Tricia O’Hare’s yearbook photograph from her senior year at Stadium High stared up from atop the papers Grace had spread out on the kitchen table overlooking the water off the front of the house on Salmon Beach. Her sister’s photograph. She could so very easily draw that exact image from memory. From the way her sister’s long hair rested just past her right shoulder, the left side pushed back. The leotard top Tricia wore offered a classic and elegant neckline. The dove necklace, the only real adornment. Her ears had been pierced after the photo was taken. Conner O’Hare wouldn’t let his daughter get them done until her eighteenth birthday. Grace could see herself in her sister’s eyes, her mother’s eyes, looking up at her in a serene gaze that could never have hinted what was to come. The image was in color, but over time the photograph had taken on a kind of pinky and orange cast, which only served to make Tricia seem even further away.
She was familiar, but there was no doubt she was from another time, another era.
If Tricia hadn’t vanished, Grace knew without an iota of doubt that she would not be sitting there. She wouldn’t exist at all. She loved her life. Her mother. Her husband. Yet gratitude for her very existence wasn’t in the offing. Anger was. She’d lived in the shadow of a phantom. Two of them, in fact. Her sister and the deliberate stranger.
She flipped over the photograph to vanquish it from her thoughts just then, to put Tricia out of her mind.
As if.
The coffeepot beeped and she poured herself another cup. The day hadn’t even started, but it already felt so heavy. She looked at the photo of Ted Bundy that her mother had taped to the outside of one of the folders. Sissy had used a
thick red pen to write the words: HE TOOK HER.
If he did, the answers were there somewhere in the twisted story of the killer from down the street. She knew his story, but still she reread the pages her mother had written.
After a period of rootless travel, Ted returned to the University of Washington and focused his studies on psychology in 1970. He’d found his niche, and his grades reflected it. It was as if there was something in those classes that pushed him to dig in deep and actually do the work. He didn’t skate on his handsome face, facile tongue. Later, in a moment of introspection, Ted would tell a confidant that he didn’t know exactly what drew him to that area of study-or what it was that sucked him into it so deeply.
“It wasn’t as if I wanted to be a shrink or anything. I guess I just wanted to know what it was that motivated people to do whatever it was they did.”
The friend didn’t answer back with the obvious. It was too inflammatory.
Ted, do you think you were looking for what made you into a monster? Ted, did you ever find out what it was?
In 1971, Ted Bundy took a job that always carried the ultimate in irony. At the time, Seattle was one of a few major U.S. cities with a suicide prevention crisis line. The Suicide Hotline, as it was known, was that number the brokenhearted and desperate called when they could think of no other way out of their misery.
One call, two months into his tenure there, was like so many of them. It came from a young woman at her wit’s end, deep into the drama and depression that had enveloped her since a breakup with a boyfriend.
GIRL: I think I might hurt myself. I really do.
TED: Talk to me. I’m Ted. I care.
GIRL: I have a bottle of sleeping pills and I just want to take them and, you know, never, ever wake up.
TED: I’ve felt that way, too. Everyone has. What’s your name?
GIRL: You have? But you’re working at the crisis hotline.
TED: Everyone has their moments of despair. But this call isn’t about me. I didn’t catch your name.
GIRL: Annette, my name is Annette.
TED: Annette, what happened? I want to know how to help you. I don’t want you to take those pills. I want you to live through this, all right?”
GIRL: I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I want to live.
TED: Are you alone?
GIRL: My mom and dad are asleep.
TED: Where are the pills? Can you put them someplace away from where you are?
GIRL: I don’t want to.
TED: What happened to make you so sad, Annette?
GIRL: My boyfriend, Brian, dropped me. Said I was “too much work” and that he didn’t want me anymore.
TED: You don’t sound like too much work to me, Annette.
GIRL: You’re nice.
TED: Thank you, but this call’s about you, Annette. I think you are nice. Tell me, are you really going to hurt yourself?
GIRL: (long pause) No, I guess not. I was just mad. I just wanted someone to talk to.
TED: Call me anytime you are sad.
GIRL: I’m sad a lot. I don’t know what time you work.
TED: I’ll give you my home number.
After the conversation was over, Ted set down the phone and swiveled his chair to face one of the other operators on the line, a pretty young woman with blond hair and light eyes.
“Ted Bundy, I should report you for giving out your phone number to that girl,” Iris O’Neal said, nearly wagging her finger in Ted’s direction.
Ted grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Iris. It just came out.”
“Well, I won’t turn you in,” she said, looking over at another of the counselors, a Goody Two-shoes who walked around with a clipboard marking down everything that happened on the lines.
“Thanks. Why not?” he asked.
Iris smiled. “Because I know you. I know that you can’t help but empathizing with these callers. You just can’t help but do good, Ted. You’ll be a legend around here, long after you’re gone.”
She’d thought about her way out of wherever she was from the moment she’d regained consciousness. Every conceivable scenario ran through Emma’s first groggy and confused, then sharper and more determined, mind. She considered a myriad of remedies she could pursue to subdue her captor, that is, if she could only get close enough to strike. Emma didn’t have many weapons at her disposal in the so-called apartment. There was the gooseneck lamp, of course. It was the most likely candidate. The teenager imagined how the fixture could do double duty. She could pick it up, hide it behind her back, and when the moment was right strike him over the head with it. In her mind’s eye in that scenario, her captor would fall to the floor after a single blow. She was a better hitter than Alex Rodriguez. She’d been infatuated with the ballplayer before he became a Yankee. She was sure, like A-Rod, she could swing, swing hard, over the fence. He’s out! Dead. Home run! Then, Emma believed with complete certainty, she would be able to take the cord and wrap it around her abductor’s veiny neck, cutting off his air supply until he was absolutely, positively, for sure, dead. When he was dead she felt pretty sure no one would blame her. Although he hadn’t raped her, she would say that he did-as if being held hostage God-knows-where wasn’t enough of a reason to kill him.
She looked around the dimly lit space. The only other weapon was the bucket that she’d used as a toilet. She’d like to drown the pig in the stinking bucket, but as disgusting and fitting as that was, it wasn’t practical. Her captor emptied it every other day. He filled it with fresh bleach-water and made her lay on the mattress while he took it and brought it back. She remembered how she’d been so embarrassed that someone had seen her feces in a bucket, but that kind of modesty was over by the first or second day. When Emma Rose came to grips with the fact that she had but one chance to get out of there she vowed not to blow it.
She just wasn’t sure when that chance would present itself.
Emma lay still on the mattress listening. For a second she thought she heard the voice of Ellen DeGeneres. Yes, it is Ellen! She loved Ellen’s show and the comedienne’s voice calmed her. She listened more carefully. She was pretty sure that the man who held her captive had gone out. If he was out, then maybe there was someone else in the house. Someone, somewhere, watching Ellen. Maybe whoever it was would save her.
