Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

the rocks, heaving over me and pouring into me, and I was not there anymore, I was already outside of myself, but it was still my body as he fell, grunting, over what was left of me. Hot breath and stickiness on cold skin. The wretched sound of him tucking himself back in, zipping himself up. The sound that said he was finished. Done with me.

O’Byrne was right. Tom couldn’t resist the mystery. Found the memory of what he’d done was not enough to keep him satisfied. So, he carefully removed the film, found a photo lab he thought would be far enough away from the river. He had always intended to come back for the prints, but then they found out my name. And my face was everywhere again. My real face this time, the one he had looked away from as he killed me. Realising how stupid he was, how caught up he’d been, Tom never went back to collect those pictures.

But he could not stop returning to the river. At first, he was careful to avoid the scene at unusual times, at 5 a.m. and midnight when he felt the strongest pull; he made sure he only ever went down there when he could blend in and remain inconspicuous, himself. When Ruby finally came along, he was there, waiting. And from the moment he saw her leaning over the rails, her eyes closed, muscles flickering, Tom was certain she was aware of what had happened there. He assumed, a strange pride swelling in his chest, this woman was caught up in the drama of the dead girl. He had seen others like this at the vigil, that night of candles and outrage. So many skittish women, foolishly thinking their fear was anger, or that it made any difference in the end. He had bowed his head that night, standing next to his wife, and she had squeezed his hand when she saw a tear wind down his cheek. She thought he was crying for the girl, but he was crying at the beauty of it all, for the magnificence of this grand tragedy he had orchestrated. How could it not fail to move him, after he had felt unseen, unheard, for so long?

When he approached Ruby and asked her to join him for a coffee, Tom never thought to imagine she was the one who found the body. This incredible news, when she finally told him, was like electricity, a body heat reminiscent of that first moment he struck me. It felt like fate, the way the Australian was delivered to him so easily. Finally, he would have the chance to talk with someone who knew. Someone who was there. After so many weeks, it was beginning to feel like a dream. Talking about it would make it blessedly real again, but she kept refusing, swatting him away, and it was taking all of his energy not to explode. Sitting across the table from him that second time, drinking wine he paid for, eating food he ordered just for her, Ruby was so pious and polite, he had a visceral yearning to strike her, to watch her fall. To fall over her, himself.

It was too bad the weather had not gone his way that day.

It was an accident, that verbal slip when he said goodbye to her. He was too caught up in the idea of Ruby out there alone that morning, thinking about how easy it would be to drag her over to the construction site further along the river—metal and dirt for this one, not rocks and water—and he just wasn’t paying attention to his words. Still, the Australian hadn’t reacted at the time, there was nothing in her face to say she had picked up on his mistake, and he never expected the truth of his words to be followed. The breadcrumbs of those pictures, taken all over this city.

His second mistake, leaving that cigarette butt behind, offering up his DNA when they couldn’t yet take it from him, occurs the same day Detective O’Byrne holds my pictures in his hands. Something carelessly discarded, something found. I like to think it all happens at the exact same time.

He never expected the knock at the door. The same kind of knock made for Mr Jackson. Only this time, when Tom Martin answers, there are men who stand at attention on the other side of the door. His wife comes into the hallway as they clasp handcuffs around his wrists.

‘Tommy?’ At first it is confusion. ‘Tommy!’ Then fear. She lunges toward her husband, but the officers block her way.

‘Ma’am,’ they say, holding her back. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

So polite in these last moments, before they take apart her whole existence, before they deliver a revelation that leaves her gasping on the floor. Her husband arrested for the rape and murder of Alice Lee. She held his hand tight at the vigil. Gently laughed off his concerns about being careful these days, when that man could be anywhere.

That man could be anywhere.

There will never be enough days to scrub clean the lies Tom Martin has pored all over this woman’s body. Each revelation that will come—the hardcore, underage pornography on his computer, the fake profiles he’s posted on dating sites, the bags of amphetamines hidden in his closet, an ex-girlfriend who said he had stalked her when she left him. And soon enough, the details of how he smashed an eighteen-year-old girl’s head with the lens of her camera, squeezed her throat with his nicotine-stained fingers, and continued his assault of her body as she lay dying on the banks of the Hudson River. How he scooped up her underwear and shoes and jacket and unscrewed the bloody lens from the camera, all the while standing over the battered body of a teenage girl. Though no one else will understand the specificity of her horror, this is the part that will come to haunt his wife