Part 2 (2/2)

The irony was that, if there had ever been a chance of my becoming ”the good daughter,” it ended with the publication of Thorpe's book. While my mother tried valiantly to treat me exactly as she always had, my father could not hide his disappointment. I heard it in his voice when he spoke to me, saw it in his face when he looked at me. Mine was an ambitious family-my father's successful financial consulting business, my mother's well-regarded law practice, Lila's burgeoning genius. Only one of us was average-a break in the genetic code, perhaps, a dilution of the Enderlin family determination to succeed. My mediocrity was a fault which my father had largely chosen to overlook when Lila was alive. With a prodigy like Lila, he could afford for me to be average. Even after her death, there was a grace period during which I suspected he was trying to give me the benefit of the doubt; for the first time in my life, he took an interest in my studies, frequently asking about my cla.s.ses, my goals. I tried to come up with worthy answers to his questions, never letting on that I skipped most of my cla.s.ses or that my promises to follow in my mother's footsteps as an attorney were meaningless. For a short time, he seemed to harbor a genuine faith in me. But after the book came out, everything changed. Our conversations became shorter and shorter, the silences between us more strained. I suspected it was an effort for him not to say what he was thinking: that the book was my fault, that, through my indiscretion, I had turned our family's private tragedy into a public spectacle.

Six.

THE SIXTH CHAPTER OF MURDER BY THE BAY, more than any other, s.h.i.+ned a spotlight on our home life. Ent.i.tled ”A Tale of Two Sisters,” it focused in particular on the relations.h.i.+p between me and Lila. As I read the book that night, three weeks after its publication, I cringed at the picture Thorpe painted of the two of us, the idea that we could be so easily summed up.

One was tall and dark, the chapter began, the other pet.i.te and fair. One was a math prodigy, while the other was always lost in books.

Both of these sentences were basically true, although the language implied a kind of fairy-tale dichotomy that had not existed in real life. Lila did indeed have almost three inches on me, and she shared my father's olive complexion and brown hair, while I had inherited the pale skin, red hair, and small stature of my mother's Scotch-Irish family. Aside from those differences, though, we looked very much like sisters-a fact that people often commented on when they saw us together. We both had dark brown eyes, dimples, and rounded faces. We shared my mother's mild cheekbones and my father's straight, serious nose. And both of us had lucked out when it came to our mouths, a happy accident of genetics that combined my mother's bow-shaped lips and my father's full pout.

On the page facing the opening paragraph of chapter six, there was a photograph of me and Lila standing together on the day of her graduation from Berkeley. She looked academic and respectable in a cap and gown, her long hair fastened in a low ponytail. I fit the image of the carefree younger sister, with my low-cut sundress and sandals, hair falling loose around my shoulders. To further the contrast, Lila never wore more than a dab of mascara and a hint of pale lipstick, while I wore lipstick in rich shades of red. The photograph had originally been in color, so that when it was rendered in black-and-white on the cheap, porous paper, my lipstick appeared even darker. Readers might study the photograph and be utterly convinced that we were just as Thorpe had described us.

Thorpe went on to portray Lila as painfully shy, me as wildly sociable. But to anyone who actually knew us, it would have been clear that Thorpe had grossly exaggerated our differences for dramatic effect. Anything that might disrupt the narrative as he saw it was omitted: he never said that until Lila's death, I had always been quite studious when it came to the cla.s.ses I enjoyed. He never mentioned that Lila, while basically a loner, could be quite friendly with strangers.

I understood why. ”It's all about character,” he had said, in one of several lectures he gave on storytelling during my first cla.s.s with him. Even though the cla.s.s was called Contemporary American Literature, Thorpe took liberties with the syllabus, frequently requiring us to write short stories of our own. ”Plot, setting, style-none of it means anything if you don't have interesting characters, preferably in conflict with one another.” From his standpoint, I could see how the contrast of the shy, intellectual sister with the wild, artistic one might have made the book more entertaining. And that, I believed, was what he was after. It wasn't accuracy that mattered in Thorpe's mind, so much as the overall effect.

From page one, there was a ”lean closer and I'll tell you a creepy story” feel to Murder by the Bay. I had read and enjoyed many such books myself over the years. While I liked my Chekhov and Flaubert, my O. Henry and Pavese, I could always get into a well-written detective novel or a riveting true crime tale. In Cold Blood was one of my favorite books of nonfiction. The fact that Truman Capote had allegedly taken liberties with the truth had never really bothered me. Years after I first read the book in high school, I still had a clear picture in my mind of sixteen-year-old Nancy Clutter, ”the town darling,” pleading for her life in the upstairs bedroom. I could still see the farmhouse as Capote had drawn it, with each member of the Clutter family isolated from the others at the moment of his or her death. But the unthinkable depravity of the crime didn't keep me from feeling a voyeuristic thrill as I turned the pages of Capote's book.

There are two characters in In Cold Blood who are mentioned only in pa.s.sing, so that one easily forgets all about them.

The eldest daughter, Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently...Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse.

In the aftermath of the murders, Eveanna and Beverly must have felt the blow more deeply than anyone else. I wondered if they had ever read the book, and if so, what they thought of it. When Capote was writing the story that would make him famous, did it ever occur to him to consider how painful it would be for the surviving sisters?

AT SOME POINT THAT NIGHT, AS I SAT ALONE IN my room, reading, I heard my mother shuffling down the hall. She tapped on my door, and I stuffed the book under the covers. ”Come in.”

She walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. ”Your light was on,” she said, smiling. I'd noticed lately that she was always smiling, or trying to, but the expression never looked quite natural. I reached over and held her hand. It was soft and moist with night cream. She was a woman who believed in minor luxuries. As long as I could remember, she'd used the same expensive lotion on her hands that she used on her face, claiming that you could always tell how well a woman took care of herself by looking at her hands. It worked; despite the endless hours of gardening, hers were beautiful.

”You don't have to do that, Mom,” I said.

”Do what?”

”Smile. You don't have to smile for me.”

She looked down at the comforter, and with her free hand she rubbed at a dot of dried red nail polish that had been there for months. ”Windex will take care of that.”

”Mom?”

Finally she looked up and said, ”I'm not doing it for you, sweetie. I read somewhere that if you force yourself to smile, it will actually improve your mood.”

”Does it work?”

”Not yet.”

I had an idea. ”You and Dad should take a vacation.”

She looked at me as though I'd suggested she quit her job and join a commune. ”Whatever for?”

”Maybe it would help.”

I wondered if she entirely understood what I was saying. Over the past year and a half, my parents had become so distant with one another that I worried their marriage might end. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before Lila died-I'd never known a married couple who seemed more solid in their commitment, more certain of their love. But lately they had begun moving around the house like roommates who feared invading one another's s.p.a.ce. I couldn't remember the last time I had seen them touch.

She reached up and smoothed my hair. ”We could go to Timbuktu, it wouldn't matter, I'd still miss her so much I could hardly breathe.”

I wished, at that moment, that I could have traded places with Lila. I imagined a scenario in which my mother's grief was smaller, more manageable, a scenario in which she had not lost her brilliant eldest daughter. Surely, if she'd only lost me, the recovery would have been quicker, the devastation less complete. Perhaps the family would have inched closer together rather than farther apart.

She hugged me good night, got up, and closed the door behind her.

It was four in the morning when I finished the book. I hid it under my bed and switched off the lamp.

What I felt for Andrew Thorpe could only be described as disgust. When I read the long pa.s.sages about Lila-pa.s.sages in which my sister was painted as a math prodigy, a loner, something of an oddball, a late-blooming beauty-it was clear that Thorpe had used me. Stupidly, blindly, I had delivered Lila right into his hands.

Nonetheless, in the matter of the murder itself, he was very convincing. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was compelled to believe his version of the story. The case he made wasn't foolproof. There was no forensic evidence, for one thing, and some questions remained unanswered. In no way would Thorpe's theory stand up to Lila's own rigorous test-the standard of absolute proof. She would probably scoff at it, calling it what it truly was: mere conjecture. Nevertheless, Thorpe's prime suspect-Peter McConnell-made perfect sense.

Seven.

WE LIVE OUR LIVES BY WAY OF STORY,” Thorpe said one afternoon, a couple of months after Lila died. ”Over time, we construct thousands upon thousands of small narratives by which to process and remember our days, and these mini-narratives add up to the bigger story, the way we see ourselves in the world.” He was talking to the cla.s.s, in a lecture loosely based on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but I knew his words were really meant for me.

Looking back, it was easy to see that the major story of my own life had been my sister's death. Andrew Thorpe's book had deeply influenced the way I constructed this story. I was twenty years old when I read Murder by the Bay, young enough to believe that the things he said about Lila's murder, and the things he said about me, were true.

In the world of mathematics, he wrote, Lila had found her place. When Lila was murdered, Ellie had yet to find hers. The sense of belonging and clarity of direction that simplified Lila's short life would continue to elude Ellie.

There were times when I wondered if, in describing my flaws in relentless detail, in using me to create a character to fit the story he wanted to tell, Thorpe had somehow altered the course of my life. The Ellie he put on the page was uncertain, unanch.o.r.ed, incapable of finding her way. Did I take his words too much to heart?

But there was one part of the story even the author couldn't have foreseen.

Nearly two decades after the fact, in a South American cafe, the villain of Thorpe's book stood before me, tall and soft-spoken, nervous as a schoolboy, saying, ”Do you know who I am?”

Gazing into Peter McConnell's dark eyes, I had the same impression I'd had the first time I saw him outside his office at Stanford-the sensation that his face was comprised of perfectly ordinary features which, put together, added up to something memorable.

”Yes,” I managed to say.

”May I sit down?”

This was not part of my story, not part of the plot of my life as I saw it. My sister's murderer would not simply walk up in a cafe and ask to join me. I must have nodded again, or perhaps answered in the affirmative, because Peter McConnell proceeded to sit down in the chair opposite me, lay his book on the table, lay his hat on top of the book, and place his large hands palms down, on either side of the book and hat, as if he did not know what to do with them.

”How did you find me?”

I was disappointed in my voice, which came out weak and uncertain. All the anger I had silently directed toward this man in the past, all the disgust, remained locked somewhere inside me, in a place I couldn't, at this crucial moment, quite reach. All that came was my astonishment, which must have been as obvious to him as the sound of Maria's footsteps in the kitchen.

<script>