Wilde Lake(92)

I resigned from my office on August 1. I said I needed to spend time with my family. No one questioned this excuse or put it in ironic quotation marks. After all, I was considered a success as state’s attorney. And there was my father, suddenly in need of so much care. I am trying to keep him home as long as possible, but—irony of ironies—the dream house that my father oversaw is not suitable for a man in his increasingly frail condition. For now, we are making it work. For now. But I’m not sure how much longer I can keep him at home. And once he leaves, why would the twins and I stay here? We can live anywhere we want, only—what do we want? I realize it’s a luxury to be able to ask that question. But it’s a luxury for which I have paid dearly. I think I want to go somewhere far away, or at least far enough away that our name, Brant, means nothing except to birdwatchers.

Anyway, once I had resigned and was an ordinary citizen again, there was nothing to prevent me from calling Eloise Schumann and asking her to take me for a walk in the woods.



“There was this big piece of concrete, the remains of an old amphitheater, or something,” she said. Her stride was purposeful and strong. I found myself thinking: She’s a tiny thing. Then: Wow, I never get to think that about anyone; do people think that about me? Until recently, I never really felt tiny. Now I feel as if the wind could pick me up and carry me away.

She spoke incessantly as we walked, always about Ryan Schumann. She was girlish on the topic, as silly and giggly as the teenage girl she was when she met him at age fourteen. “I was short, but I had a good figure, I didn’t look like a kid. And he wasn’t all that tall, so he liked my height. He said I was like a little doll. He was in love with me, but, of course, we had to wait. For him to get divorced, for me to finish high school. I would have done anything for him, anything. So when he said, ‘Let’s pick up that girl hitchhiker,’ I said sure. And when he asked her if she wanted to go party with us in the woods, I was okay with that, too. But she got flirty when she got high. Real flirty.”

I asked: “Did you tell my father this?”

“Yeah, the second time. But because I lied the first time, no one believed me. After Ryan had been away two years, I couldn’t take it anymore. I told your father that she had died, but it was an accident. That she sassed me and I pushed her and she grabbed me and we were fighting and then I pushed her off me and she hit her head on a rock.”

“But that wasn’t true, was it?” My father had told me that Sheila Compson was much taller than Eloise, and at least thirty pounds heavier. He had reason to doubt her.

Now Eloise was not so talkative. She walked a little farther. “I swear there was an amphitheater. But it was more than forty years ago. I guess it’s amazing the woods are still here. One day, I bet there won’t be any trees left between Baltimore and Washington. When I was growing up here, it was country, real country. We hated Columbia, with its tacky houses and all those circular streets that don’t really go anywhere.”

“Cul-de-sacs,” I said. It was, admittedly, an inane thing to say. But Eloise Cabot Schumann was born in 1959 and she was acting as if she was the original owner of the colonial tavern that had become my family home. She was all of seven years old when ground was broken for Columbia. These words, these memories, these complaints belonged to someone else. Possibly Ryan Schumann.

“How did you meet Ryan?” I asked, knowing this would get her talking again. This was the story she wanted to tell. A love story.

“At the mall,” she said. “I was at McDonald’s. I thought I had enough money for french fries, but I didn’t. I was seven cents short. There were all these people behind me in line and they were so mean when I was looking for that seven cents because I was sure I had it. One man began yelling and the girl at the cash register, she could have just let it go, but she wouldn’t. I was about to cry—I wanted those french fries so bad, I had hitched up to the mall to get them—and Ryan came up and he gave me the change and then some, bought me a Big Mac, and we started talking and that was that.”

“When was this?”

“September 17, 1973.”

“You were fourteen.”

“And only fifteen when he was arrested. That’s why he didn’t want me to testify. He was trying to protect me.”

“And himself, I guess? From statutory rape charges?”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes, that, too. But, really, he did what he did out of love for me.”

We had been walking for forty-five minutes now. I didn’t really expect she could lead me to Sheila Compson’s grave, and I wasn’t sure what I would do if she did. She hadn’t been able to do it thirty-some years ago, when her memory was fresher, the landscape virtually unchanged. But what else is there to do on a long walk but to talk and talk?

“He told the truth. He didn’t kill her. And there was a rucksack, and the sandals were in there. One must have rolled out, in the car.”

“What happened to the rucksack?”

“We threw it away.”

“Why? Why didn’t you just leave it with her body?”

“It was a long time ago,” Eloise Schumann said. “I can’t remember it all.” She stopped at a dying tree. “It might have been here. I don’t know. We probably should have marked it. But, you know, it was an accident and we panicked because no one was going to believe that. Ryan was trying to protect me. So he buried her and we threw the rucksack in a Dumpster behind the Giant in Laurel. If that one shoe hadn’t rolled out in his car, if his wife wasn’t so mean—”