After Her by Joyce Maynard Page A

them—which is everyone—can sleep soundly again.”
    There were a million questions. What weapon had been used to commit the murders? Had anybody spotted a suspicious character on the mountain that day? Did the killer leave any evidence—footprints, an item of clothing? Was there any relationship between these most recent victims and the first one?
    Only that they were young and female and—from the photographs displayed on the screen—all of them dark haired and good-looking.
    A reporter asked how anyone could feel safe in Marin County with a serial killer at large. My father said they were posting police officers on all the hiking trails now, as a safety measure. “If you want to enjoy the trails,” he said, “do so in a larger group, preferably in the company of a male. We’re speaking of a ruthless individual, single-handedly capable of murdering two women at the same time, from the looks of it.”
    â€œGiven that four girls have now been murdered within a matter of weeks,” a woman asked, “we have to ask: Is the police force taking these crimes with sufficient seriousness?”
    â€œI have two daughters of my own,” my father said. “Nobody needs to remind me of the urgency here to find this man and make the mountain safe again.”
    This was us he was talking about, on television—Patty and me. I felt a glow of pride, hearing our father speak of us this way. He was thinking about us, looking out for us. Of all the fathers, all the police officers—all the detectives, even—they had chosen our father as the one to stand up in this place and reassure everyone, because he was the strongest and the best. And he belonged to us alone.
    T HEY PUT UP SIGNS AT all the trailheads. CLOSED, BY ORDER OF THE MARIN COUNTY HOMICIDE DIVISION. HIKER ADVISORY: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
    But Morning Glory Court was not connected by trail to the mountain. The mountain was just there, in our backyard. There was no way we were staying off it. Least of all now, when something exciting was finally happening there.

 

    Chapter Ten
    L ooking now at pictures of our mother’s young self, I can see she was a pretty woman, with a trim figure, slim ankles, and bouncing brunette curls. Knowing my father—a man incorrigibly drawn to beauty, with the endearing ability to locate what was beautiful in nearly every woman he met—it’s not that surprising he would have struck up a conversation with her that first day they met. He was working on the city road crew, fixing a pothole just as she approached it on her old one-speed bicycle. Her glasses fell off and he picked them up. Picked them up and polished them.
    She had been on her way home from her favorite place, then as now—the library. She was twenty-one years old—had never kissed a boy before—and she loved to read. For three years she’d been saving up money for college. Our dad was twenty-five, working two jobs while attending the police academy at night. Standing there on the sidewalk, holding out her glasses, he had actually started singing to her.
    When he found out she was called Lillian, he made a song out of her name.
    The affair would have lasted no more than a few weeks if my mother hadn’t gotten pregnant. In fact, it may have been over already by the time she found out. I know she rode the bus to his house then, knocked at the door, was met by his Italian father, and introduced herself. Shy as she was, my mother had always possessed a strict sense of fairness and an unblinking eye when it came to seeing that a person did the right thing, or failed to do so.
    Our father would have honored his responsibility and did. Their wedding—in church for the parents’ sake, but a small ceremony, pulled off on a low budget—was set for the end of November 1963. The day after the Kennedy assassination, as it turned out. My father’s mother had been gone for years by