True Crime: A Memoir
Author: Patricia Cornwell
Date: 2026-05-05 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Biography; Crime
Description: The No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell finally tells the story that rivals all of the works that precede her own. Patricia Cornwell is best known for her international bestselling thriller series about forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta. Every story comes from somewhere, and Scarpetta's began when Patricia Cornwell embedded herself in a morgue. In this achingly honest memoir, Cornwell excavates her own life, detailing her traumatic childhood being raised by neglectful parents, her father abandoning the young family on Christmas day, her mother being institutionalised twi

This memoir reflects the author’s life faithfully rendered to the best of her ability. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Copyright 2026 by Cornwell Entertainment, Inc.

Cover design by Terri Sirma. Cover photo by Annie Leibovitz /Trunk Archive.

Cover copyright © 2026 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cornwell, Patricia Daniels author

Title: True crime : a memoir / Patricia Cornwell.

Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2026.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025050101 | ISBN 9781538778449 hardcover | ISBN 9781538778463 ebook

Subjects: LCSH: Cornwell, Patricia Daniels | Women novelists, American—Biography | Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism | LCGFT: Autobiographies

Classification: LCC PS3553.O692 Z46 2026

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025050101

ISBNs: 978-1-5387-7844-9 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-8248-4 (large print edition), 978-1-5387-8437-2 (Canadian edition), 978-1-5387-7846-3 (ebook)

E3-20260312-JV-NF-ORI

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Copyright
4. Dedication
5. Epigraph
6. What drove me to it
7. 1
8. 2
9. 3
10. 4
11. 5
12. 6
13. 7
14. 8
15. 9
16. 10
17. 11
18. 12
19. 13
20. 14
21. 15
22. 16
23. 17
24. 18
25. 19
26. 20
27. 21
28. 22
29. 23
30. 24
31. 25
32. 26
33. 27
34. 28
35. 29
36. 30
37. 31
38. 32
39. 33
40. 34
41. 35
42. 36
43. 37
44. 38
45. 39
46. 40
47. 41
48. 42
49. 43
50. 44
51. 45
52. 46
53. 47
54. 48
55. Photos
56. Discover More
57. A Word of Thanks
58. About the Author
59. Also by Patricia Cornwell

1. Cover
2. Table of Contents
3. Dedication
4. Title Page
5. Start of Content
6. Start of Backmatter
7. Copyright

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To Staci forever

And all who have helped me along my journey…

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We will be gone one day, you know. Off like pilgrims on to progress.

—Patsy Daniels, April 17, 1980

WHAT DROVE ME TO IT

OVER THE YEARS I’VE BEEN ASKED WHEN I PLAN TO WRITE A MEMoir. I’ve said never. It’s my obsessive nature to move forward full speed without looking back. But as has been true of most important projects, this one picked me rather than the other way around.

In recent years there have been discussions about a TV series based on my life. The focus would be my intense research and tendency to get involved in real murder investigations. When I read the first draft of the outline and then the pilot, I didn’t recognize myself. This wasn’t anybody’s fault. Until now there’s been no accurate and full accounting of my personal background and career.

At the end of 2024, I was five months early turning in my twenty-ninth Scarpetta novel, Sharp Force. I don’t know how that happened. But some plots uncoil faster than others, the characters more cooperative than usual. Suddenly, I had time on my hands and decided to draft an autobiographical treatment for the proposed TV show. If it were made, the details I supplied would be helpful to the writers.

Getting started, I was frustrated immediately. I hate composing pitches, summaries, master plots, and resist talking about something instead of writing it. I won’t do outlines unless it’s after the fact. In college, I always created them and the index cards last. I’d rather jump straight into the term paper, essay, or story. Within days of working on the treatment, I quit and began writing this memoir.

It wouldn’t have been possible were it not for my sister-in-law Mary. She’s been my archivist for more than twenty years, and has helped me research my life. This memoir isn’t as much about me as everyone else who’s had a starring role in my saga, most of all my brothers, Jim and John.

When we were growing up, they blocked out distressing episodes. But I don’t have that special talent. Now that so many people are gone, including my parents, my former husband, Charlie Cornwell, and others instrumental in my life, it’s important to tell what I remember. For some reason, I don’t forget drama, fantastic or awful.

Extreme emotions capture scenes the way light etches images on a photographic negative. I can envision what people looked like, what they were wearing, sometimes what they said, and most of all what I felt about them. This is a helpful quality for a writer, and a way of fixing programming errors.

I believe that life is a series of self-corrections if we’re willing to make them, and we don’t always understand what’s going on while it’s happening. Often what I experience, research, and imagine is intended for the future. The best example is my first full-length book. I began it the summer of 1976 when I’d just turned twenty and was transferring to Davidson College in North Carolina.

The so-called novel is a detailed recounting of my first nineteen years. I think of it as a naïve and amateurish Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Only in this case the author was a young woman who’d never heard of James Joyce or much else considered literature. I wasn’t well read and never will be.

Over the summer of 1976, I’d mail installments of my writing to Davidson English professor Charlie Lloyd. An eccentric genius, he knew more about Shakespeare than any mortal and had taught himself seven languages. But he refused to get a Ph.D. When the frustrated Davidson president Sam Spencer demanded to know why, Charlie Lloyd famously answered, “Who would examine me?”

Mr. Lloyd, as I called him, became my mentor before I arrived on the Davidson campus in late August. He was incredibly generous to a largely illiterate stranger, his appraisals honest but kind. At that time, I was writing in fractured sentences, ignoring rules while exploring how to create scenes without words, punctuation, and structure getting in the way.

Mr. Lloyd commented that my staccato style was jolting and annoying. Remotely, he was tutoring me, answering every time I wrote. While at Davidson, I often was at his home, where he introduced me to sputtered eggs that he scrambled with cream and butter. I’d leave bottles of his favorite beer, St. Pauli Girl, in the pigeonhole where he got his interoffice mail.

I spent most of my spare time at Davidson working on various drafts of my book. From the start it was an autobiography that I paraded as fiction. With rare exception, the only thing I made up were the characters’ names. The title of my first draft was The Man with the Golden Key, an allusion to the George MacDonald fairy tale about a boy who finds a golden key at the end of a rainbow. But what does it unlock? He must discover that next.

The eventual title of my book was Forum, as in the ancient Roman Forum, the site of legal trials. Ironically, forum is where the word forensic comes from. The root of it is the Latin word forensis or of the forum. Specifically, forensic refers to matters of interest to the courts, and that’s the point of forensic science and medicine. I didn’t know this when I was in college.

Ultimately, my book was three hundred pages long, composed on a pawnshop manual Royal typewriter. With each draft, I’d recycle the paper of the previous one, using the backs of pages for something else. After the final manuscript was done my senior year, I never looked at it again until half a century later.

Without that early effort, and journals I’ve kept throughout my life, I couldn’t have pieced together my past. Many of the vivid details I knew at the time I wouldn’t remember now. This memoir has been part of the master plan all along. Only I didn’t know it.

I wish I could time travel and tell my young self not to be discouraged. I imagine her typing away as if possessed while her classmates participated in extracurricular activities and partied. I would whisper to young Patsy Daniels that things would turn out far better than she dreamed. Don’t despair and never quit.

You’ll be shocked to find out what your future holds, I’d confide. Most of it magical and wonderful. And the rest you will survive.

I didn’t grow up wanting to be an author. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that one day I’d be known for graphic thrillers that read like true crime. But the foreshadowing was there early on. By the age of nine I was telling scary stories that made the neighborhood children cry and run home. I’d feel chagrined, a touch remorseful, but not for long. They always came back for more.

I can’t abide violence, which is why I feel compelled to write about it. I hate to think about anything being killed. That’s not to say I haven’t taken a few lives, mostly during my early years. Fish. Crabs. Bugs. During a brief but shameful period, I collected butterflies, writing a poem about it that I titled “Murder in the Lilacs.” I went dove hunting once and am sorry for all of it.

People assume I enjoy spending time in morgues, and at the scenes of murders, suicides, and violent accidents. It must be a thrill talking to serial killers on death row. Obviously, I think it’s the coolest thing to see an autopsy. How amazing to watch a dead body shoved into a crematorium oven. Or to witness an execution.

I find most of my research all but unbearable. I endure it because I must if I’m to tell the truth in my stories, whether nonfiction or imagined. To witness gore and suffering is fascinating while indescribably awful, and I pay a high price. Disaster and violence await around every corner. Wherever I am, I spot something potentially fatal.

An escalator can cut you to ribbons if you’re not paying attention. The scaffolding you foolishly walked under could collapse. The backhoe gouging the earth on the roadside is way too close to cars going past. The person loitering suspiciously might be a serial killer. If I’m not careful I’ll imagine the scenario to its gruesome conclusion while making sure everybody else does too.

One might suppose that my exposure to virtually any horror you can think of would have made me insensitive. I’d be impervious. It’s the opposite, as if I have no emotional skin left as a barrier. I get upset, even teary, when I see cruelty. I switch the channel when an animal rescue commercial comes on.

I’m squeamish and can’t watch scary or depressing movies. I avert my gaze during gory scenes or get up and leave the room. I avoid shows like Grey’s Anatomy while eating dinner. I have a list of food associations that are best left unmentioned. But I will anyway. Topping the list are beef liver, steak tartare, and borscht.

I became a published author for the first time at the young age of twenty-eight, but nothing about my career has been easy. This is one of many reasons I tell people, especially artists, not to give up. If anybody’s had good reason to on countless occasions, it’s me. My early life was a string of failures. I was convinced I’d never amount to a thing. I would die young, possibly by my own hand.

If nothing else, this story is my way of encouraging others never to stop trying, and to take a big swing at life. Like that flawed book I wrote in college, there are reasons for what happens, and we may not know them until much later. In January 2025 as I began sifting through the manuscript of Forum, I felt as if Patsy Daniels and Patricia Cornwell finally found each other. Patsy was helping with my story, and I was helping with hers.

On August 29, 1977, the beginning of my junior year in college, I noted in my journal:

The first draft of my novel is finished. I wonder if my gut rending effort will be destined to rest in a dusty box on a closet shelf. If so, I can only say that I would have written it anyway.

1

I AWOKE TO A TERRIBLE COMMOTION, SOMETHING WRONG THAT January morning in 1966. Sensing trouble in my mother’s rapid footsteps up and down the hall, I hurried into pants, a pullover shirt, thick socks.

My brothers’ urgent voices sounded from their bedroom.

“No, Mom…!”

“MOM…!”

“PLEASE STOP…!”

Out my window the gray sky hung low over the whited foothills of western North Carolina. Fresh snow was piled deep on tree branches, a male cardinal a splash of blood red on the birdfeeder. Icicles looked like glass stalactites and daggers, the rising sun a ghostly smudge.

While I’d slept, a winter storm had dumped another six or seven inches, frosting tree trunks and evergreens, the rhododendron leaves tightly curled against the cold. Footprints, sled tracks from earlier were covered, big flakes drifting down like feathers. In front of our wooded property, Kanawha Drive was blank and silent.

There would be no church today, the schools closed again tomorrow as they’d been since Christmas, the buses unable to manage the conditions. It was now late January, and no one was going anywhere without chains on tires or four-wheel drive. Many businesses were closed. Our car had been stuck for a while at the bottom of the hill near Montreat’s gated entrance.

The next town over was Black Mountain, where Mom grocery shopped and ran other errands. She hadn’t been to the store or anywhere else for weeks. Alone with no help, she was overwhelmed by three children. I was nine and in the fourth grade. Jim was in the sixth, and John in the first.

Staying home from school was paradise for us at least. We loved snow, and the first time I saw it I was filled with wonder. I remember sunlight glaring off whiteness, the snow crunching and groaning as I moved around and rolled snowballs. My brothers and I would race each other out the door to be the first leaving footprints.

Mom took us on trudges through the neighborhood, and I was astonished by our breath fogging out. She showed us how to make snow angels, the ground covered with wings and body shapes while we laughed. I remember gathering small handfuls of snow, disappointed it had no flavor as I ate it until my tongue was numb. I tried a bowl with maple syrup but found it inedible.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mom said the first times the flakes floated down after we’d moved from Miami. “I haven’t seen snow since growing up in Chicago.”

She wasn’t talking like that anymore at the beginning of 1966. Now she made strange comments that I found unsettling.

“God is forever trying to clean up our messes,” she said the other day when looking out the window. “He covers them over with a robe of whiteness. Then we sully ourselves again and again.”

While home from school, I’d been making snowmen with pine branch arms and comical faces. Building an igloo, I’d sequester myself in quiet whiteness, pretending I was in a spaceship. The winding mountain roads were treacherous when the top layer froze into an icy slick. Jim and I rubbed candle stubs over the runners of our sleds to make them faster.

John was a bit young to keep up with his big brother, and I shouldn’t have tried. For some unknown reason I tended to do what Jim said. I’d taste a hot toothpick that burned my mouth, climb the sheer rocky face of Lookout Mountain, run through a briar patch, let go of my bicycle handlebars, pick up a worm.

I’d race after him on my sled, the red metal runners sparking over exposed patches of pavement. It was like following in the fiery wake of a comet or dragon, dragging my toes when trying to brake, careening and fishtailing. Inevitably, he’d lose me around a tight turn, and I’d crash through the woods or upend in a ditch, my galoshes in the air.

Back up the hill we’d tramp, tugging our sleds by ropes lashed to the wooden steering handles. We’d hurtle downhill again and again, never able to get enough. Sometimes we’d resume after supper when it was dark and the roads the iciest. I scarcely could see anything except our sparks.

After the first snow earlier in the month, Jim took me on a long slog through the woods, emerging in what looked like an overgrown logging trail. He showed me the deep shaft of an abandoned mica mine that was caving in, rotted scaffolding inside. I watched him pitch a stone into the dark mouth and it took a long time to hit bottom, a thrill of fear running up my spine.

That night he told Mom about it while she drank Russian tea near the fireplace, fingerlike flames curling over logs. Our wet gloves and socks were steaming on the mesh screen, and I stared at a charred chunk of wood until it became a shark with a fiery knothole eye. Mom frowned as she heard about the mica mine we’d visited.

“You’re not to go there ever again,” she said firmly. “You could have slipped on the snow and fallen down the shaft, and no one would have ever found you!”

It’s a wonder we survived exploring, sledding, not to mention snowball fights when Jim added gravel to his frozen ammunition. Predictably, John and I ended up fleeing to the house, crying, and complaining, tracking water over the hardwood floors and braided rugs.

“Mom!”

“Jimmy hit me again!”

“MAKE HIM STOP!”

As this was going on the front door would slam shut, Jim stomping in to make his rebuttal.

“They started it!” was his usual defense.

Sometimes it was true. I’d tease him and get what was coming. But often his incursions were unprovoked, and when it was payback time, I wasn’t obvious. Better to be stealthy if I wanted to avoid punishment. One day when I was especially miffed by something he’d done, I sneaked into his bedroom when no one was home.

On the windowsill was his prized soda pop bottle that had been twisted and elongated by a glass blower, a souvenir from a visit with our aunt and uncle in Chicago. I picked up Jim’s Daisy B.B. gun and shot his precious bottle, not intending to cause such extensive damage, putting a hole in the window screen while at it. Of course, he found out, and Mom wasn’t happy either.

It didn’t help that she was obsessive-compulsive, having no peace when things were dirty, off center, out of place. She’d been cleaning up after us nonstop since that snowy January morning in 1966, constantly straightening the bath towel in front of the door. The floor was filthy from us tracking snow in and out. Literally, she was at the end of her rope, and we were too young to understand.

I knew she was irritable or sad, rarely smiling. I could feel her stress as she made oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, grilled Cheese Whiz sandwiches, Campbell’s vegetable soup. I sensed her despair as our provisions dwindled, the cupboards getting bare. We were out of canned tuna fish, peanut butter, jelly, eggs, Tang, the last bag of puffed rice cereal almost empty.

The Biltmore Dairy Farms delivery trucks weren’t running, and we had no milk. There wasn’t much left in the refrigerator. We’d emptied the basement freezer of backup staples like loaves of sliced Bunny bread, hot dogs, and Blue Bonnet margarine. The heat was turned down, the oil tank almost drained, the firewood low. Soon we’d have no hot water.

When I paused in my brothers’ doorway, Mom was heaping pants, shirts, shorts on one bed while Jim and John were upset on the other. I realized that she was burning their belongings in the family room fireplace.

“No, no! That’s mine!” John cried as his teddy bear was added to the pile.

“DON’T!” Jim kept protesting.

“Hush, and do as you’re told,” Mom would repeat in a dull flat tone.

I now know that she was in the throes of a psychotic depressive episode, purging in preparation for the end of our world as we knew it. She intended to erase her painful childhood, our years in Miami, her failed marriage and every vestige of the husband who left her. She wanted no reminder of my brothers and me, not a trace.

Jim was one of the most agile people I’ve ever known and a daredevil. In later years I would joke that he was the best argument for evolution. Clearly, he was a monkey in an earlier life.

Not long after we moved into our new Montreat house in the spring of 1965, he bought two long pieces of lumber two-by-two inches thick, attaching plyboard triangles for footrests. He painted the wood the same blue as the shutters and doors, the stilts so tall he had to mount them from the railing of the back porch. He would walk around some six feet off the ground.

Stalking the hills like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Jim would rest now and then by sitting on top of stop signs. He had the balance of a gymnast or acrobat. There wasn’t much he couldn’t climb, including our roof, where he’d recently rolled huge snowballs, pushing them overboard, one almost landing on my head.

As Mom raided my brothers’ dressers and closet that January morning, Jim snatched a pair of jeans and fled into the hallway.

“Come back with that!” Mom called out after him.

Feet planted on one wall, his back against the other, he scooted up to the attic like an inmate escaping prison. Pushing open the ceiling access door, he shoved in his favorite Levi’s for safekeeping, his panicked eyes the size of half dollars. As he climbed back down, Mom left the bedroom with an armload of clothing.

“What are you doing, Mommy?” I followed her. “What are you doing!”

“Someday you’ll understand when you’re older and the ugly beast comes,” was her unnerving response.

“What are we going to wear?” I tried to reason with her.

“We’ll have new things. White things.” She hurried down the hallway, dropping a sock.

Inside the family room, a fire raged on the hearth, the flames popping and snapping, the air shimmering with heat. Flashing in my thoughts were Mom’s evacuation drills that had become more frequent. She was always anticipating what might injure or kill us. Fires and carbon monoxide, floods, hurricanes, murderers, sexual predators, drug addicts.

Most of all her former husband, Sam Daniels, a brilliant attorney in Miami and the love of her life despite his cruelties. She believed that if anything bad happened he was behind it. He wanted her to suffer. He wanted her off the planet.

“You’re not fit to live… You’re not fit to live…,” he’d whisper in her sleep like a hypnotist while they were still together in Miami.

She might be washing dishes at night when he’d appear in the window above the sink, his face smushed by a nylon stocking pulled over his head. Out in their motorboat, she divined that he intended to push her into the Atlantic Ocean. After she drowned, he’d pass off her death as an accident, a suicide. She stopped going out in the boat, not telling him the reason.

2

JUNE 9, 1956, AT 6:56 A.M., DR. WILLIAM MIXON DELIVERED ME IN room 309 of Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, Florida. Some seven hours earlier there was a total eclipse of the sun, the weather that Saturday clear, a high of 91.

I weighed close to eight pounds, was nineteen inches long with platinum blond hair. A cutting of it is saved in my baby book, the yellow satin cover decorated with pussy willows. Dad was a gifted photographer and took the pictures that Mom mounted on the thick creamy pages, writing copiously in blue with her Parker fountain pen.

She listed the many gifts I received from relatives, friends, my father’s colleagues. Mostly checks but also frilly panties, dresses, swimsuits, a Swiss music box, a silver brush and comb set, and an engraved silver baby cup and spoon that I still have. In my earliest photographs I’m smiling and laughing, especially when Jim was hovering, kissing the top of my head.

By the time I was a year old, I weighed twenty pounds and Mom described me as “a placid, healthy baby… always smiling and cooing… and what an appetite! She is a very fat baby; In fact, is almost overweight.” She noted that I was a “roller.” I never learned to crawl but would “roll over and over” while seeming to enjoy it.

Maybe I found rolling a more efficient way to get from one place to another. Later in life, I realized I had weak ankles that were a drawback in sports, most of all tennis when I played competitively. Maybe my rolling everywhere caused my ankles not to develop properly. More likely, it was genetic. When my father later remarried, his daughter Rona wore ankle braces when she was little.

I wasn’t very verbal, at least not at first. I’d make up for it soon enough, routinely accused of being a motor mouth. I had no awareness of that early on, but my mind was never still. That was a factor in my becoming a writer. I had so much to say about anything and everything.

I’d pick up a crayon or a pencil, having no other way to express my rapid-fire synapses. At eleven months, my racing thoughts weren’t articulated, my vocabulary most unimpressive. I knew three words, da-da, mama, and pattycake. I didn’t walk until I was a little more than a year and a half old, also at the late end of the normal spectrum.

We were living on Alfonso Avenue in Coral Gables, near the University of Miami and a canal called the Mahi Waterway, where there were alligators and cottonmouth moccasins. Our single-level house had two bedrooms and two baths. It was pale yellow stucco with terrazzo marble floors and a white brick fireplace.

The huge gnarly ficus tree in the backyard had ropy exposed roots and a lush canopy. It was great to climb when I was a little older until I happened upon a bright green snake, its beady eyes peeking out at me from leaves. I shrieked and scrambled back to terra firma, the snake just as scared, undulating to a higher branch.

Our yard had mango and citrus trees, and an early memory is checking on my latest experiment with orange peels. I was curious about what would happen if I dried them in the sun for several days. Deciding they didn’t taste good, I tried hibiscus flowers, tiring of them quickly. I was intrigued by bumblebees and dragonflies, watching them endlessly.

My first few years on the planet were contented as best I know. I remember visits to the beach where I’d drink Orange Crush, grape soda pop, and Brownie chocolate drinks, usually getting sand in the bottle. My father provided the most wonderful modes of transportation. A surrey with fringe on the top, and my favorite, a rocket on wheels that I’d pedal madly on the driveway.

I have happy memories of him taking my brothers and me to the circus, a boat show, the beach, or he might hit a few balls with us on a tennis court at his country club. I remember the Musa Isle Indian Village where I’d stand behind a thick concrete wall watching Seminoles wrestle alligators, their forced-open mouths exposing wicked-looking teeth. I thought it was disturbing and rather horrible for all involved.

I felt the same way during visits to Parrot Jungle, the immured colorful birds manipulated for entertainment. Sometimes we’d go to Monkey Jungle, where I was unnerved by the chattering creatures with spindly furry arms flailing in the air. Shrieking, they clutched the sides of the wire cages, snatching peanuts off the filthy floor. They’d look at me with eyes that seemed human.

What made me the happiest was when we went on road trips, spending several days and nights with Dad. I remember following Alligator Alley through the Everglades, stopping for the best key lime pie I’ve ever put in my mouth. Our favorite vacation spot was Vero Beach, where the waves were huge, the smokestack of a nineteenth-century sunken steamship jutting above the surf at low tide.

In my imagination it was a pirate ship that wrecked with gold and jewels aboard, and I’d search the beach in hopes of finding doubloons, emeralds, and diamonds that we could sell for a fortune. I’d envision a treasure chest filled with white and black pearls on the ocean floor near a cutlass and a skull wearing an eyepatch.

We always stayed in the Driftwood Inn, constructed from salvaged wood, a lot of old metal bells everywhere that I would clang. A breezeway led to our room facing the ocean, the loud thudding surf lulling me to sleep. During the day my brothers and I floated on canvas-covered rubber rafts. At night we’d feast on fried seafood platters at Waldo’s Restaurant, the walls covered with fishnets and old photographs.

Whenever Dad took us on an adventure, we were plied with delicious food, and all the soda pop we wanted. I don’t remember being hungry when he was around. He surprised us with wonderful gifts like leather lace-up boot skates with rubber toe stops. He shrewdly got them a few sizes too big, so we didn’t outgrow them in a hurry.

I wore mine for years, replacing the ball bearings I’d lose around sharp turns and wipeouts. I was industrious about applying Kiwi white shoe polish, the leather looking chalky no matter how vigorously I buffed it. But my best present came from a maritime museum or some other pirate attraction.

I don’t know where or what it was but seem to remember paintings and carved wooden statues of Blackbeard and the like. I was enthralled as we walked around perusing anchors, cannons, Jolly Roger flags, showcases of sunken treasure and other artifacts. When it was time to leave, Dad told me to pick out what I wanted in the gift shop.

I went home with six fake gold doubloons that I valued more than anything. I thought I was rich and hid the box in my bedroom where my brothers couldn’t find it. Now and then I’d shut my door and retrieve the coins from their secret place. I’d sit on the bed staring at the bright gold metal shining in the light.

I wouldn’t have the gold doubloons for long. Around this time there was a house fire close to where we lived in Coral Gables, smoke pluming above the horizon. Racing there, Jim and I stared mesmerized by the flames, the big red trucks, the thick hoses snaking everywhere. The driveway was deep with what looked like soap suds that I now know was fire-suppressing foam.

One of the people who lived there was a girl in my St. Thomas Episcopal kindergarten class. I don’t remember her name, but it might have been Maria. So I’ll call her that. I watched her on the street with her distraught family and imagined how sad they must be. I felt sorry for Maria even though we weren’t friends, scarcely civil, really. It’s not that I hadn’t tried.

She’d never been nice when I’d strike up a chat in the classroom, usually while I was drawing the hamster, white with a pink nose, its nails clicking on the wire wheel. A sign posted on the cage warned not to stick fingers through the wires. I did, and got bitten, bleeding like crazy. I was doing other weird things like eating globs of white paste out of the big jar. I’d get carried away with fingerpaints.

On my report card in late January 1961, the teacher mentioned my “inclination to tease a lot.” Apparently, I was relentless with the other kids, perhaps explaining why they weren’t my fans. “Patsy contributes greatly to all of our discussions,” my teacher commented. That was her diplomatic way of saying I talked too much.

During the sing-alongs, I was loud belting out “My Poor Little Pony” and “Thumbelina.” I couldn’t sit still or be quiet and must have been a handful. Meanwhile Maria looked on with condescension and disgust. Then her mother left the iron plugged in, causing the electrical fire that destroyed their house. Or that’s what I was told. I imagined that happening to my family.

I wanted to make Maria feel better and to save the day. Knowing just the thing, I carried my prized box of doubloons to kindergarten, barely able to contain my excitement. The room was divided in two sections by a heavy plastic curtain, and I stepped behind it, finding Maria. She looked dubious and annoyed as I summoned her for a private conversation.

“This will help you buy a new house.” I solemnly handed the box to her, the six doubloons shining under their clear plastic cover.

She stared at me as if I might be the stupidest person ever born. Then she huffed back behind the curtain with my phony booty. I was sorry I’d given away something that mattered. Especially to a snobby ingrate. I didn’t realize the extent of my anger until the next time I was on the playground climbing the monkey bars while a few boys played jacks in the dirt.

Maria was nearby in her pretty dress, carrying her small white pocketbook. I jumped down, shoving her to the ground so hard I imagined I heard her eyeballs rattle. She wasn’t hurt but avoided me like the plague after that. Most of all I regretted giving her my doubloons and wanted them back. I never asked, figuring they’d long since ended up in the trash.

When I told Dad the story, he shook his head.

“What a waste,” was his verdict.

The coins weren’t worth anything, but what I’d done was foolish and self-destructive. I’d set myself up to be victimized, he said. Much later in life when my literary agent Esther Newberg began negotiating huge deals, making me millions, Dad would shake his head rather often.

“You’ll have a lot of money someday if you don’t spend it or give it all away,” he’d warn.

Often on Sunday mornings when I was five, Dad would take my brothers and me fishing, weather permitting. I’d wake up in the pitch dark to his quiet voice.

“Rise and shine, Patsy Boo! Time to go fishing!” Dad’s warm breath tickled my ear, and I’d open my eyes, excited and joyful.

There wasn’t much I loved more than going out in the boat. Mom didn’t come with us anymore, and we’d be gone long before she was up. I’d wrap my arms around Dad’s neck as he lifted me out of bed, telling me to hurry and get dressed, we’d be leaving in a few minutes.

He’d load my brothers and me in the car. Usually, I was in back and it was hard to keep my eyes open. The first stop was Sambo’s restaurant for a hearty breakfast. I’d drink orange juice and eat pancakes with tiger butter, pouring maple syrup on everything, including my eggs. Afterward, it would still be dark when we followed Old Cutler Road to the marina.

I remember the smell of gasoline and creosote as we carried the ice chest, the bait bucket, and fishing gear. I don’t recall what kind of boat we had, but something small like a twenty-footer. My brothers and I settled on our cushions as the outboard motor puttered to life, the bow light glowing red, reminding me of Rudolph.

We’d set out along the channel, the NO WAKE buoys nodding their welcome as we passed. I didn’t understand what the signs meant, only that we always slowed down. I assumed something was sleeping underwater that we weren’t supposed to wake up. Maybe a family of manatees that Dad called sea cows. I imagined their reaction to boats with sharp propellers churning overhead.

I didn’t like the Snapper Creek channel, the water dark and murky with gasoline slicks that in daylight looked like spilled rainbows. When Dad’s boat was going slowly, the mosquitoes caught up with us, the air thick and too warm. It seemed to take forever as we’d rumble past the dark, twisted shapes of mangroves. Their roots showed above the water as if the trees were lifting their legs and about to run.

Sitting on my orange cushion, I’d look up at the sky, counting the stars, wondering what would happen if the Big Dipper flipped over. What would spill out, and would it drench us? Maybe milk, I deduced, connecting the constellation to the Milky Way. Or perhaps the Big Dipper was full of stardust that would settle over us like a magic pollen and we’d live happily ever after.

I’d stare at the moon, making out the craters that Dad showed me through the telescope he sometimes set up in the backyard. The channel cut through a wildlife preserve impenetrable with trees, shrubs, all kinds of birds, and fish, the water brackish. I’d slap at mosquitoes while Dad stood behind the wheel, silhouetted in the red glow of the bow light, the tip of his cigarette a tiny orange coal. I could smell his smoke downwind.

When we entered the Biscayne Bay, he’d open the throttle. I’d close my eyes, hanging on to the railing as we roller-coasted over waves, bumping up and down. Opening my mouth, the wind rushing in, I imagined blowing up like a balloon and floating off my cushion. Then Dad would catch me with his fishing pole, reeling me back. He’d laugh at how clever I was, and there I’d go again, spinning another story.

Dad’s favorite fishing spot was a submerged pipe that I found mysterious and spooky. I wondered how it ended up there, possibly during the construction of the nearby Cutler Power Plant, its two smokestacks jutting into the horizon. Sometimes when the tide was low, I could see the vague rippling shape of the pipe on the bottom like a sunken submarine.

By the time we’d anchor, the sun was rising, and Dad would put on his dingy terrycloth tennis hat. We’d fish at the pipe for hours, rocking on the surf, our reels click-click-clicking. I was impatient, jerking up my line every other minute, rarely catching a thing, and not caring. I was content to sit on the boat, spending time with Dad, and I found the motion soothing.

Inside the ice chest were the fisherman sandwiches and soda pop he’d bought the day before, and I was more interested in them than in catching anything. But I played the part, holding my cork-handled pole, sometimes standing up. Usually, I’d lost my bait long ago and did nothing about it, including telling anyone.

Sometimes Dad anchored near a sandbar where my brothers and I would wade, netting blue crabs that he’d cook that night for supper, dipping the tender white meat into melted butter. I’d think about a huge cannibal chasing me with a net, throwing me into a big cauldron of boiling water. I hoped the crabs didn’t feel any pain but feared they did.

It was always disheartening when the day was done and we’d return along the Snapper Creek channel, my mood sinking like the sun. The thick mangrove roots now reminded me of snakes I’d seen at the Miami Serpentarium with its huge concrete hooded cobra in front. I remember glass cages of pythons draped over trees, and Dad saying that they wrap around animals, even humans, squeezing them to death.

Fear and I are old companions. Our introduction was mostly because of Mom, but not entirely. Dad often took my brothers and me to places that could be scary for a little kid. Not just the serpentarium but the seaquarium where he’d show us the shark tank. I’d gawk at dead-eyed gray predators swimming like missiles, getting close to the glass. I hoped never to encounter such a thing while swimming.

My first visit to the zoo, I screamed when a peacock fanned its spectacular tail in my face. My father said it sensed I was afraid, and that made it aggressive. In other words, it was my fault. Had I been brave and calm, it would leave me alone, Dad pronounced from the sidelines. I cried and stood on top of a bench until someone shooed the huge bird away.

I’d wish I could be like a hermit crab hiding in an empty shell. The instant I’d try to touch its spindly legs, they’d tuck out of sight. Dad said it was for self-protection. If only I could keep the fear from showing and barricade myself where no one could touch me. Much later in life, I’d master that ability.

Usually, it was late afternoon when we’d arrive back at the marina, our feet thumping hollowly on the dock as we carried everything to the car, the mosquitoes and sand fleas attacking in squadrons. Big horseflies droned, their stings itching and smarting during the hot ride home with the windows open. My skin was always bright red, sunblock uncommon then.

3

I HAVE FEW MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER WHILE WE LIVED IN MIAMI. When she was home and not sequestered in her bedroom, I’d hear her move swiftly through the house making sliding sounds over the terrazzo. Rather than lifting her feet she skated room to room so her bedroom slippers wouldn’t fall off.

I have many more images of my father, even though he wasn’t home much. But when he’d show up it was fun and exciting, even as I felt mostly ignored. I can still see him making Jiffy Pop, sliding the pan back and forth over the burner as the kernels machine-gunned, the foil swelling until he stabbed it with a fork, steam blasting out.

He’d spirit us away to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q where we’d have baby back ribs and corn on the cob at a picnic table, sawdust on the floor. I loved Royal Castle, eating cheeseburgers, drinking birch beer. Dad would bring us barrels of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and hoagies in thick buns with delicious meats, cheeses, and shredded lettuce.

One Sunday morning when I was four and it was too hot to fish, my brothers and I were in the kitchen that Mom decorated in greens and yellows because they didn’t show the dirt. I’d heard her telling our maid Lutilla that while I was sitting at the table spooning tomato soup into my mouth, wishing I could drink it out of the bowl. When I did, I spilled too much.

On this occasion, my brothers and I were eating Frosted Flakes when Dad walked in, sunglasses in hand.

“Come on, Boo Boo Bears,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s get into the car.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

My brothers and I climbed into his Karmann Ghia convertible, white with a tan interior. It was early but already scorching, the Miami sky pale blue like a swimming pool, and no breeze. As we drove, I pointed out water trickling across the hot pavement ahead, wondering how that was possible when it hadn’t rained in days.

The shimmering ribbons moved as we did, never getting closer. Dad said they were heatwaves that created mirages. He explained the illusions weren’t water or anything we could touch. A metaphor for life, I’ve always thought. No point in chasing something you can’t catch. But that’s never stopped me.

We pulled over at a Shell service station, and Dad parked in front. He left us in the car, the silver keychain gently swinging in the ignition. Inside, he talked to a man behind the cash register, handing him a crumpled dollar bill. When Dad returned, he yawned open the trunk.

Nearby was a big white freezer, Crushed, Cubed and Block ICE. Pay inside in blue letters. Opening the square door to a cloud of thick fog, he pulled out three blocks of ice, the biggest I’d ever seen, loading them into the trunk, where they slid and thumped during the drive home.

Filling the wading pool, he arranged the blocks of ice in the grass, reminding me of polar bears at the zoo. My brothers and I would freeze our backsides before jumping into the water to thaw. While this was going on, the screen door thudded shut, my mother emerging from the house. She was in a sailor dress that reminded me of a bib worn the wrong way, a big straw hat shadowing her face.

“Well, isn’t that nice,” she said, her sandals clacking past Dad.

I could feel her unhappiness and the tension between them. My grandmother G.G. lived within walking distance, and Mom announced she was going there for lunch. They were extremely close, much to my father’s annoyance. He resented G.G. and anyone who adored her.

Some of my earliest memories are of Mom and G.G. going shopping or sitting in the yard, drinking iced tea under a shade tree, talking, laughing. They’d take my brothers and me to Matheson Hammock Park for swimming and picnics. When G.G. babysat we’d sally forth on treasure hunts, filling a picnic basket with whatever struck our fancy. Flowers. An intact leaf skeleton. A bit of sea glass. A perfect shell. A coconut.

She’d surprise us with unusual toys like the Etch A Sketch filled with “magic” aluminum powder that made it possible to draw pictures by manipulating two plastic knobs. I discovered that the transparent screen was glass when I cracked Jim over the head during one of our fights.

Everything G.G. gave us was instructive, like the gravity-defying toy car that used suction cups to climb walls. The Wooly Willy taught us about a magnet’s attraction to the metal chips we dragged with a wand. I made impressions of my finger pads in Silly Putty, wondering the purpose of the loops and whorls.

As my brothers and I sat on our big blocks of ice, I watched Mom’s blue dress and white collar disappear behind stucco walls and green bushes. Dad wasn’t smiling.

Dad returned to the air-conditioned house, the screen door screeching like a cartoon bird and banging shut. G.G. was my father’s mother, and he had as little to do with her as possible. She loved and enjoyed Mom, who didn’t come home the rest of the day. By late afternoon our ice had melted away, and Dad reappeared to fire up the grill. He cooked a sirloin steak that my brothers and I devoured, fighting over the bone.

My father wasn’t affectionate or demonstrative, and certainly not a disciplinarian. He didn’t raise his voice but spoke deliberately as if stating his case before an appellate judge. But when he was around, he fed and entertained us. I associate him with delicious food. That might have been a factor in my developing a life-threatening eating disorder years later, resulting in my being hospitalized.

Mom hated to cook, and barely tried. I don’t remember a single meal she served while we lived in Miami except for chicken cacciatore that she’d make with canned mushrooms, spaghetti sauce, and dried oregano from the spice rack. We’d eat it night after night. But even making that was rare, as unhappy as she seemed.

When she was around, she spent a lot of time picking up and cleaning. She’d wipe fingerprints off the refrigerator. Usually they were mine no matter how many times she’d tell me to touch only the handle.

“Kinder sind so ein trost,” she’d say in German.

Children are such a comfort. That’s what my great-aunt Tilly would lament when Mom was a child in Chicago and dropped food on the rug. If it was strudel, she wanted it anyway, holding out her hand for the apple filling and broken pastry.

“Du bist verrück, mein kind!” Aunt Tilly would laugh at what a crazy child Mom was.

By the time I was five, she was either gone from home or in her bedroom most of the time. The housekeeper didn’t come in anymore, and neither did the babysitter. There was no one to grocery shop, heat up soup, make sandwiches, or do anything else. Sometimes I had to scrounge, eating raw hamburgers and hot dogs from the freezer.

I was aware that my parents were having problems. On one occasion, I heard Mom screaming hysterically in the kitchen where John was sitting in his high chair. Then a door slammed as she shrieked and cried. When I tried to check on her, Dad ordered me to return to my room. I was frightened by how aggressive and unkind he seemed.

Later I found out that Mom had spilled hot bacon grease on herself. Grabbing the diaper or “baba” John held for comfort while sucking his fingers, Dad roughly wiped her hand, the top layer of skin rolling off. Shoving her into their bedroom, he shut the door, telling her not to come out until she “got hold” of herself. I remember feeling scared.

My father’s demeanor was unnerving. He’d look right through me as if I were made of air. I don’t remember him hugging or touching my brothers and me hardly ever. He didn’t ask about our feelings or seem to care if we had them. Even when he whisked us away on fun outings or bought presents, there was a disconnect that made me feel wilted and empty.

By the fall of 1961 he was having a meltdown while sleeping with his secretary, a cheap-looking woman I’ll call Shirley. The affair wouldn’t last, and I’ve often wondered if it was a way of escaping his dysfunctional marriage with my mother. I remember their fights, her crying while he remained mostly silent.

He wouldn’t engage, and that was one of the most frustrating things about him. If he was reading the newspaper and my brothers and I started squabbling, his answer was to rustle the pages.

“Sam, why do you just sit there and allow them to fight?” Mom would say. “They could kill each other, and I don’t think you’d even notice.”

She’d push her auburn hair off her face, sometimes with shaky hands. Her skin was as pale as marble because she didn’t like the sun, and I’d detect the fear in her eyes.

Don’t show it. Don’t show it.

I knew what happened if you did. It was a red flag for Dad. He was bullied most of his young life, and to him fear was weakness. It was the scent of blood to a predator.

“They just want attention,” he’d say from behind his newspaper, speaking slowly, logically like an attorney to a client. “Eventually they’ll learn that the way to get attention is to be good.”

He talked about us as if we weren’t in the room, and at times I felt certain he didn’t know we were. He didn’t see us, and my impulse was to jump in his lap.

I’m here!

I’m here!

“When are you going to stop applying your logic to us?” Mom said one morning, twisting the belt of her bathrobe. “I wish you’d leave your cold analysis in the office.”

“The law is all there is,” Dad replied in his impenetrable voice.

I eavesdropped while tracing patterns with my finger on the stone floor. As my parents’ fight heated up, I scuttled around the corner like a crab, leaning against the wall, listening.

“Naturally, I don’t expect you to feel the same way, Pat. You obviously have no respect for the law.”

“You’re a monster, Sam…”

I’d heard this exchange before and wouldn’t understand until later that what my father alluded to were three abortions Mom had undergone in Chicago. Her first was at the age of seventeen when she was dating a Lake Michigan lifeguard. They had sex in the backseat of his car, and she thought that was safe. She couldn’t get pregnant unless she literally slept with the person.

Her older sister Alice took Mom to some back room where a doctor performed the illegal procedure. I don’t recall if Mom ever mentioned who got her pregnant the other two times. When she and my father had been married several years, she told him the truth. He turned on her after that.

“If you weren’t so weak, if you had been strong enough to obey the law, maybe then I’d have some respect for you, Pat,” he said in his soft voice, the newspaper rustling. “Murder, I just can’t believe it.”

“I had no choice. Six weeks old… not human yet… The doctor said it wasn’t murder.” Mom was sobbing. “Oh, I wish to God I’d never told you!”

When she cried, so did I, stifling it as I spied from my hiding place. I didn’t know the word abortion then. When I did it would cross my mind that if she’d had three of them, maybe the unborn babies didn’t give up. Maybe they insisted on being here and came back as my brothers and me.

During another one of my parents’ fights, Dad refused to engage emotionally as usual, dismissively telling her to stop being hysterical. She called him a monster again, and he said she was out of control, stupid, and worthless. I was hiding in the hallway listening. When his footsteps sounded in my direction, I crept into my bedroom, closing the door.

Moments later, I watched through my window as he left the house, walking across the lawn, his tennis racquet tucked under an elbow. His shorts and shirt were white like snow against the thick grass and bright sky. He climbed into his car and drove away, leaving Mom dismantled. Absenting himself and ghosting were his special weapons.

Most likely what offended him at his core weren’t the abortions she’d had years before they’d met. He didn’t hold life sacred as best I could tell, and I doubt that the illegality of what Mom had done was the biggest problem either. He was massively insecure, picked on when he was younger, accustomed to being called a weakling, a sissy.

As a child, my father had a lazy eye and wore glasses. He was quiet and studious, much smarter than his peers, making him a target. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he played on the tennis team while future Wimbledon champion Vic Seixas was the captain. Dad was assigned to the dorm for varsity athletes. He shared a room with a football player who found Dad inconsequential, a wimp.

In the late 1940s, tennis wasn’t the sport it is today. Men running around in white with wooden racquets wasn’t macho. My father looked like the proverbial nerdy professor and wasn’t outwardly aggressive. Every night his football player roommate would stay out late partying. He’d return to the room drunk and pee on the floor, not cleaning up after himself, expecting my father to do it. Dad obliged without saying much or acting like he cared. He would wreak his revenge by mixing green dye into the roommate’s Brylcreem pomade, and a little dab would do him, all right.

Day after day, the roommate’s slicked-back hair got greener, to his bewilderment. Certain he had a fatal illness, he sought medical care, and no one could determine the cause of the problem. While this was going on, Dad swapped out the Brylcreem for an untainted bottle, the football player never knowing why his hair was green and then not after a while.

To me this wasn’t funny considering the distress Dad caused. But confrontation wasn’t his style. Sneak attacks like that were his modus operandi.

4

IN MARCH 1961, EVANGELIST BILLY GRAHAM HELD A TELEVISED crusade in South Florida for the first time in his organization’s history. Traffic was backed up day after day, a quarter of a million people filing into the Miami Beach Convention Center to hear him preach about Jesus and salvation.

In the audience was my mother, Marilyn Frances Zenner Daniels, or Pat as everyone called her. I don’t know the origin of her nickname. But it’s why she named me Patricia. When Billy Graham’s crusade began in Miami my mother was thirty-six and closely resembled the actress Vivian Leigh.

While a flight attendant, Mom had met my father on a blind date. I’m not sure when this was, but likely 1952 or early 1953 while she was living alone in a garage apartment, taking art and philosophy classes at the University of Miami. A part-time model, she’d been hired by the chamber of commerce for touristy photoshoots that might involve a parrot and her posing in a swimsuit.

In October 1951, Miami News columnist Herb Rau did a piece on her for his Sunday column. Included were several provocative photographs that made her look very Hollywood. She was touted as “a recent addition to Miami’s beauty,” a painter, a photographic model, a former actress.

“She dabbles in everything.” Including men, Herb Rau wrote, describing her as “attractive enough to find a niche in show business.”

With her “shorts-and-sweater figure” she easily “could win beauty contests” but thought they were “silly,” the Miami News columnist gushed.

The same month Billy Graham was preaching in South Florida for the first time, my father announced he was starting his own law firm. Recently, he’d stunned friends and colleagues by leaving the prestigious Nichols, Gaither, Green, Frates & Beckham, located in Miami’s Pan American Bank Building.

In the mid-’50s Dad had helped start the firm with Perry Nichols, a prominent trial lawyer and pioneer in personal injury cases. One of the first to use court exhibits, Perry had begun winning record-breaking settlements, his firm nationally recognized. Originally from Texas, he was flamboyant and persuasive in front of a jury, his oratorical style compared to Billy Graham.

Perry Nichols was a powerhouse. He received publicity and accolades, and earned a lot of money. Meanwhile my father worked behind the scenes. He didn’t make headlines and was rarely in the news. The firm’s appellate wizard, he’s credited with creating appellate law as a specialty. He was gifted at dissecting a legal case, perhaps explaining my eventual affinity for autopsies.

Dad was known for his logical mind, quirky humor, and impressive pedigree. His father, Carroll Salem Daniels, met Augusta “Gussie” Warner in 1915 in Muskegon, Michigan. She was a well-paid legal clerk, and a direct descendant of the Beecher family, best known for Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

After my grandparents married, he and a business partner decided to open an office supply company. They needed just the right location. Grandma Gussie, or G.G., as we called her, discovered a hat store for sale. She could have the building and everything in it for $1,500. This included barrels of ostrich feathers that G.G. had fashioned into hats, making more than what had been paid for the entire business. Daniels Office Supplies in Muskegon still exists today.

My grandparents’ first child, Warner Brown Daniels, was followed by a sister, Priscilla, who died from laryngeal diphtheria at the age of six. A year later, my dad, Samuel Carroll Daniels, arrived on February 22, 1927, the family bereft and in turmoil from losing their daughter. G.G.’s husband claimed it was her fault for leaving their sick child with the nurse.

By all accounts, Priscilla was special, playing the piano by the age of five. She had black curly hair and big eyes in the photograph on her father’s desk near his pens and ink bottle. G.G. remembered that after Priscilla died, her husband would stare at the photograph, wiping the gilt frame with his handkerchief. Then he’d wipe his eyes.

My grandfather had doted on Priscilla, wanting another daughter to take her place. He was disappointed by the arrival of Sam, born five months premature and not expected to live. He was in an incubator for quite a while, and when he came home from the hospital, G.G. had to hire a wet nurse. Mother and son never bonded.

Dad would later claim his compromised immune system was from being born prematurely. While in his early forties he would develop rheumatoid arthritis. He tried every remedy. Snake venom. Gold salts. Copper bracelets. A lifetime of steroids, and his skin became as thin as cigarette paper. He was always covered with bruises.

When he developed asthma as a child, his parents decided it would be best for him if they moved to a warmer climate. They relocated to Miami and started the family’s successful business, Daniels Incorporated Women’s Clothing Department Store. Or simply Daniels Department Store, famous for its free circulating library that encouraged people, especially women, to read books.

The nearly twenty-thousand-square-foot store occupied acres of prime Coral Gables real estate on Ponce de Leon Avenue. It was co-owned by G.G. and her husband, but she was the driving force. By now, their marriage was a façade. My father grew up in an erudite but toxic environment, his parents growing to detest each other. Eventually, they would take separate vacations, Sam his father’s confederate, and Warner his mother’s.

The brothers were vastly different and eventually had nothing to do with each other. Their father thought Warner was a lazy do-nothing. He was weak and worthless. Those were my dad’s sentiments as well. G.G. once commented that he wouldn’t speak to Warner if they were on the same elevator together.

Fair or not, my father blamed his brother for the eventual ruination of Daniels Department Store. G.G. would have been comfortable financially the rest of her days were it not for her older son. My father said that Warner borrowed money from the till and didn’t repay it, which is a nice way of saying he embezzled.

I don’t know if what I heard about my uncle Warner was true. But my few exposures to him weren’t impressive. Once while I was visiting G.G. in Coral Gables, he dropped by unannounced. Hovering near the front door, he explained he needed money for milk and bread. He struck me as homeless, and she left him in the living room, returning with her pocketbook.

As a young man Dad became a tournament tennis player, gifted at slices, spins, and chesslike strategies. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UNC Chapel Hill, he went on to attend Columbia Law School in New York City. Top in his class, he was selected in 1951 to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

That fall Dad moved into a Washington, D.C., apartment, and two months later, the justice’s fifty-one-year-old wife, Josephine, died suddenly in her sleep. The cause of death was never determined, although she’d not been feeling well for several days. Her husband was overcome by grief and found my father good company.

Hugo Black asked Dad to move in with him. During the clerkship, my father stayed in the justice’s house in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, on South Lee Street. I never knew the location until researching this memoir. Ironically, it’s but a few blocks from where Kay Scarpetta lives in my more recent novels.

Dad would spend the year in Black’s two-story brick house, built in 1800, Federal style with dormer windows. Best of all, it had a backyard clay tennis court. Black was a passionate tennis enthusiast and fierce competitor. He’d designated an area of the U.S. Supreme Court building to knock balls around with his clerks and others.

In the fall of 1952 the clerkship ended, and Dad left to begin working as an instructor at the University of Miami Law School. Over the next decade he and Hugo Black would write each other regularly and visit.

In March 1953 during a court recess, Black had stayed in Dad’s Miami apartment for a while. They deeply respected each other until Dad cheated on Mom and left her at the end of 1961. His mentor wouldn’t have approved of such behavior. Kindness, unselfishness, humility, and decency were the justice’s top priorities.

Without good character, nothing else mattered, and Hugo Black must have been disappointed, not to mention shocked. He was quite fond of my mother, appreciating her bright childlike spirit, her whimsy, and her obvious attractiveness. He thought Dad had won the romantic lottery, and was their cheerleader, sending them sterling flatware for a wedding present.

“I should be surprised if that pretty wife of yours would ever see a man without ‘a gleam in his eye,’” he’d written to my father on October 24, 1957.

Four years later, it appears the correspondence stopped. The last letter I could locate was dated the end of August in 1961. I’ve wondered if Dad confided that he was involved with another woman and wanted a divorce. I can’t imagine Hugo Black would have been sympathetic, not even a little.

Likely, he reminded his former law clerk that such behavior limited future opportunities. My father dreamed of becoming a judge, possibly a U.S. Supreme Court justice. With his cold impartiality and steel-trap mind, he would have made a good one. But that lofty ambition was unlikely after a scandal. Certainly, in that era, and he was becoming noticeably off tilt, his behavior alarming.

By March 1961, Dad was on his own as an attorney. He’d opened a small office in Miami’s DuPont Building, working there long hours alone except for the secretary he was sleeping with. At Perry Nichols’s firm Dad had colleagues, a support staff, a salary. He had structure. For him to resign and strike out on his own was a bold move. Possibly a reckless one.

Supporting a wife and three young children, he was coping with mounting financial pressures while his relationship with my mom continued deteriorating. His underlying insecurity, grand ideas, and need to impress were causing him to overreach. We lived in the wealthy subdivision of Coral Gables, our lovely home on Alfonso Avenue filled with fine furniture. We had nice cars, nothing inexpensive.

In 1961, Dad decided we should move to the relatively new and more private subdivision Snapper Creek Lakes. He began building a big house there, white stucco with a columned portico, a wall in front. The driveway was long, the backyard shaded by palms and ficus and fruit trees. When we moved in that late summer, I remember plenty of vacant lots.

His decision to relocate to a more secluded and exclusive subdivision may have been prompted by hostility from neighbors. Dad was making the news for accepting a case on behalf of the Cuban government. This was during a volatile period when it was reported that the Soviet Union planned to establish missile bases in Cuba. American citizens were prohibited from traveling there.

The U.S. had cut off all sugar purchases, and embargoed Cuban exports. At the beginning of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ended all diplomatic relations. Three months later was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban fighters trained by the CIA, and equipped by our military.

Some countries, like Czechoslovakia, supported the Cuban revolutionaries and their leader, Fidel Castro. Ambassador Miloslav Rusek hired my father on Cuba’s behalf. Castro needed representation in lawsuits filed after he began seizing American properties. Dad argued in court that Cuba grabbing a U.S. tractor company or a construction company in Havana was the legal act of a sovereign government.

He took this position at a time when the U.S. was trying to overthrow Castro. Ultimately, Florida Supreme Court Justice Hal P. Dekle ruled against my father, the case all over the news that summer of 1961 and into the early winter. I’m not sure how much my mom knew about what Dad was doing on behalf of Castro, but certainly she was aware of it.

At a party in Coral Gables, neighbors made comments just loud enough for her to hear. They referred to our newly constructed home in Snapper Creek Lakes as the house that Castro built. The new Impala that Mom drove was the Guevara-mobile. People were outraged, calling my father a communist and a traitor.

He was receiving death threats, and somebody decided to make a point by spray-painting our white hound dog bright red. It took Dad hours to scrub Snuffy clean with paint thinner, a pile of red-stained rags on the garage floor. By now, Mom was chronically depressed and feeling worthless, retreating to her bed with another sick headache.

As Billy Graham’s Miami crusade began in March 1961, she was circling a black hole emotionally, the timing miraculous. Intrigued by the television evangelist drawing such enormous crowds, Mom accepted a friend’s invitation to a service one night. It would change our family’s destiny.

Had my mother not gone, I don’t know what would have become of us. I call that synchronicity, the purpose and quantum of our mysterious existence. To her it was God’s will or an answer to prayer, and maybe they’re the same thing. She walked forward, responding to Billy Graham’s altar call as the choir sang “Just as I Am” and the organ played.

She began attending a Baptist church in Coral Gables and took me there several times for various activities. She joined a women’s Bible study group, and I can well imagine my father’s reaction. He wouldn’t have been happy about her going to a Billy Graham crusade and being born again. It was bad enough that she’d started watching the evangelist on TV at every opportunity.

No doubt Dad would have made derisive comments that painted her as irrational and lowbrow. He would have mocked her conversion experience and been threatened by it. Anything that had power over her took it away from him. He had no use for religion or those who practiced it, most of all Billy Graham. Dad detested him long before there would be a personal reason.

5

CHRISTMAS OF 1961, I WAS THE FIRST ONE UP AS USUAL, PADDING into the living room before dawn. The early morning shone through a crack in the living room draperies. Dust floated in the light, reminding me of the moted beam from Dad’s slide projector.

The house was illuminated just enough to see the dark forms of furniture, the jagged outline of the Christmas tree and presents in a corner near the red velvet wingchair. At the age of five, I knew Santa wasn’t responsible for what awaited. He hadn’t landed on the roof with his reindeer. Nothing about him made any sense.

Mom had taken us to a department store days earlier, hurrying my brothers and me past mannequins with painted cheeks and rigid poses. At a counter with mirrors and fancy bottles, Mom paused to pick up a black and gold tester of Jeanne Anvin’s “My Sin,” her favorite fragrance. She sprayed her wrists, dabbing the cologne on my nose, and I smelled jasmine and roses.

Christmas music filled the air, bustling shoppers loaded down with big boxes and bags. Mom kept a worried eye on my brothers as they were distracted by baseball equipment, then fishing gear, a myriad of gaudy lures displayed on pegboards.

“Just around the corner. We’re almost there,” Mom encouraged.

Santa was in a roped-off square of green carpet, sitting in a blue-and-silver throne beside a Christmas tree, wrapped packages beneath. He smiled while red lights twinkled and glass balls glittered. Now and then he bellowed “HO! HO! HO!” Parents and impatient children waited in line, and I was excited but not in a good way. Better put, I was nervous and filled with dread.

I’d had my photograph taken several times on Santa’s lap and never enjoyed it or believed in him. For one thing, it was never the same bearded man in red from one year to the next. Also, he appeared in other places at the same time. How many Santas were there? How could he be in multiple places at once? I found him scary.

When we reached the front of the line, Mom handed the photographer a dollar, and he smiled, patting my head. The red velvet rope was unhooked, and Mom fussed with my hair, smoothing the red dress she’d made me wear. My turn now, and Santa wrapped his arms around me, lifting me into lap, his white beard scratching my face and neck.

“HO! HO! HO! What’s your name, little doll?”

“Patsy,” I said quietly.

“Well, Kathy, what would you like me to give you for Christmas?”

I felt like hiding because everyone watching just learned that Santa didn’t know my name. He had no idea who I was even when I told him. How unimportant could I be? Obviously, I wasn’t on his nice or naughty list, either one. I wasn’t on any list at all. His beard was itching me something awful, and I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted.

“Kathy, cutie, what would you like Santa to give you?” In the same cheery voice.

I was becoming frantic, tears threatening as he continued to ask while I didn’t answer, the line getting longer, everybody staring. The plastic reindeer next to his chair watched my humiliation, and I wanted to leave. Digging my fingernails into Santa’s bright red knee, I pulled his beard.

“HEY! Sugar pie, now be nice to Santa!” Then he repeated his question about what I wanted, his fakey tone not as friendly.

I had no answer, the photographer’s flashbulb blinding. Santa sighed, lifting me off his lap a bit too abruptly. I was presented with a candy cane while my brothers took their turns, not hesitating in the least to ask for boats, B.B. guns, Hershey bars. Moments later, Mom guided us back through the store, my brothers chattering up a storm while my cheeks burned.

When I got up that Christmas morning in 1961, I could see that someone had been busy while my brothers and I were sleeping. The pink Schwinn bicycle with training wheels must be for me, but I would have preferred a different color. Maybe blue or green, best of all red. The black Schwinn bike was for Jim, the tricycle for John.

I took an inventory of wrapped packages, excited by the ones with Patsy on gift tags in my mother’s handwriting. I couldn’t wait to tear into them. Lying on my back under the tree, I entertained myself by staring up through the artificial green branches, the lights and ornaments a colorful galaxy.

I pretended I was in outer space, happy and peaceful, until I heard Mom crying in the hallway. She was saying something to my father while he strode into the living room, a brown suitcase in hand. I jumped up in a panic, somehow knowing the worst. As he reached the front door, I wrapped myself around one of his legs, screaming.

“Daddy, don’t go!”

“Daddy, don’t go!”

He shook me off. The shutting of the door was the most final sound I ever heard. For a while, the house was shocked silent. It was a bleak affair when my brothers and I turned our attention to presents. I remember John opening a box with a pair of cowboy boots inside.

Jim had little to say about the black paper pirate kite with a skull-and-crossbones on it. Mom got a Michelangelo art book from her sister Dolores, a Wedgwood candy dish from my grandmother G.G., and nothing from Dad. As soon as we crumpled up the gift paper, Mom stuffed it into grocery bags, carrying them outside to the garbage can.

She wasted no time taking down the tree, ornaments bouncing on the floor and breaking. She wanted every hint of Christmas gone, and that would be the same from then on. Only it would be me removing the tinsel and angel hair, saving it for next time. I’d pack up the ornaments, many of them sentimental.

The gold-painted skeleton was from a flounder Jim caught. Styrofoam balls decorated with glitter were my creation, the elegant blown glass and hand-painted balls from G.G. The chiffon angel was a gift to me from Mom. I’d disassemble the tree, returning the glossy plastic branches to their long, narrow cardboard box that was stored in the attic.

After Dad left, my brothers and I came down with a “bug.” It seems we got sick instantly, all of us at once. Most likely, that was our emotional response.

I don’t know how much time passed before we saw him again, possibly several weeks. One Saturday morning, I was sitting at the kitchen table as Mom scrubbed the countertop with Ajax. Dad had called the night before, and they talked briefly behind her shut bedroom door.

He said he was coming for my brothers and me so he could spend some time with us. Since daylight I’d been sitting at the kitchen table. I was busy with my crayons and a coloring book while peeking out the screen door, on the lookout for my father’s Karmann Ghia.

When he pulled up, I scrambled out of my chair, a crayon rolling across the floor. I left my coloring book open to a half-purple cow jumping over a white moon. I raced outside, the screen door slamming. The first to reach the car, I claimed the front seat, hugging Dad’s neck, getting tangled in the stick shift and emergency brake.

His cheek was smooth, and I detected his lime shaving cream. Once I squirted some in my hand to see if it tasted the way it smelled. It didn’t.

“Daddy, I knew you’d come back!”

But he hadn’t really, and I began to sense it as he drove my brothers and me to Royal Castle for a breakfast of chocolate-covered donuts. From there it was on to a Howard Johnson’s, and I was baffled. Prior to this I’d never been there except for meals, most of all ice cream, my favorite flavor peppermint stick that I’d stir until it melted in the silver dish.

I loved Howard Johnson hot dogs that Mom called pigs in a blanket, the tops of the buns cut off and grilled in butter. Sometimes I got fried shrimp, onion rings, and chocolate milk. That couldn’t be why we were here now. We’d just eaten. But Dad didn’t stop at the restaurant. Through plate glass windows I saw people having breakfast, drinking coffee, watching cars go by.

Slowing down, he passed rows of orange motel room doors with silver numbers on them, and he parked in front of one. We climbed out as he reached into a pocket for a key connected to a green diamond-shaped fob. He unlocked the room door and pushed it open to a waft of chilled air.

“Sam, is that you?” A woman’s sultry voice sounded from inside.

“It’s Sitting Bull and his wild Indians, and we’re coming to steal you away!” Dad laughed, happy to see whoever it was as my uneasiness grew.

We followed him into the brightly colored room, nothing much to it but a double bed, a bathroom, a TV on a stand. The air conditioner rattled as a woman stood in front of the dresser mirror, a hairbrush in her hand.

“Well, I do hope you don’t scalp me because I just fixed my hair!” She smiled with bright red lips and set down the brush next to a bottle of perfume.

“This is Jimmy, Johnny, and Patsy.” Dad introduced us to his secretary, Shirley.

“I’ve heard so much about each of you. Your father brags about you all the time,” she said, walking across the room. “Aren’t you a little angel!” She petted my head.

I smelled gardenias, reminded of the white-spangled bushes growing close to the house. Mom would place the fragrant blossoms in a dish of water, and to this day they’re my favorite flower.

“I have a late Christmas present for you, Angel,” Shirley said to me.

She picked up a shopping bag, reaching inside it. Paper crackled, and she pulled out a neatly folded pink sweater with white pearl buttons.

“Here, honey. Let’s see if it fits.”

She helped me work my arms through the sleeves, then stepped back to appraise my appearance, seeming pleased.

“Well, don’t you look pretty!”

I smiled and stared down at the carpet, deciding not to take off the sweater even though I wasn’t cold. I didn’t want to make her dislike me because I could tell she was important to Dad. Placing his folded sunglasses on the dresser, he sat with Shirley on the bed smoking, sharing an ashtray.

I remember she had on shiny silver slippers, and snug pink slacks that hiked above her ankles as she leaned against a pillow with her knees up. Her dark red sweater reminded me of the candy left in the bottom of the bowl when my peppermint ice cream melted. Eyeliner tapered half an inch beyond her lids like the tips of butterfly wings, her dark hair teased into a helmet.

I thought she looked like my pictures when I pressed down too hard with the crayons, and Mom would tell me it looked unnatural. I knew to press lightly and stay inside the lines, wondering why Shirley’s mother never taught her that. It seemed we were in that room for hours while she and Dad leaned against pillows, lounging on the bed as my brothers fought over the TV.

John wanted to watch the Three Stooges, and Jim kept switching the channel back to a Tarzan movie. Soon enough the two of them were on the carpet pulling hair and punching each other. I sat in a chair by the window sucking my thumb while Tarzan swung on a hairy vine across the TV screen.

I watched Shirley reach for the heavy glass ashtray, tilting it over, emptying cigarette butts into the wastepaper basket, a fine gray dust floating in lamplight, the room reeking of smoke. By now, it was lunchtime, my brothers and I hungry. Dad picked up his wallet from the bedside table, pulling out six one-dollar bills.

Shirley took the money, tucking it inside her black patent leather purse. Dad handed her his car keys and she left for Royal Castle. The instant she was gone, I jumped up on the bed next to Dad while Tarzan bounced through the jungle on the back of an elephant.

When Shirley returned, she carried in two paper bags, one white, one brown, and Cokes in a cardboard holder that she secured with her chin before setting everything down. The hamburgers were soft and warm. I tore open ketchup and got it on my new sweater, smearing it with a napkin, hoping Shirley wouldn’t notice.

She was busy digging in the ice bucket, clinking cubes into water glasses. Then she took two bottles out of the brown bag, mixing gin and vermouth, handing one of the drinks to Dad.

“I forgot to get olives,” she said, an unlit cigarette wagging in her mouth.

She leaned close to Dad, and he flicked on his lighter as she puffed. My brothers and I devoured our food as my anxiety grew. I watched Coke travel up the plastic straw as I sucked, and my stomach began to ache. Suddenly, my lunch was rushing back up my throat to escape.

“UH-OH.” Dad crushed out his cigarette and scooted off the bed.

He led me into the bathroom while my brothers held their noses. I cried even though my stomach no longer ached. I’d made a mess on the carpet, then Dad started laughing.

“Uh-oh. Patsy Boo lost her lunch!”

His smile blurred through my tears, and I squeezed my eyes shut while he wiped my face with a wet washcloth. Shirley was there too, trying to make me feel better. Afterward, she took me outside for a stroll, stopping under the spreading branches of a pin oak tree draped in Spanish moss that looked like dirty dead hair. She tried to engage me in a coaxing voice.

I suspected she wanted me to like her better than Mom. No doubt, Dad had passed on that his mentally ill wife called Shirley a tramp, and he was never to bring her to our house. I don’t know what happened to the pink sweater. Most likely, Mom threw it out.

Not long after this, I was in the kitchen while she talked to my grandmother over the phone. I could hear only Mom’s side of the conversation.

“I know, G.G. I know all about her. But what can I do…?”

I overheard Mom say this as I colored Snow White’s hair with a yellow crayon.

“Yes, I know she’s disgusting.”

I decided to color Snow White’s gown blue instead of pink.

“…I don’t know how long Sam will stay in that motel. I don’t know anything…” Mom’s voice was tragic.

I found the peach crayon for Snow White’s hands.

“Oh, G.G., what am I going to do? What am I going to do? How could he love her? How could he leave me for her? How could he…?”

I picked out the silver and gold crayons for Snow White’s slippers. Not sure which to use. Deciding on gold, I bore down too hard, going over the lines. I scribbled all over the ruined picture, frustrated and angry as reality settled over me like darkness when the sun dips below the horizon.

My father had replaced my mother with Shirley. He wasn’t going to live with us ever again.

6

MOM BELIEVED DAD PICKED CHRISTMAS TO LEAVE BECAUSE HE knew the holiday season was treacherous for her emotionally. It was when tragic echoes from her past were the loudest, making her the most vulnerable.

On December 27, 1939, at 12:20 p.m., her father, “Fred” Gustav Zenner, supposedly jumped from a window in Chicago’s Conway Building, now called the Burnham Center. I say supposedly because I’m not sure what really happened that Wednesday after Christmas when he showed up on the seventeenth floor where a renovation was going on.

The construction workers claimed they didn’t see him. No one seemed to have any idea what he was doing there. My first question is his connection with that location. Why would he pick it? How did he know construction was going on? Was he familiar with the building because of Scientific Precision, where he worked as a sheet metal engineer?

The company manufactured tubing, coaxial cable, and other precision metal components. Did Scientific Precision have a job in the Conway Building or a potential one? Sheet metal is used in the ductwork of air-conditioning systems. Perhaps my grandfather was interested in the ongoing plans for air-conditioning the historic skyscraper.

Eight months after his death a $200,000 system would be installed for the first five floors. By today’s accounting, it was a $5 million job that could have attracted the interest of organized crime, which was rampant in Chicago at the time. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the gangster Al “Scarface” Capone was rumored to frequent the Conway Building.

Supposedly, many of his illegal operations were conducted from there. After Prohibition ended in 1933, organized crime had shifted its focus from bootlegging to racketeering and infiltrating labor unions. Huge construction jobs were opportunities for bribery and kickbacks. Lucrative air-conditioning contracts likely weren’t immune from corruption.

Naturally, my murder mystery mind is compelled to consider the worst-case scenario. Maybe my grandfather was forced out the window by someone who wanted to steal his inventive ideas. Perhaps Al Capone’s “men” were involved in the air-conditioning project or there was some other reason Fred Zenner was inconvenient.

What about schematics or notes? If he had any with him, what happened to them? The coroner’s office reported no personal effects, including a briefcase. My fifty-four-year-old grandfather had nothing with him except a receipt from the sheet metal workers’ union, which explains where the police got his name and address.

His pockets were empty otherwise, and that seems strange to me. What about keys, loose change, cash, a money clip, a wallet? His oldest daughter, Alice, was seventeen, and the only sister questioned by police and the deputy coroner. She stated that the day of his death he appeared in her bedroom at 6:50 a.m., the same time he always left for work.

She was barely aware of him walking in to leave a clock for her. One might presume she was referring to an alarm clock that she would reset after he left. Asked if she could think of any reason why he would take his own life, she said no without equivocation or pause. When repeatedly pressed about anything possibly bothering him, she guessed that he was concerned about his health.

His “heart was very bad,” she offered. The year before, he’d been sick in bed with what he said was the flu, but maybe he was “lying.” Maybe he’d been suffering from heart trouble and didn’t want her to know. She added that he didn’t have much money in the bank and was mindful of “expenses.”

“He seemed to be a little bit more worried than other times,” she finally conceded about the last time she saw him.

When he left the apartment that early morning, she assumed he was on his way to Scientific Precision. But that’s not where he went, Alice stated. Apparently, he called his office and said he wasn’t coming in. She didn’t explain how she might have known this. There’s nothing mentioned in the inquest about where he was that entire morning.

Is it possible he had business on the seventeenth floor of the Conway Building? I wonder if he planned to meet someone. None of his colleagues were called to testify at the inquest. We’ll never know what was going on with him professionally and if he might have mentioned interest in the Conway Building or a reason for going there.

When he hurtled fourteen stories to his death, crashing into a third-floor glass canopy, the building supervisor heard the noise and found the body. He set out to locate where the victim had jumped from. Rather magically the supervisor thought to check the construction site on the seventeenth floor and the unlocked storeroom where lumber was stored.

Inside, a window was open wide, a button on the windowsill identified as having come from “a man’s coat.” Based on very little information and virtually no investigation, the six-member jury reached a verdict:

Suicide while temporarily insane due to despondence over ill health.

All this because of a traumatized seventeen-year-old’s speculations and a button. I suppose my grandfather may have snagged it on the window frame as he climbed out. But there’s no description that might hint whether the button was ripped from his coat. Were fragments of thread still in the buttonholes, for example? And was his coat missing a button?

Was it really his button? If so, could it have been torn off during a struggle as he was forced out the window? His arms, legs, ribs, and jaw were broken. Was he beaten or tortured first? Did the coroner’s physician check him with that possibility in mind? The answer is I seriously doubt it, and the alleged jump was said to be unwitnessed. But if something criminal was involved, maybe anybody present was afraid to talk.

I have no idea what transpired beyond the scant details in the inquest that the Cook County medical examiner’s office retrieved from storage. I can’t know what was going through my grandfather’s mind the day he died. The detail about the clock nags at me. Why did he carry it into Alice’s bedroom early that morning? If the point was for her to reset the alarm, why didn’t she?

She testified that she didn’t get up until around 10 a.m. If she was barely awake when her father appeared in her dark bedroom, what made her think he was more worried than usual? It’s clear from the inquest that she was coerced into offering conjectures, to grasp for explanations that would satisfy the deputy coroner.

The jury’s verdict was based almost entirely on her testimony, and I wonder about the lasting effect on her psychologically. For all practical purposes, she’s the one who decided that he was a suicide. His cause of death was “evisceration of the liver and intestines.” He would have bled to death in minutes. It doesn’t appear he was autopsied. That’s too bad because we’d have more information about his health and perhaps what he was doing the morning before he died.

A postmortem would have told us if he had heart disease, scarring from old infarcts, possibly atherosclerosis. We might have an idea what he’d eaten last and when, and if he had drugs or alcohol on board. When someone drops from a great height and impacts a hard surface, the external examination and autopsy rarely tell you why.

The injuries are the same whether one falls, jumps, or is pushed unless there are signs of a struggle or other evidence. Suicide is determined by investigation, and it’s a shame more witnesses weren’t called. The only three were Alice, the building superintendent who heard the body hit the canopy, and the responding police officer.

The death certificate was signed by coroner Frank J. Walsh, an elected official and not a pathologist. A controversial figure, he was coroner when the FBI shot gangster John Dillinger to death in Chicago on July 22, 1934. Politicians and others unauthorized filed into the Cook County Morgue to gawk at the body of the notorious gangster. A plaster cast death mask was made of Dillinger’s face without the FBI’s approval or knowledge.

Eerily, in 1916, my grandfather’s father, “John” Johann Zenner, also died violently from a fall. While meeting with electrical engineers, it was reported that he stepped into the freight elevator, not realizing the car wasn’t there. He owned a successful hardware store in Chicago and was an inventor with patents filed.

The death was an accident, according to the coroner Peter M. Hoffman, the somewhat nonsensical cause, “Shock and injuries fall [sic] from elevator shaft.” His explanation seems to have been hastily jotted, the explanation poorly worded and meaningless. Because he signed out the death as an accident, most likely the police had no interest.

Later when Coroner Hoffman became the Cook County sheriff, he was accused of colluding with mobsters. Was John Zenner’s death really an accident? And what about his son allegedly leaping from a skyscraper? Chances are, what was believed back then is reasonably accurate, nothing nefarious or conspiratorial involved. But there’s not enough information to say that with certainty.

My grandfather’s alleged suicide left his three daughters alone, their mother, Frances, dying four years earlier from chronic nephritis. Mom was traumatized by the memory of visiting her in the hospital to say goodbye, and later having to kiss her cold dead cheek in the open casket. Alice, Dolores, and my mother had no parents and no income.

When the police officer arrived to notify the daughters, Alice opened the rolltop desk, digging in a pigeonhole for a photograph of her father, giving it to the officer. A priest arrived, as did Fred’s sister Tilly. She hung a black wreath on the apartment door, telling her three nieces that they couldn’t go outside for a while. What had happened was shameful.

Mom couldn’t understand why her father would abandon his three daughters. He must not have loved them very much. For the rest of her life, she would say that to me. Her father’s alleged suicide would always be painful, and we rarely talked about it. Later in life, she wouldn’t talk about it at all.

Three years before she died in 2023, I began looking into what I could find out about her father’s death. I told her I had a lot of questions, not convinced he’d committed suicide. I explained my reasons for having doubts, but she didn’t want to listen. She got just as upset as she always had.

My hope had been to supply information she’d find helpful. She might take comfort in knowing that it wasn’t her father’s intention to leave his daughters alone and helpless. Even if he killed himself, it wasn’t because he didn’t care about them. But it’s possible he didn’t end his own life, I’d explained to Mom. We couldn’t say for sure that someone didn’t help him out that window.

She told me that she’d never shared the details with my father, but he found out anyway.

“No wonder you’re maladjusted,” he said to Mom not long before he left us in 1961. “No wonder you’re sick. Your father died of evisceration, and you were raised in an orphanage. You’ve never gotten over it.”

Five years later when Mom would have her first breakdown, her sister Dolores was asked by psychiatrist Dr. Bill Griffin what she recalled about the day of their father’s death. She said that after the police officer left and the shades were drawn, Mom began crawling around and around the oriental rug in the living room, straightening the fringe. She began acting strangely.

The Zenner daughters had no choice but to leave their Foster Avenue apartment on Chicago’s North Side. My mother was twelve, her sister Dolores fourteen, and too young to be on their own. For some inexplicable reason their relatives didn’t take them in or do anything to help as best I can tell. My mom and Dolores were sent to an orphanage.

At the Central Baptist Children’s Home, they were referred to as inmates. My aunt’s name was misspelled as Dolarise. When she turned sixteen, she moved in with Alice, the two scraping by like the characters in my favorite childhood stories The Boxcar Children. Mom was left in the Baptist home. Defenseless and beautiful, she may have been preyed upon.

I don’t know if that happened, but her behavior makes me suspicious. For the rest of her life when hospitalized for various medical conditions, she was frightened by orderlies, doctors, any male who had charge of her. Believing she was being sexually abused, she would panic, often trying to make a run for it, sometimes setting off the fire alarm so that the doors would unlock.

On one occasion when she was in her eighties, she pulled out her IV lines and got dressed. Grabbing her quilted pocketbook, she snuck out of her hospital room in Asheville. She fled to the parking lot where an elderly gentleman from her retirement home awaited in a getaway car.

In the fall of 1962, I entered the first grade, and my teacher, Mrs. Gordon, didn’t like me. A dour woman, she looked a bit like Jane Hathaway in The Beverly Hillbillies. Mrs. Gordon was humorless, always sighing, and unhappy. I’d try to chat with her, hoping I might cheer her up. Maybe she’d be friendly.

“My husband died, and I have frozen grief,” she saw fit to confide one day when I was standing by her desk.

I’d never heard of frozen grief but envisioned her trapped in a cold, sad place. I remembered the time I stuck my tongue on a freezer shelf at home. I couldn’t move without injury, leaving a spot of blood on the ice. I wanted to tell Mrs. Gordon that sometimes we can’t free ourselves without it hurting.

“Why do you think your grief is frozen?” I figured I could help her get to the bottom of it.

“Because it is.” She was impatient and told me to sit back down.

I don’t think she liked children, certainly not an endlessly inquisitive one like me. It was in her class that I realized I wasn’t a good reader and easily bored. I’d look at words on a page and they seemed to morph into an alien language or hieroglyphics when we’d take turns reading Dick and Jane primers.

See Puff run

See Puff jump and play…

I wasn’t impressed. How dull. The earliest book I checked out of the school library was nothing like that. I don’t recall the title, but it featured a girl and her boy companion on an adventure they hadn’t told their parents about. The brave little girl led the way with a flashlight, sneaking into a dark scary house where they shouldn’t be, and I was enthralled.

Jump, Spot, jump

Jump, Puff, jump…

While Mrs. Gordon went around the circle of chairs, asking one student after the next to read, I would imagine what the girl with the flashlight might find in that dark, spooky house. Maybe a monster like Frankenstein. Or a bloody knife on the kitchen floor, a door cracked open, strange noises sounding below…

“Patsy?” My suspenseful reverie would be shattered by Mrs. Gordon’s firm dispirited voice.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Your turn.”

“‘Look, Dick. Look, Jane. Look, and see…,’” I dutifully read while imagining the girl with the flashlight creaking down old stairs into the cellar where something terrible awaited.

I might have been thinking about another library book I’d checked out, The Story of Patsy by Kate Douglas Wiggin. A little girl lives in poverty and other unhappy circumstances. One day she’s shipped off to her wealthy aunt and uncle in Boston. She’s headed off into the unknown, and it was just my kind of story.

I brought the book to class, and Mrs. Gordon asked me to read from it. I stumbled over the words, and she shook her head knowingly. I wasn’t old enough to be reading things like that. I was admonished for my poor pronunciations.

Help! Help!

Run, Spot, run…!

That was about as exciting as Dick and Jane got, and my attention would wander off the grid again. I’d decide it was time to make a funny remark. I’d write notes that I stealthily passed under my desk to the kids on either side. In modern parlance, I spent a lot of time acting out.

This was evident earlier in the year when I’d been selected with other school kids to appear on Miami’s Popeye Playhouse television show that included puppets, clowns, all sorts of goofy capers and music. During the taping, I was so excited I couldn’t contain myself. Showing off, I made asides until Skipper Chuck took off his sailor cap and swatted me with it.

Mrs. Gordon lost patience with my constant chatter and notes that she’d intercept and read aloud. This was reflected in my report cards. I got X’s in citizenship, works and plays well with others, also an F in handwriting. Her comments indicated I was poorly behaved.

One day, she went after me in front of everyone, running a red bookmark across her throat as if I was driving her to suicide.

“No wonder your father left you!” she declared. “You talk too much!”

Pinecrest Elementary School was in walking distance of our house in Coral Gables, and that’s how Jim and I went back and forth. After school, we’d hurry home to Snapper Creek, crossing a canal, passing Parrot Jungle. I remember my humiliation when headed home that day. Several classmates yelled that my parents were getting divorced. I was horrified that everybody knew.

“Your daddy’s never coming back!” one of the first graders yelled. “Because of his secretary! My daddy said so…!”

I started running as fast as I could, past hibiscus bushes splashed with bright red flowers, not stopping until I reached our yard, flying past the wading pool, bits of brown grass floating on top of dirty water. Cool air hit my face as I rushed inside the house, slamming the screen door.

Prior to Mrs. Gordon’s unkind comment, I’d assumed Dad’s leaving was a secret. I knew my parents fought and seemed unhappy. But until that moment I never imagined there was another reason my father didn’t want to live with us anymore. I talked too much. I was a nuisance.

7

AFTER MY PARENTS SEPARATED, DAD WAS SCHEDULED TO PICK UP my brothers and me every Saturday. He didn’t always. I’d sit on top of the wall in front of our house, often with the pair of binoculars he’d given me. On the lookout for his white Karmann Ghia, I knew what it meant when he was late.

He wasn’t coming, but I wouldn’t accept it. Wandering back inside the house, I’d find Mom and ask where he was. On one occasion, I remember her in the kitchen with a knife in hand, sawing through a raw chicken, making cacciatore again. She informed me that Dad couldn’t make it, and I may as well entertain myself with my coloring books and crayons.

He’s just late for some reason, I told her. Maybe he had to stop to get gas or had car trouble. I was going to wait for him, I announced, halfway out the screen door, the long spring taut and quivering. Faint music and laughter sounded from the living room, where Jim and John were watching cartoons. They’d given up on Dad picking us up that day. But I wouldn’t.

I left the house to the rough sawing sound of Mom cutting through chicken as the morning got hotter. A breeze rustled the palmettos, cars swishing in the distance. The wall out front had thick square posts crisscrossed with boards that I’d use to boost myself up. Once on top I’d sit with legs bent, my chin on my knees.

Waiting.

I’d imagine the big lantern on top of the column was a periscope. I’d press my cheek against the glass, one eye squinted shut.

Waiting.

Turning my head slowly, I’d look up and down the street for Dad’s car. When someone else drove by, I’d sit very still, barely breathing, thinking they couldn’t see me.

Waiting.

On our street was a two-story brick house where a divorced father lived. I was afraid of his son, a monster I’ve never forgotten. I know his real name but will call him Jake.

Not long before, Jim, Jake, and I were playing in a vacant lot where I noticed a stranded baby bird on the ground. I picked it up, cradling it, my heart aching as I wondered how to help.

“I know what to do,” Jake boasted. “Let me see it.”

Taking it from of me, he crushed it with a big rock as I watched shocked. I ran home crying and hid in my room. The few times I’d been on Jake’s property, he’d pushed me into the swimming pool. As I’d dogpaddle to the ladder, he’d try to pull off my clothes and duck my head under the water.

“I’m a shark! I’m a shark!” he’d say, laughing, and he was.

One day he showed up at our house, taking me into the bathroom, shutting the door and turning on the hot water. He pulled a few steel screws out of a pocket, instructing me to heat them up and insert them into his rectum. I declined his offer, as did Jim. Looking back, I wonder what went on inside Jake’s home.

Waiting on the wall for Dad, I’d fantasize about the fun in store for us. Maybe we’d go out in the boat, anchoring in shallow water so we could swim. He might take us to the beach and feed us hot dogs and soda pop. Or if it wasn’t too hot, we’d visit the Crandon Park Zoo where I’d gawk at the lions, tigers, and polar bears while feeling sorry for them.

I’d watched for my father all morning, the sun bleaching the street, the rising heat making the air seem wrinkled. For hours I’d maintain my outpost or climb the banana tree for a better vantage point, scanning with the binoculars. I was sure that any minute I’d hear the distant rumbling of his Karmann Ghia.

Then it would roll away from the intersection, pulling into the driveway. He’d stop and the emergency brake would ratchet up, reminding me of Jim cocking his toy tommy gun. I’d imagine my brothers and me driven away, maybe to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q or Howard Johnson’s, then on to a surprise adventure.

The street remained empty as hope burned off like dew on the thick, coarse grass. Mom never told us why he didn’t show up on occasion. I could only assume he didn’t want to see us. Eventually, I’d return to the chill of the air-conditioned house, Mom barricaded in her bedroom with the door shut. My brothers and I knew not to enter as she became more depressed and nonfunctioning.

No father around, and she wasn’t really either. My brothers and I ran wild. Jim was gigging frogs in the canals and getting into rock wars with the Florida crackers, as people called them. A few doors down from us, a woman was startled to hear someone banging on the piano in her living room. Three-year-old John had wandered inside her house, the front door apparently unlocked.

I’d steal fruit from the neighbors’ backyards, loading oranges, grapefruit, limes, mangos into my Radio Flyer red wagon. Rolling it around to my victims’ front doors, I’d ring the bell, offering the loot for a nickel. I thought I was sparing them from having to pick anything. They always paid and told me to keep fruit that Mom wouldn’t want either.

I constantly trespassed, believing that if I ran fast enough no one could see me. I’d sneak Mom’s books from the house, intrigued by childbirth and other racy subjects. Hiding in a vacant lot, I’d look at the graphic pictures, intrigued by human anatomy. I remember a photograph of a fetus that looked like a shrimp. Microscopic images of sperm reminded me of tadpoles.

Several neighborhood boys built a treehouse about ten feet off the ground, no girls allowed. It was accessible by a rope, and I decided to climb up when no one was around. I was no more than five at the time and got up the rope without a problem. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to shimmy back down headfirst, and hurtled to the ground, landing on a rock.

One day a boy gave me a cup of the antiseptic merthiolate, telling me it was orange juice and to drink it. Fortunately, I didn’t. Sometimes I prowled around after dark, watching people through their lighted windows. I fell off my bike into a pile of broken liquor bottles, cutting my knee wide open. It needed stitches but Mom was too depressed to take me to the doctor.

My brothers and I were unsupervised. Predators notice things like that, and one did. A substitute security officer had begun patrolling the neighborhood and became aware of the blue-eyed blond little girl roaming the streets at will.

One day I was walking along the roadside near a canal lined with tall grasses and cattails. Jim had ridden off on his bicycle, a bamboo gig across the handlebars, heavy twine looped around his fist.

I was trying to find him when I heard a car slowing behind me. It backed into a driveway and turned around. Then it was pulling up next to me. The driver’s window cranked down.

“Hello, sweetie. Whatcha doing?” The patrolman’s weathered face crinkled into a grin, wisps of hair fringing his uniform cap.

I have a vague memory that he appeared to be in his forties with shoe polish black hair, a craggy face. He was missing teeth like a jack-o’-lantern.

“I’m frog hunting,” I told him.

“Well, I’m little girl hunting, you wanna be my friend?” His grin widened until I could see the tops of the ugly yellow teeth he had left.

Reaching out the window, he grabbed my arm. I saw black hair and thick fingers. I was aware of his firm grip, his hand meaty and damp. I remember liking his affection while feeling that I shouldn’t.

“If you’re really my friend,” he teased, “give me a kiss.”

Standing on my tiptoes, I kissed his cheek, and it was sandpapery like Dad’s. Then the patrolman drove away and began stopping his white cruiser daily whenever he saw me. I enjoyed the attention. My father had moved out weeks earlier. I missed him terribly and Mom was just as absent.

When the patrolman intercepted me for our visits, each one was friendlier and more inappropriate than the last. One day he opened his door, pulling me close. He started talking dirty. Around this same time, Mom was getting obscene phone calls that added to her sense of poor self-worth and helplessness.

“What if I dropped by your house?” the patrolman said to me.

“I guess that would be okay.”

“What if your mother was home?” He stroked my arm with his thumb.

“She wouldn’t mind,” I lied.

“What if she was naked?” he continued, and I didn’t know what to say to that.

Wrapping an arm around me, he started kissing me on the mouth, digging a hand in a pocket of my red shorts.

“Whatcha got in your pocket?” he asked. “Bet you’ve got treasure in it.”

I shook my head, scared as he wormed his finger deeper into the pocket. Finding a tear and making it bigger. Fingering my panties. Then he withdrew his hand and slid it into the waistband of my shorts. I was embarrassed and too frightened to move. I felt elastic stretch as he touched my hip.

“I’ll find your treasure,” he said. “I’ll find it.”

He was pulling me into his car when Jim rode up on his bicycle, slamming on the brakes.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” his shrill voice screamed.

Turning around, he pedaled furiously back to the house to alert Mom. The patrolman slammed his door, squealing away, leaving black streaks of rubber on the pavement. Within the hour I was in our living room, sitting in the lap of a Dade County police officer in a light blue uniform with a shiny silver badge. I told him the details of what had happened. I remember feeling ashamed of myself.

“It’s just a good thing they caught him before he ruined other little girls,” my mother tried to reassure me.

All I heard was the word ruined. She was saying that I was ruined like some of my drawings when I was impatient and annoyed. I don’t know the name of the private patrolman who molested me. But I heard he was a convicted pedophile recently released from prison. Apparently, the neighborhood association didn’t bother looking into his background before hiring him as a substitute.

I’m all but certain that if Jim hadn’t interrupted, the patrolman would have driven off with me. Chances are, I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. No way he intended to go back to prison, and someone would have found my body floating in a canal. At the age of five I found myself involved in my first criminal investigation.

Unfortunately, the victim was me, and soon enough I was sitting inside a formal room with dark paneling and a conference table, no windows, a wooden ceiling fan turning. I don’t remember men present, only women dressed as if for church. They were quiet and gentle, solemnly passing around my red shorts, asking questions I didn’t like answering.

I was mortified. What had happened was my fault. I should have resisted somehow. I didn’t run, or fight. I’ve thought a lot about why a child molester picked me. I’ve analyzed my response. I remember feeling special that he liked me. Then I was afraid to anger him. I wanted to please him so he wouldn’t do something terrible to me or my mother.

I don’t know the details of my meeting in the rarefied gloom of that conference room during the early months of 1962 after Dad had moved out. But I assume it was a hearing, perhaps a grand jury proceeding. After it was over, I wanted to hide and never come out. But my bigger worry was Mom. She felt guilty and like a failure.

I sensed it in her silence as we drove away, stopping at a big toy store where I didn’t want to go. She told me I could have anything I wanted. Absolutely anything at all. She said I was brave, but I wasn’t and didn’t deserve a reward. I picked out a Magic Designer set, an early version of a Spirograph. I never touched it once we got home. I wouldn’t look at it.

Over the decades I attempted unsuccessfully to find out the identity of the patrolman and what became of him. I couldn’t locate any records about the case. I’ve imagined confronting him in prison, informing him of the damage he caused, most of all to my mother. While I was growing up, she wouldn’t buy me red shorts. Even if I wanted them.

8

ONE SATURDAY IN 1963, DAD SCHEDULED TO PICK UP MY BROTHers and me for an afternoon outing. While waiting on top of the wall in front, I worried that once again he wasn’t coming after all. My brothers were inside the house watching TV, and as usual Mom was in her bedroom with the drapes drawn.

I was in and out of the air-conditioning, refusing to give up. I reasoned that once I did, he for sure wouldn’t come. I had to will it. Midafternoon I spotted his small Karmann Ghia with its bug eyes and chrome bumper that seemed to smile. Jumping down from the wall, I met him in the driveway as my brothers raced out of the house.

“Daddy! What are we going to do today?” I asked, overjoyed.

“I get the front seat!” John cried out.

“No, you don’t! I get it!” Jim pushed him into a hibiscus bush.

Dad was behind the wheel, the car in neutral, the engine thrumming, the top down. I climbed in the back behind him and began stroking his hair.

“How would you Boo Boo Bears like to play a new game?” He smiled but his demeanor was disconcerting.

“Yes!”

“What game?” I wanted to know.

“Kidnap.” Another smile as he wiped sweat off his jaw, driving away.

“How do you play that?” Jim wanted to know.

“You’ll see,” he said as I watched palm trees and telephone poles flying by.

I remember going to Royal Castle for food and bathrooms. Then we stopped at a gas station, and as we were leaving, he used a pay phone. I overheard what he said.

“Hello, Pat… Never mind that… Of course, they’re with me…”

He was quiet for a moment, listening to whatever Mom was saying. When he spoke again, he sounded mean.

“You’ll never see them again. In fact, no one will ever find them… Getting hysterical won’t change a thing,” Dad said, hanging up.

As we drove off, I asked why he’d talked that way to Mom, but he said not to worry about it. He got quiet, giving us no further details about what his game kidnap was about. What did kidnap mean? I hoped it wasn’t about taking a nap because I hated them.

I was getting increasingly uneasy as we drove for what seemed a long time, the scenery unfamiliar, Dad preoccupied and trancelike. I sensed something was very wrong as he shifted into a lower gear, bumping onto a dirt road, tiny rocks popping beneath the tires. Tall palms towered from either side, the stirring broad fronds draped with beards of Spanish moss.

I sucked on a Life Saver that John had given me from the roll Dad bought at the gas station. John said I could have any tropical fruit flavor I wanted except orange, lemon, tangerine, cherry, or lime. That left pineapple, and I didn’t think it fair. I wondered where we were going as I noticed NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to trees.

The air was humid and salty, and I could tell we were nearing the Biscayne Bay. Maybe we were going to play kidnap on the beach. Dad was simply taking us on an adventure for fun and everything would be fine. The bumpy road curved and I caught glimpses of white sand, and the low sunlight twinkling on waves.

We stopped at a driftwood gated fence with PRIVATE PROPERTY and more NO TRESPASSING signs. On the other side, a sandy path led to a deserted shore where I knew we shouldn’t be. A dinghy I didn’t recognize seesawed in the swells, and I asked whose it was and why we were here.

“It belongs to a friend we’re going to visit,” Dad said.

He parked in front of the fence.

“What friend?” I wanted to know.

“You’ll see.”

“Where are we?” I fired off questions.

“How would you like to take a boat ride to an island?” He slid the key out of the ignition.

“Yeah!” Jim yanked up the door handle, hopping out into the thick hot air, the buzzing of insects an unsettled static.

John stepped from the car in cowboy boots, black leather with pointed toes and red diamonds up the sides. They swallowed his legs midcalf, the heels sinking into the sand.

“Here, Johnny, let’s get rid of those,” Dad said. “You won’t need them.”

He sat John down on the ground, pulling off the boots, tossing them into the backseat. Dad began collecting dead palm fronds and covered the car with them. I assumed this was part of a game we were playing as he explained we were escaping to an island that wasn’t really an island.

If Mom came looking for us, he was making sure she didn’t see his Karmann Ghia. If she did, she’d murder us, he said. He was making sure we were safe. But he was the one acting dangerously. Lifting us over the fence, he told us to stay put. We waited on the shore as he waded into the surf. The waves were up to his chest as he reached the dinghy that didn’t belong to us.

He grabbed the anchor rope and drew it in. Clutching the rusty iron shank in both hands, he hoisted it into the boat. The heavy metal clanked hollowly against wood. The rope over his shoulder, he took big slow steps through the water, pulling the boat behind him. Piled inside were old lifejackets and a sun-weathered wooden paddle.

“Everybody in!”

He steadied the rocking boat against his thighs, lifting us inside. Sitting at the stern, he draped an arm over one knee, his other hand holding the tiller. The dinghy skimmed across the water as we followed the shoreline. I sat on the floor near Dad, an oversized faded orange lifejacket strapped around me.

I wondered why we hadn’t brought fishing poles, tackle, or bait. He had no food or drinks. Who was Dad’s friend, and what would we do when we got there? My brothers sat in the bow, laughing while the rushing wind sent white straps whipping against their lifejackets, their hair blown straight back. They didn’t seem unnerved like me.

Ahead the shore receded, the wide band of white sand narrowing and becoming thicker with grasses, mangroves, and shrubs. I now know that Dad took us to Stiltsville, where homes were built in the water on barges or stilts at the edge of the Biscayne Bay.

Dad steered inland, easing on the throttle, slowing down. I smelled the salty, pungent odor of rotting plants, kelp rocking on the surf and washing onto the coarse, weed-infested beach. Veering the boat sharply, Dad entered a cove that I suspect was Hurricane Harbor.

“Look!” John yelled, twisting around, staring wide-eyed at Dad.

On top of a barnacle-encrusted metal barge was a one-story white house with awnings over the windows. A Boston Whaler tied to a piling rocked in our wake. Draped over the side of the barge were old fishnets with yellow-and-white float-bobbers on them. I noticed multiple red gas cans, a rain barrel, and what I now know was a portable generator.

Dad cut the motor and we drifted to a wooden ladder. He looped a rope around a piling, pulling it tight. Then the front screen door swung open, and a man walked out. I knew instantly he wasn’t expecting us. Tall and tan, he was dressed in white shorts and a yellow shirt.

I had no idea who he was. But he reminded me of Sailor Jack in a storybook I’d read. His name was Perry Nichols, my father’s former law partner. I would learn later that Perry owned the house with another lawyer and a U.S. congressman.

“Sam! What brings you here?” Perry put his hand over his eyes, shielding them from the sun.

“You three sit tight for a minute.” Dad climbed the ladder, the house some ten feet off the water.

He and Perry shook hands, moving farther away so we couldn’t hear what they talked about. But I caught enough to understand that Dad was acting strange. He said he was going to write a book that would change the world, and I remember his affect as blunted, his hands rigid by his sides.

Perry must have recognized that something was wrong. Moments later my brothers and I were on the barge and led inside the house, the open windows covered by screens. I could feel the barge swaying beneath the grass-mat-covered floor. By now the sun was low, the blue sky dusky.

We walked through a sitting room of wicker chairs, settees, and oil lamps glowing on bamboo tables, ceiling fans stirring the warm air. Perry took us into the kitchen and opened the lid of a big red ice chest. I noticed a small gas stove with a pan on top of a burner, and a freshwater tap fed by a tank.

There were paper plates and plastic silverware. On a table was a ship-to-shore radio like ones I’d noticed on big boats at the marina.

“There are plenty of Cokes, and I have cookies too.” Perry smiled and winked at my brothers and me. “How about a beer?” he offered Dad.

Perry Nichols rummaged in a drawer for a can opener, punching two tiny triangles into the beer can. Dad drank several gulps, setting the can on a table. I asked Perry if he lived on the barge, and he explained it was his getaway when he wanted quiet while he worked. It was his special place that few people knew about.

“I have something you’d like to see,” he told my brothers as if I might not be interested.

“What?” Jim’s eyes got big.

“Come on.” He passed through a doorway, and we followed.

I remember several tiny bedrooms, and a bathroom with a sink and marine toilet. He took us into his den, dominated by a large desk amid animal skins and heads. I moved closer to Dad, unnerved by dead things staring.

“These are animals I shot in Africa,” Perry said proudly.

I looked up at a set of crossed spears. They had sharp black flint tips lashed by leather thongs to wooden staffs, red and yellow feathers dangling.

“Did you kill the animals with gigs?” I pointed at the spears, hoping Perry would be surprised that I knew what gigs were.

He leaned his head back and laughed, his eyes lighting up as if the sun was inside them. For an instant, I felt happy.

“What’s this?” Jim was studying a big gray trash basket that seemed covered in shark skin.

“That’s an elephant’s foot,” Perry said, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, fascinated and repelled.

How could anything have a foot that big? I’d seen elephants at the zoo and the circus but wasn’t close enough to notice much about their feet. I ran my finger lightly over the hard, rough surface and saw wadded-up yellow legal paper in the bottom. It crackled when stepped inside, the taxidermied foot coming up to my thighs.

“Did you kill the elephant?” I asked, thinking Perry must be very powerful and important.

“Yes.”

“How?” I was doing my usual thing of asking too many questions.

But he didn’t seem to mind. Walking behind his desk, he touched a long, thick rifle that had a dark reddish-brown stock with a dull black barrel. It was held by two wooden hooks attached to the wall.

Nearby were several birds, colorful and stiff, flattened against plaques, their heads turned to the side. They reminded me of flowers I’d press between the pages of a book. I stepped out of the elephant-foot trash basket and wandered around the den, wanting to run my fingers over tawny furs and a leopard skin.

But I didn’t dare. I remembered stroking Mom’s mink stole when it was laid out on the bed, and she told me not to touch it or the fur would fall out.

“Is this from Africa too?” I pointed at an indigo blue bird with a red beak, its wings fanned out.

“From the Amazon,” Perry said.

I promised that next time I found a dead bird I’d save it for him if he’d like, thinking he’d be pleased, and he laughed again.

“It took six shots to kill her, and that was bad.” Perry resumed talking about the elephant, looking at the trash basket, the yellowed ivory nails still intact. “She could have caused a stampede.” As if she deserved what she got.

I thought of her being killed for no good reason while her friends and family looked on. Perry told us about other animals he’d shot as I looked at them sadly. The kudu with corkscrew horns and the okapi had barely open mouths as if about to say something. Their heads moved with the subtle rocking and creaking of the barge.

Dad walked across the den toward the doorway, the grass mat making a dry crackling sound.

“Why don’t you tell the kids some of your hunting stories,” he suggested to Perry. “They’d like that. I’m going to finish my beer.”

“Okay, Sam. Bring me one while you’re at it.”

Perry sat on the edge of his desk as Jim, John, and I gathered around him, sitting on the moving floor.

“Have you ever heard of a bear over eight feet tall?” Perry lowered his voice as if getting ready to tell us a secret.

“No!” Jim’s face lit up. “Is that taller than Dad?”

“Yes.” Perry smiled. “A good bit taller. Well, I have a Kodiak bear, eight feet eleven and a half inches tall. How about that?”

“Wow!” John exclaimed, his fingers in his mouth again.

“Where?” I looked around the den, and behind me toward the doorway.

My heart fluttered with fear. I was afraid that at any moment a gigantic bear with long teeth would storm into the room.

“No, no, Patsy. Not here. I’m talking about my house in Coral Gables,” he said. “In fact, it isn’t very far from yours.”

“Do you keep the bear in a cage?” Jim was enthralled.

“What? No, no, no. The bear is dead, Jimmy. I shot him off the Alaskan coast nine years ago and had him stuffed. I suppose one of these days I’ll give him to a museum.”

“Can I go get a Coke?” I was thirsty and wanted to find Dad.

We could have our drinks together and I’d tell him about the bear.

“Sure, help yourself.” Perry lit a cigar.

In the kitchen, Dad’s beer can was on the table where he’d left it. He wasn’t there or in the sitting room. Standing next to a fisherman’s lamp, I didn’t know what to do. I smelled the faint scent of burning oil and noticed a long, curved sailfish mounted on the wall near the front door. It looked like a giant needlefish with a tremendous blue-black fin. Lamplight illuminated faded indigo spots on the sail as it cast a dark irregular shadow on the wall. Visions of glassy eyes, bared teeth, dull fur, and stiffness jumbled in my mind. I felt terror creeping over me.

Opening the screen door, I walked outside, pushing away oil smells and dappled incandescence. I was shocked to see Dad sitting astern the dinghy, paddling away from the barge, sending a trail of ripples behind it. The setting sun smeared pink and orange across the horizon, and tree shadows mottled the smooth water.

At intervals Dad turned his head. But he didn’t seem to notice me leaning against the ladder, tears rolling down my face. After he drifted farther away, he shifted his position, yanking the cord to start the outboard motor. The quiet cove resonated with low-speed rumblings that became more rapid as Dad went faster, gripping the tiller.

The bow lifted off the surface, and white water churned and tumbled. He rounded the bend, his wake slapping hollowly against the metal barge under my feet. I listened as the roar of the motor faded into silence and Perry appeared. I told him Dad was gone, pointing at the bend in the cove, the water smooth again.

“Go wait in the den with your brothers. I’ll be right back,” he said, and I could tell he was unhappy.

He got into the Boston Whaler and set out after my father as the sun smoldered on the horizon. I waited in the den, wondering if the dead animals would wake up seeking revenge for being killed in cold blood and displayed like artwork or trophies.

THUMP!

THUMP!

THUMP!

I imagined the elephant foot coming alive and stomping after me. I fled to the kitchen as the two motorboats returned. Perry and Dad talked outside on the barge for a while as night fell. When they walked into the kitchen, Perry looked serious and tired. He announced that we’d be spending the night there.

9

THE NEXT MORNING, JIM THREW UP HIS EGGS AT BREAKFAST, THE three of us shell-shocked. I don’t recall our sleeping accommodations but imagine Dad and Perry were in the bedrooms, my brothers and I camping out in the living room.

My father’s former law partner recently had been sworn in as a special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Perry had connections, and obviously realized Dad was acting irrationally if not bordering on psychotic. What I remember vividly, as does Jim, is Dad continuing to mention a book he would write. He talked grandiosely about it changing the world.

I don’t know the details of what was put into motion, but I remember a white Coast Guard boat picking up Dad. I watched as it churned away through the quiet cove, horrified that I might not see him again. Perry loaded my brothers and me into the Boston Whaler, and I don’t know where he took us. But I remember gliding up to a pier, water slapping the boat sides.

He stood up, a coil of rope in his hand, moving to the bow. Waiting with his feet far apart, he held his hands out to stop the boat before it drifted into the dock. He wound the rope around and around a piling, pulling it tight. Then he helped each of us out, unstrapping our lifejackets.

A station wagon was parked nearby on a narrow road, and I don’t know who was in it, but suspect it might have been Perry’s wife, Inez. My brothers and I were driven off, headed home. Tires hummed over pavement, and John cried quietly because he wanted his cowboy boots.

It would seem my father tried to give my brothers and me to the Nichols. I’m forever grateful for their kindness and what they did to help. Chances are this was when Dad ended up in the care of a psychiatrist he referred to as Dr. Salinsky. Never seeing the name spelled out, I’m not sure who that was.

I don’t know how long Dad was hospitalized, undergoing what Mom referred to as sleep treatment, unconsciousness induced by drugs. It was a good time for us to make a run for it, and we did that May of 1963. I knew we were moving when a big yellow truck with green ships painted on the sides pulled up to our house.

I watched movers carrying out cardboard boxes, and lamps, couches, beds, loading them into the truck. It took two men to carry the red velvet wingchair, shoving into the truck’s dim interior, sweat staining their gray uniforms and rolling down their tired faces. Mom told my brothers and me that “Mayflower” would one day carry our furniture and other belongings to a quiet valley in the mountains, a place far away.

Before we left, we stayed with my grandmother. I remember sitting in her living room during that last visit before Mom moved my brothers and me to North Carolina. G.G. was distraught and kept rapping on a window overlooking the birdfeeder.

“GET AWAY FROM THERE! GET AWAY FROM THERE!” she yelled, rapping some more. “Darn old blue jays. They’re scaring away all the birds. And that’s the first scarlet tanager I’ve had in weeks. Did you see it, Patsy? Or were you asleep?”

“No, I wasn’t asleep.” But I almost was, the couch very comfortable, our gray cat Sniffy curled on top of me.

“Of course you weren’t asleep. I don’t suppose the dead could sleep with Gussie shaking the house like a hurricane. Sometimes I’m such a silly old lady.”

She was wearing her usual blue flower-printed dress and thick glasses. Her eyes looked unnaturally big, her white hair fluffy, and when she laughed, I could see bridgework and pink gums. We said goodbye, and it was the only time I ever saw her cry.

“G.G., don’t cry, don’t cry.” Mom was teary.

“If I lose you too, I’ll have nothing.” G.G. took off her glasses, wiping her eyes. “You’re the closest thing to a daughter an old lady could dream of. What will you do? And where will you stay?”

“All that matters is we escape,” Mom said.

G.G. worried about how we’d afford to live. She kept saying that she wished she could help us. But the only money she had was what Dad gave her, and her winnings at playing cards. Mom said she’d sold her engagement and wedding rings. She complained that she was given only $160 for both.

“The Cubans have flooded the market with diamonds,” G.G. said.

“I know I was cheated,” Mom complained.

She had $48 left, I heard her tell G.G. That would have to last until we were settled safely in North Carolina. As soon as Dad was released from the hospital, Mom would let him know our new address so he could send checks to support us.

“Pat, don’t give him a divorce. Don’t give in to his foolishness,” G.G. advised her.

“I wish I’d never married him.”

“Birds are faithful, Pat. They’re more faithful than Daniels men.”

I remembered the scent of lavender and my grandmother’s heavy arms around me as we hugged goodbye. Never again would I carry the picnic basket on treasure hunts with her. I wanted her to come with us, but that wasn’t possible. After saying goodbye, Mom loaded us and Sniffy into the Chevy Impala, white with blue swooshes on the sides.

My father could know nothing of our escape plan until we were safely in North Carolina. I suspect that’s why Mom did little in advance beyond hiring Mayflower to pack up our house and put everything into storage. I assume she was taking no chances that he would discover her intentions and try to stop us. For sure, he would interfere.

Jim sat in the front seat with the map open in his lap. At the age of eight he was directing Mom which way to go. I remember he kept instructing her not to turn right or we’d drive into the ocean. Finally, we were on U.S. 1 headed north. In the backseat with Sniffy’s cardboard carrier at my feet, I’d pet her through the air holes.

We drove some eight hundred miles, arriving in Asheville on June 6, three days before my seventh birthday. Mom found a motel and we spent the night, checking out the next morning after breakfast. She stopped at three different gas stations asking for directions to the tiny town of Montreat.

Tunnel Road turned into Old U.S. 70 as we drove east. Daisies and Indian paintbrushes dotted the roadsides, thick clusters of green leaves tumbling from gnarled branches. Clean cool air blew through the cracked windows, stirring my hair.

Mom was hugging the center line as we crept around turns with steep drop-offs beyond guardrails. I’d never seen mountains and thought they were a frozen ocean. Amazed by the cool temperature, I deduced that western North Carolina was air-conditioned.

Then banks of raw red clay soared on either side of the road, and it seemed the Red Sea was parting as we passed into the Promised Land where Billy Graham lived. It would be a secure haven for us. We would be fine, Mom assured us. Nobody was going to hurt us, she said.

Montreat is hugged by mountains on three sides, tucked in a cove crisscrossed with streams. That part of the world is rich in the granite used to construct the college, the church, the conference center, walls, bridges, waterfalls. The rugged rock structures are a primitive combination of ancient castles and the Flintstones.

In 1897 a congregationalist minister named John C. Collins was looking for an unspoiled spot where people of faith could gather. He chose western North Carolina because of its temperate and healthy climate. The forty-five-hundred-acre tract he decided on was untouched forestland in a valley some sixteen miles from Asheville.

He called his new utopia Mountain Retreat, the name later shortened to Montreat. In 1907, the Presbyterian Church U.S. purchased the entire settlement for conferences, fellowship, and education. It was to be a sanctuary where clergy and missionaries could gather, furlough, and retire, a place of rest and reflection, a spiritual oasis in a secular world. My family arrived late morning, passing through the double stone gate that reminded me of the McDonald’s golden arches. I remember slowly following Assembly Drive, hundreds of tourists and conferees milling about. We’d shown up at the height of the season without a single acquaintance or a place to stay.

But Mom was convinced that God would find someone to save us. As we crept along in traffic with no destination in mind, we neared the congested part of town where the conference center and college are located. People were everywhere, some carrying fishing poles and tennis racquets. I saw a lot of families with children.

We neared the rugged stone Assembly Inn looming over Lake Susan, and Mom stopped in the middle of the road. She cranked open her window, flagging down a well-dressed man with white hair. He stepped over to see what this pretty young woman with three towheads needed.

Our car had a Florida license plate, and the white-haired man likely assumed we were lost, as were many visitors in these parts during the summer. Mom explained that we weren’t lost and were moving here. But we had no place to stay and didn’t know a soul.

The man she was talking to happened to be the president of Montreat Anderson College. A few years later, he would become the town’s first mayor. Grier Davis was prominent and well connected. She couldn’t have picked better. What are the chances he happened to walk across Assembly Drive at the very moment we rolled up in our white Chevy?

Synchronicity, the universe reminding us that we’re not alone. Or an answer to prayer, a miracle, something meant to be, as Mom believed. To me they’re different names for the same mystical intervention. Grier Davis told her to pull off on the shoulder, and they talked for several minutes, traffic rumbling past.

Everywhere I looked, I saw people carrying folders and Bibles. They wore big nametags that included where they were from. Mom explained that we’d driven all the way from Miami where she’d heard Billy Graham preach earlier. If he lived in Montreat it must be special, she asserted, and Grier Davis agreed that it was very special indeed.

She said we were moving here because she wanted a safe place to raise her children, and obviously Miami wasn’t. As I listened, I felt shame again. Dad left because I talked too much. We were fleeing Florida because of what the patrolman did. I’d upended our family, and halfway expected Mom to tell the future Montreat mayor that.

Grier Davis was sorry for our troubles and would try to help. But we couldn’t have shown up at a worse time of year, he explained. Suitable accommodations had been reserved long ago. There were no vacancies at the imposing stone Assembly Inn. All the summer cabins and cottages were taken. He said he knew everyone in town and had a few ideas.

We shouldn’t expect much beyond a roof over our heads, he apologized. But as Mom was always telling us, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” She thanked him, relieved and grateful. He scribbled his phone number on a piece of notepaper, handing it to her, promising to make inquiries on our behalf.

He needed time to return to his office and make a few calls, he said. Mom was to find a pay phone and check with him a little later. Before the day was out, we’d rented a first-floor efficiency in a dump on Assembly Drive across from the balding athletic field with its dusty baseball diamond.

An older woman named Mrs. Arnold owned the paint-peeled white frame house. She lived upstairs with her nephew, Mom told us. When we pulled up for the first time, he was stretched out in a lounge chair, sunning and reading in the weed-choked front yard. Putting down the book, he got up.

In his thirties with dark blond hair cut short, he was friendly, welcoming us. I remember he had the wonderful last name of Crimm that I would appropriate decades later in my crime spoof Isle of Dogs. The real Mr. Crimm was terminally ill. That’s why he warmed himself in the front yard, Mom explained.

Or maybe there was some other reason he was out there watching people go by, a lot of them kids, she noted. He seemed pleasant enough but made her uneasy. Not long after we moved in, she discovered that he’d invited Jim upstairs for a visit. She forbade my brothers to be alone with Mr. Crimm despite him doing nothing to merit suspicion, as best I could tell.

From Mom’s point of view, everybody was a suspect because of what happened to me in Miami. I’d been molested, and she worried my brothers would be next. She was like that all the while we were growing up. If a man paid attention to her, he was really after her children. Over the years there would be many people Mom falsely accused.

On Mrs. Arnold’s dilapidated front porch was a hammock that looked like a fishnet suspended between sticks. I thought the wicker chairs were fashioned from broom straws. Mom introduced us as my stomach grumbled. I wondered where the nearest Royal Castle was, not realizing the chain had no restaurants in North Carolina.

“What’s in your box?” Mrs. Arnold asked me.

“Sniffy,” I replied, my arm getting tired from holding her.

Whenever I’d move, the cat would slide around inside the cardboard carrier, a corner of it jabbing me in the leg. Mom asked about places to run errands, and topping the list was a grocery store. Mrs. Arnold told her where the A&P was, and a drugstore and other shops in Black Mountain.

We moved our suitcases and several boxes inside the tiny downstairs apartment. I lifted Sniffy out of her carrier, holding her up to a dusty window.

“Look, Sniffy, here we are!” I told her happily.

Mrs. Arnold’s house was in such poor repair that the leg of my bed broke through the rotting floor the first night there. The sleeve of Mom’s bathrobe caught on fire the next morning when flames shot up too high from the malfunctioning gas stove. We hadn’t been staying there long when Sniffy got out and we couldn’t find her. I looked with no success and was bereft.

Montreat is less than three square miles, and I could walk from one end to the other without getting lost. Mrs. Arnold’s house was in the middle of town, and in ten or fifteen minutes I could reach the playground or lake. During the summers, a club program offered activities to occupy children while their parents vacationed or attended conferences.

Mom had a lot on her as she got us settled in a place she’d never lived in or visited before now. It was the first time she’d been to North Carolina. There was only so much she could manage with three young children needing her attention. Unlike Miami, Montreat was the sort of place where we could run around without needing supervision.

She’d enroll Jim and me in the clubs when she could manage the fee. We joined other kids on scavenger hunts, hikes along mountain trails, and learned to shoot a bow and arrow. The rest of the time we played on our own, exploring the woods, rock hopping in streams, and swimming in the kiddie pool at Lake Susan, a lifeguard posted on the shallow, gritty beach.

We hadn’t been in Montreat long before Dad was out of the hospital and realized we were gone. Mom told him where we were, and he began sending money for alimony and child support. I suspect my aunt Dolores and uncle Bill might have been subsidizing us also. They would in the future when we had nowhere else to turn.

10

WHILE WE WERE RENTING MRS. ARNOLD’S HOUSE, MOM SENT ME to Camp Merri-Mac in Black Mountain. I lived in a cabin called Tweedle Dee, the schedule regimented, hardly a free moment to spare. Reveille was at 7 a.m., and I’d dress in the uniform of knee-length denim shorts and a white cotton shirt with a black ribbon tie.

After cabin cleanup, it was off to breakfast and chapel. The rest of the day was mandatory activities like swimming, volleyball, making hammered metal ashtrays and pottery in arts and crafts. My two weeks there reinforced what I already knew about myself. I wasn’t skilled at making friends. When I tried, I was rebuffed.

It was better to be by myself. I felt far lonelier when with other people and always would. I engrossed myself in making crafts and learned a valuable lesson. To create anything that matters, it always starts the same way. Lanyards are a good example. I made several at camp and each began with a swivel hook I’d fasten to a nail in a wall.

I’d braid the four colorful flat plastic laces into something long enough to wear around my neck, the finishing touch a square sliding knot for adjusting the size. I got fast at making lanyards for my favorite counselors, and they’d clip their whistles to them. I realized that no matter what I created, I had to start with a hook of some sort.

Without that nothing is going to happen. The same rule applies to writing a book. How to start? What’s the hook? Once I figure that out, I start weaving the story. Often the “hook” or scene I open with ends up moving closer to the end or is deleted. It doesn’t matter if it got me going.

My entire time at Camp Merri-Mac I was desperately homesick. Not wanting anyone to know, I pasted a big smile on my face during meals and activities. I pretended to be carefree and happy on bus trips to Sliding Rock, Tweetsie Railroad, the outdoor historical drama Unto These Hills in Cherokee.

I didn’t let on how isolated and out of place I felt. I rode a horse for the first time and was thrown off, ending up in the infirmary. I acted like I wasn’t hurt when I might have been. My lower back and stomach ached from my crashing into the riding ring’s white picket fence. I didn’t complain about the pain when examined in the infirmary, managing to fool everyone.

I seemed so upbeat and cheery that the counselors called me “Miss Sunshine.” Alone inside my cabin, I’d crawl inside my laundry bag to cry. I never let on how miserable I was. I missed Dad. I missed Mom. I don’t recall her coming to visit me at the camp even though it was less than a mile from our house. She literally could have walked there.

Merri-Mac was started by Alice Coburn, or “Macky,” as people called her. She and her husband, Harold, lived in a sprawling white frame house at the entrance of the camp, and often she’d have me over. I don’t know why she singled me out. Probably because I saw her at some event and struck up a conversation. That was my M.O. with adults, and rarely was I afraid of them.

Sitting in Macky’s living room of antique furniture and Persian rugs, I preferred her company to kids my age. Maybe because I had two brothers, I seemed unsocialized when it came to making friends with girls. I was aggressive in sports, extremely competitive, and not the least bit interested in dolls or feminine clothes, especially dresses. That wouldn’t change as I got older.

For some reason, Macky Coburn took an interest in me. She must have known the details of what was going on with my family. Maybe she felt sorry for us or simply was kind. She let me stay at the camp basically for nothing, and I gave her some of the poems I wrote and pictures I drew.

It was due to the encouragement of people like her that I would continue my creativity. I was praised for my efforts, and perhaps much of it was disingenuous, simply grown-ups being nice. There’s not much left of my early writings and artwork. Eventually, Mom would throw away most of it after my brothers and I left home.

What still exists today isn’t exactly Leonardo da Vinci or Hemingway. Yet I was applauded for my efforts. When I’d write a story or a poem, people had a reaction. I was motivated to continue my introverted endeavors, spending hours alone with crayons, pencils, and cheap paper. The world I lived in was empty, and I learned to populate it with imagined characters.

I’d bind my illustrated stories into books with cardboard covers, a few of these self-publications surviving my mother’s purges. The Magic Snowman who had a kind heart. The Little Bear who made friends with a chipmunk. Another tour de force I wrote at the age of eight is simply titled Storys, the main character a happy cloud.

My Little Halloween Book features a dramatic scene in the forest between “a happy little gost” and an “old witch,” my spelling atrocious. “Do not sit here,” the old witch said, but of course the ghost did anyway and got into trouble. The witch knocked him out of the air, down to the hard dirt rather much like I did to Maria on the playground.

The books begin “Once A Pond a time” and end with everybody friends. Despite what most people might expect, the stories I wrote during my early years weren’t tragic or violent. But they were suspenseful, and I overused the phrase all of a sudden. My inventions were the result of wishful thinking, an attempt at creating imaginary friends since I had no real ones.

My mother found my little books amusing, but I don’t recall her showing much interest. She saved a few of my early efforts in the scrapbooks she kept. Most of my childhood I felt alone and was. I learned to create worlds of my own, and my inventions kept me company. That’s good conditioning if you’re going to be an author.

After a month in Mrs. Arnold’s downstairs efficiency, we moved into a rental on the remote Montreat hillside of North Carolina Terrace. The ramshackle house was roomy and two stories, the crumbling rock wall in front strangled with ivy. Our landlady, Miss Craig, was gaunt with yellow-stained fingers and a deep voice from smoking cigarettes.

Our new neighborhood was filled with spooky curiosities like the grand white villa peeking through trees. Cold spring water plashed from the mouth of a bronze lion’s head in the rockery, the estate like something one would see in Italy. As best I could tell, no one was ever home. I wondered who lived there. It seemed a secret.

Across the street from it was a weathered shack, the doors padlocked. My brothers and I would peer through the cracks of boards. The luxury roadster inside likely was from the 1920s or ’30s. Daylight seeping in dimly illuminated dusty chrome, flat tires with spoked rims and wide whitewalls. A folded-down leather convertible top was festooned with spiderwebs.

Miss Craig looked like she’d stepped out of Hansel and Gretel and seemed to take a shine to me. We’d go on romps in the woods where she introduced me to the fauna and flora. I met rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, all sorts of birds and wildflowers. She showed me birch and sassafras trees, the twigs delicately spicy.

“A natural way of brushing your teeth,” she said while stripping off bark with a pocketknife. “Be careful of splinters,” she advised.

Carrying a small pickaxe and a basket on our hikes, she’d show me smoky quartz and garnets while looking for gold, rubies, emeralds. Cleaving mica into fragile silvery sheets, she said it was used to make windows long ago, warning me about the abandoned mines hidden in the foothills. I told her about the one Jim showed me, and she shook her head disapprovingly.

“Stay away!” she warned.

As we walked along creeks, she pointed out tadpoles, and salamanders that were speckled and striped. A crawfish looked like a tiny lobster skittering along the mica-flecked silty bottom. The black snake zipping across the path wasn’t harmful. But copperheads and rattlesnakes were deadly. I was to avoid poison ivy, poison oak, and briar patches.

Some mushrooms were fine to eat but best not to try. And be aware of yellowjacket nests underground. Should I get chiggers, cover the itchy area with nail polish until the little critters suffocate. She introduced me to puff balls that when touched blow out clouds of dusty spores. I tasted honeysuckle and touched moss that looked like green carpet.

Miss Craig confided that there were fairies in the woods, and now she really had my attention.

“What do they look like?” I wanted to see one badly.

“Very small with wings. They’re very shy and don’t trust most folks.”

Determined to be the exception, I was careful and polite around decaying stumps. When I’d see a hollowed-out tree, I was respectful, figuring such places might be where the fairies lived or hung out.

“You know what this here is?” Miss Craig asked one morning, and she seemed excited.

She gently lifted a tender stem, its billowy pink blossom reminding me of a pink balloon.

“This here is a lady’s slipper.” She smiled proudly. “And it’s what you classify as a rare woodland plant.”

She carefully dug it up by the roots, placing it inside her basket.

“What’s this called?” I pointed to glossy heart-shaped leaves and tiny white flowers.

“Galax,” she said.

“Can I pick the flowers?”

“No! You never pick nothing!” She shooed me away with a sweep of the pickaxe. “You always dig things up by the roots so they can be replanted.”

She led me to a stream, and we followed the fern-covered bank. Suddenly, she stopped and knelt near a rhododendron bush.

“Glory be! Why come see, Patsy!”

I knelt next to her as she pushed aside a branch, pointing at a single delicate plant.

“A Jack-in-the-pulpit.” She spoke in a hushed voice as if we were in church. “You don’t see them very often.”

She pointed out the striped hood that was the pulpit. Jack was the spadix or spike inside.

“What’s Jack doing?” I leaned closer.

“Why, he’s preaching a sermon to all the other plants and animals in the woods!” She sat back on her heels and laughed.

I leaned even closer, and Jack had no hands or mouth. He didn’t look like he was preaching at all, this faceless man inside a green-striped hood. She dug that up next, gently pulling the hairlike roots from the loamy earth, placing Jack into her basket. We waded through more tall ferns and grasses.

Sticks cracked under our feet as we stepped around mountain laurels, ducking under pines and low branches to the constant sound of water trickling over rocks in the creeks. She introduced me to fairy wands growing near a tree trunk, telling me they were magic as I looked for the ethereal winged creatures that might use them.

“You can close your eyes and make a wish,” Miss Craig offered. “And if you’re a good little girl, it will come true.”

She laughed as I squeezed my eyes shut, saying a silent prayer to the fairies and their wands.

“Please let Daddy come soon… Let him come now!”

I counted to ten before opening my eyes, and my father was nowhere to be seen. I wasn’t a good enough little girl. That’s why I wasn’t granted my wish. The Jack-in-the-pulpit stared blankly at me, not caring. As we headed back to the house, the basket bobbed with plants, and I asked what she would do with them.

“Sell them, sugar pie,” Miss Craig replied as we moved in and out of shadows.

She instructed me sternly never to kill a lady’s slipper or a Jack-in-the-pulpit. They’re protected, and it would be a crime, she threatened. I wasn’t sure that was true but took it to heart. Whenever I’d see one of the rare plants she’d pointed out, I gave it a wide berth.

At the end of our first summer, it was time to move again. Miss Craig’s house wasn’t winterized, and she would return to where she lived off season. I’d lost my companion and guide. She was my only friend. My family packed everything we had back into boxes and suitcases, loading up the car.

When it was time to say goodbye, Miss Craig was busy on the front porch, a broom in hand, her short gray hair covered with a red bandana. My brothers sat on stained grass matting, looking at Jim’s tropical fish book, pointing at photographs and whispering.

“I wish y’all would git!” She shook the broom at them. “How do you ’spect me to sweep the dirt off the porch when you’re sitting right in front of the door?”

My brothers weren’t fond of her, and I’m guessing a lot of people felt the same way. She was peculiar, according to my mother. Why had Miss Craig never married? Or if she had, what became of her husband? For sure, she was crabby, but I was used to her eccentricities and oft-time irritability.

Accustomed to seeing her daily, I’d look forward to our adventures and tutorials. Miss Craig made sure Mom had the address in Mississippi where she lived most of the year. Our final rent payment was due, and as soon as Mom got her next check from my father, she’d take care of it.

“When you can,” Miss Craig told her. “I ain’t in a rush.”

Our last time together was a downhearted occasion. She gave me a mini pickaxe, and picture books of local flora and geology. I would keep them for years, using the pickaxe to dig up rocks and hammer them open, hoping to find gold or something else of value.

11

IN EARLY AUGUST WE MOVED INTO THE WARRENS’ HOUSE (AS WE referred to it), two-story and painted brown. It had pine paneling and floors, comfortable furniture, a fireplace. On a back road in the middle of town, it was much newer than our two earlier rentals, my upstairs bedroom overlooking the rope swing in the overgrown backyard.

Off season, there were maybe twenty children in Montreat, almost exclusively boys, for some strange reason. Our minister, Calvin Thielman, and his wife had three sons. The Barkers had six. The Sommervilles had four. Every family had at least one, and not a girl my age. I’d hang out with the boys as much as they allowed, the same way I did in Miami.

I wasn’t looking forward to starting the second grade, despite Mom’s assurances about how much I would love it. One afternoon she took us to Mack’s Five & Dime in Black Mountain. She bought Jim and me blue cloth spiral-ring notebooks, and yellow pencils and plastic pouches to keep them in. John was only four, too young for school.

I was excited and scared when Jim and I were enrolled in late August. I remember dark brown floors, shiny and smelling like wax on the basement level where my second-grade classroom was located. Mom held my hand while looking at a slip of paper, glancing up at numbers over the doors.

“Eighteen,” she said, stopping. “This is it, Patsy.”

Inside were rows of wooden desks, and a green chalkboard across the front wall. A gray-haired lady sat at her big boxy desk writing in a roll book. She looked up at us, taking off her wire-rim glasses.

“Good morning.” She set down a pen and folded her hands on the ink blotter. “It looks like I have a new student.”

She smiled at me, and Mom squeezed my hand, my brothers hovering near the doorway.

“Hello, you must be Mrs. Hickey?” Mom said to my new teacher. “This is Patsy. And I’m Mrs. Daniels.”

I was busy looking around at shelves stacked with thick yellow spelling books and boxes of fat black pencils. On a felt-covered bulletin board giant letters of the alphabet had hands and feet. They marched in a circus parade. I noticed stacks of cellophane-wrapped paper. Also, boxes of crayons and pastel chalk.

I was warming up to the idea of my new school. Maybe being in second grade meant spending the day drawing pictures and writing stories.

“Patsy?” Mom interrupted my preoccupations. “Remember this is room eighteen. As soon as you get off the bus each morning, you are to come here. Okay?”

Mrs. Hickey walked us to the door, and we left to find Jim’s new classroom. At the end of the hall, we entered a dark stairwell, our feet thudding, our hands sliding along the smooth wooden railing. Once Jim was enrolled in his fourth-grade class, we made our way back through the noisy hallways, voices echoing off brick walls.

There were many rooms and flights of stairs, and I wondered if I’d be quite so happy once Mom wasn’t holding my hand. I was afraid of getting lost, making sure to memorize my route. On the ground level, we pushed through a heavy door, leaving the varnish smells and high-pitched voices behind.

My first day of the second grade, the weather was still warm, and it had rained the night before. Earthworms littering the wet pavement reminded me of skinny airless balloons. Morning glory vines crept along the roadside, the white-and-purple blossoms open wide and trumpeting a new day.

Mom had announced at breakfast that she would walk us to the bus stop, making sure we knew where it was. John tagged along as we set out at 7:15, and I held her hand, kicking pebbles with my black-and-white saddle shoes. Mom told Jim and me that after this morning we were on our own.

“And when you ride home this afternoon, you get off where you got on and walk straight back. See?” She squeezed my hand. “It’s easy.”

The bus stop was a low stone wall thick with rhododendrons, mountain laurels, pines across Assembly Drive from Montreat’s weathered strip mall. We’d get our mail at the post office with its wooden counter and walls of bronze boxes. The postmistress, Mrs. Solomon, wore a blue uniform that reminded me of a police officer.

The beauty shop’s hooded hair dryers made me think of space helmets, and I was reminded of the picture I drew of John Glenn and a monkey standing by a rocket. There was a laundromat with coin-operated washers and dryers. Best of all was the general store that opened at 7 a.m.

It was run by William Hinkle, who was always nice when we’d stop in for the occasional Creamsicle, ice cream sandwich, Swee-Tarts, bubble gum. Assembly Drive was quiet at this early hour, and then we heard bus 91, orange with a flat nose like a caterpillar. When it roared right past without slowing, I was relieved.

“See, Mommy, it didn’t stop,” I informed her. “We can’t go to school.”

“It’s just turning around so it’s on the proper side of the road to pick you up. It will be right back.”

Five minutes later I heard the roaring again, the round glass headlights and chrome bumper bearing down. It stopped and the door folded open while air brakes sighed, and Mom hugged us goodbye.

“Behave yourselves and work hard!”

Climbing the metal steps, Jim and I sat near the front on the brown vinyl bench seat. I watched Mom through the window while the gaunt mountain man behind the wheel eyed me in his rearview mirror. He wore a taxi driver’s cap and chewed a plug of tobacco.

“Who er you?” He spoke with a twang that sounded like a jaw harp.

“Jim,” my brother said.

“Patsy,” I added.

“Well, I’m Mr. Neilan. You’se mor’an welcome to ride as long as you ain’t loud and don’t git out of yer seat.”

When we reached the Montreat gate, he detoured around it on the dirt access road, stopping for a pickup at the foot of Rainbow Mountain where people lived in shacks. The next half hour, I stared out my window watching unfamiliar children boarding. They gave me curious glances as they clomped down the aisle.

When we reached the brick school building, I hurried off the stuffy bus. Jim and I stopped to get our bearings as kids shoved past.

Room eighteen, I reminded myself silently, nervously.

Inside the school, my brother raced upstairs while I headed down.

Room eighteen. Looking at the numbers over the doors.

Room eighteen. Relieved when I found it, suddenly overwhelmed by shyness.

At 2:15 that afternoon the school principal made an announcement over the intercom’s crackling static, the microphone clattering. He read the long list of bus numbers, telling us which ones to ride for certain locations. I stared up at the wooden speaker hanging crooked next to the clock.

“… Children riding to Montreat take Number Ninety-One…”

When the bell rang, I hurried along the hallway, clamoring down the stairs. Number 91 was easy to find because it was older and didn’t look like the other buses. It had no snout of a front hood, the engine encased in brown metal next to the stick shift. I could spot my bus instantly in the long line of them wrapped around the driveway.

I climbed the steps while Mr. Neilan watched, leaning against the window, his work boots propped on the motor cover. I noticed Jim already aboard, sitting in back, talking loudly with other boys.

“Afternoon, Gabby,” Mr. Neilan said in a nasal voice, touching his cap.

“My name isn’t Gabby.” I sat down behind him.

“I know it ain’t.” A plug of tobacco lumped in his cheek. “But I p’fer calling ya that since you’se sech a big talker.”

He turned his head to spit out his side window, wiping a trickle of brown from the corner of his mouth. I’d ridden the bus but once so far and hadn’t talked to anyone except Jim. I didn’t like being called a big talker, imagining another X on my report card.

“No, I’m not! No, I’m not!” I protested.

He smiled as small feet thudded up the steps, racing down the rubber-matted aisle for seats.

“You’uns quit running or git off!” he yelled, jiggling the tall stick shift.

The bus was much more crowded than it had been in the morning. I wondered if it was because no one wanted to go to school, but everyone wanted to come home. I asked Mr. Neilan about it.

“It’s ’cause lots of young’uns ride with their parents and git drapped off on the way to work.” He pulled a handle and the door slammed shut behind a poorly dressed freckle-faced girl.

She stood next to me, looking up and down the rows of packed seats. Mr. Neilan yelled that we weren’t moving until everyone sat down, and she glanced fearfully at him. She plopped down beside me, and we rolled forward, following the slow-moving orange train to the highway.

My seatmate was quiet, and I felt her glancing at me. Finally, a dirty fingernail pointed to my folded school papers. She wanted to see my drawings, and I wanted to see hers. We made the swap, and I felt sorry for her. She’d colored rows of flowers, the blossoms not connected to the stems. Clouds were blobs floating in the air, everything crooked and smeared.

I told her how good her pictures were. It wasn’t true, and I knew my artwork was better. My brightly colored birds with long yellow beaks perched on twigs beside a birdfeeder. Mrs. Hickey’s red check marks were in the upper left corner. Toward the end of the day, she’d told everyone to put their crayons away while she walked around the room inspecting our efforts.

She stood next to me and seemed to look at my artwork longer than anyone else’s.

“Very good, very good, Patsy.”

As I studied my seatmate’s drawings while we rode the bus, I knew they would receive no praise from anyone. Her name was Rosy, and she asked where I lived. Not anywhere yet, I told her.

“We’re building a house,” I explained, and she got quiet.

When I mentioned Montreat, she began to frown.

“Yore rich, ain’t ya?” she accused, turning away from me. “My paw tol’ me that only rich folks live in Montreat.”

I was startled and tongue-tied.

“Here.” She shoved my drawings across the seat, the ultimate rejection.

I wanted to tell Rosy that my family wasn’t rich. We could be friends even if I did live in Montreat. I left the drawings in a messy stack between us.

“You can keep them if you want,” I offered.

“I don’t want nothing of you’rn!”

She wouldn’t look at me, scooting to the edge of the seat as we slowed to a stop. The door unfolded, flapping against the bus, and Rosy got up without goodbye or a glance, thundering down the metal steps. I watched her veer off the pavement, taking a dirt road that meandered up the mountain.

She ran kicking up dust, her face flashing white when she turned around to look as we drove off. In the distance a wooden shack peeked through spindly pines and hardwood trees.

When Mr. Neilan reached my bus stop, three kids were left besides my brother and me. We glanced at each other silently as everyone headed home, the loud noise of the bus fading in the distance. I noticed the morning glories had shriveled like closed umbrellas, remembering Miss Craig telling me that the flowers didn’t like the heat.

I wanted to skip and pick honeysuckle. I couldn’t wait to trade my dress for shorts and tennis shoes. Mom greeted us with hugs at the front door, announcing that milk and cookies awaited on the kitchen counter. John was home from kindergarten, and she gave each of us a nickel for being good.

We bought popsicles at Mr. Hinkle’s store and ate them while walking to the playground. My brothers and I raced each other down the shiny metal sliding boards, arguing about whose feet touched the ground first. I decided I might like school if I didn’t have to sit by myself on the bus in the mornings and have Rosy hating me for being rich in the afternoons.

Jim and I didn’t know the other kids at our bus stop. I vaguely recall they were from a family on furlough for a year. Like the summer people, the missionaries were here and then gone, returning to far-flung places like Bolivia, Ghana, Haiti, Korea, Japan. There was little point in being friends, and they felt the same way.

Jim carried a metal slingshot in his back pocket, the thick rubber band bouncing when he walked. While waiting for the bus, we’d take turns nailing the stop sign with rocks. In those days it was fine to carry a pocketknife to school, and when time allowed, he might carve a stick into a gee-haw whimmy diddle.

He’d play Mumbly Peg, throwing the knife as close to his feet as possible, and it’s a wonder he didn’t stab himself. Climbing the apple tree near the bus stop, he sometimes ripped his pants. Later, when it was cold enough to see our breath, we’d pluck tightly furled rhododendron leaves, puffing on them like cigarettes while the missionary kids looked on with disapproval.

All the while I’d listen apprehensively for the thunder and gear shifting of old Number 91. I could hear it long before it got to us, and my adrenaline would pump. After the bus passed us and turned around at Lake Susan, I’d hear it coming from the other direction and pick up my books.

“Hi, Mr. Neilan,” I’d greet him while drumming up the diamond steel steps.

“Well, hello, Gabby.” He wasn’t going to stop calling me that.

Always chewing tobacco, he’d spit out his side window, sometimes forgetting to open it first. SPLAT, and all of us would laugh as he smeared the glass clean with a rag. He’d whip his head around, yelling at everyone to shut up. He’d threaten to flap open the doors and jettison those who misbehaved.

If you didn’t make it to the bus stop on time, Mr. Neilan wasn’t going to wait, and I was phobic about missing my ride. The thought of it would send me into a panic. It had happened a few times. Mom had to drive us, and we’d show up after the bell had rung, in trouble for being tardy. I became neurotic about punctuality, always early.

If I don’t have plenty of time to get where I’m going, I drive everyone around me mad with reminders to hurry up, we’re going to be late. I made it a practice getting to the bus stop with plenty of time to spare, leaving as the sun rose over the mountains. Often, I’d leave my books on top of the wall and cross Assembly Drive to the store.

I’d warm myself in front of the potbelly stove while Mr. Hinkle asked about school and how I was doing. I would chatter with him nonstop, and he always seemed interested. He’d give me treats like bubble gum or a pack of Life Savers. One morning he sneaked me a small bag filled with silver-wrapped Peppermint Patties that I hid like my Halloween candy.

Later on, Mr. Hinkle befriended two gray squirrels he named Charlie and George, treating them like pets. They’d scamper inside the store for food, darting inside the door when a customer opened it. He showed me how to feed them peanuts in the shell, and they’d claw up my jeans, perching on my shoulder. The Black Mountain News did a story about them, and they became local celebrities.

It was terrible when I heard somebody shot them. I don’t know for a fact that happened. But it’s what I was told, and suddenly I didn’t see Charlie and George anymore. I wasn’t surprised. At an early age, I had no misconceptions about human nature. I knew people could be cruel to all living things, including each other.

12

LIFE OFF SEASON IN MONTREAT WAS QUIET AND SLOW. WEEKDAYS meant school, and on Sunday the mornings were spent in church at Gaither Chapel. I don’t remember socializing with our neighbors our first year there, sensing my family was conspicuous and a source of gossip.

I’d catch people cutting their eyes at Mom and making judgments behind her back. No doubt my second-grade teacher had heard a few stories. Her husband, William Hickey, was the vice president of Northwestern Bank’s Black Mountain branch where my family had accounts.

I enjoyed accompanying Mom to the low brick building with white trim on East State Street. She’d dress up, looking elegant, reminding me to be quiet and polite inside the bank. Mr. Hickey would take care of Mom’s transactions, afterward giving me a lollipop. I was aware that he sometimes called our house. Usually, it was to inform Mom that she was overdrawn, on one occasion by a dollar.

I can still see her sitting at the kitchen table with her big checkbook open and an array of invoices neatly ordered by priority. I’d hear sighs and the sound of her carefully tearing out green checks along their perforated edges. She struggled to pay our bills, hoping for enough left to buy groceries and other necessities.

I’d wish I could do something to earn a lot of money. Maybe then she wouldn’t seem so worried and unhappy. I noticed her begin to implode when Dad was late with his check. It was her only means of keeping a roof over our head and food on the table. I knew when the check was due to arrive each month, and if it was so much as a day late, Mom would become agitated.

Several days late, and she was paranoid, about to freak out. She would start in with her suspicions. Dad was playing a sadistic game, forcing her to call his law firm to ask about money. The last thing she wanted was to talk to his secretary. It reminded Mom of the one he’d been sleeping with before walking out on our family.

If the check arrived with a trace of lipstick on the envelope flap, Mom thought it was deliberate. Day after day she’d walk or drive to the post office, despairing when the legal-size white envelope wasn’t in our mailbox. As I’d watch her anguish over money, I’d connect it to her mental state deteriorating. I was desperate to fix everything wrong and felt helpless because I couldn’t.

Mrs. Hickey never alluded to our financial woes and embarrassments. Like many teachers I’ve not forgotten, she was a lighthouse in dark, troubled waters. She encouraged my creativity, praising my efforts, seeming to appreciate my curiosity and imagination. I don’t recall a single instance of her being anything other than kind and patient.

During the first few weeks I was in her second-grade class, she gave me a red, white, and blue pencil. I’d commented that it was pretty, probably when I was chatting her ear off before the bell rang. To my surprise and delight, she presented the pencil to me with a smile, and everyone in the classroom saw her do it. I’m sure I was beaming.

At recess, I left the pencil in the groove on top of my desk before filing out to the athletic field. When I returned to the classroom, the pencil was gone and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Questioning my classmates, I was answered by shrugs or nothing at all. I decided that someone was resentful because Mrs. Hickey gave a special pencil to me and no one else.

It’s natural for me to assign motives and land on suspects. Often, I’m right. But not always. I didn’t trust the boy who sat behind me, small for his age and always squirming. Joey Cort (as I’ll call him) would kick my chair whenever Mrs. Hickey wasn’t looking. He reminded me of the cover boy for Mad magazine, right down to the missing teeth and mischievous eyes.

“Did you borrow my pencil?” I whispered to Joey during quiet period when Mrs. Hickey was grading papers at her desk.

“Why would I want yer stup-hid pencil?” he retorted with a sneer.

“Because it’s better than yours.”

“I didn’t tetch hit…!”

“Patsy! Joey! That’s enough. Hush!” Mrs. Hickey was quiet but stern, peering at us over the rims of her glasses.

That afternoon when I got home from school, I retreated to my bedroom closet in hopes I might have a chat with my secret friend Mr. Owl. I don’t know his origin. He wasn’t a character in any story I was aware of, including those I wrote. The Mr. Owl in the Tootsie Pop commercial didn’t exist at the time. My Mr. Owl was unique, and I believed he was real.

As I would feel when writing novels someday, it didn’t seem he was my idea or invented. One day he fluttered into my mind of his own volition. It was as if he discovered me and not the other way around. Decades later, I’d feel the same way about my medical examiner protagonist Kay Scarpetta and other characters. Also, Jack the Ripper.

Mr. Owl was magical like the winged fairies Miss Craig told me about. Maybe he was spiritual like an angel. He was large with mottled brown feathers, a curved black beak, and tufted ears. Wise with big yellow eyes, he lived high up in a tree in some other dimension. Or maybe he was from a faraway planet and needed me as much as I needed him.

He would have recognized that at the age of seven I had little in my life. I was lonely and often viewed as a nuisance, my future not promising. I thought of myself as a broken toy that doesn’t work as advertised. I was aware of deficits such as my dreadful sense of direction. It’s as if I’m missing an inner compass that others take for granted.

Out of necessity, I developed habits to compensate. As a teenager playing tennis tournaments, I’d leave the house an hour earlier than needed for fear of getting lost no matter how many times I’d driven wherever I was headed. I have no instinct that leads me in the right direction and don’t always recognize faces, including those of relatives.

I realized early on that I can’t spell, some of my attempts so bad that spellcheck and Google don’t recognize what I’m trying to say. I can carry a tune but not harmonize. Eventually I would fail at playing the piano, the guitar, the drums. I was hopeless in ballet, the teacher recommending that Mom not waste her money.

I flunked the Singer sewing course. Baton twirling lessons were another disaster. When my class marched in the Asheville Christmas parade, I kept dropping my baton, and it would bounce end over end into the crowd while people pointed and laughed. The year I was a Girl Scout, I hated every minute except selling the most boxes of cookies, not letting on that I solicited over the phone.

During my stint as a cheerleader my senior year of high school, I was out of sync when shaking my pompoms. Worst of all and perhaps related, I can’t do math. Even simple arithmetic was challenging during grade school, and in later years I was lost in space when taking algebra and geometry. Other than drawing and storytelling, it seemed nothing I did was noteworthy.

But I tried hard, and maybe that’s the attribute Mr. Owl looked for when I was in the second grade. I took it seriously when he’d summon me to meet where we wouldn’t be disturbed. If I initiated the encounter, he didn’t always respond as if on a different frequency and unable to answer my call. When he appeared, it was in a thought, rather much like sensing a presence I can’t see.

I didn’t know what telepathy was, but that’s how we communicated. It was important no one could hear us as we conferred in our cone of silence, usually the bathroom where I’d lock the door and sit on the closed toilet lid. Or I’d hide in my closet, the overhead light bulb glaring, a chain dangling from it.

“Today was a bad day,” I told Mr. Owl about my pencil being pinched.

“Why do you think someone took it?” he asked.

I replied that Mrs. Hickey had singled me out, and taking my beautiful pencil was an act of retaliation. My top suspect was Joey Cort. I couldn’t prove it. But he’d accused me of being the teacher’s pet.

“And you are,” Mr. Owl wisely answered.

At least this time, I reminded him. Certainly, I wasn’t Mrs. Gordon’s favorite the year before, but I didn’t know Mr. Owl then. He didn’t enter my thoughts until my family moved into the Warrens’ house and I started school.

“It’s important for you to be the teacher’s pet. And you do what you can to make it happen,” he went on, and that was true too. “But when you get special attention, it chums the water, attracting the green-eyed monster.”

I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded scary like the green snake that startled me in the ficus tree. Mr. Owl said to be careful when someone treated me special. Don’t let others know about it or they’ll summon the green-eyed monster to put you in your place and steal what you have like the red, white, and blue pencil.

I told Mr. Owl how much I liked talking to him. There was no one else. Dad was gone. My mother had little emotional energy or attention to spare. The kids at school were mean, and I relayed some of what they’d say.

“Patsy talks funny!”

“Ha! Ha!”

It was true that my brothers and I didn’t talk like everybody else. Our vernacular didn’t include expressions such as…

Y’all sit down.

You-ins is in a heap of trouble.

Go fetch the shopping buggy over yonder.

The young’uns is fussing.

We got us a flat tar, better call the wrecker.

Stop hollering! Mr. Neilan was always yelling.

Most of the people in Montreat didn’t says things like that and my family didn’t either. We didn’t have a southern accent or permute words, and we used proper grammar. When other students and teachers talked, I was reminded of twanging banjo strings and pulling taffy. I didn’t understand everything they said or why it took so long to do it.

“Patsy doesn’t have a father!”

“Patsy’s not from here!”

I relayed to Mr. Owl other taunts from my classmates.

“If you’re really good at something, that won’t happen,” he told me. “Especially if it’s something people want or find helpful.”

The best part of the school day was recess. My classmates and I would file along a hallway reeking of the oily sweeping compound the janitor used on the floors. We’d clunk down the dark-painted metal stairs, emerging in a cacophony of loud chatter on the unpaved driveway. Across from it was the athletic field that I remember as much bigger than it likely was.

We played kickball, dodgeball, Red Rover, freeze tag. In bad weather we’d go to the gym. My first few days in school I was the last person picked for any team. But I thought about Mr. Owl’s advice, deciding the kids would treat me better if I was good at something besides stories and drawing pictures. That shouldn’t be hard as I looked around at the competition.

Growing up with my rowdy brothers and their male friends, I was fast and agile out of self-defense. A relentless competitor, I’d run the fastest and hit the softball farther than most of the boys. I was stoic, not showing the pain I felt after stepping into an overgrown ditch on the field at school and badly spraining my ankle. I tried not to limp when returning to my desk in Mrs. Hickey’s room.

I remember my nemesis Joey berating me for acting like a boy, and I thought how illogical that was. Certain behaviors were okay for him but not for me? And the answer was yes. But that didn’t stop me. If anything, it made my competitiveness worse. I had to beat everyone at everything. It wasn’t personal. At least not for me.

I can still hear the ping of the rubber ball after I’d hurled it, eliminating one member of the opposing team after the next. I had a hard throw, and no one was spared.

PING!

PING!

Oh, how I loved that sound when I eliminated the competition. I associated it with reward, deciding that people couldn’t ignore me if I was the best and our team won. Being a tomboy jock meant I was the top choice for athletic competitions. But it didn’t make the other kids like me any better.

In fact, it seemed that nothing about me was compatible with popularity. I tried for perfect scores on my tests, waving my hand in the air every time Mrs. Hickey asked the class a question. Finally, she’d suggest I give others a chance to answer. I don’t blame my classmates for glaring and making faces.

Every morning as Jim and I headed out the door to catch the bus, Mom would give each of us a quarter for lunch money. The food was dreadful, and I ate very little of it, some days scraping the entire plate into the big plastic garbage can. It was a wonder I could eat at all, as stressed as I felt when the other students shunned me.

I’d try skipping the cafeteria altogether, but a teacher would command me to get in line. As soon as I’d collect my tray of inedible food, the ordeal began.

Where to sit.

Every empty wooden chair I tried suddenly was “saved.”

Where to sit!

“Saved.”

Where? As I’d look around frantically.

“Saved…”

Often, I ended up in the hinterlands with the “free lunch” kids who were very poor, eating pats of butter as if they were candy. Most were too old for the grades they were in. They may as well have been speaking a foreign language, their grammar and accent unrecognizable.

But they accepted me, especially when I let them have most of what was on my sectioned plastic plate. Collard greens. Cornbread. Hamburgers made of “mystery meat.” Fish sticks on Friday. One of the girls at the free lunch table was my classmate Deborah, tall and gaunt, cross-eyed with rotting teeth, and brown hair as lifeless as a doll’s.

In Mrs. Hickey’s class, she’d been held back so many times she towered over everyone. The two of us didn’t talk much, communicating by holding hands on the playground. When I was a team captain, I’d pick her first even though she was awkward. When she swung the bat too late, it was in slow motion as she struck out. She’d miss the kickball entirely, loping like a giraffe.

The other kids wouldn’t touch her in freeze tag, treating her like a pariah. I supposed both of us were. I understood how Deborah felt. Although I can’t be sure what registered. Not much, it seemed, but I felt sorry for her. One day I asked if she’d ever been to Montreat, and she shook her head no. I invited her to come home with me, and she got a blank look on her face.

It wasn’t going to happen. She was one of the mountain folks. Or hicks, as they were unkindly called. It seemed an unwritten rule that they didn’t step foot in our neighborhood, and we didn’t visit theirs.

On occasion Mom would call G.G., and I’d beg her to come visit. We wrote letters back and forth, and she always said she was saving her quarters. A card shark, she’d promise to use her winnings for a plane ticket, and she did twice.

The first time was in the fall of 1963, and she spent a week at the Warrens’ house. She took us shopping for sleds in Black Mountain at Western Auto. I remember the smell of paint, the racks of tools, the barrels of nails, the fishing gear. I was thrilled by the wooden Western Flyers that could be driven while lying down or sitting up, steering with hands or feet.

The snows began in December, and we were at it all day long flying around Montreat’s steep back roads. While my brothers and I played and went to school, Mom started looking for a place to build our permanent home. I remember her as more carefree then, a lightness about her. She seemed present, her blue eyes not as sad and vacant. Life had taken a better turn. But I missed Dad.

Now and then he’d send presents, and I didn’t understand his choices for me, wondering if his secretary or someone else did the shopping. I saw no value in the wind-up music box with three ballerinas that twirled to the Blue Danube Waltz. I hated the wooden zither that wasn’t a toy. It was black and hand-painted with flowers, and it made no sense why Dad would pick out such a thing.

I had no clue how to play its too many strings that had to be tuned with what looked like a skate key. I attempted to make sense of the musical instrument a few times, but it was light-years beyond my ability. I wanted the same types of gifts he’d give my brothers. No matter how often I told Dad that, he always sent things that he (or someone) thought a girl should have.

The only time he had ever smacked me was while we were driving in his Karmann Ghia with the top down one weekend, and I grabbed his Chesterfield cigarettes off the seat, tossing them out the car. That’s what he deserved for giving Jim a toolbox and not me, I declared. Instead, I’d gotten a talking doll that I tore limb to limb, yanking out her string.

Our first few months in Montreat, Mom and Dad were trying to be civil, occasionally talking on the phone. She was quiet and preoccupied afterward, but with a glimmer of hope. She asked him if they should get back together. She was willing to try. Assuming he still loved her.

“He choked up,” she confided in me tearily after hanging up. “His psychiatrist said we aren’t good for each other.”

We hadn’t been in the Warrens’ house long when I heard yowling outside my window during a rainstorm one night. I was shocked to see our missing cat Sniffy up in a tree, thin and soaking wet, cringing on a branch, her eyes frantic. We’d moved twice since she’d vanished months ago. I don’t know how she found us. It seemed miraculous.

Around this time Mom had gotten a miniature collie she named Laddy and we’d go for walks and play in the snow. I’d take him on adventures in the woods, sitting on a log, sharing a snack the same way Miss Craig and I had done. I’d point out briars, poisonous creepers, and warn about snakes. It was a dangerous world, I’d explain to the puppy.

At bedtime Mom read us stories like A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six and Winnie-the-Pooh. She’d make up tales about a character she called Dickie Bird. It was a happy moment when he’d make a surprise visit, leaving treats, usually cookies. Jim and John would devour theirs and race off to play while I loitered by the kitchen counter. When no one was looking, I hid my cookies in my bedroom.

I did this for weeks, never eating a single pecan sandie, wedding cookie, or Fig Newton. Every time I’d sit inside my closet to chat with Mr. Owl, I’d take the baggie with me, tying it to a coat hanger with a piece of string. I wanted to make sure he could see the cookies dangling midair.

“I brought you a snack. Eat all you want,” I’d invite him with largesse.

It seemed he was never hungry, and I saved the cookies for weeks, adding to the stash, never indulging. One day I forgot to remove the bulging baggie from the coat hanger.

“Patsy, come here!” I heard Mom call out while I was in the living room watching Bugs Bunny.

I hurried to my room to see what was going on, and she was sitting on the edge of my bed. She looked puzzled, not smiling, holding my lumpy bag of stale cookies with the string tied around it, the plastic dusty with powdered sugar.

“Patsy, why do you have these cookies hanging in the closet?”

I couldn’t mention that I was sharing them with Mr. Owl, even though he wasn’t interested. She didn’t know about him, and if I told anyone, he would fly away.

“What are you saving them in the closet for?” Mom looked worried, putting her arms around me.

“So Jimmy and Johnny won’t get them.”

That didn’t explain why I hadn’t eaten the cookies to begin with. Why was I hoarding? I answered with a shrug.

“You must have a reason, Patsy.”

“I felt like saving them for later.”

I was afraid of running out of food but didn’t mention that part. Mom told me no more cookies in my closet. This was the worst news of all. If I didn’t offer cookies to Mr. Owl anymore, he might be offended even if he didn’t want them. Like Mom often said, it’s the thought that counts.

From now on when Dickie Bird had treats waiting for us after school, I had to eat them on the spot in front of witnesses. Otherwise, Mom would return them to their cookie bag. I don’t know the significance of Dickie Bird or where she got the name, but he was her creation. She’d make up stories about him, and we couldn’t wait for his next appearance.

He was her imaginary helper and friend. Perhaps that’s why Mr. Owl alighted in my thoughts around then. After I’d earned his trust, he began sending me on secret missions. It was part of my training. For what? I wanted to know, but he wouldn’t say. Our relationship was serious and purposeful. I don’t remember him laughing or smiling. I was to do as instructed.

He told me it was forbidden to venture alone outside Montreat’s stone gate. It wasn’t safe. If I did it even once, there would be no forgiveness. I’d be on my own alone in the universe. At first, I’d carry out his assignments on foot. Later when my family’s belongings were moved out of storage, I’d ride my pink bicycle to some destination without knowing the reason.

I took these operations seriously. They were a test of my willingness to do as directed. Maybe Mr. Owl was God in disguise. Or possibly an alien from a different galaxy. Pedaling along Montreat’s hilly roads I’d make up stories about the houses I passed. After dark, I’d hide behind shrubbery, watching neighbors through lighted windows, wondering what they were doing or having for supper.

Over time, Mr. Owl’s tasks became more demanding. I was scared when he deployed me to where the town drunk Mr. Reilly lived. I’ve changed his name to protect his guilt. His house was falling apart and looked haunted, the overgrown front yard strewn with junk and garbage.

Topping the crumbling brick chimney was a hooded metal cap that creaked as it turned in the wind, and I imagined it was an improvised periscope. Mr. Reilly used it to spy on anyone who dared to get near his property. If I did, he’d show up with his shotgun. He’d grab me, and I’d never be seen again.

Mr. Owl wasn’t my only so-called imagined friend. I say so-called because I’m not sure what’s behind invisible visitors who seem to come from elsewhere. Perhaps they’re a gift when we’re the loneliest and least hopeful. Later I would have another “friend” who had no name that I recall.

I described him in one of my journals as “very wise and wonderful. He has no hair or eyes.” I drew a picture of him levitating in a short loose robe, a pyramid-shaped helmet on top of his head. Sounds like an alien from another world, and maybe he was. A typical theme in my poetry was the moon, stars, and distant planets. I believed in entities like angels and demons.

Imagined or not, I had characters in my life that no one knew about, and it seemed their purpose was to make me face what I feared. The town drunk. The frigid water of Lake Susan that took my breath away. Soaring to the treetops on the playground’s swings with long chains. Finding a place to sit in the school lunchroom.

As the author George MacDonald would say, I had to pass through the land of shadows to get where I was going. Somehow, I’ve been doing it all along.

13

AFTER TWO YEARS IN MONTREAT, I’D LEARNED A NEW RHYTHM that was as certain as the changing seasons. At the end of the summer, the tourists and vacationers would return to homes in faraway places that I never imagined I’d visit one day. Washington, D.C. New York City. Charleston, South Carolina. Dallas. Atlanta. Even California and foreign countries.

Many motels, farm stands, tourist shops, and other seasonal businesses were boarded up until the following year. Montreat’s club program and related activities would cease, the lake closed. Anderson Auditorium was where we went to church in the summer. It could hold two thousand people, almost all of them strangers. I was glad when the services would return to the small, cozy Gaither Chapel.

Off season, the population would shrink to around two hundred permanent residents. I didn’t have to dodge traffic or wait in line. But I’d feel sad when everything stopped, as if the town was in mourning. There was no family night skating, no square dancing, no swimming in Lake Susan, the icy water a shock when I’d first jump in, mindful of snapping turtles.

I’d swim as fast as I could to the green-painted dock where I’d stretch out in the sun, careful of splinters. During an outing to the Kmart department store in Asheville where we shopped for clothes twice a year, Mom bought me a blue plastic boat that I’d drag to and from the lake, making a godawful scraping sound. I named it Drifting Star and floated blissfully until Jim would flip me over.

In those days, Montreat residents had free access to hiking trails, tennis courts, playing fields, even a gym and an indoor skating rink because of the junior college, Montreat Anderson. I never lacked for things to do: baseball, mountain climbing, touch football. Jim would build bike ramps and we’d pedal at top speed, flying into the air like Evel Knievel, hopefully landing on the tires without wrecking.

I’d help myself to the college library where I was forever imprinted by the smell of the old clothbound volumes with labels on the spines. Pulling one out as if I might read it, I’d settle at a big wooden table where college students were lost in books while making notes on lined white paper. I would roam about as I pleased, nobody questioning, nothing locked until after hours.

The summer people brought excitement and glamour to the neighborhood. New acquaintances would promise to write. They wouldn’t. The locals were forgettable and boring, or that was my perception. Our homes and clothing were modest. No one drank alcohol, or smoked marijuana (supposedly). Disco dancing was considered a sin, listening to rock and roll frowned upon.

When I turned nine, I began babysitting for the hourly rate of thirty-five cents. The summer people kept me busy, and I enjoyed having access to their homes. Most didn’t live the way my neighbors did. My guilty pleasure was playing records like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel. I’d take the cap off a bottle of liquor, smelling it.

One night when the children were in bed, I tasted a drop of whiskey and thought it awful, my throat burning as I rinsed out my mouth. I pinched a cigarette, later smoking it in a wooded vacant lot. I was sick the rest of the day, baffled at adult indulgences that seemed like punishment.

Montreaters didn’t have cool cars like Cadillacs, Thunderbirds, Lincoln Continentals. Or the Mercedes convertible that heartthrob Bruce McTigue drove to the tennis courts while I was working there one summer. Blond and dressed in white, he could have stepped out of The Great Gatsby. He was nice, almost flirty, but I figured summer kids like him didn’t date townies.

My year-round neighbors had little money and were the antithesis of worldly or ostentatious. They also spied on everyone and had a network. If I misbehaved, Mom was going to hear about it. Gone were my Florida days of trespassing and selling purloined fruit.

If I took a shortcut through someone’s yard in Montreat, the telephone at our house would ring within minutes.

“Patsy cut across my grass again…”

“Patsy picked some of my lemon lilies without permission…”

“Patsy ran through my yard and thought I didn’t see her…”

Mom would say she was very sorry. I wouldn’t do it again, she’d promise. Off the phone, she’d sigh, reminding me to be considerate. Some of the neighbors were fussbudgets, but I needed to respect their wishes. At a young age, I knew what it was to be watched and talked about. I got an early taste of what it was like to be famous.

In early 1965, we were reunited with our furniture and other belongings that had been in storage since leaving Florida. I remember the smell of new wood and how excited I was when we’d visit the house while it was under construction. Mom was frugal with the money Dad sent, and worked closely with the contractor. She’d picked a lot on a steep stretch of Kanawha Drive where there was little risk of flooding.

Otherwise, our former property probably would have in 2024 when Hurricane Helene decimated western North Carolina. Montreat’s main road turned into a swift river gushing through the stone gate. Much of the town was damaged or destroyed, but our former home was spared, not looking all that different from when I was growing up.

Mom was an artist with an engineering mindset. She had no formal training, taking but a few college classes in Miami. When designing our new home, she made wise use of the fifteen hundred square feet, not an inch wasted. We had three bedrooms, two full baths, and a half bath in the unfinished basement where we roller skated to 45s on the record player.

In May 1965, G.G. visited a second and last time, taking us to Western Auto for a magical surprise. Her housewarming present was a zipline that Jim installed, securing the long steel cable around two sturdy trees. Holding on to the handles, we’d streak through the air across the backyard, sticking out our feet to stop.

We were the only people in the area to have such a thing. My grandmother loved contraptions, as she’d call them, and understood how things worked. It was part of her DNA. She told me one of her ancestors was Robert Fulton, who invented the steamboat. She said that in the 1800s, her parents had been granted lifetime free passage on steamboats, showing me an old ticket to prove it.

“Of course, it’s no good a’tall now,” she explained.

Not long after G.G.’s visit in the spring of 1965, Mom was washing dishes on a Saturday night while my brothers and I watched a TV show. I remember a forest ranger holding two golden retrievers on a leash, trotting through the woods looking for a lost little girl. We were sitting close to the TV while water ran and plates clattered in the kitchen sink.

The telephone rang, and I turned around to see Mom drying her hands on her green checkered apron. She picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” she answered with hesitation.

I saw her face tighten and blanch. Then she said his name. Sam. As the dogs on TV bayed and heavy-booted feet crackled over dry leaves and twigs. Jim was staring at Mom with wide eyes.

“Yes.” Her voice was quiet and small. “Yes, we’re fine…”

I hurried off the couch, wondering why she was crying.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose so,” she said over the phone, biting her bottom lip. “But do you think it’s a good idea?” She pulled a tissue from her apron pocket, dabbing her eyes.

“Shirley will… Oh, Sam, don’t do it. She’s so bad for you. So bad.”

“You fool. You’ve always had an evil mind. It’s not her.” She later told me what he said.

“What do you mean?” Mom asked, stunned. “What do you mean it isn’t her?”

She listened for a while, then cupped her hand over the phone.

“Children, it’s your father,” she said, and I grabbed the receiver, excited, breathing fast.

“Hi, Daddy!”

“Hello, Patsy Boo! How’s my favorite little girl?”

“Okay.”

I couldn’t speak. The cat got my tongue, as G.G. would have put it.

“How would you like it if I came to see you?” he asked to my delight.

“Yes. YES! When?”

“Well, not until the end of the summer. I have work to do here first. And I’m getting married.”

The world went black just like that, as if God turned out the lights.

“No,” I said. “No, no…”

“Patsy Boo, you want your dad to be happy, don’t you?”

I nodded my head but didn’t answer.

“Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

Jim snatched the phone away, and I ran to my room. Not bothering to turn on the lights, I shut myself in my closet, sitting on the hardwood floor, staring up at the dark shapes of my clothing on hangers. Jim’s reaction to the news was to thunder downstairs to the basement where he began hammering nails into scrap lumber for no discernible purpose.

I wouldn’t know the details until later, but Dad was marrying a vivacious British flight attendant named Rita Lott. They’d met on the tennis courts, and she was fourteen years younger, extraverted, upbeat, and fun. His affair with Shirley had ended a while ago, and she no longer worked at his law firm.

Rita was good for him, exactly what he needed. My father’s psychiatrist had met her and approved of their relationship.

“For the first time in my life I’m happy,” Dad told Mom over the phone.

He was bringing Rita with him in the fall. It was important, he explained. She wanted to know my brothers and me. She wanted to meet Mom too, and it’s hard for me to believe that was true unless it was curiosity. There was no telling what he’d said to Rita, but I’m certain it was bad.

I supposed she wanted to see what he was talking about. He’d been making his case. Mom was deranged, according to him. She wasn’t well. Her mind was gone. He had no choice but to leave. He feared she’d stab him with a butcher knife while he slept. In the beginning he didn’t know how sick she was. Those are the sorts of things he’d say to her and later to me.

When Dad and Rita visited in August, it was the first time we’d seen him since moving to Montreat. Flying from Miami to Asheville, they rented a hotel room and a car. Dad called to let us know they were on the way, and I was ecstatic. Mom was quiet and acting weird when they pulled into our driveway, the weather drizzly and gloomy. It was chilly for August.

Overjoyed, I jumped into Dad’s arms, and he was undemonstrative and distant as of old, setting me down like an inanimate object. He introduced us to Rita, tan with short blond hair and a big bright smile. She was bubbly and positive, not the least bit creative or moody. Everything about her was the opposite of my mother.

Rita and Dad planned to take Jim, John, and me to Bat Cave, but it was very foggy, the visibility only a car length or two. Instead, we had lunch at a Stuckey’s Restaurant in Old Fort. I sat next to dad in the booth, Rita on his other side. I’d been thrilled to see him at first, then glum, reminded he didn’t live with us anymore and never would again.

He’d gotten married to someone else, and she looked pregnant now that she’d taken off her jacket. He was starting a new family to replace us. I’d lost my appetite and didn’t care what I ate.

“What would you like?” Dad asked again as I stared at the glossy menu.

“It doesn’t matter.” I shrugged.

“What if I suggested a Laddy Burger?” he replied to my horror.

I suppose he was being funny, but I was shocked and unnerved. Laddy was my emotional support dog and best friend. The idea of something happening to him was unbearable. I pretended that Dad’s joke hadn’t upset me. But he knew it had. He saw right through me. He always did.

After lunch we stopped in Black Mountain at Western Auto, and Dad got each of us a tennis racquet and a can of Wilson tennis balls, in those days white instead of chartreuse. We returned to Montreat, and he and Rita accompanied us inside the house. They talked to Mom while touring what she’d designed and built.

Laddy and I trailed along as Dad said that he and Rita were having a baby. Then they drove away, returning to Miami, and Mom began to spiral. She got worse a few weeks later when Laddy mysteriously vanished. I came home from school, and she told me she’d let him out in the backyard. Then she heard him bark. When she opened the door to bring him inside, he was gone. I began looking everywhere, heartbroken, and often crying. For weeks I continued roaming the woods, calling out his name. Mom was sure Dad was behind it, hiring one of the “garbage collectors” to steal our dog. Or maybe Dad had sent someone from Miami to do it.

She told me that he’d orchestrated this to punish her, to drive her mad. The more likely story is that she gave Laddy away. It would have been her modus operandi to drop him off at the Humane Society. She’d done it before with pets and would again. I don’t know what happened to most of our dogs and cats because I wasn’t told the truth.

Usually, I wasn’t told anything at all. Some of them remain unaccounted for to this day. During our Miami years, Snuffy was our only dog. Dad adored him, often taking his picture with the Kodak Brownie camera. One day when he came home from the office, Snuffy was nowhere to be found.

His silver dog tag was on top of the dresser in my parents’ bedroom, and Mom wasn’t home. Dad drove for hours searching the neighborhood in vain. When Mom returned, he demanded to know what she’d done with Snuffy.

“What do you mean you gave him to the dog pound?” I heard him say, and it was one of the few times he sounded angry.

“He’s too vicious,” she replied.

“No, he isn’t.”

“He bit Patsy.”

“All he did was scare her. He didn’t even break the skin.”

“Next time it could be worse.”

Snuffy nipped at me because I was teasing him. But I wasn’t hurt. I don’t think Dad ever forgave Mom for surrendering his dog to a shelter. I don’t know what happened to Snuffy but fear the worst. When Laddy disappeared in the fall of 1965, she decided that Dad had someone steal him to pay her back for Snuffy.

A bit of an elaborate plot, and I doubt that’s what happened. After our cat Sniffy disappeared and reappeared months later, she vanished again, this time for good. Krafti was a mixed terrier, and I don’t know what became of him either. Or Smoky the cat. Or the second Laddy. Or her third miniature collie, Bella. And other pets Mom had and then didn’t.

14

BY THE EARLY WINTER OF 1965, MOM WAS SWINGING FROM DEEP depression to bursts of mania. She was talking in symbols and riddles, God sending her messages.

A blackbird on a telephone wire meant death. A tree shaped like a sailing ship was a sign that help was on the way. Or maybe danger was coming, and we needed to flee as we had from Florida. Snow promised the past was scrubbed clean and no longer hurtful. But it also portended death and abandonment.

A fierce wind might hint that God was angry at human behavior, and Mom would pray to be forgiven. I don’t think she ever felt she was, thanks to the vile things Dad said. He’d made her feel broken and shameful. She spent hours reading the King James Bible presented to her at the Billy Graham Miami crusade.

She wrote copious notes on the tissue-thin pages. Verses that held special meaning she’d underline in red or blue colored pencil.

“The battle is not yours but God’s.”

Scattered on her bed were inspirational books that she’d read repeatedly, scouring for insights and solace.

“God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain,” she quoted C. S. Lewis in her Bible’s marginalia.

She’d been complaining that the neighbors were spying. They were talking about her, and that much was true. A transplant from Miami and divorced, she didn’t fit in, nothing about her provincial or rural. She spoke with a midwestern accent and had been raised Catholic. She was a first-generation German, her father from Luxembourg, her mother from Baden-Baden.

Our Montreat neighbors were southern evangelical Christians, most of them kind and well-intended. But they had their impenetrable ideas about how people were supposed to live. Some were judgmental and believed that worldliness was evil. A few were Pentecostals, unnerving me with their talk of divine healing, speaking in tongues, and raising the dead.

Most of our neighbors were skeptical of my mother as they pretended otherwise. They didn’t know what to make of her, and women found her threatening. Single, she must be on the prowl for a man to replace the one who left her. Inappropriate and unpredictable, she wasn’t right in the head. But her biggest flaw was being beautiful.

The Montreat women resented and didn’t trust her. Their husbands were keenly aware of Mom’s attributes, through no fault of her own. If anything, after leaving Florida she was overly modest, bordering on prudish, nothing clingy, short, or showing cleavage. She didn’t flirt or want attention, especially from the town drunk, Mr. Reilly.

Soon after we’d moved into our new house on Kanawha Drive, he’d become the self-appointed welcoming committee. One morning, I spotted him staggering up our white gravel driveway, stabbing the ground with his cane. Dressed in filthy threadbare overalls, he carried a big brown paper grocery bag spotted with stains.

He reminded me of the Bogeyman and was the only person in Montreat I feared, not putting anything past him. I’d heard stories about his wife dying from an alleged self-inflicted shotgun blast. There were rumors about Mr. Reilly getting drunk in bars and bragging that he’d murdered her.

Supposedly, he was distilling moonshine deep in the Montreat woods, and Jim claims he came across a still that he was certain was Mr. Reilly’s. It was known among the local kids that if we came upon a collection of steel pots, columns, and coiled tubing, turn around and run. If the still was active, likely the armed owner was in the vicinity.

When Jim was older, he and our minister Calvin Thielman made a wellness check on Mr. Reilly in his unheated house. It was the dead of winter, and he was passed out drunk near his shotgun. Most of his frozen toes had to be amputated. But long before that he staggered and stumbled with a lurching gait. I’d see him with his cane weaving along the side of Assembly Drive, his wily eyes tracking every car and pedestrian.

At the playground, Lake Susan, and elsewhere he’d dig for bottles in the metal trash barrels, turning in the empties for the deposits. Jim and some of the other boys in Montreat did the same thing. But if they saw Mr. Reilly there first, they stayed away. He had an energy about him that was frightening. Right or wrong, I felt he was dangerous. I didn’t doubt that he killed his wife.

I wasn’t happy when he appeared at our front door on a fall afternoon in 1965 when Mom was sick with a cold. Grabbing the railing and struggling up the front steps, he rang the bell. I stayed close to Mom as she opened the door. He introduced himself, slurring that his wife had died some years back. He volunteered to help with odd chores as Mom obviously had no man of the house.

He asked her to marry him, presenting a bag of rotten apples he must have picked off the ground somewhere. Days later he was back. This time with a jar of kerosene for Mom to rub on her chest. It would cure her cold. He’d cooked an entire opossum, fur and all, the metal baking pan lined with newspaper, a few unpeeled carrots floating. Jim buried it in our backyard.

Mom warned us to stay away from Mr. Reilly. He was a bad man, and his brain was pickled. She said he was an alcoholic and would do anything for money. He’d killed his wife and gotten away with it. Mom didn’t hesitate to share such convictions with the neighbors.

Intelligent and talented, she was stunted emotionally by earlier losses and abuses. She perceived the world through the filter of a damaged child, a gifted and angry one. Saying exactly what she thought, she was unaware when offending someone.

“What a phony.” A typical remark.

“She’s fat! A blimp!” That’s another.

“The legalistic old biddy.”

“Oh, she’s holier than thou.”

“He looks like a drinker.”

“What a dirty old man!”

Worse were childishly rude gestures like her unsolicited oil painting of our minister’s wife, depicting her with a red clown nose. I have no idea why my mother did this. Dorothy was always kind to my family and everyone else in Montreat. When Mom presented the offensive portrait, it was relegated to the Thielmans’ basement.

More than fifty years later, when Dorothy was in her late eighties, her demeanor glinted with puzzled indignation when the subject came up. I’m sure no other parishioner had done anything so outrageous. She probably smiled at the time and said thank you. But she knew. Everybody did. Mom was the town crazy.

My fourth-grade teacher, Jean Skidmore, started out as a social worker, her family moving to Montreat that past summer. Her husband, John, had been hired as the college’s business manager. She took a job teaching the fourth grade, and I was fortunate enough to be in her first class.

The Skidmores lived on Mecklenburg Circle around the corner from us, and it wasn’t unusual for me to stop by their house. My favorite teacher so far, Jean was young and pretty, friendly, and fun. She put up with a lot of my antics, including climbing out a classroom window, showing off. I dropped five or six feet to the ground, practiced because of Mom’s fire drills at home.

I thought it was funny and so did the other students as I waved through the glass, trotting to the door, heading back inside the building. When I returned to the room, Mrs. Skidmore wasn’t amused, scolding me, making a pretense of smacking me with a yardstick. It’s a wonder she didn’t march me to the principal’s office. But I think she recognized that I was unsettled, scared, and desperate for attention.

Since my father’s visit with his pregnant wife, Rita, then Laddy’s disappearance, Mom had relapsed into a dark depressive state. She got worse as the fall dissolved into winter, and then in December the snows started. I began trudging back and forth to the post office twice daily as she awaited the arrival of the extra check, as she called it.

If all was going well with Dad’s law practice, he’d send her the equivalent of a month’s income as a bonus. We never knew in advance if that would happen or not. When it didn’t, Mom was crushed and frantic, depending on the infusion of cash to help with outstanding bills and Christmas.

Day after day and no check, but other gifts from Dad arrived, adding to Mom’s disappointment and fear. Nothing came except gifts to my brothers and me, and I hated mine, a gold metal Gruen watch with a thin stretch band four sizes too big. It wasn’t anything I’d wear, and I walked through the snow to Mrs. Skidmore’s house, giving it to her.

I can still see the puzzled look on her face and her reluctance, but I insisted she take the watch. It fit her fine. She agreed it was an “unusual” present for a little girl, suggesting I give it to my mother, and I explained that she wouldn’t wear it. I don’t remember what Dad sent my brothers, but it wasn’t something as impractical as what I’d gotten.

Along with these presents from him was a wooden crate of Florida grapefruit and oranges that we picked up in Black Mountain at the train station. We couldn’t possibly eat all that fruit. How thoughtless when what we needed was money, Mom complained. If Dad wanted to do something nice for my brothers and me, send us cash, she let him know over the phone.

His response was to tell her calmly that she needn’t worry. He wouldn’t repeat the mistake. From then on at Christmas, we wouldn’t get fruit or anything else. He no longer remembered birthdays either. In later years he would claim that if he’d sent money to my brothers and me, Mom would have intercepted it. Maybe that’s what he believed, but I don’t.

The week before Christmas the extra check finally arrived. When I peered through mailbox 218’s tiny glass window, I was thrilled by the white envelope printed with the return address of 1414 DuPont Building, 169 E. Flagler Street, Miami. My excited fingers spun the combination dial lock, and I tucked the check in my coat pocket, running all the way home.

That afternoon Mom took us to Asheville to celebrate at the Tunnel Road Shopping Center, recently renamed the Innsbruck Mall. I was enthralled with the indoor shops and their big glass entrances. I loved the splashing fountain where coins were tossed, mostly pennies and nickels. Had no one been around, I would have waded in for them.

There was very little my family could afford at the mall. I remember a jewelry store, a hobby shop, an Appliance Mart, a Fabric Barn, and a Hickory Farms with free samples that we’d indulge in as much as decency allowed. Mom adored the sausages, the handcrafted cheeses, the fancy mustards, and crackers. We’d roam the aisles tasting whatever we could without appearing piggish.

Mom prided herself on not being a mooch, as she called it. She always bought something in the end, usually a summer sausage and block of smoked cheese that I loved. We’d shave thin slices, making the delicacies last as long as possible. I’m sure we would have stopped in Hickory Farms when we visited the mall in December 1965. No doubt, Mom bought a few treats, feeling flush with her extra check.

Walt Disney’s That Darn Cat had just hit the mall’s Terrace Theater, and we ducked in to see it. I was intrigued by a cat solving a bank robbery, wishing I had thought of it for one of my stories. Afterward, we ate dinner at Shoney’s restaurant, where I indulged in a Big Boy burger and onion rings. We shared a hot fudge cake and slice of strawberry pie, my brothers stabbing in their forks for the biggest bites.

Not long after this, a bad snowstorm hit, and the schools closed. Mom’s car got stuck on her way home from the grocery store, and she had to walk the rest of the way carrying bags. When she got home, she called our minister’s wife, Dorothy Thielman, and talked bizarrely.

“I drove back from the store and there was blood all over the road,” Mom reported.

When she was unstable her paranoia bloomed, and the atmosphere inside our house got increasingly chaotic that holiday season. What Dad had set into motion during his visit in August was about to crescendo, and I wonder if that was his intention. She used to swear that he wanted her to commit suicide, and maybe he did. It would have saved him a lot of money, if nothing else.

Despite it all, she harbored a secret belief that he’d come back. He’d been wildly in love with her once. How could that have changed? She believed he’d suffered a bout of mental illness, and that’s why he left. He would get well and return to his senses. She talked about him constantly, telling stories, the good and the awful.

By the age of nine, I was her unwilling confidante as we’d take walks or run errands. She’d regale me with morbid accounts about growing up in Chicago, and her traumas. The only thing she didn’t mention was her time in the orphanage. I don’t recall her offering a single memory about those four years. The rest of her life, it was a verboten subject, and that doesn’t bode well for what went on while she was there.

But she didn’t hesitate to tell me about men she’d been with, calling them by name, detailing where they went on dates right down to the meals she ate, her descriptions sensuous and cinematic. But mostly she obsessed about Dad, graphically describing their sex life and when they stopped having one. Without intending to, that’s how she taught me the facts of life and then some.

I didn’t mind sharing my titillating insights with other kids in school and was quite skilled in drawing “dirty pictures” to illustrate my precocious carnal knowledge. I was doing this a lot in Mrs. Skidmore’s class, passing my lusty sketches back and forth to the boy sitting behind me, Joey Cort. Yes, I’m talking about the same Mad magazine Joey who likely stole my pencil in Mrs. Hickey’s class.

In the fourth grade he was my boyfriend of sorts and lewd accomplice until we got caught. Better put, I did eventually. Mrs. Skidmore intercepted some of my rather shocking artwork, taking me aside one day for a private conversation.

“This is awkward to bring up,” she started in, showing me the evidence. “Why are you drawing dirty pictures, Patsy?”

“I guess I thought it was funny.”

“Well, it’s not. Was it your idea or Joey’s?”

She showed me several of his attempts, the stick figures lacking the anatomical details present in my fine art.

“I did it first,” I confessed. “And then he did. But he’s not very good at drawing.”

“Where did you get the idea?”

“Things I’ve heard.” I wasn’t going to rat on my mother.

“Well, you’re not to do it anymore.” Mrs. Skidmore was firm but kind. “Or talk about such things with the other kids. When you’re older, you’ll understand. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

My behavior was the obvious sequelae to Mom filling my mind with provocative images that I shouldn’t have entertained at such a young age. Especially when it involved my parents. This, added to my encounter with the patrolman in Miami, had awakened my sexuality. I was intrigued by males and females alike, curious about them physically and prone to crushes.

No doubt, my mother had grown up similarly. She was passing on to me what had been her early experience when at the mercy of anyone inappropriate. I now realize our walks were her therapy as she detailed foreplay, what happened in bed, her abortions. She treated me like a best friend or mental health professional, seemingly unaware that I was her daughter and a child.

15

DAD STARTING A NEW FAMILY MEANT THERE WAS NO HOPE FOR reconciliation. It was the ultimate rejection, and in the months leading to the Christmas of 1965, Mom became increasingly fixated on fire. Should there be one, she had an escape plan.

As irrational as that might sound, much of what she feared wasn’t baseless. In the 1960s, most homes, including ours, didn’t have carbon monoxide or smoke detectors. Without them, there’s no early warning, and people die in their sleep. Or the house becomes engulfed in flames and it’s too late to escape. Mom constantly warned what could happen if a spark escaped the family room fireplace.

Jim’s job at bedtime was to cover it with a big square of thin steel that had been custom cut in Black Mountain. During the day it was stored behind the upright piano in the parlor. The heavy metal cover would dampen the din when I’d peck away at “Chopsticks” (a musician I’m not). Mom made sure we knew how to get out in a fire, a flood, or other catastrophe.

First, we’d dash to her bedroom at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen and family room where the problem most likely would start. Next, we’d climb on top of her wormy chestnut dresser below the window overlooking the woods in front. We’d remove the screen, jumping six feet to the ground. We’d do this over and over, her drills and deadly scenarios always leaving me unsettled.

It whispered in my thoughts that what she feared most was herself. She didn’t trust what she might do when not in her right mind. And she wasn’t that snowy morning in January 1966 when she burned our clothing in the fireplace. I’ll never know why she did it then but have a suspicion.

On January 16, Dad’s and Rita’s first child was born, a son named Clark. G.G. would have informed my mother of this, possibly in a letter. Or she might have called, not realizing the impact on Mom’s already fractured psyche. I believe the news was the final trigger, and soon after she was out of control, fueled by a psychotic mania.

While my brothers huddled in their bedroom, her purposeful footsteps sounded in the hallway. She appeared in the family room with another armload of clothing, her eyes vacant and haunted. It seemed she had no awareness of me standing near the fireplace. I was invisible. A ghost. Nonexistent.

“Mom! Why are you doing this?”

I felt confused and helpless as she shoved clothing into the wall of flames, sparks swarming, the ashes getting deeper.

“Mom! Stop!”

She didn’t, and my bedroom was next. I watched as she raided my closet, yanking dresses, skirts, blouses off hangers. She emptied my dresser drawers of sweaters, socks, shorts, and T-shirts, piling them on my bed.

“MOM!”

Back down the hallway she’d go with as much as she could carry. All of it was consumed by flames greedy and huge, black smoke gushing up the chimney.

“NO, MOM!”

“It has to be done.” She’d head back for more.

“WHY?”

“Be quiet and do as you’re told.”

“PLEASE NO, MOM!”

The rest of her life we wouldn’t talk about that day. There was no discussion of much that happened while I was growing up. I knew better than to introduce certain topics. Countless electroconvulsive shock treatments later, she wouldn’t remember most of the dramas that have helped create who I am.

Perhaps without intending to she taught me the world was unsafe. Bad things happen. Monsters are real. So are miracles. Also, fairy tales, and she’d scripted one that January morning in 1966. She would give us to the perfect family. We would be raised in their magic kingdom and live happily ever after.

When there was little left to burn and the fire died down, Mom removed the antique model of a clipper ship from a wall in my brothers’ bedroom. It was time for us to leave without looking back like the people fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah. She said it was what God wanted and He would save us.

I don’t know what escaped the conflagration, but our coats must have been spared. I vaguely remember struggling to zip up mine. I put on my galoshes while overwhelmed by a sense of doom. We followed Mom out into the snow, and she told Jim to carry the clipper ship. He didn’t want to, embarrassed by how kooky that would look if anybody saw him. But she insisted.

We began trudging up Kanawha Drive, a slippery mix of fresh snow on top of crusty ice. The world was quiet, just the sound of our feet crunching. We’d not gotten very far when I heard the rumble of an engine as we slipped and slid. What a strange sight we must have been when John Rickman appeared in his orange Jeep, the snowplow blade scraping away a layer of wintry mess.

He was the caretaker for Billy Graham, his wife, Ruth, and their five children living straight up the winding road on top of a ridge. I’d heard the Grahams had a huge tract of wooded land and a unique house. It was rather much like living near Buckingham Palace. Whenever Billy was on TV we watched. Mom read his books, the newest one called World Aflame, and ours was.

We didn’t know the Grahams, hadn’t seen them in person, much less been on their property. There would be no reason. But we were acquainted with Mr. Rickman, as I’d address him. He lived outside the Montreat gate on Rainbow Mountain. In those days it was occupied by mountain people, an impoverished closed population, the families often intermarrying.

A recovering alcoholic, John Rickman became a Christian after Ruth’s father, Dr. Nelson Bell, found him passed out drunk in the woods. Dr. Bell took care of him, sobering him up. For a while, Mr. Rickman did odd jobs for the Bells on their property set back from Assembly Drive. Eventually, he went to work for the Grahams on their mountaintop.

Always friendly and respectful, Mr. Rickman was helpful and kind. While keeping the Grahams’ switchback of a road clear, he’d plow the streets for their neighbors at no charge. That’s what he was doing when he spotted us making our way up snowy Kanawha Drive. Slowing down, he stopped, aware that something was off.

“Morning, Mrs. Daniels,” he greeted us in his quiet drawl. “Where are y’all going?”

He acted like everything was status quo while Jim clutched the model of the clipper ship, self-consciously staring down at his boots.

“We’re going to the Grahams,” Mom announced. “They’re expecting us.”

I knew that wasn’t true. They certainly weren’t expecting us. Of course, Mr. Rickman knew it too. Recognizing our distress, and that Mom seemed delusional, he intervened on the spot. It’s what the Grahams would expect, most of all Ruth.

“Well now, y’all can’t walk up there. It’s way too far. Hop on in,” Mr. Rickman said to my astonishment.

I didn’t wait to be asked twice, scrambling into the open bed of the Jeep. I remember the frigid metal biting through my pants, and the rubbery smell of the spare tire. I felt as if I were in a dream. This couldn’t be happening. Snow chains clanked as we roared up the mountain, miles of dense woods closing in on both sides, the drop-offs treacherous the higher we climbed.

I was dazzled, having never seen any place like this, and it was as Mom promised. We were entering a magic kingdom where powerful and benevolent people reigned. We were to be their guests, and everything would be fine. In fact, it would be perfect. They’d make sure of it. Beneath my misgivings, a simmering excitement began rolling into a boil.

Around a sharp turn I marveled over the stream-fed swimming pool filled with dark green water freezing around the edges, the diving board a graying rough-hewn plank. I was filled with wonder as we clanked past a series of log cabins with whimsical flowers on the shutters. Whoever painted them was talented like my mother.

Smoke curled above the canopy of trees as we neared the top of the ridge, warnings artistically lettered in white on homemade rugged wooden signs.

PRIVATE PROPERTY

BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS

TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN

Around another bend, we reached the carved-out shelf on the hogback where the Grahams lived in a house built of reclaimed wood and stone, two-story with dormer windows and a shake shingle roof. We’d reached the top of the world, the valley spreading beneath us, the Blue Ridge Mountains rolling to infinity.

The front door opened, and an elegant, slender woman with chiseled features and a suntan stepped out on the stone patio. I remember she was dressed in a long gray skirt, a shawl around her shoulders that she held against the cold, her auburn hair pinned up like a Walt Disney queen or a movie star.

I thought Ruth Graham was the most glorious human being I’d ever seen as I watched her have a private word with Mr. Rickman. It was obvious he had the utmost respect for her. I was expecting to be banished from her kingdom, sent back down the mountain where we belonged. She’d been given no advance notice. There were no mobile phones then.

I was thrilled when she invited us in, four complete strangers all but invading, and I looked around in awe. Some of the floors were oiled dark red brick, the walls salvaged wood from log cabins, the chestnut boards with old nail holes from torn-down buildings. Sweeps of a trowel were visible in the plastered ceiling, and hanging from exposed beams were smokehouse hooks and Indian corn.

Off the entryway, the living area had a fieldstone fireplace as big as a cave, the flames blazing and snapping. The hand-forged poker, shovel, and other tools looked like something in an ancient castle. Shelves on either side of the hearth were filled with old books, many of them leatherbound, the rustic mantel carved with Eine Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott—a mighty fortress is our God.

When I was grown and writing Ruth’s biography, I would learn what those German words meant. And that the thick plank of wood they were carved into was the former diving board from Lake Susan. Ruth discovered it in the town dump during one of her many scavenges while building the house. She had a knack for finding things nobody wanted, including people.

The medieval knight’s helmet on the mantel had a plume of silk bittersweet flowers flowing from the visor. Above it was a musket and a black iron betty lamp. Propped in a corner was a pair of tarnished copper coach horns. A big leatherbound Bible and a coffee mug were on a chairside table next to a wingchair, the room centered by a tan and beige patterned rug.

One day Ruth would tell me that her salvaging expeditions weren’t only about being frugal. She was drawn to things with character, including her husband’s face as he got older. The daughter of medical missionaries to China, she was raised there, and accustomed to ancient porcelain bowls and edifices. Her idea of beauty was different from most people’s.

She seated my family in front of the fire, and it was lunchtime for her youngest child, Ned. His older sisters Gigi and Anne no longer lived at home. A third sister, Bunny, was in high school, and Franklin was close to Jim’s age. But it seemed while we were there no one else was. Later I’d learn that Billy was preaching in Jamaica, and Ruth had just returned home from there.

This was Ned’s and my first meeting, and undoubtedly, I made an unfortunate impression. To me he was royalty, his dark blond hair shiny in the overhead light, his features fine like his mother’s, his eyes greenish gold. Thin and tall for his age, he was the prettiest boy I’d ever seen, and it wouldn’t be the last time I thought that.

Seated at the kitchen table eating spaghetti, he glanced at us silently, warily, his mother hovering. An overhead wrought iron rack hung with blackened pots and copper pans. I remember sitting on the sofa by the fire as I would often years later. But in 1966 Ruth didn’t know me, and my family was uninvited.

Worse, my mom was just one more fanatic obsessed with Billy Graham. She explained that he’d saved her at his Miami crusade, and that’s why we were here. Ruth had heard such talk before from other unbalanced and boundary-crashing people. Before she moved her family up the mountain, they’d lived in a rambling gray frame house off Assembly Drive near her parents.

As Billy rocketed to fame, charter buses began parking at the end of the Grahams’ driveway, people boiling out with cameras. They’d chip off pieces of wood from the gate, picking up rocks, leaves, anything they could for souvenirs. The oldest child, Gigi, showed what she thought by hurling crab apples and mud balls. Bunny was an entrepreneur charging for photographs.

While drying her hair in the bedroom one morning Ruth noticed someone peering through her window. Enough was enough. It was time to sequester her family, and in 1954 she bought their two-hundred-acre ridge for $4,300. It was much more difficult to navigate if one wished to drop by uninvited. But that wouldn’t deter everyone, including my mother.

Billy Graham was the reason she’d moved us to Montreat to begin with, her admiration of him boundless, bordering on worshipful. She found him dynamic, charismatic, and hawklike handsome. At every opportunity she watched him on TV, listened to him on the radio, read his newspaper columns. He was a divine messenger, she’d tell me.

Today she might be called a stalker, but she wasn’t in the least. For twenty-some years she would live in Montreat but two miles down the road from the Grahams’ house. But I don’t think she and Billy ever met. Not once. On the rare occasion he was home and attended the Montreat church, Mom wouldn’t introduce herself or stare.

She didn’t get him to autograph her church bulletin, try to shake his hand, or ask him to pray for her. She didn’t do as so many, typically people who weren’t Montreat residents. I remember a female college student waylaying him in the church lobby, asking him to sign her Bible.

“I didn’t write it.” He politely declined.

Another student noticed the price tag still attached to Billy’s suit jacket, and asked if she could have it. He was good-natured as she removed it, practically swooning. My mother was quietly proud and not the sort to do things like that. Especially not to Billy Graham. It was more than politeness and respect. She was embarrassed.

Not long after our showing up at his house in 1966, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would advise Billy to own guard dogs and enclose the property with a ten-foot-high fence. One had to pass through two remote-controlled gates to reach the house. Possibly, my mother was a contributing factor in this decision.

But if Ruth was upset by our showing up on her doorstep that January day when I was nine, I couldn’t tell. I recall she was gentle and understanding, asking questions in a voice strong and melodious. She talked to my brothers and me as if we were neighbors and not intrusions. Nothing about her demeanor was disparaging or judgmental.

Mom sat close to the fire, staring at the flames as she explained that my father had left us, and that Miami was a terrible, Godless place. It wasn’t possible to stay there. She rambled about bad people, evil, and the importance of her children being safe. At some point she handed Ruth a folded note.

I wouldn’t know what it said until fifteen years later while researching Ruth’s biography. I read her journals and was startled by an entry describing that occasion in 1966. When I began this memoir, I contacted Kerri and David Bruce at the Billy Graham Montreat office. They’re in charge of archives, and I asked if they could locate the journal in question.

Ruth’s private papers were kept in her home until her death. It is hard to know what became of some of the journals I was privileged to read. We couldn’t locate the one that included the entry she made after my family showed up at her house in 1966. I can’t vouch for the precise date, but suspect it was January 23 or 30.

What I remember is Ruth wrote about what she’d set into motion to help us. I was stunned to learn what Mom had written in the note she gave to her:

There’s going to be a flood, and I’m sailing away on a ship. Please raise my children in your kingdom.

After Ruth read this in front of the fireplace, she stepped away for a moment to make a phone call. I didn’t know it then, but she reached out to her father, Dr. L. Nelson Bell. When she returned to the family room, she leaned over Ned, writing his name with a spaghetti noodle on his plate. I sensed she was making sure he didn’t feel ill at ease or neglected.

I can’t imagine what was going through her mind, and she had every reason to be distrustful, even threatened. But as I would learn about her over time, she was fearless. I watched her take control of an unpredictable and potentially dangerous situation. As I sat on the sofa, images raced through my mind of Mom with armloads of clothing, the fire raging.

I was trembling inside, feeling chilled to the bone, and Ruth collected wool throws from the backs of chairs. She draped one over Mom’s lap, the other around my shoulders. Rearranging burning logs with the iron poker, Ruth sent showers of sparks up the chimney, firelight glowing on her beautiful face. Mom was in the rocking chair, silently staring at the flames.

Ruth asked if we’d like anything, perhaps apple juice and cookies, but my stomach didn’t want them. I got the sense she was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. Sitting down next to Ned, she read us stories about a snowman coming to life, and rabbits that knew how to ice skate. She’d touch her finger to her tongue, turning pages.

In my fantasies, I would stay on her mountain forever, listening to her stories in front of the fire. It was obvious that Mom intended to leave us there, and I felt guilty for wanting the same thing. But that wasn’t meant to be. Ruth had children of her own and couldn’t possibly manage three more.

Had this happened to most people, especially the family of a public figure like Billy Graham, the police would have been summoned. Mom would have been committed to a state institution. Jim, John, and I would have ended up in social services or the orphanage in Swannanoa.

16

IT WAS GETTING TO BE LATE AFTERNOON, THE LIVING ROOM DEEPLY shadowed, the fire on the brick hearth piled with glowing embers. A chill was in the air. Ruth said it was time to go, explaining that we were being taken to people who would help us.

She smiled, but her eyes were distracted and conflicted. At the age of nine, I realized the magnitude of what Mom was asking the Grahams. Three additional kids underfoot would have been a huge unknown in every way imaginable. Ruth always put her children and husband first. She had good reason to worry about their well-being and safety.

All sorts of curious and unstable people made pilgrimages to Montreat in search of her husband. It wasn’t uncommon for strangers to end up at the house, pretending to be lost, wandering about, knocking on the door. Some visitors bore special messages from God. Others believed they were God or Jesus Christ. Ruth was the buffer between people like this and her family.

As she walked mine to the front door that January afternoon in 1966, I could tell she was reluctant to send us back down the mountain. I desperately wished we could stay. Maybe forever. I felt frightened again as we left the house, Mr. Rickman waiting outside. The sky was overcast, the sun behind the mountains, darkness spreading over the valley.

Ruth and her caretaker talked in low voices on the driveway as I climbed back into the Jeep, Mom up front, my brothers in the open bed with me. The Grahams couldn’t keep us. As we were leaving, I sensed Ruth wanting to do more. But she couldn’t.

“Not possible,” I overheard her say, and Mr. Rickman agreed with “yes, ma’am” and a nod.

I caught phrases like better off and for their own good. There were mentions of Gaither Chapel, and Reverend Calvin Thielman. I wouldn’t know until years later that he was her partner in kindness. They tag-teamed helping people, including those who lived outside the Montreat gate, families with nothing.

Ruth and Calvin would deliver food, blankets, clothing, whatever was needed. While Billy was preaching on TV all over the world, she was home helping whoever she could, including kids in the juvenile detention center and adults in prison for serious crimes like murder. She didn’t turn her back on anyone no matter what they’d done. It wasn’t up to her to judge.

“We’re not punished for our sins but by them,” she often said.

As she stood in the cold on her driveway, I gathered that she’d alerted Calvin Thielman about my family. He’d been on the phone contacting members of his congregation, making our arrangements. I heard Ruth say something to Mr. Rickman about missionaries and the Congo, my apprehension and disappointment rising like a tsunami.

The Jeep rumbled and shook to life, and I held on to the spare tire as we drove away, Ruth watching and waving. Around a bend, she was gone, as was my earlier hope and excitement. Dread tightened its grip as we bumped down the mountain, my eyes watering in the cold air, a few snowflakes blowing as the sun dipped lower.

Dense trees and foliage receded into shadows, my mood sinking deeper than I thought possible. When we reached our house, a black Buick Electra 225 was in the driveway with the engine running, exhaust swirling. The huge sedan reminded me of a hearse, and it seemed an ominous sign. We’d gone from the mountaintop back into the valley of shadow and death.

I was devastated and afraid, having no idea what to expect. Calvin Thielman had arranged for us to stay with former missionaries to the Belgian Congo. My family didn’t know them. They were members of the Montreat church, but I had no recollection of ever seeing them on Sunday mornings. As best I know, I’d never heard of them before this moment.

A burly man, Manford Saunders was short with dark hair, a deep voice, and a casual manner. I remember him as gregarious and warm, smelling pleasantly like pipe tobacco. It didn’t seem much bothered him except perhaps his wife, Lenore, and I liked him right away but not her. She was unfriendly and severe, her dark hair in a tight knot on the back of her head.

Her beady dark eyes reminded me of the black snake that almost bit me the previous summer when I didn’t see it stretched across the path until too late. I jumped as high as I could, and it struck my shoe, hissing. My heart machine-gunned as I raced away, seeming to levitate.

My brothers and I piled into the backseat of the big sedan as Lenore escorted Mom inside our house to get certain essentials. I watched light fill Mom’s bedroom window. Moments later, it was dark again, and they emerged with a small suitcase. Mom climbed into the backseat, John sitting on her lap while Lenore returned up front, giving us little information.

Mom wasn’t well, and we were headed to a place where she’d receive special treatment. She would stay there for a while. That much we learned while driving down Kanawha Drive and passing through the Montreat gate. I looked out my window at the landscape dissolving in the dusk, the setting sun smoldering in a cleft of mountain ranges.

The car had chains on the tires, and we clattered and clunked past Camp Merri-Mac for girls, where I’d spent several weeks during our first summer in Montreat. Beyond was the country store that sold hot cinnamon jawbreakers, root beer barrels, horehound drops, cans of sour balls. It was a special occasion when Mom would stop there and buy us treats.

The proprietor was Mr. Leatherwood, and the name suited. A tall mountain man, he was lean, sinewy, and hard-bodied, with a weathered face, his eyes preoccupied and tragic. I’d heard his son had been struck by a car and killed. Or maybe it was Mr. Leatherwood who’d hit someone else’s child. I didn’t know what was true, but it seemed something terrible had happened.

I wanted to ask him the details, hoping I might say something to make him feel better. That was on my mind while perusing bags of Fritos, potato chips, pork rinds, tins of sardines, and the Slim Jims and pickled eggs in jars on the wooden counter. Past the store on the left was Max Twitty’s farm stand where Mom bought homegrown tomatoes, corn on the cob, and other produce.

This time of year, it was boarded up. Beyond was the imposing brick First Baptist Church, then the Presbyterian church where John had attended kindergarten. Next was the Ingles supermarket, the lights out, the empty parking lot churned up with dirty snow. I thought of what little was left in our refrigerator and cupboards. Maybe if we’d had more food Mom wouldn’t be unwell.

Not many people were out as we drove through downtown Black Mountain, the roads beginning to freeze again. Few places were open on Sunday, the windows dark in the Rexall drugstore, Mack’s Five & Dime, Tyson Furniture, the Rug & Jug, and Collins Department Store.

Past the lumberyard, Manford picked up Old U.S. Highway 70, heading west as night fell, the waves of mountains darkly rising. Traffic was light, the roads clear as we neared Asheville, snowflakes crazed like tiny white moths. We skirted the Innsbruck Mall and motels like the Mountaineer Inn, the neon sign in front a barefoot hillbilly leaning on a musket.

Bumping over railroad tracks, we reached downtown Asheville. Turning off onto Biltmore Avenue, we crossed a narrow murky stretch of the Swannanoa River as Mom hugged John tightly in her lap.

“Where are we going?” she asked now and then.

“To a place where you’re going to get better.” Lenore would say the same thing.

“What place?” Mom’s voice sounded small and distant.

“A very good place, Pat. The best for what you need.”

Soon we reached the posh area of Biltmore Forest, known for George Vanderbilt’s 250-room summer retreat built in the late 1800s. Mom had promised to take me to Biltmore House one day. She’d showed me a brochure with photographs of lavish wall coverings and paintings, the library, the grand staircase, the banquet hall, and gardens.

It wasn’t often we visited this part of Asheville with its upscale shops, big estates, and fancy country club. I wondered where we were being taken. What would happen to Mom? What would happen to all of us? Up a hill, we wound along Caledonia Road through a neighborhood of small homes spread out in the woods.

Around another sharp turn was a snow-covered clearing and a four-story Tudor Revival building with rows of lighted windows. Hemlocks bordered the covered stone patio arranged with dark green rocking chairs. Appalachian Hall looked huge and foreboding like something in a scary story.

The private psychiatric hospital once was a resort called the Kenilworth Inn. In the early 1900s it offered luxurious rooms, a swimming pool, bowling, tennis, and gourmet dining. During the First and Second World Wars, the inn was used as a military hospital, the design well suited with its three separate wings that from the air form an inverted T.

In 1931 the property was purchased by psychiatrists Mark and William Griffin. Dr. Bill, as he was called, would take charge of my mother this time and again four years later. I would have been horrified to know that one day he’d be my doctor too.

We parked under the covered stone entryway, and through windows I saw formal furniture and brass lamps, the front wooden door solid and imposing. Lenore escorted Mom inside with her suitcase, an awaiting nurse intercepting them, clearly knowing they were coming. The nurse talked to Lenore for a few minutes, taking notes before spiriting Mom away.

No doubt, Ruth’s father, Dr. Bell, had been on the phone with Dr. Bill Griffin. Or maybe Calvin Thielman had. The minister and psychiatrist were close friends, often taking long hikes together. Calvin had grown up poor in Texas, and had plenty of range marks on his hide, he used to tell me. He didn’t judge people suffering from depression and other mental disorders.

Mom would be well taken care of at Appalachian Hall, but my brothers and I didn’t understand that as we drove away, leaving her behind. I felt my world had ended as I stared out at the lighted hospital disappearing behind trees. We headed back along Caledonia Road, and Lenore informed us that we’d be moving in with them.

They had room now that their two oldest children were away at college, the youngest son my age and still living at home. While she explained this, Jim and John were as mute as statues. I could feel their fear in the dark, and now that Mom wasn’t in the car, I wanted the truth. What was wrong with her?

“Your mother isn’t well,” Lenore repeated. “She’s very tired and worried. So, she’s going to have to rest for a while.”

“How long?” I felt my insides tighten.

“I don’t know.”

Why would she burn our clothes? Why was she crying and acting strange? I kept on with my questions and was given no answers. When I asked how long she would be staying in the hospital, Lenore swiveled her head around from the front seat, nailing me with her snake eyes.

“You must never ask that!” she hissed. “She might be home in a few months. Or she may never come home again.”

“What do you mean?” I was appalled.

“What did I just tell you? You’re not to ask!”

Feeling desperate, I suggested that maybe we should stay with the Grahams. They had Mr. Rickman and a big house. We’d promise to be no trouble, and it would be easier for the Saunders.

“They don’t want you!” Lenore declared.

I felt my brothers and I must have done something bad to deserve such punishment. Or more likely, it was my fault we’d been kicked out of Paradise like Lucifer before he turned into the Devil. Memories of Ruth’s gentleness and warmth were replaced by my belief that she must have found us unworthy.

We’d been given an audition and hadn’t been picked, failing some sort of divine test. I don’t recall what I’d said while sitting inside the Grahams’ family room. But chances are it was something. Knowing me, I asked a lot of questions and made comments nonstop. Ruth probably decided I was disruptive and annoying like my first-grade teacher Mrs. Gordon had.

I stared numbly out the window as Manford drove along Tunnel Road, the chains on the tires cutting into the snowplowed pavement. Most restaurants and motels were open, but there weren’t many people out. Bright lights were interspersed with darkness before the hulking black backdrop of Beaucatcher Mountain.

I should have been excited when we pulled off at Buck’s Restaurant, the neon sign in front lit up, a yellow arrow pointing at the redbrick building. Wrapped around the huge back parking lot, the curbside service could accommodate dozens of cars. When I was growing up, Buck’s was considered the top place to dine in the Carolinas, attracting celebrities like boxing legend Joe Louis and movie stars Mary Pickford and Grace Kelly.

Eating out was a rarity in my family. When we did, typically it was at Hardee’s or McDonald’s for fast food. On special occasions we might go to Shoney’s or Howard Johnson’s. Now here we were at the legendary Buck’s, and Mom wasn’t with us to enjoy a steak or anything else. Realizing that made me feel only worse about leaving her in a foreboding hospital where she might be locked up forever.

My brothers and I climbed out of the car, quiet as we headed inside. Manford spoke to the maître d’ as we hung up our coats. A waiter carrying menus in fancy covers led us into the famous Red Carpet dining room. We were seated in leather chairs at a cloth-covered table, someone playing the electric organ. I wasn’t sure how to act in a place this nice.

I stared at my menu, overwhelmed by anxiety and not the least bit hungry despite having had very little to eat all day. My stomach felt twisted like a wrung-out washcloth as Manford ordered steak sandwiches, french fries, and salads. When the food arrived, he bowed his head and closed his eyes while I peeked. He thanked God for all we’d been given when there were so many in the world who were hungry and had nothing.

“Please, dear Lord, take care of Mrs. Daniels. Please heal her,” he added, and I was glad he kept the blessing short.

My brothers and I looked like ragamuffins among well-dressed people who probably ate here whenever they pleased without being overdrawn at the bank. Some of them were staring, and I worried they assumed my brothers and I were orphans. I don’t think we ate much, unnerved and mindful of our manners, such as they were. Truth is, we didn’t have any.

Mom was fussy but picked her battles, some things more important than others. She didn’t care what utensil we used or if we licked our fingers. She was tolerant unless we were rude or made a mess for her to clean up. When she was well, she knew how to act without being formal or pretentious. She was nothing like Lenore Saunders with her severe disposition and Victorian etiquette.

My brothers and I were at Buck’s having our first meal with our new foster parents and already the corrections had begun. If we held our silverware wrong or picked up something we shouldn’t, Lenore’s glare reminded me of the Bible story about Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. I couldn’t move. It was like being caught in a tractor beam. I barely breathed.

If we chewed with our mouths open, talked with a mouthful, God forbid, Lenore’s voice would ring like iron, coldly with a South Carolina lilt. Manford stayed out of it as if weary of an endless battle he’d never win. Good-natured and easygoing, he’d get quiet until she’d finished her latest salvo. I sensed the tension between them. They didn’t seem to enjoy each other.

17

MANFORD HARDING SAUNDERS WAS HEMINGWAYESQUE, RUGgedly attractive and macho. Born in 1924 some twenty miles outside Boston, he was bright and gifted mechanically. There wasn’t much he couldn’t fix or build.

He began his career as a test engineer for Pratt and Whitney Corporation in Connecticut. After that he was an aviation engineer in the Army Air Force during World War II. While stationed in Florence, South Carolina, he met Lenore McCall at a church social. A college graduate, she worked in a bank, and in 1944 they got married.

As they started a family, each secretly dreamed of becoming a missionary. One day they decided to leave their comfortable lives behind. After long months of rigorous training, they set out for Lubondai in what was then called the Belgian Congo. Tshiluba was the main language spoken, the area rich in gold, diamonds, coffee, cotton, and tobacco.

The Saunders lived in a small, sunbaked brick house that had no running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They kept a chicken coop, grew vegetables in raised beds, eating antelopes and other animals Manford shot in the jungle. He caught fish in the nearby river, watching out for crocodiles. Giant mounds around the house teemed with flying ants that the Saunders would roast and eat as a snack.

During the summer the temperatures got as high as 120 degrees. Half of the year it rained. Manford’s main responsibility was to help construct a mission, hospitals, schools, and other facilities. Building a chapel, he preached while his wife played the accordion during hymn sing-alongs as they’d travel village to village spreading Christianity to the local people.

While I lived with the Saunders, Lenore often talked about her years in Africa, the stories harrowing and nothing like Tarzan. She described getting a fever and slipping into a coma, her family and others believing she was dead. She couldn’t react to them talking about placing her into a coffin. She feared being buried alive, waking up just in time, and I remember my horror.

The Saunders returned stateside for good in 1960, joining the Montreat church four years later. Now Manford was traveling as an evangelist for the Asheville Presbytery. This might explain why I don’t remember seeing him much while my brothers and I stayed with them. But there may have been other reasons if he and Lenore were having problems with their relationship.

I admired and liked him immensely, and that began my fall from grace. Lenore didn’t appreciate it when I began paying attention to him inside Buck’s Restaurant during that first dinner with them. He didn’t seem to care how I held my fork or if I picked up a french fry with my fingers. He didn’t glare or reprimand, and I talked to him instead of her.

It was pitch dark and freezing cold when we returned to Montreat, stopping at my house briefly, the lights off inside and out. Lenore escorted my brothers and me to collect any belongings that Mom hadn’t burned. Toothbrushes. Schoolbooks and supplies. Shoes. My plastic coin purse. I remember the smell of smoke and soot, the cold air empty and dead.

The Saunders lived in Montreat on a back road near the baseball field. I’d passed their place many times, noticing that the two-story wood-sided house was nicer than most. When we walked in, I was startled by the African animal trophies mounted on the living room wall. Exotic birds flattened on plaques. Heads with horns. I was reminded of Perry Nichols’s barge, and it seemed another bad sign.

My bedroom on the first floor had a dresser, a closet, and a full bathroom, luxurious by my standards. It occurred to me that the Saunders seemed to have plenty of money for missionaries. How else could they afford their big car and eating at Buck’s? The older son was away at Springfield College in Massachusetts, the daughter at Queens College in Charlotte. I was asked not to use their names and won’t.

The youngest child attended Asheville Country Day, an expensive private school that was rigorous academically. Bright and hardworking, he’d been awarded a full scholarship. Some of his projects looked college level to me, including an intricate model of a building he designed in the fourth grade. I wasn’t surprised when he grew up to be a successful architect.

The mother, Lenore, was from a strict South Carolina family, her father a gentleman farmer. He owned considerable land in Florence and wasn’t known for a kind disposition. Sixty years old when Lenore was born, he couldn’t abide children or noise. A severe disciplinarian, he’d be called abusive today, and Lenore was no different.

Her traits were exacerbated by growing up during the Great Depression, and spending the better part of a decade in the Congo, where danger literally was outside the door. If her children didn’t do as instructed, they could be killed by wild animals like the leopards that drank out of the rain barrel near their small home.

Green mamba snakes camouflaged themselves in the grass and trees. The black ones disappeared in the dirt and rocks, and there was no surviving a bite. While Lenore was hanging up laundry one day a mamba reared up like a cobra. It chased her back to the house, where her husband blew it away with a shotgun, also taking out their front door.

Mambas were just one threat. There were cobras, puff adders, pythons, and crocodiles. Tsetse flies and mosquitoes carried sleeping sickness, malaria, and yellow fever. Elephants could stampede and flatten a village. When a herd was nearby, the ground would tremble and shake like an earthquake. Lenore ruled her household with the severity of a prison wardress.

My brothers and I were undisciplined, and Mom used to call us schnickelfritzes, or mess pots. Lenore had her hands full with us and was determined nothing would happen on her watch. When I talked to her younger son in 2025, he told me that she was petrified my father would have us kidnapped. She feared someone with a gun might show up at her door.

It was a constant worry that we would sneak out and end up abducted or dead. I understand her concerns, but there’s little excuse for most of her behavior. The house had an intercom system that was always turned on so she could hear what we were doing. Our first night there I remember I was cold and scared. I tucked in my arms and legs, rocking in bed, quiet so she didn’t hear me.

When I woke up the next morning, I looked out my window at trees materializing as the sun rose behind the snowy foothills. The sky was marbled different shades of gray, reminding me of Dad’s boat cover when it rained. A chickadee landed on a branch in a puff of whiteness, turning his head, looking right at me.

“Patsy, get up!”

The intercom blared with Lenore’s stern voice, reminding me of the witches I drew flying on brooms past the full moon. I hurried into the same clothes I’d had on the day before at the Grahams’ house. My brothers were upstairs, and I could hear them moving around as I walked into the kitchen.

Lenore was cooking eggs, ham, and something called grits that looked like Cream of Wheat. It clumped on the wooden spoon as she stirred the pot, and my stomach flopped. Once again, I had no appetite.

“Set the table and make the toast” was her good morning.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Meals were formal affairs in the dining room overlooking the front of the house. I was mystified by the white linen cloth spotless and crisply ironed as if we were expecting important company. Matching napkins were snuggly rolled in hand-carved ivory rings from the Congo, a velvet-lined wooden chest gleaming with sterling flatware.

We had silver and china in the breakfront at home from our lives in Miami. We’d yet to use it or the formal dining room table and matching chairs. Most meals were at the white Formica kitchen counter where my brothers and I perched on wooden stools. Sometimes we sat at the table in the family room.

Setting up for meals at our house meant folding paper napkins by each place. Our everyday dishes were white with fluted edges, something inexpensive and durable that Mom bought at Kmart. If a fork was required, that’s what each of us got. If something needed cutting, she did it for us. We drank out of Tupperware glasses, dirtying as little as possible.

The instant my brothers and I gobbled our food, the stools or chairs would scrape back as we got up without asking to be excused. We didn’t bother carrying our dishes to the sink or know that we should. When I began setting the Saunders’ table, I didn’t realize there was an order to it, rather much like arranging a chessboard.

I had no clue what to do with salad forks, dinner forks, butter knives, serrated knives, soup spoons, teaspoons, serving spoons, ladles, cake servers. I picked out what seemed to make sense, arranging them with no rhyme or reason while panic mounted. When Lenore saw the chaos I’d created, she was taken aback that I didn’t know better.

Clearly, I had no domestic skills whatsoever. She declared early on that it was time I learn how to cook and clean. At the time, I had no insight about why her default was to berate and terrorize. She seemed angry all the time like an animal turned vicious and fear-biting.

I’m unaware of when the Saunders’ marital problems began but suspect their relationship was strained in early 1966. Lenore’s health was precarious after almost dying of malaria and other illnesses in Africa. My brother Jim and I remember seeing her taking multiple pills at dinnertime. Years of living in the primitive and dangerous conditions of the Congo made her a candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder.

I didn’t understand that my gender was a factor in her going after me. Mom had many old-fashioned values, but she didn’t impose limitations on us. She never said I couldn’t do anything my brothers did or that I was inferior somehow. Not once did she tell me to stop playing with the boys, that I should stay home and do “women’s work.”

“If you’d been helping your mother around the house, she wouldn’t have gotten sick!” Lenore often said, and I believed her.

At the age of nine I didn’t realize that my affection for her husband ignited her hostility toward me. I don’t know how long he was unfaithful to her or when she became aware of it. Maybe he’d had a wandering eye for a while. I suspect she took exception to any female attention paid to him, including mine.

That first breakfast in her house, I was forced to clean my plate. I managed the salty ham and undercooked scrambled eggs, but grits were another story. They’d get cold quickly and form a skin on top. My stomach balled up like a fist. I don’t remember being hungry the entire time we stayed there.

“Patsy, you may begin clearing the table.” Lenore’s snake eyes fixed on me.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her coolness the night before at Buck’s was about to get exponentially worse. Had I been more astute I might have thought twice about hanging out with her husband after breakfast. His office was near the kitchen and down several steps, a cluttered space overwhelmed with books and African artifacts.

Manford showed my brothers and me ceremonial masks, shields, objects carved from ivory, a snakeskin some thirty feet long. We listened with rapt attention as he recounted hunting in the jungle one day and stopping to rest on a log that began to move. He was standing on a huge python that had swallowed an antelope whole, he explained dramatically.

He talked about fire ants that could sting you to death. The Congolese used blowguns. They poisoned darts and arrow tips with something called curare that caused paralysis. After the monsoons, one could pick up diamonds from the top of the ground, and I imagined stuffing them in my pockets and solving my family’s problems.

Manford told us about cannibals with teeth filed into sharp points, and shrunken heads, and voodoo dolls. He showed us photographs of himself in safari clothes and a pith helmet, shouldering a powerful long gun. All the while he was telling stories, he puffed on a cigar. I liked him and wanted him to like me back.

I don’t know how much money was in my plastic change purse, probably less than a dollar. I asked Manford’s permission to visit the Montreat store maybe ten minutes from the house. I told him there was an errand I wanted to run, not mentioning what it was. Had I proposed this to Lenore, the answer would have been a resounding no and rightly so.

But her laid-back husband was fine with it, and out the door I went, running to the store. When I got there, I headed straight to the cash register, pointing to the box of rum crook cigars behind the counter. I don’t remember what they cost, something like two for a quarter, and I squeezed open my change purse, fishing out the coins.

“Patsy, you know I can’t sell those to you.” Mr. Hinkle had a disappointed look on his face.

“They’re not for me,” I explained. “They’re for Mister Saunders.”

“Are you sure?” A shadow of suspicion.

“Yes, sir.” I nodded.

“As long as you promise they’re really for him.”

“They are, Mister Hinkle. Why would I buy them for me?”

“Well, you could get me in a heap of trouble.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m going to call Mister Saunders later and make sure he got them.” Mr. Hinkle tucked the cigars into a small brown paper bag.

Racing back to the house, I presented my gift to Manford and was pleased by his response. He made a big thing of my generosity, thinking it hilarious that a nine-year-old was sold cigars. I explained that Mr. Hinkle would be calling him. I’d promised him the cigars weren’t for me, and Manford laughed louder, reminding me of Perry Nichols.

His wife was audience to much of this and didn’t smile. I hadn’t bought her anything, and my infractions were mounting. While her husband puffed on one of my cheap cigars, she ordered me to set the table again. I did a better job this time but not much. After a few minutes, she appeared in the dining room to inspect and reprimand, loud clinks as she rearranged with angry hands.

Dinner was baked ham, big mealy lima beans, yams, and it was a rule that you cleaned your plate. My brothers and I were unaccustomed to the food the Saunders ate. Overcooked vegetables and meat. Corned beef with boiled cabbage. Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cooked carrots. Stewed tomatoes with breadcrumbs on top.

Once or twice a week the Saunders would pick up and drop off their cook, Cora. I was always relieved when she showed up with her quiet thoughtfulness and sweet smile. She made delicious beef stew and biscuits. Smart and insightful, she knew how to handle Lenore.

In some ways Cora was a surrogate mother to the Saunders’ three children while raising three of her own. Her family was relegated to an area of Black Mountain unkindly referred to as “Colored Town,” those who lived there segregated from the rest of us. White people and those of color didn’t use the same swimming pools or drink from the same water fountains.

I remember my neighbors as extremely religious but not racist. Now and then they could be surprisingly progressive. Seven months earlier, Montreat held a conference called “The Church and Civil Rights.” Martin Luther King was invited to speak, over the objections of county officials who feared protests and riots. This was on the heels of violent protests from his recent visit to Los Angeles.

On August 21, 1965, he arrived in Montreat with a full police escort. Sheriff’s deputies and state troopers stood guard at Anderson Auditorium because of threats made. My neighbors had guns ready in case a mob of violent racists stormed the town. Police checked the I.D.s of everyone trying to enter the Montreat gate.

Martin Luther King appearing in Montreat made the national news, and I doubt Mom would have missed such an historic event. She used to tell me about her father taking her to the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. She listened to him chat for an hour with the African American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver. She’d tell me how enthralled and impressed she was. I never heard her make a bigoted comment.

I don’t recall hearing Martin Luther King speak, but that doesn’t mean much. I was only nine and more interested in playing outside. Current events weren’t a topic of conversation in our house, and celebrities visiting Montreat wasn’t unusual. During the summer, guest speakers held forth at Anderson Auditorium.

While the conferences were going on I’d sit in vast crowds of strangers listening to important guests every Sunday and on other occasions. I’d fidget with the bulletin, often drawing pictures on it while my mind wandered. Most of all, I wanted to race home and tear off my dress clothes. Sometimes I’d wear my shorts under my skirt to speed up the process.

18

MEALTIMES AT THE SAUNDERS’ WERE THE WORST PART OF THE day. I didn’t like most of the food. To be fair, it was probably quite good and nutritious, but unfamiliar. And I was dreadfully anxious.

When Lenore wasn’t looking, I’d swallow my lima beans and other offenses without chewing or tasting. After a few days of this, she figured out what I was doing.

“Patsy, if I catch you gulping down food with your milk one more time, I’ll not let you have anything to drink until after the meal!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Patsy! Put your milk down now. Put it in the middle of the table until you finish eating!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I’d stare at the mound of lima beans that seemed bigger than before. I hated the tomato noodle casserole. Beef was well done, and I didn’t like country ham. No matter what might have been served, I didn’t have an appetite. While I struggled to clean my plate my every move was edited.

“Elbows off the table!”

“Don’t slump!”

“Hold your fork properly!”

“Your manners are deplorable!”

I didn’t know what deplorable meant but could tell from Lenore’s cold hard stare that it wasn’t a compliment. When we drank from a glass, we were supposed to crook our little finger like nobility. To this day, I’ll do it automatically if I don’t catch myself.

“Spoon the soup away from the center of the bowl. Away from you,” she instructed.

One didn’t get up until excused, and then I’d help clear the table, standing on a footstool in front of the kitchen sink to wash the dishes. Lenore waited nearby, her fists on her hips, inspecting. Sometimes she’d make me scrub the same dish three, five, ten times, refusing to tell me what was wrong, and I’d begin to shake.

After we’d been with the Saunders several days, she drove my brothers and me to Collins Department Store in Black Mountain where Ruth Graham had opened an expense account for my family. I dimly remember buying essentials, including matronly underwear that came up to my ribs. That was the only time I left the Saunders’ house except for school and attending church on Sunday mornings.

I’ve had allergies all my life, and early on I made the mistake of sneezing. I must be catching a cold, Lenore decided. I assured her that I wasn’t. Sneezing was normal for me, and often my nose ran. It didn’t mean I was sick, but she wouldn’t listen. Marching me into the kitchen, she opened a cupboard and pulled out a tall water glass.

Next, she retrieved a bottle of apple cider vinegar and a jar of honey. Tablespoons of both were mixed with tepid tap water that I was supposed to drink. She’d stand there and watch as I gagged down the last drop.

“To kill germs and other cold-causing things,” she explained.

Maybe my brothers were subjected to this superstitious treatment. If they were it wasn’t often. I was increasingly convinced that the concoction of honey and vinegar was a punishment, not a medicine. If my allergies were bad enough, I’d drink the awful stuff multiple times daily, and she’d forbid me to wash my hair. I was to clean up with a washcloth.

After we’d been with the Saunders a few weeks, my father found out where we were and that Mom was in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t know who told him, but he started writing and sending presents. A rock tumbler was followed by a Spin Art set that included paints in squirt bottles. Lenore relegated such gifts to the basement in my family’s house.

One day, I heard the fantastic news that Dad was arranging for my brothers and me to fly to Miami. We’d live there until Mom was better, and I was delighted. The plane tickets arrived, and I packed my red Amelia Earhart suitcase, appropriate for someone who gets lost everywhere.

The day before we were to fly out of Asheville on Piedmont Airlines, Lenore appeared in the living room while my brothers and I were playing Monopoly. She sat down and said she needed to talk to us. She announced that we wouldn’t be going to Florida after all, and it felt like the prison door had clanged shut, the lock turning.

It was complicated, Lenore explained. Our mother had legal custody of us, and our father’s intentions were criminal. Apparently, the plan wasn’t for us to live with him, having fun like the early days. He’d lined up three different foster families in the Miami area. Jim, John, and I would have been separated.

Lenore said that she was in constant communication with Calvin Thielman and the Grahams. They would make sure that a judge signed a court order preventing my brothers and me from leaving the state. We were told that our father was threatening to fly to Asheville and take us back to Miami with him. Lenore warned that we’d have to be more careful than ever.

I turned away from her so she wouldn’t see me cry.

I hate you. I hate you. You mean ugly lady. I wish you would die.

The snows continued through the second week of February, the school buses still not running. I wanted to leave the house, but it wasn’t allowed. Meanwhile, my brothers played outdoors with impunity while I stayed in and did chores. After cleaning up the kitchen one morning, I took the risk of asking Lenore if I could join my brothers outside.

“Absolutely not.”

“But why?” I wouldn’t let it go. “Please?”

“NO! Your father might have someone lurking in the woods to kidnap you!”

It had happened before when Dad took us to Perry Nichols’s house. But how did Lenore know that? Or did she? And why would my father send someone all the way from Miami to kidnap me but not my brothers? I could hear them outside having snowball fights.

It wasn’t fair and made no sense. I was good in sports, even better than the boys in many instances. I could keep up with my brothers just fine. But I was a girl, and Lenore made sure I didn’t forget it. Clearly, my mother had taught me nothing about how to act. Lazy, I had no polish and was useless around the house. I was spoiled, and selfish.

One morning Lenore marshaled me into the living room, sitting me down on the sofa, placing a sewing basket next to me. It was filled with packages of needles, pin cushions, and spools of colorful thread and skeins of yarn. She drew a pattern on a laundry bag and handed it to me. I obviously wasn’t interested, and she erupted again.

“It’s no wonder your mother isn’t well! She had so much on her and what have you ever done to help?”

Lenore left me trying to make loop stitches, following the dotted line she drew on the white cotton. My daisy petals weren’t good, everything crooked. The thimble wouldn’t stay on my finger and I could hear my brothers playing Army outside in the rhododendrons.

“CHARGE!” one of them yelled, imitating a machine gun.

I was tempted to kick the sewing basket across the room. I wanted to cry but knew better. If I dared, all hell would break loose.

“I’m sick to death of you feeling sorry for yourself!” Lenore would scream.

She began calling me names. “Little Miss Priss.” And “Miss Pity Party.” My mood sank lower when she unfolded an ironing board one day. Momentarily, she licked her finger, flicking the iron with a quiet hiss. She plucked a wrinkled white shirt from the laundry basket, and ironing was the next phase of my domestic education. Oddly, she didn’t teach me to cook, a chore I would have enjoyed.

“When is Mom coming home? Do you think it will be soon?” I made the mistake of asking while ironing, and Lenore looked at me with those snake eyes.

“Don’t even think about such things,” she warned, wagging her finger.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Your mother may be home in a month. Or it could be a year. Or never.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Just expect the worst, and then you won’t be disappointed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t be foolish and think nothing bad’s going to happen. Or when it does, you won’t be ready.”

I nodded, not needing her to tell me that. I knew all about bad things happening. She left me to finish ironing everything in the laundry basket, and I did a very foolish thing. Something possessed me to find a snack that I might like. Maybe there was a cracker or a cookie somewhere.

Climbing up on the kitchen counter, I began opening cupboards. I was startled by footsteps, and there she was in front of me, her face a mask of fury.

“Just what are you doing, young lady?”

I looked down at cold, dark eyes and tight lips. Terrified, I made up a story. I thought I saw a funny bird fly into the kitchen and was looking for him. I told her about Dickie Bird and his treats as my face got hot. She berated me as she would so many times, a vein popping out in the middle of her forehead.

“If there’s one thing I won’t condone, it’s lying!” Fists on her hips, her body rigid. “You know not to help yourself to things in the kitchen! And do you know why?”

“No, ma’am.”

I wished I could disappear. I wanted to fly away with Dickie Bird and live where he did.

“Well, I’ll tell you why! I can’t afford to be buying you snacks. Your father hasn’t sent any money, and the church out of goodness and generosity has been supporting you.”

“I’m sorry.” I felt sick with guilt and fear.

“Just another sign of your ingratitude. You think it’s fun for me to take care of you three?”

I shook my head. No.

“Huh! Fun my foot! If you don’t shape up, I’ll take you to Swannanoa and put you in the children’s home!” Then she turned on her heel and hurried up the stairs, a door shutting loudly.

That night while I hid under the covers in bed rocking myself, I prayed to Dickie Bird. I apologized for blaming him after I got caught. I begged him to bring my mother home soon. I was sorry for telling Lenore about him.

“Don’t fly away! Please don’t fly away and leave me!” I thought.

He promised he wouldn’t, confiding that he lived in a shoebox in my closet. But I wasn’t to look, or he’d vanish. There would be no choice.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I promise…”

“PATSY, BE QUIET AND GO TO SLEEP!” Mrs. Saunders’s voice crackled from the intercom speaker on the wall.

The next day at dinner, she passed a basket of country ham biscuits around the table as I stared at the mound of lima beans on my plate. I eyed my glass of milk, trying to figure out a way to gulp down the food without her noticing.

“Let’s give thanks.” She folded her hands on the edge of the table.

I closed my eyes, trying to block out the unpleasant aromas, wondering how I was going to eat everything without being sick.

“… We most humbly show our appreciation for supplying our needs when we ourselves are unable…”

I contemplated pretending to chew the beans. Then I’d wait for a pause and pick up my milk, swallowing everything at once. Maybe I could hide food in my napkin, emptying it in the garbage when she wasn’t looking.

“… Bless all the starving children in the world. Forgive those who have sinned,” Lenore prayed, pausing just long enough for the hair to prickle on my scalp.

She was talking about me. My eyes peeked open as she went on and on. I was greeted by John’s wide stare, his fingers in his mouth up to the knuckles.

“… Amen.”

“My food’s cold,” Jim announced, moving beans around on his plate.

Lenore nailed him with that stare of hers. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to, the color draining from his face.

19

THE SNOW CLEARED AND WE RETURNED TO SCHOOL MID-FEBRUARY. It was a huge relief. My teacher, Mrs. Skidmore, seemed to understand what was going on with my family.

I confided about how strict Lenore Saunders was, and that when it came to me, she turned up the volume. I felt her intense disapproval without understanding the reason. I suspect I wasn’t forgiven for lavishing attention on her husband. But he wasn’t around anymore for reasons not explained at the time. Perhaps it was the fantasy world Lenore thought I lived in because of my drawings and stories.

To her, playing make-believe was another form of lying. She’d remind me that my creative activities were trifling and a self-indulgent waste of time. I never touched a crayon while in her house, and Mr. Owl didn’t visit or communicate. No longer was I summoned to secret meetings, and there was no private spot to have one.

He couldn’t send me on missions when I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. I never heard from him again, deciding Lenore scared him off forever. Or maybe he’d overheard the horrible things she said about me and had decided I wasn’t worthy. Whatever his plan, he’d changed his mind, firing me of any purposeful future I might have had.

Mrs. Skidmore was my safe place, and I couldn’t wait for school each morning. She encouraged creativity, her bright, positive energy the antithesis of what I experienced the rest of the time. Most of all, she was kind, and I felt acknowledged for my artistic efforts. She opened my mind to poetry and possibilities.

When she taught the class about limericks, I wrote one about an old woman named Mrs. Mish who swallowed the bone of a fish.

… When the clock struck five,

She was no longer alive…

My cartoonish illustration depicted a severe harridan with a bun on top of her head, an obvious caricature of Lenore Saunders. But I also began composing more serious poetry. I remember Mrs. Skidmore’s surprise when I wrote about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

There was a man whose name was Abe,

He lived in a cabin when he was a babe.

He romed [sic] the land here and there.

He set slaves free everywhere…

And then one day got shot and he was dead…

Not exactly T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson but one might wonder why a fourth grader was thinking about such things. I created a lot of illustrated poems while in Mrs. Skidmore’s care, and often she’d pin them on the bulletin board as examples of excellent work. It was kind of her if for no other reason. She made a difference in my life at a critical juncture.

Many decades later when she was in her eighties, I’d fly her and her daughter Banna first class to Los Angeles, putting them up in a Beverly Hills hotel. They were special guests at a book event where Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis interviewed me onstage. I asked Jean Skidmore to stand up and thanked her in front of the audience.

“I remember when she paddled me with a yardstick after I climbed out the classroom window,” I told everyone. “I mean, it was supposed to look like she paddled me, but it was for show. I barely felt it.”

“That was my mistake!” she retorted for all to hear.

I don’t know exactly when my mother was released from Appalachian Hall in 1966, but flowers were blooming. Aunt Dolores flew from Chicago, staying a while to help her reacclimate and settle. I remember Mom’s affect was distant and weirdly blunted, but I was overjoyed that all of us were together and home again.

I developed new routes in Montreat, doing what I could to avoid riding my bike or walking past the Saunders’ house. On weekends, I often ended up with the Skidmores. How lucky that my favorite teacher lived down the street. Her three children were too young for me, but I’d play with them anyway in hopes of spending time with their mother. I felt lonelier than ever.

I missed G.G. so much that I adopted elderly people in the neighborhood, including Ruth Graham’s parents, Virginia and Nelson Bell. I’d see them in church and asked if they minded my visiting. They didn’t, and I started doing it regularly. Taking a shortcut through the woods, I’d arrive at their house in fifteen minutes, helping myself to the back screen door that was never locked.

As I walked through the kitchen, Mrs. Bell would call out for me to help myself to an egg custard, a tray of them under wax paper on top of the refrigerator. I remember the flavors of nutmeg and vanilla, the consistency reminding me of an omelet. We’d sit in the living room, and she’d tell me about her years in China as a medical missionary.

I was shocked by stories of girl babies killed because they weren’t wanted. Women were hobbled by bound feet, the deformed bones clenched like fists. Mrs. Bell talked about warlords, rickshaws, and ancestor worship. Also, strange foods like duck eggs buried and later dug up. A delicacy, she said, probably as I was digging my spoon into the custard.

Dr. Bell would tromp upstairs from his office to say hello, always smiling and full of fun. A gifted baseball player in his youth, he could have turned professional but decided to become a medical doctor, then a missionary. When he’d see me, he’d ask how my throwing arm was doing. He’d mention Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and I’d talk about the bubblegum cards I collected.

On occasion Dr. Bell would drop by the Montreat baseball field across the street from Mrs. Arnold’s house. He’d watch the local kids playing on Saturdays, and I was the only girl. Covering first base, sometimes I pitched. I swung a mean bat, often sending the stitched leather ball arcing over trees and into the creek. I held my own with the boys until one of them would stick gum in my hair that had to be cut out with scissors.

Once the Bells invited me to Sunday lunch at the fourteen-story Battery Park Hotel in Asheville. The restaurant was on the top floor, and I felt like a bird looking at downtown, the mountains close all around. Mindful of the fancy cloth-covered tables and formal settings, I was polite and careful the same way I’d been at Buck’s.

The pull-apart dinner rolls were inside a silver basket. As I reached for one, it escaped, landing on the floor, resting in plain view. Horrified, I avoided looking at it, pretending my faux pas hadn’t happened in hopes nobody noticed. Dr. Bell went along with this for a moment. Then he picked up the breadbasket, passing it back to me without changing the expression on his face.

“Patsy, would you like a roll to replace the one you just lost?” he deadpanned.

Usually when I’d visit Mrs. Bell, I’d give her some of my poems and drawings. Maybe I’d include a story I’d block-printed in pencil, my handwriting and spelling horrible. I had no idea that she was sharing my efforts with her important daughter. It would be years before I’d find out that Ruth read some of my early stories and poems.

Often when I was at the Bells’ house, she’d appear to bring them dinner on a big tray covered with aluminum foil. This happened one afternoon when I was sitting on the sofa in ill-fitting jeans and a shirt that were hand-me-downs from Jim. I’d been playing outside before dropping by the Bells’ house. I was a disheveled mess.

During the visit I heard a car drive up, the back screen door wheezing open. Ruth called out a greeting from the kitchen in her cheery alto voice. She had a trace of a Virginia accent picked up from her parents, both born in the Shenandoah Valley.

“We’re in here!” Mrs. Bell chirped from her wheelchair.

Ruth walked into the living room on this occasion, beautiful as always. Kissing her mother on the cheek, Ruth gave her the lowdown on what she’d brought for dinner. She instructed how to warm it up while I listened spraddle-legged and slumping on the sofa. Then she smiled at me and asked how I was doing.

“These are my brother’s hand-me-downs.” I thought it important to point that out.

“They look nice on you,” she decided after a pause.

I explained the provenance, making sure the blame was squarely on Jim for the clothing’s poor state of repair. Holes. Threadbare knees. Stains. Nothing fit quite right either. And I was mindful of my crooked hair. Mom would cut it by placing a plastic bowl over my head, and she wasn’t skillful with scissors. My bangs were never straight.

“Well, I think you look cute.” Ruth smiled again.

It was always a bright spot in my life when I’d encounter her while I was walking, usually to the post office, the lake, the tennis courts. The instant I saw her silver Oldsmobile 98 coming, I’d make sure both of us were headed in the same direction. If we weren’t, I’d turn around.

I’d act nonchalant as she approached me from behind. Sure enough, she’d stop, rolling down her window.

“Would you like a ride?”

“Oh!” I’d feign surprise as if I’d not seen her coming. “Hi, Mrs. Graham. Yes, thank you.”

I climbed up front, possibly with my Western Auto tennis racquet and bag of dead balls. Maybe my baseball glove or boot skates.

“I’m headed home. Where are you going?” she’d say.

“I’m going home too.” I knew she’d drive right past my house on the way to hers.

For the next ten minutes I had Ruth all to myself, and she’d listen patiently, seeming interested, often making witty remarks. When she’d let me out at the end of my driveway, I had to start all over again, hurrying back to my original destination. I did this at every opportunity, and if she was wise to me, she never said a word.

Her son Ned, my first crush, was a different story. Sometimes she picked him up after school, parking behind the old brick building. If I spotted her car, I’d walk past several times as if looking for my bus in the long line of them. Ruth would see me, offering a ride. It worked every time until one afternoon when Ned rolled down his window.

“You can stop walking past our car because we’re going to Asheville!” he announced.

I was devoted to Ruth from afar after that first visit to her mountaintop when I was nine. I took it personally when people tried to invade her family’s privacy. Scarcely a day went by during the summer when strangers didn’t ask where Billy Graham lived. They’d stop their cars, quizzing the locals, wondering if we knew him, and where they might go to catch a glimpse.

They always wanted directions to his house, and it was an unspoken rule that we never told. Most Montreaters would shrug and say they didn’t know. But not me. I’d send nosy tourists on a wild-goose chase, offering detailed directions, pointing, and elaborating while playing innocent.

I’d instruct them to turn around and go back out the stone gate. Typically, this was followed by the driver looking skeptical.

“Are you sure? Because I thought he lived inside Montreat…”

Well, that’s exactly what people are supposed to think, I’d confide. Only those of us who are his neighbors know the actual location of his house.

“Makes sense.” A knowing nod.

I’d explain that beyond the gate they were to take the first dirt road on the left and follow it to the top of Rainbow Mountain. Watching them lumber away, I’d hightail it, taking one of my many shortcuts through the woods before the tourists got angry and came back looking for me. I figured there was always a chance of that. I knew very well what they were about to confront.

Soon enough those I misdirected on any given day would roll up on log cabins and outhouses. They’d see dilapidated lean-tos, trash strewn down the hillside, and rusted-out cars. The mountain folks didn’t take kindly to strangers rubbernecking any more than the Grahams did. But for a very different reason.

Because of the active moonshine stills in that part of the world, there was the threat of the revenuers showing up on a raid. The people of Rainbow Mountain were known to sit on their porches, their shotguns loaded with rock salt to scare off trespassers.

Mom and I loved to cruise the Innsbruck Mall, rarely buying anything unless it was on sale. It was a favorite pastime of ours, and sometimes we’d have lunch at Bavarian Cellar, a huge treat as much as she loved German food.

During one of our visits to the mall when I was eleven or twelve, I had a strange experience that later seemed like a premonition. As we strolled past a bookstore, I was startled that the showcase window was filled with books by me. I saw my name on the covers clear as day. I was baffled and amazed but didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t slow my pace.

In fact, I walked faster, unnerved, never mentioning this vision to Mom or anyone. It made no sense, and if I talked about it I would have been ridiculed. At that stage of life, my ambition wasn’t to be a professional writer. The thought never entered my mind and was of no interest. Creating little illustrated books and poems was a portal out of my unhappy day-to-day existence. Nothing more.

I dreamed of being an archaeologist and had read all three books on the subject in the school library, imagining myself on exotic expeditions, digging up treasure. I was intrigued by the lost city of Troy, and King Tut’s tomb. I wondered what it would be like to unwrap a mummy, having no clue that one day I’d witness such a thing in the Andes Mountains.

I envisioned digging up dinosaur bones as my partner, Staci, and I would do many decades later when our good friends actors Dan and Donna Dixon Aykroyd invited us on a dino dig in Grand Prairie, Ontario. Our camp was in a valley where a herd of Pachyrhinosaurus drowned in a flood some seventy million years earlier.

The hillsides we excavated were littered with chunks of petrified bone, and to the amazement of our paleontologist guides, I discovered a tooth. Finding dangerous artifacts seemed to be my karma. In the 1990s when I volunteered at the Jamestown archaeology site near Williamsburg, Virginia, I found arrowheads and a musket ball.

I was always looking for something. While growing up in Montreat I’d pan for gold in the creeks, using tweezers to pick up tiny garnets on the roadsides, hoping I might find a ruby. When an elderly woman at the other end of town gave me strands of chipped pearls, I didn’t realize they were fake until I presented them to Mom.

I was always scavenging for anything of value that might solve our financial worries. My most memorable find was on the dirt access road at the Montreat gate. One day, I noticed something flat and greenish in the rocks, and squatted down to pick it up. I was perplexed by an Indian Head penny that had a hole through it.

I collected coins like buffalo head nickels, Liberty dimes, and knew the Indian Head penny was worthless because of its poor condition. I wondered who nailed the hole in it and why. What did the coin mean and how did it get lost? More perplexing was why it ended up near the dirt road’s surface and I happened to see it.

I don’t recall the exact date on the penny, but it was the late 1800s, and I imagined all sorts of scenarios. One of Montreat’s early settlers had worn it as a lucky charm. Or it was a memento from a lover, and I conjured up a couple dressed in old-fashioned clothing. They’re on a stroll when he finds the coin, turning it into a necklace that she’ll never take off.

But one day, she loses it and is heartbroken. It made me sad to think that the lovers probably were dead by now. It was possible that someone in more recent history had lost the penny, but it appeared to have been out in the elements for a long while. Why it suddenly appeared when it did is a mystery.

Finding it when not looking somehow seemed a message that has held true throughout my life. If I’m receptive and attentive, treasures find me, including stories. My ideas aren’t premeditated, my best work never forced. I’m constantly surprised by what I consider gifts from the universe.

The only requirement is that I try. Nothing happens if I’m passive. I wouldn’t have found my special penny had I never left the house. Threading cotton string through it, I fashioned a necklace that I wore for a while. I wrote a poem about it.

Jenny’s kisses many

Warmed the copper penny

Wedded to her neck with cotton string…

I gave the necklace to my would-be boyfriend, Ned Graham. After several neighborhood boys had teased me about him “liking” me, I was in love for the first time. I wrote in my diary that I wanted to marry him one day. In fact, almost everything in my diary was about him.

… No words of passion spoken

She loved him with a token

I could tell that my grand gesture meant nothing to him, and the penny would end up lost yet again. Perhaps to be found by another girl-next-door pining away for a prince.

20

BY THE TIME I ENTERED THE EIGHTH GRADE, MY DREAMS OF ancient tombs, pyramids, and other archaeological discoveries had faded. My new ambition was to be a professional tennis player. In recent years I’d begun hanging out at the Montreat courts with my racquet that Dad had bought during his visit in 1965.

I knew how much he loved tennis and thought it would impress him if I was good at it too. Unable to afford balls, I would hunt down those that had sailed over the chain-link fence. It happened a lot, and most players rarely bothered slogging through the snaky brambles or wading into the creek to retrieve what they lost. But I made a habit of it, finders keepers. Later when playing tournaments, I’d have to adjust to balls that weren’t flat.

I’d watch Billie Jean King on TV, never imagining that one day we’d be friends and she’d give me a pointer or two. I’d hang out in her box at the U.S. Open and in the players’ lounge at Wimbledon. She and her partner, Ilana Kloss, often stay with Staci and me on Cape Cod. Had anybody told me that when I was banging dead balls against the backboard, I wouldn’t have believed it.

If I’d heard that someday the Montreat tennis courts would be named after me, I would have found it ridiculous. Certainly, it didn’t dawn on me that there really would be stores with my books displayed in storefront windows. Not just in America but around the world. If someone had said I’d sell more than 120 million copies and create the forensic thriller genre, I would have said no way.

The warning signs for Mom’s second breakdown began in early winter of 1969 when I was thirteen and in the eighth grade. Jim was at Ben Lippen, a fundamentalist Christian boarding school in Asheville. He was repeating his freshman year after struggling academically at the public high school. He refused to study, was too busy working odd jobs. He wasn’t interested in academics or motivated.

Mom had been advised that Ben Lippen would straighten him out. I don’t know how she afforded the tuition plus room and board, some $1,500 yearly. Perhaps she got financial aid, or my aunt and uncle helped again. Other than attending an occasional soccer game where Jim was the star, I hadn’t seen much of him until he was home for the holiday break in December.

Once again, the public schools closed when the first snowstorms struck. My brothers and I were outside sledding and having snowball fights. We were hungry and squabbling constantly, tracking dirt in and out of the house while Mom cleaned up after us. It seemed a rerun of what had happened when I was in the fourth grade.

Mom’s “extra check” arrived and off we went to the Innsbruck Mall in Asheville. After cruising the aisles of Hickory Farms, she took us into the Bark & Purr pet store, suddenly deciding we needed a puppy. I watched in shock as she paid $375 for a Maltese. It was a huge amount of money we couldn’t afford, and buying the dog was a terrible idea.

Cassi was eight weeks old and high maintenance. Her long white silky fur required intense grooming several times each day. She wasn’t housebroken or suited for the cold, and I knew it would be me taking care of her. On Christmas Day a nor’easter deposited more than a foot of snow on top of what was already there. Mom couldn’t drive anywhere.

She’d sit in front of the fire reading her Bible, paying little attention to our new dog. The second week of January, Jim returned to Ben Lippen while John and I remained snowbound at home. Mom was acting alarmingly again, and I’d been aware of it for a while. In recent weeks she’d begun talking to her psychiatrist, Dr. Bill, on the phone.

She told him she was pregnant with the baby Jesus. I doubt it’s a coincidence that several months earlier my father’s second child, Rona, was born. He had a beautiful son and daughter, his life with Rita happy, his law practice going well. Not long after buying Cassi, my mother called Lenore Saunders on a Sunday morning.

“I’m hungry,” Mom announced.

She explained she’d been in touch with Dr. Bill, and it was apparent from her bizarre ramblings that she needed to be hospitalized again. Arrangements were made with Appalachian Hall, and Manford showed up in the same black Buick from four years earlier. I was in disbelief that this was happening again.

Manford helped carry our suitcases while Cassi shredded newspaper and barked shrilly. I sensed that she was going to be a problem and told Manford we couldn’t leave her. She weighed two pounds and wouldn’t survive. He said that bringing her was fine with him. But he couldn’t guarantee how Lenore would feel about a puppy in the house. I knew he’d have no say about it as we gathered some of Cassi’s food.

I carried her out the door as she shivered, burrowing her head under my arm. Mom climbed into the front seat, and I held Cassi in the back, trying to quiet her. When we reached the Saunders’ house, I knew right away that Lenore had no use for our dog and was annoyed that we had one. I’d never gotten the impression that she liked animals except for the dead ones on the living room wall.

My first job was to tether Cassi on newspaper near the front door as instructed. I said the location was a bad idea. She was going to be lonely and most of all cold because of the draft. I explained what the pet store clerk said about her having no undercoat, her skin pink and sensitive. Maybe she should stay in my room, but it was out of the question.

That night we ate roast beef that Manford carved with an electric knife, new technology I’d never seen before. Mom was quiet at the table I’d set. By now I knew where everything went. She stayed upstairs that night, reporting the next morning that the canopy bed was like sleeping under a cloud.

Manford drove her to Appalachian Hall while I frantically cleaned up after Cassi, trying to get her to stop barking and shivering.

“Shhhh! Quiet, Cassi!” I’d whisper while Lenore menaced. “Stop please! SHHH…!”

Cassi would last at the Saunders’ maybe three days before the boom dropped.

“Your mother should never have bought her! Maltese dogs are expensive and you’re poor!” Lenore declared, and that much was true.

But the expense wasn’t the problem. Cassi was noisy and a nuisance. I knew what was coming.

No, no, no!

“The dog can’t stay here! I have enough to deal with!” Lenore glared at Cassi as if the poor creature were an invasive species.

Manford and I were tasked with returning her to my family’s house, and I begged him to let her stay as we drove away. But it wasn’t up to him, and the decision was final. He tied Cassi to a pole in the basement, and I couldn’t stand thinking of her alone and cold in the dark. It was so horrible leaving her there, I’ve blocked it out.

I was allowed to feed her and change her papers once a day, usually doing this late afternoon before sunset. It was forbidden that I lingered, and Lenore made sure of it by timing me. If I wasn’t back in less than forty-five minutes, there would be serious trouble. I assumed she did this to be cruel, but that probably wasn’t the only reason.

We had three telephones in our house, one of them in the basement. Looking back, I suspect Lenore worried that while there I’d call my father. He knew Mom was in the hospital again. I haven’t a clue how he found out. Possibly someone reached out to him about Mom’s hospital expenses that he would refuse to pay yet again.

But he was aware, and last time that happened he tried to put my brothers and me in foster homes. When that was foiled, he stopped sending money, as he would again this time. Had it not been for my aunt Dolores and uncle Bill in Chicago, our bills wouldn’t have been paid, including the mortgage of $167 monthly. We could have lost our home.

I don’t know any rational reason for my father stopping the payments while Mom was in the hospital. One might think he would have done the opposite, making sure we had needed resources, even moral support. As unbalanced as my mother might sound when she accused him of trying to destroy her, it seemed she was right.

He wanted her to lose everything and did his best to bring it about. Maybe if she went haywire and did something unthinkable, it would be the validation he needed. She was the sick one and not him.

Every afternoon, out the door I’d go, running down Virginia Road, careful not to slip on ice, my breath rapid and smoky, my heart hammering.

I’d race past the Barkers’ house, the sign in front displaying the names of their children on strips of wood attached to each other by hooks. It was easy to add another strip after the birth of the next baby, and they would have eight. Climbing over a stone wall, I’d take a shortcut through the woods, my boots trudging through deep snow along a path that only I followed.

A stream ran behind our house, and Jim had built a bridge from saplings he cut down and lashed together. It looked like something from the Daniel Boone TV show. The bridge was thick with snow, and I was careful crossing, not wishing to fall into the frigid water. If nothing else, I’d be punished.

I followed my footprints through the snow-covered gravel backyard. Recently, Mom had bought a preowned gold Impala with a black vinyl roof. It was cocooned in white on the driveway. I can still remember the brass house key turning in the lock as I opened the outside door that led into the basement.

I’d walk into the chilled gloom as Cassi barked and whimpered desperately. Pitifully.

“It’s okay, Cassi! I’m coming…!”

Winter light seeping through dirty shallow windows dimly illuminated our bicycles and sleds. I could make out the shapes of firewood stacked against a wall, the wicker basket of sports equipment, our tennis racquets in their wooden presses.

“It’s okay, Cassi…!”

I’d hurry past the big boxy furnace, the water heater, and under the stairs painted dark red. Cassi was tied up on squares of newspaper between the beds and the Ping-Pong table. I don’t think I turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. It was probably better not to see but so much. Hearing was bad enough, Cassi’s fear and distress mirroring my own.

Most of what would happen after that is gone from my memory. I have few images of those visits and how upsetting they must have been. The temperature wasn’t above fifty, and I remember taking the box of painting rags from Mom’s art studio. I made a bed for Cassi while trying not to be dismantled by her shivering and crying.

“I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry…” As I was dying inside.

When Mom finally came home some three months later, Cassi’s fur was so matted she had to be shaved. She was a neurotic wreck, fearful, and died less than two years later. I can forgive Lenore Saunders’s unkind and oft-times sadistic behavior toward me. It stands to reason that I might not have been as objective as I believed at the time. Chances are my interpretations weren’t always accurate.

But there’s no mistaking what she did to Cassi, my role in it haunting me to this day. I won’t forgive Lenore’s inhumane treatment of a ten-week-old creature that was completely helpless. As bad as Lenore had been our first stay with them in 1966, she was ever so much worse this time, her rage uncontrollable.

On one memorable occasion her older son came home briefly from Princeton Theological Seminary. He was driving the family Buick while having a discussion with his mother. She didn’t like something he said and slapped him hard across the face. It’s a wonder he didn’t swerve off the road, and I was shocked, shrinking in the backseat.

I made myself as small and quiet as possible while watching him clam up, his cheek bright red. Around this time, John was just as afraid of Lenore as I was even if he later blocked out much that happened. But he remembers getting a bad grade on his report card. Terrified of incurring her wrath, he changed the D to a B and wasn’t a good forger.

She found out and hauled him to Calvin Thielman’s house to be whipped with a belt. That’s one trauma John hasn’t forgotten, and I was aghast that our minister would do such a thing or be Lenore’s confederate. She warned us to keep our mouths shut. Never were we to talk about what went on in her home.

Once again, I was drinking honey and vinegar multiple times daily. Not allowed to shower, I looked like a “greaser,” as one of my classmates put it. I used Psssst! dry shampoo to clean my hair, turning it a vaguely dull chalky white. Lenore insisted on looking at every test I took.

If the score wasn’t perfect, she’d sit me down in the living room after dinner. She’d make me take the test again and again until I got every answer right. I started pulling out my hair, creating a sizable bald spot on my crown that the other kids pointed at, whispering, snickering. I’d sit in the back corner of my eighth-grade home room hiding from everyone. I was outgrowing my clothes and had holes in my underwear.

Worst of all, Lenore was teaching at my elementary school in Black Mountain. I had to ride with her every morning and afternoon, cowering in the backseat, hoping she’d forget I was there. But she didn’t, berating me nonstop throughout the entire drive, but never a cross word to my brother John. I couldn’t escape her on any front, her verbal attacks extraordinary.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” was the typical coda of her abusive comments.

It would turn out that she was disparaging me to my teachers. One morning when I walked into math class, Mrs. Brown sternly moved my desk, isolating me from the rest of the students. She’d hover near me watching everything I did. I was stunned and humiliated, having no idea what was going on, my classmates staring and whispering.

That afternoon while waiting for Lenore to drive us home, I visited with my English teacher, who was always nice and helpful. I told her the way Mrs. Brown was acting. I couldn’t understand why she moved my desk away from everyone.

“You really don’t know?” the English teacher asked.

“Know what?” I replied.

“Mrs. Saunders told Mrs. Brown that you cheated on your last math test. All your teachers had been alerted.”

It was a lie. I’d never cheated on anything in my life and never would. Besides, Mrs. Saunders reviewed my every test, forcing me to take them again if I gave a wrong answer. Had I cheated, she would have realized it immediately. But there was nothing I could do. The faculty believed Lenore and not me. I was branded, more isolated and self-conscious than ever.

That was when I became acquainted with Linda Hile, who lived in a nice house on the Black Mountain golf course. We were in Mr. Pollard’s home room, and she started sitting in the back row next to me. When she struck up a conversation, I couldn’t believe it. She seemed unaware of my ill-fitting clothes, my powdery hair and bald spot. In no time we were inseparable, and I was spending the night now and then at her house.

Eventually, her family would include me on trips to a ski resort and the amusement park Six Flags Over Georgia. It was Linda’s mother who taught me about certain indelicacies relating to puberty, such as using a tampon instead of a thick sanitary napkin attached to an elastic belt. Reassuring me that menstrual cramps were normal, she’d give me a hot water bottle and a Midol.

I knew quite a lot about what went on sexually between adults, but Mom hadn’t gotten around to telling me about puberty. The first time I had a period, I thought I was bleeding internally. I was appalled by changes to my body I’d not been told to expect. I looked at other girls my age and the way the boys looked at them.

Most of the boys didn’t notice me at all. I was skinny and still wearing an undershirt. The hair I didn’t pull out needed cutting and was dusted with dry shampoo, my front tooth chipped from flipping over my bicycle. I’d been branded a cheater and felt terrible about myself. I couldn’t imagine anyone liking me. It seemed Lenore went out of her way to crush my spirit.

By early 1970, Manford was traveling constantly, his relationship with his wife all but over. I remember him dropping by the house now and then to take care of a list of chores she’d leave taped to the kitchen wall. I could feel her resentment and dry-ice coldness. When he showed up, he didn’t linger.

Later I would hear gossip about him having an affair and being defrocked as a Presbyterian minister. He would leave his family not long after my brothers and I stayed with them in 1970. The last time I saw Manford Saunders, I was walking along Assembly Drive one summer evening.

A Winnebago lumbered in my direction, stopping when it reached me. I was startled and baffled to see Manford at the wheel. Friendly as ever, he told me that he was living in the camper and hawking Cherokee Indian souvenirs. Feeling sorry for him, I said how cool that was, promising if I ever had any extra money, I’d buy a few.

21

MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, MOM ENROLLED ME AT BEN Lippen, where Jim was a sophomore. She’d started working there as a secretary to the headmaster, and decided I should go there too, no doubt getting a good deal on the tuition. I wasn’t happy about this in the least.

The eighth grade had ended reasonably well. I had my good friend Linda, and loved tennis. Mom had been out of the hospital maybe four months. It seemed she couldn’t wait to send me packing the same way she had the summer we’d moved to Montreat and I ended up at Camp Merri-Mac. I begged Mom not to make me go to boarding school, where I knew absolutely no one.

But she wasn’t to be dissuaded, and in August she took me shopping at Kmart. Ben Lippen was even stricter and more religious than my Montreat neighbors. Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants except on special occasions. My skirts had to touch the middle of my knees. I was forced to wear a girdle even though nothing stuck out except my front teeth.

Boys and girls had segregated areas of the campus and weren’t allowed to trespass. Touching was forbidden. When we talked to each other, we were to be a minimum of six inches apart. It wasn’t uncommon for a member of the faculty to walk around with a ruler to measure the distance between boys and girls waiting to enter the dining room.

Each day Bible class began with singing, “Sin shall not have dominion over me…” The teacher was my dorm mother, Miss Turk, humorless with permed graying hair. She often answered the door with her pet parakeet perched on top of her head. When it died, she told me that she flushed it down the toilet. I remember being aghast at the image. I asked why she didn’t bury it, annoying her as usual.

Miss Turk was always on me about one thing or another, saying I had “a naughty knock” whenever I’d appear at her door. She accused me of being willful. I was careless when doing my daily chore of sweeping, mopping, cleaning windows, whatever was assigned. Every month it was a different task for the students as we helped maintain the facilities. I hated every minute of it.

If you misbehaved at Ben Lippen, you were sent to D Hall on Saturday mornings. I was a regular, my punishment writing my name five hundred times. I got quite fast at it, while other misbehaved kids were there for hours. Whenever I do stock signings now, sometimes five thousand books at a time, I think of my Ben Lippen days. If only Miss Turk could see me now, it floats into my head.

No doubt she’d say that’s what I get for my wickedness. But oddly, D Hall was good practice for something that would become part of my routine as an author, although a deep part of me still considers stock signings punishment. When faced with boxes of tip-in sheets or tables stacked with thousands of books, I feel that I must have done something wrong.

After my freshman year, Mom wasn’t working at Ben Lippen anymore, and she couldn’t afford for Jim and me to continue. By then I’d acclimated and didn’t want to leave. I got along well with my roommate and the girls on my floor. I had a few boyfriends I kept my distance from and never touched. I hate to think what would have become of me had I stayed in that rigid environment.

Many of the students were the children of missionaries and clergy, much like Montreat. But most of my neighbors weren’t legalistic and punitive. The typical trajectory after graduating from Ben Lippen was to attend fundamentalist schools like Columbia Bible College or Bob Jones University. Nothing I wanted to do in life would have been encouraged at such places.

There was no tennis at Ben Lippen, and on Saturdays when I wasn’t in D Hall, I’d practice by hitting a dead ball against a wall inside the gym. I can still hear the whacking and echoing, the ball skidding off varnished wood that was much faster than asphalt. I got quicker and more powerful, practicing split steps, running sprints forward, backwards, sideways.

I don’t remember being very creative my freshman year beyond illustrating papers I wrote. But in the main I was peaceful. My favorite teacher, Leslie Midkiff, was in his twenties and taught English. I admit to being a bit sweet on him, enjoying his attention and encouraging comments. At the end of my freshman year, I asked him to sign my yearbook, amazed by what I thought he wrote: “To Patsy, you’re my favorite girl!”

“I bet you say that to everybody.” I blushed, and he looked puzzled.

What he’d really scribbled was, “To Pasty, you’re my favorite glue.” People constantly misspelled my name Pasty instead of Patsy, explaining his quip.

Now and then on Saturdays the Ben Lippen bus would take us to Kmart and Sky City so we could shop for shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, snacks, and other necessities. What a relief it was to be off campus for a day.

I could do as I pleased without Miss Turk looking over my shoulder or getting out the yardstick to measure the length of my skirt. One Saturday the TV game show What’s My Line? was filming in front of Sky City. A handsome Hollywood-looking man was interviewing passersby, asking what they did for a living.

As I neared the camera crew at the entrance of the store, suddenly I had a microphone pointed at me.

“Who are you, and what do you do, young lady?” the smiling man asked.

My only gainful employment thus far was babysitting, and bussing tables with my friend Linda Hile at the Ridgecrest Conference Center in Black Mountain. Neither sounded important enough as I felt the camera trained on me, the mic close to my face, the cheery correspondent waiting.

“My name is Patsy Daniels, and I’m a waitress,” I said on national TV.

Decades later when my partner, Staci, and I had cameos in three TV movies based on my Win Garano and Andy Brazil series, we played waitresses serving drinks in the Harvard Faculty Club and working in a diner. Waitressing was the only real job I’d ever had, I’d tell the producers. It was my private joke.

In the fall of 1971, I enrolled as a sophomore at Charles D. Owen High School in Swannanoa. I reconnected with my friend Linda, and life took a turn for the better. I loved to draw cartoons and was in demand for making school posters. Teachers would have me design bulletin boards that I populated with characters from comic strips like Peanuts, L’il Abner, Snuffy Smith, Andy Capp.

Owen had a women’s tennis team, such as it was. My sophomore and junior years I played number one and was undefeated. I was winning the Buncombe County, the Asheville City, and other championships, including the Grove Park Inn Spring Invitational, the most prestigious tournament in western North Carolina.

Every time I won a match, the high school principal, Chuck Lytle, would announce it over the intercom, and I was thrilled. Nothing has ever made me feel as famous and limbic as that. I kept my newspaper clippings and tournament brochures in a blue-covered theme book that I still have.

Written inside the front cover were my five rules for how to win:

Keep eye on ball. Always

Hate your opposition

Move Move Feet Feet

Never Say Sorry

Relax

Not bad instructions for life if one leaves out the hatred and not saying I’m sorry part. But I understood better than most that you can’t win if you give in to your emotions. When I was scared, nervous, angry, frustrated, I was my own worst enemy on the court. I made a habit of traveling around with a copy of Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Tennis.

I learned that the Zen of things is just as important as talent and hard work. A laser focus and lack of self-consciousness are exactly what’s required to create. As I became well known locally because of tennis, my popularity dramatically shifted. The girls who’d had no room at the lunch table were now inviting me to slumber parties and football games.

There were few people of color in my high school, and Montreat was anything but diverse. While my neighbors might not have seemed racist, that didn’t mean they were comfortable with people of different persuasions. To some extent, this included my mother. I don’t recall her ever making a bigoted comment, but that didn’t mean she was as open-minded as I assumed.

While I was in high school, there was a handsome Black varsity wrestler I liked a great deal. When I told Mom about him, she was glad that we were friendly but forbade me to date him. I wasn’t allowed to ask him to escort me on the homecoming court, and I remember being shocked and upset that Mom felt that way.

“You can’t, especially in this part of the world,” she told me.

“But I really like him…”

“You can’t go out with him and that’s final.”

“But why, Mom? I really like him!”

“The answer is no!”

When I was growing up, I had no friends of color. There were no Jews or Catholics except in the summertime when western North Carolina was visited by all sorts of people. I never heard of anyone gay or knew what it was. Single women living together were old maids or spinsters. Men who never dated were incurable bachelors or Peter Pans.

My junior year the star football player Bobby Ferguson started flirting with me while the other girls looked on enviously. He was muscular with curly hair and accustomed to being swooned over. I was one of the few who didn’t, perhaps explaining his attraction to me. That and tennis. He often leaned against the fence watching me practice on the courts in front of the football fieldhouse.

Our first date he appeared on my driveway in an El Camino belonging to the father he didn’t live with. I don’t know the truth about Bobby’s background, only that he lived in the children’s home in Swannanoa. I remember he seemed embarrassed by the El Camino and had nothing to say about his father or mother, either one.

Bobby and I nervously headed to Asheville, talking mostly about sports. We held hands while sitting in the dark theater watching a Dracula movie. After that we double-dated a few times, kissing in the backseat. We went to church youth group meetings and retreats together. I’d watch his football games as he scored more touchdowns than anyone else.

Bobby and I went steady briefly. I didn’t realize how afraid I was of getting close to anyone until I broke up with him for no reason. He’d given me an eight-track player and several of his favorite tapes. Three Dog Night. The Grass Roots. One day I drove to the children’s home, leaving the eight-track player and a breakup note on his bed.

It was a terrible thing to do. I told him that in 1984 at our tenth high school reunion in Black Mountain’s Lake Tomahawk clubhouse where my old classmates gathered. By then I was married and had published the Ruth Graham biography. I dressed up in a pearl gray silk pinstripe suit and tie that I got for a song at Ramble Rack, the labels cut out.

Attending the reunion with my friend Linda Hile, I didn’t realize Bobby would be there. It was the first time I’d seen him since graduation, both of us throwing back vodka and cranberry juice in plastic cups. We took our cocktails out on the porch, refilling them often as we talked forever in the semi-dark. Carried away by more than school spirit, we were far too friendly for two people who were married but not to each other.

I got around to the subject of my breaking up with him our junior year and apologized. It wasn’t about him, I explained. After I did it and he didn’t speak to me anymore, I was smitten. As Bobby and I drank our spiked cranberry juice, I admitted to spending my senior year rather heartbroken over him.

Back then my pattern was to want someone I couldn’t have, and if that person wanted me back, I lost interest. Added to the dysfunction, I might stay in love for years when the healthy thing would be to move on. Boundaries were an issue. I didn’t always have a good sense of them. Flirting with Bobby at our reunion was an example.

I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. Clearly, his wife didn’t. The former Owen High majorette spotted us having too much fun on the porch. She pounded on a window before boiling outside. I decided it was time for me to leave.

In high school I had no one to practice tennis with except my brothers and other males. The coach of the men’s team, Bill Mott, was my sociology teacher when I was a junior. One day in the spring of 1973 he kept me after class to have a private conversation about something called Title IX.

He explained that President Nixon had signed a bill into law that prohibited discrimination based on sex. Bill Mott wanted to use that as leverage for me to compete on the men’s tennis team my senior year, a bold move in that part of the world. He asked if I was game, so to speak, and I gave him an enthusiastic yes.

I was accustomed to playing with the boys. It was either that or stay home, and the idea of competing against them didn’t daunt me in the least. Bill Mott had been paying attention to my tennis, aware of the local championships I was winning. He followed press coverage that referred to me as “our local tennis favorite.”

It took time and some finagling, but he convinced the high school faculty to allow me to be the first female in Owen’s history to play on the men’s varsity team. Mr. Mott (as I called him) considered having me play first racquet but calculated I’d win more matches for the team if I were number two.

My brother John, a freshman, would play number three, Mr. Mott said. I explained that would upset him. He should be number two.

“But you’re better,” Mr. Mott said.

“I don’t want to embarrass him,” I answered. “It’s bad enough that his sister is on his same team.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Just don’t tell him why,” I instructed. “I don’t want him to feel bad.”

The spring of my senior year I played third racquet while John played number two. Even so, he wasn’t happy. I don’t recall our practicing together or even talking on match days, and I didn’t blame him. No doubt, he was being teased. Worse than that, I got all the attention. Suddenly the Owen Warhorse men’s tennis team was making headlines.

When a reporter asked if I was afraid to compete against boys, I replied that I was scared at first.

“I had heard how boys get upset if you beat them,” I told the Asheville Citizen-Times in May 1974. “But the majority of the boys weren’t upset when I played them,” I added, leaving out how my brother John felt about it.

I had what I call a slugger game of tennis. Mom couldn’t afford lessons and didn’t think them important. She never interfered with my tournaments but wasn’t interested in them either. I don’t remember her watching a single match. As far as I know, she never saw me play and had no idea how good I was or wasn’t. She would have been far happier had I excelled at piano or ballet. That was worth wasting her money on.

I remember losing in the finals of a tournament and collapsing in tears inside Mom’s bedroom.

“I’ll never be Billie Jean King,” I lamented, devastated, while Mom remained unmoved.

“What matters is what you look like,” was her answer, and I didn’t think I excelled in that department either.

I’d learned the game by watching others and reading articles in tennis magazines. But my technique was lacking and flawed. I had an unusually powerful forehand and serve for a female in those days. But I avoided the net because my brothers and other boys would try to pummel me with the ball. Hovering deep in the court, I’d run around my backhand at every opportunity.

I loved the game and dreamed of turning pro while a part of me knew that couldn’t happen. I wasn’t Billie Jean King or Chris Evert. But I hoped that by competing against boys and practicing hard maybe I’d keep getting better. My senior year I never lost a match. In addition to female athlete of the year, I was awarded most outstanding player on the men’s team.

Despite my efforts at sparing John’s feelings, obviously, I didn’t. Revisiting all this decades later I’m not sure my being on the men’s team was entirely fair. Maybe for me, but not the other players. It never occurred to me that my male opponents might be at a disadvantage. Clearly, I was outmatched by them physically. But I didn’t factor in my having a psychological advantage.

I wasn’t expected to win, and they were mortified by the thought of losing to a 110-pound girl in a tennis dress and ruffled knickers. Added to that, I was a lightning rod for publicity, the newspapers taking my picture with headlines like BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and MISS DANIELS A CHAMPION AMONG BOYS.

My winning streak ended when I played in the men’s high school state sectionals, staying in a Charlotte Holiday Inn. My teammates resented me, and John didn’t want to be seen anywhere near me. I ended up hanging out with Bill Mott the entire time. I couldn’t have asked for a better coach, and unquestionably he devoted more energy to me than the other players.

I won my first two matches in the sectionals, and that was it. But I continued competing, partnering in the summer with Yale varsity player Andy Holden for mixed doubles. He had a strong backhand, and my forehand was my weapon. He and I dated for a while, and he taught me how to drive his stick-shift Fiat. My relationship with him was another six degrees of separation.

The summer after I graduated from high school, he and I taught at a tennis camp in Black Mountain. One of the students was Dorothy Bush, the daughter of George and Barbara, relatives of Andy’s. While I was giving Dorothy lessons, it never would have dawned on me that years later I’d be friends of her family and a regular guest at their home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

I would interview Barbara Bush in 1981 while her husband was vice president. They were good friends of the Grahams, and I talked to her about Ruth while working on the biography. In 1996 after my Scarpetta series had become successful, Barbara invited me to her literacy foundation gala in Houston, and I stayed in their home.

When I met former president Bush for the first time, he was lounging on the sofa in their living room. I was overwhelmed, and not sure what to say. The most logical thing was to let him know we had a connection through his daughter Dorothy, or “Doro” as her family and close friends call her.

“I taught her at tennis camp in nineteen-seventy-four,” I told George Bush.

“Well, that explains why she’s always had such a bad backhand,” he said without a beat.

“How did you know I have a bad backhand?”

“I didn’t. But she does,” he answered.

“I also used to date Andy Holden,” I offered next. “We played doubles together…”

“Who?”

Then the former president laughed. No one better at pulling somebody’s leg. I adored him instantly and always would.

22

IT WAS A GIVEN IN MY FAMILY THAT JIM, JOHN, AND I WEREN’T going to college unless someone helped us. That’s what happened in my case. Lenore Saunders had a sister who was nothing like her. Nelle was kind on the few occasions I’d met her while Mom was hospitalized.

Several times she visited the Saunders, and when Lenore was out of the room, Nelle would pour my honey and vinegar mixture down the sink. She’d shake her head, making a face. In 1974 her husband, Powell Fraser, was the president of King College in Bristol, Virginia. They made it possible for me to go there.

My freshman year I continued my passion for tennis. I hadn’t given up on the dream that one day I might dramatically improve and play professionally. The fall semester I played on the men’s team and became close friends with tennis pro Bob Helton and his wife, Julie. He began coaching me, and I babysat their two girls.

The summer after my freshman year I lived on campus and worked in Bob’s tennis camp. He’d have me spar with his twelve-year-old protégée Margie Brown, who beat me badly. It began to dawn on me that I wasn’t going to make it as a tennis player. To continue hoping otherwise was ridiculous. The highest I’d been ranked was only fourteenth in North Carolina, and that wasn’t going to propel me on to Forest Hills or Wimbledon.

It was one thing to play local tournaments when I was in high school. College and a pro tour were something else entirely. I was devastated and became depressed, fixating on my weight, soon enough thinking about nothing else. I’d see how long I could go without eating, my dorm room filled with bottles of Tab and Fresca. That’s all I’d have as I attended classes and practiced with the tennis team while wondering why bother with anything.

The writing was on the wall. I was a failure. The longest I could go without eating was three days. Then I’d resume and anxiety would settle in. I needed to lose weight. I was fat. At 110 pounds, I wasn’t. But when I looked in the mirror, I looked huge and felt disgusted.

Every ugly thing anyone had ever said to me sounded in my mind like a chorus of hateful voices.

You’re no good.

So, I’d starve myself again.

You’re no good!

I’d eat too much, and on it went.

YOU’RE NO GOOD!

By the late summer of 1975, I was overdosing on chocolate Ex-Lax, taking an entire box of the laxative after binging. Then I read an article about the eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia. That was the first I’d heard about people throwing up everything they ate. Apparently, the ancient Romans used to do it all the time. Researching bulimia like I do everything else, I got to be an expert at purging.

I began dropping weight rapidly as I became more deeply depressed. I started cutting classes and slept through my English final exam. At the beginning of 1976 during my sophomore year, I went to Rome, Italy, for January term. By then I was down to eighty-nine pounds. My fingernails were chronically blue and chipping. I couldn’t stay warm.

The first night in Rome a classmate and I set out on foot to find the Colosseum. I remember thinking how small it looked in person. On our way back to the hotel, we got lost and wandered for hours, the temperature in the low forties. Neither of us spoke a word of Italian and had no luck when trying to ask for directions. We finally found our way to the hotel, both of us exhausted and practically hypothermic.

That was the beginning of the end for me. I couldn’t sleep at night because of the cars and small trucks rumbling below my window at all hours. My roommate, Liz, snored from the other bed, and sometimes heels clicked along the marble corridor, people returning from the bars before the hotel doors locked at 1 a.m. I was increasingly exhausted.

Early evenings I’d go for strolls with Liz. We visited the Trevi Fountain, where Italian soldiers leaned against the basin wall waiting for Americans to buy them drinks or cigarettes. Liz would toss a lira into the water.

“Patsy, pitch a coin into the fountain and you’ll come back to Rome someday,” she’d tell me, her voice muted by loud splashing.

I stared at sculpted Triton blowing into a large shell, and Oceanus in his chariot while Salubrity held a cup as a serpent drank from it. The gods in all their majesty and austerity were silent, their empty eyes looking back at me as if I were invisible. I didn’t throw in a coin, assuming there was no chance I’d return to Rome.

Life was seeming hopeless, and it wouldn’t have entered my most wishful thoughts that one day I’d visit the Trevi Fountain while meeting with my Italian publisher. In future decades I’d be back to Italy many times doing research for my Scarpetta novels, my forensic sleuth a first-generation Italian.

On our way back to the hotel, Liz and I would skirt the Forum. We’d watch shadowy cats prowling in search of food, their dark shapes darting beneath arches and through rostrums. The walks and my eating disorder took their toll swiftly, and soon I was too weak to keep up with the group.

In 1976 there wasn’t much known about treating my affliction. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop what I was doing. If I had so much as a piece of melba toast, I was seized by anxiety. When I ate, I had to “get rid” of it. I couldn’t stay warm, barely able to function. I called Mom from Rome and told her I needed help.

The only place to turn in those days was her alma mater Appalachian Hall. She called Dr. Bill Griffin, explaining what was going on. I’m not sure of the exact date I checked myself into the hospital, but it was a late afternoon in January when Mom picked me up at the Asheville airport after I’d flown in from Italy.

I was too weak to carry my suitcase, and John had to do it. When we arrived at Appalachian Hall, I could tell how uncomfortable he was. I sensed he was unnerved and didn’t want to be seen there. I didn’t blame him. I remembered the lobby’s thick carpet, ornate lamps, handsome upholstered furniture, and coffee tables stacked with magazines.

Not long before Mom was discharged the first time a decade earlier, we were allowed to have lunch with her in the big dining room off the lobby. Afterward, she gave us a tour, and I remembered the ballroom and a bowling alley so old the pins had to be set up by hand.

“Mrs. Daniels, we’ll take Patsy now.” The nurse smiled while an orderly picked up my suitcase and disappeared with it.

I was told my belongings would be in my room when I got there later. But first they had to do “routine checks,” and I needed to “answer a few questions.” Mom hugged me tight, and I saw the pain and sorrow in her eyes. I watched through a window as she and John drove away in our old gold Impala. The nurse rested her hand on my shoulder.

“They say it’s going to snow tonight,” she told me as I turned away from the window.

She led me through the lobby, where patients sat on couches reading or staring at nothing, their mouths open or jaws grinding. An elderly man was talking to someone who wasn’t there. Another man walking by stiffly with a dead stare reminded me of Frankenstein.

I remember Mom telling me about her shock treatments, knowing what was coming when instructed to change into her nightgown. She was taken to a treatment room and placed in a hospital bed where the sheets were tucked tightly around her so that she couldn’t move.

She remembered a metal box with knobs and dials, and electrodes placed on either side of her head.

“No, please, not again,” she’d say as a man in a white coat stuck a needle in her arm.

“Count to ten backwards, Mrs. Daniels.”

“Ten, nine, eight…”

Fog and heaviness. She’d close her eyes and see flashes of red and orange behind her lids. Waking up to lights and faces, she wouldn’t remember who she was until the next day, and that was the part she found so awful. She’d wander the hallways like an amnesiac, a zombie.

For the next few hours, I answered invasive questions while the nurse filled out paperwork. Afterward, I was taken down a long first-floor hallway to the darkly paneled office of Dr. Bill Griffin, in his fifties with receding gray hair, lamplight winking off his glasses. I found him affable and warm.

I was shown into a room and instructed to take off all my clothing. Why was it necessary, I asked as my misgivings grew. I had to be “checked,” and was too frightened to argue.

The nurse left and wasn’t present when Dr. Bill walked in, shutting the door as I hid under the sheet. He pulled it down to my hips, his stethoscope cold against my skin as he listened to my heart and instructed me to take deep breaths.

“Lungs are good, but your pulse is fast,” he decided. “Are you nervous?”

“I guess so.”

“When your doctor gives you a breast exam,” he said while doing it, “do you know how to tell if he’s turned on?”

“No,” I barely uttered, embarrassed.

“His ears turn red.”

I looked at his and wasn’t sure if they were or not as he continued.

“I’m not going to give you a pelvic exam,” he said. “I’m assuming you’re still a virgin.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re morbidly underweight but all seems in order,” he decided, covering me with the sheet.

As he left the room, I wondered if he’d examined my mother like this when she was here. I could imagine her reaction. She wouldn’t have liked it any more than I did. After hurrying back into my clothes, I settled into a black leather chair inside Dr. Bill’s office, looking around at books and framed degrees on the walls.

He sat down behind his desk, lighting a pipe. I noticed hunting pictures and several severed hawk claws that were disturbing to look at.

“We’ll find out the reasons for your problems, Patsy,” he told me. “Then you’ll understand and be well.”

He asked me a few questions, and I didn’t get the impression he knew much more about eating disorders than I did. He added that I wouldn’t see him often while I was hospitalized. For how long, I wanted to know. That depends, he answered. Most of the time I would be in the care of a social worker I’d meet in the morning.

Dr. Bill and I didn’t talk long before he got up and walked me to the door. The nurse was waiting and escorted me back down the hallway. I followed her up long flights of marble steps to the third floor. Room 303 was small with a single bed, a bathroom, and a window overlooking the front lawn.

My suitcase was open and had been gone through. The hospital had confiscated several small rocks I’d collected from the Forum. They took my Bible. I wasn’t allowed to have anything that could be used for self-harm. I guessed some patients swallowed rocks and other things like that.

Or maybe the fear was I’d turn them into a weapon, throwing them at somebody. I knew that mentally ill people sometimes got bad ideas from reading Scripture, particularly the Old Testament.

“If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off,” and they would.

The nurse went over the litany of rules. I wasn’t in lockdown and had reasonable freedom unless I abused it. I could go outside but wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital grounds. She preferred I didn’t walk around alone, and it was mandatory that I show up for all meals and activities. I couldn’t make phone calls without permission.

“Any questions?” she asked.

I noticed there wasn’t a way to lock my door. I envisioned the patient who reminded me of Frankenstein. I thought of being naked on Dr. Bill’s exam table.

“Is it possible for me to lock my door?” I wanted to know.

“No, it’s not allowed,” she said.

That night I lay awake in the dark listening to the clicks of the digital clock on the nightstand. The radiator clanked like something was trying to beat its way out. I thought of my father and what he would say if he knew where I was. Before leaving Rome, I’d written notes on postcards, addressing them to him and faking the dates.

I described walks along the Tiber River that never happened. I mentioned Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican, the Circus Maximus, the Mamertine Prison where people were locked up while awaiting execution. I told him about my accommodations at the Kolbe Hotel on Via di San Teodoro, and that I could pick blood oranges from trees on the grounds.

But my favorite site so far was the Roman Forum, once a meeting place where politicians stumped, gladiators fought, and criminal trials were held. It’s where Dad would have hung out in ancient times, I mentioned. Now it was in ruins, columns standing with nothing around them but rubble. I asked my roommate to mail a postcard to my father every three days, and she said she would.

When I woke up the next morning in my hospital room, I didn’t know where I was at first. Then my stark surroundings came into focus as the radiator hissed and banged. I got up, looking out the window at snow falling, dismayed by what had become of my life. A brisk knock on my door, and a nurse walked in holding a small paper cup and a slightly bigger one with water in it.

“Good morning,” she said. “It’s twenty-eight degrees out and you might want to wear a sweater.”

She handed me the cups. In the small one was an orange-and-yellow capsule, and she watched me swallow it with water.

“Open your mouth so I can make sure it went down,” she instructed, and I did.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Navane,” she said, and I had no idea what that was.

There was no way for me to look it up. Had I done so I would have discovered that it’s an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia. I didn’t know this at the time, but Dr. Bill had diagnosed my mother as a paranoid schizophrenic. Those were his words exactly years later when I went to see him, asking what was wrong with her.

I don’t believe his diagnosis was correct. Even if it had been, it was ridiculous for him to assume I needed her same medication. I had an eating disorder. Dr. Bill said if I didn’t get it under control my organs would shut down. I might have a heart attack. For sure I would die. Maybe that would be fine by me, I thought.

After the nurse left, I dressed, walking out of my room and shutting the door. I headed to the stairs, reaching the nurses’ station, where I was intercepted by a heavyset man with a shaved head and deep-set piggish eyes. He introduced himself as Don Boone, the social worker Dr. Bill had mentioned.

Don told me that we’d be spending a lot of time together, and I was instantly wary. He was far too touchy and invasive in every way imaginable, all in the name of therapy. He boasted that he had a good idea what was wrong with me. Nobody better than him to deal with it, and we’d fix me together. I wasn’t confident and didn’t like him.

This wasn’t starting well, I thought while heading downstairs. Inside the dining room with its bare wooden floor and white-cloth-covered tables, I picked up my plastic tray of eggs, toast, orange juice. I sat alone looking around at other patients, a few of them middle-aged, the rest much older.

I was the only young person in the hospital and prayed that no one would shuffle over to my table. But two patients did, a man and a woman, both in their sixties or seventies.

“Why are you here?” the man asked me.

“I have trouble eating,” I replied, my breakfast untouched.

“Why won’t you eat?” the woman inquired.

With shaky hands she picked up her glass of milk. It dribbled down her chin, and she explained she had cerebral palsy. Her body had no control, and that’s the way I felt inside. I couldn’t control a thing. Not even something as basic as eating. I either ate nothing or too much and got rid of it. But I didn’t tell the patients at my table that.

By the time breakfast was over, my brain wasn’t working right. Within hours, I could scarcely function. I felt like Pinocchio morphing from flesh and blood back into a wood carving. I couldn’t think. During group therapy, I was in a stupor. When I wasn’t attending something scheduled, I sat in a chair in the lobby staring into space as if I’d died and nobody told me.

The next morning the nurse walked into my room with her singsong greeting as if I were a child or demented. I told her I couldn’t function on Navane. I didn’t want to take it.

“Well, you have to.” She hovered over me as I sat up in bed.

“It makes me feel terrible.”

“After a while you won’t notice it as much.”

“Why do I have to take it?”

“Doctor Bill wants you to.”

“What’s it supposed to do?” I swallowed the capsule.

“It will help you,” she answered.

I spent another day in a fog as if someone had banged me on the head. I’d take a shower and fear that a patient would wander into my unlocked room. When I’d dry off, I’d stare in the mirror at blue veins and protruding bones. I had no insulation against pain and cold.

23

THE NEXT MORNING, THE NURSE WALKED INTO MY ROOM TELLING me to rise and shine. She handed me my paper cups, and I popped the pill in my mouth, hiding it under my tongue. I took a sip of water and opened my mouth wide.

As soon as she was gone, I spat the capsule into the toilet. This went on day after day, and I wasn’t in a stupor anymore. But my anxiety raged. I had insomnia and lay in bed at night listening to distant whispers and laughter, wondering what the nursing staff found so funny. I’d hear patients crying and shouting.

During my free time, I’d put on my coat and walk outside around the hospital with its rows of windows, wondering who was looking out them. If I heard a car coming, I’d flip up my collar, tucking in my chin, staring down.

Don’t look at me. I’m not a patient, I’d silently say to the car as it drove past. I’m not like the other people here. I’m walking in the free winter air like you or anyone. So don’t stare.

I’d watch the car disappear around a bend, walking and walking as my cheeks turned red in the wind. The wing behind the hospital was called Back Hall where extremely sick patients were locked up. They were considered at risk for hurting themselves or others, I’d been told. Often, I’d hear wailing and wild laughter that made me pick up my pace.

When I’d stare up at the windows, I’d see nothing but gray glass that looked like slabs of ice. As I’d walk by myself, I’d contemplate my therapy and that nothing was helping. I wasn’t keeping down anything I ate. The only advantage of bulimia versus anorexia is I absorbed at least some calories. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t control myself, and Dr. Bill’s explanation didn’t ring true.

“You’re hostile toward your father,” he told me during our second session. “You’re hurting yourself to hurt him.”

Several of the nurses told me I didn’t want to grow up.

“You’re afraid to be a woman,” they’d say as I’d listen silently, my hands folded in my lap, my eyes lowered.

My social worker, Don Boone, was of a very different opinion.

“You’re afraid of sex, Patsy. That’s what’s wrong with you.”

He decided I needed to learn how to masturbate, and had a female social worker give me a book that was step-by-step.

“I want to hear your bed creaking!” she chortled to my horror.

Meanwhile, I flushed my Navane every morning. I visited the dining room three times a day and didn’t eat. Or I did and got rid of it. In fact, I was worse, the urges more unstoppable. It didn’t seem to occur to Dr. Bill that I was depressed. He never once asked questions that might explore whether I was delusional like my mother. I wasn’t. But I wanted to die.

Every day was scheduled with therapy sessions, both one-on-one and with a group. It seemed I had plenty of free time to walk, hang out in the recreation room, or talk to someone who seemed reasonably normal. I got the impression that a lot of the elderly patients were being warehoused. They came from money, and this was their retirement home.

They had dementia or some other disability that required full-time care. I don’t remember most of their names, but if I did it wouldn’t be fair to share them. They didn’t ask for the nineteen-year-old in their midst to one day become a famous author and write her memoir. Not that I had a thought about that either. By now I was sure I had no future at all.

I don’t know how many patients were there when I was, but it seemed I saw the same dozen or so all the time. Some had been extraordinary once, like Victoria (as I’ll refer to her). In her eighties when I met her, she told me she’d graduated with honors from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

She wore her Phi Beta Kappa key on a bracelet, and every time we chatted, she’d hold up her arm, charms softly jingling. I’d inspect the gold key as if for the first time, remembering my father’s that was in Mom’s jewelry box. I thought how regal Victoria looked when opening her purse, sliding out a silver case of slender brown More cigarettes.

When our paths crossed, she’d launch into stories about her illustrious past, much of it not making sense, her eyes staring at something I couldn’t see. She was always impeccably dressed, as if on her way to church or a business meeting, her posture perfectly straight, reminding me of Alice Coburn from my Camp Merri-Mac days.

Victoria had lived at Appalachian Hall for years. So had Harold, and that’s not his real name either. Closely related to a legendary Hollywood producer, Harold was sweet but disinhibited. Every Thursday night the hospital held a mandatory social in the ballroom, a cavernous space with wood paneling and floors, everything echoing.

There wasn’t a stick of furniture except metal folding chairs, and a table offering paper cups of punch, and bowls of potato chips and onion dip. Harold was yet another permanent resident, and my dance partner at every social that I hated attending. I remember him as very short with strong features and thick white hair.

He’d talk the entire time we shuffled around to big-band music like Glenn Miller. I didn’t understand much that Harold rambled on about close to my ear. But every other sentence was something about Gone with the Wind. I’d catch mumblings about Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Vivian Leigh, and then he’d tell me I should be in the movies. That’s when I knew he was impaired or couldn’t see worth a hoot, maybe both.

He said his family lived far away in Los Angeles, and I wondered why they didn’t want him nearby. I could tell he desperately missed the past and was lonely. Then there was Fred, as I’ll call him, in his fifties, balding, and built like a fire hydrant. He’d been admitted around the same time I was, a thick bandage above his left eyebrow from being pistol-whipped.

Or that was his story. He was a self-avowed alcoholic. But that wasn’t his reason for being at Appalachian Hall, according to him. Fred claimed that he was hiding from the Dixie Mafia.

“Yeah, I drink,” he said one day in group therapy. “But lately I’ve been drinking due to the extreme anxiety from having my life constantly in danger. I felt that coming here was a smart move.”

He told me that he was a very successful businessman and fantastically wealthy. Whatever he supposedly did was related to Roto-Rooter, a company that cleaned sewers and drains. But he also was a private detective and had information that could get him killed. Fred and I often played cards, and he taught me poker.

“You can’t let anybody read your face.” He’d point to his bandaged one. “And you gotta learn to bluff, kiddo.”

We took walks together as he’d tell me about organized crime coming after him because of the secrets he held. I talked about my family dramas, and Fred was understanding right before he’d bring up hit men again. He mentioned notorious gangsters like Billy Sunday Birt, who’d murdered someone a few years back.

Fred seemed to know an awful lot of details and was paranoid. As we’d walk around the hospital’s big paved circle my attention was everywhere, especially if a car approached. I was waiting for men in double-breasted suits to boil out with tommy guns. When Fred and I sat in the lobby chatting, I kept my eye on the front door.

I never had my back to it, a habit long before I became a volunteer cop, riding with detectives and going to crime scenes. It crossed my mind that Fred might be telling the truth. Who’s to say that his stories about Roto-Rooter and gangsters were made up?

The only female patient I palled around with was Sheena, another made-up name. She was closer to my age, probably in her thirties or early forties.

Sheena had started out in Back Hall, her room having nothing inside that could be weaponized. She told me the story of pissing off the staff by detaching her bed from the floor and dropping the screws through a hole. She violently rearranged her room and remained on Back Hall for a while, she confided, laughing hilariously while smoking a cigarette.

I wondered if she was one of the patients screaming while I hurried past the back of the hospital. After a while she was moved into general population. She seemed normal by the time we met except for her loud laughter that erupted with no warning like a geyser. I never knew what her problem was. She didn’t say why her family wanted nothing to do with her.

Weather permitting, Sheena and I went on walks daily, sitting in the sun to chat far away from everyone else. I don’t recall what we talked about, but much she said made little sense, her comments conspiratorial and disconnected. I was getting used to the way the other patients expressed themselves, somehow following along or at least pretending I understood.

Sheena taught me to smoke cigarettes, and I remember my first few drags on an unfiltered Camel. After I stopped hacking, I lay back in the grass as the world spun like a slow merry-go-round. It reminded me of the way I felt when swinging. Occasionally, I’d invite her into my room and give her a snack I’d charged in the commissary.

This caught the attention of Don Boone, who confronted me about it one day. Barging into my room, he wanted to know why Sheena had been in there with the door shut.

“She was eating a snack, and we were talking,” I told him.

“Are you sure that’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing else was going on between the two of you?”

“No.”

“I need you to be honest, Patsy.”

“I am being honest.”

“Well, it’s best you two aren’t alone with the door shut.”

“Why?” I was getting angry.

“Because you have enough shit to deal with and don’t need more.” His intimation was obvious, and I was offended.

I’m not certain I knew the word gay then beyond it describing someone happy. But I was aware of same-sex relationships and as a kid had been suspicious about an unmarried female missionary or two. Sheena did seem masculine, I supposed. And never mentioned dating men. Also, she referenced people, especially family members, unfairly judging her.

But she didn’t say for what even when I asked. I had no idea whether she was gay or not. Looking back, she might have been. She seemed quite drawn to me. But unlike Don Boone, she never made any comments or inappropriate gestures. The worst part of each day was my sessions with him. Inwardly I was seething. I loathed him and felt helpless.

We’d sit in the recreation room’s folding chairs, talking while old men played pool and Ping-Pong balls made a hard hollow sound as they bounced on the table and floor. Don always asked the same thing right off while handsy and too close.

“Did you have a good night?”

He’d want to know what I dreamed. One morning I told him I’d had a nightmare about sitting on a tree branch overhanging a canal full of snakes. Suddenly, a hand emerged from the murky water, thick fingers covered with scum reaching up, clamping around my ankle, pulling me into the canal…

My eyelids flew open as steam hissed from the radiator. I explained that I sat up in bed, breathing hard, worrying about my unlocked door again.

“You’re not afraid of snakes,” Don told me.

He squeezed my hand, nudging me with his shoulder, the fluorescent light shining on his bald head.

“Sex, Patsy. That’s what you’re afraid of.”

He always grinned when talking about sex. I could see his small teeth, his tongue, and he reminded me of something. What was it…? Then it occurred to me. Yes, I knew what it was. A lamprey.

“I could fix you up real good,” Don said salaciously with that same grin. “I could cure you of your problem in just a few minutes.”

Piped-in music floated over the scraping of chairs, the clicking of pool balls, the shuffling of cards. A patient named Bob was waltzing around the room with his pool cue, his eyes blank, his mouth hanging open. He released his skinny wooden partner long enough to clack the white ball into a pocket.

“You lose, ol’ boy,” his opponent grumbled.

Bob didn’t blink as he resumed dancing across the room, slowly twirling, pool cue held close. Probably what I’d be doing if I were still taking the Navane, I thought. I’d heard he’d been here twenty years. He was fifty-five years old and still called his mother every day.

I’d see him enter the tiny telephone room, walking slowly, his bottom teeth bared, his eyes sometimes twitching. He’d close the wooden door, and his head would disappear behind the glass window as he sat down next to the telephone on a table. I could hear the murmur of his monotone.

Usually, I could flip through three magazines by the time he reemerged, often looking despondent. I’d watch him mince across the carpet, vanishing behind the sliding elevator doors.

“I could fix you up real good,” Don repeated. “Yes, indeed. What you need is for me to take you in the corner. How would you like that, little girl? Would you be my friend then?”

His shoulder pressed against me again, only harder, his scratchy, flabby cheek rubbing against mine.

“STOP IT!” I pulled away from him, fear running through me.

“You ready to talk about it? You ready to talk about the patrolman?” Don covered my hand with his.

“How did you know?” I asked. “I never told you.”

He said he’d called my mother and found out from her.

“She’s always thought it messed me up more than it did,” I replied. “I’ll tell you what I remember, but I don’t think it matters very much.”

I didn’t believe my encounter with the patrolman was why I was starving myself to death. But Don wanted the details as he continued touching me while I watched Bob dancing. Why did he crush the pool cue in his embrace yet refuse to be anywhere near the ladies at the Thursday night dances?

Why did I let Don touch me and make his lewd intimations? I’d ask the same thing in 1997 when talk show host Larry King and I were booked on the same American Airlines flight to Los Angeles. I was doped up on decongestants, well on my way to having a terrible case of the flu that I hope he caught.

He’d interviewed me several times on his radio talk show, and now he was a superstar on CNN. Recently, I’d been invited on his TV show with several other bestselling female mystery authors. I knew that when he had my friend Tom Clancy on, it was just the two of them for an hour. I said no to being on Larry King, and when we ran into each other, he asked why.

“Oh gee, I don’t know,” I replied while making myself a cup of hot tea in the first-class lounge. “My publicists handle that sort of thing and not me.”

We boarded the plane first, and he smiled and waved at every passenger walking by in the aisle. Most recognized him. I was amazed that he wanted everyone to see him. I’d noticed the same behavior when both of us were staying in the same hotel once. He’d hover in conspicuous places, usually next to the elevators.

We were alone in first class, chatting across the aisle. Then the devil flew into me, as Montreaters might say. I got up to use the bathroom and paused by his seat.

“You know what?” I confided hoarsely, dabbing my nose with a tissue. “I lied. I told my publicists to turn you down. If you want to talk to me, then do it alone. Nobody else on the show but me, just like you do when it’s Tom Clancy.”

I headed to the bathroom, and as I returned to my seat Larry said, “I almost followed you back there.”

“There’s nobody in it now,” I puzzled.

It took me a second to realize he was alluding to the Mile High Club, and then he scuttled into the empty seat next to me. For the next six hours he hit on me mercilessly. It was so obvious, the flight attendants never returned to our cabin. He was a little man in suspenders with stiffly sprayed hair, his aggression fueled by insecurity, anger, and misogyny.

Maybe he was a major celebrity, but he had nothing real to brag about. Trust me when I say that.

“Do you feel it?” He’d shove my hand between his legs while I was woozy from cough syrup.

No, I didn’t feel it. But I didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

“You feel it?” he tried again, and still no joy, as we say in aviation when we can’t find what we’re supposed to be looking for.

I should have punched him in the nose. Intimidated, I was too nice. He wanted my cell phone number, and like an idiot I gave it to him. He started calling, and said he’d heard I liked women. So did he, and maybe we could have a threesome.

“Cornwell, it’s King,” he left in a voicemail. “I’m feeling amorous.”

On occasion, I’d take his call, mindful of his influence. Most of all I didn’t want to anger him, keenly aware of his power in the entertainment industry.

“Do you find me attractive?” he asked during one of our phone calls, and I was noncommittal.

Not in any way would have been the honest answer. Not even as a human being. A few months later I was in Charleston, South Carolina, for a book signing. He decided to come see me. He wanted to have “lunch.”

“Okay,” I said as I thought, Oh God.

He insisted on showing up at my hotel room, and I refused, repeatedly insisting that we’d meet at the restaurant. We did without him knowing that I had two of my bodyguards eating lunch nearby in case I needed protection. If anybody was all about overpowering women, it was Larry King.

Ultimately, he didn’t appreciate my rebuffing his advances, and I never heard from him again. Whenever my publicists approached CNN about his show, the answer was no, if they got one at all. I didn’t want to be interviewed by him anyway, and asked myself why I didn’t fight back on that flight to Los Angeles.

I envisioned myself socking him in the face without getting arrested. Why was I intimidated? Why was I too nice? I asked the same questions when Don Boone talked lewdly and wouldn’t keep his hands to himself. Why did I let my social worker say these things to me?

It had gotten to the point that his first gesture every morning was to press me to the wall, his pudgy body pushing against me.

“You just gave me a beautiful hard-on, baby,” he’d announce.

During my next infrequent appointment with Dr. Bill, I told him all about it. His answer was to toss one of the severed hawk claws at me. I picked it up, returning it to his desk, having no idea why he’d done that or seemed amused. It was obvious nothing I said held any credence.

“Don’s using verbal shock treatment.” Dr. Bill got serious. “He’s trying to jolt you out of your phobias and self-destructiveness.”

“Oh,” was all I could say.

Why not just throw me into a snake pit and see if that will scare away my eating disorder? Why didn’t I scratch Don’s eyes out when he greeted me every day with his aggressive hands and vulgar comments? That would have been a more productive topic for Dr. Bill to explore with me.

As the days and weeks went by, Don began talking obscenely in front of others during group therapy, everybody decades older than me and sitting around in a circle. He’d make disparaging comments about my physical appearance. One morning he walked around holding up a full-length mirror to each of us.

“This is you, Patsy,” he said when it was my turn. “Do you like yourself?”

“Sure,” I said to my reflection, but I was liking myself less each day.

24

THE PATIENT I FEARED MOST WAS HEINER, AND I THOUGHT HE must have been close to seven feet tall. His face was so swollen it looked like he had a stocking pulled over it, and he stared at me a lot, breathing heavily.

One day he touched my hair and grunted as I played poker near the coffee machine. When he lumbered away, I asked Fred what was wrong with Heiner.

“Was he born that way?” I wanted to know.

“Naw.” Fred stacked his poker chips. “He’s got some kind of brain disease, I think.”

Sometimes at night when moonlight seeped through the curtains as I tried to sleep, I’d see formless shadows that reminded me of Heiner’s face. I was terrified he might leave his room and lumber into mine, and I’d pull the covers over my head. I don’t think I slept much the entire time I was at Appalachian Hall.

One day in group therapy Don asked if I was a “good actress.” He wanted me to participate in psychodrama and act like Fred was my father.

“Just pretend Daddy is sitting across from you,” Don said as if I were a toddler. “Here is your golden chance to tell him what you think, what you feel, what you have suffered.”

“Dad,” I said, looking at Fred, “tell me why you’ve never loved me.”

“Now, Patsy, you have misunderstood things.” Fred sat on the edge of his chair, leaning closer. “I’ve always loved you, but my business takes all my time.” At this he whispered to me, “What did you say your father does?”

“He’s a lawyer, an appellate specialist.” I watched Fred scratch around the angry red scar over his eye from the alleged pistol whipping.

“Yes,” he replied. “My law practice is very demanding. And I’ve had to work so you could go to college and… ah… have nice things.”

“You’re a terrible actor, Fred,” I replied, because my father had made it clear he wouldn’t pay for college. “And you’re not a good lawyer either.”

“Patsy,” Don interrupted with a frown. “Remember this is all pretend. Now go along with it. Just remember it’s therapeutic.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath, returning my attention to Fred. “Dad, you won’t give me an education, and you don’t give me nice things either. There’s no excuse.”

“What can I say?” Fred shrugged at Don. “I think she wins the case!”

After the first month of my hospital stay, Don told me I needed to write my father. It was time to tell him where I was and that I hadn’t stayed in Rome. Don also mentioned my eventual hospital bill, and that was his real agenda. There was concern about how it would be paid. The staff knew my mom couldn’t possibly afford an expense like that.

The next morning, I woke up to my alarm at six o’clock, propped pillows behind me, and wrote the letter. I told Dad the truth.

“I’m in a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t want you to find out because I know you hate weakness.”

On my way to breakfast, I dropped the letter in the lobby’s mail slot. During my next session with Dr. Bill, I decided to tell him the truth too. I confessed I wasn’t taking the Navane. I hid it under my tongue every morning and flushed it down the toilet the minute the nurse left my room.

“And if she now starts forcing me to swallow it,” I threatened, “I’ll just go into the bathroom and throw it up.”

“Patsy, you always have to have control, don’t you?” Dr. Bill shook his head very much like my dad did after I gave away my fake gold doubloons. “How can we help you if you won’t let us?”

“But nothing is helping, Doctor Bill.”

“Give it time. It takes a while for our emotions to catch up with our intellect.”

I agreed to try the medicine again. I sat all day long, my head nodding, my eyes refusing to stay open. I took no walks. I didn’t laugh or smile. I didn’t feel anything except heaviness and depression as if I were being sucked inside a black hole. From that point on, I threw up the pill and this time didn’t tell Dr. Bill or anyone.

February turned into March, and the snow melted. The days began to feel like spring, the temperature nudging close to sixty, the flowers sprouting and trees budding. One of the social workers was a tennis fanatic. I’m not sure of his name and will call him Seth. In his late twenties, he had brown eyes and a nice smile.

He was tall and must have weighed more than twice what I did. He’d read about me in the newspaper and knew I was a small-town tennis celebrity. The hospital had an ancient asphalt court that was in poor repair, the net half rotted, the painted lines partly peeled away, no windscreens or fence.

I didn’t have the impression the court was ever used. That didn’t deter Seth from challenging me to an exhibition match in front of all the patients except those on Back Hall.

“No,” I said.

“Come on, it will be good for you.”

“I don’t want to.”

“This is how you return to your life, Patsy.”

“I weigh ninety pounds, can barely climb the stairs, and don’t have a racquet here.”

“I’ve got one you can borrow.”

“I can’t…”

“Sure you can. It’s happening.”

I had no choice about it and didn’t trust his motive. He wanted to play me in front of everyone, no doubt certain he would win. He would brag about it. On the appointed day, the weather was clear and cool, and I didn’t have so much as a warm-up suit or proper shoes. I wandered outside, my anger sparking.

Dozens of patients were instructed to gather around the tennis court to watch this parody of the Battle of the Sexes. Front and center sat my Camel-smoking friend Sheena. She winked at me, giving me a thumbs-up when I appeared in jeans, a sweater, and Hush Puppies. She hooted, “Beat him like a drum,” as I walked onto the court like Billie Jean facing off with Bobby Riggs.

Seth handed me a racquet I’d never used before, and by now I was quietly furious. Practically murderous. How dare he put me on the spot like this, especially when I was so disadvantaged. The stress and upset of it all sent a cascade of adrenaline rushing through me and I did what Sheena said. I beat him like a drum.

Maybe worse than that, and it was the most satisfactory victory of my life. Looking back, it still is. Nothing could have been better than watching him slink off the court after scarcely getting a point. I slammed sharply angled shots anywhere he wasn’t, and if he dared rush the net, I’d try to hit him with the ball where it would hurt. Patients stared, a few clapping, Sheena cheering wildly and heckling.

Soon after, I announced to Don Boone that I’d been in the hospital almost two months and was no better. I needed to leave.

“That’s a very bad idea,” he replied somberly. “You’re not well.”

“Actually, I’m worse,” I said. “And if I don’t get out of here, I will be crazy.”

“I don’t want you to leave.” He held my hand again.

“I signed myself in and can sign myself out,” I retorted. “I’m leaving and you can’t stop me.”

I returned to my house on Kanawha Drive around mid-March. I don’t know the exact date, but I’d been home only a day or two before the tennis-playing social worker Seth called.

“How are you doing?” he asked when I answered the phone on the kitchen counter.

“Okay.” I wasn’t.

He said there was a Glen Campbell concert that night at the Asheville Civic Center and would I like to go with him. Mom was in the kitchen, the copper teakettle whistling on the stove. I told her who was calling and what he wanted. She assumed Seth taking me to a concert was follow-up therapy. She was happy for me to go.

That late afternoon, he picked me up. I thought it unusual that he didn’t probe for details about whether I was eating and keeping anything down. I was surprised and unsettled when he started holding my hand. It wasn’t like Don Boone’s meaty paw making sure I knew he was dominant.

Seth laced his fingers in mine the way my high school boyfriends did. I had no interest in Seth, especially after he forced me to play that tennis match. I’d disengage my hand from his at every opportunity. Reaching for a tissue. Scratching my nose. Sneezing. Digging out a ChapStick. Finally, he got the message.

What I remember most about the concert is how amazed I was to see Glen Campbell in front of me onstage even if from a distance. I thought of all the times I’d skated around the basement playing his 45 vinyl records on my boxy red phonograph. “Little Green Apples.” “Wichita Lineman.” “Galveston.”

After our therapeutic date, Seth walked me to my front door, and I rushed inside before he could kiss me. I never heard from him again. To give him credit, he wasn’t pushy, unkind, or rude. While it wasn’t a good idea to date a recently discharged nineteen-year-old patient, that was par for the course at Appalachian Hall and maybe other places in those days.

Nothing much that had gone on was appropriate or necessarily helpful. But it was a different era and the only staff member I held accountable and frankly hated was Don Boone. One of my regrets is that I never tracked him down before he died and told him what I thought. He was a sexist blowhard, a fraud, and completely disgusting.

All those years in church and I’d been taught that to hate is sinful. I was a sinner then. Thinking about him, the patrolman, Lenore Saunders, Larry King this many years later causes my mood to harden like steel. I won’t forgive what they did.

I’d been home from Appalachian Hall two weeks when Mom insisted that I go to church with her. I said I couldn’t possibly. I was humiliated that people believed I was mentally ill.

Overwhelmed by shame, I felt only worse after neighbors dropped by to pray for me. I was mortified when Mom took me to see the local Pentecostal ringleader Adger McKay. Supposedly, he could heal people, and Mom figured it was worth a try since nothing else was working. I didn’t discuss my eating disorder with her, but obviously it was worse than ever.

While she waited in the car, I sat down in Adger McKay’s living room, about as ill at ease as I’d ever been. He said he could make me whole again. He could cast out my eating disorder as if it were a demon. But that was possible only if I let him lay on hands to fill me with the Spirit.

I needed to accept the gift of tongues or he couldn’t help me. I remember what that made me feel.

Controlled.

Exploited.

Captured like a butterfly.

He looked downright evil, pinning me with his eyes, his intense face gaunt, his nose sharp like a knife.

“No, thank you,” I said, getting up from the sofa.

“As you wish.” He got up too, his demeanor turning cold.

He died two years later, and I heard people tried to raise him from the dead for three days before giving up. I don’t know if that’s true. But it wouldn’t surprise me. After my encounter with him, I asked Mom not to take me to see anybody else. Nobody was going to make me better, and I needed to be left alone.

She was as helpless with me as I’d been with her. I isolated, taking walks only after dark, setting out alone wearing my black trench coat to keep warm while melting into the shadows. I’d ponder my trainwreck of a life and wonder how I’d managed to derail like this. Why was I such a loser?

Once a local celebrity, an overachiever who made straight A’s, I’d dropped out of college. I thought of myself as a has-been who never was. I’d been locked up in a hospital for two months at the expense of $5,500. That was the equivalent of some $30,000 today, an insurmountable amount. I asked Dad if he would pay it.

Paperwork was drawn up for my brothers and me. He gave each of them the equivalent of what was outstanding on my hospital bill in exchange for being written out of his will. That was our share of his estate, and we’d get nothing else. John used his money to buy a pickup truck. I don’t remember what Jim did with his. I got nothing, but at least my bill was paid in full.

After all this, and here I was no better. I couldn’t control what I ate or didn’t, and by now I’d accepted there was no cure. My failure at tennis had broken my heart and shattered my dreams. I felt like the biggest screwup on the planet. I had nothing to look forward to, and wished I were dead. I was thinking about it a lot, not saying a word to anyone.

I’d imagine disappearing into the woods and ending my life. I had no purpose. I was ruined exactly like Mom said after my episode with the patrolman. Jim kept a loaded .22 revolver in his bedroom, and using it crossed my mind. But if for no other reason, I wouldn’t do that to him. I didn’t want anyone blamed if I jettisoned off the planet and returned to the Other Side for repair like a damaged toy in Santa’s workshop.

“I don’t want the neighbors staring at me.” I told Mom I wasn’t attending church with her. “You go on and I’ll stay here.”

She wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I got dressed, putting on my black trench coat. When we walked into the lobby of Gaither Chapel, it was what I expected. Everybody stared. An elderly neighbor sidled up to welcome me home.

“I was going to send you cookies at the hospital but figured you’d just throw them up,” she said loudly.

“That’s all right,” I replied. “There was no need to send me anything.”

I tugged Mom inside the sanctuary with its stained-glass windows and wormy chestnut pews. Tucking us in the back, I sat next to the aisle. As we sang hymns, the pews creaking as we stood every other minute, I was increasingly uncomfortable. My heart was racing. I avoided eye contact.

Calvin Thielman appeared in his black robe, and began one of his colorful sermons, his sleeves flapping like bat wings as he gestured. I felt eyes on me. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Let’s leave,” I whispered to Mom.

She looked at me and shook her head.

“Then I will.”

She shook her head again, her hand on my arm.

“I’m going.”

Calvin was quoting Scripture as I got up. I walked out, pews creaking some more, people turning to watch. Mom had little choice but to follow, and I was relieved to step outside in the fresh air and sunshine. A few hours later the phone rang in the house, and I answered. It was Calvin.

He’d always been wonderful to me and was my only visitor at Appalachian Hall. It was a happy moment during my stay when he showed up one afternoon. A nurse announced that someone was in the lobby to see me. Calvin and I talked for an hour, and I told him everything that was going on. He prayed that I would get better.

“Patsy, I saw you get up and leave church,” Calvin said over the phone in his Texas drawl.

“Yes, sir. I just couldn’t sit there.”

“I want you to come to the college vespers with me tonight. I want you to play your guitar for everyone and sing one of the songs you wrote.”

I felt my insides cringe at the thought. I knew only three or four chords on the guitar I’d bought at Finkelstein’s Pawn Shop in Asheville, the same place I would get my manual typewriter for college. But I couldn’t say no to Calvin. I’d adored him ever since we’d moved to Montreat, and his family was good to ours.

They’d have us over for Thanksgiving dinner and Calvin would warn us to be careful about biting into lead shot as we ate the duck he’d hunted. Now and then he’d take me to Custer’s Last Stand in Black Mountain where the locals went for soft-serve ice cream dipped in chocolate or covered with sprinkles. It was open only in the summer, and we’d sit at tables to the hissing of the bug zapper mounted on a pole.

I got off the phone and hurried to my bedroom, unclamping the cardboard case with my steel-string guitar that needed tuning. Calvin knew I used to play for my church youth group. I practiced one of my songs for a few minutes, making sure I remembered lyrics that are long since forgotten.

25

CALVIN PICKED ME UP EARLY EVENING IN HIS BLUE VOLKSWAGEN Rabbit. He had three sons but no daughter and treated me as if I were his own.

When I wrote him from college, I’d refer to him as my adopted dad, and he was proud of me when I became a successful author later in life. Not long before he died in 2002, I’d go to see him for the last time. He was bedridden, his backyard a riot of roses he’d planted, Flat Creek tumbling over rocks.

I pulled up a chair next to him, and he clasped my hand.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said.

“Anything.”

“I’d like you to give me something of yours.”

“Okay. Like…?”

“Something that I can look at and think of you, Patsy. Something you wouldn’t give to anyone else.”

I pondered that for a moment, and told him I had just the thing, an antique revolver that had been a gift. The ivory grips were scrimshawed with the Scarpetta crest that was on my stationery, jewelry, even the paint jobs of my various helicopters and motorcycles. As soon as I got home, I had the revolver sent to him.

After I’d walked out on his sermon in the spring of 1976 and he called, it was to be the greatest turning point in my life. I shoved my guitar into the backseat of his car and climbed in front. When we walked into that room in Gaither Chapel, the chairs were in a circle, all but three of them were occupied by college students with Bibles in their laps.

Calvin sat on my left, the chair to my right empty as if saved for someone. A few minutes later, I was surprised when Ruth Graham walked in. She headed straight to that empty chair, giving me the warmest smile. Calvin bringing me here was a setup. No doubt, his first call was to her after I walked out of church that morning.

I’d seen Ruth only in passing over the years, but she’d never stopped being important. Calvin opened in prayer and announced that I was a special guest and was going to play something I’d composed. I snapped open the clasps of my cheap guitar case. Standing up in the middle of the circle, I slipped the strap over my shoulder.

I began singing and strumming a song that at best was mediocre. When I sat back down, Ruth whispered how talented I was, and I didn’t believe her. But it was a nice thing to say. At the end of vespers, she turned to me again with another smile.

“We should have lunch,” she said.

Sure, I thought sarcastically. That will happen when the moon is made of cheese.

“Thank you. Yes, that would be nice, Mrs. Graham.”

“Please call me Ruth.”

“Okay.”

Early the next morning, the telephone in the kitchen clangored, and I grabbed the handset.

“Hello?”

“Patsy, it’s Ruth Graham,” she said to my astonishment.

“Oh! Hi!”

She was on her way to Asheville and wondered if I’d like to come with her. She thought we’d stop at Pizza Hut if that suited. My excitement dimmed when I remembered I had a follow-up appointment at Appalachian Hall midafternoon.

“That’s fine,” she said after I told her. “We’ll have lunch and I’ll drop you off at the hospital.”

“I don’t think you want anyone to see you pulling up to that place.” I was mindful of gossip that might end up in the news. “Someone might think…,” I started to add.

“It’s not a problem,” she replied. “How long is your appointment?”

“An hour.”

“I’ll wait in the car,” she said to my disbelief.

When her silver Volvo appeared in my driveway, I flew out the door, my feet scarcely touching the ground, it seemed. I climbed in, fastening my seat belt, my heart pounding, and she placed a dark red leather journal in my lap. It had gold-edged creamy pages, and a brass clasp with a tiny key.

She’d bought it in Lausanne, Switzerland, and maybe it would inspire me. I thought the journal was exquisite and didn’t feel anything I might write worthy of it. As we drove to Asheville, she remembered my visiting her mother, Mrs. Bell, when she was confined to a wheelchair, barely able to form words after a stroke.

“She’d show me your stories and poems,” Ruth said. “I’ve always known you’re talented, and I want you to write.”

At Pizza Hut I pushed my food around, barely eating a morsel while hoping she didn’t notice. She didn’t draw attention to it or make me feel self-conscious. I asked questions about herself, her family, and she mentioned that Billy had received another death threat that the FBI was taking seriously. Sometimes these communications included vile promises about what the person intended to do to his wife.

Five years later while working on her biography, I’d read the details in journals she kept, and was disturbed by references to her as the target of sexual violence. She’d write that the threats about her were “unpleasant,” but she didn’t seem frightened. She paid little attention to the FBI’s recommendations about her safety, not wanting to live like a prisoner.

She told me there were guns in her house and she knew how to use them. I have no doubt that Ruth wouldn’t have been an easy victim. One of her fireplace tools was a wicked-looking long-handled iron fork she used to roast marshmallows. It was her weapon of choice for killing poisonous snakes when they coiled in her yard.

She’d hear the dogs barking and fly out the door with her fork, getting within arm’s reach of a rattler or copperhead. She was fearless and methodical in her executions. Not much riled her except journalists and their aggressions. She often commented that she’d like to go after some of them “with a switch.”

They’d dig through the Grahams’ metal trash cans chained to a post at the bottom of their road where the garbage truck could reach. It was a routine for Ruth to soak the labels off prescription bottles, food containers, and anything else that was nobody’s business.

While we ate lunch at Pizza Hut in 1976, I could see a shadow of worry about Billy and the most recent death threat. Then she changed the subject, focusing her attention on me.

“I want you to write your story,” she told me as we sipped iced tea. “People need to hear what you’ve been through and yet here you are.”

“Yes, I’m here. But not very impressively.”

“You’re a talented writer. You need to tell your story, Patsy. Do you think you could do that for me?”

“I’ll do my best.”

She suggested I start with an article for Christianity Today, or maybe Decision magazine. I was amazed while worrying that the evangelical publications weren’t my cup of tea. I envisioned the pack of More menthol cigarettes I bought after the patient Victoria let me try one of hers. I thought of the swear words I sometimes uttered.

“I’ll look forward to reading it,” she promised, giving me her phone number.

I didn’t own a typewriter yet, but our next-door neighbor had an electric one. She was kind enough to let me borrow it. Every morning I’d appear at her door and head upstairs to a private space where I’d type most of the day. This went on for the better part of a week, and I was beyond frustrated.

I knew the point was to show that God had healed me. But it wasn’t true. I don’t know how Ruth or anyone else could look at me and think otherwise. I still weighed around ninety pounds. Everything I wrote was factual until I got to the happily ever after. That was pure fiction, and finally I called Ruth.

“I need to talk to you if it’s okay,” I said.

“Come on up,” she told me.

She said to honk when I reached the lower and upper gates, and she’d open them for me. I headed out in the family Impala, navigating that steep road with its scary drop-offs. It was the first time I’d been to her house since Mom tried to leave us there ten years earlier. Ruth was in a lawn chair in the backyard with its view of the valley and mountains beyond. I remember it was a sunny day, the spring air cool.

I showed her the manuscript I’d written, apologizing for the italic font and the pale blue ink that weren’t my choice. The typewriter was borrowed, I explained. Then I got around to what was on my mind.

“I did what you asked,” I told her. “But I can’t let you publish it.”

“Why not?” She had her sunglasses on, flipping through the onionskin pages.

“Because it’s not true. I’m not any better.”

The last thing I wanted was to admit failure to the very person I was most desperate to impress.

“That’s all right, honey. Now, what else is on your mind?” she said.

After that and perhaps not coincidentally, I got a call from Ruth’s childhood friend Gay Currie Fox, the two of them having grown up in families that were Christian missionaries in China. Gay offered me a job making folk art flowers called Springles that were invented by her husband, Joe. Every morning I’d drive to their big frame house on Lake Tomahawk in Black Mountain, the workshop in the attic.

Eight hours a day, I’d sit at a table bending copper wire around a jig in the shape of a flower blossom. I’d solder long green wire to the frames, and these were dipped in clear plastic. The stems were attached to magnets on racks, and after the plastic dried it was hand-painted. Leaves and flowers were glued into wooden bases and sold at craft shows around the South.

Late afternoons and weekends I resumed doing as Ruth had asked. I started writing my story. I would tell the truth disguised as a novel, beginning it in longhand, recalling scenes from my earliest years. When the weather permitted, I taught lessons at the Montreat tennis courts, showing up with my racquet and a plastic bag of old balls.

I charged fifteen dollars an hour, and a few people signed up. One was Carolyn Fitzpatrick, who lived in Black Mountain. I was giving her a lesson one afternoon while a man sat on the courtside bench watching as I prompted my student.

“Racquet back sooner!”

“Hit the ball in front of you!”

“Step into it. Hit!”

I’d remind her how to do split steps, and to use her index finger like a gunsight to line up an overhead smash. While this was going on, she’d engage me in breathless snippets of conversation. I was aware of the man in white tennis clothes on the bench, figuring he was waiting for my court.

Then Carolyn posed a question that must have been divinely inspired.

“Are you going back to King College this fall?” she asked me.

“I’m thinking of transferring,” I replied, hitting another ball from the net. “Racquet back, step into it, HIT!”

“Transferring where?” she asked, the ball burrowing into the net.

“I don’t know yet. Racquet back. HIT!”

“What about Davidson?” the man on the bench asked loudly.

“And I’ve always wanted a Rolls-Royce,” I replied, knowing that Davidson College was called the Princeton of the South.

The man was Ed White, Davidson’s dean of admissions. His family had a summer home in Montreat, but this was the first time we’d met. He waited until after the lesson, and we talked for a while on the bench. As fate would have it, Davidson had an opening for a female transfer student after one had just dropped out.

The former men’s college was trying to build their women’s tennis team, and how would I feel about playing on it? He asked questions about my academic history and wasn’t thrilled when I told him about my Scholastic Aptitude Test. I’d taken my SATs twice, scoring 830 the first time, and 1030 the second. Both were “clearly below the Davidson average,” Ed said diplomatically.

I knew my scores were pathetic. But I never took a book home during high school, I added. All I did was play tennis, and Owen was easy enough that I made mostly A’s without studying. As an example, I mentioned that my only exposure to Shakespeare was seeing the movie Romeo & Juliet with my English class. My teacher didn’t expect us to read the play.

“Well, if we can get you in,” he said, “you’ll never make above a C. Davidson is extremely competitive.”

To this day, I don’t know why Ed White was willing to take a chance like that with me. I was grossly underqualified to attend such a place and couldn’t possibly afford it. He followed up with the usual package prospective students got. I wrote my essays, filling out the application while he called people who knew me, asking questions.

Some of those queried recommended against me. Davidson wouldn’t be doing me a service if I were set up for yet another failure. I’m sure Ed was told many details about my mother’s history and the troubles in my family. He was warned it would be impossible for me to handle Davidson’s academic load.

Miraculously, I was accepted, and decided to start my sophomore year over. In late August I would arrive on campus having never seen a catalog. I moved into Belk dormitory, and English professor Tony Abbott was my advisor. My first day on campus he and his wife, Susan, had me to their house for dinner.

They knew I’d been through rough times and struggled with an eating disorder that wasn’t improving. There was no judgment. They treated me like family. If I needed them for any reason their door was always open.

26

IN 1976, DAVIDSON WAS A CLUSTER OF HANDSOME NEOCLASSICAL brick buildings, some of them antebellum, the campus small and accessible. There were only thirteen hundred students, and my class would be the first to graduate women.

Fall term I signed up for three English courses, including one with Gill Holland. Tony Abbott warned me that was a bad idea. Gill was considered the most demanding professor in the English department. Tony said I might not realize how much reading and writing were involved if I took three literature classes at the same time.

But the alternative was something else like chemistry or calculus, and I avoided science and math at every opportunity. Classes began the first week of September, and each of my English professors assigned a term paper. I’d never written one and had no clue how to do footnotes or anything else.

I mentioned this to Gill Holland after class, and he made the mistake of telling me he’d read as many drafts as I gave him. I could tell he assumed that I would do as most of the students and turn in my paper at the last minute. But he didn’t know about my phobia of missing the bus and that I was early for everything.

He received my first draft in no time, and six more would follow. After a while I was getting back my marked-up papers with his footprints on them. The increasingly poor condition of my endless drafts seemed an indication of his growing aggravation. After exams and a brief fall break, I was terrified to find out how I did my first term at this very demanding college.

Professors would leave graded papers and tests in big manila envelopes taped to their office doors inside Chambers classroom building. When I snatched out the recycled term paper I’d written for Gill Holland, I was disappointed.

“I only got a B-plus?” I exclaimed in frustration. “That’s it? After all that?”

The next day as I was walking through Chambers, Gill stopped me.

“Miss Daniels, I understand you weren’t happy with my grade on your paper,” he said to my chagrin.

It turned out he was inside his office when I shot off my mouth. I got a B+ in each of my three classes, and after that it was A’s in literature courses the rest of my time at Davidson. My habit was to suggest offbeat projects because I hated writing term papers. In astronomy I wrote a six-page illustrated poem on the life and death of a star.

While studying Victorian literature, I composed an elegiac poem in the style of Alfred Tennyson. After reading Paradise Lost, I offered to try my hand at an epic. Dr. Cole said that it might be “more involved” than I realized. The spring term of my sophomore year, I wrote a paper for Gill Holland about The Mystery of Edwin Drood and how Charles Dickens might have ended it had he not died.

The way I deciphered the murder and who did it showed how my mind would work when writing crime novels years later. This time Gill Holland gave me an A. Little did we know that one day that paper would be on loan for a summer at the Dickens House Museum in London. I made sure to inform Gill of that.

I thrived at Davidson, not just learning but discovering how to think. When I’d arrived on campus my first fall, I wore a gold dog tag with nothing engraved on it. I called myself a tabula rasa, a blank slate. I’d never heard of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, and assumed the Victorian novelist George Eliot was a man.

Professor Charlie Lloyd would go down a list of books, asking me if I’d read this one or that.

“What about…?”

“No, sir.”

“What about…?

“No, sir.”

“How about…?”

“No, sir.”

“Miss Daniels, I wish I’d read as little as you,” he declared one day. “I’d have so much to look forward to!”

The faculty was encouraging and attentive. Because Davidson had no graduate school, the students were taught by the professors and not assistants. My advisor Tony Abbott was a poet and writing a novel. We often talked about my classes and creative efforts. I kept Ruth Graham’s red leather journal in my dorm room, and already its pages were filling with reflections and verse.

My junior year I’d started working at Peregrine House on Main Street. Owned by Eddie and Cindy Booker, the popular restaurant was a two-story frame building with a big front porch. It had become my home away from home and was my only source of income. Had it not been for the Bookers, I couldn’t have managed at Davidson. I had a terrific financial aid package but nothing for rent, food, books.

My mother had no money to spare, and my father refused to help. At one point I needed surgery to extract impacted wisdom teeth. It would cost $500 and Dad wouldn’t pay it. I called Calvin Thielman, and the church gave me the money. Every now and then Ruth would send me a letter with a hundred-dollar bill tucked inside. When I tip hundred-dollar bills today, it’s my way of paying her back.

The original Peregrine House doesn’t exist anymore but used to be the best place in Davidson for sandwiches and pizza. I spent far more time there than on campus, my employers and coworkers extended family. Our staff was small and during peak times the tempo was crazy. I’d tie on my red apron and wait on tables, learning early on that those with the least money often were the most generous.

Tony Abbott wanted me to graduate with honors in English. But I’d have to write a thesis. It would be considerably longer and more involved than a term paper, he warned. I proposed the book I had begun the summer of 1976 after getting out of the hospital. I explained that I called it a novel, but it really wasn’t fiction.

The story was about my family and everything that had happened in my life so far. As Tony and I were having this discussion, I noticed the striking-looking English professor directly across the hall. Charles Cornwell and I hadn’t met. I don’t recall ever seeing him before that late afternoon, but I couldn’t stop staring, electrified and unsure why.

I watched him put on a long dark wool coat and a Russian cap. His black hair and sharp features reminded me of Dr. Zhivago. I asked Tony about him and learned that Charlie was in his late thirties and a bachelor. Because of his dramatic style and comradery with students he was one of the most popular professors on campus, his classes in huge demand.

He was considered quite dashing in his tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, roaring around in his butterscotch-colored Triumph TR6 convertible. As I listened, I recalled seeing the sports car, wondering whose it was. Tony had only high praise for Charlie but warned he was aloof and seemed all too happy being a bachelor. Tony sensed my interest and gently discouraged it.

At my first opportunity I began to take Charlie’s seminars that typically were no more than six students. I found any excuse to spend a moment with him, asking questions even if I knew the answers. Now and then he’d invite the seminar students to his apartment in Jackson Court off Concord Road at the edge of the campus.

On December 15, 1977, he hosted a Christmas party for my class. I brought him a bottle of sherry, and “loved being inside his private world,” I wrote in my journal. I admired his antiques and oriental rugs, my allergies acting up when his two Siamese cats slinked in.

I noted that he lived “a very controlled life. Everything is tasteful and meticulous—very unusually so.” If anyone understood control or the lack of it, I did. “I was the last to leave and wished I did not have to go at all,” I added.

During Christmas break my junior year I returned to Davidson more than a week early. None of the other girls I lived with were back and I had Henderson House to myself. One night while I was hammering away on my typewriter, I got a creepy feeling. I sensed a presence. A man was watching through the ground-floor window to the right of my desk.

When he realized I saw him, he ran off. I didn’t notify the police and should have. Instead, I called Mom and she promised to pick me up the next morning. I made sure the doors to Henderson House were locked, and barely slept that night, terrified the man was going to break in. He brought back memories of Appalachian Hall and my fears about patients walking into my room.

I returned home long enough to borrow Jim’s .22 revolver, tucking it in my tote bag. I knew it was against the rules to have weapons on campus, but that was too bad. No way I was returning to Henderson House unless I had a way of protecting myself. But when I got there, two other girls were back early to work on projects.

I wasn’t alone and didn’t need the gun. I unloaded it and made the mistake of entrusting it to Mom. The next day it was rainy and foggy. I took several long walks on campus wondering why I felt unbearably anxious. I couldn’t work or sit still, so unsettled I was coming out of my skin. I called Mom.

“Please come get me,” I said.

“Why are you calling me?” she asked weirdly.

“I need to come home.”

“Why?” Her voice sounded the way it did when she wasn’t well.

“Please, Mom.”

Several hours later I climbed into the car, and during the foggy drive home she said she’d spent the morning preparing for her suicide. She carried my brother’s revolver into the house and reloaded it, placing it on the table next to the sofa. Turning on the hi-fi, she started playing her favorite records. When she’d listened to every one of them for the last time, she was going to shoot herself.

The next day I wrote in my journal that my upset mood prompting me to reach out to her “must have been my intuition… I am still frightened and depressed now. I fear that she may sink again because she is all alone in the house… my hands tremble, my heart races, and my stomach is closed like an iron vault.”

All the while I was trying to keep up with schoolwork, I worried about Mom. I’d call to monitor how she was doing. As the Christmas holidays retreated further in the background, she seemed better. Then her poisonous paranoid mood would return. The middle of January 1978, I wrote:

“She has been snowed in for days and that is dangerous…”

It did no good to suggest she talk to Dr. Bill Griffin. Mom never admitted that she had ongoing psychiatric challenges. She would say she was “blue” or worried about money or the neighbors were hateful. She blamed her dark moods on past traumas, not seeing them as triggers to an underlying illness.

As she struggled with depression, so did I. The eating disorder was no better. I blamed it on myself.

“It is my willfulness which starves my flesh; yet I honestly cannot stop.”

At the time I was writing a term paper about Black Mountain College, once located in the Swannanoa Valley near Asheville. It was an experimental institution for influential creatives like architect Buckminster Fuller, musician John Cage, architect Walter Gropius who started the Bauhaus School, in addition to others identifying themselves as the Beat Generation.

I’d heard stories about the place while growing up and was curious what I might be able to find out about it. While home during Christmas break, I’d spent time in the Black Mountain public library looking at everything written about the college and any records in archives. My method was journalistic even if I didn’t know it.

Black Mountain College had closed around the time I was born, but many of the artists were still alive. I wrote letters to any whose address I somehow managed to find. I didn’t expect anyone to answer, but that didn’t stop me.

“People are people, famous or not,” I journaled at the time. “And if I can locate them, I’ll ask anything I want.”

In early February I received a three-page letter from poet Allen Ginsberg, a central figure in the Beat Generation. Friends with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg is best known for his poem “Howl.” He had little good to say to me about Martin Duberman’s book Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972).

“My opinion. Frankly, all this is sheer bullshit,” Ginsberg says in his January 28, 1978, handwritten letter on the back of two manuscript pages. “You’re asking my opinion from a distance on Duberman’s distant opinion of an event—Oh fuck it. It’s too stupid to blather more…”

I was astonished that Ginsberg had answered me, as was the Davidson faculty. I also got responses from author Martin Duberman, playwright Eric Bentley, poet Joel Oppenheimer. Another poet, Robert Creeley, also responded. He agreed to let me interview him over the phone, and I invited him to campus. He came and did a reading.

He was kind enough to critique some of my poetry and had little good to say about it. Unimpressed by my attempts to mimic Tennyson, Robert Creeley suggested I avoid iambic pentameter. He called it archaic and monotonous. I should try reading modern poetry. His visit to campus was a big event, and there was a buzz about my Black Mountain College project.

I was writing the paper for Charlie Cornwell, and in early March I appeared at his office to discuss it with him. He was unfriendly, saying he was busy, and I left. By the time I’d reached the main floor, I’d decided it wasn’t fair “for him to brush me off.” I stormed back up the stairs, finding his office door open.

“So I froze,” I noted in my journal. “I stood in the stairwell trying to get my head together. And he walked by & saw me!”

“I KNEW you were up here,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

“Because I could tell by your unique perfume.”

That embarrassed me. I wore Intimate by Revlon and must have overdone it, I thought.

“Doctor Cornwell, I really need to talk to you,” I said to him.

He invited me into his office, and I told him what “I thought of his brush-offs.” We began getting along a bit better after that. My paper “Sailing on to Eden” was twenty-four pages long, and Charlie gave me an A on it.

“The essay is masterfully organized and quite well written—until the final pages,” he commented in the margin.

A reminder that it’s important to have a good ending.

“Jargon!”

I learned the dangers of using a thesaurus.

“Ugh!”

Maybe the worst insult.

“The best word?”

“Use dashes ever so sparingly—”

“Poorly constructed sentence.”

He had something to say on every page.

In May 1978, Ruth Graham visited me on campus. She spent a night at the guesthouse and spoke at a luncheon open to all students. As much as she hated getting up in front of people, she did it anyway for me.

It was one of my proudest moments squiring her around. She sat in on several of my classes, to the delight of my professors. I introduced her to Charlie, and later in life the two of them would get along famously. Not long after Ruth had visited the campus, I walked to his apartment unannounced, knocking on his door as the sun went down, telling him I had something to say.

He invited me in, and we sat in his living room. I confessed I was in love with him. His only reaction was to smile and stand up, walking me to the door, wishing me a good night. I felt like a fool as I returned to Henderson House. I retreated to my bedroom, sitting down at my typewriter to resume work on my novel that wasn’t really one.

By now, I’d changed the title to Forum, using a lot of Roman archaeological allusions as I tried to create a work of literature. Tried too hard, in other words, much of the writing overblown and sentimental. Its only merit is the memories I captured at a time when they were sharp and fresh.

With rare exception, Charlie avoided me. I’d see him walking across campus, and the next instant he would vanish as if abducted by aliens. I started dating John Zambos, a good-looking Greek with brown eyes and thick dark hair. He wanted to be a surgeon and my Peregrine House friends thought he was the perfect catch. But I had eyes only for Charlie.

There wasn’t the slightest glimmer of hope until I was headed to Oxford University for a summer program after my junior year. The night before I left in early June, I happened to attend a keg party where Charlie was drinking beer with a crowd of students. We started talking, and to my amazement he offered me a ride back to Henderson House.

I climbed into his TR6 and was disbelieving when he took me on a drive around the back streets of Davidson. Stopping at the cemetery, we sat there for a long while in the dark, the headlights shining on old, tilted headstones. I felt sure he liked me. I’d found my true love. It was really happening.

He told me he’d grown up on a farm outside Charlotte in the rural town of Latimore. He’d gone to Davidson, then the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where he got his master’s degree and Ph.D. I shared more about myself, admitting the intensity of my feelings. He said he loved me “as a friend.”

27

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG CHARLIE AND I TALKED IN THE CEMETERY, but it was well after midnight when he dropped me off in front of Henderson House. He hugged me goodbye under the streetlight and promised to write while I was in England.

I slept a few hours, waking up hungover in more ways than one. My roommate Karen White and I headed off to Danville, Virginia, staying with her family for a night. The next day her father drove us to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Karen was sophisticated, artsy, and outgoing. She acted as tour guide.

Had it not been for her, I likely would have done my usual thing and isolated. When we arrived in London that June, Wimbledon was starting. We got ground passes and I saw my idols up close. Björn Borg, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe. We watched the musical Hair, and a ballet of Romeo & Juliet starring Rudolf Nureyev.

Karen and I took a train to St. Anne’s College at Oxford to begin our summer program, “The Literature, History, and Society of Britain from 1870 to Present.” For six weeks we would listen to talks and tutorials by Oxford faculty called dons. I was staying alone in a small, dreary dorm room with narrow windows overlooking the garden court. The weather was cold and rainy, the gloom oppressive.

My Davidson student classmates and I attended lectures while I obsessed about Charlie. Days went by, and I can still hear my shoes squeaking over the polished floor inside Hartland House as I’d check my mailbox constantly. Our first weekend there, Karen and I took the train to Edinburgh, passing a cheap bottle of wine back and forth as we watched the scenery go by.

The sound along the tracks reminded me of bored fingers tapping on a snare drum, starting a tune that never finished. I looked out my window at the North Sea breaking in white foam over shoals and craggy coastlines. Sleeping in our steerage seats, we woke up while rolling into the station, stumbling out into the cold, drinking hot tea from paper cups.

We stayed in a youth hostel, and toured Edinburgh Castle, walking steep winding streets, stopping in pubs to drink a brew or two. Prowling antiquarian bookshops, I found a beautiful 1860 edition of Chaucer’s Poems bound in tan calfskin with marbled page edges. I don’t recall what it cost, but more than I should have spent. The money I’d saved from working at Peregrine House wouldn’t go far.

I knew that Charlie taught Chaucer. I couldn’t wait to give the book to him after returning to Davidson at the end of the summer. As I continued writing him letters, I didn’t mention the gift, wanting it to be a surprise. Frequently visiting the college mailroom, I was reminded of waiting for Dad’s check to arrive. I’d do the same thing when it was my birthday, hoping he’d remember it for once.

By the middle of June, I was all but certain Charlie didn’t intend to write despite his promise. Each day I noted in my journal “still no letter.” I was deeply hurt and despondent. All it did was rain, and I hated the food in the cafeteria. As I walked through the line one day and asked what the strange-looking meat was, the server pointed to her tongue.

After that I informed the dining staff that I was a vegetarian. But if the meat looked good, then I wasn’t a vegetarian. It was unsurprising that the dining room workers got annoyed with me.

“Are you or are you not a vegetarian?” I was asked one day.

I spent as little time in the library as possible, rarely reading the material assigned. I’d skim enough to make what seemed salient comments. In a pub across from the college on Woodstock Road I’d sit at the bar by myself every night after dinner. I’d drink a pint or two of Harp lager while smoking Dunhill cigarettes and writing in my journal.

Sometimes I’d wander into the Eagle and Child where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis once gathered with their literary group the Inklings. Dusty, smoky air was all that remained of them now. I’d look around, wondering what would become of me. The way I was going, probably nothing.

I’d write poetry every day, not realizing that it was preparing me for the life of a novelist. I was training myself to pay attention, to experience the details of every moment. In a journal entry I described a process that’s the same today:

“Tonight, I took a walk in the fog and stood beside a fence post for 30 minutes or so looking at trees.”

Carrying a journal everywhere became a lifelong habit and is more about focusing than remembering details. I’d make myself look at something as if I never had before. I willed myself to do it until the metaphors and images would come. It required energy and courage. How much easier it is to zone out and not be present.

I learned early on that the biggest enemy of creativity is fear. If I’m filled with dread and looking for excuses to distract myself, nothing dynamic is going to happen on the page. The characters don’t cooperate. Everything feels forced or stalled. I often tell people that writing isn’t a job or even a craft. It’s a relationship.

What we create reacts the same way something real does. If you dread seeing certain people and find excuses not to, why should they bother showing up? I know I wouldn’t. The same is true of writing. Creating is an invitation to a private viewing of reality that must be honored and enjoyed. Stories aren’t made up but transmitted through us.

Carrying my journal everywhere, I’d describe what I was seeing. Sheep flowing away from the roadside reminded me of the frothy white wake from a speeding boat. Poppies looked like paper flowers, a field of them reminding me of big blood drops and splashes of paint. When I was supposed to be listening to the visiting lecturers, I was drawing caricatures of them in my journal.

As Charlie continued to ignore me, I began socializing with both my dons, playing tennis with one, and having meals and a motorcycle excursion with the other. I watched the countryside go by through cracked goggles, deciding “the world will not end with a whimper but with the flip of a kickstand.” I didn’t feel safe on the wet, narrow streets, and practically froze to death.

Each day I continued checking the mail hopelessly, the rain unrelenting. Someone told me it was one of the rainiest summers on record, and I don’t remember seeing the sun even once. When the rain would pause, the skies glowered, the world soggy. I’d walk the streets of Oxford for hours, the puddles wicking up the legs of my jeans.

“No letter. A bad day. God help me,” I wrote in my journal on July 24.

I wasn’t sleeping well, often awakened by loud laughter as the pubs emptied. Cars sped by on Woodstock Road, trains clattering in the distance like overloaded tea carts. Motorcycles reminded me of bumblebees rumbling in a bass octave.

By mid-August it was time to return to the U.S. Karen, our friend Aida Doss, and I were booked on Freddy Laker’s Skytrain out of Gatwick Airport. The tickets were cheap, but we had to wait under a huge tent with dirty carpet on the ground. We were there three days in forty-degree weather. I had no blanket or pillow.

We didn’t sleep at all, smoking cigarettes and shivering. I opened the bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream sherry I was carrying home as a gift. I didn’t realize I could buy it in America, but it didn’t matter since we drank it all. I was out of money and had to borrow from Aida. I felt “dirty, poor, and low,” I jotted at the time.

When we arrived in New York after midnight, I sat on the cold marble floor of the Eastern Airlines Terminal until morning. From there it was on to Charlotte, then Asheville. By the time I got home on August 13, I’d not slept in days, and the first thing I did was call Ruth. The next afternoon she took me for another lunch at Pizza Hut.

Having heard nothing from Charlie the entire summer, I gave her the book of Chaucer’s poems I’d bought in Scotland.

“I felt strange about it because it can never really be hers. It will always be Charlie’s,” I noted in my journal.

While I was home Ruth sent me a leatherbound copy of the devotional Streams in the Desert, and an album of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major that became our special piece of music. We’d play it whenever we were together. I hadn’t mentioned my eating disorder that had been going on several years by now. I was beyond discouraged. I decided to tell Ruth about it, and the next day spent two hours with her.

“I’m still no better,” I admitted uncomfortably, and she didn’t act disappointed or disgusted.

She didn’t understand that I was suffering from depression and felt I had no control over anything. It should have been obvious when looking at my family history. But we both decided my problem was “spiritual.” I constantly begged God to do something. The eating disorder was wretched and dangerous. Nothing I tried made any difference.

I returned to Davidson for fall term of my senior year and heard nothing from Charlie. I didn’t seek him out. His message seemed clear enough. Then I ran into him on campus one day in the fall, and we spoke briefly. I told him my feelings hadn’t changed. He made it clear he intended to do nothing about it. If he was causing me discomfort, I should “keep away for a while.”

It never occurred to me that a professor seventeen years older shouldn’t get involved romantically with me. Charlie wasn’t going to ask me out while I was a student, but he didn’t mention that. It would have been inappropriate. I was under the impression that he had no interest. The best thing would be for me to return to England after graduation and forget about him.

While at Oxford I’d decided I wanted to go there for graduate school. I was a semifinalist for the Rhodes Scholarship and the early winter of my senior year learned I didn’t get it. For one thing, my application had misspellings, a faculty advisor informed me. Also, I’d decided not to play varsity tennis at Davidson, and that wasn’t helpful to my cause. I wasn’t the right stuff.

I continued working on my so-called novel every spare moment. By now it was three hundred pages long, and I’d written several drafts. Most of them I no longer have. In some cases, I recycled the paper, never imagining that anything I was doing would matter almost half a century later. I wrote as if obsessed with no goal in sight beyond graduating with honors.

While working almost full time at Peregrine House, I took classes and continued with my book. My only social life was the restaurant, and that was true for a lot of people. We had regulars who came in daily, sometimes for lunch and dinner. One of them was music professor Don Plott, handsome with a full head of white hair, reminding me of Lorne Greene from Bonanza, one of my favorite shows when I was growing up.

Don also was the conductor of the Oratorio Singers, a chorus that performed with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. Whenever there was an evening concert, he’d stop by Peregrine House on his way home, looking divine in tails. He’d stay until we closed, and a few of us would drink beer with him. His wife had died six years earlier, and he was highly sought after by unattached women.

I attended several of his concerts at Charlotte’s Ovens Auditorium, awed by the sight of him in the spotlight conducting. Once I appeared backstage to give him red roses. I wrote a glowing review for the Davidson College newspaper. Having done as Charlie suggested, I was trying to put him aside. There was no point in continuing to chase him, and Don and I started getting flirty.

One night after an Oratorio concert, he stopped in Peregrine House as usual, looking splendid in his black cutaway and white shirt. We sat at the table drinking beer as he smoked a pipe while touching me with his leg every other minute. When it was time to leave after midnight, he asked if I wanted to go home with him. I could watch him clean his pipes was the way he put it.

I knew that wasn’t what he was really thinking about. I wasn’t either. I agreed, and climbed into his BMW, headed to his home on Hillside Drive but a few minutes away. We didn’t get around to cleaning a single pipe while making out for several hours, going only so far, but it was plenty.

“What have I gotten myself into?” I wrote in my journal on February 26, 1979. “I’m having a ‘fling’…” I added that the entire time I was with Don, “I wished he was Charlie.”

The next day at Peregrine House, Don came in for lunch. I was working the cash register when he approached the counter, my earrings in his outstretched hand. He had a mischievous smile on his distinguished face, and my friend Suzanne Frye saw what was going on.

The instant Don was seated and out of earshot, she took me aside and asked, “What the hell was that?”

“Don and I had a moment,” I whispered.

Delighted, she said the encounter had been good for both of us, and she was right. It did wonders for my self-esteem until I realized that Don wasn’t acting right anymore. He’d untie my apron when I walked past, making salacious remarks, none of it in character for him. His behavior rapidly deteriorated, and soon enough I found out why.

He had a malignant brain tumor. While he was recovering from surgery, I went to see him. His beautiful head of hair was shaved, and he had a hard time with his memory. He joked that he’d taken a shower and then sat under the hair dryer.

“I’d forgotten that wasn’t necessary anymore.” He touched his bald head.

I told him how much our relationship meant to me, and that I deeply cared for him. I thanked him for helping me in ways he’d never know. Don would die less than two years later. I never regretted going home with him to help clean his pipes. It was a moment in time that will live on forever.

28

WORKING AT PEREGRINE HOUSE INTRODUCED ME TO COOKING, and I realized how much I loved it. When not waiting tables, I was in the kitchen making Hot Willies with roast beef, green peppers, and provolone on wheat bread. Or a George with corned beef, coleslaw, and cheese on an onion roll. We’d heat the sandwiches in the steamer, and they were delicious.

Our most popular pizza was a So’s Your Mother with the works. We had a pizza oven in back, and some nights I’d be at it nonstop until closing. I learned new tricks like adding a little honey and olive oil to the dough and extra garlic to the sauce. I worked late on weekends, sometimes never sitting down until the last customer was gone. I’d take off my dirty apron and collapse in a chair, lighting a cigarette.

Whoever I closed with would hang out with me for a while, going through a six-pack of Molson Golden Ale. Then I’d head home to my condemned apartment on Main Street, along the way dropping the restaurant’s cash pouch into the bank’s night deposit box. It wasn’t smart walking alone after midnight, carrying sometimes a thousand dollars cash. I was always looking for someone to slip out of the shadows.

Karen White and I were sharing a second-story apartment that was little better than a slum. Our couch was a bare mattress on the living room floor a safe distance from a vintage gas heater that was the only source of warmth. In the winter it was so cold I could see my breath. Raw eggs left out would freeze in the kitchen. They rolled off the counter because the floor sloped badly.

Before moving in, I’d cruised hardware stores and other shops for carpet and paint samples no one wanted. I used them to fix up the apartment as much as possible, transforming it into a patchwork of unmatching shapes and colors. My desk was a section of unpainted plyboard nailed to my bedroom wall. I’d wear my coat as I hammered away all hours of the night on my pawnshop typewriter.

I had no expectation that my book would be published. But I felt compelled to do what Ruth said and write my story. After I turned in the manuscript to Tony Abbott, I didn’t send it anywhere, not believing it was good enough for professional scrutiny. And it wasn’t. I would never touch it again until lifting it out of an archival box in 2025, marveling over details both whimsical and sad.

By spring term of my senior year, I began applying to graduate schools. Occasionally, I’d see Charlie. As usual I’d find a way. Dropping off expired Dannon yogurts, for example. We couldn’t sell them at Peregrine House, but they were perfectly fine to eat. When I heard Charlie was under the weather, I delivered food to his door. He didn’t refuse my gestures but wouldn’t invite me in.

Then in March he invited me to lunch at Peregrine House, and I couldn’t believe it. My matchmaking friend Suzanne Frye waited on us, opening a bottle of Mouton Cadet white wine that she’d set aside for the special occasion. Charlie presented me with a leatherbound copy of The Scarlet Letter, his face very tan after baking under a sunlamp. We sat in front of a window talking until Peregrine House closed after lunch.

We were still sitting there when it was time to reopen at 5 p.m. I told him I’d been applying to graduate schools, and it wasn’t going well. He asked me which ones. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Virginia, I went down the list. All had turned me down in short order, the letters terse and impersonal, and I wasn’t surprised.

I think it was my subconscious intention when I’d filled out the applications in pencil, knowing that was rather careless and sloppy. Each time I got a rejection letter, I felt more relieved than disappointed. After that lunch with Charlie, I called Ruth and asked if I could have the Chaucer book back. I reminded her why I’d bought it in the first place, and she returned it to me while I was briefly home on March 15.

Soon after I gave it to Charlie, explaining why I’d inscribed it for Ruth almost a year ago, and then she inscribed it back to me. Finally, I inscribed it for Charlie, and he would return it to me decades later. Since then, it had been on a bookshelf in my office. I didn’t look at it until early 2025 when starting this memoir.

As I sat at my desk flipping through Chaucer, I was surprised by what was inside. The unsealed letter from Ruth had no postage and I don’t think I’d ever seen it before that moment. It was dated March 16, 1979. Apparently, she’d tucked it in the book when returning it to me. I’m all but certain I never noticed.

“Dear Patsy, Loved your cute letter of request for my gorgeous copy of Chaucer!! Only to you and for such a reason would I relinquish it… Seriously, now, I’ve treasured old Chaucer and am equally tickled you felt free to ask for him back…, Loving you, Ruth.”

This had been pressed between the pages the many years that Charlie owned the book. He never noticed either. Ruth’s note is as clean and crisp as if she’d just written it. I felt she and Charlie were helping me from the Other Side as I’d find things I wasn’t looking for and didn’t know I had.

I couldn’t work at Peregrine House the rest of my life and knew the book I’d written wasn’t going to get me anywhere. As April approached, I asked Tony Abbott what I was going to do with myself. I needed to think about a real job, and he suggested The Charlotte Observer. I had no interest in journalism. But maybe I could write feature stories.

Tony got me an interview with the newspaper’s publisher, Rolfe Neill, and Suzanne Frye let me borrow her MG convertible. I drove to Charlotte in a downpour, constantly checking my written directions as rain dripped through the leaky rag top. I was excited as I rode the escalator up to the newspaper’s second floor and met with Rolfe Neill in his big office.

I’d brought a portfolio of cartoons, and articles I’d written for the Davidson College newspaper. I’d drawn a caricature of Rolfe Neill and he smiled, flipping through my work. I could tell he had little interest. He seemed more amused than impressed. After a half hour, he directed me upstairs to the newsroom.

I was to meet with features editor Stuart Dim, and I interpreted that to mean I had a chance at being hired as a features writer. I was encouraged and hopeful as I sat down in Stuart’s office. The first question he asked was if I watched a lot of TV.

“Oh, no, sir. I read,” I replied.

“That’s too bad,” he mused. “I have an opening on our TV magazine.”

“Well, I do watch TV some.”

It wasn’t exactly true. None of the places I’d lived in during college had TVs, and there was no time for watching shows or movies. Now I was renting a tiny cottage on Lake Norman, and it didn’t have a TV there either. Stuart Dim told me the paper had a magazine called TV Week, and was I interested?

My job would be to update the blurbs for shows. I asked if I would get to do any writing. Maybe, he said. We’d have to see how things went. I was to start soon, my annual salary $12,000. Using my savings from Peregrine House, I made a down payment on a 1973 black BMW 2002 that had 100,000 miles, the speedometer broken.

I never knew how fast I was going and started getting speeding tickets, mainly from the Davidson cops, who noticed beer cans on the floor. Then the fuel gauge went bad, and one day the car conked out on the highway. Taking my life in my own hands, I accepted a ride with a stranger, a man in a pickup truck who dropped me off at a service station so I could make a few phone calls and have my car towed.

My BMW always had something not working right, but I was proud of it, washing and waxing it during my time off. I used model paint to restore the badge on the hood. When the interstate was deserted, I’d floor it while smoking out the open window. Sometimes I’d throw back a tall boy beer while at it, a terrible idea. But drinking and driving was rather common back then.

My first day at the Observer was May 14. I was tasked with learning how to use a cathode-ray tube, or CRT, an early precursor to a computer monitor. It was grueling getting used to bright green letters against a black background, and inserting nonsensical symbols that were commands. By the end of my eight-hour shift I was dizzy and exhausted.

“The Charlotte Observer is a cruel taskmaster,” I wrote after nine days on the job. “I am insane with fatigue and frustration by late afternoon.”

I hated updating the TV magazine and wasn’t good at it. Since I didn’t watch TV, I didn’t know if a blurb was correct or not. Often, I got them mixed up. One weekend I had an NFL team playing a college one, and the time was incorrect. The phones rang off the hook. People were furious, my editor Gerry Leland’s face bright red. I noticed that the longer I worked for him, the worse his eczema got.

“For God’s sake, Patsy! Please be more careful,” he’d exclaim, and at moments I worried he might have a stroke.

When I’d make a mistake that ended up in print, he’d circle it in red and pin it to the bulletin board in the newsroom. My most infamous typo was Daffy Fuck instead of Daffy Duck and the copy desk missed it. I imagine the ratings went through the roof that morning. One day Gerry took me downstairs to the cafeteria for coffee and told me I was the worst clerk the paper had ever hired.

I didn’t doubt it, and the mistakes continued, my writing the wrong blurbs for shows. It was easy to have this happen if you had no idea that Robin Williams was in Mork & Mindy and not WKRP in Cincinnati. I found updating the magazine unbearably tedious. It didn’t require an ounce of intelligence or creativity.

I started casting my friends into the late-night low-budget horror flicks featuring actors with unfamiliar foreign names. My pal Aida Doss starred in a few. So did the owners of Peregrine House, Cindy and Eddie Booker. Also, my classmate Ellen Schlaefer and several Davidson professors. I never admitted my mischief to anyone at the newspaper. Nobody there noticed.

I wanted to write stories, and every day I’d cruise each desk asking about anything they needed someone to cover. The book reviewer Dannye Romine could use my help, and one morning she handed me an early copy of Elvis, We Love You Tender, a memoir based on hours of interviews with Dee Presley, the king of rock and roll’s stepmother.

I read the book over the weekend and thought it would make a much better review if I tracked down Dee Presley and interviewed her. What a coup that would be. Don’t ask me how I got her phone number. I don’t remember. But I seemed to have a knack for finding out how to contact people. She and I talked for about an hour.

“The truth is, Vernon was more married to Elvis than to me,” she said about her former husband, Elvis’s father.

I asked if the book exploited her famous stepson.

“We all gave our lives to Elvis… Now maybe we’re just trying to take a little something back,” she told me.

When I turned in my story, Dannye Romine was aghast.

“When you write a book review, you’re not supposed to talk to the author!” she protested.

“But the book is more of an as-told-to and not really written by Dee…,” I argued.

“That’s not how we review books!”

The paper ran my story anyway, and it went out over the wire. Even my father in Miami saw it and sent a letter congratulating my good work. I began writing obituaries, and one of the first was another mess. I cited the wrong person being dead, and the next day he called me to say he wasn’t.

WE WERE WRONG, the paper printed yet another retraction, my mistake pinned on the bulletin board for all to see. It’s a wonder I didn’t get fired. Perhaps the secret to my eventual success was my willingness to cover anything that no one else wanted to write.

Ingersoll Rand had a new air compressor that would be used in the Olympics to make artificial snow, and I toured the factory. The Boy Scouts’ convention featured wrestling star Ric Flair, and I enjoyed my chat with him. The stamp collectors were in town, then the backgammon world championship, where the number-one-ranked player gave me a lesson, insisting I try a game.

I was so freaking lucky with the dice that I beat him. I’ll never forget the look on his face, and I was wise enough to leave that out of the story. It seemed yet another example of magical things that happened in my life, like the intramural basketball finals my sophomore year of high school. Three seconds before the final buzzer, I had the ball and hurled it from half-court. It went in and my team won by a single point.

My biggest challenge early on at the newspaper happened when one of the journalists had a spat with her editor and refused to cover that night’s Ebony Fashion Show. I was asked to fill in at the last minute. It was a big assignment for a novice, and the first thing I did was drive off in the newspaper’s staff car forgetting that my notebook was on top of it. I watched in dismay as it fluttered away in my wake.

Then I failed to jot down which designer outfit was what. The photographer couldn’t identify the clothing he’d taken pictures of and chewed me out. I wasn’t interested in the designers or their outfits, spending my energy on interviewing the members of the audience, some of their outlandish attire far more newsworthy than what I saw on the runway.

Each morning I would arrive for work at 4 a.m. and finish my TV blurbs by noon. The rest of the day I would write stories. I reworked my term paper about Black Mountain College, and it ran as a big feature. By the end of my first summer at the Observer I was logging considerable overtime.

“This sort of writing does little to feed me,” I journaled that October. “I’m not sure what I’m meant for, but I don’t think it is this.”

I was still living in the small cottage on Lake Norman, and usually not home until nighttime, by then bleary with exhaustion.

“Fatigue is strange, it unleashes sleepy beasts in my mind,” I noted. “As I drive home in the dark, I expect furry King Kongs and strange apparitions to swoop down upon me and fling my car, like a toy, into space.”

Toward the end of 1979, I was promoted to the metro desk. One of my first assignments was to interview the legendary actors Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. They were appearing with religious celebrities Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on their PTL show. The acronym stood for Pass the Loot, the media joked.

Dale got up to sing, making her way to the bales of hay onstage, when her pumps went out from under her. She slid halfway across the floor on her velvet-covered backside.

“If she breaks a leg, you gotta shoot her,” Roy announced.

Before I left, I was given a leatherbound PTL counselor’s edition Bible, and asked Roy and Dale to sign it. Unlike Billy Graham, they didn’t mind. I wanted the autographed Bible for Charlie, knowing he’d be amused.

Charlie, God bless you with many happy trails. Dale Evans, Roy Rogers & Trigger.

On Sunday, December 3, Charlie took me out to dinner, and while we were in the car I finally asked about his intentions. We’d been dating since the summer, and not a word about marriage. I needed to know if that was on the horizon, and he surprised me by proposing.

“Question,” he said. “If we got married, would you let me keep my cats?”

“Of course,” I replied.

“Question. Will you marry me?”

We were seeing each other only on the weekends. He’d appear at my lake house for dinner, and leave no later than 3 a.m. I never understood why he wouldn’t stay over, and it bothered me considerably. I’d get up and tidy the mess we’d made, feeling forlorn when I’d look out the window at his tire tracks in the grass.

As a general assignment reporter, I was covering everything. Fires. Service stations cited for overcharging at the pumps. A policeman losing his cap to a bullet. An estranged couple dead in a murder-suicide. Parades. A baby born in a taxicab. Free tests for auto pollution. A plane crash. The weather.

Then I was assigned the police beat, and writing about crime was life-changing. For the first time, I was afraid to go home after a shift covering murders, rapes, robberies, death, and more death.

“I don’t even want to leave the newsroom because my imagination escorts me to my car…”

I bought a B.B. gun pistol, as if that would solve my problems should someone break into my lake house in the middle of the night.

“I go mad with a deep fear as images of what I’ve read & written nag at the back of my mind.”

I was perpetually jumpy and afraid to be alone in the dark. The instant I’d get home at around 1 a.m., I’d close the curtains. I worried that someone might be watching.

“Every sound startles me. Every pair of headlights that swings around a curve & follows me makes me want to flee. It’s because of this God-forsaken reporting…”

One of the journalists I worked with had covered the police beat before I was assigned it. He told me what it did to him, all but driving him crazy. Some nights he’d go home, get drunk, and throw up after covering a fatal car crash where he watched someone die. He was burned out and warned about the same thing happening to me.

“I know there is evil in this world, in this town, but Jesus I don’t want to wallow in it,” I wrote in my journal on March 13, 1980. “I continue to think there must be something wrong with me because I can’t cope with the nastiness. But maybe there would be something wrong with me if I could.”

By now I’d met Charlie’s family, and he’d visited with my mother in Montreat. She wasn’t keen on him, and when Mrs. Cornwell invited her for dinner, Mom said no. She told me Charlie wasn’t right. She didn’t trust him, and no doubt wouldn’t any man I might have decided to marry. When I’d try to change her mind, often she hung up on me.

“She hasn’t even met my future in-laws yet,” I noted on March 23, “and I bet she won’t until the wedding—if she comes.”

I wasn’t seeing much of Charlie because of our schedules. He worked during the day, and my shift was four to midnight Sunday through Thursday. The police beat had completely dismantled any sense of safety and peace I might have had. I was afraid of death. I was afraid of losing people I loved, most of all him.

“I fight my fear that the world will end before we begin. I won’t let it. I’ll spin the stars and sun around and start our time all over again,” I wrote on April 13, 1980. “After all—who knows how many times we’ve done that… In this world and the next and from then on—I do and will forever love you.”

Charlie and I were married on June 14, 1980, our schedule terrible for newlyweds. After we returned from our honeymoon in Charleston, South Carolina, our only quality time was Friday and Saturday nights. The rest of the week we were the proverbial ships passing. In that era of no internet or cell phones, sometimes we went days not communicating.

When I’d roll in at 1 a.m., he was asleep. When I’d get up in the morning, he’d already left for his office on campus. Adding to the unhealthy mix, we’d moved into his bachelor apartment on Jackson Court, and he wasn’t accustomed to having anyone in his private space. He’d insist I take off my shoes when walking in, and it was obvious he felt invaded.

Tension began building between us. This would get worse as I dealt with the stress of the police beat. I was off to a bad start because the cops hated my newspaper. When I’d walk into the duty sergeant’s office to ask what was going on, the officers would swivel their chairs around, turning their backs to me.

“What’s it going to take for you to give me a chance?” I asked one afternoon.

“Maybe if you sit in my lap,” the duty sergeant sneered.

“Well, I won’t do that. And you’re welcome to hate me if I’ve earned it. But I haven’t.”

The next day I brought in a barrel of Bojangles fried chicken. I began riding around with Captain Roy Phillips, and he became a mentor. My relationship with the police changed dramatically. As much as I hated violence, I seemed to have a knack for writing about it.

I realized I was good at getting people to talk openly. If I was told there was no way so-and-so was going to give me an interview, I made it my mission to get it and usually did. I didn’t care what anybody assumed, or how much I was discouraged about the impossibility of an idea. I was driven to find out the truth for myself, and that’s a good attitude to have.

I noticed what my colleagues took for granted, and next thing I was writing another front-page story. A good example was what went on around the Observer’s building in the heart of downtown on West Trade Street. When I’d pull in and out of the parking garage in the beige Skylark staff car, I noticed sex workers loitering near the wall out front.

Reporters drove past them all the time without a glance or a thought. I started strolling outside late at night and striking up conversations with the ladies and their pimps. I ended up doing a front-page series on prostitution in downtown Charlotte, and it would win an investigative reporting award by the end of 1980.

Then I got subpoenaed to testify against Angel, who’d told me what she charged and for what. After I quoted her in the newspaper, she was arrested. I was eager to help bring about justice, thrilled that the police and district attorney needed my help for real. Angel represented herself, her examination of me on the witness stand Gary Larson Far Side.

“Now you wrote that I told you how much I supposably get paid.” As she paced like Perry Mason.

“That’s right,” I said from the witness stand.

“Now I’m wondering why would I tell you something like that?”

“I wondered the same thing. I was surprised.”

“Meaning maybe I didn’t tell you nothing like that.”

“But you did.” I reminded her of the amount per trick.

I gave the court the salacious details, and she was convicted of soliciting for prostitution. It must not have been much of a sentence. As I left the courthouse, she and her pimp were on the same elevator with me. We smiled at each other as if old friends. I wrote a story about that too and included a photograph.

My editors were most unhappy. It wasn’t my job to solve crimes and lock people up. I was supposed to remain neutral. Well, that just wasn’t possible in my case. I was more interested in helping the police than reporting on them, and as a result I became their favorite. When something big went down, they’d give me the tip.

29

EACH DAY WHEN I ARRIVED IN THE NEWSROOM, I’D COLLECT MY portable radio and the keys to the staff car I always drove. It was equipped with a two-way radio and a scanner, making it look a lot like a detective’s car.

This would be fortuitous when I was turning around at a dead end one night and two rednecks in a pickup truck roared up behind me out of nowhere, blocking me in. I was trapped and had to think fast. Grabbing the radio mic, I held it up so they could see, rolling down my window.

“LEAVE RIGHT NOW UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE ARRESTED!” I yelled at them in the most threatening voice I could muster, and they squealed away.

First thing I’d do when arriving at the newspaper each day was head to the police department, digging through the press basket and looking at every report. On July 28, 1980, four former Outlaws motorcycle gang members hacksawed their way out of prison in Reidsville, Georgia. One of the escapees, Troy Gregg, was found floating in the Catawba River near Charlotte.

I didn’t know how he died but most likely it wasn’t from natural causes. The body was being held in an area hospital, and late that night I started making calls from my desk. I managed to get a nurse on the phone and asked about the dead escapee. She said the body was downstairs in the hospital’s morgue. I could tell she was young, naïve, and curious.

“I’m wondering if he has any obvious injuries,” I suggested to her.

“I haven’t seen the body,” she replied.

“Well, maybe you could go down to the morgue and take a peek at him? Tell me what you see?” I was certain she wouldn’t.

But she agreed, and I waited for long minutes on the phone, not daring to hang up. When she was back on the line, she said that the body showed obvious signs of trauma. Swelling. Bruising. Lacerations. As it would turn out, his jaw was broken in two places, his Adam’s apple crushed after getting into a fight at the Old Yellow Tavern in western Mecklenburg County.

The next day when I arrived at the police department, a lieutenant walked past in the corridor, slipping a note in my hand as he kept on going. I waited until I was in a private space to see what it said.

“Death row escapees are here,” the note informed me.

It was a huge tip, and I spent the next few days working around the clock as the police searched high and low. After dark, I’d cruise the city in the staff car as if I might figure out where the escapees were holed up. Then I wondered what I was doing. How crazy to be looking for three ruthless murderers, and suddenly I got scared.

What did I think I was going to do if I found them? I knew they’d committed brutal crimes such as torturing a young woman to death with razor blades. I realized maybe it was best if I stopped looking. Once again, my impulse was to work with the police instead of merely writing about them. I felt it was more important to solve a crime than anything else. I still feel that way.

On another occasion when the report of a rooftop sniper sounded over the police scanner, I raced there, emergency lights flashing everywhere. Without a thought, I climbed a fire escape ladder to the roof. Fortunately, the police had apprehended the suspect, and I again wondered what I was doing. I wasn’t a cop.

Late on the night of December 8, 1980, I was in the newsroom when the information came over the wire about John Lennon being shot to death in front of the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan. The next day I began calling every police precinct in midtown and bizarrely one of the officers who answered the phone was Jimmy Moran. He’d responded to the call.

He told me about placing John Lennon in the back of the cruiser and speeding to the nearest E.R. as the former Beatle moaned and bled profusely. When Yoko Ono arrived at Roosevelt Hospital, Jimmy Moran sat with her. He was with her when she learned that her husband was dead. My information went out over the wire, and that was a big deal for a rookie reporter.

But it wasn’t about the story. I felt compelled to investigate the crime itself. I had to know what happened. Area journalists nicknamed me The Scoop. My relentlessness and the trust I built with police were garnering me favored treatment, including by the top city officials. They were generous about giving me quotes, saying they appreciated my fair portrayal of law enforcement.

One of these officials shall remain nameless for legal reasons. I’ll call him Mitch. But if he’s reading this, he knows I remember exactly who he is and what he did. Mitch was new to the Charlotte area and the media was excited about him. When he visited the newsroom the first time, the editors were unusually impressed. I was flattered that he winked at me.

Considered a wunderkind, he was charming, forceful, polished, nice-looking, only in his forties. No one I talked to had anything bad to say about him. It would be a coup to do a day in the life of story about him before my competition did. I was pleased and surprised that he said yes without hesitation.

In the spring of 1981, we met in his office early morning as he was snapping open his briefcase, a .38 revolver on top of The Wall Street Journal. On a bookshelf were photographs of his family. He told me they hadn’t moved to Charlotte yet. That day I watched him do everything from conducting meetings with police and other city officials to picking up his dry cleaning.

Late afternoon, I thanked him for spending so much time with me and asked if the newspaper could buy him dinner. Even as I was saying it, I knew better. A voice in my head whispered it was a bad idea. He stopped by his office to collect his briefcase and “a few other things” while I waited in the corridor. From there we drove in his car to Victoria Station, a restaurant in a retired train caboose.

All was fine until I got up from the table to visit the ladies’ room. When I returned, I finished my glass of wine and soon after began seeing double. I didn’t understand how I could have gotten so drunk so suddenly. It didn’t make sense. I’d not had much wine, knowing I would have to drive home to Davidson after dinner. I’d left my BMW in the police department’s parking garage.

I don’t remember getting up from the table or much else, having only shards of images to this day. Riding in his car. Him holding my hand and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Climbing the stairs to his apartment. Waking up the next morning naked in his bed and remembering everything after that.

Rolling over, he had his way with me again, and no doubt would claim it was consensual. It wasn’t. As I lay there, my head pounded, and I felt dead inside. Charlie was the only person I’d had sex with, and now I’d killed everything. I’d never felt so hungover in my life, and as I cleaned up in the bathroom, I was puzzled to see my makeup on a towel. I had zero recall of washing my face the night before.

It was maybe half past 5 a.m. when Mitch ordered me to get dressed, his demeanor dramatically different now. The early morning was cold and pitch dark as he drove off with me, neither of us talking. His energy was cold and contemptuous, as if what happened was my fault. It wasn’t.

“Is this the first time you’ve done this?” I finally asked him.

“No,” he answered, not sounding like himself anymore.

He was aggressive and threatening. He was flaunting what he’d done.

“And you’re not going to tell anybody about it,” he warned as I thought about his power and the gun he carried.

He told me to get down on the floor so no one would see me. Then he ordered me out of the car. I walked the rest of the way to the police department’s parking garage. As I drove off in my BMW, I wondered if anyone questioned why it was parked there all night.

Back in the newsroom, I was in a stupor, wondering what Charlie was thinking about my not coming home or trying him on the phone. But that had happened before when I was caught up in a big story. He’d later tell me that as I was leaving Victoria Station, I called him on a pay phone. All I said was, “I’m here.”

Charlie told me I was almost incoherent. I suspect I was drugged. As I sat at my desk, I tried to write the story about a day in the life of Mitch. It was almost impossible, but somehow I managed. My brain was so sluggish I could barely string words together. I felt sick, my head pounding.

Midmorning the paper’s much-loved columnist Dot Jackson stopped by, asking if I wanted coffee. A delightful eccentric, she was old enough to be my mother. We were good friends, and on many occasions before I was married, I’d spent the night at her home in Charlotte instead of driving back to my godawful place on the lake.

“Are you okay?” She gave me one of her sideways appraisals, touching a finger to her lips.

“No. Something happened,” I said under my breath.

“I had a feeling. You look like death.”

“I feel like it.”

“Let’s get some fresh air.”

She took me on a walk around the building where nobody could hear us, and I told her everything that I remembered.

“You must NEVER tell a soul.” She was emphatic. “As powerful as he is, do you understand what could happen?”

“Yes. Besides, nobody would believe me.”

“Worse than that, do you want to end up dead?”

I agreed that reporting him to the police was out of the question. Even showing up at an E.R. for a blood test would accomplish nothing except put myself at risk. To this day, I believe that something terrible would have happened had I dared to accuse Mitch of sexual assault. He was an expert at it, based on what I gathered before he ordered me out of his car onto downtown Charlotte’s dark mean streets.

It would be my word against his, and it was true that I’d found him attractive, even sexy. But I never meant for anything like that to happen. I told Dot it was my fault for being so stupid as to invite him to dinner. Maybe he misinterpreted the gesture.

“Maybe he did,” she replied. “But there’s no excuse for the rest of it.”

Nobody reading the story I wrote would imagine that my day with Mitch had ended the way it did. That afternoon I was going through the press basket at the police department when an officer informed me that Mitch needed to see me in his office immediately.

Oh God, I thought. No, no, no…!

“Do you know what he wants?” I asked as my mouth went dry.

“Only that he needs to see you. Pronto.”

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Maybe he intended to apologize. Hopefully, he wanted us to get past this. Or he was going to make an excuse. Worse, he might pretend it didn’t happen as he told me how much he liked the story I’d written. And he did tell me that before assaulting me again inside his office with the door locked.

That was the last time I ever saw him except once or twice in my rearview mirror while he followed my car. I took it as a warning. I’d better keep my mouth shut. He was making sure I didn’t forget, and I suspect he enjoyed the rush it gave him to overpower another human being.

I didn’t tell Charlie what happened, and he didn’t ask. It wasn’t until a week or so later that the truth came out. Not long before my day with Mitch, he and I had appeared on a local TV show together discussing crime in Charlotte. It was airing over the weekend and Charlie wanted to watch it. The minute it came on, I started crying.

“Something happened with him, didn’t it?” Charlie asked, and it was then I knew he’d suspected it all along.

I told him the details, and that was the beginning of the end for us even if we didn’t know it yet. Charlie was angry and hurt, the subject often coming up when we’d fight. Eleven years later in March 1993, I referenced this in my journal. I said that Charlie “continued to throw the rape in my face, saying I wanted it to happen.”

“No, I didn’t! You know I didn’t!” I would exclaim. “How can you not see what it did to me too?”

I thought about what detectives had told me about rape. Often it ends with the victim getting a divorce. Charlie and I tried to go on as usual, but now there was something between us. He claimed I’d cheated on him. No matter what I said, that’s how he felt. Mitch had taken away his power too, and Charlie didn’t know how to recover from that.

I blamed myself the same way I did when the patrolman molested me. If I were stronger and braver, these things wouldn’t happen. I didn’t talk about the assault publicly until some twenty years later. In 2002, BBC did an hourlong show that aired on October 30. The focus was my investigation into the Jack the Ripper case. But during the interview I talked about past traumas that have shaped me.

“I think that I am a poster child for what the average victim feels like,” I said to producer Francis Whately. “I was sexually assaulted when I worked at The Charlotte Observer. I don’t want to say by who because there was never a court case… I think one of the reasons I have so much compassion for victims is because I know what it feels like to be one. In my case part of the way I fight back is through my work and in defending those people who can’t defend themselves, even if they are dead.”

I was asked about this in other interviews and would tell what I remembered without giving up the high-ranking official’s identity. I echo what happened in my first published Scarpetta novel, Postmortem (1990), when reporter Abby Turnbull reveals that she was raped by the city’s commonwealth’s attorney Bill Boltz. Fiction, yes. But what inspired it isn’t, although the offender wasn’t a local prosecutor.

People who know me well have heard the story, and that it’s one of the few traumas in my life that I would uncreate if possible. I can see the good in most things no matter how unpleasant. But not what that man did, and I wasn’t the only person he hurt. Charlie couldn’t get past what happened. If there was any chance of us surviving as a couple, the assault destroyed it.

It ruined my interest in journalism. I hated the police beat after that. When I’d show up for my shift, I’d hope nothing would happen. I didn’t want to cover it and took no initiative. I’d ride around in the staff car feeling numb and totally lacking in motivation. When I’d drive home at midnight, I’d stop for a beer that I’d guzzle while seeing how fast my old BMW would go. The broken speedometer of course lied, but the RPMs didn’t.

A few weeks later, I gave notice at The Charlotte Observer. My editors had known for several months that I was leaving because Charlie had resigned his tenured position at Davidson. He’d decided to become a Presbyterian minister, much to my disappointment. That wasn’t what I’d signed up for, but I wanted him to be happy, and we’d begun looking at seminaries. He decided on Union Theological in Richmond, Virginia.

Instead of quitting the newspaper at the start of summer, I did it in mid-April because my heart wasn’t in the job anymore. Also, I was scared that my rapist would have me conveniently eliminated. How easy that would be as I rode around all hours of the night. Risk-taker that I was, should I end up shot to death in my staff car or in a bad part of town, it wouldn’t have come as a huge surprise.

But before I walked out of the Observer newsroom for the last time, I had one final story I felt compelled to write. I doubted I’d return to journalism ever again and needed to do this now no matter how awful I felt about myself. The world didn’t know Ruth Graham and should. It was selfish to keep her all to myself. After what had just happened to me, I didn’t feel worthy of the task.

At the same time, I knew Ruth better than anyone. In my own way I wanted to honor and thank her for all she’d done. It seemed I’d not turned out well despite her unflagging efforts, but that was beside the point. I called and asked if we could talk in person, and she said yes, sounding congested and groggy.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine, honey.”

Driving to her house, I discovered her in bed recovering from a cold. I remember she had a pot of her homemade vegetable soup simmering on the stove. Ruth smelled like Rose Milk when I hugged her. Moving a chair close to her bed, I pitched my idea of a big newspaper profile.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“I promise it will be good.”

“I don’t want it.”

“But people need to know you,” I argued.

“No, they don’t.”

“I’ll do a really good job and let you look at it first.”

“No way.”

“If you don’t let me, it will be the only selfish thing I’ve ever known you to do,” I then said to her surprise.

“Boy, that’s really hitting below the belt.”

“Not because you’d be denying me the privilege, Ruth. But you’d be denying the world your influence.”

“And it would be better off.”

I reminded her of what she’d done for me. I wouldn’t be the same person had she not come along. As far as I was concerned, she’d saved my life. I suggested that if she liked the profile I wrote, maybe she’d let me do her biography.

“I don’t want a biography,” she coughed, snatching another tissue out of the box.

“Well, someone will do it one of these days.”

“Not with my help.” Her eyes were glassy as she blew her nose.

“Consider the newspaper story an audition?” I suggested. “If you hate it, I won’t bug you about this ever again.”

“I’ll let you do the story,” she reluctantly decided at the end of our visit. “But you’re not doing my biography.”

30

AFTER RUTH AGREED TO THE PROFILE, I CALLED THE OBSERVER’s editor, Rich Oppel, and said I had an idea I’d like to discuss with him. We met at a McDonald’s in Charlotte, sitting at an outdoor table eating Chicken McNuggets. He’d always been an encouragement to me from the very start, and I considered him a friend.

I told him about Ruth Graham, and that most people had no idea what she was really like. I’d first met her when I was nine years old and knew her extremely well. I explained that she was intensely private, an introvert happiest alone on her mountaintop. But I’d grown up around her. I knew about her stealthy acts of kindness.

A family going through a hard time would come home from church to find a roast in the oven for Sunday dinner. When a neighbor or employee was sick, Ruth would show up with a pot of her signature vegetable soup that wasn’t made but accumulates, as she’d quip. She’d visit families at Thanksgiving and Christmas, delivering food and other necessities.

But there was much more to her than good deeds. I added that she was a speed demon in the car. When she’d get a ticket, she’d tell the officer not to follow her because she was going to do it again. During a political rally for Gerald Ford, a protester was holding a sign in front of her, and she snatched it, standing on top of it. The protester charged her with assault.

“I don’t know that anybody would be interested,” Rich Oppel mused after my spiel.

“Yes, they will,” I promised. “If you knew her, you’d get it.”

“Tell you what, the paper will pay you a hundred and fifty dollars to do it freelance,” he decided as we tossed our fast-food wrappers into the trash.

“Her story is worth more than that,” I countered.

I talked him up to five hundred dollars and began interviewing Ruth at her house. The next few weeks I worked at my former desk in the newsroom. I was consumed by talking to her friends and family in person and over the phone. When I completed the profile, I let Ruth read it early to make sure everything was accurate.

The third week of May she and Billy were in Charlotte to attend a wedding over the weekend. They were staying at the Sheraton, and I had lunch with her on Friday the twenty-second. I felt important sitting in a hotel restaurant discussing the story I’d written. I don’t recall her saying much about it, but she was favorably impressed.

“I’ve not forgotten about wanting to do your biography,” I finally said.

“I was afraid of that.”

We discussed it for a while, and she asked for a few days “to pray about it.” I anxiously awaited her decision.

“I’ve felt so led in this direction. If she is led not to do it, I wonder who or what I’ve been listening to? Either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ is frightening,” I wrote in the new journal she’d given to me at lunch.

Two days later she called and said “yes.” I was excited and scared to death. On Sunday, June 7, her profile ran front page above the fold. Ruth was featured on placards in every newspaper box in the greater Charlotte area. I signed with New York literary agent Gerry McCauley, and in early August he used my newspaper story to sell the biography.

Harper & Row’s religious imprint in San Francisco bought the rights for a $40,000 advance that seemed like a fortune to me. Charlie and I were now in Richmond, settled into a tiny apartment on the edge of the seminary campus. I was accustomed to writing my newspaper stories on a CRT and couldn’t imagine using a typewriter again.

I bought a Lanier word processor for the outrageous sum of $12,000. In those days, it was new technology, the expense prohibitive.

“This book is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” I noted on August 10, 1981, having no idea what an understatement that would prove to be.

I’d no sooner signed the contract than I had a jogging accident. I didn’t see the transparent plastic newspaper strap on a sidewalk. The loop caught my feet, and I was slung facedown. Had my hands not broken the fall, my head would have slammed into concrete. I knew right away I’d badly hurt myself. I couldn’t bend my arms. At the hospital I was told that the impact was the equivalent of being hit by a car.

I began work on the biography with two broken elbows and couldn’t visit Ruth until the casts had been sawn off. My left arm was damaged so badly it’s an eighth of an inch shorter than my right and would cause problems from then on. I was wearing a splint when I began making the eight-hour drive to Montreat, smoking up a storm inside my Honda hatchback, listening to the same Supertramp cassette over and over.

At Ruth’s house, I’d hook her up to a tape recorder, and spent long hours reading decades of her journals. They weren’t to leave the house, and I’d stay in an upstairs bedroom going through each one, making notes. I’d blow cigarette smoke out the window, deluding myself into thinking Ruth didn’t notice.

Each time I’d roll up to her house, she’d meet me outside, giving me a big hug. I must have reeked of cigarettes, but she never mentioned it or complained about my bootlegging white wine in a distilled water jug. At bedtime I’d have a glass or two in front of her. She never judged.

“I honestly don’t know what will unfold or even what I’ll write!” I noted in my journal. “I only know in my soul that there has always been a very special reason for Ruth and I knowing each other. It has been eerie and powerful… What an incredible honor.”

One night I dreamed I was in her living room when someone walked in and gave her a paperback book. It was filled with depictions of her that were “tacky and unexpected,” I recorded in my journal on August 11.

“She began, slowly, to sob—so upset and dismayed by the intrusion. And I put my arms around her trying to comfort her as she repeated ‘I didn’t want anybody to write this. Really, I didn’t…’”

It’s not coincidental I would dream something like that. Without question Ruth didn’t want the biography written. Despite her reluctance, she made herself available, instructing the Billy Graham office in Montreat to make photocopies of her correspondence. The only documents she said I couldn’t see were the love letters between Billy and her. She wouldn’t share those with anyone.

When home in Richmond, I’d spend hours sitting in a lawn chair outside the seminary’s Rice Apartments reading historian John Fairbank’s books about China. The deeper I got into my research, the more I sensed that Ruth was having grave reservations. I saw her attitude shift. I could tell she was unhappy and anxious, her mood shadowed in a way I’d not seen before.

One night when I was staying at her house, I woke up to an apparition on the foot of my bed. It looked like a ghost of Ruth, filmy and transparent, her face anguished as she raked her fingers through her hair. I was startled and taken aback. Perhaps it was nothing more than a bad dream. But it seemed a projection of what was going on in Ruth’s psyche.

On August 23, 1981, at the age of sixty-one, she was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for a hip replacement. Four days later, the phone rang inside Charlie’s and my seminary apartment. A woman with a New York accent introduced herself as Harriet Pilpel, Billy Graham’s attorney, who I’d heard of before. She often was a guest on conservative commentator William F. Buckley’s Firing Line TV show.

Harriet informed me that Billy Graham was against my doing Ruth’s biography, as were their children.

“You shouldn’t do the book.” Harriet Pilpel stated it like an order. “You’re not the one.”

On behalf of the Graham family, she ordered me to “cease and desist,” and I told her no. I didn’t answer to her. Ruth would have to tell me herself. But she was recovering from surgery, and it wasn’t possible for me to reach her. I figured the timing wasn’t an accident that I’d hear from the Grahams’ attorney while it was impossible for me to tell Ruth what was going on.

I worried she’d changed her mind and vanished to avoid having to tell me herself. In hindsight, I think Ruth would have dropped the project right then. But it wasn’t so simple now. I’d signed a contract. It would have been impossible for me to return the advance money to the publisher. Ruth’s intention of helping my career would have resulted in her ruining it had she bailed on me.

“I didn’t sleep well. This situation is so terrible,” I wrote the next day. “I am exhausted & sick. Ruth is inaccessible and Billy is in Calgary.”

It was true that the Graham children were opposed to my writing about their mother, and who could blame them? The older son, Franklin, kindly explained it to me in a letter. The timing wasn’t right. He hated to tell me that, “not wanting to hurt my feelings.” I didn’t know him then but had seen him around town while growing up.

He was the local James Dean, a strikingly handsome bad boy racing around on a motorcycle or in a sports car. Whenever I’d catch a glimpse of him, it was exciting. I’d wave and say hi, thrilled when he waved back. No doubt, Ruth’s children associated me with the family that appeared on their mountain in 1966. Mom had been hospitalized at Appalachian Hall and so had I.

I could only imagine the stories the Graham family had heard, and obviously, I didn’t measure up. I was having nightmares about being at Ruth’s house while her children were there. I was invisible, I wrote in my journal. Worse than that, I was humiliated “because I shouldn’t be there at all.”

After Ruth returned home from the Mayo Clinic, she continued to cooperate despite the opposition. She’d made a promise. She would do her best to honor it, but she wasn’t herself.

While she recovered from her hip replacement, I’d run the tape recorder for hours, a microphone clipped to her bathrobe. I’d sit in my room transcribing from her journals and other private papers. I’d been told I was much too young and inexperienced to be Ruth’s biographer. I decided I needed to seem older and more sophisticated to the luminaries I hoped to interview.

I ordered engraved Crane stationery that didn’t look like the sort of thing a naïve young person would use. The governor of Virginia in 1981 was Chuck Robb, his wife, Lynda, the daughter of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The Johnsons were friends of the Grahams, and I sent a letter to Lady Bird just as I would to June Carter Cash, Dan Rather, Barbara Bush, the radio commentator Paul Harvey, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, to mention a few.

My interview with Lady Bird Johnson would take place in the governor’s mansion in downtown Richmond. I started out by not being able to find a parking place, frantically ditching my Honda in a federal marshal’s reserved spot, hoping I wouldn’t get a ticket. (I did.) I arrived at the mansion breathless and lugging a big briefcase packed with notepads and two tape recorders.

I was seated downstairs while caterers fussed over a luncheon the Robbs were having that day. When Lady Bird glided down the curved staircase, she looked at the women caterers. She looked at everybody. Then finally at me. I stood up, introducing myself, to her surprise, catching the doubt and questions in her eyes. And maybe a glint of annoyance.

“Oh, you’re quite young, aren’t you?” she said in a resigned way as I followed her upstairs.

The next year I traveled to Washington, D.C., Texas, New York City, Tennessee, Boston for interviews and research. Ruth’s children continued to distrust my intentions. No doubt there was resentment about their mother giving me unfettered access to the most private details about their family.

It should have come as no surprise that they would take exception, convinced I was the wrong person for the job. My claim to fame at the Observer was my series on prostitution. I was in my early twenties and had never published a book. Worse than the girl next door, I was an unqualified interloper.

I reacted as personally as they did, squabbling with the youngest daughter, Bunny, as if siblings. In a way we were. Many decades later, Franklin would tell me, “You’re as much as part of this family as the rest of us are.” That was a big thing to say. I don’t doubt I wouldn’t have been nearly so charitable had a neighbor come along and decided to write about my family.

Without a doubt, I would have sicced lawyers on that person and tried to put a stop to it. I didn’t handle the situation well at the time, not knowing what to do with my volatile emotions. Poor Charlie had to listen to my rants. So did my friend Annie Hall, wife of the Union Theological Seminary president. She was a licensed therapist, and we walked every day, often drinking wine after hours as she patiently listened and advised.

She said what was happening between Ruth and me was a necessary transition. It wouldn’t be until many years later that I’d realized it was predictable. Prior to this we’d had a parent-child relationship. I’d put her on a pedestal, expecting far more from her than was realistic. We had to break out of that for us to become adult colleagues and friends, and the process was brutal.

Ruth had the legal right to approve the final manuscript in exchange for permitting me to interview her endlessly and draw from her private papers. We started disagreeing about the details I wanted to include, much of it comical. Another person I interviewed was her former beau Harold Lindsell, an evangelical Christian author.

“Ruth wrote in her journal about your piercing blue eyes,” was the first thing I said when I got him on the phone.

“My eyes aren’t blue,” he said after a pause. “They’re brown. They’ve always been brown.”

When Ruth described him in her journal while in college, she’d already met Billy and fallen in love with him. She was thinking about his piercing blue eyes and not Harold Lindsell’s. I mentioned this to her, and her retort was, “I’m pretty sure Harold had blue eyes too.”

“He says he didn’t,” I countered. “And still doesn’t.”

If she remembered something that contradicted what she’d written decades earlier, she’d say, “I don’t care what I wrote back then.”

It was a frustrating process, and both of us were enjoying it less and less. By 1983, I was on the fourth revised draft, and the publication had been delayed. The Graham family’s concerns about me weren’t the biggest problem. Harper & Row had its own agenda, I’d find out soon enough.

It seemed they cared only about pandering to the Grahams and decided to hold up my advance money, causing serious financial strains. Charlie was a full-time seminary student, and our only income was what I earned. I had to pawn the family silver that Mom had asked me to buy from her. If I didn’t, she would sell it to one of my cousins.

I was devastated that Harper & Row didn’t seem loyal to me. That’s putting it mildly. I realized they didn’t care about me at all. They were keen on getting the rights to Billy Graham’s eventual memoir and a novel by his friend, the legendary Johnny Cash. My publisher wanted to hire Bunny as an editor of acquisitions and did.

“So, who am I? Nobody. I have no name, no money, no clout,” I wrote in my journal.

By June 1983, Ruth couldn’t handle the biography or me anymore. She was maxed out and distraught, her impulse to duck and dodge. Suddenly, the phone numbers were changed at the Graham house. I couldn’t reach her. If I called her staff, they wouldn’t put Ruth on the phone, no doubt per her instructions.

Billy asked if Harper & Row “could fire me & hire a professional.” He said I was “an amateur, the job’s too big for her,” my editor Roy Carlisle repeated to me, and I wrote it down. I don’t know if what he said was true. It had become patently clear whose side he was on, and it wasn’t mine. I had no respect for Roy, calling him a “weasel” to Charlie, who couldn’t stand him either.

Various people who worked for the Grahams or were related reviewed my manuscript, making changes. Some changes were merited and for the better. But others weren’t accurate or the way I expressed myself, and that was fine with Harper & Row. I suspect Roy encouraged it.

“It doesn’t matter,” my publisher, Clayton Carlson, told me over the phone when I complained. “We could publish a comic book and as long as Ruth Graham is on the cover, it will sell.”

“What I’m writing isn’t a damn comic book!” I retorted. “And that’s not what Ruth wants!”

I demanded that he remove my name from the book. My writing was scarcely recognizable after a myriad of edits, most made by Ruth when she objected to my hard-nosed journalistic candor.

“She resents my violating her privacy and having the gall to analyze her,” I noted in my journal. “Though she knew this was coming, she wasn’t prepared for it.”

Looking back, it’s clear to me that once the biography was real, she panicked. But the biggest problem was Harper & Row’s disregard of me as a writer. After an editorial meeting in the Grahams’ home, Roy Carlisle and Charlie went at it in private on the driveway. The editor warned him of the publisher’s “deep pockets.”

“Well, we have deep pockets too!” Charlie returned the threat.

“I probably shouldn’t have said that.” He would chuckle about it many years later.

We had anything but deep pockets, and that was obvious to all involved. It became apparent I was simply a means to an end for Harper & Row. But that wasn’t true legally. The biography was supposed to be written by a sole author, and it wasn’t anymore. The publisher was violating my contract, and Charlie engaged the help of Joseph Carter, the managing partner of Hunton & Williams, Richmond’s most prominent law firm.

Carter took on my case pro bono, threatening to sue Harper & Row if the manuscript wasn’t returned to the original form. Things changed overnight. Clayton Carlson tried to throw the Grahams under the bus by telling me that “what really made [the Billy Graham organization] mad was that right under their nose, Ruth gave away a very valuable property.”

I don’t believe that was the reason the family had objections about me. In fact, the Graham organization would end up giving away the book at crusades. As the project neared completion, Ruth was so stressed she came down with sciatica, disappearing off the radar. I heard she’d left for Europe but don’t know where she went. For all practical purposes, she quit.

Bunny was tasked with going through the manuscript page by page as we worked on reaching a consensus about the approvals. We spent the rest of the summer in marathon phone sessions. She explained that Billy, his organization, and her siblings were “critical of mother” about her letting me write the book. The ordeal had put a terrible strain on Ruth. Bunny tried to make me see the situation from their point of view.

None of them knew me. I was just a neighbor Ruth had become close to over the years, someone she’d “adopted.” Billy Graham was the most famous evangelist in the world. The idea that his wife would entrust her life story to me was incomprehensible. Bunny and I spent months getting the manuscript back in shape.

We didn’t always agree but found common ground, were even cordial, gaining a new understanding of each other. I will always appreciate what she did, and the countless hours spent. Had it not been for her, the book wouldn’t have been approved. It wouldn’t have been published. Truth is, I was far too caught up in my own needs and worries to realize how Ruth’s family must have felt.

The restored manuscript was accepted by the end of August, and while awaiting the publication, I was thinking about what to do next. I made queries to magazines and newspapers in hopes somebody would hire me for an article or two. But there was no interest. I wanted to write books and was still intrigued by crime. What if I combined the two?

Maybe I should try my hand at murder mysteries. I suggested this and nobody cared. My agent, Gerry McCauley, didn’t want to represent me anymore. He’d gotten so fed up with my tirades that he started hanging up on me when I’d call. Ruth and I had limited contact, and she seemed a shadow of her old self. The ordeal had taken it out of everyone, her most of all.

“But by God—we wrote the book anyway,” I jotted in my journal on September 14, 1983.

Her biography would be released at the end of the year with a first printing of sixty-five thousand copies. In December, I wrote Ruth a six-page letter expressing my hurt feelings about her bailing on me. She called, upset by what I’d said. She told me at least a dozen times that it was all “a big fat misunderstanding” and for me not to give it another thought.

“I can tell that Ruth feels so bad about all that happened,” I journaled at the time.

On January 28, 1984, The Washington Post’s book review was horrible. I found out after church when a parishioner mentioned seeing it. I could tell by the look on the person’s face that I wasn’t going to be happy. I raced to the nearest newsstand and picked up the Sunday paper. I sat for the longest time in the car, stunned and humiliated.

“But I should have known,” I wrote that same day.

Any book about the Grahams wasn’t going to be reviewed positively by the mainstream media unless it was critical, even a hatchet job. The biography was neither, nor was that ever my intention. Because my account of Ruth was warm and positive, I was accused of writing “a hagiography.”

“My confidence is gone at the moment. I know I shouldn’t let one bitchy review do that to me,” I noted on January 31.

I wouldn’t visit Ruth again until the following April after I was done with book promotions. We sat together in Montreat’s Gaither Chapel and afterward visited on her mountaintop just like the old days, our friendship restored but more mature. She said she loved me with a “special love,” I wrote at the time, “like one of her own children but different.”

31

IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1984, I BEGAN RESEARCHING MY FIRST murder mystery, The Stick Doll Murders. The story has an African theme involving voodoo and poisons. I didn’t know what I was doing, unfamiliar with the genre. I’d never read a single mystery and that had to change.

I visited a secondhand bookstore in Richmond and bought three paperbacks by Agatha Christie, P. D. James, and Dorothy Sayers. I read them while trying to make sense of what I was doing at my word processor. Nothing good. I was frustrated and woefully uninformed.

While feeling this way, I had a very strange dream that I remember vividly to this day. I was standing in a long line of people waiting to see someone sitting at a table far away. The scene playing in my head was as graphic as a movie. It was as if I were awake and asleep at the same time, Charlie next to me quietly snoring.

My eyes were shut, and I couldn’t move as the line crept forward while I wondered what I was doing in it. I don’t like waiting in line for any reason, and then I realized I was at a book signing. That was even more out of character. Those weren’t the sort of thing I went to either. And the few signings I’d done for Ruth’s biography hadn’t drawn a crowd.

As I neared the table in my dream, I realized everyone was there to see Agatha Christie. She was dressed in black, her face shadowed by a big black hat. I could tell she was shy, not looking up as she signed her name again and again. When I reached her, I said thank you as she autographed a book for me.

“It’s an honor to meet you,” I added, and she glanced up.

“You will take my place,” she said.

“Excuse me?” I looked around, assuming she must be talking to someone else.

“You will take my place.” She looked me in the eye, and I woke up.

I lay perfectly still for the longest time trying to figure out why I had dreamed something so ridiculous. When I looked her up in an encyclopedia, her photograph was the woman in my dream. I don’t recall knowing what she looked like prior to that. The only thing of hers I’d read was that secondhand paperback, Sparkling Cyanide.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to take Agatha Christie’s place. No one has or ever will, least of all me. But the dream seemed like a nod from her, a visit from beyond meant to offer encouragement. I should carry on. But how? The only approach I knew was that of a journalist. Unless I did research, I’d have no story and nothing to say.

While at The Charlotte Observer, I hadn’t been granted an interview with the local medical examiner, Dr. Hobart Wood. He wasn’t the sort to get on the phone with reporters, and my powers of persuasion didn’t work with him. He never returned my calls. I saw him only once and from a distance as he helped carry a dead man out of the woods.

I remember talking to Charlotte detectives after they’d attended the autopsy. I noticed the foul odor as they told me about swiping Vicks VapoRub in their noses. I didn’t know how I could write a proper murder mystery without learning more about what happened to the body after it was spirited away to some unknown facility.

When I’d show up at a homicide scene, once the body was driven away, I had no idea what happened next. I’d never been to a morgue and needed to see one. I wanted to ask questions. Charlie knew someone who was friends with Richmond’s deputy chief medical examiner, Marcella Fierro, described as brilliant, gruff, and a firebrand.

I made an appointment with her in the late summer of 1984 and was surprised by the idea of a woman forensic pathologist. That wouldn’t have occurred to me, and I was excited. I had to make sure that my murder mystery was credible, approaching fiction the same way I did newspaper stories and Ruth’s biography. Research. Showing up. Making no assumptions.

While working on The Stick Doll Murders I’d decided that a clever way to kill someone might be to poison a dart with digitalis derived from a foxglove plant. I thought about my childhood walks through the woods with Miss Craig. I remembered her pointing out poisonous plants like oleander, water hemlock, castor bean, pokeweed, devil’s trumpet, baneberry, bitter nightshade.

I set about to create the perfect weapon, painting a section of aluminum pipe matte black. Sawing off the handle of a cane, I attached a bamboo skewer that could be used like an icepick to finish someone off if the digitalis didn’t do the trick. The handle fit nicely into the aluminum pipe section, and I attached a rubber stopper to the other end.

The weapon was well disguised. I could have walked around with it in broad daylight, and no one would be the wiser. I used bamboo kabob skewers to make darts that I imagined doped with digitalis. Another idea was using bee venom if the intended victim was allergic. I ordered some by mail from an apiary, making sure the killer could do the same.

I needed some type of fletching to help the dart reach its target. I read that in Africa, pith wood was a substitute for feathers, and I liked the idea. The lightweight pulp was commonly used to clean delicate gears, and I acquired pith wood buttons from a Richmond clock repair shop. If I gave a good puff, my homemade blowgun could sail the dart a good twenty feet.

In August I had my first meeting with Marcella Fierro at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), its headquarters in Richmond. The four-story precast building was located downtown at 9 North 14th Street, the top three floors the forensic labs. I brought the weapon with me, getting curious glances from those wondering why I needed a cane.

A secretary led me into the conference room, and momentarily Marcella walked in wearing a lab coat. She was short and looked like the sort who would take no prisoners. I recognized right away that this was someone formidable, nothing creepy or peculiar about her. She wasn’t at all what I imagined about a medical examiner.

Demonstrating my blowgun in her conference room, I puffed a dart into an anatomical poster. Marcella tried next and was impressed. I explained that if the tip was poisoned with digitalis, it might appear the victim died naturally of cardiac arrest. If all else failed, the skewer attached to the handle could be stabbed into the heart.

She said such a ploy wouldn’t fool her if she did the autopsy. She’d find the puncture wound to the heart and explained that the pericardial sac would be filled with blood, causing cardiac tamponade. Digitalis would come up on the toxicology screen.

“You’d be caught,” she told me right off.

Then we sat down, and I started my tape recorder. We talked for the next few hours as I asked all sorts of naïve questions. Did she wear a lab coat to crime scenes? (No.) Did she put Vicks up her nose? (No.) What did she do at the scene besides pronouncing the person dead?

“It’s not up to the medical examiner to pronounce someone dead,” she said. “We’re not the rescue squad.”

I began telling her about the crime scene in my novel, and now she was the one asking questions. Was the body warm? Was it cool and stiff? Was the victim killed during the day?

“Yes, around ten, eleven in the morning,” I replied.

“Is it sunny or shady.”

“It’s a little bit of both,” I explained.

“Okay that’s going to alter our time of death…”

We talked about deadly plants, and she suggested oleander. I asked, if someone was poisoned with it, would the pupils be dilated when the body was found? She patiently replied that everybody’s pupils are dilated after death because the eyes don’t react to light anymore.

All the while we were talking, both of us were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. As things progressed, she brought in a stack of autopsy photographs to give me a peek at what can kill you. I remember her showing me a nude body that had a small cut in the upper thigh. The man’s girlfriend had stabbed him, severing the femoral artery.

“That will drop you like a shot.” Marcella tapped an ash. “You’re going to bleed out in minutes.”

“You think she meant to kill him?”

“Probably not.”

When it got to be late afternoon, she gave me a tour of the autopsy suite on the ground floor. The tile floor recently had been mopped, the three stainless steel tables shining. She opened the cooler, a few pouched bodies inside on trays, toe tags attached to zippers, cold foul air blowing.

I asked her if there was anything new coming down the pike. She mentioned a technology called DNA, and lasers for finding trace evidence such as hairs, fibers, dirt, could be anything.

“What about seeing autopsies?” I asked. “I really need to if I’m going to get things right.”

“They’re not a spectator sport,” she replied.

I was enthralled, and wanted to know when I could come back.

“In a month,” she said to my disappointment.

Why so long? But I didn’t ask that. It seemed pushy and rude. We made the next appointment and would continue our conversations. She invited me to do research in their library, and I’d visit at every opportunity, scouring the same tomes that the forensic pathology residents used.

Toward the end of 1984, Marcella sat me down in the OCME library and inserted a video into the VCR. I could watch a teaching film of an autopsy, she said, and I did. That wasn’t good enough. I wanted to see the real thing, and she explained that I had no legitimacy for being in the morgue.

“If a commonwealth’s attorney or detective walked in, how would I explain you being present?” She made a good point.

“Then what can I do so there’s no problem?” I inquired.

She suggested I become a neighborhood assistance officer for the Richmond Police Department, a volunteer cop. I wasted no time signing up, and it was rather much a dream come true. I couldn’t think of much I’d rather do, and began the academy in January 1985, visiting a hole-in-the-wall to be fitted for my uniform, khaki with a clip-on brown tie.

The shoes were patent leather with no arch support, and most of all I didn’t like wearing the hat, thinking I looked dorky in it. But I was proud of my uniform and tried it on to see what Charlie thought. He was nice, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that I didn’t cut an attractive figure. He took several pictures of me inside our seminary apartment that was so small the front and back doors were next to each other.

I loved being a volunteer cop. Each time I showed up for duty, I would stand at somber attention as a sergeant made sure my uniform was ironed, the whistle where it should be. I was required to log a certain number of hours each month, sometimes directing traffic during parades and floods. I became an expert at lighting flares I carried in the trunk of the unmarked Ford LTD that I’d check out of the carpool.

I’d work foot patrols downtown and at baseball games, the police hat giving me a headache, my shiny shoes killing my feet. Often, I was heckled, jerks wanting to know where my gun was, and I’d point at my wristwatch, implying it was some sort of stealth weapon. When I’d direct traffic during rush hour, the carbon monoxide would make me woozy.

If I wore plainclothes and rode with the homicide detectives it counted toward my monthly hours, and I started doing that several nights each week. I again asked Marcella about seeing an autopsy, and finally she relented. She was doing a demo for the Richmond Police Academy on May 16 and said I could attend.

That morning, I took the elevator down to the morgue, and bumped into the gurney bearing the body of an elderly woman. Caught by surprise, I felt my knees get weak for a moment. Then I was fine. The body was lifted onto an autopsy table with a quiet thud, the cops gathering around, a plastic bucket handy in case someone got sick.

That and passing out weren’t uncommon, and Marcella explained this as water pounded into the steel sink attached to the table, a Stryker saw whining from the other end of the room. She said it was important “not to fixate” on any one thing she was doing. Then she began, making the Y-incision clavicle to clavicle and down the torso, reflecting back tissue with a scalpel.

When she snapped the rib cutter through calcified bone it sounded like dry sticks breaking. She lifted out the bloc of organs, placing it on a cutting board, and the odor was bad even though the woman hadn’t been dead long. I watched everything Marcella did, trying to adopt her same perspective. If I focused on the reasons for what she was doing instead of the gore, I was fine.

That wasn’t true of the rookies. One got faint and had to step outside. The rest of them looked like they might be sick. Marcella sliced organs with a long knife and explained what she was checking for as a matter of routine. Injuries. Tumors. Old scarring. Genetic anomalies. Atherosclerotic changes to arteries that crunched when she sectioned them.

She emptied the stomach contents into a plasticized paper carton that looked suspiciously like something used for takeout barbecue. I would learn soon enough that the state bought supplies as cheaply as possible, often surplus from other businesses. On one occasion, the cartons had Fish Bait printed on them.

The demo autopsy lasted about an hour, ending with the Stryker saw whining through the skull, sounding like an orthopedist cutting through a plaster cast. Sections of organs were saved in a glass Ball jar filled with the formaldehyde solution called formalin. Everything else was plopped into a big plastic bag that Marcella placed inside the chest cavity.

When she was done, she threaded a surgical needle with white cotton twine and sutured the Y-incision, returning the skull cap, pulling the scalp back over it. The death wasn’t suspicious. But the autopsy was required by law because the woman hadn’t been in the care of a physician when she died. That usually means the person was poor.

As we headed back upstairs a little later, Marcella asked me how I did. She wanted to know if I was okay, and I assured her I was. By now, I was visiting her office daily, watching anything I could while cruising the forensic labs on the third and fourth floors. I’d chauffeur Marcella to court and watch her testify in homicide trials. I’d listen as she was deposed by lawyers.

She found out about my bad sense of direction when I was driving us from a murder trial in Virginia’s Mecklenburg County. Busy reviewing notes in a folder, she didn’t pay attention to where we were. When we ended up in North Carolina, she wasn’t happy. It would take us almost three hours to get back to Richmond. She still laughs about me heading south on the interstate instead of north.

Arriving at the OCME every morning in time for the eight o’clock staff conference, I’d hear about the cases awaiting in the morgue. I’d accompany Marcella downstairs and watch while taking notes. I’d follow her as she made her evidence rounds, learning about serology, fingerprints, tool marks, toxicology, firearms, footwear impressions. I couldn’t have ended up at a better place.

Dr. Paul Ferrara was the director of the forensic labs that took up most of the building, and he invited me to attend the Forensic Science Academy that was open only to professionals. For a while I was in class twenty hours a week. The rest of the time I went to court, watched autopsies, and put in my police hours. Charlie was just as busy, seminary all-consuming.

Meanwhile, I was finishing The Stick Doll Murders, and giving talks now and then when someone wanted to hear about Ruth Graham. I’d bring copies of the biography and sell them. It was a great way to pocket a little extra money. In June I attended a fire school, and visited the FBI Academy at Quantico, where I began to learn about criminal profiling.

I was at it every day, and for the first time in a decade no longer struggled with the eating disorder. It completely went away without my trying. I can’t explain that. But many years later my partner, Staci, would offer a theory that makes sense. A prominent neuroscientist who works in psychiatry, she suggested that my research gave me control over my life. I had a purpose, a direction, and felt empowered.

Working on The Stick Doll Murders, I’d created a fictional female chief medical examiner. I needed a name for her and thought of Charlie’s landlady while he was in graduate school at the University of Virginia. Her last name was Scarpetta, and he told me funny stories about her. I decided my character would be Kay Scarpetta with no middle name. Because I loved making pizza, I figured she should be Italian.

I made her a tough, chainsmoking forensic pathologist in her early thirties, and already a legend in law enforcement. But she isn’t the main character in my early attempts. Perhaps inspired by P. D. James, I’d created an erudite male detective. I gave him the silly name Joe Constable, and it isn’t long before he has the hots for Scarpetta.

When big cases happened, she’s summoned. One of the local medical examiners hears she’s on the way and “had known it was coming.” He’s annoyed that the intrepid chief was dropping “the curtain on his private drama.”

Detective Constable warns, “Dr. Scarpetta has a thing about messing with the body.”

She arrived in my mind full blown not long after I began hanging out at the OCME every day, and I now see what was happening. It was a takeover that I didn’t recognize at the time. In my early unpublished novels, the Scarpetta character eclipses all others, including Joe Constable, who’s single and a loner.

He’s handsome, introverted, independently wealthy, a dapper dresser, and drives an expensive BMW. In other words, he’s the precursor to FBI criminal profiler Benton Wesley, who one day would be Scarpetta’s husband. The Stick Doll Murders involves a voodoo doll, and I made one of those too from an apple I dried in the oven.

Painting the face with Liquid Paper, I glued on black yarn for hair, the body made from burlap. The book opens with a scene that took place decades earlier in the Belgian Congo:

“The three of them passed beneath the green canopy of the rain forest while the children of the trees watched with invisible eyes…”

That book and the next two I wrote had the fatal flaws of structure that didn’t work. It wasn’t the stories themselves. The engineering morphed from a traditional whodunit into a procedural. Scarpetta and her forensic tricks were incompatible with the format of a traditional murder mystery. She’s mentioned 117 times in The Stick Doll Murders, what I’d created was a hybrid.

In August 1985, I sent off the manuscript to my new agent, Sallie Gouverneur. She couldn’t sell it, but I wouldn’t know that for a while. In those days, by the time I’d gotten a final rejection letter for one book, I was well into the next. By now I’d become a part-time employee at the OCME. The chief, Dr. David Wiecking, had asked me to do technical writing for his medico-legal bulletin.

I gave tips about the best way to deal with the press. Another article I wrote explained DNA and how it can help with identification. The serology lab upstairs was using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) to analyze genomic sequences, but the technology was new and hard for people to understand.

32

WHILE WORKING AT THE OCME I WAS RIDING WITH THE DETECTIVES several times a week. I became friends with Ray and Glenn Williams, who weren’t related. They treated me like a partner, and sometimes I’d be on a homicide scene at night, and the next morning I’d present the case at the OCME staff meeting.

I carried a theme book everywhere I went, writing down what I saw and often what was said.

“Father shoots 24-y-old son with shotgun. So we go downstairs in morgue to view. Wound in left chest. White filler helps /w distance…”

I noted that the victim was dressed in a pair of blue long underwear, a red-checked robe, and corduroy slippers. Apparently, he and his father had begun arguing in the kitchen.

“I ought to shoot you,” the father said.

“I dare you,” replied the son as he fixed a cup of coffee.

Police said that the night before the father had been drinking “Ten High Bourbon” and went after the son with “an iron pipe.” The responding officers encouraged the son to take out a warrant, but he refused. His mother told police that the father “got the gun, took a few steps closer, still talking & then fired,” I wrote in my notes.

“They should have a place to check on the death certificate, was this death stupid, yes or no?” Marcella said this often.

“Victim on gurney / bloody white sheet, pack of Marlboros in robe breast pocket,” I jotted while watching her perform the postmortem. “Rigor makes it very hard to get clothing off. Lividity looks like a birthmark. Purple…”

A homicide, Marcella determined as she hung up the decedent’s bloody blue union suit to air dry. That same day we had a suicide, an elderly man who shot himself in the mouth. While we often see someone “eating his gun” on TV, in fact it rarely happens. Marcella wanted to make sure the case wasn’t a homicide, mentioning one that had been.

“The man said his wife talked too much and stuck the gun in her mouth,” she told me while dropping damaged vertebrae into a jar of formalin.

Another case that morning was a woman found burned to death in a car pulled off on the side of a dead-end road. A gas can and matches were nearby, and the first thought was she’d committed suicide. That would be a brutal way to do it, Marcella told the frustrated detective. She wasn’t buying it.

As it turned out, the victim worked as a waitress and overheard two drug dealers discussing a killing. When they realized that she was listening, the problem had to be dealt with. She fled in her car with them in pursuit and, unfortunately, turned onto a dead-end road. She had no way out, and they poured gasoline on her, lighting a match.

Every day it was one terrible event after another that brought bodies through the morgue’s vehicle bay door. I didn’t realize how much it would change me. Murder wasn’t an abstraction. It wasn’t entertaining. When Ruth Graham and I talked on the phone, she’d voice her concern about what I was doing.

“Patsy, get out of the morgue,” she’d say first thing. “It’s not good for your mental health.”

“The dead won’t hurt you,” I’d remind her. “It’s everybody else,” and she’d laugh.

In later years when a Scarpetta novel would come out, I’d send Ruth an inscribed copy. Randomly scattered throughout the pages were tiny boxes I’d drawn.

“Check if you’re still reading,” I’d jot next to each one.

I don’t think she read anything I ever published, including her own biography. The same was true of my mother. The only book of mine she read and cherished was the children’s story Life’s Little Fable that I dedicated to her. Decades later when she was in a retirement home, she’d display my novels proudly, having never cracked a single one.

In 1985, the state health department mandated that all agencies were to be computerized, including the OCME. A desktop computer, printer, and modem arrived. They were installed inside a small office with cinderblock walls and a dark green tile floor. The room behind it was a storage area with filing cabinets where old cases were stored.

Not long after the computer appeared, Dr. Wiecking said to me, “If you really want to help around here, do something with that thing.” He pointed at the computer.

I wasn’t an ideal choice. When I’d taken computer science at Davidson, I dropped it after three days. Back then there were two things I refused to do. One was work with computers. The other was attending funerals or having anything to do with dead bodies. How was it possible I’d become a computer programmer in a medical examiner’s office?

Sometimes one learns things because there’s no choice. If I wanted to immerse myself in the world of law enforcement and forensics, I needed to make myself useful. Scribing during the autopsies, I’d write down weights, measurements, whatever the doctors dictated. I’d help weigh organs, count the pills in prescription bottles, and hang up bloody clothing to dry.

Afternoons were spent working with an IT expert from the health department. Whenever Gail Sauvager showed up at the office, I’d sit next to her learning the relational database Oracle. She was long-suffering and helpful, never treating me condescendingly. Had it not been for her, I wouldn’t have learned enough to create the OCME’s computer programs.

I began compiling our statistics statewide. Soon enough, I was taking care of the computers for our other district offices in Roanoke, Norfolk, and Fairfax. When anyone had a problem or new software needed to be loaded, I was the one in charge. I’d drive the maroon station wagon that we used for hauling bodies.

The back was covered with plyboard, the morgue wagon, as I called it, a biohazard. But nobody thought about that in those days. We’d smoke in the morgue. We’d set our coffee on the counter. Often, we touched bodies with our bare hands. There was no such thing as wearing Tyvek.

My PPE was a teal surgical gown made of cotton, and over that a disposable plastic apron. I’d wear latex gloves and a surgical mask, never showering before I headed home. I didn’t realize the stench followed me until I stopped at the seminary post office one day after work. I was picking up the mail and noticed a student giving me a startled, disgusted look as he hurried away.

I learned not to stop on my way home, and the first thing I’d do when arriving was shower. I made sure Charlie detected nothing offensive when he’d amble in after class or his job at the downtown Second Presbyterian Church. We talked a lot about his courses, and I helped him write sermons. But I rarely said much about what I was doing. Most people didn’t want to hear it.

My first few years of research wouldn’t have been possible had he not cashed in his stocks. For a while, I had very little income, only what I got for book sales when giving talks and an occasional royalty check that wasn’t much. The pittance I earned at the OCME covered my gas, food, professional meetings, and infrequent research trips involving overnight stays somewhere, usually with Marcella.

She and her husband, Bob, became extended family. When schedules allowed, Charlie and I would have dinner with them, and I’d make pizza. Charlie didn’t cook. All those years as a bachelor, and suddenly he forgot how to do anything in the kitchen beyond opening a can of tuna fish. I didn’t mind. I loved putting meals together.

My specialty was homemade onion bagels that I’d make from high-gluten flour I’d buy from the O’Brianstein’s restaurant at the Regency Mall. I’d boil the bagels in water before baking. Charlie and I would eat them fresh out of the oven with plenty of butter. He loved it when I’d broil them with three types of cheese and slather on mustard.

That would be our lunch when we had outings in Washington, D.C. We’d take in exhibits like El Greco’s paintings or the sculptures of Rodin or a performance by the actor Joel Grey. Afterwards it was dinner at Bottoms Up and I began experimenting with deep-dish pizzas. Another favorite meal was London broil, and I’d perfected my own special marinade that included red wine, Worcestershire, olive oil, fresh garlic.

Charlie’s and my first few years in Richmond were arduous and relentless. He was overwhelmed by seminary while I struggled as a novelist. Returning to graduate school in his midforties was daunting. On top of that he was unaccustomed to dealing with parishioners. They weren’t the same as college students, and he’d come home exhausted after visiting people at their homes or in the hospital.

A life in the church wasn’t for him, but he would finish what he’d started. A master’s degree, a Ph.D. in literature, and now he was on track for his doctorate of divinity. All we did was work. Neither of us wanted children, and I was terrified of being a bad parent. Soon after we’d moved to Richmond, I decided to have my tubes tied, and Charlie had agreed.

When I’d have a hysterectomy at the age of forty, Richmond’s Dr. Erika Blanton said I probably couldn’t have had children anyway. My uterus was abnormal, likely because I’m a DES baby. While my mother was pregnant with me her doctor prescribed diethylstilbestrol to prevent a miscarriage. DES is now known to cause significant birth defects.

Our early Richmond years together, Charlie and I were committed to finding careers that were viable. Both of us were running scared and discouraged much of the time. But we had fun. It didn’t take much. Friday nights were always the same. We’d indulge in watching The Dukes of Hazzard, Dallas, and Falcon Crest.

We’d start out with Scotch and peanuts, progressing to one of my pizzas and a salad. We never missed Masterpiece Theatre, both of us addicted to series like Caligula and Brideshead Revisited. Charlie was a huge fan of Jeremy Irons, who I’d become acquainted with much later in life.

If anyone ever made a movie or TV show about me, Charlie hoped Jeremy would play him. That’s what Charlie told me not long before he died. Maybe I could ask Jeremy about it, and I did. I emailed him, passing along the message.

Witnessing hundreds of autopsies while making notes, I was careful to leave out the names of the dead. An exception was twenty-eight-year-old Anne Keller Vaden, autopsied Monday morning, November 19, 1985. When her nude body arrived at the morgue, it was bound with multiple pairs of different-colored pantyhose the killer found in her bedroom.

Beaten with a liquor bottle, she’d been stabbed multiple times in the neck and abdomen. The detective said she was a business broker who’d graduated with honors from William & Mary. Recently, she’d separated from her husband and was living alone in a new upscale Chesterfield County apartment building on the other side of the James River.

That past Friday, she’d attended an evening class at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). On her way home, she stopped to pick up a fried chicken dinner for two. The next morning, she was supposed to be up early, she and her parents headed out of town. The plan was for her to leave at 5:30 a.m., meeting at their house. Her father called at 4:50 making sure she was up.

When she answered the phone, she sounded strange. He felt something was wrong, and her mother called next. This time Anne ominously said, “I’ll be all right,” and the line was disconnected. Alarmed, the father raced over to her apartment. When he arrived, he found the door unlocked, his daughter’s bound nude body on the living room floor.

In the kitchen was the takeout box of chicken for two, and all of it had been eaten. The receipt showed the food had been purchased the night before at around 9 p.m. On the living room floor were scrapbooks. It appeared she or someone had been looking at them. Because there was no sign of forcible entry, it was assumed the killer was an acquaintance, possibly her estranged husband.

Marcella wasn’t buying it. What she saw would be extremely atypical for a domestic homicide. She and I wheeled the body into the X-ray room, and fingerprints examiner Wally Forst arrived with the big boxy laser on a cart. For the next hour or so he and Marcella went over the body an inch at a time, the skin lighting up eerily in the thin beam of pulsing laser light.

Looking on while taking notes, I noticed that the body was amazingly clean. There was nothing on it but fibers that likely were from the sheet she was covered in before being placed inside the body bag. Her legs were perfectly smooth, and I thought that odd. There was no trace of stubble, as if she’d just shaved them.

I supposed she might have had them waxed. We’ll never know, but I wondered aloud if the killer had made her shower or bathe after he raped her. While Marcella was performing the autopsy, she cut open the stomach, noting it contained an unusual amount of food that was completely undigested.

It was assumed Anne Vaden had eaten fried chicken with someone the night before. How could that be the case if the food was undigested at least eight hours later?

“Fight or flight,” Marcella said as she emptied the stomach contents into a container. “When someone is sufficiently stressed, their digestion quits. This lady was extremely stressed all night.”

Marcella instructed the detective to drive to the fast-food chicken restaurant and buy the same dinner for two. I watched as she took the chicken off the bones, and everything went into a blender. The amount was the same as the gastric contents. The victim had eaten both dinners herself. Marcella told police to search the apartment for laxatives, and they found plenty.

A year later the police would arrest Ronald Bennett, a maintenance worker in Anne’s building. Making a copy of the master key, he’d let himself into her apartment. He’d been there before when her air-conditioning had a problem. I remember the detective telling us that she’d offered Bennett iced tea while he worked. She was a nice person.

It was speculated that she’d just eaten the takeout food when Bennett came out of hiding. Likely, he was already inside looking for money to buy cocaine. He would give his girlfriend the jewelry he stole, and later she turned him in after they broke up. Ronald Bennett would die in the electric chair eleven years later at the age of forty-two.

Anne Vaden was an overachiever, on her way to a promising career as a businesswoman. I suspect that during the endless hours she was held hostage, she tried to make her killer view her as a person. Perhaps she was showing him her family scrapbooks for that reason. I imagined her using her intelligence and decency on a brute who had neither. Her murder had a powerful impact on me. It’s one I can’t forget.

By the end of 1985, publishers were rejecting The Stick Doll Murders. I was crushed but well along in my second mystery that focused on archaeology. I participated in a dig in Williamsburg, not finding anything but a lot of clay pipe stems. Touring the magnificent eighteenth-century Westover Plantation, I was intrigued by the secret tunnel that ran from the main house to the James River.

A new plot was swirling in my head. I would call my second attempt Murder in the Lost Hundred.

“It was November in Carter’s Towne, Virginia, and the late afternoon sky was as hazy as an ice cube…,” the novel begins.

Once again, Scarpetta is a forceful presence, mentioned 111 times. As soon as I’d sent off the manuscript, I started writing The Queen’s Pawn. She’s mentioned 221 times in that one.

“Some stories should never be told, and Joe Constable supposed that this was one of them. But it was early spring, the exact same time of year that it all happened…,” chapter one begins.

More rejection letters, and it was obvious that my first two efforts were dead on arrival. I sent out The Queen’s Pawn in late 1986, and it began making the rounds of New York publishers. More rejections followed. There was no respite from bad news.

33

IN 1987, CHARLIE BEGAN EXPLORING WHAT TO DO AFTER SIX YEARS of seminary. He was working as an associate minister at Ginter Park Presbyterian Church on Richmond’s Northside. We’d become increasingly estranged as my books were rejected and he stressed about his future.

I helped him as best I could, editing and often rewriting his sermons while participating in various church activities. For a while I taught a young adult Sunday school class, and on occasion I wrote children’s sermons, reading them during the services. I interviewed parishioners and wrote profiles of them. Meanwhile, I was running around with the police and working full time at the OCME.

Charlie and I saw less of each other, rarely taking the time anymore. I didn’t enjoy being a preacher’s wife, and he didn’t like the ministry but hadn’t admitted that to himself. We’d moved into Honey Tree Apartments in Henrico County, an upgrade from seminary housing. I no longer had to use a communal laundry. We had a second bedroom that was my office.

We never took a vacation. But once a year we visited my father and Rita in Miami where Jim and his wife, Mary, also lived. She worked in a law firm, and he was a carpenter on his way to becoming a gifted mill worker. Charlie had encouraged me to get to know my father, and the two of them got along very well. In fact, it irked me how much attention they paid to each other.

While in Miami I loved visiting G.G., but it was awful watching her get so old. She’d tell me how desolate it was, showing me her address book, page after page of blacked-out names. Whenever I visited, she’d pull out this same address book and show me the morbid progress made. The last time I was there, every name had been redacted.

“The stupidest thing I ever did was quit smoking,” she once complained. “Who wants to live this long?”

Until her death in April 1987 at the age of ninety-six, she was still reading the Sunday New York Times and sipping an occasional glass of port or a pony-size Budweiser she’d drink with a straw. She’d watch PBS, the news, the volume so high you could hear her TV across the street. When taking out the garbage at night, she’d wear a “rape whistle” around her neck.

She wouldn’t bother with hearing aids. Burglarized one night, she slept through it. I doubt the would-be thief found anything of value or lingered. The police arrived, walking into her bedroom, looking at the clothesline strung across it. Hung up to dry were large pairs of men’s briefs that she wore stuffed with diapers. She’d boil them clean in the kitchen.

Jim and I quit eating at her house when he discovered a Fruit of the Loom label in his bowl of cheese grits. G.G. was too cheap and stubborn to buy Depends and fabricated her own. One day Mary and I took her to the grocery store. As we were cruising the aisles with our cart a safety pin sprung, and G.G.’s rig began its descent.

We hurried into a utility closet to fix her wardrobe failure, the three of us laughing hysterically, making matters only worse. G.G. saw the ridiculousness of life. She was funny and fearless with an insatiable sense of adventure. I wish she’d lived long enough to see me published as a novelist. By the time she died, my future as an author wasn’t looking promising.

As the rejections continued, I realized that The Queen’s Pawn was going nowhere just like the other books. My agent decided she didn’t want to represent me anymore, and I announced to Marcella, “Three strikes, I’m out.” She told me the same thing she always did. I mustn’t quit. I was going to make it one of these days. She knew it.

After my agent fired me, I was despondent, some of my black moods returning. Once again, I wondered why I was on this Earth. The only thing I’d been successful at was journalism, and I contemplated going back to it. I thought about becoming a police officer, but my heart wasn’t in it. Maybe I was destined to be a state employee barely making a living.

After my first three mysteries had been rejected, I’d done the gauche thing of calling an editor at the Mysterious Press. Sara Ann Freed had read my earlier attempts. Her responses were measured, even kind, and I took a chance, getting her on the phone.

“I know I shouldn’t do this,” I apologized right off. “But please tell me the truth. Should I quit?”

“No,” she surprised me by saying. “I don’t think you should.”

“Then what am I doing wrong?”

“You work in a medical examiner’s office, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“These things you write about, are they what you see there?”

“No.”

“Well, I want to see what you see.”

“What I see is pretty awful.” I was wondering if I could write about it.

“I want to see what you see,” she repeated. “And your best character is the lady medical examiner. You should write about her.”

“Okay. Thank you so much. I promise I’ll try.”

I was grateful for her advice. But what she’d suggested was a tall order. By now I’d seen thousands of autopsies. There wasn’t much I hadn’t been exposed to, but I’d never allowed the reality to violate my imagination. When I’d get home and sit at my desk, I didn’t want to envision what I witnessed at death scenes and inside the autopsy suite.

My first three novels didn’t include the graphic details that were part of my daily life. I wasn’t telling my stories from Kay Scarpetta’s point of view. I didn’t think it possible I could walk around in her shoes. I was an English major, a former journalist, and not a doctor or scientist. The idea of writing about what I really saw through the medical examiner’s eyes was daunting.

Most of all I didn’t want to celebrate what should be condemned. How could I tell the truth about violence without exploiting it and victims? I decided there was only one way to do it. I had to take on Scarpetta’s persona, not realizing I’d already done it years earlier. I’d created her, and she’d created me. Our point of view was the same.

In the fall of 1987, a serial killer began his rampage in Richmond, what was referred to as a reign of terror. On September 18, Debbie Dudley was murdered in her Westover Hills apartment on the south side of the James River. The thirty-five-year-old was an account executive at Richmond’s Style Weekly magazine.

She was found partially nude on her bed, her arms bound with shoelaces. She’d been strangled with a sock that the killer tightened with a metal vacuum cleaner attachment, creating a crude garrote. Two weeks later, on October 2, Dr. Susan Hellams was murdered in Westover Hills, her body on the closet floor. She was hog-tied and strangled.

The killer fractured her nose and injured her bottom lip, perhaps to silence her before she screamed. He’d gotten in by cutting the screen from the second-story window, and likely was inside the house when she got home from a dinner with friends. Her husband discovered her body when he returned after midnight, and the police briefly landed on him as a suspect.

Richmond was in an uproar. People were buying guns, the hardware stores running out of locks, and I remember the mood at the OCME was tense. Marcella was responding to the scenes and doing the autopsies the instant the bodies arrived at the morgue. She locked the case files in her office credenza so that nobody could look at them.

I never saw the bodies, only photographs the police shared as we’d discuss the cases while I was riding with them at night. Marcella didn’t offer details to me or anyone else in the office. In fact, she and I rarely talked or saw each other while the murders were going on. She began breaking out in hives. The police had no idea who the killer might be, and I was shaken to my core, most of all by Susan Hellams.

I was sure I’d seen her before at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV), where she was completing her neurosurgery residency. She was attractive, with long red hair, and I noticed her one day while Marcella discussed pathological specimens with the students. I can still envision Susan in a lab coat, standing on the other side of the room as I took notes.

I remember her well because I felt ill at ease and out of place among the young doctors attending to Marcella’s every word. They were accomplished, and all I had to show for myself was three failed mystery novels. Perhaps Susan Hellams sensed my discomfort and that’s why she gave me a warm smile. I have no idea why. I was surprised she noticed me or cared.

I was riding with homicide detectives on weekends, haunted when we’d drive past her house, and where Debbie Dudley had been murdered, the lights out, no sign of life. We cruised past, sometimes parking on the roadside, trying to get into the mind of a sadistic killer who strangled his victims, then resuscitated them, then strangled them, over and over.

The Southside Strangler, as he’d been dubbed, struck again on November 22. This time he was even more brazen. Fifteen-year-old high school student Diane Cho lived with her family and was asleep in bed when the killer climbed through her second-story window. He raped and murdered her while her parents were downstairs watching TV.

The next morning when she didn’t get up, her mother found her dead in bed, her hands bound. She’d been strangled with rope, an infinity symbol painted on her hip with nail polish. The police believed the killer may have spotted her recently at a mall where she’d noticed a young African American man staring at her in a way that was unnerving.

Richmond detectives and I would speculate endlessly about the infinity symbol. Had the killer painted it on her? Was he bonding himself with his victims for all eternity, showing his omnipotence and ownership? Or had Diane Cho painted the symbol on herself earlier? What did it mean, if anything? What caused the Strangler to target his victims? Where did he see them? Why did he choose them?

Five days after Diane Cho’s homicide, the Strangler struck again, this time a hundred miles away in northern Virginia. Forty-four-year-old Susan Tucker, an editor for the U.S. Forest Service, was murdered in her home. Arlington County detective Joe Horgas thought the modus operandi was the same as in an unsolved murder four years earlier.

On January 25, 1984, Carolyn Hamm, a thirty-two-year-old Washington, D.C. attorney, was found dead in her basement, her nude body bound with a venetian blind cord. She’d been raped and strangled. Her murder reminded Horgas of a series of rapes that remained unsolved in Arlington. He suspected all the cases were the work of the same perpetrator.

In January 1988, the Southside Strangler was identified as twenty-five-year-old Timothy Spencer based on DNA analysis. A parolee living in a Richmond halfway house, he was within walking distance of where Debbie Dudley and Susan Hellams lived. An infinity symbol had been drawn on Spencer’s mattress, but he wouldn’t explain that or anything else till the day he died.

One of the detectives working the cases was my friend Glenn Williams, married with two children. At the age of thirty-eight he committed suicide the night of February 3, 1988, shooting himself in the chest. I heard about it over the radio as I drove to work the next morning. When I arrived at the OCME, his body was inside the X-ray room, and I walked in, closing the door.

He was one of the first cops to have a 9mm pistol and apparently grabbed it off the dresser, saying he couldn’t take it anymore. That’s what I was told by Detective Ray Williams. The unrelenting stress of the Southside Strangler cases apparently had gotten to Glenn and severely impacted his personal life. He hadn’t been autopsied yet and was covered by a sheet from the waist down.

I marveled at the small hole in his chest that had caused such immeasurable damage. I remembered him showing me that very pistol when we rode together on evening shifts. He carried it and his service revolver, predicting that one day all cops would be armed with semiautomatics. He was always cracking jokes, but I sensed his anxiety.

“Why?” I asked his dead body on the X-ray table. “Why did you have to do that?”

A year later Timothy Spencer would be convicted of capital murder. I attended the Richmond trial with Marcella during the sentencing phase. We were sequestered in a private area of the courthouse while she waited to testify. As she reviewed her paperwork, I headed to find the ladies’ room. As usual I took a wrong turn, only this one was a doozy.

I opened a door to what I realized wasn’t a bathroom, and there was Timothy Spencer all by himself and unshackled. His back to me, he leaned over a table, palms flat on it, his head hanging as if he were tired or dejected. Maybe he was deep in thought, but he didn’t look at me or seem to notice I was there. I remember his white shirt and dark pants, the V-shape of his upper body.

African American, he was nice-looking and of medium height, not at all scary. Of course, he wasn’t wearing a mask and armed with a knife climbing through a window. He’d been groomed for court in hopes of influencing the jury. I quietly shut the door, astonished he was alone and unrestrained. Had I not recognized him I would have asked how to find the ladies’ room. I might have struck up a conversation.

He was no more than five feet from me, nobody around. He could have hurt me badly. Or worse. Marcella testified in gruesome detail about what he’d done to the victims she examined. She elaborated on what they would have been conscious of, how much they suffered, and for how long. Spencer would die in the electric chair six years later.

I hadn’t stopped thinking about what the editor Sara Ann Freed had told me. I wondered what Scarpetta would do if the Southside Strangler cases happened on her watch. They were my inspiration for Postmortem. I began writing it while the crimes were going on. There was no way I couldn’t.

I don’t want to say I was forever traumatized by them, but I might have been. That period was a tumultuous one at the OCME, all of us suspicious of everyone. If a man arrived to service our microscopes, I wondered if he was the Strangler. Maybe the killer worked at MCV. I suspected he was someone people paid little attention to, blending with crowds, not drawing attention to himself.

I began to write the novel in late 1987, the working title Death Bell. But I had no one to send it to and needed an agent. That wouldn’t be easy after being fired by two of them. Synchronicity struck again in early 1988 when I attended the dedication of the new Dade County medical examiner’s office in Miami while staying with my dad and Rita.

The Miami Herald’s Pulitzer prize–winning police reporter Edna Buchanan and I were acquainted, and we planned to meet at the dedication, spending the rest of the day together. She referred me to her literary agent, Michael Congdon, and he agreed to look at Death Bell when I was finished writing it. That March, Charlie read the first draft.

“You might have done it this time,” he told me over the phone.

I sent the manuscript to Michael Congdon, and he said I needed to make substantial edits. He spent considerable time going through the draft, tightening it, explaining that a thriller needs to move at a lightning pace. Too much introspection and background information about characters are deadly, he said. I decided to change the title to Postmortem.

While we worked on edits over the next few months, I ran the computer system for the OCME as Charlie job hunted. He began talks with Bill Carl III, the senior minister of a prominent church in Dallas. The idea of relocating there was impossible for me. I’d already given up one career when we’d moved to Richmond.

I wasn’t going to do it again. After four years at the OCME and three rejected novels, maybe I’d finally written something that would work. I had a real job with a salary of $27,000. Not a fortune but respectable, and I wasn’t a college student anymore. I was thirty-one years old.

Charlie wanted me to move to wherever he was hired. It didn’t matter if he hated the location or the job. He described it as signing a blank check. That was a hard thing for me to consider, especially when we weren’t getting along. One early evening I came home from work, and he was in the living room eating dinner while watching the news.

He’d gotten over his amnesia about cooking and had opened a package of chicken breasts, broiling only one of them and making a single salad. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might want to eat too, and sometimes it’s the small things that make you realize the big ones. We loved each other but couldn’t live together. We weren’t a couple anymore.

34

IN THE SPRING OF 1988, CHARLIE PLANNED A TRIP TO LONDON. HE would meet a few friends there while I stayed in Richmond and worked. I was worried about our relationship and thought I’d surprise him. I called his travel agent, arranging to book a seat on Charlie’s same flight. Maybe it wasn’t too late to restore what we’d once had.

That night I planned to give him the happy news as we ate dinner at the Crazy Greek restaurant, ordering our usual pizza, Greek salads, and pitcher of beer. I told him about my surprise, and it didn’t have the effect I wanted, to put it mildly. He was livid that I would interfere with plans that he’d been setting up for months. He had theater tickets and everything else, he said.

It was last-minute, and he didn’t want me to come. We had a terrible fight as we left the restaurant. He refused to get into the car, tossing the key on the pavement, storming off. Our apartment was almost four miles away, and he was acting irrationally. As he strode along West Broad Street in the dark, I slowed down the car, calling to him out the window, but he kept going.

I’d never seen him this angry and was unnerved. I knew better than most the horrible things people do when enraged, desperate, and hurt. I was frightened, having no idea what might happen next. And I was angry too. I couldn’t believe he would treat me this way. It almost seemed that he hated me, and I worried it was about the sexual assault again.

At the time I couldn’t recognize how frustrated and unhappy he was. Most of what he felt had nothing to do with me. The person he hated was himself. He’d left a tenured position at Davidson where he’d been beloved, admired, extremely popular. Now here he was getting close to fifty and disgusted by his life. After I returned to our apartment, I wrote a note.

“If I’m dead, question Charlie,” it read. “We had a bad fight.”

I tucked it in a back pocket of my jeans. Marcella would see it if the worst happened. I knew she’d insist on handling my case, and probably would do my autopsy. She would make sure the truth came out. As morbid and bizarre as that might sound, it’s no different from being operated on by a gifted surgeon who’s a close friend.

Charlie’s long trek home was his attempt at cooling off. Except he didn’t. Our fighting continued and he yanked open a kitchen drawer, grabbing a knife. He didn’t point it at me but at himself.

“Maybe I should kill myself!” he raged.

I managed to calm him down, but our situation was hopeless. There was “no room for diplomacy,” as he put it. After he returned from London, he attended a religious retreat in Virginia, and Bill Carl, the minister of that big church in Dallas, called me. He wanted to hire Charlie as an associate minister and understood that I didn’t want to move to Texas.

Obviously, Charlie had given him our phone number and relayed my resistance about leaving Richmond. I felt ambushed and sucker punched, not to mention betrayed. I explained I had a serious job managing the medical examiner’s statewide computer system. I couldn’t just walk away from what I’d built, and it was obvious that Bill Carl wasn’t impressed.

I suggested a compromise. I couldn’t move right away but maybe could get there after a while.

“How long is a while?” he wanted to know.

“Maybe six months.”

“That’s way too long,” he said. “The congregation would think, well, that something’s wrong. They’d expect you there in at most a month.”

“With all due respect, Bill,” I replied, “you’re hiring him, not me. I’m not the prize that goes with the Cracker Jack.”

When Charlie got home from his religious retreat, he’d already heard the news, including my Cracker Jack comment. He said the church elders he’d been with believed it would be best if he and I got a divorce. Clearly, I wasn’t cut out to be a minister’s wife, and it would be wise to end things before he got his first real job at a church.

We were separating, and I knew it was best. But I was devastated that he seemed to give up so easily. I resented that our future had been decided by a church committee. We started meeting with Richmond lawyer Torrence Harmon and agreed that each of us keep what was ours before the marriage. It was only fair. He’d lived with his furniture and rugs longer than he had with me.

I had no interest in our fancy wedding gifts like Royal Doulton china and Waterford crystal glasses we never used. I didn’t want his artwork or books. I agreed to his taking our Siamese cat, Billy. Charlie and I signed a separation agreement, and he changed our billing addresses so that I would take over the apartment rent and other expenses. Once again, I was alone and on my own.

To make matters worse, in November 1988, Michael Congdon started getting the first rejection letters for Postmortem. By the end of the year, Doubleday, E. P. Dutton, and William Morrow had passed with criticisms about the author and Scarpetta. “I felt the writing was too monochromatic,” an editor commented. Obviously, I wasn’t a fiction writer, and it was time to face it and move on.

I’d written four novels over the past four years, all of them failures. I was working in a morgue and getting divorced. Maybe I should return to journalism. What choice did I have? I set up a job interview at the Miami Herald while spending the Christmas holiday with my father, Rita, and Jim and Mary.

I met with the newspaper’s editors, and it was awful taking tests to check my writing ability. It felt insulting after all I’d been through. While I was in Miami, Charlie moved everything out of our apartment. He’d decided it would be easier for both of us if I weren’t around to see that happen, and he was right. By now, his anger had burned off. The two of us were sad and felt like failures.

When I returned to Richmond after the New Year, the only remaining furniture was my word processor, the desk, office chair, and a lamp. Charlie also left me the TV and our blue Honda sedan. Neither of us had any money, and he moved into a parishioner’s guesthouse. I slept on the floor, and Marcella let me borrow lawn furniture for the living room. At least I had something to sit on while watching TV.

Living alone, I was unnerved and haunted by what I dealt with at work every day and while out with detectives. I bought my first handgun, a Ruger .38 revolver, and took shooting lessons from a Henrico County police officer. I installed a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door and made sure never to leave my windows unsecured. Sometimes I carried my Ruger, depending on where I was going.

On January 19, Michael Congdon heard from the Mysterious Press. I was stunned that editor Sara Ann Freed had turned down Postmortem. It was obvious from her comments that she hadn’t read the new manuscript, probably assuming it was another version of The Queen’s Pawn. This time I didn’t bother calling her to ask for advice.

The writing was on the wall, as my mother used to say. Not three strikes, but four. And that wasn’t counting my impending divorce. I blamed myself for not being a better wife. I was a bad version of Kay Scarpetta and a worse Ruth Graham. I blamed Charlie for listening to his clergy friends instead of me. I had a nightmare that I was escorted past all of them in candlelight, headed to my execution.

Enraged and heartbroken, I vented on the tennis court, serving so hard I tore my rotator cuff, eventually requiring surgery. I gathered up my wedding dress and the boxes of old tennis trophies stored in a closet of the apartment. I tossed all of it into the parking lot dumpster, getting rid of a past that seemed disastrous.

Maybe for the first time I could empathize with Mom burning her children’s clothing and wanting to sail away.

The third week of January 1989, I took Amtrak to Washington, D.C., interviewing at USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. None of them were interested in hiring me. I’d been working at the OCME longer than I’d been a journalist in Charlotte.

“We don’t have a morgue beat,” an editor at the Post told me.

I rode Amtrak back to Richmond on January 24, discouraged to the point of despair. I supposed all I could count on was my job at the OCME for the rest of my years. I drove back to my apartment, and could hear the answering machine beeping as I walked in. There was a message from Michael Congdon.

“Scribner might take your book,” he said in the recording.

I called and he explained that one more person needed to read the manuscript, “to make sure” the publisher wanted it. Hopefully we’d know tomorrow. By now I was numb and didn’t believe my luck would change. But tomorrow would come and I’d get the confirmation. Scribner editor Susanne Kirk thought the book had special qualities, and that Kay Scarpetta was dynamic.

Four days later I was headed to Manhattan, taking the train to meet Michael Congdon and Susanne Kirk. Scribner bought the U.S. rights to Postmortem for $6,000. The first $1,200 of my advance went to posters I had made at a local print shop. That winter I recruited help from my buddy Betsy Mikell.

We’d known each other since shortly after I’d moved to Richmond. My age and a former tennis pro, she played doubles with me at the Westwood Club and hung out regularly. Our friends Sue and Steve Lewis drove us around Richmond taping the posters inside stores and restaurants. That was the extent of Postmortem’s advertising.

Months later I was called back for a second interview at the Miami Herald and offered a feature-writing position at their Broward County bureau. I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of my life. Maybe I should take the job while I had the chance, and Miami might be a good place for me to live.

Jim and his wife, Mary, were starting a family there. I was close to them, rarely seeing my brother John, a high-ranking officer in the Air Force, never living in the same place very long. Mom had moved from Montreat to Hendersonville near Asheville, and we weren’t getting along.

I told myself there was little possibility Postmortem or anything else I wrote would amount to a big deal. Better to be a journalist in Miami than a computer analyst in a morgue. But by now, I was already well along with my next Scarpetta novel. I’d started it while waiting to hear about Postmortem.

As usual, I had to write. I couldn’t help myself. The dreadful working title was Posthumous. Later I would change it to Body of Evidence. I decided to give myself a chance at making it as an author. I knew that if I went to work for the Miami Herald, I’d be drained creatively by the end of every day just as I’d been while working for The Charlotte Observer.

I worried it was foolish to leave the environment that had facilitated my creation of Scarpetta, and I told the Herald no. I continued to work on Body of Evidence while waiting for Postmortem to come out. When it did in January 1990, the first book review was vicious. It seemed like a replay of what happened with the Ruth Graham biography.

Robert Merritt of the Richmond Times-Dispatch referred to Scarpetta as a whiner. She complained about male chauvinists obstructing her way to the top of her profession. He had nothing good to say, his criticism and the tone of his review striking me as personal. It seemed what he really took exception to was me. I suppose if Mr. Owl had weighed in, he would have reminded me of the green-eyed monster.

Postmortem had no marketing or publicity budget, and I was on my own to promote it. The only appearance I made was at Cokesbury, a religious bookstore in downtown Richmond, and I walked there during my OCME lunch break. Copies of Postmortem filled the front window because that was the deal. I’d told the store manager I’d give him my free case of books if he’d display them.

I sat for an hour, not a single copy sold. I got excited when a browsing customer approached, until she asked where the cookbooks were. Nobody showed up except a man in a suit and tie. I sensed his hostile energy as he picked up a copy from the stack in front of my table. Without so much as a glance at me, he rudely tossed Postmortem back on top of the stack, stalking out of the store.

Remarkably, he looked a lot like Robert Merritt. Or Robert De-Merritt, as I began to call him. Soon after his nasty review, I got a call from Charles Wilson, the owner of Volume I, an independent bookstore known for anti-censorship. I remembered seeing the front window filled with copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses when it was published.

Volume I was the last store where I expected the reaction I was about to get. I was sitting at my desk at the OCME when Charles Wilson told me he was “banning” Postmortem. He criticized its graphic violence and similarity to the Southside Strangler cases. It would seem he told the media about banning my book and the story went out over the wire.

A few women’s clubs that had scheduled me to speak saw the news and canceled their invitations. I knew what it felt like to be canceled. How could things get any worse? Many years later I was told that the banning of my book was a publicity stunt on the part of Volume I. Without intending to, Charles Wilson did me a favor, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

It seemed that once again I’d failed. Worse, I was accused of causing harm by writing a story inspired by real murders. If I told the truth about violence from Scarpetta’s point of view, it seemed to upset people and offend literary sensibilities. A reviewer in the U.K. was so angry after reading Postmortem, he hurled the book across the room.

His reason? The killer was a stranger, as violent psychopaths usually are. Rarely do they know their victims. After all I’d seen, I was incapable of writing a traditional whodunit. I couldn’t if I tried. Brutalized bodies on autopsy tables weren’t mysteries or puzzles, and murder wasn’t a parlor game.

I was certain my career as a novelist had ended before it began. I should have taken the job at the Miami Herald. But everything was about to change.

35

IN FEBRUARY 1990, CHARLES CHAMPLIN OF THE LOS ANGELES Times wrote a fantastic review of Postmortem, calling it “a first-rate thriller.” It was the validation I’d been hoping for, my publisher ecstatic.

Nine months later in early November I got other news that was stunning. I’d won the British Crime Writers’ Association award for best first crime novel. It would be presented by Princess Margaret in London the following month, and I was astonished while worrying what to wear and how to curtsy.

As soon as I got the news, I hurried downstairs to the morgue to tell Marcella, but she wasn’t there. Autopsying a homicide, Dr. Wiecking held an excised stab wound in forceps as I announced the news. His only reaction was to toss the stab wound at me. I don’t know why. Picking it off the floor, I returned it to him and washed my hands.

On my way home, I stopped at Montaldo’s, Richmond’s ritziest women’s clothing boutique, where I’d never shopped. But I needed advice about what to do and wear when presented to royalty. I assumed if any local place would know it would be Montaldo’s. I walked in dressed like college and hopefully not smelling like the autopsy suite.

Finally, I got the attention of a sharply dressed saleswoman named Diane Jefferson. I told her the situation, and suddenly there was interest. I was shown a long black skirt and an ornate gold-and-black beaded top. When I tried them on, I stood on a wooden box feeling like a figure on top of a wedding cake while a seamstress stuck pins here and there.

The following Monday, I stopped at Montaldo’s after work and picked up my outfit, spending $161 I couldn’t afford. Diane Jefferson taught me how to curtsy, and I practiced until she was satisfied that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in front of royalty. I bought a pair of pantyhose and found a pair of low-heeled pumps I could wear without breaking my neck.

On December 4, I arrived in London for the first time since my summer in Oxford. My British publisher was MacDonald & Co., the name later changing to Little, Brown Book Group. The afternoon of the awards ceremony my editor and other staff took me to lunch at a wine bar where we spent far too much time. When I returned to my hotel, I was tipsy on top of jet lag.

I took a long shower trying to revive. As I got dressed in my dazzling outfit from Montaldo’s, I realized I’d made a serious tactical error. My beaded top was as tight as a glove. It wasn’t possible for me to zip it up in back even a little. Opening my room door, I spotted a man in a suit carrying a briefcase.

He walked briskly in my direction, and I said, “Excuse me?”

He looked around, making sure I was talking to him.

“Yes?” He stopped.

“I’m so sorry to bother you. But could you zip up my top?”

“Why… certainly.”

He zipped me up with an air of expectation, and I quickly shut my door. That night more alcohol flowed in candlelight, and I watched Princess Margaret at the head table across the crowded room. She was smoking, and into the Famous Grouse Scotch. I was glad to see it since I still had a buzz going from my protracted lunch in the wine bar.

When it was my turn to walk up front, I did fine with my curtsy, my award an engraved magnifying glass I keep close to my desk to this day. After the ceremony the winners were directed backstage by men in red coats. We were to sign a big red book, and Princess Margaret appeared to greet the award recipients individually. And briefly.

“And how long did it take you to write your book?” she asked me.

“About a year.”

“Yes, it does take a while.” Her eyes seemed elsewhere.

“I understand you like horses?” I wanted to be friendly, and she froze like a wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s.

I realized that my attempt at chitchatting wasn’t welcome or appropriate, not knowing that one doesn’t initiate conversations with members of the royal family. The saleswomen at Montaldo’s had neglected to pass along that bit of intelligence. One of the red coats quickly escorted me away as if I’d been grabbed by a stage hook.

The next morning, I woke up to snow in London, and it was like a scene out of Dickens. The weather was too bad for me to fly home, and I had a magical time walking around Knightsbridge. I trudged past Liberty London, Harrods, Laura Ashley, and all sorts of places I couldn’t afford. It was a limbic moment I’ll never forget. I’d won a major award presented by a royal, and London was blanketed in snow.

Postmortem would go on to win four more awards, including the Edgar presented in New York City. Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles Champlin attended as my guest. While we danced together, he said he was interviewing actress Jodie Foster onstage in the fall. I should come, and he’d introduce us.

“She should play Scarpetta,” Charles Champlin said, and I was dumbfounded, agreeing that would be amazing.

In the early spring of 1991, Michael Congdon sold Body of Evidence for $120,000, an astonishing amount of money to me. I moved out of Honey Tree Apartments and into a faux Tudor home in Richmond’s wealthy neighborhood of Windsor Farms. The house hadn’t sold yet because it was modern construction and handicapped equipped.

Countertops, cabinets, toilets, everything was low. A huge oriental rug had conveyed with the house because it covered plyboard flooring so that the great room was level for a wheelchair. The elderly couple who built the place had died, and many of their belongings were left, some of them tossed into super cans at the foot of the driveway.

I owned next to nothing, and dug out an old violin with no strings, antique tools, a tapestry, a few vintage law books that I displayed in the great room. I bought my first Mercedes and was getting a lot of media requests, including national ones like The Washington Post and the TV news magazine 48 Hours.

I was starting to be recognized wherever I went, and it made me uncomfortable. I did my best to duck nosy neighbors who pushed through my hedge when I was in my backyard minding my own business. They’d start in with a litany of questions, most of all wanting to know about my family.

“We’re not from here,” is all I would say while thinking, You don’t know the half of it.

I was beginning to have privacy concerns, getting calls from strangers, prompting me to change my phone number to an unlisted one. I hired a woman I’d met at Honey Tree Apartments, setting her up in the parlor of my house. She was my secretary and a buffer between me and everyone else.

I no longer made appointments or reservations myself. I didn’t want strangers on the phone asking questions or making comments about my books. I began disguising myself with baseball caps and sunglasses. I trained with firearms experts at the FBI Academy, learning everything I could about self-defense.

I was one of the first to install outdoor cameras. When people rang my bell, I could see them while hearing everything said. I had a security system and kept my revolver on my nightstand. On Christmas morning of 1991 I was up early and working in my office next to the main bedroom. A friend called and we were talking when my burglar alarm started hammering.

The window next to my bed was open several inches. Someone had tried to break in. Strangers had begun leaving books on my doorstep in hopes I’d sign them. Or they “returned” them because they didn’t like something they’d read about me. With increasing frequency, cars parked across from my house, people hoping to catch a sighting.

I didn’t have a clue how to deal with becoming famous. In the spring of 1991, I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t keep up with my mail, the media requests, and when I’d appear in the grocery store, people would check out what was in my basket. I was working at the OCME part time, watching autopsies and shadowing Marcella as always.

I slept poorly, my heart racing, and a cardiologist had me wear a Holter monitor. I was hooked up to electrodes while in the morgue, aware of how odd that must look. I told a visiting commonwealth’s attorney that when I’d gotten to work that morning, I was dead, and the medical examiners had reanimated me. For an instant, his face turned pale.

The cardiologist decided I was having premature ventricular contractions and recommended that I limit my stress. I decided I needed to get away. Far away. But who would I take with me? I thought of my FBI agent friend Ed Sulzbach. He worked out of the Richmond field office, and we’d gotten to know each other years earlier after I heard him lecture about criminal profiling.

Taking the cardiologist’s advice, I decided on a research trip that would also be restorative. I invited Ed and his wife, Susan, to Austria and Germany. She declined but told me to take her husband and have fun. He’d make sure I was safe, she added. What Ed and I didn’t know at the time was Susan had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

When Ed and I landed in Vienna, I rented a BMW 735i we’d take turns driving from Austria to Munich. I spent a lot of time thinking about my life, imagining how much Charlie would have loved the trip. Not so long ago, he’d visited my house in Windsor Farms. He tried to reconnect, and I’d started crying. Then we argued.

What we’d had was broken beyond repair. He knew it too. What I didn’t say was that I’d gotten involved romantically with a woman. I’ll call her Merle because it’s not my business to out anyone, and as far as I know she’s remained closeted. We started out as friends, and I was caught by surprise when we became more than that.

I’d never thought of myself as bisexual. But clearly, I am, and it would take most of my life to come to terms with that part of myself. I didn’t grow up aspiring to such a thing. In Montreat, that was the stuff of fire and brimstone. When people ask why I decided on that “lifestyle,” I always reply that our attractions aren’t a decision. They’re not a choice.

By the time I left for Austria, Merle had broken up with me, and I was having a hard time getting over her. She didn’t want to be friends, and we weren’t anymore.

“I will not forget you,” I wrote in Austria on June 29. “I see you in the roses blooming in the wild and the bells chiming late at night. I see you in the cafes when young lovers stare into each other’s eyes and laugh as they smoke, knees brushing and bodies begging for a way to be closer…”

My favorite place was Schloss Ernegg. Built in the twelfth century, it was set back on a huge property lush with wild orchids, cherries, roses, ancient yew and linden trees. White stucco with a red roof, the three-story castle was filled with suits of armor, medieval furniture, and old oil paintings.

There were very few guests while Ed and I were there, and I enjoyed the quiet spookiness of the place. Each day I’d go for walks alone with my notebook, reflecting on my divorce and all that had transpired since. The castle was next to a golf course that was deserted. Each late afternoon, I’d sit on the edge of a green writing in my journal.

“Not a cloud in the sky. Daisies white and yellow. Red poppies… Trees like bottle brushes… farmland and mountains in the distance. Reminds me of Western North Carolina. Air like cool, distilled water…”

I was told Schloss Ernegg is haunted. I’m pretty sure that’s true.

“I’m a little weirded out,” I wrote on the early morning of July 1.

I’d placed my deodorant inside my cosmetic bag on the back of the toilet. When I returned to the bedroom, I heard a loud clatter. The deodorant seemed to have leapt out on its own and was on the floor.

“It scared the hell out of me, and I don’t see how it happened,” I described at the time. “Also, there was a misty shadow on the wall, moving like the faint shadow of leaves when the sun is shining through trees beyond a window. But there is no tree so tall as to make a shadow. And after a minute the shadows were gone. And I’m sitting here, thinking, no this isn’t happening to me…”

At breakfast I mentioned the experience. I found out that one of the castle’s ghosts was a young beautiful blond servant girl who had misbehaved and was locked in the cellar. That made sense as I thought of something flinging my deodorant to the floor. There was a portrait of her across from my bed. She held white flowers in one hand, a handkerchief in the other.

The next day, Ed and I set out for the town of Mauthausen, quaintly filled with stucco homes painted in pastel colors, their gardens sumptuous. Such an irony that any place could be civilized and beautiful when located close to a notorious former concentration camp. I wanted to see it after reading the book Mauthausen: The History of a Death Camp.

I needed to put my hands on the Holocaust’s atrocities the same way I did a dead body, to feel what had happened, to see for myself. That required visiting. I felt led in that direction without knowing why. Maybe I could incorporate something about it in my next Scarpetta novel. I imagined my character’s reaction to such an unthinkable crime scene.

Ed and I parked our car and followed a very steep, narrow path. I heard children laughing and sheep bleating as we reached the road that would take us to the death camp. It looked like a huge granite penitentiary. I was sickened by photographs of the emaciated Jews carrying granite up from the quarry. Many of them were pushed off the cliffs.

When we toured one of the barracks, I smelled death as vividly as if I were inside the morgue cooler. I asked Ed if he smelled it, and he didn’t. I said we had to leave. He was looking around while drinking a beer, baffled, asking if I was okay. I shook my head, no. I wasn’t okay and needed to go. I’d wanted to experience what happened at Mauthausen, and I did.

“I felt sick in there,” I wrote in my journal.

While in Austria, I had an overpowering sense that I’d been there before. Perhaps it was my ancestral DNA stirring, since my mother’s German-speaking family was from that part of the world.

36

THE FALL OF 1991, I BROKE THE SOUND BARRIER FLYING ON THE CONCORDE for my first book tour in the U.K. My schedule was light compared to what it would be from then on. There were days with nothing, and I’d packed my tennis racquet, playing on grass a few times.

While in London, I was hoping to visit the famous detective novelist P. D. James. Years earlier when I was writing mysteries no one wanted, I sent a few letters to her, asking for advice. I presumptuously included a couple chapters, and she graciously replied that she couldn’t read them. But she wished me well.

My U.K. tour was the beginning of strange questions by the media as I fended for myself abroad. While on the BBC in Brighton, I was asked if I would agree to being “raped for research.”

“Why?” I said to the male interviewer. “Are you volunteering for something?”

The night of September 10, my cab driver asked me out for drinks, trying to date me, and it was a scary situation. He stopped for gas, then drove around for an hour and a half, finally dropping me off at the Cranley Hotel at 2:30 a.m. Later that day he came back looking for me. It would be the last time I’d travel on tour alone. From then on, I’d take at least one assistant and have security.

After I returned to the U.S., I continued my research. On August 22, I remotely witnessed the execution by electric chair of convicted killer Derick Peterson. I’d been invited to do this by Governor Doug Wilder’s chief of staff, Jay Shropshire. At the appointed time, Jay was on speakerphone with the prison while I wrote down every word.

“The governor’s not going to intervene,” Jay informed the warden.

“All right, we’re about to begin the first cycle,” he announced.

At 11:07 when they thought the inmate was dead, they realized he wasn’t.

“He’s not expired. We’re going to have to run it through another cycle,” the warden said.

“What?” Jay asked.

“It may have malfunctioned…”

This gave me the idea of what would happen to the executed inmate Ronnie Joe Waddell in my novel Cruel and Unusual. As I continued my research, I was given a tour of the Richmond prison on Spring Street before it was torn down. The crude wooden electric chair had been built by inmates. A warden explained exactly what was done during an execution. I thought about an autopsy I’d witnessed several years earlier.

While the prison was still running, all executions took place in downtown Richmond, and the bodies were delivered to the OCME directly afterward. Usually, the autopsies took place close to midnight, the inmate dead maybe an hour when he was lifted onto one of our steel tables. I remember the temperature of the body was 106 degrees, indicating it had been much hotter at the time of death.

What a terrible way to die, and my eyes played tricks on me as I watched the autopsy, at times touching the body. He was so warm and limber, his veins standing out as if he was alive. Most medical examiners and cops I knew were jaded against violent criminals. I don’t understand how one can see brutalized victims on autopsy tables and feel much empathy for those who put them there.

I wanted to know how I really felt about capital punishment. I couldn’t have an informed opinion unless I was familiar with the details. In later years I would talk to three inmates on death row, facing them through thick glass. Not one of them struck me as truthful, including Darlie Routier in Texas, convicted of stabbing her two young sons to death in 1996.

I don’t believe she did it but got the impression she was being evasive about what really happened. I felt sorry for her but not the serial killer Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, known as the Railroad Killer. When I interviewed him in 2003 for an ABC Primetime special, he said that whenever he was about to murder, he saw a purple aura. Seven years later, I would meet Christa Pike, the youngest woman sentenced to death in the U.S.

In 1995 at the age of eighteen, she tortured and murdered a Job Corps classmate, carving a pentagram into her chest and keeping a piece of her skull. I interviewed Christa in 2010 at the Tennessee Prison for Women and she enjoyed the attention, seeming without a conscience. I was told that while in maximum security she tried to strangle another inmate with a shoelace.

In 2001, I witnessed the execution of Robert William Clayton in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’d been convicted of brutally murdering nineteen-year-old Rhonda Kay Timmons in 1985. A groundskeeper at her apartment complex in Tulsa, he’d noticed her sunbathing in front of her unit while her husband was at work.

Robert Clayton forced her into the apartment and tried to rape her. When she resisted, he strangled her with the top of her swimsuit, beating and stabbing her. I sat with her mother and stepfather as Clayton died by lethal injection. What I remember most are the ugly faces he made through the glass partition separating him from the witnesses.

He denied his crime until the end and was hateful. I could imagine him murdering Rhonda and believing she had it coming. When the lethal drugs rushed through his veins, his face turned blue as he asphyxiated, his diaphragm heaving. While this was going on other inmates in the prison were kicking their cell doors.

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

With each one, the mother, Pat Bullard, saw Robert Clayton stabbing her daughter. Again, and again.

“It was the first time I saw her die,” Pat later told me. “Prior to that I’d never envisioned it.”

During the execution, she gripped my hand and prattled silly jokes as if she were a five-year-old. After it was over, she apologized, saying it was her way of coping. I asked if the death of her daughter’s murderer was closure.

“I hate that word,” Pat said. “There’s no closure except that he’s not in our lives anymore.”

I thought about what Marcella often commented. When someone takes out a victim, he takes out everyone around them. The ripple effect never ends. A crime against one is a crime against all, reverberating eternally like the Big Bang. After the execution, I sat alone in my hotel room writing in the near dark.

I tried to pinpoint what I felt during those three minutes when I watched the convicted killer die. The honest answer is not much. I’d reviewed Rhonda Timmons’s case records and seen the photographs of her bloody dead body draped over the side of the crib with her infant son inside it. I imagined her husband walking in and finding that.

I didn’t feel sorry for Rhonda’s killer. I was impassive as I watched him struggle for his last breath. My only concern about capital punishment is what it does to the rest of us. I have no pity for the monsters who inflict the damage I’ve seen. I couldn’t possibly.

On October 21, 1991, I flew to Los Angeles to meet Jodie Foster. She was to be interviewed onstage by Charles Champlin, and he’d promised to introduce us. Once again, I didn’t know what to wear and returned to Montaldo’s.

I bought an Escada midnight blue cashmere blazer with lime green silk lining. I didn’t want to look like I’d gone to much trouble and wore it over a T-shirt and jeans with a pair of Cole Haan basketweave loafers. Checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel, I was excited but extremely nervous.

Charles Champlin picked me up, and we drove to the University of Southern California to watch a screening of Little Man Tate that Jodie directed. That week she was on the cover of Time magazine and the auditorium was packed. Hundreds were turned away at the door.

During the intermission before her interview with Charles, he sneaked me into the stairwell where Jodie was waiting with two bodyguards. She was dressed in a denim jacket, khaki slacks, and loafers with no socks. I recall that she wore no jewelry or makeup. The instant Charles introduced us I knew she hadn’t been forewarned. She had no idea who I was or why I was there.

“Patricia’s writing novels you should know about. She has this character…,” Charles started to say as Jodie looked blank and uncomfortable.

I felt bad for her and embarrassed for me. Charles shouldn’t have foisted me on her without checking first. He awkwardly explained about Scarpetta, but Jodie had tuned out. I wasn’t in the stairwell with her more than two minutes and hurried back to my seat. Afterward, Charles and I returned to the hotel. We had drinks in the Polo Lounge, an awkwardness between us.

I began to sense he might like me a bit too much, and that might explain his wanting me to fly across the country. Had the only objective been for Jodie and me to meet because of a possible movie, why wouldn’t he have cleared it with her earlier? Why have me go to so much trouble and put her on the spot like that? Charles seemed disappointed when I said I needed to turn in for the night.

During this trip, I met with film agent Diane Cairns at International Creative Management (ICM) and agreed for her to represent me. She sent Postmortem and Body of Evidence to Jodie, but she wasn’t interested. I didn’t give up, thinking she’d be great in the role, as did many of my fans.

At the end of 1991, Michael Congdon was ready to make my next deal, this time for two books. I asked if he could get me a million dollars. He worked out the numbers while riding the subway and said he didn’t think my request was feasible. He would sell the U.S. rights to All That Remains and Cruel and Unusual for $700,000.

By the spring of 1992, I thought it best if Michael and I didn’t work together anymore. I was grateful for all he’d done but felt I’d outgrown his agency. I needed a big thinker, and Diane Cairns recommended ICM’s Esther Newberg, describing her as a super-agent, and a legend. The New York Post called her “one of the most powerful agents in the literary world.”

I met her for the first time that summer at Michael’s restaurant on West 55th Street. I told her it was cheeky to pick a place with the same name as the agent I’d fired. Of course, that wasn’t the reason we were having lunch there. But it would be in character for her to do something like that, I’d discover.

In due time I’d see that Esther could be quite intimidating, nothing warm and fuzzy about her on the surface. She doesn’t back down from a fight and isn’t one to cross. But she’s honest, incredibly smart, and more sensitive than she lets on. She told me she’d read the manuscript of my third Scarpetta novel, All That Remains.

“You really kill people in your books.” She picked at her Niçoise salad.

Esther explained that she was surprised when the reporter Abby Turnbull got murdered. Most authors didn’t knock off repeat characters, she commented, adding that my style was more like true crime than a mystery.

“Well, that’s because of what I’ve experienced. I know these horrible things happen in real life,” I explained, too nervous to eat my burger.

Esther has an unusual background, working in politics for fifteen years on Capitol Hill. One of the six “Boiler Room Girls” who socialized with Ted Kennedy, she was present at the party on Chappaquiddick Island when Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after Kennedy’s car plunged into a pond.

Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes suggested that Esther become a literary agent, and by the time she took me on as a client, she was a legend. It didn’t take her long to prove her prowess, selling the U.S. rights for The Body Farm and From Potter’s Field for $4.5 million. I was speechless, and she was only getting started.

I began a habit of sending Esther a dozen roses for every million. At one point she had more than thirty dozen arrive at once and couldn’t fit them in her office. Prior to J. K. Rowling, I was the highest-paid female author in the world, winning every major crime-writing award. Typical headlines were MURDER SHE WRITES, and MYSTERY WOMAN, and A CAREER TO DIE FOR, and CORNWELL’S LIFE OF CRIME.

The summer of 1992, I heard that actress Demi Moore was interested in playing Scarpetta. Esther thought it a fantastic idea. A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise was about to hit the theaters, and Demi was making Indecent Proposal with Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford. I told Esther it was amazing that Demi was interested. But I needed to have closure with Jodie Foster.

I wanted to hear for myself that she didn’t want to play Scarpetta, and on September 25, I met her in an L.A. diner. There with an assistant, she was dressed in a rumpled white T-shirt, jeans. Alone and feeling foolish, I didn’t look nearly as cool as she did. I remembered our awkward visit in a stairwell the year before. She remembered it too, saying we’d met before. I was flattered.

I asked again about her playing Scarpetta. I said that she was the top choice among my fans.

“Don’t you know why this is a bad idea?” she leaned forward and asked in a quiet intense voice.

“No,” I replied, disappointment sucking the air out of the room. “I think you’d be amazing.”

She didn’t go into detail about why she shouldn’t play Scarpetta. But I got the drift that my books were too much like The Silence of the Lambs. I didn’t agree, explaining that Scarpetta was nothing like Clarice Starling. But Jodie was unmoved.

“What if you directed the movie and Demi Moore starred in it?” I made another attempt, and Jodie answered with a cryptic smile.

It was one of those meetings that was over before it started. We were together in the diner no more than a half hour, and I felt stunned as we were leaving. Jodie wasn’t going to play Scarpetta, and I think she sensed I was crushed. As we emerged on the sidewalk, she asked if I needed a ride somewhere, and I was even more stunned. I told her that a media escort was picking me up.

Not to be confused with a limo driver, but I left out that part, hoping my escort wouldn’t roll up that moment in her cluttered compact car, a woven God’s eye dangling from the rearview mirror. During the early years of my career, I didn’t have professional drivers or a publicist traveling with me. There were people who volunteered to squire authors around when they were on the road for tour events. It wasn’t ideal.

As nice as these media escorts might be, they also were quite sociable, even fans, asking endless questions. By the time I’d arrive for an interview, I’d already been through several and was exhausted. Waiting on the sidewalk for my media escort, I watched Jodie drive away in her Saab convertible. I headed to the airport, on my way to Australia and New Zealand for a book tour.

While there, I was leaving my hotel in Canberra, headed to my next interviews. I was about to climb into the media escort’s car when the concierge excitedly ran outside hailing me. Demi Moore was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. Dashing back inside, I wondered how she knew where I was.

She asked about my tour in Australia and reminded me that she was serious about playing Scarpetta. I told her the role was hers if she wanted it, and we agreed to get together as soon as I returned to the U.S. After that it was a whirlwind. She invited me to watch filming of Indecent Proposal, and I flew to L.A., checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel again.

The next day she sent a mile-long stretch limousine, and I was impressed by the dishes of candy, the booze in crystal decanters. I arrived on set at the Paramount Pictures lot, and she couldn’t have been warmer or more unassuming, introducing me to Robert Redford. I shook his hand as images from some of my favorite films flashed in my head.

The Sting

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

The Way We Were

I’d always thought he was one of the most handsome and classiest men on the planet and here I was chatting with him.

“I’m sure everybody says this to you, but you’re such an intelligent actor on top of being a fabulous one.” I said something gushy like that.

“No, actually, everybody doesn’t say that to me,” he replied with a touch of bemusement.

After filming, Demi invited me to visit her dressing room, and I climbed into her black Mercedes sedan, startled that it was exactly like what Scarpetta drives in my early books. It impressed me that Demi drove herself, no assistants hovering. I was fascinated by the inside of her trailer with its makeup station, and a vast wardrobe hanging from racks.

Afterward, we went to the Hotel Bel-Air for tea, where I met one of her production assistants. Soon after this Demi invited me to her home in Malibu where we watched A Few Good Men. Or better said, I did. Demi fell asleep on the sofa with one of her young daughters. The next time I visited, I met Bruce Willis for the first time. I had no idea what to say to him as I thought of Look Who’s Talking and Die Hard.

“What made you want to be an actor?” I asked yet one more lamebrain question.

He talked about his early years as a bartender and how much he loved to make people smile and laugh. I visited him and Demi at their house in Sun Valley, Idaho. Working out with her and her trainer, I bravely tried to keep up with them, Demi as fit as a professional athlete.

We were jogging along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu one day when actor Jack Klugman walked by on the sidewalk.

“The old Quincy just passed the new one,” I said to Demi, alluding to the first TV show about a medical examiner.

It seemed prophetic, and we continued discussing how to adapt Cruel and Unusual into a film. I’d rented a house in Malibu while writing the screenplay, having no idea what I was doing. At the same time, I was working on a possible TV series with Faye Dunaway and writing the treatment. Again, not knowing much about such things.

In early November 1992, Demi flew to Richmond and spent a day with me at the OCME. She put on a surgical gown like the rest of us, and that morning was an especially bad one. I always knew when heinous cases were coming in. I could feel it in the air like a storm about to hit.

A high school student had gunned down his parents and brother, the three bodies arriving with paper bags over their destroyed heads. There was a sexual abuse homicide of a child. I remember at least five awful cases that morning, and Demi witnessed all of it without flinching.

After the autopsies were done, we cleaned up and walked to Shockoe Slip for lunch at the Tobacco Company. As we were shown to a table, heads were turning, a lot of whispering and nudging.

“Are you who I think you are?” the waitress asked Demi.

“Who do you think I am?” she replied solemnly.

At least three members of the wait staff began hovering and constantly topping off our water glasses. The waitress was so nervous she forgot the day’s specials. Demi was staying at my house and the next day we visited the FBI Academy together. We hung out with female agents and got some training on the firing range.

On November 11, I attended her birthday party in Las Vegas with Bruce Willis, Woody Harrelson, Mike Myers, and other megastars. They engaged in high-stakes gambling in a casino while I worked a slot machine, unhappy that I lost $60. We attended the Cirque du Soleil, and I was impressed by Demi’s ability to whistle through her fingers.

I flew back to L.A. with everyone on a Columbia Studios Gulfstream jet and must admit I didn’t feel I belonged with all these luminaries. I picked a seat in the front cabin where there was no one else except a bearded man who said hello.

“And what do you do?” I asked Rob Reiner.

I had no idea who he was, and he diplomatically mentioned starting out in TV as a character named Meathead in All in the Family. He was the director of A Few Good Men.

“Well, now I feel really stupid,” I told him.

We’d laugh about that in years to come, and I’d remind him of how gracious he was on that occasion. He could have made me feel even smaller than I did. I forever will be stunned and crushed by the murders of Rob and Michele on the first day of Hanukkah in 2025.

After Demi’s birthday bash, she sent me a handwritten letter.

“It was a wonderful birthday and having you there was a treat… I want to express my deep appreciation for the educational trip to the morgue as well as the FBI Academy. You shared your life and friends, and I will never forget your kindness. Anyway, enough mushy stuff. All my love, Demi.”

37

EARLY DECEMBER 1992, I ATTENDED THE NEW YORK PREMIERE OF A Few Good Men. Demi took me to a party where I met Donald Trump, and we chatted about publishing and writing bestsellers. I said hello to Christopher Reeve and mentioned that I missed him as Superman.

“Well, I don’t,” he retorted, walking off.

Increasingly, I felt out of my element. I didn’t know how to relate to people of such magnitude and was overwhelmed. Demi was talking about casting Bruce Willis as Scarpetta’s investigative sidekick Pete Marino. I was excited but unable to shake anxiety and dread. I began seeing a psychiatrist in Richmond and she suggested I try the antidepressant Prozac.

That proved to be a near-fatal mistake. I couldn’t calm down and began drinking more. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. Demi began asking when she could see my screenplay, and I was increasingly frantic. That December my father and Rita joined Betsy Mikell and a few of my other friends at my rental house in Malibu. Spending a few days with Dad didn’t help my mood.

In January 1993, it was raining hard in Los Angeles. I was alone listening to the surf pounding the pilings under the house. There were mudslides, and my Mercedes sports car was in the shop after I’d gotten a flat tire. The dealership was backed up with repairs, and I’d been given their last loaner, a small 190E sedan.

Had I been driving my convertible instead of the loaner sedan on Sunday, January 10, I likely wouldn’t be here to tell this story. That morning the rain was heavy, and a dead seal had washed up in front of my house. I was unsettled and unable to calm down. Prozac made me feel like an engine overspeeding. I mixed a pitcher of Bloody Marys, figuring I’d be fine because I wasn’t going anywhere.

Midday my film agent Diane Cairns called and said she’d finished reading my first draft of the screenplay. She asked me to meet for dinner at Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica. I was ecstatic but scared. I knew I should hire a limousine to take me there. But I wasn’t thinking right. The Prozac made me more impulsive and reckless. I couldn’t seem to make intelligent decisions.

I decided to drive myself and got to the restaurant fine. I didn’t drink much, still feeling the effects of the Bloody Marys. Of course, I shouldn’t have had any alcohol at all but indulged in a few liqueurs. I also didn’t eat much of my pasta with marinara sauce, taking most of it with me in a takeout container.

Leaving the restaurant between 9 and 10 p.m., I merged back onto the Pacific Coast Highway. It was pitch-black and still raining. The last thing I remember is being confused by taillights getting closer on my right. I thought I must be in the wrong lane. I slowed down, and the taillights kept getting closer.

I didn’t realize that what I saw was an abandoned van pulled off on the shoulder. I slammed into it at an angle, my car flipping several times. I landed on the other side of the highway, the roof caved in. I recall hanging upside down before slipping out of the seat belt. Blood dripped, and I thought, I’ve ruined my head.

I’d find out later the inside of the car was splattered with pasta and marinara sauce. The screenplay of Cruel and Unusual disappeared, as did my Oakley sunglasses. Later, more images would come back to me. A firefighter in a yellow slicker asked in a loud voice if I could hear him, and I answered “yes.”

Cut out of the car with hydraulic tools, I was med flighted to the UCLA hospital. I suffered a concussion, a sprained neck, and lacerations to my face and head. I woke up while a doctor was stitching my scalp as Irene Brafstein sat nearby watching, her oxygen tank parked by her leg.

A former tutor to child stars, she was my best friend in L.A. She explained that I’d given someone her number as my emergency contact. I didn’t remember that. She said I’d informed the doctors they could take all my organs. I wouldn’t need them anymore. I didn’t remember that either.

“You were saying a lot of crazy stuff,” she said.

The clothing I’d worn in the accident was returned at the hospital. It was surreal seeing my bloody Chanel shirt and Escada blazer that had been cut off me by the rescue squad. Betsy flew to L.A. to stay with me in Malibu, and my first night home Demi called. I told her what had happened, and she was incredulous.

“That was you?” she asked.

She said several of her bodyguards had been stuck in traffic because of the accident. When they drove past the mangled white Mercedes, they were certain the driver had to be dead. I’ve often wondered if I was and came back. I remember an out-of-body experience, watching firefighters extricate me. It was as if I were hovering over the wreck.

I returned to Richmond with stitches, and bits of glass still in my scalp. Charged with DUI, I wondered what was going on that I would do anything so stupid. I was beside myself. How wasteful after all I’d been given. Just when it seemed my life was everything I’d dreamed of, I almost killed myself. Was it intentional? I needed to figure that out before it was too late.

Demi and I had another visit scheduled at the FBI Academy. We were supposed to attend a multiday course on profiling and criminal investigation. I told her not to come. I said I needed to figure out why I wasn’t dead. The last thing on my mind was the movie. She wanted to see the script and I said no. Maybe it was best if she didn’t play Scarpetta after all.

I didn’t have a contract, nothing but a verbal agreement. I called my film agent and said the deal was off. When the head of Columbia studios, Michael Nathanson, rang my house, I wouldn’t take his call. Columbia threatened to sue me, and I said to go ahead. Nothing came of it. But I wasn’t thinking right, my neck and head hurting like crazy. I kept falling asleep without warning as if I had narcolepsy.

I owe Demi an apology and have told her that. What happened to the movie wasn’t her fault, and to this day I feel bad about how much of her time I wasted. I can’t imagine how aggravated she must have been. I didn’t realize it then, but I wasn’t myself and shouldn’t have been making major decisions. Looking back, I don’t think I was ready to turn over Scarpetta to her or anyone.

“If I did, I’d be giving my power away,” I noted in my journal at the time.

On January 19, 1993, I left for the FBI Academy. Demi was supposed to be with me, but I’d blown her off. I went alone and could scarcely think straight. I stayed at Quantico several days, living in the dorm just as I’d always done, speaking at a banquet on January 21. I wasn’t cogent and made my talk very short.

“I just thanked everyone for everything and briefly relayed what I have been through and why I was absent for most of the course,” I journaled at the time.

I told my audience of FBI agents that had I not been in a loaner Mercedes sedan I most likely would have been killed.

“This is the near-death experience you hear about but hope you’ll never have,” I said, adding that “it has been good to be here at Quantico with my buddies.”

The entries I made in my journal at the time don’t resemble my handwriting. I still can’t decipher what I was trying to say in some entries. After returning home, I woke up one morning and felt as if I’d had a stroke. Incoherent, I was staggering and couldn’t remember anything. Rushed to the hospital, I twitched so badly I had to be sedated for an MRI.

There was no evidence of a brain injury, and the worst of the symptoms quickly subsided. Throughout it all I was talking to Faye Dunaway. Incredibly supportive, she’d call to see how I was doing and agreed it would be wise for me to check myself into a treatment center. I asked my office to set it up.

While I struggled to recover, I spent much of my time in my bathrobe. I slept a lot and was chronically agitated. After a battery of tests, there was no evidence of permanent damage, but I was scared. My friend Sue Lewis stopped by daily to check on me. Finally, I called Ruth Graham and said I needed her.

She stayed in my Windsor Farms house the weekend of March 12, 1993. A decade had passed since her biography came out, and we weren’t the same people with each other. We were more like equals.

“We are better friends than we’ve ever been,” I wrote in my journal during her visit.

We had as much fun as ever, shopping, and raiding my closet playing dress-up. Ruth and I were about the same size, and we put on Escada suits and neckties to go out to dinner with Betsy. We went to Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and Ruth was the designated driver.

She handled my Mercedes 500E like Richard Petty, and I was reminded of her reputation when I was a kid riding my bicycle in Montreat. The neighbors would warn, “Watch out for Mrs. Graham.” She was notorious for always being in a hurry, flying along the hilly roads, careening around curves.

Not long after her visit to Richmond I stopped taking Prozac and noted that I felt “like myself again.” But I was having terrible nightmares, sweating, tossing and turning. I dreamed I was being chased by people who wanted to rob and kill me. I tried to shoot them with my 9mm pistol, but it wouldn’t work. I heard sirens screaming loudly. In another dream, I was in a plane crash.

Obviously, I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, reliving what I couldn’t recall. Betsy was either at my Richmond house or I was staying on the sofa in her apartment. The first day of April, I checked into Edgehill treatment center in Newport, Rhode Island. In my journal I described it as “one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.”

My first room there had two hospital beds separated by a divider curtain. Beyond my window, huge rocks hulked. Thunder and rain sounded like the ocean washing over the shore. Seagulls startled me as they soared past in graceful flashes of white. The setting was beautiful but not to be enjoyed.

The first few days I was in a ward for patients under close observation. Most of them were heroin and cocaine addicts. I noticed that they joked a lot to mask their misery.

“Almost everybody smokes,” I wrote. “I am feeling invaded. I can’t even read the newspaper without someone interrupting and basically forcing me into a conversation.”

Eventually I moved into a private room and felt like I was in Appalachian Hall again. My days were regimented. Private therapy. Group therapy. Activities like indoor badminton, volleyball, Ping-Pong. I didn’t make friends but was fond of my counselor Kathy. She asked me to keep a journal, and I said I always did.

“This is different,” she explained. “I want you to write down things about yourself and let me read them.”

I wasn’t in the habit of allowing anyone to look at my journals, but I did as she asked. It was the most helpful part of my stay at Edgehill. I realized I had rage that I didn’t want to admit. Some of what I wrote about certain people was vicious and hateful. Lenore Saunders, for example. Also, my father. And Charlie.

Venting those feelings on the page caused them to diminish if not go away over time. I learned I could forgive but that didn’t mean I forgot. It was a good thing to remember what hurt you. But my near-fatal car accident made me realized that the weaknesses I saw in others often were my own. I’ve never been cruel like Lenore Saunders. But I’ve hurt people, including myself.

If I had children, how might they judge me? How would the journalist in me judge myself? “Terribly” was the answer to both questions as I relived mortifying news stories about me. I remembered every shameful and stupid thing I’d ever done. While in the throes of these powerful revelations, I was alerted by my office that Demi Moore was trying to reach me.

Too ashamed to talk to her, I instructed my staff to “politely tell her I can’t contact her for quite a while because I’m on a safari—part of my work for my new book.” This is what I wrote in my journal at the time. I didn’t want Demi to know where I was, and that was silly and unfair. Of all people she would have understood. But I ducked her, and then she didn’t try anymore.

While I was there, Dad and Rita came to see me as part of my therapy. I was honest with him about my feelings, and he was logical like an appellate specialist before a judge. Our relationship was better, but it would never be what I wished. I wanted to discuss the past and ask questions. Why did he walk out on Christmas? Why did he hate Mom so much?

The most he would say is he was afraid she’d kill him in his sleep. But that didn’t make sense. If she was dangerous, why did he leave his children with her? Those dark days were off-limits and always would be. I found it almost impossible communicating with him. If nothing else, our time together validated much of what I’d felt while growing up.

We didn’t discuss my car accident or anything personal. Nor did I with my mother. I’d asked her to visit me in the treatment center. But she made excuses until I gave up and told her not to bother. I began to accept that I would never have a normal mother-daughter relationship with her. I was the parent and always had been.

But she couldn’t help it, and for the rest of her life I would take care of her. On occasion, I brought her on trips. To Aspen, New York, London, but nothing really made her happy, her perception of reality skewed. It wasn’t until late in my career that she would say she was proud of me. She didn’t understand me but accepted who I am.

Dad wasn’t capable of emotionally connecting but I knew he was proud of me too. Toward the end of his life, he would brag about me to strangers. He’d promise to send them signed books, and then forward me their addresses. When I asked him to stop doing that, he replied on a sheet of yellow legal paper, “You need to see a therapist.”

Some things never change, and I learned to live with his lack of warmth. If I revised my expectations, he was manageable, even fun. The time I spent with him in Florida after the treatment center was special because I’d given up trying to turn him into someone he wasn’t. The only way I could repair the past was to make the best of what we had now.

I was discharged from Edgehill on April 25. As it turned out, a judge in Los Angeles sentenced me to a month in a treatment center. Fortunately, I’d already done it on my own. Flying to Miami, I stayed with Dad and Rita three nights at Fort Myers Beach, spending reflective time alone walking along the ocean.

On April 29, Dad, Rita, and I went to see Indecent Proposal starring Demi. They enjoyed it, but all I could think of was what I’d been through.

“It’s hard not to look back on the hope and promise I felt,” I journaled. “I sallied forth into a world I thought I could manage… So here I am back east, convicted of a crime and sentenced to 3 months in a Los Angeles jail (suspended). That was my Hollywood debut.”

Returning to Richmond, I continued having nightmares. I began researching how rescuers cut people out of crashed cars, wanting to know exactly what was done at the scene of my accident. I investigated my own case while researching my fifth novel, The Body Farm, deciding to have Scarpetta’s niece Lucy survive something similar.

I got busy with research again and was back on the tennis court, life returning to some semblance of normal. Cruel and Unusual came out and was an instant bestseller. On June 12, I did a signing and sold a thousand books. The crowds were mind-boggling and would get only bigger.

38

ON JUNE 14, 1993, I HAD LUNCH IN THE SENATE DINING ROOM with Senator Orrin Hatch and FBI Assistant Director Tony Daniels, who headed the Academy at Quantico. I’d become close friends with Orrin, spending an unusual amount of time with him in his office, and riding through the bowels of the Capitol on the blue Senate train or a golf cart.

I based a character on him, Senator Frank Lord, appearing in a few early Scarpetta novels. Orrin introduced me to all sorts of people, including Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, Joe Biden. I knew Orrin didn’t believe Anita Hill’s claim that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. So I asked what really happened.

“I’ll let you find out for yourself,” Orrin replied.

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in his office with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He spent two hours telling me his version of the story. It was typical of Orrin to do something like that.

When we first met in 1992 it was yet another example of synchronicity or providence. While I was in the Beverly Hills Hotel gym on the stair climber, I noticed the tall, elegant man on the treadmill, and thought he looked familiar.

I knew I’d seen him on TV. He started chatting and introduced himself as Orrin Hatch. At this early point in my career, I had only three Scarpetta books published, and he’d never heard of me. We chatted the entire time we were in the gym, and he invited me to have dinner with him and his sons that night.

I declined, thinking I’d feel out of place, and Mormons had a lot of rules. Like not smoking. Or drinking booze. Or anything with caffeine. The next morning when I was checking out, I carried a coffee to the front desk. There was Orrin with several men I assumed were the sons he mentioned. He was paying his bill and wished me a good morning.

“What are you drinking, Patsy?” he asked with that dry sense of humor of his.

“Nothing.” I exaggerated hiding the cup.

Both of us were headed to the airport, and he offered me a ride in his Lincoln Town Car. As we were driven there, he told me about his ambition of running for president one day. He talked about his love for the United States and that he felt he’d been put on this Earth to make it a better place.

After that encounter, I wrote to him asking for a favor. The FBI Academy had severe budget problems and was in a hiring freeze that precluded training new agents. Orrin was the head of Judiciary, and I explained to him what I knew. He responded by touring the Academy with me by his side on September 25, 1993.

“The Senator was such a gentleman with me,” I wrote in my journal. “Treated me with such honor and gave me much credit.”

After the tour, Orrin would include $50 million for FBI training in a new crime bill. We had a very special relationship for many years, and his wife, Elaine, wasn’t happy about it. This was evident one early evening when the three of us were walking to our cars at the Capitol.

She was several steps behind us when Orrin lightly wrapped his arm around my shoulders, telling me how he appreciated our friendship. Suddenly, I was startled by someone touching me from behind. His arm was pulled away rather violently.

“I’ll put up with a lot of things but no touching!” his wife snarled.

Hurrying to my waiting limo, I returned to my hotel, and the next morning he called. The two of us needed to talk, and he asked me to meet him at the Capitol. Leading me into the austere Vice President’s Room outside the Senate chamber, Orrin closed the door. He told me he was sorry for how his wife had acted. He hoped I’d understand what it’s like when someone is “insecure.”

“That’s fine, and I understand completely and have empathy,” I replied. “But please tell her never to come up behind me and do something like that again. I had no idea what was going on. She’s lucky I didn’t turn around and slug her.”

Not a diplomatic thing to say, but I was simply being honest. If I’m walking along a sidewalk and hear someone closing in from behind, I’ll stop what I’m doing and turn around aggressively. After years of the morgue and working with police, it’s my conditioning to assume everything is a potential attack. I told Orrin that, explaining it had nothing to do with his wife.

I didn’t blame her for perhaps wondering about our friendship. I’d visited him in Utah, sitting next to him during the flight there. I even flew him in my helicopter once. On another occasion, he wanted to test drive my V12 Mercedes. I let him take it for a spin around the Capitol while the police watched in befuddlement.

Talking to me about the Mormon faith, he gave me books, including a Mormon Bible. He’d call regularly to see how I was, always ending our chats by threatening to “send the missionaries.” He composed music for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and would play his songs for me.

As we talked inside the Vice President’s Room, I looked around at the ornate wall coverings, the antiques, the dark oil paintings, gilt-framed mirrors, and chandeliers. I thought to myself, This is crazy. It occurred to me that we were closer to an indiscretion than we might realize.

Orrin was devoutly religious and not the sort to cheat. But had he been, I’m not sure what would have happened, if I’m honest about it. I respected him enormously, my feelings for him intense. I watched how kind he was to everyone he came across, calling the security officers, the janitors, and housekeeping staff by name. Orrin was easy to love.

In the summer of 1993, I returned to London for a book tour and hosted a launch party at the Hyde Park Hotel. My dad and Rita flew in for it. So did Ruth Graham. She was dressed in black, wearing pearls, her hair pinned up. I thought how bizarre that she and my father would finally meet.

When I introduced them, they barely said two words to each other. I’m just sorry Billy Graham wasn’t there. Dad used to accuse him of owning all the North Carolina judges. After London, I flew to Nice, France, and spent several days with the Grahams. From there, we drove to Monte Carlo, where I stayed in the Beach Plaza Hotel.

It was one of the few places Billy could go without being bothered, and I got the impression the owner or someone gave them quite a discount. Our first night there we made our way to Chez Cianni on Avenue Princess Grace.

We got there at 7:30, “too early for anyone but us ‘old folks’ who wanted to be left alone,” I wrote in my journal. “Billy moves so painfully, and yet his face would still stop traffic. His blue eyes glint with the light of a 1000 warriors…”

After dinner we returned to the hotel where Billy and I sat in a quiet corner of the lobby discussing the memoir he was writing. He didn’t have a literary agent, and I called Esther Newberg. She agreed to meet with him, and when he showed up at her office, her colleagues kept walking past her door, staring. ICM was used to celebrities. But Billy was in a category by himself.

On July 16, I took a helicopter shuttle from Monte Carlo to the airport in Nice, flying low over the sparkling blue water of the Mediterranean. I’d been captivated by helicopters since first seeing one up close in the early 1970s. I’d gotten off the school bus one afternoon, and parked in the grassy field next to the Montreat gate was a Bell 47 like on the TV show M*A*S*H.

In those days, it was rare to see a helicopter at all, much less up close. It may as well have been a UFO as I slowly walked around the long, crisscrossed metal tail boom. I peered into the glass bubble cockpit, awestruck, wondering what the “stick” and all those instruments did. I rode my bike back to the gate later, disappointed that the helicopter was gone.

Apparently, someone important had flown in to meet with Billy Graham. I heard it was Muhammad Ali or Richard Nixon, but rather much doubt it was either. The boxing legend was notoriously afraid of flying, and the president of the United States likely wasn’t buzzing around by himself in a single-engine civilian bird.

When I saw that helicopter, I never imagined it was a glimpse into my own future. One day I’d become a pilot, and in 2004 would chopper Mom to the Grahams’. It was the first time she’d been to their house since that snowy January day in 1966. Now she was arriving in my Bell 407, thundering down and landing inside the split-rail fence, blowing roses everywhere.

After my first helicopter flight in 1993, I was smitten. From that point on I began taking helicopters on research trips. It was a great way to set scenes while getting a bird’s-eye view from the air. I’d fly with the charming and handsome Whit Baldwin, the owner of Richmond’s HeloAir and at the time single.

When we were buzzing around, we often had dinner and many adventures. In New York City we’d go to the 21 Club, eating steaks and drinking very good Scotch. We smoked cigars, laughing a lot. When we flew, I’d sit up front in the left seat, and being a passenger wasn’t enough. I was curious about how everything worked.

Whit began explaining the cyclic (stick), the collective that controls the power, and how to talk on the radio. I decided that Lucy would be a helicopter pilot in my Scarpetta novels. I began lessons with one of HeloAir’s instructors, Rob Roberts, and there were many instances when I was tempted to quit. I thought I’d never learn to hover, but one day it happened.

I got lost on my first long-distance solo, flying over endless pine forests, getting low on fuel. Finally, I had to call the Richmond air traffic control tower for a heading, and a mayday was declared. Landing in Petersburg, I refueled without having done it by myself before. Meanwhile, several old-timer pilots were watching. The overcast had settled even lower. I couldn’t see much but grayness.

“Which way is Richmond?” I had to ask, and they pointed.

I finally got my license in 1999, and to this day still fly with Whit three or four times a year. Piloting requires me to be present. I can’t think about anything else while I’m doing it. Usually, I have my NASA friend Ken Dudley with me. He’s also a chopper pilot. I figure with NASA and Whit on board I’m about as safe as anyone could be.

With each new Scarpetta story, I’ve always wanted to introduce my audience to aspects of forensics and crimefighting that are new and exciting. The journalist in me needs to know what I’m writing about, and my mantra is to show up. If you look, you never know what will find you. In late July 1993, I visited the research facility the Body Farm for the first time.

My commercial flight to Knoxville, Tennessee, had an eventful start. I’d clipped my mobile phone on my belt, and a worker on the ramp at Washington National Airport (as it was called then) thought I had a gun on my hip. As I buckled up in my seat waiting for takeoff, two air marshals boarded and I could tell by their faces that something was wrong.

I sensed they were looking for someone. I decided a fugitive must be on the plane and I calculated what to do. I would trip the person as he tried to resist. Maybe I could help catch the bad guy. It was a terrifying moment when one of the marshals stopped next to my seat and flicked open the snap on his holster, his hand ready to draw down on me.

He told me to stand up slowly and let him see my hands. Then he looked disgusted, realizing it was a phone on my belt and not a gun.

“Sorry about the delay, folks,” the chief pilot said over the intercom. “One of the passengers was armed with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic phone.”

Everybody laughed except me. In Knoxville, my cab driver introduced himself as “Cowboy” and said he wrote songs and played the piano. He dropped me off at the Hyatt, and that night I took another cab to Calhoun’s on the Tennessee River. It was common for me to eat out alone, looking around, making notes about what I saw and heard.

One of the ways I learned to write dialogue was to eavesdrop. I’d sit in a restaurant and write down verbatim what I overheard from the nearby tables. People don’t talk in complete sentences. They use non sequiturs and mangle words. Snooping as a kid and working as a journalist were excellent training for fiction.

I learned to pay attention to what people really say. The best example of an author who does this masterfully is Ernest Hemingway. When I read his dialogue, I know he was a listener. I recommend to other writers that they carry a small notebook everywhere they go.

Taking pictures or recordings with a phone is easy and has utility. I do it all the time on research trips. But writing down what I hear and see causes my brain to encode the information. My attention can’t wander and the poet in me awakens. Often, I don’t need to refer to my notes later. I remember because I was paying attention.

My first night in Knoxville at the restaurant Calhoun’s, I sat at a table covered in red-checked cloth, faux Tiffany lamps glowing, antlers and deer heads on the walls, ceiling fans spinning. A boxing match played on the TV over the bar as I feasted on barbecue, fried onions, biscuits drenched in butter, and Jack Daniel’s pie.

The next morning, I got a tour of the Knoxville Police Department, spending time with Art Bohanan, the skeleton in his office missing a few pieces. A senior forensic investigator, Art had invented a superglue cabinet he called a Cyanoacrylate Blowing Contraption. In my novel The Body Farm, the character Dr. Shade was inspired by him.

Art explained that fuming with superglue “fixes” latent fingerprints. He emphasized the importance of using a vapor that doesn’t overcoat the ridge detail. He demonstrated that his contraption could lift prints from nylon running shorts or a windbreaker. Once he superglued the outline of a hand left on the ankle of a murdered sex worker found in a dumpster.

That afternoon, he drove me to the Body Farm behind the University of Tennessee’s hospital. Inside the fifteen-foot-high unpainted wooden fence were two wooded acres scattered with decomposing bodies donated to forensic science. The point of studying decomposition is to learn more about determining time of death.

We were met by Bill Bass, the anthropologist who started the place. It was a hot muggy day, and I could smell the stench as we got out of the car, putting on gloves but no other PPE, including surgical masks. I braced myself for what I knew would be most unpleasant. I can’t stand the foul odors of decomposition and burned flesh.

It was an incredible act of will when I’d scribe for Marcella while she autopsied a floater, or someone charred in a fire. One morning her patient was a man who’d fallen off his boat in the James River while fishing with his young son. The body wasn’t recovered for a week during hot weather. The stench bristled in the air as Marcella and I descended in the elevator.

“Sometimes I don’t know how you do this,” I said to her.

“I try to envision people the way they were before ending up here,” she answered.

The dead man was a horror, but as she autopsied him and I scribed, I imagined him vital and smiling. I saw the sun shining on the river as he fished with his little boy. Marcella determined that the man didn’t drown. He’d had a heart attack and that’s why he went overboard.

As I prepared to tour the Body Farm, I remembered the purpose of what I was about to see. The dead volunteers once had lives, careers, hopes, dreams, loved ones. They selflessly had wanted to help further science. Bill Bass unlocked the fence’s front gate, and we stepped inside what looked like a battlefield, the bodies placed about in various poses and situations, some clothed, some not, cattle tags in the ears.

One body was behind the wheel of a rusting white Cadillac, another in an open body bag, the ribs showing. Some bodies were covered by sheets. A body bound with nylon rope was in a hole filled with water. Tiny yellow flags marked skeletonized remains that needed to be collected and cleaned for examination.

Old bones were almost indistinguishable from the earth. They look like sticks, stones, and debris as the body is reclaimed by nature. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amputated limbs from the hospital were strewn about. A man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer was on top of the dirt. He’d filled out the paperwork to donate his body before putting a gun to his head.

I could tell that an elderly man hadn’t been out there long. He was dressed in maroon polyester pants, a white shirt, a skinny silk maroon tie, and black socks. I was told he’d overdosed on drugs in a hotel room. I squatted to get a good look, noticing he had no teeth. Surveying the muck around me, I found his dentures bright pink, the stainless steel shining.

A body sled leaned against the fence, gurneys parked here and there. Near the gate was a mailbox. When the red flag was up, it meant a message was waiting. That was how the anthropologists left notes for each other. Cameras were mounted in trees, and at night they recorded fat opossums and rats helping themselves.

I noticed buzzard feathers everywhere. Leathery skin and exposed bones teemed with maggots that are tattletales. They can tell us when the decedent died and if the person was on drugs. More than forty decomposing bodies were there that day, and a few had sutured incisions from autopsies. Some had been embalmed and others not.

Bill Bass told me about a Civil War soldier who still “had red meat” when his body was found.

“I thought he’d been dead only a year,” Bill said. “I missed it by a hundred and twelve years. That’s what got all this started. They say you should learn from your mistakes.”

We walked around, many of the dead mostly skeletonized, their jaws gaping as if startled. I told Art and Bill that I’d like to fund an experiment if they were willing. I wanted an unclothed body to be placed on a concrete slab that was enclosed in a plyboard structure and left for a month at this time of year.

“I’d like to see what happens if you place a quarter under the buttocks,” I explained.

I was curious whether the coin would leave a pattern on the skin and suspected it might. Art and Bill agreed it was an interesting question and told me to come back at the appointed time to see the results. A month later I returned, and we entered the plyboard enclosure. They turned the body over for the unveiling.

The quarter had oxidized unevenly, leaving a pattern on the desiccated skin. That was the basis for evidence relating to the young girl murdered in my novel The Body Farm. In the story, Scarpetta notices a strangely shaped discoloration on the victim’s skin and matches it to a quarter found in the suspect’s basement.

What Bill, Art, and I saw was the incomplete outline of the quarter and the eagle on the back of it. Had my experiment failed, I wouldn’t have used that scenario in my plot. I can’t bring myself to write about something I know isn’t true. Whatever I say must be within the realm of possibility. If I don’t believe it, neither will my audience.

My mission at the Body Farm had been successful. I was ecstatic despite my surroundings. It was fall now, the afternoon overcast, the Tennessee River the brownish color of tarnished copper. UT’s Vols were playing the South Carolina Gamecocks, and the home team football fans were decked out in blaze orange.

Art, Bill, and I went to Calhoun’s for lunch. Unfazed by our morning at the Farm, they chowed down on baby back ribs served with white rice. I didn’t eat a thing.

39

I DEDICATED THE BODY FARM TO ORRIN HATCH “FOR HIS TIRELESS fight against crime.” President Bill Clinton found out and asked him about it. Then the president said he wanted to meet me.

On September 8, 1994, I was starting my book tour for The Body Farm, and while in Washington, D.C., had lunch with Orrin in his office. He picked up the phone and arranged for me to sit down with the president. Orrin and I headed to the White House and were shown into the Oval Office.

I was directed to an antique chair upholstered in pale yellow silk where I waited nervously. Momentarily, a door opened, and President Clinton walked in wearing a dark blue suit and blue-and-gold-patterned tie. He had an imposing presence and seemed to make the room small as he sat in a chair close to me beneath a portrait of George Washington.

This was three months after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered in Los Angeles. The trial would start in January, and I had no doubt that O. J. Simpson did it. I remembered having dinner at Santa Monica’s Ivy at the Shore several years earlier. O.J. and Nicole were there at a corner table, and I was alarmed by how aggressive he seemed.

She was against the wall as he leaned over the table, his arms folded on top of it while they had an intense conversation. I sensed she was intimidated, and thought about that a lot when I heard she’d been murdered. Not long after it I was at the Grahams’ one night and the subject came up.

I asked Billy what he thought, and he said that O.J. had wanted to talk to him from jail. They got on the phone, and of course Billy wasn’t going to tell me the details. But he did mention this much.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “If people knew what he told me, there would be no trial.”

When President Clinton sat down next to me in the Oval Office, I wanted to talk about crime-busting. I started my spiel about the importance of forensic science and medicine, and hoped the president would be supportive. That’s about as far as I got before he interrupted. He launched into his theory about why O.J. had murdered his former wife and her friend Ron Goldman.

It was because O.J. had a huge emptiness in him that nothing can fill, the president said to my astonishment. He went on and on about this as I wondered if he was talking about himself. It flashed in my mind as I was looking at him that maybe his personal life was empty. Maybe he understood why O.J. had been driven to commit such a brutal crime.

I would have loved to share that story as I set out on my book tour. I imagined the headline: PRESIDENT CLINTON SAYS O.J. DID IT. I haven’t gone public about it before now. Or mentioned the way the president shook my hand at the end of the visit, trailing his fingers along my palm and not letting go. All the while, Orrin was watching from the back wall.

He didn’t roll his eyes, but I could tell he felt like it. He was no fan of the Clintons and often told me that Democrats were “sneaky” and full of “mean tricks.” He’d introduce me as a Democrat to his colleagues, and quip that he was working on me. That and sending the Mormon missionaries after me, he’d add.

The Body Farm went straight to number one, and I held another signing in Richmond at the Barnes & Noble at Willow Lawn. People began lining up at eight in the morning for the late afternoon event. When I arrived, the line was around the entire shopping center, possibly ten thousand people waiting. I couldn’t believe it.

As I climbed out of the limousine and walked past the crowd, it was all I could do not to cry, I was so touched and overwhelmed. I signed forty-eight hundred books without getting up from my table. Not long after this, I learned that Cruel and Unusual had won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for best crime novel. One of the judges was Agatha Christie’s daughter, Rosalind Hicks.

The award was presented by Rosalind’s son, Matthew Pritchard. As I listened to his spiel about his famous grandmother, I felt as if I knew her. I could relate to what he said about her shyness. When headed to a public event she’d become the public Agatha as if she were a fictional character. I do something similar when I make appearances, becoming an extraverted version of myself.

I thought about the strange dream I’d had about Agatha Christie while I was struggling to write my first mystery in 1984. I remembered my first trip to Paris in 1991 when I was presented the French Prix du roman d’adventures. The display cases in the publisher’s lobby were filled with Agatha’s books and copies of Postmortem.

After winning the Gold Dagger, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore in Manhattan one day. I asked the dealer if he had anything signed by Agatha Christie.

“Well, one thing, but it’s rather odd,” he said.

I followed him upstairs to his overwhelmed office where he pulled out a clothbound copy of a book about Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. It was signed by Agatha in pencil that’s now so faded it’s difficult to read:

“To Lucy Boo, Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy the beauty of this book—as much as I enjoy your beauty. Always love, Agatha Christie. Dec. 1967.”

I wondered who Lucy Boo was. I found it eerie that my father used to call me Patsy Boo, and Lucy is the name of Scarpetta’s niece.

In early 1994, I began work on From Potter’s Field, some of the story set in New York City, where I prowled the subways with the Transit Police. Whit Baldwin and I flew a Jet Ranger there, and I visited the New York medical examiner’s office, where I met the legendary death investigator Barbara Butcher.

I heard hammering as staff constructed pine boxes for burials in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, accessible only by boat. Officers took me to the Second Avenue subway station in the Bowery. I was led through a catacomb of concrete and steel in complete darkness, flashlights probing like long bright fingers.

The next day Whit and I flew along the Hudson River in a strong crosswind, the choppy water the color of patinated copper. Along the East River we passed Rikers Island and its white bubbles used as temporary shelters for inmates. Soaring cliffs on our left, and then directly ahead was Hart Island, a single brick smokestack rising above trees.

Below my feet was Potter’s Field with its shells of old brick buildings, the grave markers reminding me of teeth. It was our good fortune that we’d timed it just right. Inmates from Rikers were burying pine boxes while guards stood by with shotguns. I’m often asked about being afraid of helicopters, and I never have been. But scuba diving was another story.

When I began researching Cause of Death, I thought it would be interesting to have Scarpetta work an underwater crime scene. I happened to be in San Francisco when I had this revelation, and it wasn’t the best place to learn how to scuba dive. During my training, my open-water dives took place in the cold, murky San Francisco Bay.

I had to make shore entries with a fifty-pound tank on my back and a twenty-pound weight belt. All of this was preparation for the dive I needed to do in Virginia’s Elizabeth River at the Navy Inactive Maintenance Facility. I wanted a body found near the mothballed military ships called the Dead Fleet.

I thought that would make for a creepy scene and got permission from the Navy to make the dive. When I made my giant stride off a floating platform the visibility was no more than a few inches in front of my face. The ships were tethered by rusty cables that suddenly were in front of me, and I’d have to duck under them. One hit my tank, knocking it loose, and it started sliding down my back.

By now I’d moved into Richmond’s gated neighborhood Lockgreen. It wasn’t possible for me to stay in my Windsor Farms home. I was tired of curious people parking along the street. I craved privacy while worrying about my safety.

“It’s all so weird, really. I’m so much in my interior world that I just don’t see this fame stuff like most people apparently do,” I noted in my journal.

Being famous was something I’d dreamed of since I was a kid. Now that I had it, I remembered what my eighth-grade teacher Mr. Pollard warned me.

“One day you’re going to get what you want and be sorry,” he said.

Throughout my life I’ve replayed his words, realizing there’s a lot of truth in them. Eventually, I’d get many things I wanted. Or thought I wanted. But it was like those heatwaves I never caught up with in Miami. There’s always the next thing, nothing within reach good enough. It took me a while to figure out that fame and adulation are imposed by others. They’re real and they’re not.

While growing up I imagined one day driving an expensive convertible sports car. I’d roar up to my father’s house unannounced to see the look on his face when he opened the door. In my scripted scenario I’d won Wimbledon or was a big star like Donny Osmond or David Cassidy.

The obvious price of giving up my anonymity was the loss of privacy and often my dignity. Not to mention how it feels when people say dreadful things about me or what I’ve written. There have been times when I didn’t want to leave the house after especially bad publicity. If it was scandalous enough, I’d call Ruth and say we needed to talk face-to-face.

“What did you do this time?” she’d ask.

To this day I rarely read anything written about me, most of all book reviews. Something jolting can send me off course. I’m careful what I expose myself to, aware of how I’ll react. When I want to know the current star rating on Amazon or Goodreads, I ask my partner, Staci, to look and give me the upshot. I don’t want so much as a glimpse at the comments.

Staci has a steady, kind, and reassuring disposition, which is one of many reasons we’re together. Things don’t bother her the way they do me. If an important article has just come out, she’ll go through it first. Maybe I’ll read it, maybe I won’t, but not while I’m writing. Distractions are my mortal enemy.

I can relate to Charles Dickens paying street musicians to stop playing in front of his house. I don’t listen to anything while I write, my office in Boston soundproofed. When I work in hotels or other places, I always carry a pair of noise-canceling headphones.

40

IN 1994, A NEW BIOGRAPHY OF ABOLITIONIST HARRIET BEECHER Stowe was published, and I started reading it with great interest. My grandmother G.G. used to tell me that she was a direct descendent of the Beecher family. I grew up hearing her say that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was considered the most influential novel in history.

The first time I read it, I was sickened by brutal scenes of slavery and families ripped apart. It was obvious that Harriet Beecher Stowe had witnessed what she described, her words carried on the cadence of emotions that can’t be contrived. I recognized that she had the mind of a journalist and an artist’s eye.

To write what she did was incredibly courageous and risky. Many people objected to her convictions, blaming her for causing the American Civil War. Now and then the severed ear of a slave would arrive in the mail to thank her. She often received hateful letters and death threats. Other authors weren’t always charitable.

Charles Dickens dismissed her work as sentimental, and that must have been painful to Harriet. I imagined those resentful of her success, reminding me of Mr. Owl’s warning about the green-eyed monster. The ugly truth is that many authors don’t like each other even if they won’t admit it.

Writing books is one of the most noncollaborative, if not antisocial and competitive, activities imaginable. I learned a long time ago not to give in to jealousy. It doesn’t land one higher on the bestseller list and poisons the soul. Rarely have I come across writers who are sincerely supportive of their competition.

During the earliest days of my career, I was friends with historical novelist John Jakes. He was one of those generous authors who celebrated someone else’s success. Another was Tom Clancy. When he and his wife were getting divorced, he called me every week for a while.

He’d go on and on about the latest submarine or aircraft carrier he’d visited. I’d asked him for security advice, and he was sorry he couldn’t be helpful. It wasn’t something he thought about a lot. Tom was over six feet tall and a sharpshooter, he explained. He had an Army tank in his front yard.

I wondered what it was like for Harriet Beecher Stowe in an era when women were second-class citizens, not allowed to vote, enter contracts, or own property. During her lifetime few women were taken seriously, and she was an anomaly. An international bestseller, she supported her theologian husband and their seven children.

They lived stylishly in fine homes because of her. Yet when she received awards, she wasn’t always allowed to accept them herself. Often, her husband did in her stead as she remained seated at the banquet table. In early 1994, I would visit her home in Hartford, Connecticut, two-story gray brick with a complex gabled roof, a big side porch, and a splendid garden.

Mark Twain was her next-door neighbor. He and Harriet were good friends, sharing similar views about social reform and human nature. Her house was filled with beautiful art and furniture, the wall coverings rich, the kitchen well equipped, everything precisely appointed. She liked to shop, spending a lot of money, and maybe I inherited that from her because I’m guilty of the same.

Her Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Joan Hedrick was kind enough to give me a tour, telling me stories about what I was seeing. Afterward we visited the archival area where Harriet’s private papers are kept. I was shown a manuscript of Uncle Tom’s Cabin handwritten in black ink, the words angular and slanted to the right, some of them scratched through.

Most of the pages were missing, and Joan explained that when someone would write for an autograph, Harriet would send a signed original manuscript page. I wondered how many of them are forgotten in attics. Or perhaps they were thrown out when the recipients died, and those left behind didn’t recognize what they were looking at.

Joan’s masterful biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life had just been published when we first met. We talked about how onerous it was to promote our written work, and the perils of publicity if you’re an introvert. I’d been told all my life that Harriet is an ancestor of mine, and it seemed only fair that I should help her biographer if possible.

For some reason, I thought it a great idea to host a book signing in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Loyalty to the cause still smoldered 130 years later, the city’s thoroughfares resplendent with statues of Robert E. Lee on his rampant horse, of Jeb Stuart and other Confederate heroes.

The South Will Rise Again was emblazoned on bumper stickers, T-shirts, beach towels. Confederate flags decorated license plates, and waved from poles in front of homes, government buildings, schools. I couldn’t have picked a much worse venue for an event honoring Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Maybe thirty people showed up, all of them my friends and staff. Each bought a book or two because I’d made sure of it in advance. Had I not salted the signing, scarcely anyone would have come. I was dismayed that the subject of Joan Hedrick’s book still inspired such animosity. If it was like this now, what did Harriet endure?

Yet she had to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin like Michelangelo freeing David from the marble. The story was already there. It just needed to be told, and she was chosen to channel it. I understand the feeling. My books don’t change history. But I write because I must. A story never told is a loss of signal in the cosmos.

It’s been said that when Harriet Beecher Stowe was at the end of her life, she’d sit at her desk every day writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She didn’t remember that she’d already done it. I feel a deep connection to her and perhaps it’s imagined. But maybe it’s in my DNA.

G.G. told me that her mother, Jennie Martha Herrick, was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cousin. That means I am too, some five generations removed. As different as my stories are from those my ancestor told, we focus on the same thing, the abuse of power. I believe it’s the root of all evil.

I have a feeling she’d agree, and it must have devastated her when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. She met him during her visit to the White House in late 1862. It was reported that he grabbed her hand and uttered those famous words, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

In 1868 her book Men of Our Times is a sketch about his murder. She sounds like Scarpetta reconstructing the night of April 15, 1865, when actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Harriet describes in detail Booth knocking on the president’s upper balcony box, then blocking the door when it opened, barging in with a pistol and a dagger.

This was during a raucous moment of the comedy Our American Cousin and Lincoln was looking down at the performance. He may have detected a commotion, turning toward it when the bullet punched through the left side of his head. Harriet describes him collapsing back in his chair and closing his eyes as Booth leapt down to the stage and escaped.

Long after I wrote my childhood poems about Lincoln, I visited the National Museum of Health and Medicine near Washington. I was shown the bullet that killed him and a piece of his skull. I held them in my hand while hearing the details of his autopsy report penned by Army surgeon Joseph J. Woodward.

“The ball entered through the occipital bone about one inch to the left of the medial line… it then penetrated the dura mater…”

The hole in the skull was described as “quite smooth, circular in shape, with beveled edges,” and that’s what I saw when I held the squarish piece of cut-out bone in my hand. The museum curator’s name was Dr. Noe, pronounced the same as the villain in James Bond.

She showed me a glass jar filled with a clear preservative, possibly alcohol, since that’s what was used in the 1800s. Suspended in this medium was John Wilkes Booth’s trachea with a hole in it. After fleeing Ford’s Theatre, he eventually was cornered by a posse and shot in the neck.

The pistol ball smashed through vertebrae, severing his spinal cord, perforating the trachea I was looking at. Booth would have been almost paralyzed and fighting for breath, inspiring little sympathy from the men standing guard. He died miserably after several hours, a fitting end after what he’d done.

G.G. often talked about her ancestors the Beechers, recounting anecdotes she’d heard while growing up in Michigan. She said that Harriet’s brother Henry Ward Beecher was a famous preacher known for his pulpit-pounding dramatic style. He was a political activist, railing against slavery and other social issues.

His church in Brooklyn, New York, was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of people who helped slaves escape to freedom. He was a passionate abolitionist, and in 1863, President Lincoln sent him around Europe lecturing against slavery and the Confederate cause that must be defeated.

An advocate of temperance and women’s suffrage, my distant cousin Henry also was an alleged serial adulterer, publicly accused of having an affair with a married woman in his Plymouth congregation. She sued him, the trial in 1875 lasting six months and a national sensation.

It ended in a hung jury, Beecher acquitted but scandalized. G.G. told me that when she was growing up her family owned a portrait of the famous preacher. It had hung over the horsehide couch until news of the affair hit the press. Then it came down, never to be displayed again.

She immensely admired Harriet but not her controversial brother. G.G. had strong feelings about adultery after her husband ran off with her best friend and moved to California. Eventually, he returned to Miami, dying from a cerebral thrombosis in 1949. G.G. would outlive him by almost forty years.

While I was spending time with Joan Hedrick, I thought about my grandmother, wishing she’d lived long enough to see what was happening in my life. I would have loved taking her on a helicopter ride. I can imagine her on a spin in one of my 600-horsepower Ferraris, or maybe riding the waves in a dive boat, exploring shipwrecks in the Bermuda Triangle.

She would have applauded my doing research at fabled places like New Scotland Yard, Interpol, the FBI, the French Préfecture de police, the Carabinieri in Rome. G.G. would have wanted to see the videos of me flying in a Zero G plane and floating. She would have laughed at photographs of me in a NASA Advanced Crew Escape “pumpkin” space suit or learning to spacewalk.

I can imagine the questions she’d ask when I told her that I got to know Jay Raymond, a four-star general and first commander of Space Force. I worked closely with NASA astronaut Jack Fischer to have Scarpetta work a death scene on a spaceship orbiting the planet. G.G. would have been fascinated to know that nothing is the same up there in microgravity.

Blood doesn’t drip. It floats and spatters everywhere as fans blow constantly. If the air isn’t stirred, when you exhale, carbon dioxide forms a bubble around your head. It will suffocate you while you sit in your chair or sleep. If you die on the International Space Station, there’s no place to store your body, and it will be jettisoned out the air lock.

G.G. would have been delighted when I began hanging out with the U.S. Secret Service, touring the White House, ogling the presidential Beast SUVs. Assistant Director Kyo Dolan would become one of my closest friends, helping me understand the demands of protecting the highest officials in the land.

I can imagine the look on my grandmother’s face if I told the story of visiting a Richmond tattoo parlor that featured a gynecologist’s chair with stirrups in the middle of the floor, the walls covered with flash. I hired the artist to tattoo a design onto a turkey roaster I bought in the grocery store. The point was to see what would happen if someone tried to eradicate one tattoo by covering it with another.

What would that look like when the body is decomposing? It’s not the sort of research anyone volunteers for, including me. I wasn’t going to get a tattoo covered with another tattoo and then have it cut from my decomposing body. I spent two days watching the artist work on my turkey.

It wasn’t in good shape by the time I carried it to the OCME. Marcella excised the double tattoo, and we studied it under crime lights. I wanted to know if Scarpetta would be able to see the original tattoo that was obliterated by the one on top of it. I had to make sure what I wrote was accurate, and it was.

Marcella dropped the turkey tattoo into a jar of formalin just like she did tissue sections from autopsies. The toe tag she placed inside read, Cornwell’s tattoo. I hope someday it’s not assumed it came from my hide.

In late August 1994, I flew to Asheville and spent several days with Ruth and Billy. I slept in a downstairs bedroom with their very fat cat Chester. I remembered the reclaimed split logs with mortar showing between them, the wide board pine floors, the brick fireplace. A handmade quilt covered the canopied bed, and in a corner was a spinning wheel.

Silvery spiderwebs festooned panes of glass, forming intricate patterns in the corners of casements. The fine threads were shimmering highways from forgotten furniture to drapery hems. A hummingbird hovered eye-to-eye with me in the bay window before vanishing. The German shepherds were barking in hopes Billy would emerge from the house with treats.

I’d often stayed in that same room while working on Ruth’s biography some fourteen years earlier. Nothing had changed except the two of us, and we’d sit up late talking as trusted friends. No longer was I that young girl walking past her car hoping she’d give me a ride. I was one of the few people she confided in.

She kept a canary in a cage that she’d hang from hooks in the exposed beams, often moving the bird room to room depending on where Ruth was. She’d had the canary for many years, and it wasn’t vocal anymore, only peeping when startled. Ruth had once told me that it sang because it was lonely.

“Maybe that’s why I write,” I replied, and she understood perfectly well.

We’d both spent a lot of time alone, and not always by choice. We kept journals and wrote poetry. She wasn’t making research notes like I do, but she’d write what she was feeling while leaving a history of her day-to-day. She used to tell me that when Billy headed out for his long trips, the shutting of the front door was like a little death.

A week after that visit I was back in Montreat to attend Calvin Thielman’s retirement dinner. During lunch while I was staying with the Grahams, Billy and I had another chat about his memoir. He hated writing it, preferring to look forward and not back. He was in his late seventies, and we talked about getting older. I suggested we were better at some things while worse at others.

“I’m not better at anything at this stage,” he lamented with a touch of pique.

While he and Ruth rested, I went for a walk alone on their steep, winding road. It hadn’t changed much since my family’s Jeep ride with Mr. Rickman when I was nine. The sound of running water was constant as streams flowed over rocks and through a riot of mountain weeds and shrubs.

“I can’t help but think my life is entwined with all of this more than I ever imagined,” I wrote while there.

Whenever I visited, I didn’t want to leave. I’d feel a strong desire to retrace my footsteps on that mountaintop and roam the streets in my childhood small town.

“Sometimes I wish Scarpetta was from a place like here because I’d rather write about it than Miami,” I noted. “But what’s done is done, and she has her own life and history.”

I hired a limousine to drive us to Assembly Inn for Calvin Thielman’s retirement celebration. Billy roasted him and was wildly entertaining. He might have thought he wasn’t as good as he used to be, but I saw no evidence of it. As I ran into former neighbors, I was reminded that not all of them were pleased with my success. Ruth’s brother-in-law John Sommerville, for example.

A retired missionary to Korea, he used to coach the local kids in baseball, and I couldn’t wait for our games on Saturday mornings. My brothers and I would meet at the Sommervilles’ house and walk to the baseball field together. I was maybe eleven or twelve, and sometimes I held John Sommerville’s hand.

His wife, Virginia, was Ruth’s sister, and the Sommervilles were fond of me. No doubt, they’d heard a lot about my family from Ruth. One day Virginia came to my house to have a private conversation. She invited me to live with them in Korea and go to school with her children. This was soon after Mom’s second hospitalization, and I thanked Virginia but declined her offer.

At Calvin’s retirement dinner I was crestfallen when John Sommerville criticized me endlessly about how inappropriate I was to ride around in stretch limousines. As this was going on outside Assembly Inn, he didn’t seem like my former neighbor and baseball coach. I could tell he didn’t approve of me. He was offended and angry.

He wouldn’t be the only one who made me feel that way. People I’d grown up with had heard about me in the news, and thought I was wayward, a sheep that had wandered far from the fold. The Grahams’ oldest child, Gigi, said as much to me once. I was the “most experienced sinner” among them. She was being playful and funny but meant it.

Many people I grew up around think I’ve made a mess of my life. They consider my books secular and perverse. Not to mention how they view me as a person. Divorced and bisexual. An alumnus of Appalachian Hall and a treatment center. I didn’t measure up to the standards of my former Montreat neighbors.

Ironically, the only ones who didn’t judge me were Calvin, Billy, and Ruth. During that visit with the Grahams in the late summer of 1994, she and I were talking in the living room one night after Billy went to bed. Ruth said she wanted me to be buried with her on her mountain one day.

41

IN THE FALL OF 1994, I VISITED THE MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, MEDICAL examiner’s facility where Elvis Presley had been autopsied. I was shown his report, and it reminded me of what Marcella Fierro often said. People tend to die the way they lived.

“He had a terrible heart,” I was told, and based on what I reviewed, he did.

But that wasn’t why I was there. I was meeting with Steve Symes, one of the country’s experts on cuts to bone. I told him about the dismembered body in Unnatural Exposure, wanting to know if he could tell whether a saw had been used versus a straight-edge blade or one that was serrated.

The answer was yes, he certainly could. He explained why, offering tips on the best way to deflesh and degrease skeletal remains. Until that’s done it’s not possible to see defects like cutmarks.

“Simmer in ten percent bleach and do it under an exhaust fan,” he advised.

When working at the medical examiner’s office in Richmond it was eerie walking past the anthropology lab while bones rattled in a huge pot that came from a restaurant supply store. That was another unpleasant stench I prefer to forget. The images aren’t something I care to recall either.

Steve had a list of forty-five different types of saws that left varying tool marks he could identify. We looked at examples under a fiber optic light. A meat saw leaves a track that’s “rougher looking.” He explained harmonics, the measurement of the distance between saw teeth. I was surprised to learn that few killers dismember victims by cutting through the joints.

After I’d finished my research for the day, I visited Graceland where Elvis had lived. It seemed only fitting to learn more about him after reading his autopsy report. On August 16, 1977, he was found dead on his bathroom floor at the age of forty-two, his pajama bottoms around his ankles. It’s believed he went into cardiac arrest while using the toilet.

I toured room to room in his mansion, taking in the white furniture, the gilt stair rails, the shag carpet while his music played. Watching videos of him when he was in his prime, I was amazed. I thought back to my start at The Charlotte Observer when I interviewed his stepmother, Dee Presley.

“Elvis was a genetic accident that exploded into a star, or a god, depending on who you ask,” I wrote after touring his mansion. “Marino would be a huge fan. Scarpetta too but she wouldn’t want to admit to it.”

I’d never paid much attention to Elvis, and I thought about the indignity of death. It’s no respecter of persons, not caring who you are. How embarrassing to die on the toilet. Not for the dead person but the family, I knew from experience. Sometimes relatives move a loved one’s body to conceal where the person died. Rarely is the medical examiner fooled.

In one instance, a man had a heart attack during sex, and the family decided to relocate the fully rigorous body, propping it against a chair like a plank of wood. In another case, the decedent supposedly collapsed in the bedroom. When the body arrived at the morgue, there was blanching on the buttocks consistent with the ring left by a toilet seat.

On tour in the U.K. in October 1994 was the first time I’d visited Edinburgh since college. I remembered roaming the hilly streets with my roommate Karen White while all I did was think about Charlie.

“I have to wonder where that young woman got lost in all that’s happened since,” I wrote while sitting in my hotel room with its view of Edinburgh Castle. “Maybe we were each other’s fantasy, not each other’s reality, and that’s where we went wrong.”

I relived how excited I was when first arriving in the U.K. that June in 1978. Then days passed and Charlie didn’t write.

“The summer was a cold, relentless rain, and I was in abject despair. I can only thank God I do not know pain like that now and hope to never again.”

I’d changed a lot since those days, evolving into a strange mix of extremely sensitive and flatline stoical. I learned to confront frightening and tragic situations while registering nothing emotionally. Unlike the way I was when playing tennis, I can remain calm and logical at a gory crime scene, an autopsy, or while visiting my father on his deathbed as I did in the early spring of 1996.

My half sister Rona informed me that Dad was in intensive care with a severe respiratory illness he couldn’t shake. He’d been sick for months, and I’d visited him earlier while he was home in bed. When he got worse and was hospitalized, Jim and I flew to Miami to see him, knowing that it likely would be for the last time.

I asked John to meet us, but he wouldn’t. He said he’d never known Dad in life and didn’t need to say goodbye. I sensed John’s deep-seated hurt and anger, explaining that he might regret not seeing Dad. But John was firm in his convictions, his experiences as a child different from Jim’s and mine. John was barely four when Mom moved us to Montreat. He has few early memories of Miami.

Despite his claims of “feeling nothing” about our father, I didn’t believe it. I tried to talk John into saying goodbye. It wasn’t going to happen, and in late March, Jim and I checked into a Miami Beach hotel. When we arrived at Healthsouth Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, we were told that we could spend no more than fifteen minutes with Dad because of his condition.

We walked into his room, and he was thin and pale, intubated and unable to talk. He was awake and alert as we pulled up chairs on either side of his bed.

“I won’t ask how you’re doing. Obviously not great or you wouldn’t be here,” I said to him with a smile, trying to keep the mood light.

His response was to reach for Jim’s hand, squeezing it. But he didn’t do the same to me. Picking up the legal pad and pen next to him, he jotted a note to Jim.

“I love you,” it said.

“Love you too, Dad,” Jim replied.

Then Dad wrote a note to me.

“How’s work?”

I felt gut-punched but didn’t let it register.

“Fine,” I replied. “I have a new book coming out in a few months.”

He nodded, writing nothing more as pain and anger seethed inside me. A few minutes later, Jim and I left.

“Can you believe that?” I erupted in the corridor. “How’s work? That’s the last thing he’s going to say to me? He writes that he loves you but can’t tell me the same thing?”

Jim had no explanation.

“Well, I’m glad,” I decided. “He did me a favor. At least he’s consistent to the very end. At least I know that everything I’ve thought about him wasn’t imagined. He has to make me feel bad. Because he knows he can.”

During dinner Jim and I talked about the beautiful art deco hotel we were staying in and how empty it seemed. We were the only ones in the restaurant. We decided maybe the hotel was a front for money laundering. We began spinning sinister scenarios just like we used to do as kids, avoiding the subject of Dad and the past.

Not long after this, on April 4, I was out to dinner in Richmond when Rona paged me. Dad had died. I would find out later that he was autopsied, likely at the hospital. I’m not sure why that was necessary, possibly because it wasn’t clear what type of respiratory illness he’d suffered from.

His cause of death was “respiratory failure due to Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome due to Severe Acquired Community Pneumonia.” When he first became sick, he told me no one was sure what he’d contracted or how. He blamed it on his compromised immune system, and maybe that was true.

I’m glad I went to see him to say goodbye. But I’ll never understand why he couldn’t say he loved me or anything remotely warm or caring.

“How’s work?”

I wish I’d torn out that page in his legal pad and kept it.

“How’s work?”

I’ll forever see those two words in his small, snarled handwriting. When I got the news of his death, I had no emotional reaction. I went cold inside. I felt numb as it dawned on me that my life with Dad was ancient history. He’d left my family more than thirty years ago. We weren’t part of his world. It wouldn’t be until decades later that I’d learn he was cremated, his ashes scattered by boat at one of his favorite fishing spots. My brothers and I weren’t informed or invited, but I wouldn’t have gone.

My mother used to say that Dad was an enigma, and she was right. To this day, there’s much about him I don’t understand. His power was to withhold. He knew I wanted information and validation. And he wasn’t going to give it to me on his deathbed any more than he had during his life.

During my last visit with him at his Miami home soon after he’d become ill, I once again brought up our early years in Miami. I again asked about him walking out on Christmas morning. I brought up a number of things that had happened, and hoped he might enlighten me about what was going on with him at the time.

“If I understood why, it would be helpful to me,” I explained.

“I don’t think I was much of a father,” was all he said.

“You weren’t.” I was honest about it. “But all of us have reasons for our behaviors. What were yours?”

He didn’t offer an explanation and never would.

A week before Cause of Death was published in early July 1996, I traveled to Hawaii for research at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) Laboratory. I was in Honolulu only a day when I got a very disturbing phone call from my friend Diane, an FBI firearms instructor. She informed me that my life was in danger.

Two weeks earlier, on June 23, the estranged husband of FBI agent Margo Bennett had abducted a priest in a church, strapping what appeared to be explosives around his waist before luring Margo there. Eugene Bennett was a former undercover FBI agent who’d been convicted of fraud three years earlier. He’d recently been released from prison.

In 1990, I’d gotten to know Margo at the FBI Academy where she was an instructor. We became close friends, our relationship crossing the line when she came to see me in Richmond. It happened one more time when she spent the night at my house after a party that included her husband and FBI colleagues.

Afterward I ended the intimate part of our relationship, but that’s not what she wanted. When she persisted in her attentions, I warned that she was being reckless. Finally, I had to tell her to stop calling me. I knew she was unhappy in her marriage, but what I’d done was stupid and not worth it, to be brutally honest.

I had cared about her as a friend and mentor. I admired her but regretted becoming physical. For one thing, I wasn’t in love with her. For another, her husband wasn’t someone to trifle with. When released from prison the first time, he filed divorce papers, naming me as the reason for his failed marriage.

It wasn’t true, and I’d not seen either of them for years. But the news was devastating.

“Best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell had a lesbian love affair with an FBI agent while doing research for one of her novels, according to court documents filed in a bizarre divorce case,” wrote The Roanoke Times on June 26, 1996. “‘Mrs. Bennett met and became totally infatuated with Patricia Cornwell,’ said the statement filed by Eugene Bennett’s lawyer, Douglas Bergere. ‘These liaisons and this relationship was supposed to be a covert affair, but [Eugene] Bennett discovered it, the statement said.’”

When my firearms instructor friend Diane called me in Hawaii, she said that before Eugene Bennett lured Margo to the church, he’d driven a rental car to Richmond looking for me. By then I no longer lived in the house he’d visited years earlier. Had I been, I hate to think what might have happened.

I’d just gotten a Boston terrier in the spring of 1996 and imagined Margo’s husband waiting in the shadows for me to take my puppy out to potty. The instant I was in the dark yard with the alarm off, I would have been vulnerable. I was told that he intended to stage an elaborate murder-suicide involving Margo, me, and a woman I didn’t know.

The scenario included sex toys that would be planted at the scene. He’d made pipe bombs, leaving one in Margo’s locker. Another seemed to be missing, and my FBI friend Diane suggested I shouldn’t come home from Hawaii anytime soon. I said no way that was happening. Instructing my staff to have my Richmond house and car swept for explosives, I flew back to Richmond on July 6.

I was advised to cancel the book launch for Cause of Death scheduled at Richmond’s Willow Lawn Barnes & Noble that following weekend. Instead, I hired extra security, placing off-duty officers on the store’s rooftop, making sure most of all that the people in line were safe.

Eugene Bennett was arrested for attempted murder and other charges. He’d serve more than twenty years in prison. Prior to that near-fatal disaster, virtually no one knew that I engaged in same-sex relationships. Often this simply meant having intense eye contact with a female bartender or someone else I met. It might lead to a short-term fling while publicly I was dating men.

But the incident with Margo was international news, and I was outed. Prior to that I wasn’t hiding my sexuality. Rather, I was trying to figure it out. I loved men but felt emotionally more connected to women. It seemed safer when obviously it wasn’t. Getting involved with Margo was the most unsafe thing I ever did. When it was all over the news, I was devastated.

For weeks I barely left my house, too ashamed to be seen in public. It crossed my mind a few times that maybe I’d be better off dead. That would be easy. I had an entire saferoom full of guns. Revolvers, pistols, shotguns, an assault rifle or two. In those days, it was easy buying firearms in Virginia.

I’d collect them for research purposes but also personal protection. It wasn’t unusual for me to have a Glock 9mm concealed in a fanny pack when I was out and about. I rarely drove anywhere without a gun on the passenger’s seat, and often practiced on the firing range with cops or FBI agents.

I remembered what my detective friend Glenn Williams had done when he couldn’t take it anymore. Then I’d think, Well, if you do that, you’ll end up on Marcella’s table. That was a sobering image. While I was in the throes of all this, my mother called one morning. She’d heard about my scandal and seemed more furious than anything else.

“You’ve shamed the family,” she told me over the phone.

You’re one to talk, I thought but didn’t utter.

“If you really feel that way then I have two choices,” I replied. “I can kill myself or never speak to you and my brothers after this. Which do you prefer?”

“Neither,” she admitted, never raising the subject again.

42

IT HAD BEEN ALMOST A DECADE SINCE CHARLIE AND I SEPARATED. I never heard from him unless it was a snippy note asking me not to talk about his marriage, as he’d put it. I would write back that it had been my marriage too. I’d heard that he was most upset with me. It must have been jolting that I finally got published and began making a lot of money.

I wouldn’t see him again until the late summer of 1997 when the chain Books-A-Million asked me to do a signing. If I agreed they’d hold it anywhere I wanted. I decided on Charleston, South Carolina, because that’s where Charlie lived. I was going to make him deal with me. Someone on my staff contacted him, and I was surprised that he agreed to dinner.

On July 21, I met him in the café at the Charleston Place Hotel. It was surreal when we were facing each other, both of us looking older and different. He was thinner and tan, dressed in a white linen shirt and pants. I had on Armani and was traveling with an entourage that included bodyguards. When we sat down at the table, he reached across it to hold both of my hands.

“Please tell me I didn’t turn you into this,” he said.

He worried it was his fault I was with women. As if he’d driven me to it.

“You don’t have the power to do that to me,” I replied. “And I don’t have power over it either. We are what we are, Charlie.”

“I’m very relieved to hear you say it’s not my fault.”

I think he would have had a much harder time if I’d replaced him with another man. I never did. During our reunion in 1997, it was as if we’d never been estranged. He’d just returned from a vacation in Mexico with the lovely artist Marty Whaley Adams, famous in Charleston for her paintings and historic garden. He’d been seeing her for a while, and they planned to get married.

Soon enough, I met her too, and the three of us became fast friends. Charlie had quit the ministry, telling me he didn’t believe anything he’d preached. Burying his robes, he gave up his ordination because he didn’t want to do weddings or funerals anymore. Or that was his rationale, and I asked if he would like to be my private editor.

“I couldn’t have done the Ruth book without you,” I reminded him.

Long years after those early days at the seminary, I’d quote his editorial insights. He had no patience for unnecessary verbiage, and most of all for writing that was self-indulgent. He was ruthless about slashing through whatever he deemed “purple” or “sentimental.”

“Too many words!” he’d declare.

“If you love a metaphor too much, throw it out,” he’d advise.

Whenever I’d get a manuscript back from him, I braced myself for his critical marginalia. Most of the time he was right. Now and then he’d go after Scarpetta herself.

“Bitchy!” he’d scribble, and other smackdowns.

She was too driven, too cold, too forceful, and even unlikable, as if they were former intimates who no longer got along. His view of her was very different from mine, and at times I wondered who he was really talking about.

“Don’t get mad at Scarpetta because you’re really mad at me,” I once told him.

At the time we met in Charleston, I had begun working with Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), learning about arson and explosions. I attended post-blast and fire investigation schools at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia.

While I was there, ATF agents taught me how to make a pipe bomb. I went shopping with them for PVC, end caps, double-stranded wire, duct tape, nine-volt batteries, gunpowder, nails, and ball bearings. Of course, we didn’t add gunpowder, the pipe bomb we built inert. All the same, it looked like the real thing.

Unfortunately, I left it in my hotel room when I checked out. God only knows what housekeeping thought. I’d done something similar when working on biohazards, leaving a box marked as such in yet another hotel room. Often, I was given props by the experts I worked with, and it’s a wonder I didn’t get into serious trouble. These days, I would for sure.

In Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., ATF investigators would pick me up in the middle of the night to ride along while they worked suspicious fires. I hung out with firefighters and got to ride in their trucks. I watched ATF investigate the fire at the Heaven Hill Distillery in Kentucky where warehouses filled with barrels of bourbon created an inferno hot enough to melt glass and metal.

I’d write down what I was seeing while following investigators through burned-out buildings that were treacherous with alligatored wood, exposed wires, broken glass, and detritus floating in sooty water that constantly dripped. Some of my notes are impossible to read, the writing huge and slanted, the ink smeared as I wrote in the illumination of flashlights.

One night I went with a crowd of ATF agents to a favorite watering hole in Washington, D.C. Drinks were on me, and everybody overindulged. The Italian owner of the restaurant was lamenting about his father recently dying. The body needed to be shipped to Italy, but it wasn’t affordable. I volunteered to pay for it and added the amount to my tab.

After I’d finished Point of Origin, I began spending a lot of time in France. My American-born editor Nina Salter lived in Paris, her French flawless. Otherwise, I couldn’t have managed. When I’d show up for publicity events, we’d take in all sorts of sights that I might want to use in my latest story.

It was my habit to do research when I traveled on tour, and often I was invited to visit the local police department. Or a plague pit. And most often, the medical examiner’s facility. Morgues aren’t all the same. In Poland, I was proudly shown the head of a dead Nazi soldier in a tank of formalin.

In Buenos Aires were more heads, these of decapitated prisoners, their milky eyes staring out of glass tanks lining the top of the lobby wall. From there I flew to Salta in the Andes Mountains. I’d been invited to see the five-hundred-year-old mummies of an Inca Indian girl and boy drugged with coca and alcohol, then buried alive as sacrifices to the gods.

They were in remarkable condition, the expressions on their faces seeming to capture the panic they must have felt. The girl’s arms were bound with a woven rope, and white fur was wrapped around her ankles. She wore a silver bracelet, and pins in her braided hair. The bodies were wrapped in red-and-brown blankets. They had on decorative leather moccasins.

I found the experience painful and depressing, imagining those poor children and what it must have been like for them. I’m expected to do a lot of things that aren’t necessarily what I consider fun or even safe. Touching a snake or holding a tarantula come to mind. Shooting a pump-action shotgun while running toward a target is a bad accident waiting to happen.

I don’t enjoy being around death, and neither does Scarpetta. But it’s necessary to answer questions and bring about justice. When I walk into the lobby of a medical examiner’s office, I always remember that few people choose to be there. For most, walking through those doors is the worst day of their lives.

While in Paris in 1998 researching Black Notice, I visited the Institut médico-légal on the Seine River. In front on benches, people waited to go inside, staring with vacant eyes. I spent time with Scarpetta’s French counterpart, Professor Dominique Lecomte. This was a year after she prepared Princess Diana’s body for transport back to London after her death.

On August 31, 1997, Diana and Dodi Fayed were killed while evading the paparazzi, their car slamming into a pillar inside the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. In 2002 I would do an ABC Primetime Live show on their deaths. One of the questions was their driver Henri Paul’s high carbon monoxide level. Five percent is normal. His was four times that.

It was suggested that his postmortem blood tubes had been switched in the lab. Or perhaps his deploying air bag had caused the high CO level, and I doubted that was the case. I thought we should test the hypothesis and bought a 1994 Mercedes-Benz S280. It was the same make and model of the car they died in but theirs was armored.

I also bought an air bag of that vintage and had it installed in the car. Scientists in the Richmond labs deployed the air bag on camera, and as I suspected, no carbon monoxide was released. My guess is that Henri Paul’s CO level was caused by exhaust from the engine gushing through the crumpled hood and broken windshield while he was slumped over the steering wheel.

If that wasn’t the reason, then possibly a mistake was made with the toxicology analysis. It’s conceivable the test tubes were mislabeled either accidentally or deliberately. Four years after their deaths I would be recruited to help in the investigation when my book tour was canceled because of 9/11.

Harrods department store in London insisted I come speak at a luncheon. I was promised security and anything needed to make it easy to say yes. After I’d given my talk, a security guard told me that the owner of Harrods, Mohamed al-Fayed, wanted to see me. He lived in a sprawling apartment on his store’s top floor, and I was apprehensive about going up there.

When I sat down with him, I discovered that the reason I’d been invited to speak was his intention of talking to me alone and in person. He asked me to investigate his son’s and Princess Diana’s “murders.” He wanted to hire me to write a book about it. I politely explained I didn’t write books for hire and couldn’t do as he wished.

Instead, I proposed a television show about it. When I returned to the U.S., Mohamed al-Fayed called me and agreed to an investigative piece on Primetime Live. He promised to give me access to whatever we needed, including Dodi’s apartment that had been sealed like a time capsule.

We filmed there, also on Mohamed’s yacht, and in his home in the south of France where a Monet painting hung over the sofa where I sat. I interviewed Henri Paul’s family, and they told me he was a fixed-wing pilot. They talked about how much he loved to fly, and I asked to see his flight log.

I noticed how neat and exact his entries were. I could tell he took pride in his piloting, and wondered if he felt the same about being a chauffeur. When I talked to the mortuary assistant who was present during Diana’s autopsy, he told me poignant details. Her toenails were painted turquoise blue. Her fingers were broken, most likely when she put up her hands defensively while impacting with the back of the front seat.

He said there was no visible sign that she was pregnant when she died from a torn pulmonary vein that caused massive internal bleeding. Frederic Maillez, the doctor who stopped to help her in the tunnel, told me about finding her on a backseat floor, the Mercedes split in half, smoke billowing out of it. She was struggling to breathe, and he assisted with a respiratory bag.

When I interviewed Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, he seemed convinced that her death was no accident. The royal family didn’t want her marrying Dodi. The problem I have with their deaths being homicides is that she and Dodi weren’t wearing their seat belts. Had they been, they may have survived the crash.

The likely truth is that Henri Paul was driving at an excessive speed to escape the paparazzi and lost control of the car. If there’s more to their deaths than the obvious, I doubt we’ll ever know. It was a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened, and while I retraced Diana’s footsteps during filming, I felt haunted by her.

One night I had a strange dream. I was by myself in a London coffee shop and noticed a young woman sitting alone in a corner. I realized it was Princess Diana, nobody else there but the two of us. She was running her fingers through her hair, seeming anxious and extremely upset. I didn’t want to bother her but was concerned.

Finally, I approached her as she got up from her table. I asked if she was okay. Maybe I could help her? Weirdly, there was an elevator in the middle of the room, and she walked toward it, the doors opening as she boarded.

“Would you like me to accompany you?” I asked. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“You can’t come where I’m going.” She vanished behind the closing doors.

When I woke up, I felt I’d been visited by her ghost.

By the fall of 2000, I didn’t want to live in Richmond anymore. My house was monitored by surveillance cameras, the windows in my office bulletproof glass. I was having a problem with stalkers.

A woman disguised herself in a FedEx uniform and tried to get up to my apartment in Manhattan to “deliver a package.” Another woman would sneak a look at the tennis schedule at the club where I played. She’d make sure to be on the court next to mine whenever I showed up. She never missed a book signing or public event, managing to run into me all over the place.

A high school teacher, she had a fine reputation and it seemed no one knew how deranged she was. One day she was playing tennis next to me again, and as usual her balls strayed into my court, forcing me to return them every other minute. She’d walk back and forth in front of my car as I was pulling out of my parking place.

On this occasion as I drove away in my V12 Mercedes convertible, I was fuming with my security over the phone. I’d always been told that you never confront a stalker. But I’d had enough of this one. By now, she’d been at it for the better part of five years.

“Screw it!” I told my head of security. “Enough is enough!”

Making a U-turn, I raced back to the tennis club, and there she was outside the entrance talking to someone. I pulled up and called out her name. It was the first time I’d ever addressed her, and she looked startled. Reluctantly, she walked up to my car.

“You know, it isn’t lost on me that wherever I go, there you are,” I started in. “And just so you know, your behavior is obvious to others. Including people at this very club. And I’m wondering what your school would think about it. I highly recommend you cut it out or you’re going to discover you’ve picked up the wrong end of a snake.”

She was taken aback and rather mortified that I did this in front of other people lingering nearby. I never saw her again after that. But she wasn’t the last of my problems. Soon after, another stalker publicly accused me of stealing his self-published book idea. I’d never heard of this person or his writing, and I sued him.

During my deposition, I was forced to spend eight hours with him inside a small room. That’s unfortunate when the person across the table is a stalker. Pale and without any affect, he stared at me the entire time. He would cyberstalk me after that for more than a decade, accusing me of ridiculous things like trying to murder him and killing his cat.

While on tour for The Last Precinct in the fall of 2000, I met Irene Shulgin, who introduced me to her friends Dan and Donna Dixon Aykroyd. Irene had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner with “friends” of hers without saying who they were. When Whit Baldwin and I landed a helicopter on a farm in Winchester, Virginia, Dan and Donna were standing there waiting.

I hired Irene to help me close my Richmond office and start over somewhere else. It was a painful thing to do. I loved the building I’d bought near my favorite restaurant, Ruth’s Chris. The owner would let me land a helicopter on their lawn. I was fond of my staff and appreciated all they’d done for me over the years. But I had no peace of mind in Richmond. It was time to move on.

In early 2001 I moved into a ten-thousand-square foot house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where I bought my first Ferrari, a Modena 360 with a Grigio Ingrid pale gold paint job. In the spring, I flew to London with my close friends Virginia governor Jim Gilmore and his wife, Roxane. They’d invited me on a trade mission to promote the Jamestown archaeology dig outside Williamsburg.

I’d been involved with the excavation for several years, often participating, and mostly that meant digging up ancient skeletons. I was working on my helicopter pilot’s license, and would fly a Jet Ranger to the site, landing in a grassy clearing on the James River. There’s little I found more exhilarating than flying solo.

I admit getting a kick from the looks on people’s faces when they’d watch me landing and taking off by myself. One late afternoon at Jamestown, I was covered in red clay and limping after kneeling on the hard ground for hours on end. It would turn out I had nerve damage to the same ankle I’d sprained badly in the second grade.

I called the injury Granny’s revenge, because it happened while I was working on a skeleton that I nicknamed Granny. She was old when she died, with an abscessed tooth, a notch between her front teeth from smoking a clay pipe. I had a feeling she was cranky while alive, imagining her puffing away on tobacco inside the Jamestown fort in the early 1600s.

After carefully brushing away dirt from her bones all day, my right ankle prickled numbly when I stood up. The helicopter I’d flown was empty and baking in the sun when I gimped back to it. A tourist standing nearby watched me with a baffled look on his face.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing!” he exclaimed.

“A girl’s gotta get home somehow!” I replied, climbing into the cockpit.

While I was in London with chief archeologist Bill Kelso and the Gilmores, New Scotland Yard invited me for a tour. It was terrible timing, my schedule packed. I was there to talk about Jamestown and not my usual research, but it was an honor to be invited to the Yard. It would be rude to say no.

43

ON MAY 3, I ARRIVED AT THE GLASS AND METAL BUILDING ON THE Victoria Embankment, the revolving sign in front making a quiet clicking. I was shown to the office of Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve. In tweed and with gray hair and a mustache, he looked the part of a legendary Scotland Yard sleuth. We hadn’t been chatting long when he got to the point of my visit.

He wanted to discuss the Jack the Ripper murders that began the late summer of 1888 in the slums of Whitechapel. I’d heard of the fabled killer but never read anything about the cases, more consumed by modern crimes than historical ones. I was puzzled that John Grieve would want to meet me and talk about something that had happened well over a century ago.

When I’d ask him about current crimes, he’d brush me off and return to the subject of the Ripper and his savage violence. John spent the next hour telling me all about the case and suggested we tour Whitechapel the next morning. He’d take me to the areas where five of the victims were murdered. He’d tell me what he knew. I didn’t want to do it, Jack the Ripper of little interest to me.

But I couldn’t say no to John Grieve and was curious. I had an odd feeling that he had an agenda. The next morning, I woke up early to the rattle of rain against windows. I met John at New Scotland Yard, and two of his officers drove us to Whitechapel. I noticed that there were at least three plainclothes officers shadowing us. We did a lot of walking, my fingers stiff from the cold, making it hard to take notes.

He took me to the areas where Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were attacked on the street, their throats cut, each murder more mutilating than the last. He showed me where Mary Kelly was murdered in Miller’s Court, the flesh cut from her face, her breasts amputated, her right leg flayed to the bone.

London was in a panic as the Ripper wrote mocking and violent letters to the police and others.

“All hell broke loose,” John told me as we walked in the cold and drizzle. “Queen Victoria suggested how to investigate. She advised that East End women wear armor under their clothing.”

He mentioned suspects like the queen’s physician Sir William Gull, and her nephew the Duke of Clarence.

“Rubbish,” was John’s verdict.

After the tour, we stopped for something to eat at the Dickens Coffee House on Wellington Street at the edge of Covent Garden. I asked about the suspects.

“Based on what?” I wanted to know.

“Based on absolutely nothing.” John’s frustration seemed fresh, as if the murders had happened recently.

I asked if there was any evidence left, and he said only the Ripper’s letters and telegrams that he sent mostly to the police and other officials. John believed that many were fraudulent, hoaxes, the product of “crackpots” writing. But some seemed to have been penned by the killer.

“Well, you can tell a lot from letters,” I said as we drove back to New Scotland Yard after my tour. “The paper, the ink, what they say, and best of all might there be any DNA under an envelope flap or a stamp?”

He told me the documents were locked in a vault at the Public Record Office (now called the National Archives). I replied that I would look at them. Then he offered a tip that would alter the course of my career and in many ways disrupt my life forever.

“There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out as long as you’re going to look into it,” John said.

It flared in my thoughts that I hadn’t agreed to look into anything. What was going on? I was feeling recruited.

“An artist named Walter Sickert,” John went on. “He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of a nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called The Camden Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”

He said that Sickert had started out as an actor and was a master of disguise. Born in Munich, Germany, he was extremely handsome, charming, a genius who spoke many languages. He’d been mentioned before in connection with the Ripper crimes, and I should start digging. In a diplomatic way, John was giving me an assignment.

“Why don’t you investigate him yourself if you’re suspicious?” I inquired. “You’re the most senior and respected investigator at the Yard. Can’t you do that?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not possible.”

He explained that the Yard couldn’t work on a case that old. There was no one left to arrest, including Walter Sickert, who died in 1942 at the age of eighty-one. John warned that people didn’t really want to solve the case. It was much more fun to spin endless theories, most of them baseless.

“It’s a cottage industry,” he explained. “It’s like proving there’s no Loch Ness Monster. The Scots would be so mad!”

I began investigating the Ripper as if I were a police reporter again, and on July 6, 2001, I visited John Lessore. A well-respected artist, he was the nephew of Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore, and had a studio in Peckham. I began asking questions about Walter Sickert.

“You should write his biography,” John Lessore said.

I didn’t divulge that I intended to write about Sickert, but it wouldn’t be the story John hoped. I brought up a fistula, a tubelike passage often caused by infection. I’d read in several books that Sickert had suffered such an affliction. As a young child he had three surgeries to correct it, two in Munich, one in London. What a horror those must have been in the early 1860s.

“I’m wondering if you know what this fistula might have been,” I asked John Lessore.

“He had a hole in his penis,” he answered without pause.

That detail became a point of huge contention for my many critics. Later I was accused of making up the detail. Most assuredly, I didn’t. I began collecting antique weapons and bullseye lanterns of the period, experimenting with them. Visiting archival sources in the U.S., U.K., and France, I read Sickert’s original letters and those of his wives and associates.

On October 29, 1888, pathologist Dr. Thomas Openshaw received a letter from the Ripper. The paper it was written on would become significant when renowned paper analyst Peter Bower matched it to Walter Sickert’s own stationery. Peter would find matches with multiple Ripper and Sickert letters.

For the next year I was in and out of the U.K. doing research while having thoughts about nothing else. My writing office in Greenwich was filled with old books and newspapers, the walls arranged with Sickert artwork that I found unsettling. After a while, I took all of it down.

I’d hear doors shutting when no one was home but me. The floor would creak overhead as if someone was walking. My house on Lower Cross Road was new, and maybe the noises had to do with the construction “settling,” but it seemed haunted. After a while, when I’d hear another door shut, I’d say out loud, “Walter? Are you coming or going?”

One night I dreamed I was at a party in London, and he was there looking quite handsome in a tuxedo, sipping a glass of champagne, his eyes boring into me. He suggested I accompany him to the cellar. He had artwork he wanted to show me. He was certain I would find it interesting. I knew not to go with him but did anyway, waking up before we reached the bottom of the old wooden stairs.

All kinds of bizarre things were happening, and they were observed by my assistant Irene Shulgin and others. A window would fly open on its own. Computers would go offline for no apparent reason. Lights flickered or went out. Our plane lost autopilot as we flew across the ocean. There were fogs, fires, and hurricane-strength winds.

One of the eeriest events happened in early March 2002 when we flew to Cornwall, England. As a young man Sickert had painted there while apprenticing to James McNeill Whistler, an American master who lived in London. Most people know him for his painting Whistler’s Mother.

During the Victorian era many of England’s illustrious would stay at the Lizard Guest House in Cornwall. I’d gotten word that one of the guestbooks dating back to the 1880s had been signed multiple times by Jack the Ripper. My first thought was this was a hoax, a prank. Maybe it was an attempt at hoodwinking me into buying something bogus for a lot of money.

Over the years I would put up with plenty of that sort of thing while investigating the Ripper. Someone found a Gladstone bag in a well near Sickert’s house. It must have belonged to him. I didn’t believe it but had to check it out, bringing U.K. DNA expert Turi King with me to swab the bag. It looked like it had been bought at a yard sale.

In 2005 an antique collector in Venice, Italy, claimed to own a Sickert painting that featured a bloody knife. Harvard art experts were fooled into thinking the painting might be genuine, and I decided to check it out. Staci and I traveled to Venice with Sickert art expert Anna Gruetzner Robins, and a translator since none of us spoke Italian.

We were driven to the antique dealer’s house out in the middle of nowhere. The painting was an obvious fake, the varnish on it still tacky. It turned out the dealer’s wife was a fan, and he’d promised my appearance as her birthday present. The table was set, and they offered us cocktails. We didn’t eat or drink anything. We didn’t linger.

The only thing good about that trip is what happened during the flight back to London. As I read the newspaper on the plane, I came across an article about forty-five-year-old Debbie Munro, a wife, and mother of three. She was terminally ill with colon and liver cancer. The National Health Service wouldn’t pay for the drug Avastin because of her advanced stage.

The NHS could offer only palliative care. The Munros had been forced to sell their home to buy her medication. They were considering going to the U.S. where Avastin was available, but that wasn’t affordable either.

“This is awful.” I showed the article to Staci as we sat together on the plane.

Agreeing to do something about it, she got in touch with the Munros. We invited them to stay at the Savoy Hotel with us for a few days and donated £30,000 to help with the medicine.

“We had such a wonderful weekend,” Debbie Munro’s husband, John, told BBC News on August 11. “We had all spent time together as a family. It was so lovely.”

Three days later Debbie died, and John offered to return the money. We said absolutely not. Hopefully it would help with other needs such as buying a house. That’s exactly what Debbie would have wanted. When I hear stories like hers, I remember the desperate times in my own life.

One of the Bible verses I’ve always taken to heart is “for unto to whom much is given, of him shall be much required.” I don’t know why the Bible infers that this applies only to males. It applies to all. Throughout my career I’ve done my best to pay forward, whether it’s donating millions to animal rescue, college educations, literacy, or crimefighting.

Staci and I give away hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly in tax-free gifts to help people who have nowhere else to turn. I don’t say this to boast or pretend I’m such a wonderful person. I’m not. My flaws and stupid mistakes are endless. But if I don’t leave this Earth a little better than I found it, I have failed. Helping others is a joy and a privilege.

When I got the tip about the Lizard guestbook in 2001, I arranged to check it out immediately. I wasn’t expecting much as I headed to Cornwall with Irene, my mother, and several others. When our private jet landed at Newquay Airport, the wind was so fierce we couldn’t open the plane door at first.

Inside the small terminal, our passports were checked by a tall man in a dress uniform. I thought his attire seemed incredibly strange for a customs officer. He looked old-fashioned military.

44

IN CORNWALL WE STAYED AT THE B&B HILL’S HOTEL, THE ORIGINAL Lizard Guest House nearby and now a pub. Joan Hill was a descendant of the family that had owned the Lizard, and she’d inherited its many guestbooks, never bothering to look at them.

But a recent food writer staying with her had been curious about the history of the place, and she pulled out the big volumes filled with signatures. As the food writer was flipping through a guestbook that ended in 1887, he came across Jack the Ripper signatures, many of them appearing to have been added after a page was filled.

It was apparent to me that the guestbook had been vandalized in many ways, including crude but skillful drawings that showed women naked under their clothing. Peppered through the pages were rude, crude remarks. My first night in the Hill Hotel I stayed up past 2 a.m. going through the guestbook, and I felt as if Walter Sickert was in the room with me.

“It sounded like a hurricane all night from my windows,” I wrote in my journal.

When my guests and I flew out of Cornwall, landing in London at Gatwick Airport, we were told that our passports hadn’t been checked. I gave a detailed description of the uniformed man who had done it after we’d landed in Cornwall. I was told adamantly that there was no one at Newquay Airport who fit that description.

As I continued my research, I’d meet with John Grieve periodically, usually in Whitechapel at an Indian restaurant. He would review my latest portfolio as I pieced together the case. We’d have discussions the same way partners in an active homicide investigation would.

One day he said, “You know, Patricia, you’ll be hated for this.”

I wasn’t prepared for the vitriol inspired by my first book, Portrait of a Killer (2002), or my second one, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (2017). Critics swear that Sickert was in France the entire fall and early winter of 1888. But it’s not true. He was in London at Collins’s music hall on September 28, October 5, and October 8.

I suspect if more of these music hall sketches were found, there would be other dates placing him in London that fall and early winter. When I began bringing forensic scientists to the U.K. in 2001, they swabbed envelopes from Sickert, his associates, alleged suspects, and the Jack the Ripper letters.

But we were dealing with over a century of contamination. The nuclear DNA tests came back with nothing. We had more luck with mitochondrial DNA, and the test results didn’t exclude Sickert as being the Ripper. But that’s as much as can be said. Recent DNA analysis claims the Polish barber Aaron Kosminski was the Ripper. That’s not true either.

I don’t trust the DNA testing that was done, and by far I’m not the only one. U.K. geneticist Adam Rutherford said in a March 18, 2019, interview with Forbes Daily that the analysis is “terrible science.” DNA expert Turi King has said the same thing.

In the summer of 2002, I traveled to Boston for research at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Their Department of Manuscripts had correspondence between Sickert and painters William Rothenstein, Jacques-Émile Blanche, and others.

Sickert’s archivist Vada Hart had flown from London to help me review the documents. She was one of the few people I knew who could decipher his handwriting. After we were done, Vada wondered if I would take her to the “Witch City,” as Salem, Massachusetts, is called.

She’d like to see it before heading back across the pond, fascinated by the witch trials that began in the winter of 1692. Two hundred men, women, and children were accused. Twenty-five of them were executed. It was a brutally hot and humid day as Vada, Irene, and I toured Salem, ducking in and out of shops and museums while chatting with psychics.

I was fascinated to learn more about witches and magic. Those of the craft were nothing like my childhood drawings of pointy-chinned women in peaked hats flying on brooms across the moon.

“A witch is a wise person who studies the elements of the universe,” Salem mystic Lori Bruno explained. “Spells are like prayers.”

I told her about my work on Jack the Ripper, and she advised that Walter Sickert is a very dark entity, and evil never dies. Lori is a channeler of the unseen, and we would become close friends. While having breakfast at Salem’s Hawthorne Inn with Vada and Irene, I was reading the newspaper when I came across an article that would send me on another investigation.

A forty-four-year-old former beauty queen named Pam Kinamore had been murdered several weeks earlier in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She owned the Comforts and Joys antique shop in Denham Springs, and on Friday, July 12, she couldn’t find her keys. While closing for the day, she mentioned that they had vanished.

The missing keys included one to her home on Briarwood Place in Baton Rouge. She returned there after work, her husband and son out for the evening. I’ve always wondered how she got in. Perhaps there was a spare key somewhere, and the killer was watching. At 11:45 p.m. when her husband pulled into the driveway, Pam’s car was there but she was nowhere to be found.

Spots of blood were on the carpet in the master bedroom, and some of the furniture was in disarray. The bathtub was filled with cold water, votive candles around it. By all appearances Pam was undressed and about to unwind when violently abducted. Four days later, her badly decomposed nude body was found in the woods south of the Whiskey Bay exit on Interstate 10. She’d been raped, strangled, beaten, and stabbed.

Prior to her murder, there had been at least five others in the Baton Rouge area in recent years, the victims brutalized in their homes. One was twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Murray Pace, who’d just gotten her master’s degree in business from Louisiana State University (LSU).

On May 31, 2002, she’d returned home for lunch. She was sitting in her living room eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Pepsi when the killer entered her apartment. Fighting him from one room to the next, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed more than eighty times. East Baton Rouge Coroner Louis Cataldie later told me that it looked like her apartment “had been spray-painted red.”

Five months earlier, another LSU student, twenty-two-year-old Geralyn DeSoto, was stabbed to death. Four months before that on September 24, 2001, Gina Wilson Green had been raped and strangled near LSU. As I was reading about this during my visit to Salem, I commented to Irene and Vada that there was a serial killer on the loose in Baton Rouge.

Whoever was doing this was going to continue and be very hard to catch. It seemed strange that as I was winding up my Jack the Ripper investigation, another similar monster was on a rampage in Louisiana. I suggested to ABC’s Primetime Live’s star anchor Diane Sawyer that we should cover the ongoing murders in Louisiana. Maybe bringing attention to them would help the investigation.

As I waited for the Ripper book to be published, I began visiting Baton Rouge, sometimes piloting a helicopter there. I got to know the families of Pam Kinamore and Charlotte Murray Pace. When their mothers and sisters first met me, they were hopeful, saying, “Doctor Scarpetta has come to help us.” If only that were true, I thought. If only I really were her.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for me,” I replied.

Coroner Louis Cataldie and his death investigator wife, DeAnn, showed me the crime scenes, sharing the gruesome details. The murders continued even as I was investigating them. On November 21, 2002, twenty-three-year-old Trineisha Dene Colomb was abducted while visiting her mother’s grave in the Gran Coteau Cemetery. She died from blunt force trauma, her body found in the woods by hunters.

On March 3, 2003, twenty-six-year-old Carrie Lynn Yoder was abducted from her LSU apartment. She was raped, beaten, and strangled, her body thrown off a bridge and found floating in Whiskey Bay. Louis Cataldie was the coroner in all the cases. He said it was miraculous that he was able to recover DNA from Carrie Yoder’s decomposing body. But the police had no suspect for comparison.

As was true in Richmond’s Southside Strangler cases and the Ripper serial murders, the public was in a panic. Nobody had a clue who was doing this, and it was suggested it might be someone connected to LSU. Perhaps he was on the faculty or had some other job there. Mr. Nobody, as I’d called the killer in Postmortem. The monster could be anyone.

These sexually violent psychopaths don’t look like what they do. They might be handsome like Walter Sickert, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez. Often, they are likable, even charismatic, and those close to them have no idea about their secret lives of murder, rape, fetishism, torture, necrophilia, cannibalism.

Such a killer could be the person you sit next to at work. He might be a neighbor or a volunteer in a crisis intervention center as Bundy was. Often these violent offenders are married, and those who live with them have no idea. Or maybe, as I believe was true with Sickert, the wives are in denial or outright cover for them.

45

IN 2003, I WAS IN BATON ROUGE OFTEN AND WOULD STAY WITH the Cataldies. Early in the investigation, I didn’t feel safe being alone, not even in a hotel.

They’d take me to their favorite restaurants where I’d indulge in pork chop sandwiches, chicken fried steak, homemade biscuits. Their idea of turndown service before bedtime was to place a bottle of water and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver on my nightstand.

On March 19, I flew a helicopter to Baton Rouge with its skyline of oil refineries, the rigs prehistoric shapes in the haze. Container ships were ghostly on the Mississippi River, its sweeping bends dizzying as I flew over. That night I had dinner with Pam Kinamore’s family, and we spent hours talking about her murder.

The mother, Lynn Marino, wouldn’t rest until the killer was caught. She and other family members were desperate to reconstruct exactly what had happened to Pam. How did the serial killer spot her? They wondered if he might have browsed inside her antique store, perhaps at that time spotting her keys and taking them. Likely he’d been stalking her and watching her house.

“In the air is a surreal hysteria that I feel,” I wrote in my journal after that evening with Pam’s family. “It seems so hopeless when all that these suffering souls can do is speculate and ask what if? And what do you think? I worry about them ever going forward and fusing their two selves back together. Because they are divided. One person normal and trying to be who they were—and the other in hell.”

In March, ABC sent a film crew to Baton Rouge, and producer Jeff Martz and I conspired with the Cataldies about ways we could help. I decided it might be smart to lure the killer with a public event. My Jack the Ripper book Portrait of a Killer had been published that past November. Why not do a book signing in the Baton Rouge area?

My publisher scheduled one at Books-A-Million on March 20, 2003. Maybe the killer would show up. It’s not a far-fetched thought. Often these people insert themselves into an investigation. They get off on the attention, following their cases in the news. We made sure there was publicity in advance, and that it was known I had interest in the Baton Rouge cases.

There was a long line at my book signing, and Jeff Martz wore a concealed camera, filming everybody who showed up. Later the recording was looked at by the police. Unfortunately, from the get-go they weren’t happy with my involvement. Louis Cataldie and I were summoned to sit down with a U.S. attorney who grilled me about what I was doing.

It was made clear that local law enforcement didn’t appreciate me sticking my nose into their investigation. They were at odds with Louis too. I was worn out by it all, and deeply disturbed.

“This evil man must be caught. I need my relief from him too so I can go on with my life,” I wrote in my journal.

In May 2003, DNA connected thirty-five-year-old Derrick Todd Lee to the crimes, and he was taken into custody. An itinerate construction worker, he was described as a smooth talker. He had a history of stalking and is believed to have been preying on women since 1998. He might have been caught sooner had an FBI profiler not decided that the Baton Rouge Serial Killer was white.

Louis Cataldie’s office was used to draw a blood sample from Derrick Todd Lee. A female staff member appeared to take care of this, and the accused serial killer’s pupils dilated. He “broke out in a cold sweat,” Louis told me. He said that if Lee had been alone with the woman, he likely would have attacked her next.

“There is no stereotype for a serial killer,” Louis explained. “If you trigger him, you’re not going to know it. If you become part of his delusion, he will come after you. There’s no point in begging for your life, and there’s no escaping.”

Not long after this, I had dinner in New York with my publisher, Phyllis Grann. She asked me, “What’s the next trend?” I’d started the forensic thriller trend (without intending to), and what might I do now? I didn’t know. But I was curious about the psychopathic mind. What happens to create it?

Was Walter Sickert born a violent psychopath? Or were his childhood and traumatizing surgeries to blame? Maybe both? What about Timothy Spencer, Derrick Todd Lee, and so many others? I wanted to explore this and thought about where to do the research, possibly at Harvard University. I figured if any place had experts on the subject, it would be there.

On July 14, 2004, I visited the medical school, only to learn that where I really needed to go was the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, one of the oldest and most prestigious psychiatric hospitals in the country. At the last minute, the hospital’s president, Bruce Cohen, agreed to meet with me. We talked for several hours, and he told me if I came back in a week, he could have a proper tour set up.

I wouldn’t know until much later that after I’d gotten out of my limousine, Irene took a picture of me. In the background was a black Saab driving by. It was another one of those synchronistic moments, another six degrees of separation. The car belonged to neuroscientist Dr. Staci Gruber.

We wouldn’t meet until I returned on July 21, and when she walked into the room, I felt as if the air shifted. Or the electromagnetic field changed. It wasn’t because she’s a very attractive redhead with a beautiful speaking voice and soothing demeanor. I didn’t know that she would be the most gifted person I’ve ever met, and one of the finest.

Staci has much to be arrogant about, but is modest, thoughtful, and unselfish. While an undergraduate at Tufts University majoring in psychology, she was a full-time student at the New England Conservatory, starting out in classical voice before switching to jazz. I can’t imagine going to two schools at once. It was all I could do to get through Davidson.

She did her graduate work at Harvard and Tufts and would become one of the world’s foremost experts in cannabis and how it can be used to heal. Her nickname on CNN is Pot Doc, although she doesn’t partake of her own medicine. In her spare time, she composes music and sings with Michael Orland, the former music director of the behemoth competition show American Idol.

Staci has a ridiculous sense of humor. She can send me into fits of laughter when she starts imitating people and accents. Her favorite trick is to call pretending to be the telephone company or some other vendor, fooling me completely. I often hang up on ATT, Verizon, the bank, assuming it’s Staci having fun with me as usual.

She has the mind of a lawyer and tremendous financial savvy in addition to her endless talents. When we sued our business management company and went to trial in 2013, she single-handedly won the case after her five days on the witness stand. At the end of a seven-week trial that was miserable, the jury sided with us, awarding almost $52 million.

But what one hears in the news about huge verdicts isn’t the reality. After years of appeals, the amount gets carved away depending on the judge and other factors. Our case was no exception. Suffice it to say that only the lawyers win. Staci’s and my legal fees alone were more than $12 million, the other side’s almost twice that, we were told.

I’m terrible with money and should have listened to advice Oprah Winfrey gave me at the Matrix Awards for women in communication. This was in 2000, and we sat next to each other on the dais. At one point, she leaned close and confided out of the blue, “Patricia, always sign your own checks.”

“No way.” I couldn’t imagine it.

“Absolutely.” She nodded. “Don’t forget I told you this. I give the same advice to everyone.”

“You don’t really sign every check yourself?” I was stunned.

“If I don’t account for every penny, then I don’t deserve the money,” she replied.

After the lawsuit, Staci and I never again allowed any bookkeeper or accounting firm to sign our checks. She does it, and if it wasn’t for her, I doubt I’d have much. She watches our expenditures with hawkish scrutiny, and I learned early on not to surprise her with grand gestures.

She shook her head when I bought her diamond baguette earrings from Tiffany. She can find such luxuries elsewhere for a third of the price. Or she might not want them at all, and that’s the case most of the time. She’d rather take what is saved and give it to someone in need or to animal rescue. No matter what it is, she’s never wasteful.

Not a day goes by when she isn’t helping someone. Sending money, gift cards, food, or something else needed, including her advice and time. Despite the two cookbooks I published, I can’t compete with her magic in the kitchen either. She’s one of my life’s miracles, like being left on Ruth Graham’s doorstep and running into the Davidson dean of admissions. Staci and I were meant to be together. I wish I’d known her sooner.

Of course, I wasn’t cognizant of all this when I walked into her neuroimaging lab that July day in 2004. Our first encounter was one of those inexplicable moments when you feel you’ve met someone you’ve known before in another life or dimension. I hadn’t felt that way about anybody since Charlie.

By the time Staci and I met during my marathon tour of her hospital, I was overwhelmed by information, not sure what I might do with any of it. I could scarcely focus as she explained functional MRI imaging, and the danger of lumping bipolar disorder and schizophrenia together. It annoyed her and still does when people misuse the term split personality.

She rolled out vernacular like limbic system, anterior cingulate cortex, neurochemical dysfunction. By this point, I was in gridlock. I’d met with countless scientists, and my blood sugar had plummeted. I wasn’t with her longer than thirty minutes, and as I continued the tour, I knew I had to talk to her again. I wasn’t leaving until I did.

I told the hospital’s publicist that I had some follow-up questions for Dr. Gruber. My ploy was the oldest in the book. It was the same one from my school days when I’d have a crush on a teacher and hang around after class for clarification about an assignment. My M.O. hadn’t changed a bit, and usually worked like a charm.

Late afternoon I returned to Staci’s building, and we sat down in a conference room. I was drinking a vanilla Coke, trying to wring out one last bit of mental energy. We chatted about all sorts of things, including movies, both of us agreeing we couldn’t watch anything that showed animals being hurt. It was getting close to six o’clock and I suggested we keep talking over dinner.

She said she was supposed to go to a birthday party, and I asked if there was any way she’d consider postponing. She reminded me that one doesn’t postpone a birthday, and I wondered if she could skip it, then. After a moment of hesitation, she made the call. I suggested she ride with me to the restaurant, and she refused. She didn’t get into limos with people she didn’t know. She suggested I return to the Charles Hotel where I was staying in Cambridge, and she’d pick me up in her Saab. When I was back in my room freshening up, I realized I’d checked in under an assumed name. Staci and I hadn’t exchanged phone numbers, and if she asked for Patricia Cornwell at the front desk, they would say I wasn’t there. I had to sit in the lobby and watch for her. So much for privacy.

The next three nights we had dinner, staying up extremely late talking. After that we were inseparable. I’d just rented a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and never went back. By the fall, we were living together on a forty-acre estate I’d leased outside Boston in Concord. A year and a half later we were married. As a special bonus, I inherited her mother, Hali, and later Hali’s husband, Ted.

Several months after Staci and I met, former president George Bush invited me for a weekend at Kennebunkport. I asked Staci to come, and she wondered if that was a good idea. Maybe the Bushes wouldn’t like a same-sex couple staying with them. I said that was ridiculous. Years earlier I’d brought my former girlfriend Marcia Morey with me twice.

A judge in North Carolina, Marcia was very involved in the Democratic Party. If the Bushes did fine with her, they would be fine with Staci. I added that of course Marcia and I weren’t allowed to stay in the same quarters. She was in one guesthouse, and I was in another, a lot of distance and Secret Service agents between us.

I explained that when I was outed by the media, I was scheduled to appear at Barbara Bush’s star-studded family literacy fundraiser in Houston. I was supposed to stay in the Bushes’ house. Assuming I might not be welcome after what was all over the news, I wrote Barbara a note. I said I’d understand if she’d rather I didn’t come. She replied that she’d be “heartbroken” and please not to cancel.

Staci and I drove to Kennebunkport for the appointed weekend, and Barbara was warm and fun. But she was her usual no-nonsense self. Staci and I would stay in the upstairs of the main house. I was in one room, and she was across the hall. It was fine for her to share a bathroom with a male guest. But she and I couldn’t share a room.

Since I think everything is a crime about to happen, I was most unhappy with the arrangements. What if the male guest used the bathroom and got confused, walking into Staci’s dark room instead of his? I was torquing myself into a state of what ifs and it’s happened before scenarios, deciding I wouldn’t sleep a wink if I didn’t solve the problem.

Late that night I carried a chair into the bathroom, wedging it under the knob of the door leading from the male guest’s bedroom. No way he could “accidentally” end up in Staci’s room and crawl into her bed. She thought that was absurd, not to mention rude to the other guest. But in time she’d get used to my worrying about everything that might hurt or kill her.

The next day, George Bush invited us to see his office on the property. While there, he started talking about the parachute jumps he did every birthday. He began describing tandem skydiving and demonstrated by stepping behind me and grabbing me in an inappropriate way.

The timing was unfortunate because Barbara walked in and was most unhappy. Following him down the stairs in a huff, she called him a dirty old man. He wasn’t. But like a lot of wonderful people in their later years, he was getting somewhat disinhibited.

Barbara didn’t need to be disinhibited to do whatever the hell she wanted, and it had nothing to do with her age.

During one of my visits, she asked if I would run errands with her. She intended to hop into her red Miata convertible and ditch her Secret Service detail.

“That’s not safe,” I told her.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You shouldn’t do it. But at least I’ll be with you,” I replied, as if I could prevent a kidnapping or assassination attempt.

“I’m going.” She collected her car key and big pocketbook. “Are you coming?”

We climbed into her Miata, and she put the top down. When Barbara was driving that convertible, she was as conspicuous as George Washington crossing the Delaware. Our first stop was the drugstore in Kennebunkport. As we climbed out a woman and her young daughter stared as if seeing an apparition. They couldn’t speak at first.

“Could we take your picture?” The mother finally got up enough courage to ask.

“No, you may not,” Barbara said as only she could. “I walked into a door last night and have this.” She pointed to a welt on her forehead. “And now I need to buy something for my athlete’s foot, so please excuse me.”

Later that day, she wanted to show me waterfront properties in the area that I might want to consider. She thought it would be fun if I had a summer home near theirs. Maybe we could spend more time together. The house she had in mind was beautiful but not on the market.

When she pulled up in the driveway, the people who lived there were sitting on their front porch. They looked at us in amazement. We were trespassing. Better put, Barbara Bush was.

“HELLO!” She waved at them. “JUST SHOWING MY FRIEND YOUR HOUSE!”

They didn’t know what to say. I didn’t either.

“IT’S BEAUTIFUL! HAVE A GOOD AFTERNOON!” Barbara shouted as we drove off.

She was always warm and generous with me. But she scared me sometimes. During one visit I surprised her with an antique brass mortar and pestle that I placed on a table in her living room.

“It’s not up to you to add to my décor!” she reprimanded me.

On another occasion, she mentioned how aggravated she got when people asked Billy Graham who his favorite presidents were.

“And he never mentions George,” she complained.

Next time I talked to Ruth, I brought this up. She assured me that Billy just forgot. It’s easy to overlook people you’re closest to and most admire, she explained. Billy thought the world of George, and I passed this along to Barbara.

“I’m never telling you anything again!” she thundered.

46

BY THE TIME STACI AND I MET, RUTH GRAHAM WAS HAVING TROUBLE walking and talking. Soon after that she was bedbound, scarcely able to move, and it was difficult understanding what she said.

Staci and I were on the Grahams’ mountaintop often, but I wish it could have been more. The last time we were with Ruth was in December 2006, and I had no idea I’d never see her again. Toward the end of the visit, I was alone with her, sitting in a chair pulled up close to the bed. She was on a feeding tube and completely immobile. Mostly, I held her hand.

I played Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, and she closed her eyes to listen. It was our music. It had been since those days forever ago when I was writing her biography. Speaking was laborious for her, and I did most of the talking, reflecting on all she’d done for me. Such a journey we’d had together.

“How does it make you feel knowing that the only two nonfiction books I’ve written are about you and Jack the Ripper?” I asked.

“I drove you to murder,” she managed to quip.

“Good and evil,” I replied. “I’ve met the extreme versions of both.”

I reminded her of my mom showing up on her doorstep when I was nine. I told Ruth that whenever I saw her around the neighborhood, she was always so kind. She paid attention to me for no discernible reason.

“Why me?” I asked. “How did I get to be so lucky?”

“You were always special,” she said in her faltering, fractured way.

I knew she wasn’t long for this world, and as I held her hand, it was so hot it was damp with sweat. That hadn’t happened before. Typically, her hand was cool. It was as if her circuitry could no longer manage the powerful energy of her spirit. She was melting her insulation.

Late afternoon Staci and I needed to return to the airport in Asheville. I felt terrible leaving Ruth, sorry we lived so far apart.

“I’ve got to go,” I told her.

“I wish you could be here every day,” she managed to say.

“I wish I could too. But I’ll be back before you know it.”

As I said this, I remembered a day twenty-five years earlier when I was on the mountaintop doing research for her biography. I’d been at the Billy Graham office collecting photocopies of Ruth’s correspondence. When I was driven back to the house she was nowhere to be seen, and I found a note on my bed.

“Patsy, I’ll be back soon,” it said in her distinctive handwriting.

I felt a strong premonition that someday I’d remember that note when she wasn’t here anymore. It seemed like a promise of something much bigger than her returning from running an errand. I sat down in front of the window, looking out at the Swannanoa Valley and the mountains beyond just as I had that scary day when I was nine.

Ruth’s health dramatically deteriorated after that last visit, and it wasn’t possible for me to see her again. She died at home on June 14, 2007, four days after her eighty-seventh birthday. Billy would last for another eleven years, both buried at his library in Charlotte. Since then, I often feel her presence.

I have inexplicable things happen that seem like a message. Finding her untouched letter in the book of Chaucer’s poems. Or a business card from the hotel where we stayed during our visit in Monte Carlo. Also, dreams of showing up at her house and she’s there even though I know she isn’t anymore.

After Staci’s and my beloved bulldog Tram died in 2015, I dreamed Ruth appeared to me and seemed carved out of light. She was laughing and petting Tram, cupping his face in her hands, his stumpy tail wagging. I woke up with a start, certain she’d just visited me from the Other Side, offering comfort.

As weird as it might sound, I feel her around me. Not all the time, but when I do it’s palpable. It seems she’ll do something to get my attention. Often, it’s playful. Even mischievous. People would say that’s magical thinking on my part. But it isn’t. Just because we can’t understand something doesn’t make it false.

Not long after my dream about Ruth and Tram, my novel Chaos came out, and it was aptly named. Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, and my book tour was dismal, all attention on politics. I was frustrated and fed up, deciding to quit Scarpetta. I felt it was time to do something else. It seemed I didn’t have much left to say, and the characters didn’t either.

I didn’t like the way the world was changing, most of all storytelling. The TV sensations CSI and NCIS had dented my enthusiasm about forensics. I found it hugely insulting when strangers asked me if shows like that were where I got my ideas. I couldn’t stop missing the old days of bookstores on every corner, and signings with endless lines of fans.

After 9/11 people didn’t show up to public gatherings like they once did. Then there was the insidious but inevitable fallout from online sales. Publishing had become more impersonal. Gone were the days of lavish dinners, parties, expensive gifts, and full-page ads in The New York Times. Reading was on a steady decline, and most authors, including me, didn’t feel celebrated anymore.

I’d gone from nobody wanting what I wrote to becoming one of the best in the world as a crime novelist. It wouldn’t last long. Being on top never does, but we don’t figure that out until after the fact. Others come along, and trends change, the public no longer as intrigued by forensics. There was a glut of shows featuring it (not necessarily accurately).

By the end of 2015, I realized I needed to reinvent myself. Scarpetta wasn’t the only thing I was able to write. Maybe I could find other stories to tell. For a year I worked on ideas for TV shows and films. One day while I was meeting with producers in London, someone mentioned that there was talk about creating a female James Bond. Would I be interested in writing such a thing?

Absolutely, and I started wondering about the protagonist, deciding she works for NASA. I remembered touring NASA’s Langley Research Center in 2001. The identical twin scientists Christine and Celeste Belcastro had invited me because they were Scarpetta fans. Since then, Celeste had died from cancer, but I reconnected with Christine. In 2017, I returned to NASA Langley in Hampton, Virginia.

I thought it would be fascinating to write about a young female genius who works there, as do both of her parents. A cyber investigator and scientist, she’s being groomed for rocketing to space as part of a secret program she knows nothing about. For a while I was in talks with Harry Potter producer David Heyman about an eventual film. I was hopeful I could try my hand at the screenplay.

But that wasn’t what the powers to be in my career wanted. Amazon made a substantial offer for me to write two space thrillers. Once again, I was back to books. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from them. I began spending time at NASA Langley, its campus going back to the days of the Wright brothers. I was visiting other NASA facilities and hanging out with astronauts while researching Quantum (2019) and Spin (2020).

They didn’t do well, distribution a massive problem because anything published by Amazon was (and still is) boycotted by book chains, independent stores, and bestseller lists. I knew that upfront because my second Jack the Ripper book published by Amazon wasn’t carried by a single store, no mainstream media so much as reviewing it.

But I didn’t think that would happen with novels, considering how many I’d sold through traditional stores. I figured Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and others would come around. But I was wrong in my assumptions. You can’t find Quantum and Spin anywhere except online. It’s illogical and unfair.

When the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020, my mother was living in a retirement home in Charlotte, and it wasn’t possible to visit. She’d suffered a stroke and was unable to communicate or walk. The most she could do was lift one hand, then the other, as if resorting to a cryptic sign language. Like so many people during that dark time she was a silent and invisible victim, having no visitors for more than a year.

During that interval she lost more than forty pounds. She had to be fed with a plastic spoon that she often bit in half. I have no idea what she was aware of, and in the summer of 2023, Staci and I flew to Charlotte to see her for the last time. We gathered around her bed with my brother Jim, his wife, Mary, my nephews and niece Jimmy, Owen, and Hailey.

My younger brother, John, had been to see her days before Staci and I got there, and for him to return was overwhelming, I suspect. It was an incredibly sad and painful time. Playing Mom’s favorite hymns on a boombox, we held her hand and reminisced about our Montreat days.

I painted scenes of pristine snows and fall leaves blazing beneath a sapphire blue sky. I reminded her of tapioca pudding with maraschino cherries, and her famous “perfume pie” made with Cool Whip and Jell-O mix.

“And you loved Pepperidge Farm’s coconut cake and would sneak to the store to buy one. Sometimes eating the whole thing,” I said as if divulging a long-held secret. “That was your drug of choice when you were at your wits’ end.”

Jim and I joked about our shenanigans and squabbles.

“Remember this, Mom…?”

“Remember that…?

“Remember the time…?”

“Such a beautiful house you built for us,” we’d say. “And how brave of you to move us to Montreat. What a wonderful place for kids to grow up. Baseball, tennis, swimming, and walking anywhere we wanted without being unsafe…”

Her eyes were barely open, registering nothing, and she didn’t move. But I sensed she knew we were there. I felt it the instant Staci and I had walked into her room. Day in and day out we sat by Mom’s bed watching her float further out of reach on a cloud of morphine.

One afternoon when the attendants were turning her over, her eyes flew open wide and were as blue as the summer sky. I’m convinced that’s when her spirit left her body. She died on July 25, three days after her ninety-sixth birthday, and I talked to her as I removed the oxygen cannula from her nose.

“You won’t be needing that anymore,” I told her. “You’re in such a better place now, Mom. And we’ll see you there when it’s our turn.”

It didn’t seem real as I collected framed photographs and other items while she lay on the bed. I thought about cultures that believe the spirit hovers around the body for twenty-four hours after death. I continued talking to Mom as I packed up her belongings, removing her many paintings from the walls, heartbroken by the familiar fragrance of the Coty face powder she’d been wearing since I was a child.

She’d written her will decades earlier, and I was startled to discover she’d left me her big leatherbound King James Bible. I suppose she figured I needed it more than my brothers, and keep it on my desk. Tucked between its worn pages is an ancient list I’d made of cell phone “speed dial” numbers for my brothers and me. I found a tiny vibrant green feather that appears to be down from a peacock.

“Lord teach me that you are all I need before I come to the place where you’re all I have,” she’d noted in a margin on April 14, 1991.

“Nothing is very important compared with ‘afterward’ (heaven),” she’d jotted.

Whatever heaven is, I trust she’s there in a state of perfect harmony. It’s what she’d always wanted, homesick like someone visiting from another planet. I can’t go to western North Carolina without seeing her in the butterflies, the mountains, and the foliage she loved. I feel her in the cool, clean breeze and the tiniest perfect flower that would have caught her artist’s eye.

I miss her laughter and the outrageous things she’d say, not realizing everyone could hear her. Before her stroke she told me how proud she was of my accomplishments. She couldn’t read my scary books but knew people who loved them, and she thanked me for helping to take care of her. Missing her after she was gone made me realize how much I’d missed her all along.

As was true of my father, she couldn’t connect with people, not even her own children. She was compromised, her emotional volatility like a compass needle spinning. I never knew which way it would point, and often it was in the wrong direction. What she perceived often wasn’t true, and that limited her ability to really know anyone, including me.

When I overhear Staci talking to her own mother, I marvel over that kind of closeness, wondering if Mom ever had it with anyone. I suspect she didn’t. I’ll always wonder what she was like before she met my father. I doubt she was normal. Depression runs in her family, and her early traumas took their toll. For someone so feisty she was fragile and easily victimized.

Emotionally, she was a child, and my father was her nemesis. I think he broke her, and she broke him back. My brothers and I were caught in their clashes but not the reason for them. Our mother and father couldn’t help much of what they did even when it seemed deliberate. I don’t know how anybody is a parent. I can’t think of anything harder and suspect I wouldn’t have been a good one.

My childhood may not have been ideal, but I can’t think of anyone’s that is. It would surprise a lot of people to know that I wouldn’t trade my parents for anyone. They were exceptional in many ways, and I appreciate the gifts I got from them. I wouldn’t be who I am had I grown up differently. If I’d had the so-called perfect family, I don’t think I would have tried so hard to make something of myself.

I might not have been lonely enough to sing like Ruth’s canary. I wouldn’t have found the need to create an imaginary universe. I regret not having more insight when I was younger. I was too busy feeling hurt and frightened to understand that damage creates damage. Every one of us is guilty of it. That’s the circle of life nobody wants to sing about.

47

WHILE THE PANDEMIC RAGED, I WONDERED WHAT SCARPETTA MIGHT have to say about the world we were living in. I started imagining where she was. I didn’t know, and suddenly it seemed urgent that I find her.

So, I meditated, just like I used to when starting a book about her. Where are you? What are you doing this very moment? Show me. She always would (and still does). I focus on her, and sometimes what materializes in my imagination isn’t an actual scene in the next book. It’s her state of mind during a private moment.

After I wrote Postmortem, I tried to envision Scarpetta, looking for what might be the hook for a second story. I kept seeing the same thing. She was in a lawn chair in her mother’s Miami backyard, baking in the sun. Scarpetta’s eyes were closed, her mother inside the house rattling around. And that was as far as I’d get.

Scarpetta wouldn’t open her eyes or lift a finger, and I was doing my best to fashion a story out of that. Scene after scene I attempted and deleted. Weeks went by as I tried to figure out what she was doing in that damn lawn chair.

Finally, she muttered, “I’m tired.”

After the serial murders in Postmortem, I guess she should have been. Who could blame her?

“Leave me alone,” she added nicely.

So, I did. I gave up on the lawn chair scene and accepted that she would return to the page when she felt like it. Next thing I knew, I imagined her downstairs inside the morgue cooler, unzipping the body bag of murder victim Beryl Madison. Then Scarpetta was walking outside as a Ford LTD cruised up, Pete Marino behind the wheel. Suddenly, I was writing Body of Evidence.

In 2020 while Staci and I were sheltering in place, I tried to envision Scarpetta rather much like CIA operatives engage in remote viewing, a form of ESP. She appeared to me like a scene in a movie. I saw her sitting at an old wrought iron table in a sumptuous garden in Old Town Alexandria.

She was in dirty work clothes, her pocket pruner on her hip, the sun gentle on her face, the metal chair across from her scraping as I pulled it out to sit. I said we hadn’t talked in a while, and the world certainly “has gone to hell in a handbasket.” She had her eyes closed, listening.

“I’m wondering if you’d like to work a case together again,” I ventured.

“Depends on what it is,” she answered, implying that it had better be a good one.

Then she was gone, no doubt busy pruning or planting. Or maybe she was on her way to the next crime scene with Marino at the wheel, the two of them crime-busting without me. I started writing a new Scarpetta story for the first time in five years, and it seemed she was showing up again.

I asked Esther if she thought it possible that I could relaunch the series. She said yes. But don’t expect miracles. Publishing houses were merging. There were fewer places to go and more people watching TV and not reading. The situation wasn’t helped by yet one more failed attempt at making a movie. After three decades, I was no closer to a dramatic adaptation of my series.

I began Autopsy in 2020, moving Scarpetta back to Virginia, this time outside Washington, D.C., in the historic district of Alexandria where she, Benton, and Lucy live on an eighteenth-century estate. After years of space research at NASA and elsewhere, I had a new bag of scientific tricks, a new fuel load. Quantum mechanics. Electromagnetic energy. Artificial intelligence. High-energy weapons. Robots. Drones.

My space thrillers may not have been popular, but the research was life-changing. I’d fallen in love with rockets, and it’s on my bucket list to go up in one. What I wouldn’t give for a ride in a spaceplane like the Dream Chaser I piloted in a simulator. Prior to this I’d not given any thought to life beyond our planet. I became insatiably curious about alien intelligence, the origin of humans, and began alluding to such things in my most recent novels.

Possibly, humans are descended from Martians who knew their planet was doomed. A backup plan was necessary for survival of the species. When SpaceX finally lands people on the Red Planet, I hope I’m still around to see what they find. If I were that young girl in Montreat again, I’d want to grow up to be an astro-archaeologist and learn to pilot a spaceship.

I don’t believe we’re alone in the universe. I find that a reassuring thought, hoping that if we’re being visited, we’re respectful and welcoming to our cosmic neighbors. While Staci and I were on Cape Cod a few years ago, we saw UAPs, as UFOs are called today, these inexplicable translucent orbs dancing in moonlight.

In those early years when I was friendly with Tom Clancy, he often spoke of his work in Hollywood. Based on my experiences with him, I imagine he was collaborative. Perhaps that’s one reason his movies have been so successful.

I’d think about that as Scarpetta continued falling in and out of film options, nothing ever happening. It reminded me of the Israelites stuck in the desert forty years while trying to reach the Promised Land. I’d been in the wilderness almost as long when the eventual Scarpetta TV show would begin filming in the fall of 2024.

Not all previous failed attempts have been my fault. But some of them were. As I look back, I don’t think I was aware of how rigid I could be. In 1997, I’d spent several days with Helen Mirren, and she stayed with me in my New York apartment. I wanted her to play the director of ATF in a TV show I was writing for ABC. Soon enough the conversation shifted to Scarpetta.

We talked about the possibility of Helen in that role. I worried that her starring in Britain’s huge hit Prime Suspect might be too much like Scarpetta. How stupid was I? Studio executives wanted an actress in her twenties, and that was even stupider. I adore Helen Mirren and admire her brilliance. She would have made a fabulous Scarpetta. She’d make a fabulous anything.

While I was writing the screenplay of From Potter’s Field for Peter Guber at Mandalay Studios, Susan Sarandon became the favored possibility. I met with her several times in New York and L.A. One day at lunch she launched in about why Scarpetta shouldn’t kill the psychopath Temple Gault at the end of my novel.

Susan didn’t want that and said she wouldn’t play Scarpetta if it entailed her killing someone. This was at the time the movie Dead Man Walking had been released, Susan playing a prison ministry nun, both the character and the actress opposed to capital punishment in any form. Susan suggested that in the screenplay I should have the serial killer Temple Gault commit suicide.

Then Scarpetta wouldn’t have to plunge that knife into his thigh, transecting his femoral artery and causing him to hemorrhage to death. Didn’t matter that it was self-defense or to save her young niece Lucy’s life. Scarpetta was to turn the other cheek, and Temple Gault should kill himself. Problem solved.

“Violent psychopaths rarely commit suicide,” I informed Susan.

“I know all about psychopaths.” She dismissed my argument while picking at a salad.

Movies aren’t the same as working in a morgue or spending time with those who investigate violent crimes. But I didn’t say that to Susan Sarandon. I was polite even as I thought, No way you’re playing Scarpetta. That project imploded as had all the others while I wrote draft after draft of scripts nobody wanted.

In 2009, Angelina Jolie was interested in playing the part, and I met her on the set of her movie Salt. We had lunch in her trailer and talked about the eventual script. She said something to me I’ll never forget.

“Just don’t make Scarpetta too earnest.”

I think she was talking about me and not the character. I was too earnest. My years of research and absorbing tragedies had made me too serious and inflexible. Because of what happened with Demi Moore, I had a reputation in Hollywood that was unfortunate but earned. I was considered mercurial and noncollaborative.

This followed me from one option to the next. I’d sit in on a big meeting with studio executives like Amy Pascal, and someone at the table would allude to how difficult I was. No matter what, the reputation stuck. But that’s not why a movie never got made. It always fell apart in the writing stage no matter who the screenwriter was, including me.

During the option with Sony Pictures, Oscar winner Robert Rodat was hired to write a screenplay based on Postmortem. That attempt went nowhere. In 2004, director Joel Schumacher and I met in New York. He wanted to make a movie about Scarpetta starring Nicole Kidman. I was excited and felt hopeful. I’d always been a big fan and she would be perfect.

Early summer I gave Joel and his screenwriter a tour of the Richmond medical examiner’s office, and they showed up in flip-flops. Not the best thing to wear in the morgue. The resulting script was another nonstarter, and in 2005 Sony released me early from the option. I remember producer Casey Silver calling and telling me that.

“Are you saying they don’t want to make this particular picture, or they don’t want Scarpetta at all?” I asked.

“They don’t want Scarpetta at all,” he said as I felt my mood chill, the Promised Land forever out of reach. “Amy Pascal says she doesn’t want to make a big-screen CSI.”

48

FOUR YEARS AFTER I WAS DROPPED BY SONY, ELIZABETH GABLER at Fox 2000 optioned Scarpetta. That would go on for seven years with nothing made. I’d given up that anything would happen by the time Jamie Lee Curtis and I met at a private retreat in 2014.

Staci and I instantly connected with her and her actor-musician husband, Christopher Guest. We became good friends, and on several occasions, Jamie interviewed me onstage about my latest book. I’ve told her that our discussions are the best I’ve had. She’s bright, intuitive, naturally funny, and relentless.

Most of all, she’s caring, never acting like a diva, always doing something generous and thoughtful. One day while we were on a walk in Beverly Hills, a car jumped the curb and hit a tree. She dashed to the dazed driver, making sure he was all right as he climbed out to inspect the damage.

“Are you hurt? Do you need me to call an ambulance?” she wanted to know.

“I’m okay.”

I could tell he was clueless about the identity of the Good Samaritan in dark glasses and a hat as big as a lampshade.

“Wait a minute,” I said to her as we resumed our walk. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing things like that. Not you.”

She regularly calls to check in, giving me the latest production update or simply chatting. When I was sick with a debilitating bout of diverticulitis in 2023, she sent gardenias, my favorite. She must have divined that, because I’d never mentioned it. A year later I’d undergo major surgery, eleven inches of my colon removed, and she lavished me with roses and other gifts meant to comfort.

Breakfast at Jamie’s house means she cooks, not letting anyone else lift a finger. She doesn’t hide behind her celebrity, calling people herself or making her own reservations. Fearless behind the wheel of her electric car, she doesn’t hesitate to careen through alleyways and other invented shortcuts. She has the situational awareness of a spy.

“I’ll never lie to you,” she promised when we began working together, and she never has.

Scarpetta wouldn’t be a TV show were it not for her. When she says she’ll do something, you can count on it. By 2020 she’d started her own production company, and we talked about adapting my space thrillers Quantum and Spin. There wasn’t much interest from her partner, Blumhouse Productions.

“What about Scarpetta?” Jamie asked.

“She’s got nothing going on in Hollywood at the moment,” I replied.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and she would, attracting Nicole Kidman to the project.

Nicole insisted that Jamie play Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy. Initially, Jamie hadn’t planned on that scenario, but agreed. Finally, this was going to happen. But the process was incredibly slow, year after year slipping by until at long last the filming began in the early fall of 2024.

By then Charlie Cornwell had been battling lung cancer for three years, and I’m grateful that he lived long enough to know the show was happening. I went to see him for a final time in mid-September as the filming was about to begin. He and Marty have a beautiful old house outside Asheville, and the location made the visit even more poignant.

Their place is but a few miles from where my mother used to live in Hendersonville. I was looking at the same Blue Ridge Mountains of my childhood. When Charlie was well and I’d visit him and Marty, we used to walk in the same park Mom visited near Flat Rock. I’d been told that Charlie had but a few weeks to live, and as I climbed out of my brother Jim’s pickup truck, I willed myself to be strong.

Now eighty-five, Charlie was incredibly frail when he appeared at the front door, struggling to walk with a cane. I remember he was wearing baggy pants, a loose denim shirt that Marty had embroidered with an image of their dog. We sat on the big porch for a few minutes, and he was wrapped up in a sweater. Even so, he was cold.

We relocated to the living room filled with Marty’s paintings. She was working on a portrait of Charlie that reminded me of what he looked like when I’d first laid eyes on him at Davidson after I’d been there but a few months. Suddenly, I saw him in his late thirties, putting on his winter coat and Russian cap. From then on, the rest of my time in college was shaped by him.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Marty said, and beneath her calmness was a raging sea of pain.

“Please don’t go.” I sat down across from Charlie. “I want to know more about how the two of you met.”

I’d heard the story before and wanted to hear it again. I couldn’t imagine what she felt. There had been a constant stream of visitors to the house, all of them wanting their final private moment with Charlie. Mostly, Marty suffered alone, and I didn’t want to be selfish. The three of us talked for about an hour, Charlie’s voice hushed and raspy.

Marty recalled their first encounter at a dinner party when Charlie was an associate minister at First Scots Presbyterian Church in Charleston. She was smitten with him rather much like I had been long ago. I told her I was Charlie’s warm-up, our time together a preparation for when she came along.

“I got him ready for you,” I said to her.

Charlie needed me to break him out of his celibate rut at Davidson, and I needed him to help me get started in life. As we talked, I fooled myself into believing that maybe he’d stave off the inevitable longer. Maybe he’d beat cancer. I didn’t show my profound sadness as we talked about death and what it meant.

“Well, I am a bit of an expert about that at least,” I said. “And I’ve seen enough not to believe in it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“It was clear to me early on at the morgue,” I explained. “I knew the body on the table wasn’t the person. What we leave behind is like a discarded old shoe. Death isn’t the end because we aren’t these bodies. We just live in them.”

“Well, mine’s about to conk out,” he said.

“Mine’s not getting any younger either,” I added. “But it’s a popular scientific theory these days that consciousness doesn’t originate in the brain. Rather, our brain conducts it rather much like a light bulb.”

“I believe that,” Marty chimed in.

“I hope it’s true.” Charlie’s voice wasn’t much louder than a whisper.

“It is,” I replied. “I swear.”

“When I get to the Other Side,” he said with effort, “is there anybody you want me to look for?”

“Ruth,” I replied instantly. “You two liked each other so much. And I know you won’t be seeking out my mother.”

“No.” He almost laughed, shaking his head.

I brought up our visits at the Grahams’ house when we’d sit in lawn chairs looking out at the mountains. Ruth loved the sun and so did he. I reminded him of the funny story about the Chaucer book I’d given to her and then taken back, all because of him. During our last visit I wish I’d known then about the letter still tucked between its pages. Charlie would have been amazed.

“Then I’ll look for Ruth,” he agreed.

It was a surprising thing for him to say. Prior to this, Charlie claimed he didn’t believe in anything after death. Including God. But he was rethinking his position. We talked about the Grahams for a while, remembering those trying times when I was in my early twenties and writing her biography. I told him again how much help he’d been.

Because of him I had the luxury of working at the medical examiner’s office and as a volunteer police officer. Not once did he complain and say I should get a real paying job. Never did he suggest I give up when one book after the next was rejected. Money was extremely tight, and we went through all his savings. I thanked him again for everything he’d done.

I told Marty that I’m eternally grateful for the happiness, the fantastic life she’d given him. She was exactly what he needed, and I knew that the first time I met her. I was so relieved he’d found happiness that when they married, I paid for their honeymoon, flying them on the Concorde to London. They took the Orient Express from Paris to Venice and Rome.

“A little better than our honeymoon at Folly Beach.” I reminded him of sand erosion and ants invading our rental.

I brought up the funny story about the three of us being in London at the same time during their honeymoon. The travel agent put us in the same hotel, 47 Park Street in Mayfair. A terrible faux pas. I had no idea until the front desk expressed confusion about two Mrs. Cornwells staying there. From that point on I called Marty my wife-in-law.

By now it was midafternoon, and Charlie was weary. Jim and Mary had gone apple picking to give me privacy and were back waiting in the driveway. Marty went outside to chat with them, and I got up to leave. I hugged Charlie in his chair, feeling his ribs through the back of his sweater.

“I love you, Patsy.”

“I love you too, Charlie. I always did.”

The sun was low over the mountains and bright in trees turning fall colors, the breeze chilly when I left. On the way back to Charlotte, we detoured in Asheville because I wanted to revisit a few places I’d not seen in decades. I hadn’t looked at Appalachian Hall since the early 1980s when Charlie and I went there to talk to Dr. Bill Griffin about my mother.

This was at a time when she and I weren’t speaking. I didn’t realize how devastated she was by my writing Ruth’s biography. Whenever I was in Montreat doing research, I’d stop by Mom’s house, and she would fly off the handle, accusing me of all sorts of things. It didn’t occur to me that she felt rejected. A part of her knew I’d replaced her long ago, and she’d lose it with me the same way she once did with Dad.

Charlie and I didn’t know how to deal with her, keeping our distance out of self-preservation. We asked Dr. Bill about her diagnosis. What exactly was wrong with her? He collected a thick file and went through her entire psychiatric record. In truth that was a HIPAA violation, and Mom would have been livid had she known. But I was grateful he did it. I learned much about her.

When Jim, Mary, and I pulled up to Appalachian Hall after my visit with Charlie, the former psychiatric hospital had been converted into an apartment building called the Kenilworth Inn. I got out of the pickup truck and walked around the entrance, remembered the rocking chairs, looking up at the third floor where I’d lived for two months at the age of nineteen.

The tennis court where I’d played that infamous match was gone. But much about the place looked the same from the outside. As I looked around, I thought about what Einstein said about time. It’s not real. We have it so everything doesn’t happen at once. I remembered what the writer William Faulkner said about the past not being gone. It’s not even past.

From there we drove to my former high school, now a middle school. We parked at the tennis courts, just staring out at them as I envisioned my young self. I could see her in cheap tennis clothes and shoes with holes in the toes practicing with her male teammates. When I was living in that moment, it never entered my mind that a half a century later I’d be back feeling like a ghost in my own life.

The timing of that trip was somewhat miraculous, almost biblical. The next week, Hurricane Helene would devastate much of western North Carolina, sending floodwaters roaring through the Montreat gate, washing away much of what I remember from my early days.

In October 2024, Staci and I flew to Nashville where the Scarpetta show was being filmed. I was to have a cameo with Nicole Kidman, and here we go again. Six degrees. Miracles and things meant to be.

The showrunner and screenwriter Elizabeth Sarnoff asked if I would play the judge swearing in Scarpetta as the new chief medical examiner of Virginia. It would be the first time I’d met Nicole Kidman after all these years of hearing about her as a possible Scarpetta.

While the film crew waited inside Nashville’s Supreme Court Building, Nicole walked in wearing jeans, her long hair piled on top of her head. There’s nothing pretentious about her. If anything, she seemed unobtrusive to the point of shy. I found her quiet and professional but gracious and warm.

We needed to stand in front of the Seal of Virginia that had been added as a prop. I would hold a Bible and swear in Nicole. It wasn’t exactly fair. All she had to do was repeat after me. But I had to memorize the oath, and I rarely bother memorizing anything anymore, not even my own phone numbers.

I went over and over my lines in my head, terrified I would flub them and cause one take after another. As Nicole and I got in position for our first rehearsal, I patted her arm.

“Don’t be nervous,” I told her. “I know you’ve not done this before, but you’ll be fine.”

My knees were shaking as I pretended to hold a Bible, and she raised her right hand, noticing she had an inked message scribbled on it. I suppose she needed to jot down something and didn’t have paper handy.

“I guess I’d better wipe that off.” She wet her finger and rubbed away.

“ACTION!”

“I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia…,” I began.

She repeated it after me as we locked eyes.

“And that I will faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as…” I stopped cold.

While looking into her blue eyes, I felt Scarpetta looking back, and my mind had gone blank. I said nothing. Then I looked at the sea of faces and all the cameras.

“What is it Scarpetta does for a living?” I asked, and everybody laughed.

We tried again. This time I got through the rest of it.

“… As chief medical examiner, according to the best of my ability,” I said, and she repeated it.

“So help me God,” I went on.

“So help me God,” she echoed.

After it was over, we hugged.

“I really swore you in,” I whispered. “I wasn’t kidding.”

It was a wrap, and I headed back to my trailer to scrub off makeup and return my outfit to wardrobe. As Staci and I were driving to our hotel, Marty texted me that Charlie had died at 2 p.m. I’d known the end was close. Notes from her had informed me that he was failing. He was “seeing spirits,” she said. Once again, the timing seemed prophetic.

I thought of my early days with him when I was desperate to get published, and becoming certain it wouldn’t happen. I felt destined for the same failure I’d had as a tennis player. Never would I have dreamed that one day I’d be filming a cameo with the most successful actress in the world.

After Staci and I returned to Boston, I wrote Nicole Kidman an email, and mentioned Charlie’s passing, telling her it wasn’t a bad sign but quite the opposite. I explained that he was the reason I’d named the character Scarpetta.

“It seems strangely symbolic that he would pass to the other side right after I finally met Scarpetta for the first time…,” I wrote to Nicole. “I feel her spirit waited for you. Just as she picked me (for some reason). I’m so delighted that the two of you have found each other at long last.”

She replied with a sumptuous arrangement of roses and a note:

“Come back soon. Love Nic.”

My mom

Me at six months

Dad

My mom and my grandmother G.G.

Mom and me

My big brother, Jim, and me

Big shoes to fill

Jim, John, and me

When we first arrived in Montreat

Mom and me dressed for church

My first pair of boot skates

My freshman year of college

Playing on the men’s tennis team

My wedding day

Charlie’s and my first year of marriage

Volunteering with Richmond Police

Charlie, Jim, and me on a visit to Miami

Dad’s visit to the Richmond seminary apartment, 1983

Visiting G.G. in Miami, 1982

My first copy of Postmortem arrives!

Princess Margaret presenting me with the CWA Award for best crime novel in 1991 Crime Writers’ Association photo

Taking Demi Moore to the morgue, 1992

Ruth Graham at my book party in London, 1993

Bomb Research, 1997

Visiting with the Bushes in Kennebunkport

My first Scarpetta Bird, 1999

Anthropology research

Home on the mountaintop with Billy and Ruth

In the autopsy suite with Dr. Marcella Fierro

Examining the Jack the Ripper letters, 2001

Tennis tips from my hero Billie Jean King, 2001

The Body Farm, 2002

Discussing Princess Diana’s death with Dr. Fierro

Former President Bush taking Staci and me on a spin Photo by Barbara Bush

Staci in the morgue—I always take her to nice places

Book signings!!

Flying through Manhattan

My pal Dan Aykroyd

Shipwreck diving in Bermuda

Chilling with Staci

Backstage with Staci, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Orland

My writing office

Swearing in Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta

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A WORD OF THANKS

IF MY LITERARY AGENT ESTHER NEWBERG HADN’T ENCOURAGED me, I wouldn’t have written this memoir. But that has been true of my important projects in life. Those that scared me most she would champion. My career wouldn’t be what it is without her.

I thank my editors Karen Kosztolnyik, Catherine Burke, and Tilda Key for their enthusiasm and excellent suggestions. I’m grateful to Michael Hathaway for helping keep the project on track. I would have been lost without archivists Mary Daniels and Mac Cintron relentlessly excavating more than half a century of personal papers.

The Billy Graham Archive and Research Center staff was unfailingly kind and generous in answering my many questions. Blessings to Kerri and David Bruce for finding my earliest correspondence with Ruth Graham. What a happy day it was when I reread those many letters. They broke my heart and made me smile.

To all who have helped me along the way in this life’s journey, I won’t forget it. I’m humbled and honored.

—Patricia Cornwell

Photograph by Nick Holmes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

IN 1990, PATRICIA CORNWELL SOLD HER FIRST NOVEL, POSTMORTEM, while working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. An auspicious debut, it went on to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, as well as the French Prix du roman d’aventures—the first book ever to claim all these distinctions in a single year. Growing into an international phenomenon, the Scarpetta series won Cornwell the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author, the Gold Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literary and artistic development.

Today, Cornwell’s novels and iconic characters are known around the world. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written the definitive nonfiction account of Jack the Ripper’s identity, cookbooks, a children’s book, a biography of Ruth Graham, and three other fictional series based on the characters Win Garano, Andy Brazil, and Captain Calli Chase. Cornwell continues exploring the latest space-age technologies and threats relevant to contemporary life. Her interests range from the morgue to artificial intelligence and include visits to Interpol, the Pentagon, the U.S. Secret Service, and NASA.

Cornwell was born in Miami. She grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston.

ALSO BY PATRICIA CORNWELL

SCARPETTA SERIES

- Sharp Force
- Identity Unknown
- Unnatural Death
- Livid
- Autopsy
- Chaos
- Depraved Heart
- Flesh and Blood
- Dust
- The Bone Bed
- Red Mist
- Port Mortuary
- The Scarpetta Factor
- Scarpetta
- Book of the Dead
- Predator
- Trace
- Blow Fly
- The Last Precinct
- Black Notice
- Point of Origin
- Unnatural Exposure
- Cause of Death
- From Potter’s Field
- The Body Farm
- Cruel and Unusual
- All That Remains
- Body of Evidence
- Postmortem

CAPTAIN CHASE SERIES

- Spin

- Quantum

ANDY BRAZIL SERIES

- Isle of Dogs
- Southern Cross
- Hornet’s Nest

WIN GARANO SERIES

- The Front

- At Risk

NONFICTION

- Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert

- Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed

BIOGRAPHY

- Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

OTHER WORKS

- Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen

- Life’s Little Fable

- Scarpetta’s Winter Table

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- What drove me to it
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- Photos
- Discover More
- A Word of Thanks
- About the Author
- Also by Patricia Cornwell