Read Online After Her by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online

we’d been looking in the window, and anyway, by the time we got through all that, our father would probably be done saying whatever it was he was saying now, and they’d be back to Brady Bunch.
    We could ask our mother what was going on. Only we wouldn’t. Long ago we’d learned, whenever possible, to keep her out of things.
    So we just sat there, taking it in the best we could: the sight of our tall, strong, handsome father speaking to the reporters. Whatever he was talking about, you could tell it wasn’t good news.
    Right at this point we heard a low noise overhead, but growing louder, till it was a roar almost directly overhead: a helicopter. The helicopter was hovering over the mountain.
    When the special report was over, we gathered up our blanket. But we didn’t head back to the house the way we ordinarily would at that hour. Though it was mostly dark by this point, we trudged up the hillside that led to the outer reaches of the open space and the trail—one of dozens—that led to the peak of Mount Tamalpais, and the sound of the helicopter.
    Somewhere off in the distance I could make out the static from a two-way radio—police, from the sound of it—and still that roaring engine, and blades spinning, low enough that they actually blew our hair around. A couple of police officers were standing near a trailhead, talking with a group of people carrying flashlights. We walked over to them.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked. Patty, holding the blanket, was pressed up next to me. In situations like this it was up to me to do the talking.
    â€œYou two shouldn’t be out here,” one of the men said. “A girl went missing on the trail yesterday. At first they were treating it as a runaway, but someone found a bloody sock. They’ve asked for volunteers to carry out a search.”
    â€œLike maybe a coyote got her?” Patty could only whisper. At least once a year, someone’s cat or dog would go missing, and for a few days the neighborhood would be papered with flyers showing her picture and advertising a five-dollar reward. Then the news: another mauled animal body had been found on the mountain. Could be a coyote. Could be a mountain lion or a cougar.
    â€œDad doesn’t investigate when it’s animals,” I told my sister. “When they call Dad in, it’s because there’s been a murder.”
    T HE NEXT DAY THEY FOUND the body of Charlene Gray lying in a thicket of young madrone just below the Steep Ravine Trail, near where it intersected with Little Salmon Creek. She was twenty-one, newly graduated from San Francisco State, and breaking in a new pair of hiking boots, her boyfriend said, in preparation for a trip the two of them were planning on making down the Pacific Coast Trail.
    The details we picked up—that she was naked, except for one sock, with tape over her eyes, and in a position that suggested she’d been on her knees, as if begging—were not the kinds of things our father would ever have shared with us, or our mother either. This information we learned the next day from a girl from my class named Alison Kerwin, who had never shown any interest in being friends, before, but called me up shortly after the press conference—his second in a twenty-four-hour period—in which our father announced that the victim’s death had been ruled a homicide.
    She was the coolest girl in our class and had been even before the Elvis Costello song. Someone had spread a rumor at school that it was written about her, and a few kids actually believed that.
    â€œI saw your dad on television,” Alison said. “It must be cool having a real detective for a dad.”
    When I didn’t say anything, she went on.
    â€œThe killer raped her too. Sometimes these types of sickos have sex with a person when they’re already dead, but my mom said she was probably still alive when he did it. I guess there’s