November 13, 1981

November 13, 1981, is remembered as the Friday when Susan Reynolds saw an injury on Bret Ellis’s arm and connected it to the intruder she believed she had bitten during the attack at her home. The date’s importance becomes clear retrospectively: although Bret presented himself as the boy who had fought off Robert Mallory, Susan privately suspected that Bret himself had been involved. Her later call to Thom Wright, disclosed to Bret decades afterward, unsettles the heroic account that had circulated at Buckley and leaves the truth unresolved.

The Date and What Susan Saw

In the aftermath of the attack, Bret visited Susan in her bedroom. When he lifted an arm, the sleeve of his blue shirt fell back, and Susan noticed a deep wound surrounded by bruising on his forearm. She thought it was a bite mark and recognized its location as the place where she had bitten the intruder during the previous Saturday’s attack. She also believed that the impressions of her teeth were visible. The scene turned on a small physical detail: a sleeve shifting was enough to change the mood and meaning of the visit.

Bret did not recount the incident as a straightforward confrontation. He described placing a finger to Susan’s lips, using a gesture the two of them shared to signal that speaking would make no difference. When she looked at his arm, the unspoken understanding gave way to alarm. Susan’s identification of the wound did not establish what had happened, but it made Bret’s version of events newly suspect.

The Accusation Kept from Bret

Bret believed Susan never told anyone what she thought she had seen. He also said that he never spoke to her again after the bedroom scene. Susan did not return to Buckley; she finished her senior year at Marymount and graduated in June. Bret did not see her again until they encountered one another at the Palihouse Hotel nearly forty years later. For him, the suspicion remained unspoken and apparently contained within that last encounter.

That belief was mistaken. On the Monday after the attack, Bret returned to school and became the focus of attention. He told students that Robert had attacked Susan and Thom and cast himself as the person who had fought off the supposed serial killer. In the version he circulated, Robert had stabbed both victims and then appeared as their rescuer, concealing that he had been the intruder. Students treated Bret as a survivor and a hero; the wound Susan had noticed was absent from the public story.

Thom’s Later Disclosure

The concealed account surfaced when Bret and Thom met again years later. Thom told Bret that Susan had called him from the hospital after seeing Bret. She sounded desperate, he recalled, and said she had seen something on Bret’s arm. Thom confirmed that she wanted them to call the police because she thought Bret had done it.

This disclosure revises Bret’s understanding of the past without resolving it. The reader learns that Susan’s suspicion was shared with Thom, not merely an inference preserved in Bret’s memory. The evidence does not establish whether Bret was the intruder, nor does it describe any police response to Susan’s request. What it does establish is that the possibility of his responsibility was raised at the time and kept from him until the later reunion.

Retrospective Significance

The date belongs to a narrative shaped by concealment, retrospective discovery, and competing accounts. At school, Bret’s story made him a celebrated survivor; Susan’s private suspicion and call to Thom complicated that identity beyond the reach of the school’s rumors. The revelation arrives not in a contemporaneous account but through Thom’s memory decades later, after Bret has already believed that Susan told no one.

The calendar date therefore marks less a settled explanation than a fracture in the story of the attack. Susan’s recognition of the bite-like wound supplies a concrete basis for her suspicion, while the later disclosure confirms that she acted on it by contacting Thom and considering the police. Yet the account leaves the central question open: it establishes what Susan thought, not what Bret did.