Carthage

  For Zeno didn’t believe in the death penalty. Even for the vicious brutal murderer of his daughter.

  As to the matter of Kincaid being capable of participating in his own defense and knowing “right from wrong”—Beechum County sheriff’s deputies had testified that Kincaid had lied to them when he’d been first apprehended and brought to headquarters; he’d made an effort to “cover up his crime”—“to mislead.” This is a principle in criminal law, that a perpetrator who tries to cover up his crime has understood that he has committed a crime: one who seeks to “mislead” understands that he has a reason for doing so.

  In Nathan Brede’s courtroom, Brett Kincaid had not spoken in his own behalf. His expression of “remorse” like his plea of guilty had been communicated by his attorney while the shackled corporal stood mute and staring into space like a dangerous beast brought to bay, and now but a piteous sight.

  Zeno had no doubt, Kincaid was guilty. No doubt, Kincaid should be sentenced to prison for a long time.

  Voluntary manslaughter was a weak indictment. Fifteen to twenty years meant eligibility for parole in seven years. Zeno knew this, and Zeno was sickened by the knowledge. But Zeno knew not to object publicly: he would not rant for TV cameras like a tormented bear on his hind legs. He would not provide an entertaining spectacle for the insatiable news media.

  Yet, as a lawyer, Zeno knew: there remained the prevailing question of the corporal’s confession through seven hours of police interrogation, with no lawyer present. (No lawyer because Kincaid had refused a lawyer.) How authentic was this confession? How could its details be corroborated? Had it been coerced? Had there been others who’d participated in an assault upon the victim that had begun at the lake? In the parking lot of the Roebuck Inn?—or had the assault taken place entirely in the Nautauga Preserve, with Brett Kincaid the sole assailant? Zeno had been allowed to view much of the original interview with Kincaid through a TV monitor, at the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d been allowed to examine the videotapes not all of which were entirely coherent, audible. This experience he would later describe in semi-drunken noir-humor as an experience not unlike seeing his guts dragged out of him, twisted, stabbed and burnt as he observed, if such exquisite torture could be protracted for seven hours and the victim still reasonably conscious.

  Yes. Zeno could see that the young man who’d confessed to murdering his daughter was sincerely repentant. You could see that Kincaid was repelled by his own physical being like a rabid creature about to tear at itself with its teeth. But this did not make Corporal Kincaid less guilty in Zeno’s eyes. It did not make Zeno hate him less, or feel in any way inclined to forgive.

  It had been rumored that Corporal Brett Kincaid had provided information against certain of his fellow platoon-comrades, in Iraq; that he’d participated in an army investigation into atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi citizens; that some or all of his injuries might have been the result of his providing testimony, and that he’d had to be hurriedly dispatched out of his platoon, out of Iraq, to prevent his being killed. None of these rumors was ever substantiated and when Zeno Mayfield tried to discover what had happened, both directly and by way of what Zeno wanted to think was a high-ranking personal contact at the Department of Veteran Affairs in Washington, D.C., he’d been informed that there was no such investigation on record: no charges had been filed against anyone in Corporal Kincaid’s platoon.

  Meaning—what? That the U.S. Army had buried the investigation, or that there’d never been an investigation? That Corporal Kincaid had been injured by the Iraqi enemy, or by his own comrades? Or both?

  AFTER THE INITIAL INTERVIEWS when it had seemed that Cressida was merely missing, and that their public appeals might be of help in finding her, the Mayfields never gave another.

  After Evvie Estes contacted them one too many times Zeno told her bluntly No more. We’re done with entertaining.

  FELT NO DESIRE for his wife, or any woman.

  His only desire was for—(he knew: an insipid fantasy)—the restoration of all he’d lost though at the time of his losing it, in July 2005, he’d had but a vague awareness of its vast unfathomable worth; and of his own worth, mirrored in it.

  Consoling himself, these solitary evenings when Arlette was “out”—(carefully she’d explained where she was, which volunteer organization, or which women-friends)—with a smudged tumbler of whiskey and The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

  Belatedly he would realize: even Arlette’s sickness had been an estrangement between them. An occasion for estrangement.

  Where once such a personal, physical crisis would have drawn them together more intimately, as in the intense, emotion-rife days preceding and following the births of their daughters years ago, now the discovery that Arlette “had” cancer was like an elbow in the husband’s ribs nudging him aside.

  So Zeno felt. All the more reason then in his suspended-terror state to have an occasional (surreptitious, at-home) drink. Just one.

  Or maybe, one and a half.

  (For who would know?)

  (Not Arlette in her life ever more tight-scheduled like a cobweb of maniacal precision in which, the husband was given to know, his anxious presence was a detriment and not a blessing.)

  For from the first discovery of a tiny lump in Arlette’s left breast through a sequence of mammograms, CAT scans, biopsy and surgery—the grueling regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and medication that stretched on for more than six months in the late summer, fall and winter of 2006 to 2007—it hadn’t been her husband in whom she’d confided so much as in her sister and other women-friends who’d rallied to her like dolphins in a treacherous sea rallying to one of their own stricken kind.

  Zeno was sick with fury anew, at Kincaid. Who’d killed his daughter, and was now killing his wife.

  It could not be a coincidence, Zeno thought. That his wife, Cressida’s mother, should be diagnosed with cancer approximately a year after Cressida’s disappearance.

  (Zeno had reason to believe that others, close to Arlette, like her sister Katie Hewitt, thought so, too; but were too tactful to mention it to either of the Mayfields.)

  The tiny lump “the size of a persimmon seed”—(so Arlette persisted in describing it in the vocabulary of a children’s storybook)—seemed to Zeno the way in which the destructive element that had snatched away his daughter had found, in his marriage, another way in.

  He’d wanted to take Arlette to Buffalo, to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He’d wanted her to be in the care of the very best breast cancer doctors upstate. But Arlette had demurred, wanting to remain close to home. She’d conferred with her women-friends, she’d made a decision to continue with local doctors—surgeon, interventional radiologist, oncologist. “Buffalo is more than two hundred miles away. It would just complicate things. Please, let me handle this in a way that isn’t distressful to me.”

  “But you’re my wife! I want the very best for you.”

  Only reluctantly had Arlette told Zeno her alarming news when he’d questioned her about a “surgical procedure” she was scheduled to have at the Carthage Hospital—Arlette’s euphemism for “biopsy.”

  If she’d wept, if she’d broken down to weep in anyone’s arms, it had not been in her husband’s arms.

  “Weren’t you going to tell me? When were you going to tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you, Zeno. You’ve been so—you have a tendency to be so—”

  “To be so concerned? About my family?”

  “Please don’t be angry with me, Zeno. You’re so often—”

  “I’m not angry! I’m surprised, and I’m upset, and I’m disappointed, but—I am not angry.”

  Seeing that it was all Arlette could do, to keep from stepping back from him.

  He knew, in recent months he’d lost his old, Zeno-equanimity. He knew, he was frightening his wife away even as he meant to beckon her to him.

  “I didn’t see any reason to worry
you prematurely, Zeno. If the cyst turned out to be benign, as often they do . . .”

  “Of course you should have told me! That’s ridiculous, and insulting.”

  “I—I didn’t mean to be insulting . . .”

  “You know how news spreads in Carthage. What would people say if they knew that Zeno Mayfield’s wife had had a biopsy at the hospital and he hadn’t even known?”

  Zeno heard Zeno Mayfield’s wife. My wife.

  Zeno knew, this was not the right thing to say. Not to his wife who’d been so bravely trying to hide her anxiety from him; not to Arlette who loved him, and wanted to protect him. Yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself, his hurt was so deep.

  “I want to take you to Buffalo, Arlette. We’ll make an appointment, we’ll drive there—tomorrow. I’ll call my doctor-friend Artie Bender, in Buffalo, he can get us an appointment with the very best breast-cancer specialist at Roswell.”

  “Zeno, no! I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I have a surgeon, and an oncologist. I—I like them both very much. I trust them. I’ve been talking to people, women-friends, who recommend them, and who’ve gone to them. And Katie likes them, too. You know how critical Katie is . . .”

  “Fuck Katie! Katie isn’t your husband, I am.”

  Your husband. I am.

  In his head these crude words echoed. Yet he could not stop himself, he must argue with the woman, try to impose his will upon her for nothing but the very best for Zeno’s wife.

  “You’re excluding me from your life, Arlette. In other ways, too—I hate it.”

  “I—I don’t mean to.”

  It was so, Arlette had begun attending church services more frequently. Community-service meetings, fund-raisers for local causes, evenings away from home when Zeno had only the vaguest idea where she was and what she was doing and with whom.

  Arlette, where the hell were you? Why are you getting home so late?

  Zeno, I told you. I explained, but you weren’t listening.

  Then you should tell me again. I will listen.

  It was so, Arlette had begun attending church more frequently, alone.

  For Juliet had moved away. And Zeno never went to church.

  (Though he’d have joined Arlette at the Congregationalist church if she’d asked him. He’d wanted her to think so.)

  And it was so, Arlette was beginning to say things that disturbed Zeno, the supreme rationalist.

  “Sometimes I feel, Zeno—something is trying to tell me something. I try to ‘read’ it—but can’t. As in a dream, you can’t read.”

  “What do you mean, ‘in a dream, you can’t read’?”

  “If you dream of holding a book or a newspaper, and trying to read the words, you can’t. Your eyes just don’t focus.”

  “Who says this?”

  “Nobody says it!” Arlette laughed, with something of her old, fond exasperation. “I think it must be a common experience.”

  Zeno was skeptical. He’d email a professor-friend of his at Cornell whose specialty was cognitive psychology, to ask for an expert opinion.

  “Next time you dream, Zeno, see if you can make yourself ‘read.’ Look at a paper or a book. You’ll see that the letters are all blurred.”

  Zeno laughed, this seemed to him so fanciful. Not that it might not be true but that his dear wife Arlette, who knew little of psychology, still less of the human brain, should think so.

  AND YET: Zeno was himself becoming ever more irrational, superstitious. In the particular way of a defiantly rational, ego-centered male of late middle age, confronted with a crumbling, collapsing facade beyond the reach of his will to mend. As a local politician Zeno Mayfield had been the man to see, to get things done; mostly, his presence had been a beneficent one, and even political adversaries had liked him, as a man; but now, years out of office and losing interest in maintaining his old Carthage contacts, he had nothing to occupy his time, his seething churning thoughts like tires spinning in mud, that mattered.

  He’d have made his wife’s cancer a campaign, if only!

  Saying to Juliet Why didn’t your mother let me help her? Didn’t she know that I loved—love—her?

  And Juliet replied Yes Daddy, Mom knows. But this is her new life, now.

  THEY COULDN’T BEAR to sell the house.

  The beautiful old sprawling Colonial on Cumberland Avenue on a three-acre lot dense with tall oak and cedar trees, in the high, hilly neighborhood close by the Episcopal cemetery—they could not.

  Though Arlette had moved out. And Zeno could not bear to live alone in so large a house like a beetle—(he said)—rattling inside a beetle-trap.

  For two weeks, Arlette had visited with Juliet in Averill Park, ostensibly to help out with the children. And when she’d returned she moved out, for it was a time of renewal, she said.

  Not a time to resume the old.

  She told Zeno of her plans. She told Zeno of plans already in place. His wife who’d rarely made any major decision of her own for nearly three decades, explaining to him now what she’d done, and what she would be doing, of her own volition and singly.

  Zeno protested he’d had no idea. Had not guessed. Though of course he’d known, must have guessed—those weeks and months of subtle and then not-so-subtle estrangement in the house on Cumberland Avenue.

  Weeks, months of drinking. Solitary, and with others.

  Late-afternoon naps from which he woke sodden and dazed at 8 P.M. not knowing if it was dusk or dawn; if he was alone in the house or if Arlette patiently awaited him downstairs with a meal he couldn’t bring himself to eat.

  Ever more frequently, Arlette wasn’t awaiting.

  Excluding me from your life it’s like my life hemorrhaging from me how can you when I love you.

  Too proud to protest and certainly too proud to beg the woman to stay with him.

  Getting high he called it. Never getting drunk.

  “High” had a hippie-innocence to it. “Drunk” had no innocence.

  Yet he was stone-cold sober or nearly, when Arlette came to him to explain.

  Taking his hands, his big-bear paw-hands, in hers. To explain.

  She was moving eight miles away to Mount Olive, she said. She would be sharing a house with a woman attorney named Alisandra Raoul who was a co-director of a battered women’s shelter there and she would be working at the shelter more or less full-time.

  Zeno had been hearing about this—shelter. Hadn’t been paying enough attention it seemed.

  But—“ ‘Alisandra Raoul’? Who?”

  “Zeno, I’ve told you. I’ve spoken of Alisandra many times.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ve never heard the name before, you know how good I am at remembering names.”

  Still, they would not sell the house. Juliet had begged them not to sell it and if Cressida were alive—(if Cressida were alive was Zeno’s mangled logic)—she’d have begged them, too.

  Neither could have quite explained: the marriage could be reclaimed at any time but the house, once sold, would not be reclaimed but would pass into the hands of strangers.

  Neither could have quite explained: if their missing daughter were to return home, yes improbably, yes of course impossibly, still what a further shock for the daughter, to discover strangers living in her family home.

  In the front lawn a Realtor’s sign, bright brash yellow-and-black FOR RENT/LEASE. After the first windstorm the sign was left slanted just slightly askew.

  Arlette had gone to live in Mount Olive and heartless and distracted by her new, busy and so-fascinating life did not return to Cumberland Avenue. Zeno living in a condominium in downtown Carthage in a riverfront area newly gentrified, now prime real estate, drove often to the house to check it, seeing such vigilance as a husband’s duty.

  Heartbreak: the smell of an abandoned house.

  Unmistakable: the smell of an abandoned house.

  Untenanted, the house still had electricity, gas, water. T
hose services had not been discontinued. Most of the furniture remained in the rooms intact. Even a television set, in what had been the basement family room, remained intact.

  Yet when the real estate woman called Zeno with “good news”—offers from clients if the monthly rental price could be reduced just slightly—Zeno was adamant No.

  And if the real estate woman called Mrs. Mayfield to reason with her, Arlette would say with an apologetic little laugh Oh no! The real estate is Zeno’s territory, I would never interfere.

  In this way, the house on Cumberland Avenue remained untenanted.

  IN HILLY MOUNT OLIVE Arlette lived in an older residential neighborhood of large old Victorian houses renovated and refashioned as office buildings for young lawyers, architects, dentists; gift shops, herbal-medicine shops, Beechum County Ecological Engineers. The battered-women’s shelter WomanSpaceInc. which held thirty-five beds was housed in a large red-brick building that had been a girls’ Catholic school, set back in a grassy lot behind a wrought-iron fence.

  At night, the property was lit with bright lights and monitored by surveillance cameras with alarms connected to the Mount Olive Police Department. When the battered-women’s shelter had first been established in Mount Olive volunteers had been rudely treated by neighbors and disdained by local law enforcement authorities; but since a changeover in the police department, the small police force was now supportive of WomanSpaceInc. in their aim to “reduce domestic violence”—“reduce violence in the world by beginning at home.” (It did not fail to help that a lieutenant in the Mount Olive P.D. was the brother of one of the founders and that the formerly all-male P.D. now had a female police officer.)

  Posters designed by local woman artists called for volunteers and donations—VIOLENCE BEGINS IN THE HOME. TAKE CARE. Arlette had appropriated one of Cressida’s early, pre-Escher pen-and-ink drawings, in which childlike figures played together with animals in a floating oasis of green, as the background artwork for a Woman Space poster.