Her Summer With Scott Peterson

There is a woman from Harwinton, Connecticut and her name is Diane Franklin. One morning, she was looking through a photo album from her family’s trip to southern California to visit family and she fainted dead away for a few seconds, though she never lost consciousness. It’s just that the only thing that made sense at that particular moment in her life was to flop backwards onto the floor of her bedroom (she was already kneeling, so it wasn’t that long a fall) and breathe heavily for a few seconds with her eyes closed. She was a compact, compressed, squat little woman in her mid-thirties who looked like she had been tall and beautiful until someone had pressed down on her head, letting her sag like Play-Doh and bunch up at the middle until she could barely stand under her own power. She could stand just fine, of course, but her body was a kind of sharp triangle from her hips to her ankles and it looked like she should have trouble standing, anatomically speaking. She was a loud and principled woman who was not afraid to let her friends know exactly what she thought of their other friends while remaining supremely confident that her friends weren’t saying the same kinds of things about her. When her husband was outwardly affectionate but secretly annoyed, he would call her “Stumpy” or “Stumps,” which Diane pretended to find charming even though she hated it and thought her husband could be kind of an idiot sometimes.

Diane lived across the street from an airport, though she never said this without qualifying it in several different ways, because whenever someone thought of the kind of house that was across the street from an airport, they thought of a little shack with pieces of the roof flapping around in the breeze and a tiny yard full of crabgrass sitting across from some desolate corner of the airport that was never used behind some garish barbed wire and ugly chain fencing. In fact, her house was quite nice and quite expensive, and the airport was a dinky little number with no more than a runway and a half of black gravelly pavement that was more often a parking lot for planes than an actual place for aircraft to take off and land. In fact, she had been living across from the airport for almost twelve years, and though she was always shaking her head at little planes buzzing around in the sky around her house, she had trouble remembering ever seeing one in the act of taking off or landing. She had secret fears that one day she would come home to find the ugly black and smoky wreckage of a dismembered plane waiting for her on the front lawn, but all in all, the airport barely made any kind of impact on her day-to-day consciousness, besides the odd human interest story about the high school kid who was earning his pilot’s license right there in town that came around every few years. The airport was easy to ignore, but that didn’t stop her from signing all sorts of petitions and joining all sorts of groups dedicated to paving over the thing and turning it into condos or a plaza or a new baseball field or a middle school, all of which she believed her town needed desperately. Whenever she complained about the airport, her husband would muse that he was thinking of taking up flying for himself, though he would wait a day or two to do it so the two of them could pretend it was just something he wanted to do that annoyed her rather than a carefully considered way to get on her nerves, even though they both knew it was the latter and, furthermore, they each knew the other knew and so on.

She had lost the battle to restrict television at the dinner table to her husband and three children, though the family decided to compromise by watching something that none of them wanted to see, which was the news. Slowly, the news became news analysis, and the news analysis became Nancy Grace, the take-no-prisoners former district attorney who would often use her nationally televised bully pulpit to remind people of the fact that if it were up to some people, the world would be a lawless Hobbesian mobocracy in which the strong would eat the weak and band together to hunt the stronger. Even someone as tough as Nancy could get a little wistful from time to time.

Diane liked the show because she found Nancy’s unwavering confidence reassuring and her tireless efforts to convict all suspects of the crimes they had committed by browbeating the spineless weasels who had the gall to defend them positively inspiring. Her husband like the show because he thought it annoyed Diane. Their children liked it because Nancy’s grating hollow drawl and terrifying unprovoked rage motivated them to finish eating and return to their rooms as quickly as possible. Even when she was home alone or if they didn’t eat dinner together, Diane would be sure to catch the show. Whether that night’s victim was a beautiful young woman kidnapped in an exotic foreign country or a beautiful young woman murdered by her jealous fiancé or a beautiful young woman stolen out of her home in the dead of night, Diane came to depend upon Nancy to find the likeliest suspect and expose him with the white hot light of televised justice as the cold-blooded inhuman murderer that the police all too often were unable to prove he was.

One afternoon a few days after Scott Peterson had been arrested (which brought a deep sense of relief to both Nancy and Diane, neither of whom could figure out what took that idiot district attorney so long to issue an arrest warrant when anyone with half a brain already knew he did it), Diane was flipping through a photo album she had put together after her vacation to see family in southern California. She looked at a picture of her entire family standing the lobby of some hotel in Anaheim and something just over her left shoulder had grabbed her attention. She knew she recognized the face immediately, but it took her a second to remember who it was. That awful killer! The one who had been all over the news! In her photo album! The one that said “Cherished Memories” on the cover! When she realized that was a suspected murderer gazing at the camera, Diane screamed and fainted and breathed heavily with her eyes closed for a few seconds. That she had been standing so close to such a brutal and savage man—it was horrible! Who knows what he had been capable of—maybe he, at that very moment, had been considering how he was to lure his wife onto their boat and bludgeon her to death with whatever it was she was eventually bludgeoned with (or something like that—Diane wasn’t completely clear on the details). Just touching the album, even when she had closed the cover, she could feel the evil coursing through her body, like the time when he was a teenager and she had found a Ouija board in her best friend Samantha’s closet. She flashed back to the moment in the lobby—hadn’t her hairs stood on end at the moment when the murderer would have been passing? Hadn’t she remembered something like that? She wasn’t just making something like that up, was she? No, probably not, because it all made sense now. A stranger had taken the picture for them—what if she had asked the killer instead of that nice fellow from Tennessee? She would have had to buy a new camera.

She tried to stand, but had to grab onto the wall to keep from tumbling to the ground. She made her way to the stairs, and she saw Laci’s face in her mind. She felt guilty of the crime herself. She felt she should have done something, like the kind of thing they did on that TV show based on that Christopher Walken movie based on that Stephen King book. She wanted to go back in time and turn around and just start strangling the thug until he died himself, or at least until she could see that he was comatose. Or she could have made it look like an accident—she could pretend to lose control of her car and plow into him in the parking lot and no one would know any better. Or even if she just could have taken him aside and stared into his eyes and told him that she was from the future and she knew what he was thinking and he was not going to get away with it. She would have gone to town on him, she realized, if only she had known, and her eyes were clouded with the bitter tears of missed opportunity. She would have broken him, like Nancy Grace does to the guests on her shows.

And then she remembered Nancy, and she remembered that she still had an obligation, as an American citizen who was in this unique situation with evidence that could help crack the case buried deep inside a photo album, to do what she could to make sure this guy rotted for all he had done. She tried to imagine that she was Nancy Grace. What would she do in a situation like this? She couldn’t think of anything, so she decided to just send the picture to the real Nancy Grace and let her decide, and then Diane could see for herself what Nancy Grace would do in a situation like that so that if it ever happened to her again in the future, she could act accordingly.

Still shaking, Diane got in her car and drove to the Wal-Mart in the next town over. She found that her peripheral vision was turning white, like ink was spilling into the corners of her eyes, and she had to concentrate very hard on the white and yellow lines to make sure her car stayed in her lane as it was supposed to. But by the time she got to Wal-Mart, she knew what she was doing and strode into the place looking straight ahead with a confident smirk on her face, even though she knew that everyone was looking at her, which they weren’t, of course. She walked up to the photo counter and made herself two dozen copies of the picture at the self-service picture stand thing, bought a bunch of envelopes and went right back home.

The first two people who needed the picture were Nancy Grace and the lead investigator on Scott Peterson’s case. She got a chill up her spine, wondering if she would have to testify, and smiled at the thought of sitting in the witness box, Scott Peterson glaring back at her, his attorney sneering, as she pointed with great confidence at the man she had seen in the hotel lobby in Anaheim who was in her picture as the courtroom gasped at her courage and strength and maybe even applauded (though she people didn’t applaud in court a lot, it was nice to think about). She decided to send these packages out first, so she looked up the addresses, put them in the mailbox, and returned to her kitchen table to the other twenty-two pictures. She made quick work of them too, sending them to her family in Southern California whom her own family had been visiting, her parents, her sister-in-law, some of her friends who she knew would be so jealous and was rolling by the end, so that she almost forgot to save the original copy for herself. She framed it and she keeps it on her computer desk, next to the picture of her kids.

The responses came trickling in from family and friends first, who all wanted to know what he had been like, did she remember him, was he creepy in person, was he shorter than he looked on TV because all those celebrities are shorter in real life than they look on TV, had she just died when she saw the picture and so on. She answered, with an almost heroic calm, that it was an experience, but not one that she would ever like to go through again. Though, she was known to say philosophically, glancing at the ceiling or the wall directly behind the person to whom she was talking, there were people like that everywhere and you never really knew who someone was, really. She was only glad that she had survived this brush with infamy and hoped that God would grant the people of Los Angeles County the wisdom to convict the scum as quickly as possible before he could kill again. She regretted showing her hand a little with her relatives in Southern California who reminded her that, no, it was unlikely that they had ever run into Scott Peterson themselves because Los Angeles County was pretty big, after all, with almost three times the population of her puny state. She got a similarly snobbish note from the case’s lead investigator, scrawled in blue ballpoint pen across the back of a piece of stationary, telling her that the pictures would “probably be of no use” since the only thing they told anyone was that “Scott Peterson or someone who looked a little bit like him from certain angles” had been in Anaheim “a full seven months” before the crime, “but thanks for the effort and keep snooping!” She found it to be in poor taste and clucked her tongue at that Hollywood snobbishness she was always hearing about infecting even a small-town police department since a few cameras had moved in because of one perverted little sociopath.

She was a strong woman, though, and she could deal with all this, but what broke her heart was complete silence from Nancy Grace. No thank you, no encouraging note—even a backhanded swipe written in haste by an intern would have been something. Every time Nancy began discussing the Peterson case, Diane found herself holding her breath, desperately hopeful that the new development to be discussed that night was her own picture and secretly terrified that Nancy would ridicule her for some reason on the air, wishing at these moments that she had sent the picture with an alias so that her family wouldn’t know that she had been the one to send it in. When her picture did appear over the sound of some clinical psychologist babbling on and on about this or that, Diane choked on a piece of salty ham and her tenth grade son gave her the Heimlich maneuver, with some reluctance because he found the idea of doing that to his mother kind of gross, and the whole time Diane never took her eyes of the television. Nancy had seen her picture. Nancy had seen the picture and maybe she had told an intern, “that one, that’s a good one, we’ll use that one tonight.” Diane realized with pride that she had contributed to something greater than herself. She was already thinking of all the ways her picture could mean something to someone. Maybe the nice man from Tennessee would recognize his handiwork and call Nancy and tell her, and maybe that would lead to another man in the lobby in Anaheim who had followed Scott home that evening because he looked suspicious, and maybe that would lead to a man in an antique store who had watched Scott pleasuring himself while gazing into a candlestick—and then they’d have him for sure. For the whole week after that, Diane found that she couldn’t stop smiling for anything.