Never Knowing, Page 3

  “Of course.” I searched her face, wondering what she was thinking. After a moment she said, “Maybe your father was married and she’s scared of it coming out after all these years?”

  “Maybe.… But I think she even lied about her name.”

  “Are you going to talk to her again?”

  “Hell, no! Pretty sure she’d call the cops on me. I’m just going to drop it.”

  “It’s probably for the best.” Again she looked relieved. I wanted to ask who she thought it was “best” for, but she was already picking up our plates and moving toward the kitchen, leaving me alone and cold in front of the fire.

  * * *

  As soon as we got home Ally and Moose tumbled into bed and I tidied up the house—I have a tendency to let things get a little out of hand when Evan isn’t around. After my chores were done I wasn’t in the mood to hit my workshop like I usually do when I’m wired on coffee and chocolate, so I turned on my computer. I’d planned on just checking my e-mail, but then I remembered Julia’s words.

  My parents died in an accident.

  Had Julia told me the truth about anything? Maybe I could at least find her parents’ names online. First I Googled “car accidents, Williams Lake, BC.” A few results popped up, but only one fatality involved a couple, and they’d died recently—wrong name, too. I expanded my search to all of Canada but still didn’t find any accidents with my birth mother’s last name. If they’d died years ago the article probably wouldn’t even be online, but, not ready to give up yet, I Googled “Laroche.” Odd hits, random mentions here and there, but other than the university directory I’d found before, nothing connected to Julia.

  Before I packed it in for the night, I decided to look up Williams Lake. I’d never been there, but knew it was in the heart of the Cariboo—the Central Interior of BC. Julia hadn’t struck me as a small-town girl and I wondered if she’d escaped as soon as she graduated. I stared at the screen. I wanted to know more about her, but how? I didn’t have any contacts at the university or with any government agencies, and Evan didn’t either. I needed someone with connections.

  When I Googled private investigators in Nanaimo, I was surprised to see there were a few companies. I browsed their Web sites, growing more confident when I realized they were usually retired police officers. When Evan called later I ran the idea by him.

  He said, “How much do they cost?”

  “I don’t know yet. I was going to make some calls tomorrow.”

  “It seems pretty extreme. You don’t know for sure she was lying.”

  “She was definitely hiding something—it’s driving me nuts.”

  “And if it’s something you don’t want to know? She might have a good reason for not telling you.”

  “I’d rather deal with that than spend the rest of my life wondering. And they might find my birth father. What if he doesn’t know I exist?”

  “If you feel like it’s something you need to do, then go for it. But check them out first. Don’t just hire anyone out of the phone book.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  * * *

  The next day I called the private investigator with the slickest Web site, but as soon as he told me his fees I knew how he paid for it. Two numbers led straight to an answering machine. The fourth, TBD Investigations, had a bare-bones Web site, but the man’s wife was friendly when she answered, telling me “Tom” would call me right back. And he did, an hour later. When I asked about his background, he said he was a retired cop and did this to keep himself in golfing money and his wife off his back. I liked him.

  He told me he charged by the hour, with a five-hundred-dollar retainer up-front, and we agreed to meet that afternoon. Although I felt like a cliché as I pulled alongside Tom’s sedan in the public parking lot, I was more comfortable after we talked for a few minutes and he told me anything he discovered would be confidential. I filled out his forms and drove away with mixed emotions: guilt about invading Julia’s privacy and giving out her address, hope I might find my real father, and fear he wouldn’t want to meet me either.

  * * *

  Tom had told me I might not hear anything right away, but he called a couple of days later when I was cleaning up after dinner.

  “I have that information you were looking for.” The friendly grandfather tone was gone, replaced by serious cop.

  “Do I want to know?” I laughed. He didn’t.

  “You were right, Julia Laroche isn’t her real name—it’s Karen Christianson.”

  “That’s interesting. Do you know why she changed it?”

  “You don’t recognize the name?”

  “Should I?”

  “Karen Christianson was the only survivor of the Campsite Killer.”

  I sucked in my breath. I’d read about the Campsite Killer—I’ve always been interested in serial killers and their crimes. Evan says I’m morbid, but when Dateline or A&E features a famous murder case I’m glued to the TV. They all had lurid names, like the Zodiac Killer, the Vampire Rapist, the Green River Killer, but I couldn’t remember much about the Campsite Killer—just that he’d murdered people in the Interior of BC.

  Tom was still talking. “I wanted to be sure, so I drove down to Victoria and took some shots of Julia at the university, then compared them to online photos of Karen Christianson. It looks like the same woman.”

  “God, no wonder she changed her name. So she must’ve met my father after she moved to the island. How long ago was she attacked?”

  “Thirty-five years ago,” Tom said. “She moved to the island a couple of months later and changed her name.…”

  Something cold and dark was unfurling in my stomach.

  I said, “What month was she attacked?”

  “July.”

  My mind raced to calculate dates and times. “I’m turning thirty-four this April. You don’t think…”

  He was silent.

  I stepped backward and collapsed into a chair, trying to grasp what he’d just told me. But my thoughts were all over the place, fragmented pieces I couldn’t pick up. Then I remembered Julia’s pale face, her shaking hands.

  The Campsite Killer is my father.

  “I … I just—are you sure?” I wanted him to contradict me, to tell me I heard wrong, made a mistake, something.

  “Karen’s the only person who can confirm it, but the dates match up.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was staring at our calendar on the fridge. Ally’s best friend, Meghan, had a birthday party on the weekend. I couldn’t remember if I’d bought a present for it yet.

  Tom’s voice sounded far away. “If you have any more questions, you have my number. I’ll e-mail the photos I took of Karen with your receipt.”

  * * *

  I sat in my kitchen for a few minutes, still staring at the calendar. Upstairs I heard a cupboard door slam and remembered that Ally was in the bath. I’d have to deal with this later. I forced myself off the chair. Ally was already out of the bathroom, leaving a trail of raspberry bubble scent and damp towels behind her.

  Normally I love bedtime with her. When we’re snuggled up she tells me about her day, part little girl as she mispronounces words, part little woman as she describes what the other girls are wearing. Back in my single days I let her sleep in my bed all the time. I loved the closeness, loved feeling her breathing next to me. Even when I was pregnant and Jason was out partying, I could only fall asleep with my hand on my stomach. He usually didn’t come back until the wee hours of the morning. When I flipped—and I always did—he’d push me out of the room and lock it. I’d scream at him through the door until I was hoarse. I finally left him when I was five months pregnant, and he never got to see his daughter—he wrapped his truck around a tree a month before she was born.

  I’ve stayed in touch with his parents and they’re great with Ally, telling her stories about Jason and saving his things for when she’s older. She spends the night at their house sometimes. The first time, I worried that she�
��d wake up crying, but she was fine. I was the one who couldn’t sleep. Same with her first day of school—Ally sailed through it, but I missed her every minute, missed the noise in the house, missed her giggles. Now I crave this little window into her life outside our home, want to know how she felt in each moment: “Did it make you laugh?” “Did you like learning about that?” But that night Tom’s words kept flashing in my mind: The dates match up. It didn’t feel real, couldn’t be real.

  After Ally drifted off, I kissed her warm forehead and left Moose with her. In my office I turned my computer on and Googled the Campsite Killer. The first link was a Web site dedicated to his victims. While the site played haunting music, I scrolled through photos of all his victims, with their names and dates of death below each picture. Most of the attacks were staggered every few years from the early seventies on, but sometimes he’d hit two summers in a row, then go years without surfacing again.

  I clicked on a link that took me to a PDF map that had a little cross marking every location where he murdered someone. He’d moved all over the Interior and northern BC, never killing in the same park twice. If the girls were camping with their parents or a boyfriend, he murdered them first. But it was clear the women were his real target. I counted fifteen women—healthy, smiling young women. All told, they believe he’s responsible for at least thirty murders—one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history.

  The Web site also mentioned the only woman who ever got away: his third victim, Karen Christianson. The photo was grainy, her head turned away from the camera. I went back to the Google home page and typed in “Karen Christianson.” This time numerous articles popped up. Karen and her parents were camping at Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in the West-Central region of BC one summer thirty-five years ago. The parents were shot in the head while they slept in their tent, but he hunted Karen in the park for hours until he caught and raped her. Before he was able to kill her she managed to hit him in the head with a rock and escape. She’d been lost in the woods for two days when she stumbled out of the mountain and flagged down a passing motor home.

  In most of the photos she was hiding her face, but some industrious journalist found her senior year picture from the high school yearbook, taken just months before that fateful summer. I studied the photo of the pretty dark-haired girl with the brown eyes. She did look a lot like Julia.

  The phone rang, making me jump. It was Evan.

  “Hi, baby. Is Ally already in bed?”

  “Yeah, she was tired tonight.”

  “How did your day go, any word from the PI?”

  Normally I tell Evan everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly—the second he walks in the door or answers the phone, but this time the words caught in my throat. I needed some time to think, to sort through it all.

  “Hello?”

  “He’s still looking into it.”

  That night I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to get the horror out of my mind, trying not to think about Julia’s face turned away from the cameras, turned away from me. Hours later I woke from a dream, the back of my neck soaked with sweat. I felt hungover, my mouth dry. Snippets of the dream came to me—a girl running through dark woods in bare feet, a bloody tent, black body bags.

  Then I remembered.

  I turned and looked at the clock. Five-thirty a.m. No chance of falling back to sleep after that nightmare. Like metal to magnet I was sitting at my computer again. I studied the photos of the victims, every article I could find on the Campsite Killer, my body filled with fear and disgust. I read every newspaper article on Julia, every scrap of information in every magazine, examined every photo. The reporters had hunted her for weeks, staked out her house, and followed her everywhere. The media frenzy was mostly in Canada, but some American papers had picked up the story, comparing her to one of Ted Bundy’s victims who had also escaped. When Karen disappeared the articles changed to speculation about where she was, then gradually the coverage disappeared.

  That morning I also got the e-mail from Tom with Julia’s photos at the university, walking to her car, outside her home with Katharine. I compared hers to online photos of Karen Christianson. It was definitely the same woman. In one shot Julia was touching a student’s arm, smiling encouragingly. I wondered if she touched me after she gave birth, or just told them to take me away.

  * * *

  This week I went through the motions, but I felt flat, disconnected—angry. I didn’t know what to do with this new reality, the horror of my conception. I wanted to bury it in the backyard, far away from anyone’s eyes. My skin crawled with knowledge, with the evil that I’d looked into, that had created me. I took long showers. Nothing helped. The dirt was on the inside.

  When I was a kid I used to think my birth parents would come back if I was just good enough. If I got in trouble, I worried they’d find out. Every good grade in school was so they’d know I was smart. When Dad looked at me like he was trying to figure out who let me into his house, I told myself they were coming. When I watched him play piggyback with Melanie and Lauren after telling me he was too tired, I told myself they were coming. When he took the girls to the pool and left me to mow the lawn, I told myself they were coming. They never did.

  Now I just wanted to forget they existed. But no matter what I did or the million ways I tried to distract myself, I couldn’t get rid of the dark, heavy feeling pressing down on my chest, grabbing at my legs. Evan had been out of cell range for most of the week with a group. When he was finally able to phone I tried to listen about the lodge, tried to make the appropriate responses, tried to share about Ally’s day, then I ended the call after a while, claiming fatigue. I was going to tell him, I just needed more time. But the next morning he picked up on it right away.

  “Okay, what’s going on? Don’t want to marry me anymore?” He laughed, but his voice was worried.

  “You might not want to marry me after you hear this.” I took a deep breath. “I found out why Julia lied.” I looked at the door, knowing Ally would be up soon.

  “Julia? I don’t know who—”

  “My birth mother, remember? I heard from the PI last week. He told me her real name’s Karen Christianson.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you found her?” He sounded confused.

  “Because I also found out my real father is the Campsite Killer.”

  Silence.

  Evan finally said, “Come on. You don’t actually mean—”

  “I mean my real father’s a murderer, Evan. I mean he raped my mother. I mean—” I couldn’t say what else has been driving my nightmares: My father’s still out there.

  “Sara, slow down. I’m trying to take this all in.” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Sara?”

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “I don’t … I don’t know what to do.”

  “Just start at the top and tell me what’s going on.” I leaned against my pillow, clinging to the strength in Evan’s voice. Once I was done explaining everything, he said, “So you don’t know for sure Julia is this Karen person?”

  “I looked at her photos online myself. It’s her.”

  “But there’s no proof the Campsite Killer is your father. It’s all just speculation. She could’ve hooked up with a guy after.”

  “Rape victims don’t usually just ‘hook up’ with someone right away. And there was a woman at her house—I think she might be gay.”

  “She might be now, but you don’t know what she was into back then. For all you know she was pregnant at the time of the attack. This private investigator could be scamming you.”

  “He used to be a cop.”

  “So he says. I bet he calls and tells you he can find out more for a price.”

  “He wasn’t like that.” But was Evan right? Had I jumped to conclusions? Then I remembered the look on Julia’s face. “No, she was seriously freaked out.”

  “You showed up on her doorstep and demanded she talk to you. That would scare anybody.”
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  “It was more than that. I can feel it—in my gut.”

  Evan paused for a moment, then said, “E-mail me the links—and the photos that guy sent you, his Web site too. I have some time this morning, I’ll read over everything and call you at lunch. We’ll talk about it, okay?”

  “Maybe I should call Julia—”

  “That’s a really bad idea. Don’t do anything.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Sara.” His voice was firm.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  * * *

  Ally was now talking to Moose in her room, so Evan and I said our good-byes. I tried to be cheerful for Ally as we made toad-in-a-holes with ketchup smiley faces. But every time I looked into her innocent eyes I wanted to cry. What will I say when she’s old enough to start asking about my family?

  After I drove Ally to school I took Moose for a hike, thinking the fresh air might help. But I knew it was a mistake as soon as I stepped into the woods. Normally I love the scent of fir needles in the air, of earth rich and fragrant after a rain the night before. All the different woods: red cedar, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce. But now moss-covered trees loomed over me and blocked out any light. The air seemed thick and quiet, my footsteps loud. Every dark corner of the forest caught my eye. A gnarled stump with one branch reaching out, a dead tree with ferns growing from it, the gap behind it blanketed by rotting leaves. Did he rape her in a spot like that? Moose, running ahead, startled a deer and it bounded off, its brown eyes wild with fear. I imagined Julia fleeing through the woods, her body cut and bleeding, her breath frantic, hunted down like an animal.

  I came home and tore apart my workshop. The plan was to organize my supplies and clean my tools, then hang them back up in some semblance of order, but when I saw the mess I’d made—chisels, rubber mallet, clamps, orbital sander, brushes, rags, and paper towels piled up all over my workbench—I couldn’t think straight enough to hang a ruler. I picked up a broom and started sweeping up shavings.