Free I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel by Laura Lippman

Eliza’s peculiar history. One could even argue that it was an inevitable question, that if she had allowed herself to think about such things, she would have known that Walter would not leave this world without sending out some sort of manifesto. Not to her, necessarily. She really had come to be almost smug about how she had hidden herself in plain sight. She may not have deliberately chosen to hide herself from Walter, but between Peter’s surname and the move to London, she had felt relatively invisible.
    Walter always had a grandiose streak, a concept of himself as someone much larger than he was, in every sense of the word. He had insisted he was five nine, when he was clearly no more than five six or five seven. He became about as angry as Eliza ever saw him, talking about his height, claiming those incheshe didn’t have. It was one of the rare times she felt she had the upper hand with him, which had been terrifying and pleasing in equal measure. She couldn’t afford the upper hand with Walter, or so she thought. Later, when people used terms like “Stockholm syndrome”—not her parents, but people far removed from her, prosecutors, journalists, and that odious Jared Garrett—she had found it offensively glib. That experience of being labeled had left her with a lifelong distaste for gossip, a reticence so pronounced that many people thought her incurious, when her real problem was an almost pathological politeness. She hated Iso’s fascination with celebrities, the way she pored over magazine and Internet photos, passing judgment on dresses and hairdos and habits of people she had never met. But Eliza could never explain the virulence of her revulsion to her daughter, not unless she was willing to tell her everything. She would, one day, not today.
    As she dawdled at the computer—it was late, after ten, but Peter had yet another function, one from which she was spared because the babysitter had fallen through—an icon glowed in the lower corner of her screen, announcing her sister’s arrival into this netherworld.
    Hi, Vonnie, she typed.
    Eliza! The exclamation mark signaled surprise, if not necessarily delight. Eliza had never before initiated an IM conversation with her sister, and had been famously taciturn when her sister tried to engage her via this mode. What’s up?
    Nothing. Just trying to write something.
    WHAT? Vonnie might as well have typed: Peter is a writer. I am a writer. You are not a writer. She had always been territorial that way. The funny thing was—neither one was a writer, not anymore. Peter had left journalism for the world of finance, and Vonnie was an editor at a publication so small and arcane that it was essentially unaffected by the Internet-related problems roiling the mainstream media. Something that had never made significant money could not lose significant money. Vonnie edited a foreign policy journal that charged $150 a year and was even stodgier than its subscriber list, whose average age was sixty-five. The subscribers were actually beginning to petition for some limited Web-based content, but Vonnie was fighting the change. “Life is not a timed event,” she liked to say. “I want to run a magazine that has the luxury of thought, with no shot clock on responses.”
    A letter, Eliza wrote, reflexively honest with her family. But she thought before adding: To Walter Bowman.
    WHAT?????????????????????????????????????
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    It was funny, provoking that kind of adolescent response from Vonnie. Her sister might as well have typed back: For reals? Or: R U Serious?
    He wrote me.
    The phone rang within seconds.
    â€œAre you out of your fucking mind?” Vonnie asked.
    â€œYou know, Iso might have been the one to pick up. It’s not that late.”
    â€œHowever, she didn’t. I promise I’ll be more careful in the future. Meanwhile,