Eliza Benedict, 38 years old, has by choice always been a full-time wife and mother, devoted to caring for and protecting her family. The serenity of that life is threatened one day when her mail holds a letter from Walter Bowman, the man, now on Death Row, who had kidnapped her and held her hostage for 39 days when she was a child, then called Elizabeth Lerner. No one in her present life knows about her ordeal [forever referred to with the euphemistic phrase "the summer I was fifteen"] other than her parents, her sister, and her husband. Even, or perhaps especially, her children – 13-year-old Isobel [or "Iso," as she prefers to be called, with a long "I"] and eight-year-old Albie – know nothing of that time. Having spotted a photo of her and her husband in The Washingtonian, Walter has tracked her down and sent the letter which, hauntingly, concludes with the words “I’d know you anywhere.”
The early chapters alternate pov between Eliza and Walter, to illuminating effect. Walter had two other known victims, young girls both tall and blonde [neither of which describes Elizabeth], both killed and apparently raped. The question had always stayed in her mind: Why had he let her live? And was Walter, as long suspected, also behind the disappearance of several other young girls from the area who had never been found? Twenty-two years after she had been rescued, Walter’s attorneys had gone through two appeals and a retrial; 46 years old, he has now been on Death Row in Virginia longer than anyone else in history, and implores Eliza to write and ultimately to visit him, teasing her with the promise that he would finally disclose to her things he had never admitted to anyone else.
Eliza and, by extension, her husband, are forced to relive that time, when “Elizabeth” had determined she would do whatever was necessary to stay alive, becoming a modern-day Scheherazade, telling him her own version of Steinbeck stories lest he get bored and kill her, obeying him without question when he threatened her life and the lives of her family should she fail to follow his orders. Since his last victim was kidnapped while Elizabeth was with him, she bears the guilt [and the accusations of that girl's family] of perhaps having been able to do something to save her life had she but known how. A full airing is also given to the arguments on all sides of the death penalty: “for, against, or confused.”
This latest novel by the author of the wonderful Tess Monaghan series and, more recently, the terrific standalone What the Dead Know, is also highly recommended.
