Rebecca smiled quietly, but with a certain quickness that made it clear that she had only a passing, casual interest in my present family, that her entire focus was on the other one that had been destroyed.
The drinks came promptly, and I lifted my glass casually for the customary toast. She raised hers as well, but when I moved to touch my glass to hers, she drew it away quickly, almost in an act of self-defense, and took a quick sip.
“I’ve been working on the book for three years,” she said, after returning the glass to the table.
I nodded silently, watching the steady gaze of her eyes. They were dark eyes, sensual, but not dreamy, and there was nothing in the least sultry about them. They were the eyes of an explorer, searching, determined, curiously ruthless. I imagined them in the face of Pizarro or Cortes.
“I finally settled on five cases,” she went on. “At this point I’ve finished four of them.” She opened the black briefcase she’d placed on the table between us and drew out a large manila envelope. “I thought you might like to see the ones I’ve already studied.”
“See them?”
“Well, I brought photographs of the men, and the victims,” Rebecca explained. “I’ve also written short summaries of each crime. You can read them if you like.”
She hesitated, her hand poised to open the envelope, her eyes leveled upon me, sensing the chilly dread that had suddenly gripped me as my eyes fell upon the yellow envelope.
“Of course, if you’d rather not do any of this …”
I rushed to assure her that she didn’t need to be delicate with me. “No, no, I think I should know about the others,” I told her.
She took a smaller envelope from the larger one, opened it, and pulled out a short stack of photographs. The one on top was in black and white, and it showed a tall, slender man as he leaned idly against the fender of a dusty pickup truck.
“This is the first man I studied,” Rebecca said. “Harold Wayne Fuller. Age, thirty-seven.”
That was all she said as she turned the photograph toward me.
In the picture, Fuller was dressed in loose-fitting trousers and a plain white shirt, its sleeves rolled up beyond the elbows. He wore a dark-colored baseball cap with the initials “AB” on the front, and a slender baseball bat dangled from his right hand.
“He was a steelworker in Birmingham, Alabama,” Rebecca said, “a union leader, very respected by the men he worked with. As a young man, he played professional baseball for a few years, but a knee injury finally made him quit.”
Her tone was very matter-of-fact, even a little rushed, as if this were a task she was anxious to get through.
“He had been married to his wife, Elizabeth, for fourteen years,” she continued. “They had two daughters, ages twelve and thirteen. Both girls attended the local school, and both were good students. No one at the school had noticed any signs of emotional disturbance in either one.”
She stopped, watching me as I continued to stare at the picture.
The face of Harold Wayne Fuller was the face of Everyman. It was plain and flat and impossible to read. There was no sign of dementia or murderous intent, of anything lurking beneath the surface, tightening the fingers around the baseball bat.
Rebecca let my eyes linger on the photo a while longer, then drew it away to expose the one that lay beneath it.
“This is the couple together,” she said.
The second photograph showed Fuller and his wife on their wedding day, a picture taken outside a large gray public building, probably by a stranger, and which showed them smiling brightly, Fuller in a baggy double-breasted suit, his arm draped over his wife’s nearly bare shoulders.
“Fuller married Elizabeth in the summer of 1952,” Rebecca added. “She had their first daughter, Emily Jane, the following year.”
Once again Rebecca drew the photograph away to reveal the one beneath it.
“This is Emily Jane,” she said. “Age, nine.”
In the small, black-and-white picture, Emily Jane Fuller was standing beside the same red pickup truck which had been captured in the first picture, the baseball bat her father had been holding now leaning against the truck’s closed door, her father no doubt behind the camera now, aiming it steadily at his daughter.
After a few seconds, Rebecca slid the picture away, bringing a fourth photograph into view.
“A second daughter, Phyllis Beatrice, called ‘Bootsie,’ was born a year later,” she said.
In the fourth photograph, “Bootsie” stood in a nondescript living room, dressed in a cowboy skirt and blouse, her long hair partly concealed by a large, western hat.
“Bootsie belonged to the same square-dancing club her mother attended,” Rebecca said. “They seem to have been very close.”
I let my eyes rest on the picture for a time, then glanced up toward Rebecca.
“Did he kill them all?” I asked.
Rebecca nodded. “With the baseball bat,” she said. “The police still have it stored in their evidence locker.”
They kept everything they took from my house, too,” I said. “I don’t even know exactly what they took. I just know that they never gave anything back.”
