I had let Benita drift out of my life seventeen years ago. There has to be a good reason for that, right? We had met for coffee every Tuesday afternoon for a few months after I testified. The last time, she dropped all official pretenses. She entered the café in tight black jeans and a Remember Selena T-shirt, with her six-year-old sister in tow. Texas Monthly had made Selena its tragic cover girl that month instead of me, so I was still feeling the naive bliss of being old news.
Not long after Terrell was convicted, Selena’s killer had been sentenced and locked up in Gatesville. She was confined twenty-three hours a day to a tiny cell because of death threats. The Tejano music fans behind bars wanted Yolanda Saldivar to die for her sins. While Benita and I had whispered about that, her sister carefully strung plastic beads onto a shoelace. She had tied the bracelet to my wrist like a purple-and-yellow worm.
I doubt that Benita Alvarez looms boldly in the official records of the Black-Eyed Susans case. If her name is mentioned at all, Bill and Angie would have glanced right over it. She was never interviewed by the media. She didn’t testify and only attended the trial on the two days that I took the stand. She was a minor player to everyone but me, drowned out by the thunder of Al Vega-or Alfonso as he calls himself now. Mr. Vega, 100 percent Italian, picked up the fonso to court the Hispanic vote when he ran his first successful race for Texas Attorney General.
When a Terrell Darcy Goodwin question is sprung on him, Mr. Vega declares in no uncertain terms that he would not try the case any differently today. He sent a birthday card to me when I turned eighteen, and a sympathy card when my father died. On both, he scrawled his name and wrote underneath: I will always be there for you. The cynic in me wonders if those words are just part of his regular signature to victims he wrestled into the witness chair. But Tessie? Tessie believes she could pick up the phone and he’d be at her front door in seconds.
I clear the search bar. Hesitate, just for a second. Type. Most of my teen-age angst about my doctor is gone. I’m staring at links to an array of bombastic papers he’s written for online blogs and psychiatric journals. There’s a new one since I last searched: “The Colbert Love Affair: Why We See Ourselves in an Imaginary French Conservative Narcissist.”
I clear the search bar and type another name, even more reluctantly. Click on the link at the top for the very first time.
I’m staring at the weekly blog of Richard Lincoln aka Dick the Dick, instantly regretting that I just provided him with a hit, even the tiniest bit of incentive to carry on. Today’s post: “Gasping for air.” It’s hard to look away now that I’ve come this far. Angie always wanted me to talk to him. Thought it might bump something loose. He’s a changed man.
I can barely stomach the bio, so I skim. Richard Lincoln, crusader. Nationally renowned death penalty lawyer. Author of The New York Times best-selling book, My Black Eye.
My Black Eye. His confessional, a year after the trial. Whenever I’m in a bookstore, I turn the cover around, even though I’ve heard that he donates half the profits to the children of prisoners. Because why doesn’t he donate all of them?
There’s a YouTube video link beside his blog, which my fingers click without my brain’s permission. At once, his voice is jarring the silent house, rising and falling like a preacher’s, still a saw against my skin. I hurry my finger to turn him down. He’s an upright cockroach roving an anonymous stage. Lincoln-esque, is how his fans describe him. I failed Terrell, he’s saying. I destroyed that girl. The Black-Eyed Susan case was the turning point of my life.
I can’t listen to any more.
He didn’t just destroy me. He destroyed my grandparents. The police and Dick the Dick worked in odd concert in that regard. The police ransacked their castle and drove off with my grandfather’s beloved truck as evidence. Nobody in Texas took a man’s truck unless he was guilty as hell, so even his best and most stalwart farmer friends wondered. It didn’t matter that the police said “whoops” months before the trial. Dick the Dick still hammered away in court. A tabloid screamed, Could Grampa be the killer? No, I can’t offer Dick forgiveness despite the fact that, in the last thirteen years, Richard Lincoln has used DNA evidence to free three innocent men from Texas’s Death Row. I pull the cover over the iPad. Nudge a couple of extra pillows to the floor. Slip deeper into sheets rough with sand from a war zone. Squeeze my eyes shut. Imagine the doctor lounging in pajamas covered with ducks in front of a Colbert rerun. Hope that Benita’s life is strung like a party with purple and yellow beads.
I’m floating at the edge of consciousness when Lydia finds a tiny wormhole.
It’s not like I haven’t dragged the Internet for her a hundred times. Nothing. Not about her or Mr. and Mrs. Bell. It’s like they are tiptoeing around in invisible ink while everyone else is galloping in screaming neon. The Bells were odd. They had little family, and made very few deep connections in town. Both sets of Lydia’s grandparents were dead. I retain vague memories of a distant cousin of Mrs. Bell’s who sent a poinsettia at Christmas. But how could a family simply vanish? How could nobody really care?
Over the years, I’ve imagined all sorts of outrageous plotlines about their fate. Maybe my monster killed them because Lydia knew something. She was always clipping out articles about the Black-Eyed Susan case and pasting them in a scrapbook she didn’t think I knew about. Scribbling notes in the margins in her cramped, intelligent hand. My monster didn’t turn the storm cellar into a family mausoleum, but he could have scattered their bones across the West Texas desert.
Or their bodies could be lying miles and miles under the sea with ocean garbage. The whole family could have bounced off on a spontaneous vacation and sunk to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle in a wayward craft piloted by Mr. Bell. He was always forgetting to buy a boating permit. They could have slipped, undocumented, under the waves.
My most logical theory was witness protection. Someone had to plant the For Sale sign. Mr. Bell dealt in recycled auto parts with Mexican mafia types in the salvage yards. He rushed off in the middle of the night all the time to meet them. Lydia had shown me his drawer full of hundred-dollar bills.
I do know this. If another family on the block had quietly slipped out of town right after the trial, and Lydia was the one speculating, she’d suggest that the father was the Black-Eyed Susan killer. His wife and daughter were in on it. They were spooked by my survival and now travel from town to town, changing their names as they go, killing girls.
That’s exactly the kind of story Lydia would have made up when we were under the blanket with our flashlights, and she was scaring the crap out of me.
Tessie, 1995
October third, nineteen hundred and ninety-five, 1 P.M.
O.J. was set free an hour ago, which makes me sick to my stomach.
In mere minutes, if I don’t screw this up, I will be, too.
This is my last session. The doctor is recommending a follow-up every six months for the next two years, and, of course, I should call before then if I’m ever feeling any distress. He’s taking a sabbatical in China, so he won’t be around, but he will recommend someone perfect for me. In fact, he already has someone in mind. There’s a little transfer paperwork to fill out, but he’ll take care of that before he leaves. How lucky, he says, that the trial only lasted a month. That the jury took only one day to reach a verdict.