The Juliette Society(72)

For him, oral pleasure staves off hirsute disappointment. But the upshot is he’s continually sexually unfulfilled.

Bundy’s pouring out all his woes to me, his sexual history, his personality flaws, and I don’t want to listen any more. I want to tell him how angry I was about receiving money after visiting the Juliette Society.

‘You set me up,’ I say.

I can feel myself getting mad but I don’t want to show it. I don’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing that he’s rattled me.

‘Set you up how?’ he says. ‘With Anna?’

‘The money, for that party.’

‘What party?’ he says.

‘The Juliette Society,’ I reply, like he doesn’t know.

‘Who?’ Bundy says.

I say it again.

‘The Juliette Society, Bundy.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘I never paid the girls. I only took the money.’

I’m confused, but I need to get to the real point of my visit. ‘Bundy, I’m seriously worried, where’s Anna?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I swear I don’t know.’

Just like he swears he didn’t kill those girls.

‘Did you do the same thing to Anna,’ I ask angrily, ‘try to extort money from her?’

‘I wouldn’t do that to Anna,’ he says. ‘I’d never do anything bad to her. I love Anna. I’ve wanted her so bad,’ he says, and he’s almost close to tears. ‘I don’t even care if she’s shaved or not.’

Bundy tells me he tried to get with Anna so many times and did everything he could to impress her. She’s the only woman he’s ever spent more than ten bucks on, other than his mom. He bought her gifts, he bought her jewelry. But Anna always brushed him off.

‘She told me she loved me like a brother,’ he says, ‘but she prefers men to boys.’

Bundy’s looking up at me with big sad eyes and he wants me to tell him, it’s OK. But there’s not a whole lot I can say because I know exactly what she means. He’s only pining for Anna because she broke his heart. And, as a coda to his tale of woe, he keeps repeating the same two things over and over, like a broken record.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t kill those girls.’

‘I believe you, Bundy,’ and as I say it, I realize I do believe him. ‘But do you have any idea, any idea at all about where she might be?’

And, finally, he comes out with it. ‘There was this party she was going to. You might find her there.’

‘What party?’ I ask suspiciously.

But before he’s even replied, I realize that I’m going to have to go there and I don’t have a choice.





21




I’m walking after dark through the grounds of a large Italianate villa – the location of the party Bundy arranged for a car service to, the place he said I might, just might, find Anna. It’s also the night before Bob’s election and there’s so much to do that Jack’s sleeping over at the campaign office.

I’m following a path that winds through little dips and climbs and curves. Wherever I am, I can see this sprawling villa up on a hill, cast in silhouette by the light of a full moon sitting low in the night sky and half-obscured by a great hulking cumulus cloud that just hangs there because the air is so still.

There is only one path – it doesn’t split off or meet with others – but I never see anyone else ahead of me, even when it starts to straighten out, and no one walks back towards me. The path looks exactly the same all the way along: lined with dirt and outlined by boulders, beyond which are dense thickets of bushes and trees peppered with wild flowers and orchids so vivid and luminous in hue that they seem to glow in the dark. The path is lit by this strange ambient light with no apparent source – the kind of half-light that makes everything seem alive – which falls off just a couple of feet on either side of the path.

I’m wearing same red cape that I wore at the Eyes Wide Shut party and a pair of black Mary Jane flats, and I feel like Little Red Riding Hood hurrying home to Grandma’s. The silence, the stillness, the solitariness and the blackness are all creeping me out. I’m walking as briskly as I can, willing my destination to appear around every turn. But it never does.

I’m scurrying along this path, in the dark, heading to who knows where, and two thoughts are spinning through my head over and over, first one and then the other.

What am I doing here?

Fuck Bundy.

And I can’t think of enough ways to curse Bundy because I know, I just know, he’s set me up again but I have to find Anna and I don’t have any choice. I curse Bundy’s birth, I curse his parents, I curse his stupid tattoos, his ugly penis and his stinking feet. I can’t still the voice in my head and it becomes so deafening and insistent that I have to check I’m not saying it aloud. Not that there’s anyone around to hear me. I’m running in circles through my head and, every so often, I stumble on the answer.