The Fate of Katherine Carr

  Because of that, I found myself going over what I knew of Katherine's story more slowly than normal, elaborating conversations and giving more detailed descriptions of various places, Audrey's house, the diner where I met Arlo, the look of Gilmore Street the night I'd visited it, the stone grotto by the river where Katherine had been seen last.

  "Any questions so far?" I asked at one point.

  Alice shook her head. "Not yet."

  And so I continued my narrative, now breaking to read the sections of Katherine's manuscript Arlo had given me, or to answer the questions Alice at last began to ask, most of them quite concrete, and usually about the identity of some arch-villain mentioned in the "Now" section of Katherine's story, Maldrow's criminal archive.

  Most of the time she seemed deeply concentrated on whatever I was saying, but she would occasionally draw her gaze over to the window and stare out into the middle distance. She rarely spoke during those intervals, but I sensed a purposeful silence, that within this oddly focused quiet, Alice was assembling pieces of a puzzle, perhaps even beginning to arrange them in an order she had long ago devised.

  Finally she asked, "Do you think Audrey's right about Maldrow?"

  "You mean, that he's a con man?"

  She shook her head. "No, that he was a real person."

  Her inquiry was quite fundamental in that it touched upon the essential question of whether Katherine's narrative was fiction or nonfiction or something in between.

  I offered the only answer that seemed reasonable at the time: "I don't know."

  Alice appeared entirely satisfied by this answer so that I suddenly realized that I should never read ahead of her, know more than she knew, that from here on we should explore the twists and turns of Katherine's story, if there were any, like two people winding down a river on the same boat.

  "Do you think you've caught up with me now?" I asked. "Anything else before I start to read?"

  She straightened her shoulders slightly, drew in a short anticipatory breath, and placed her fingers in position on the laptop keyboard.

  "Ready," she said.

  NOW

  "You seem to have won Katherine's confidence very quickly," the Chief says. "But then, you are good at winning trust."

  Maldrow sees Mrs. Budd staring angrily out her window, her white hair trembling, unable to focus on anything but a little cottage in White Plains, the terrible walk her daughter took, holding Fish's hand. So many like her. Drained by anguish, ready for his approach.

  "Of course, rage makes one vulnerable," the Chief adds. "We've learned that much, Maldrow."

  Maldrow recalls Katherine's eyes as she'd stared at the magazines that lay scattered across the floor. The fury of her gaze had reminded him of Yenna, emboldened by what she'd learned, her green eyes forever after searching for some murderous figure in the village square, following him as he ambled among the crowd, buying cheese and bread, stopping at the tradesman whose trade it was to sharpen knives. Had it not been for Stanovich, she would be with him now—partners, as it were, in crime.

  "Especially futile rage," the Chief adds.

  Maldrow recalls the legion of others who lived inside that furious futility, unable to go on, their lives lived in fruitless contemplation of some unknown man, his freedom an endless torture to them, a pain mercy could not ease, nor forgiveness in any way deflect.

  "Does Katherine know this?" the Chief asks emphatically.

  Maldrow recalls Katherine as she came out of the bus, a smoldering ruin, charred by what she'd seen, but moving forward anyway. "Yes," he answers. "She does."

  The Chief's gaze drifts down to Maldrow's long fingers, the rhythmic way he squeezes and releases them. "You are in an odd condition."

  Maldrow massages his fingers. "I'm anxious to close Katherine's case."

  The Chief's eyes glitter with a distant sense of approaching trouble. "Then let us determine if she is truly found. For there can be no mistake in this."

  "I know."

  The Chief regards Maldrow with a stern gaze. "Does she believe in you?"

  "Yes, she does."

  The Chief sits back and draws in a long, thoughtful breath. "So did another at one time."

  Maldrow sees Yenna's body facedown in the flowing river.

  "Tragic, all of them," the Chief adds. "You felt the weight of them." He thinks a moment, then poses the question: "But you never considered any of them after Yenna, did you?"

  "Not until now."

  "Why?"

  Maldrow sees scores of others who never made it beyond their despair, people who leaped from bridges or hanged themselves from rafters, or placed the cold steel barrel between their lips and pulled the trigger. Others had been lost to alcohol, to madness, or perhaps within the folds of their own enveloping grief.

  "Because they didn't love life anymore," Maldrow answers. "You have to love life for it to matter if you lose it."

  "But even that is not enough," the Chief says.

  "No, it isn't."

  "Then what makes Katherine different?"

  Maldrow recalls the look in Katherine's eyes after he'd finished his story of that filthy old child murderer. It was the same broken-yet-forbidding look of people on the witness stand, victims of some dreadful atrocity whose perpetrators they were now in fearful position to identify. There he is, the one who bashed my baby's head against a wall. It was the look of the people who'd identified Eichmann in Jerusalem, the look of people who knew that if justice were for mortals, eternal as they are not, then other witnesses even now would be pointing to King Leopold or the Duke of Padua along with legions of equally unpunished slaughterers, the swordsmen of Jericho, the gunmen of Babi Yar. More than anything, it was the dark look of those who knew the dreadful truth that Heaven could be made Paradise only by tribunals long and grim.

  "Her darkness," Maldrow answers.

  A darkness that had been even deeper than Yenna's, so that he'd known how mercilessly she would have faced them: Lawrence Bittaker washing pliers in a metal sink; John Joubert stuffing rope and a hunting knife in his army locker, Vladimir lonosyan buttoning his false uniform from Moscow Gas.

  "Ah, yes," the Chief says quietly. "And what is more desirable than that?"

  I stopped and sat listening to the tap of the laptop.

  "How do you spell those last names?" Alice asked after a moment. "The ones you just read."

  I handed her the page, then watched as she typed the names carefully. After typing them into her notes, she checked the spelling by looking from the text to the screen, a thoroughness that reminded me of my boyhood, the great drive I'd had to get the facts right in my school papers. When she'd finished this process, she looked up with a visible eagerness.

  "That's the end of that section," I said. "Is there anything you want to talk about?"

  "Who is Yenna?" Alice asked.

  "I don't know," I answered.

  "She's connected to Stanovich, somehow, and they're both connected to Maldrow."

  "Yes," I said. "My guess is that we'll see the connection later in the story."

  "All right," Alice said. "Then let's read on."

  THEN

  I imagined them in their endless travels, eternal vagabonds trudging through fields of windswept wheat, leaning wearily against crumbling earthen walls, squatting beside fence posts. I saw them tirelessly searching waist-high grasses, slogging down sodden roads, following muddy footprints; saw them barefoot, in tattered sandals or worn-out shoes, jostled in wooden carts, weaving in the sweltering steerage, clothed in baggy suits, soiled robes, hair shirts, tattered muslin; saw them bone-thin and squinty-eyed, studying some incriminating object through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.

  "Tell me again about Stanovich," I said.

  Maldrow smiled softly. "It is what you hoped for, the end of his story. It is what all of you hope for."

  "Is that why you do what you do?"

  "It is the only reason."

  "When was it offered to you, this ... job?" br />
  "A long time ago."

  He rose, and as if suddenly called to action, I got to my feet and we walked out onto the porch. It was a cool, beautiful night, bright stars and moon, the town visible below, fixed in a bluish light.

  "Everything seems so full," I said.

  Maldrow gazed toward the town and seemed to see everything within it, all its many rooms. Then he glanced toward Main Street, to where it ended at a little rock grotto.

  "What are you thinking?" I asked.

  "About a man," Maldrow said. "His name was Albert Fish. He murdered a great many children."

  Then Maldrow meticulously described the horrible things Fish had done to the children who'd fallen into his hands.

  "Did he get away with it?" I asked.

  "No," Maldrow answered. "He was caught and executed."

  "How?"

  "Electrocution," Maldrow answered.

  But it had been a botched execution, Maldrow told me, hideous in its details, Fish the recipient of a truly dreadful death.

  "And so, you see," Maldrow said when he came to the end of Fish's story, "Fish didn't get away with it."

  But I knew he had.

  I stopped again. "That's where this section ends," I said.

  Alice stared at me thoughtfully. "Why does Katherine think that Fish got away with it?" she asked. "I mean, if he was executed."

  I shrugged. "I don't know. But Fish was a real person, and he was executed. That much of what Maldrow tells Katherine is true."

  I started to turn the page, prepared to go on, but Alice stopped me.

  "Can I have the first part?" she asked. "The part you've already read."

  She meant the sections I'd told her about, the ones Arlo had given me initially, and from which I'd read excerpts, an updating process she now appeared to find incomplete.

  "Sure." I took the pages I'd already read and handed them to her.

  For a time, her attention was focused on Katherine's manuscript, studying its first page with her old-lady eyes. Then she glanced up suddenly, as if something had occurred to her, though not something she was prepared to share. "Would it be all right if I kept them?" she asked.

  "Sure," I said.

  She returned to the pages, studying them so intently that I thought it a good time to leave her, and on that thought, got to my feet.

  "Where are you going?" she asked.

  "Home," I answered. "I thought you might prefer to be alone."

  "Why would I want to be alone?" she asked. "Is it because you want to leave?"

  "No," I said. "Not at all."

  I sat back down and waited for Alice to speak, curiously unable to initiate conversation myself, so that I again felt the weight of just how long it had been since I'd talked to a child.

  Alice clearly sensed my unease, returned quickly to her computer, made a few taps, then turned the screen to face me.

  It was a ghastly serial-killer Web site, the faces of the men lined up in rows, like mug shots, faces of every color, race, ethnic type, their names and the countries from which they came written in a black, vaguely gothic script, a skinny Korean, a pockmarked Slav, all of them with at least one thing in common other than their maliciousness: STILL AT LARGE.

  "Why are you looking at that sort of thing?" I asked.

  "Because I read your book," Alice answered. "And I wondered if you'd ever written about people like this."

  "You mean, murderers?" I asked.

  "Murderers who never got caught," Alice said.

  "Why would I write about people like that?" I asked.

  She seemed somewhat disappointed by this answer, like one who'd hazarded a move and been blocked.

  "No reason," she said as she turned the screen back around, made another tap, then turned the computer off altogether.

  She said nothing for a moment, but merely held her gaze on the blank screen. Then, as if prompted by the recognition of some dreadful failure, she said, "Maybe you should go now. I'm tired."

  It was an abrupt change of mood, but one I had no choice but to accept.

  "Okay," I said. "See you tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow?" Alice asked doubtfully.

  "Yes, tomorrow," I assured her. "So we can read some more of the story."

  She was clearly surprised that I intended to come back so soon, and in that surprise, I saw how many people had come and gone in her life, the many faces that had lingered briefly by her bed, sweet and solicitous, promising to care, then vanished.

  "We have to find out what happens in Katherine's story, don't we?" I added. "Who Yenna is, for example. And Stanovich. Why Katherine thinks Fish got away with it."

  Alice smiled. "Yes, we do."

  "See you tomorrow, then."

  With that I rose and headed for the door. When I reached it, I turned back to say good night to Alice. But her head was lowered, her hairless pate shining softly in the light as she studied Katherine's manuscript, turning the pages with her tiny, wrinkled fingers, slowly, one by one.

  12

  PERHAPS IT WAS that last look of Alice studying Katherine's story that returned me to its long-missing author as I headed for my car that night. For as I drove back to my apartment, I could almost feel her around me, though oddly so, like someone who disappears as soon as you turn, darts around a corner or into an adjoining room, a figure gone so quickly, you're not sure it was ever there at all.

  It was a presence that wasn't present, and I suppose it was my feeble effort to conjure her up that sent me to my computer when I returned to my apartment. There was no way to get an image of Katherine, of course, but there was an image that had intrigued the woman herself, and about which she'd written, and with a few taps at my own keyboard, it flashed onto the screen.

  Munch's painting, whether called Vampire or Love and. Pain, looked much as Audrey had earlier described it. It was small and dark, with only two figures. But it was also highly dramatic, a captured moment in which a man and a woman seem locked in a fierce grief; The cause of this grief, whether death or loss or rejection, was impossible to decipher, but the intensity of it, bleak and inconsolable, was etched in both faces. Even so, the man and woman were different. The man seemed in grief for an unknown reason, while the woman appeared to be grieving for the man, cradling him in her arms; a broken man, as he seemed to me, and thus hardly the sinister figure Audrey had painted of Maldrow.

  In fact, the man in Munch's painting struck me as far more similar to the Maldrow Katherine had portrayed in her story, only half-visible, his features cloudy and indistinct, a character she'd rendered too insubstantially to be pinned down by anything I'd ever come across in literary psychology.

  But if he'd existed at all, I told myself, Maldrow might well have been a dark manipulator of the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent, just as Audrey believed. I knew that throughout history such unconscionable deceivers had existed, sometimes on a monumental scale.

  But more than that, reading Katherine's story aloud had given it an added eeriness in tone, particularly the scene where she'd stood with Maldrow on the porch of her house, her eyes cast up toward the order of the firmament, his down to the chaotic world of man. His tone had been oddly instructive at that moment, his worldliness far deeper that Katherine's, so that he'd seemed almost her teacher or mentor ... or guru.

  But would Katherine have been vulnerable to such chicanery? And if so, how would it have resulted in her death?

  I considered the police theory first, the one Audrey had so vehemently refused to accept, that Katherine had taken her own life. To my surprise, I found it quite easy to think of Katherine exactly as the police had thought of her, a woman lost in upheaval, seeking deliverance, finding none, and in the terrible aloneness of her despair, walking directly into the water. Emily Dickinson's famous lines occurred to me: how after great pain a formal feeling comes, one's tormented emotions finally at rest. Surely it was reasonable to suggest that Katherine had come at last to precisely that dark serenity, her jangling nerves, in Dickinson'
s words, "sitting ceremonious, like tombs."

  I thought of the little rock grotto by the river, the place where Katherine had last been seen. She'd been alone, according to the Route 34 bus driver, her shoulders wrapped in a long dark shawl, her hair falling in a thick black curtain over her shoulders. By such a description, she joined the legendary suicides of her sex: Ophelia floating among the flower petals, Eu-stacia Vye leaping into a raging stream, unable to be saved, as Hardy said, by earth's fettered gods. And of course there was Virginia Woolf, tucking stones into her pockets, then wading out into the River Ouse.

  For a moment I wondered if this were indeed the fate I preferred for Katherine, literary as it was, and oddly haunting, a woman walking into the water. For what end could be better for her than a willful death, carried out in sober sorrow, and with a backdrop of natural beauty?

  I imagined the lapping water, the peaceful shore. At night it would have been even more lovely, and I knew that in this aspect, as a suitable place to take one's life, it neatly fit a universal pattern. For one thing was clearly known about suicides: they often liked to die in beauty, the panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge, the cliffs of England's Beachy Head, or within the beguiling depths of the Aokigahara Woods, where the Japanese killed themselves in striking numbers. As locations, these most popular of earth's suicide sites had all shared a stunning beauty that powerfully contradicted the prosaic signs and notices posted all about, pleas to "phone a friend" or "think of your family."

  Audrey would clearly not accept such a death, and so—almost as an act of fairness—I turned to her own idea of Katherine's end: that Katherine had discovered the truth about Maldrow, an evil truth, and had threatened to expose him for the charlatan he was.

  I sat back and studied Munch's painting again, but found nothing there that could take me to the next step. I knew I couldn't read ahead in the story, for that would have been unfair to Alice.

  Luckily, however, the story was not my only source.

  Arlo's voice was drowsy, so that I knew I'd roused him from his bed.