The Drifter(73)

CHAPTER 19


THE FOLDER


February 17, 1998

Gavin was already asleep by the time Betsy came home, tears partially frozen on her eyelashes, angry, buzzed, and miserable from the unholy mix of red wine and vodka she’d consumed with Caroline. She flung her coat on the back of a chair, pried off her boots, and chucked them into a basket near the door. She sat down on the sofa in the dark and replayed the events of the evening in her head. Betsy hadn’t expected much from Caroline, but she had considered the idea that calling her before this trip to New York was, at least in part, an olive branch. It had been over seven years since Ginny died, since they’d spoken at any length, and to get her message out of the blue with the news she was coming to town seemed a little like a flare shot from across enemy lines, a call for a truce. They’d had that weird exchange at Teddy’s wedding. Betsy and Gavin didn’t invite Caroline to their wedding. Ginny, their peacekeeper, was long gone, and though history and experience hadn’t erased Betsy’s bitter memories of Caroline completely, they’d been blurred around the edges, worn by time, and she was beginning to remember the good in her, or if not the good, exactly, at least the fun parts. Betsy realized, too, that Caroline seemed like an amateur compared to the ice queens she had met at work. While Betsy hadn’t endured much hazing herself, per se, the stories of interoffice torture, the chewing up and spitting out of assistants, were legend. Rumor had it that one of her colleagues, a beleaguered assistant to the head of Impressionist Art, was driven to the edge of her sanity so many times that one day she snapped and urinated on a pear before she sliced it and presented it to her boss on Tiffany porcelain. A few times, Betsy had been allowed to stand in an officious-looking line on the side of the room and accept phone bids. Despite her effort to cajole Australian bankers, Hollywood producers, or budding tech entrepreneurs into opening their wallets, she typically came up empty-handed. Jessica, however, was a master. Once, she charmed an eccentric heir and notorious recluse to pay nearly a million dollars for a stamp. Betsy’s proximity to such major-league manipulators had bolstered her confidence, and Caroline seemed stuck in the minors.

She went to the kitchen to pour herself another vodka, with plenty of ice and a couple of olives, by the light of the refrigerator. Then, almost reflexively, she walked over to the metal desk she and Gavin kept in their “home office,” a repurposed dining alcove lined with DIY bookshelves, flicked on the vintage lamp that they had found on the street, and opened the large file drawer to look for the folder.

It was tucked in the back of the drawer, behind her tax records, a few shockingly thin manila folders with the critical mementos of her life—her birth certificate, a handful of letters from her father dating back to 1982, random ticket stubs. It had been two years since she’d searched for it, and even then it was only to stuff in an interview clipping with a screenwriter who claimed Scottie McRae was the inspiration for his popular, cult slasher movie, with a ruthless killer who posed as a sensitive singer/songwriter, like a bloodthirsty Bob Dylan. But she thought of the folder often, daily, for a while, and then not once in the past year.

The newspaper clippings, from The Tampa Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, anything Kathy could find in those early days after Ginny’s death, were yellowed and crumbling now. There was a flurry of renewed interest in 1995, around the time of McRae’s sentencing hearing. From these clippings she’d created a person, a composite character, a face, and a story to associate with the figure who haunted her, even behind bars and with all of that time stacked up against him.

She flipped through the pages, items she’d found on LexisNexis, the arcane legal research platform she used, pre–search engine, at work. There was a copy of his autobiography, cowritten with one of those bizarre women who befriend and fall in love with death row murderers. Through this research and reading, she thought she’d find something to soothe her, but it also left her feeling raw and cold, like she did on the sidewalk screaming at Caroline. Betsy was certain that she wouldn’t notice any new details on the aging newsprint that night, but the pain was starting to dull and she needed to stoke it to keep Ginny alive.

Betsy closed the folder, drained the last of her drink, and fumbled around under the desk for Gavin’s slippers, which she knew would be there. She stood up, went through the front door, and walked down the hall to the service closet. She opened the trash chute and placed the folder inside. She paused for a moment to consider what she was doing, acknowledge that she was drunk and angry and eager to “let go,” even just metaphorically. She wanted to will herself to be done with the whole mess, with Caroline, with this psychotic killer, with the haunting memories of Ginny. And then she let go. Betsy closed the door of the chute and its hinge made a metallic squeal as it slammed shut. She paused for a moment to listen to the folder rattle and thump as it fell rapidly down to the trash heap six stories below.





PART 4





CHAPTER 20


EXPECTING


October 26, 2006

Betsy opened her eyes and stared at the flat, white expanse of her bedroom ceiling. The daily purgatory between sleeping and waking was always the hardest part of her day. It was when the certainties of her life weren’t so certain. Time wound back and scrambled, and her dreams were still vivid. Inevitably, the images from those nightly visits to her past would blur and fade, and an odd nostalgia would settle in. Reality loomed.