though?” Margot asked. “I just don’t understand.”
“To keep a family together, for one,” Beverley replied. “Some women—they see their husbands’ crimes as a sickness. That’s what Dr. Garvey said. They see it as something that’s afflicted them, and they’ve got to support them through it.”
“Idiots.”
Elsie knew her and Margot’s experiences were very different from Beverley’s; they had no children to steer through post-disaster fallout. She could not imagine what it must be like to know that you’d carried a child for someone who could do these things.
“Then there’s fear,” Beverley continued. “Fear of confrontation, fear for their own safety, fear that they won’t be believed.”
“Hmm,” Margot half-conceded.
“And did Dr. Garvey ever talk to you about dissociation?”
“Bev, I was just trying to get through those sessions.”
Beverley shook her head disapprovingly. “She said there’s a link between trauma and dissociation, that the brain can sometimes protect us from the truth, from ourselves, from others, like…an involuntary detachment from reality, a way of burying memories in order to survive.”
“So…denial,” Margot argued flatly.
“No, not denial. It’s more complicated than that.”
Elsie’s head filled with a strange sound as they talked.
This concept, dissociation—it wasn’t something she’d ever heard of, yet it felt discomfortingly familiar.
Buried memories—she knew those. She knew what it was like to remove your mind from a situation as a means to survive it.
She’d had to do that so much as a child.
“Not only that, but it’s difficult to extricate yourself fully from someone you’ve already spent half a lifetime with,” Bev was saying as Elsie’s attention returned to the conversation, “especially as a woman with no income and with kids to look after. You know how many women I know who don’t even have a bank account? ”
“Okay, but I don’t think staying together for the kids is going to cut it if your husband’s an axe murderer.”
Elsie had never met anyone who spoke about murder the way Margot did. She was electric with it, tossing the concept around like a kitten batting at yarn.
“I’d argue that it’s incredibly healthy not to want to have anything to do with a man who murdered people in cold blood.
Wouldn’t you, Bev?” Margot gibed. “Look.” She’d turned to them both.
“I say we make a pact, something that will be good for all of us.” She looked pointedly at Beverley.
“We cut them out of our lives completely.”
Elsie noticed Beverley raise her eyebrows.
“No visits,” she continued. “Easy for me, obviously. No correspondence, no second thoughts. They’re dead to us. Again, easier for me, but you girls need to move on. This way, they’re out of our lives forever. Deal?”
Margot held her hand out to them both. Slowly but firmly, Elsie shook it.