Chapter 30

I thought that Bentley would avoid me after that night. Surely, the kiss—though a physical act—was a reflection of emotional closeness, and in my experience men avoided women they felt close to. In my more rational moments, that was how I made sense of Bentley's actions. He had spent months holding everything in while being hounded by journalists and podcast enthusiasts alike before finally confessing his childhood trauma to me. That vulnerability had spilled out from his lips, first as words and then as a kiss, before he remembered who I was, what I looked like, and his wife waiting at home, and had absconded into the night.

In my less rational moments, I imagined that Bentley was so overcome with desire that he was unable to stop himself from kissing me and had to leave to prevent things from going further. Considering that his wife was significantly more attractive than I was, that seemed unlikely.

Either way, I thought he would be as embarrassed as I was. Instead, Bentley went out of his way to say hello on Monday morning. Virginia was back, their hands clasped together like a couple in love. If she was threatened by me, there was nothing in her demeanor to show it.

"Hi, ladies. How are we doing today?" he asked the three of us.

"Great," Dotty said and batted her fake eyelashes at him.

I barely managed to utter, "Fine," as Lauren replied, "Good, thanks."

I didn't tell them what had happened. How could I? Our entire friendship was built around our feelings for William and I'd betrayed him. The night replayed in my head as I listened to the closing arguments. Everyone looked tired. The female prosecutor's roots were grown out and it gave me some solace to know that she wasn't a natural blonde.

"To fail to prosecute William Thompson would not only be a failure of justice," she said. "It would mean setting a monster loose on the world."

"We're all for justice," the defense responded, "but true justice means knowing that the right person has been sent to prison."

After the closing arguments were finished and the jury left to deliberate, Dotty, Lauren, and I went out to dinner to say goodbye. The weirdness between Lauren and me after I had spied on her coffee date with Mark had seemingly dissipated, if only because of our impending goodbyes. It was easy to like a person when you knew that you were never going to see each other again.

We went to a Mexican restaurant where I put one chip after another in my mouth.

"Do you want more?" the server asked.

In a different time and place, I would've said no. Chips were unhealthy and if I ate too many, it would give me a stomachache. The days, however, had taken on an air of unreality that made health an impossible concern. I licked the salt off the rim of my margarita as I dove into the second bowl.

"I'm going to miss the two of you. It's so good that we had each other through all of this," Dotty said.

Her usage of "this" might as well have referred to an amorphous blob, for all the ground that it was expected to cover.

"What are you doing after this, Dotty?" Lauren asked.

"My husband and I have been talking recently. I think we're going to try to work things out," she said. "Besides, kids need their mothers. I've been away for too long."

I suspected that somewhere inside that had been Dotty's plan all along. She had used William to punish her husband and he'd fulfilled the terms of his sentence.

"What are you doing next, Lauren?" Dotty asked.

"The semester is starting in a couple of weeks. I'm going to go home for a few days first and then drive to school. I'm looking forward to being back on campus. After all those hours at the trial, maybe classes will actually seem interesting."

"Remind me of your major," I said.

"Criminal justice," she replied, the obvious answer for a girl who couldn't stop talking about killers.

"What about you, Hannah? What are you doing next?"

There was a pause. My tongue felt sticky like I'd eaten a mouthful of peanut butter, a feeling that I was all too familiar with.

Earlier in the week I'd called my mother for the first time in over a month. After some back-and-forth ("Why haven't you called?" and "I've been worried about you"), I confessed that I'd lost my job, had maxed out my credit cards, and needed to move home for a while. I couldn't remember ever having been so honest with her, even when I was small and still considered her a potential confidante. It was worse than stripping down naked in front of a man for the first time in a room with unflattering lighting. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to reel them back in and replace them with lies about how great everything was, how much I looked forward to the future.

My mother got very quiet for a minute, so quiet that I thought the line had been disconnected.

"Mom? Are you still there?"

"Of course, you can move home," she said finally. "Whatever you need. We'll support you."

How it crushed me to shatter her idyllic notions of who I was.

"I'm moving to my parents' house in Minnesota," I told Dotty and Lauren.

Their faces morphed into pity that was thankfully broken by the server bringing our entrées. I smiled my biggest smile, like I wasn't bothered at all, and ordered another margarita.

"Do you think they're going to give him the death penalty?" Lauren asked.

None of us thought that he was going to be found not guilty, not even Lauren, who was so certain of his innocence. The question was whether they would give him life in prison or sentence him to death.

"Yes," Dotty said. "I think they will."

Lauren shook her head.

"That's so wrong. Did you know that it actually costs more for a state to kill someone than it does to keep them in prison? I mean, I obviously think it's wrong for the state to kill someone to begin with, but it doesn't even make sense financially."

"At least they don't use the electric chair anymore," Dotty said.

"Actually," Lauren butted in, "the injections are worse. There are people that they've tried to kill that haven't died. Also, the companies that make the injection drugs are refusing to supply them, so the states have to get them through illegal means."

"I still think it's better than the chair," Dotty replied.

I knew what she meant. The electric chair was a gruesome image that made her feel uncomfortable. She didn't care what the person who was dying felt as long as she could maintain her own ease.

If only,I thought, people could elect to be killed in the same way that they themselves had killed, and then William could die with a rope wrapped around his neck.

"It might actually be good to get the death penalty," Dotty continued. "Then he won't have to rot in prison for the rest of his life."

"It's always better to be alive," Lauren told her.

"I'm just saying, prison is really bad. Is that really how William wants to spend the rest of his days?"

"Maybe he can really find himself," Lauren said.

"I think he knows who he is," I replied.

I was going to miss the two of them in a weird, convoluted kind of way. They were the only people who really understood how I felt about William. Their existence implied that maybe I wasn't as messed up as I thought I was—and everyone needed people like that in their lives. Even people who were ordinary. People who weren't in love with a serial killer.

It made me sick to look at my bill, or maybe I'd eaten too much queso. At the very least, I needed enough credit left on my cards in order to make it back to Minnesota, and as it was, there was no certainty of that happening. Ironically, the more anxious I became about my finances, the more money I seemed to spend. I ate every meal like it was the last I'd ever be able to afford.

Dotty hugged me in the parking lot.

"You'll be okay," she said into my ear.

I resented the implication that I wasn't already okay, that okayness was something I needed to work toward in the future.

"See you on decision day," I said.

"Merely a formality," she replied before turning and walking away.

Something I admired about Dotty was her unwavering belief that William was guilty and how she loved him anyway. Lauren and I still played at the possibility of innocence, however minuscule, as though that absolved us of any moral sin we might have committed by being in love with such a man. If I was being honest, on that night I had no doubt about whether he'd done it. William was a killer, and though there were injustices in the criminal justice system, William going to prison wasn't one of them.

When I made the decision to go to the ravine, it wasn't because I was looking for some last-minute evidence to get William released. I went because I was a little drunk and I knew that returning home without visiting the ravine was like going to Paris and not going to see the Mona Lisa. It was my way of saying goodbye to William, to the trial, to the person I'd been in those weeks and the person I was going to become after William was locked away indefinitely.

Before William was caught, the ravine had been a popular destination for members of the forum who liked to go and take pictures under the guise of investigation. I held myself back from calling it what it really was: a type of serial killer tourism. The same people, I knew, would shell out money to stay in the Lizzie Borden house, which had since become a bed-and-breakfast.

I drove there recklessly, passing through yellow lights that were very nearly red. It was like the ravine was a grocery store about to close before a storm and I desperately needed a loaf of bread.

I had always pictured it as being somewhere rural. The kind of place where even if someone managed to survive, they would never make it back to civilization again. Instead, the ravine was surrounded by the signs of suburban America. There were midlevel chain restaurants in a nearby strip mall, places that I had never eaten at but were recognizable nonetheless. It was amazing the way that Outback Steakhouse had penetrated my life without requiring me to ever step inside of one. There were several hotels, including another location of the hotel chain that I was staying in. The parking lots were busy with the flows and pauses of vehicles waiting for pedestrians to cross through traffic to get to their own cars.

Any light that remained from the setting sun was immediately blocked out by the trees as I got out of my car and made my way down the side of a hill. I turned on my phone flashlight and chastised myself for not being better prepared. The ground was littered with discarded chip wrappers, half-drunk soda bottles, and the occasional used condom. This was no nature preserve.

At the bottom, the sound of traffic disappeared. I shivered despite the July heat and looked around at the dense brush, a sight that the women themselves had never been able to see because they were already dead upon arrival.

I imagined William driving to the ravine. Unlike me, he would've driven carefully. After all, it was erratic driving and a stolen license plate that ultimately doomed Bundy. "Drive like you have a body in the back of your car" was as good an appeal to safety as I'd ever heard. He would've already had the spot picked out before he killed Anna Leigh because that was the type of man that he was.

No one would've noticed William or, if they did, they wouldn't have cared. He looked so innocuous. Even I thought that the first time I laid eyes on his picture and dismissed him as a possible killer. He was a man who was welcomed wherever he was, regardless of the baggage he had stored in the back of his car.

It was almost tender the way in which he had lifted the women out of his trunk, like a husband carrying his new wife into their wedding suite. A final moment of sweetness before everything was lost to them.

Once the women were tipped over the edge of the ravine, they would've rolled all the way down. That rolling was likely responsible for most of the injuries that they had sustained after they were already dead. There was nothing gentle about the earth.

By the time they reached the bottom, their transition from women into bodies was complete. Vermin would begin to feast upon them, rendering them unrecognizable. In the world above, life continued without them, their loved ones still unaware that there was anything to be missed.

Fire ants bit at my ankles as I stood there. I should've been grateful to be alive, to experience the ravine as the four dead women had never been able to, but I could only feel disappointment at the lack of answers it gave me.

Bentley was probably right. The best thing to do was to go back to Minnesota and find a nice, boring man. The type of person who got up in the morning, made coffee, shoveled the walk in the wintertime, and whose deepest secret was that he occasionally watched some porn. There were a lot of people who lived that life who were ostensibly happy. Sure, there wasn't the thrilling tickle in their stomach every time they thought about their love, but who needed that when they had someone willing to put ingredients in the Crock-Pot before work?

As I emerged from the depths of the ravine, headlights flashed in the parking lot. I scurried back to my car, suddenly frightened in the way that I sometimes became when returning from the bathroom in the middle of the night, convinced that a monster had materialized beneath my bed in my absence.

I exhaled as I sat in my front seat, ensuring that the doors were locked around me. The headlights that had been pointed in my direction turned and parked in front of one of the chain restaurants. There were no monsters under the bed after all.

I wouldn't learn until morning the danger that I was in that night, at which point my fear would seem like a prescient and precious thing. Perhaps it was better that I didn't know because I wouldn't have run away. I would've embraced it, let the ravine take me as it had taken the other women, my body consumed by vermin and garbage.