Never Knowing

“I don’t know yet. I was going to make some calls tomorrow.”

“It seems pretty extreme. You don’t know for sure she was lying.”

“She was definitely hiding something — it’s driving me nuts.”

“And if it’s something you don’t want to know? She might have a good reason for not telling you.”

“I’d rather deal with that than spend the rest of my life wondering. And they might find my birth father. What if he doesn’t know I exist?”

“If you feel like it’s something you need to do, then go for it. But check them out first. Don’t just hire anyone out of the phone book.”

“I’ll be careful.”

The next day I called the private investigator with the slickest Web site, but as soon as he told me his fees I knew how he paid for it. Two numbers led straight to an answering machine. The fourth, TBD Investigations, had a bare-bones Web site, but the man’s wife was friendly when she answered, telling me “Tom” would call me right back. And he did, an hour later. When I asked about his background, he said he was a retired cop and did this to keep himself in golfing money and his wife off his back. I liked him.

He told me he charged by the hour, with a five-hundred-dollar retainer up-front, and we agreed to meet that afternoon. Although I felt like a cliche as I pulled alongside Tom’s sedan in the public parking lot, I was more comfortable after we talked for a few minutes and he told me anything he discovered would be confidential. I filled out his forms and drove away with mixed emotions: guilt about invading Julia’s privacy and giving out her address, hope I might find my real father, and fear he wouldn’t want to meet me either.

Tom had told me I might not hear anything right away, but he called a couple of days later when I was cleaning up after dinner.

“I have that information you were looking for.” The friendly grandfather tone was gone, replaced by serious cop.

“Do I want to know?” I laughed. He didn’t.

“You were right, Julia Laroche isn’t her real name — it’s Karen Christianson.”

“That’s interesting. Do you know why she changed it?”

“You don’t recognize the name?”

“Should I?”

“Karen Christianson was the only survivor of the Campsite Killer.”

I sucked in my breath. I’d read about the Campsite Killer — I’ve always been interested in serial killers and their crimes. Evan says I’m morbid, but when Dateline or A&E features a famous murder case I’m glued to the TV. They all had lurid names, like the Zodiac Killer, the Vampire Rapist, the Green River Killer, but I couldn’t remember much about the Campsite Killer — just that he’d murdered people in the Interior of BC.

Tom was still talking. “I wanted to be sure, so I drove down to Victoria and took some shots of Julia at the university, then compared them to online photos of Karen Christianson. It looks like the same woman.”

“God, no wonder she changed her name. So she must’ve met my father after she moved to the island. How long ago was she attacked?”

“Thirty-five years ago,” Tom said. “She moved to the island a couple of months later and changed her name.…”

Something cold and dark was unfurling in my stomach.

I said, “What month was she attacked?”

“July.”

My mind raced to calculate dates and times. “I’m turning thirty-four this April. You don’t think…”

He was silent.

I stepped backward and collapsed into a chair, trying to grasp what he’d just told me. But my thoughts were all over the place, fragmented pieces I couldn’t pick up. Then I remembered Julia’s pale face, her shaking hands.

The Campsite Killer is my father.

“I … I just — are you sure?” I wanted him to contradict me, to tell me I heard wrong, made a mistake, something.

“Karen’s the only person who can confirm it, but the dates match up.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was staring at our calendar on the fridge. Ally’s best friend, Meghan, had a birthday party on the weekend. I couldn’t remember if I’d bought a present for it yet.

Tom’s voice sounded far away. “If you have any more questions, you have my number. I’ll e-mail the photos I took of Karen with your receipt.”

I sat in my kitchen for a few minutes, still staring at the calendar. Upstairs I heard a cupboard door slam and remembered that Ally was in the bath. I’d have to deal with this later. I forced myself off the chair. Ally was already out of the bathroom, leaving a trail of raspberry bubble scent and damp towels behind her.

Normally I love bedtime with her. When we’re snuggled up she tells me about her day, part little girl as she mispronounces words, part little woman as she describes what the other girls are wearing. Back in my single days I let her sleep in my bed all the time. I loved the closeness, loved feeling her breathing next to me. Even when I was pregnant and Jason was out partying, I could only fall asleep with my hand on my stomach. He usually didn’t come back until the wee hours of the morning. When I flipped — and I always did — he’d push me out of the room and lock it. I’d scream at him through the door until I was hoarse. I finally left him when I was five months pregnant, and he never got to see his daughter — he wrapped his truck around a tree a month before she was born.

I’ve stayed in touch with his parents and they’re great with Ally, telling her stories about Jason and saving his things for when she’s older. She spends the night at their house sometimes. The first time, I worried that she’d wake up crying, but she was fine. I was the one who couldn’t sleep. Same with her first day of school — Ally sailed through it, but I missed her every minute, missed the noise in the house, missed her giggles. Now I crave this little window into her life outside our home, want to know how she felt in each moment: “Did it make you laugh?” “Did you like learning about that?” But that night Tom’s words kept flashing in my mind: The dates match up. It didn’t feel real, couldn’t be real.

After Ally drifted off, I kissed her warm forehead and left Moose with her. In my office I turned my computer on and Googled the Campsite Killer. The first link was a Web site dedicated to his victims. While the site played haunting music, I scrolled through photos of all his victims, with their names and dates of death below each picture. Most of the attacks were staggered every few years from the early seventies on, but sometimes he’d hit two summers in a row, then go years without surfacing again.

I clicked on a link that took me to a PDF map that had a little cross marking every location where he murdered someone. He’d moved all over the Interior and northern BC, never killing in the same park twice. If the girls were camping with their parents or a boyfriend, he murdered them first. But it was clear the women were his real target. I counted fifteen women — healthy, smiling young women. All told, they believe he’s responsible for at least thirty murders — one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history.

The Web site also mentioned the only woman who ever got away: his third victim, Karen Christianson. The photo was grainy, her head turned away from the camera. I went back to the Google home page and typed in “Karen Christianson.” This time numerous articles popped up. Karen and her parents were camping at Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in the West-Central region of BC one summer thirty-five years ago. The parents were shot in the head while they slept in their tent, but he hunted Karen in the park for hours until he caught and raped her. Before he was able to kill her she managed to hit him in the head with a rock and escape. She’d been lost in the woods for two days when she stumbled out of the mountain and flagged down a passing motor home.

In most of the photos she was hiding her face, but some industrious journalist found her senior year picture from the high school yearbook, taken just months before that fateful summer. I studied the photo of the pretty dark-haired girl with the brown eyes. She did look a lot like Julia.