Tell No One

It is now eight years later, and David is a pediatrician in Washington Heights at the Columbia Medical Centre. It is a day before his anniversary with Elizabeth, and it would have been 21 years since they shared their first kiss. He is still deeply bereaved and has not properly moved on from the incident.

David receives an email from an unfamiliar source with the subject line “E.P. + D.B.” (17), the couple’s initials. He is devastated by the email, still struck by guilt over being unable to save Elizabeth, and he cannot imagine who would send such a thing. In the body of the email there is also the mention of “kiss time” (19), denoting the couple’s awareness that their first kiss was at 6:15. The email invites David to come back to his computer tomorrow on their anniversary at 6:15 p.m. He saves the email onto a diskette. David finds the email especially strange because Elizabeth’s body was found, and she was pronounced conclusively dead. 

At David’s current home, which he shares with his Alzheimer-suffering grandfather and the dog Chloe, he receives a note with a phone number and the instruction to call Sheriff Lowell, the sheriff put to Elizabeth’s case. The stress of hearing from Lowell after eight years triggers a migraine, the kind which David has suffered from since the blows from the baseballbat-like instrument that cracked his skull. He feels guilty because he summoned the strength to save himself but did not do the same for Elizabeth. On the phone, the Sheriff announces that two bodies were found in Riley County, near the Becks’ Lake Charmaine home.

The Sheriff comes over to David’s along with David’s sister, Linda. The bodies are old, white, and male and have been dead for at least five years. They were unearthed because a bear hunter found a human bone next to his spoils. Sheriff Lowell is there to take a blood sample from David because next to the buried bodies was a wooden baseball bat with his type of B positive blood on it. Lowell makes him go through his memories from the night Elizabeth died. David claims that he remembers passing out in the lake and then waking up in the hospital, but nothing in between. However, according to Lowell, David has forgotten central details, such as getting out of the water, making his way to a cabin, and calling for an ambulance. Linda wonders whether the men are victims of KillRoy (Elizabeth’s killer), but it is unlikely as KillRoy only murdered women and branded their bodies with his initial.

When David returns to his office early the next morning and clicks the hyperlink, it comes up as an error. At night he gives blood to satisfy Lowell’s need for a DNA sample. It turns out that Elizabeth’s body was found off Route 80, five days after the abduction, and the coroner estimates that she had been dead for two days. David is chilled by the thought that she “spent three days alive” (29) with Elory Kellerton (KillRoy) her murderer. KillRoy had been on a killing spree and claimed 14 women, who were all dumped on the side of the road and branded with the letter K. It is the day of the anniversary, and David waits for Kiss Time, 6:15 p.m., wondering how the bodies got uncovered. He gets a call from Sheriff Lowell just after 6:04 p.m., who asks if David was aware of the name Sarah Goodhart. The name means a great deal to David, and he is so shocked that he asks to call Lowell back.

A view from a sky camera has started to come up on the computer screen. David sees an urban scene in black and white. After 6:15 p.m., he sees a short-haired woman with Elizabeth’s face. She apologizes to him and then walks away. 

Chapter 4 switches to third-person narration and describes the tribulations of scammer Vic Letty. Vic is able to pull off his scams because he is prepared, only accepting cash and walking with a limp so that he cannot be traced. Vic gets involved in extortion by learning that Cable TV chooses work by codes. Vic climbs the telephone poles and reads off the numbers. He then often finds that the male member of the family had watched pornography and threatens to relay the information to members of the family and employers if he is not paid $500. Vic learns to zone in on families in the public eye, who have the most to lose by being exposed as pornography watchers. He thinks that he has hit the jackpot with Randall Scope—a political aspirant and an heir to a large fortune. As Vic pockets the $50,000 and is deciding to leave his life of crime behind, two men appear at his apartment and shoot him. They are more prepared than him because there is plastic on the ground, already laid for an easy cleanup of his blasted remains. 

Chapter 5 returns to David’s first-person narration, where he is recovering from the shock of seeing Elizabeth. He remembers that Elizabeth’s father, the ex-cop Hoyt Parker, and his brother Ken identified her body. Hoyt was the one who told David that Elizabeth was dead.

The name Sarah Goodhart means something to David because it is part of a childhood game combining Elizabeth’s middle name (Sarah) and her childhood street name (Goodhart). David gets a message from Elizabeth, stating that there will be another message for him—the user name “Bat Street” and the password “Teenage.” Finally, there are the words: “They’re watching. Tell no one” (49).

Following a switch to third-person narration, the reader learns that Eric Wu was the man who killed Vic Letty and carried away his body on plastic sheeting. His accomplice, Larry Gandle, is the one who thinks to speak with Griffin Scope about the bodies on the lake.

Back in David’s first-person account, he describes his visit to Kim Parker, Elizabeth’s mother. It’s revealed that Elizabeth was an intelligent, remarkable person who wanted to be a lawyer and work with socially disadvantaged children. She was not squeamish about rescuing runaway and homeless children from the worst streets in New York. David wishes that he could tell Kim about seeing Elizabeth, but he does not dare to because he was sworn to secrecy. Hoyt Parker comes home and looks on David’s visit with disapproval. David senses that Hoyt blames him for Elizabeth’s death.

David asks Hoyt how he found Elizabeth when he saw her in the morgue. Hoyt is taken aback because David has never asked him for the details before. Nevertheless, Hoyt relates that Elizabeth was badly messed up, “left eye […] swollen closed […] nose broken and flattened like wet clay” (58), and her jaw had been ripped out. Despite all these disfigurements, Hoyt claims he knew it was Elizabeth instantly. 

Switching to third-person narration, the chapter describes billionaire Griffin Scope’s gala for the Brandon Scope Memorial Charity, named for his murdered son, Brandon. Linda, David’s sister, runs the fund, and it transpires that both of their educations were paid for by Scope scholarships. Larry Gandle approaches Griffin to tell him that Vic Letty, who threatened Randall, has been dealt with. Gandle mentions that there was a similar incident eight years ago, where two men were hired to perform a “certain task” (63). Money was paid and the two men were kept quiet. However, their bodies were found to have been dead for at least five years near the lake where the incident took place.

Griffin is horrified, having kept tabs on the people in Elizabeth’s life, especially David. Now Griffin is worried that the scandal will be uncovered. He asks Gandle to make sure he and his friend Eric Wu do whatever it takes to cover it up. 

While Linda is out at the gala, David is at the apartment Linda shares wither partner, Shauna. David confesses to Shauna that there is a chance Elizabeth is still alive. When he gets home, he calls Sheriff Lowell and asks him why he asked him about Sarah Goodhart. Lowell brushes him off and says he will call back in the morning.

Meanwhile, Gandle is with Wu. They have hacked into David’s emails and found that he has received two unexpected ones in which Elizabeth appears. They are confused by the message, and Wu realizes that “someone is going through a great deal of trouble to stay anonymous” (73). Wu sets up a digital network tracker on David’s computers so that if he does anything online, they will be able to monitor it.