Part 6 (2/2)

Lila, on the other hand, never possessed the arrogance of youth. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that, in math years, she was already getting on. ”If I'm going to make my mark, I don't have much time,” she told me during her final year at Berkeley. ”Niels Henrik Abel was only nineteen when he proved that there is no finite formula for the solution of the general fifth-degree equation. Gauss published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae at twenty-four. Galois discovered the connection between group theory and polynomial equations before dying in a gunfight at the age of twenty. It's like Hardy said, 'Mathematics is a young man's game.' Or, in my case, young woman's.”

Stella pulled two cell phones and a beeper out of her purse and lined them up above her plate, as if some urgent matter might whisk her away at any moment. She was dressed in an ugly but expensive-looking green suit. ”I've read every one of Andrew Thorpe's books, even Second Time's a Charm,” she said.

”This was my first,” said Claire. ”I loved it. After I finished this I borrowed Runner Up, Runner Down from Mom, and now I'm working my way back.”

”Just wait until you read Murder by the Bay,” said Barbara. ”That was his best by far.”

”I met the mother once,” Dwight said. There was a visible s.h.i.+ft of attention at the table; all heads turned toward him. ”At a fundraiser for the San Francis...o...b..llet. She was the nicest lady you could hope to meet. We swapped tips on growing geraniums.”

I doubted very much that my mother had ever been at a San Francis...o...b..llet fund-raiser. I knew for a fact that she'd never taken an interest in geraniums. He must have remembered her green thumb from Thorpe's book. Thorpe had taken two pages to describe the intricate layout of my mother's garden, which she showed him once when I invited him to dinner at our house. Now, I wondered-did Dwight really think he had met her, or was he just pretending he had in order to make himself appear more interesting? One thing I'd discovered over the years is that tragedy is like a major earthquake or an act of terrorism: no one wants to experience it firsthand, but everyone wants to be able to place themselves close to the scene of the disaster.

Maggie tapped me on the forearm. ”Have you read it?”

”Yes, but it was a long time ago.”

”Well? What did you think?”

I took a sip of my water. A bit of lemon pulp stuck in my teeth. ”It was well-written.” I couldn't bring myself, at that moment, among those people, to say that the whole book was a betrayal of my family on a monumental scale.

”Personally,” Maggie said, ”I don't think Thorpe has yet to write another book to even compare to his first.” She turned to Claire. ”It's a cla.s.sic, you know. Write that in your school paper.”

”But there are plenty of true crime books out there,” I said. ”What was it about Murder by the Bay that left such an impression?”

It was a question I'd never asked anyone before. After I read the book the first time, I wanted to forget it existed. Even several years after the fact, a perfectly good day could be ruined by spotting someone with it on the bus, or coming across a used copy in a bookstore. Every time I caught a glimpse of it, my memories of the day when my parents pulled out of the driveway in their gray Volvo, headed to the morgue in Guerneville, came flooding back.

”When I read it,” Stella said, ”I felt like I was there in the woods with that poor girl where her body was dumped. My own daughter was ten years old at the time, and it chilled me to the bone. For the longest time I couldn't let her out of the house without worrying that something terrible was going to happen.”

”It wasn't just that,” Maggie said. ”That's part of it, of course-the fear that it could happen to someone you love. But for me, more than that it was the fact that I felt like I knew Lila. What a sweet, smart girl she was, with such amazing promise. The kind of daughter any parent would be proud to have. You invest everything in your child-time and money, of course, but also your emotions, and your hope. So much goes into a life, so much goes into nurturing a child. As a mother, it's just absolutely horrifying to think that one person can put an end to all of that.”

”At least it wasn't a random act of violence,” Stella said. ”Nothing's more terrifying than the idea of being attacked by someone you don't even know.”

Nods all around. I believed that Stella had hit on a key aspect of the book's success. The ultimate effect of naming Peter McConnell as the killer was to rea.s.sure readers that it couldn't happen to them. Thorpe's version of the story gave the impression that violence wasn't random, it wasn't something that happened to good, ordinary people going about their good, ordinary lives. In the vast majority of cases, he wrote in the prologue, murder victims know their killers.

There was a slight commotion in the room, and I turned to see Andrew Thorpe walking through the door.

Thorpe had lost weight. Back when I knew him, he wasn't over-weight, but he'd always had a slightly dumpy look, a result of his distaste for the outdoors and his affinity for pasta and beer. Now he was trim and tan, his head entirely shaved. He wore black pinstripe pants, a snug black Oxford, and side-zip boots. The overall effect was a kind of Bruce Willis flair, but he wore the style self-consciously, as if someone else had chosen his clothes. At fifty, he appeared to be in better health than he was when I knew him at thirty.

A woman in a yellow pantsuit led him to a pedestal and introduced him.

”It's a real pleasure to be here with you,” Thorpe began, smiling broadly. ”You work on a book in solitude for such a long time, when you finally get out into the world to talk about it, it feels like you've been released from prison.” The Southern accent which had been just a faint holdover when I knew Thorpe was much stronger now, and I couldn't help but wonder if he was playing it up for the crowd.

”Speaking of prison,” he continued, ”I've just returned from Pelican Bay State penitentiary, where I went to see Johnny Grimes, who, you might recall, is serving twenty to life in a second-degree murder charge for the deaths of Stacy Everett and Greg Simmons.”

There were nods and murmurs. The waitstaff came around with the salads, iceberg wedges with blue cheese dressing. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had iceberg lettuce in a restaurant. In a hipper establishment, I would have thought the iceberg wedge was a new fad, but in this case I knew it had probably been on the menu for decades. Our waiter glanced down Claire's s.h.i.+rt when he set her salad in front of her; she leaned forward to give him a better look.

Thorpe spent a few minutes talking about how he'd become interested in the Silicon Valley murders. He mentioned his friends.h.i.+p with families of the victims, and I wondered what their take on the relations.h.i.+p would be. Had they let Thorpe into their lives? Had he eaten dinner in their homes as he did in ours? Had they shown him the family photo alb.u.ms, played him home movies of their kids in happier times? I imagined that, if they'd had a say in the matter, they would have chosen not to have a book written at all.

The waiters cleared away the salad plates and brought out the main course, grilled chicken with rice, a side of broccoli florets. Thorpe had finished his preamble now and began reading. I wondered if anyone else found it strange to be gnawing on chicken and broccoli while Thorpe eagerly read a particularly b.l.o.o.d.y scene from his book. It was the first chapter, and like the book about Lila, it opened with a description of the bodies as they had been found in the aftermath of the crime. It was his thing, what he was known for-what one reviewer had called his ”unflinching portrayal of the crime scene.”

While he was reading, Thorpe looked up from the book, made eye contact with the audience. I waited for him to see me. Would I throw him off balance? Would he fumble his sentence, lose his place on the page? But then I realized he wasn't actually making eye contact with anyone. Instead, as he glanced around the room, he kept his gaze just slightly above eye level, so as to create the appearance of interacting with the crowd without actually doing so. And I remembered that he used to do the same thing during cla.s.s. He confessed this to me one afternoon over ice cream at Mitch.e.l.l's. ”If I look in the students' eyes, I get nervous,” he said, ”so instead I just pretend.”

Dessert came. Just as the lunching ladies tucked into their flourless chocolate cake, Thorpe said, ”Any questions?”

A frail-looking woman at the table next to mine raised her hand, and Thorpe acknowledged her with a nod. ”What was the most difficult thing about writing this book?” she asked.

”Just untangling the web,” Thorpe said. ”When you write a novel, you have complete power over the events and the characters, complete control of the story. You start with a blank canvas. But with nonfiction, obviously, you're at the mercy of the facts. I interviewed dozens of people for this book. Everyone had his or her own version of the story, and every version was different.”

Someone asked how his wife felt about Second Time's a Charm. ”She hated it,” he said. ”Then she saw the first royalty check.”

People laughed. Forks clinked. The waiters came around with coffee.

”How do you find stories to write about?”

”I don't really find stories,” Thorpe said. ”The stories find me. In this case, for example, I had a friend who was working at Yahoo at the time of the murders. We were golfing together one day, and he began to tell me about how the organization had been turned upside down by the events. He talked about how fearful people had become, about the culture of mistrust that arose on the Yahoo campus after it happened. To me, that was a story begging to be told. I wasn't interested in the murders so much as I was interested in their aftermath, and I was less intrigued by the victims than I was by the people who were left behind, the way those relations.h.i.+ps s.h.i.+fted.”

Watching Thorpe work the room, I tried to recall what it was about him that made me willing to tell him such personal details, things I had revealed to no one else. Now, even more so than before, his persuasiveness was in full form, as if he'd spent the last twenty years perfecting it. He'd pa.s.sed the Sundays of his childhood in a Southern Baptist church in Tuscaloosa, and I couldn't deny that he had something of the evangelist's flair about him-a stagy, folksy presence that made everyone lean slightly forward in their seats.

There were still hands in the air when Thorpe smiled and said, ”Well, if there are no more questions...” and stepped away from the pedestal.

The woman in the yellow pantsuit instructed everyone to form a line in front of the signing table.

Thorpe signed quickly, head down, exchanging a couple of words with each person before sliding the book back across the table with a smile. As the line inched forward, I felt my stomach knotting up. So many times over the years, I had wanted to confront him, but something had always stopped me; for one thing, I didn't know that I could face him. More important, a confrontation seemed futile. The book was written, the damage done. What possible good could it do-for me or my parents, or for Lila-to open up the wound? But now, everything had changed. If the book was made of lies, as McConnell alleged, then Thorpe's betrayal was even greater. I needed to hear from Thorpe himself how much truth was in those pages.

When it was my turn, he took the book without looking at me. ”And whom should I sign this to?”

I didn't answer.

”Would you like me to inscribe it to you or just sign my name?” he asked, growing impatient. Then he looked up, pen poised over the page. His mouth opened, but he said nothing. He laid the pen down and moved as if to stand, but then appeared to think better of it, and sat down again. ”Ellie, I-”

It was the first time in my life I'd seen him speechless.

”Hi.”

”Hi,” he managed, his voice soft. His eyes looked wet, but the Thorpe I knew would never have become so emotional as to find himself on the verge of tears.

Finally he pushed his chair back and stood, leaning forward across the table, arms outstretched. Realizing he meant to hug me, I stepped back. He dropped his arms to his sides, glanced at the fans still waiting eagerly behind me in line, and sat down again. ”I can't believe you're here. You don't know how good it is to see you.” He was quiet again for a moment. And then, ”G.o.d, Ellie, you really haven't changed at all.” His Southern accent was all but gone. For a moment, he was the old Thorpe-the friend I knew before the whole terrible business with the book began.

The woman in the yellow pantsuit tugged at his sleeve. ”Mr. Thorpe, we only have the room until one.”

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