The Fate of Katherine Carr

  For that reason, probably more than any other, I welcomed the sound of the downstairs buzzer, walked to the window, looked out and saw a figure at the door, held in shadow, with shoulder-length hair so luminously black, so much the shimmering curtain that was said to have been Katherine's, that for a single miraculous instant, I thought, She's found.

  "Mr, Gates," the voice said over the intercom. "My name is Cody. I'm Audrey's son. I was with Katherine when she was attacked."

  "Cody, yes," I said. "I know about that."

  "I wonder if we could talk," Cody asked.

  "All right," I said, then pressed the buzzer.

  A heavy tread sounded on the stairs, then on the landing that led to my door.

  "Sorry to bother you," Cody said when I opened the door.

  "No bother," I told him. "I was just reading."

  "It's just that I know you've talked to my mother about Katherine, and so I thought I should speak to you about her, too."

  I could see that something of life's ineffable vitality had been stolen from him. He didn't appear as one who'd been touched by the sort of evil Katherine had experienced, but something just as powerful had left its mark, one I'd seen in people who'd had to confront some dreadful truth about themselves. But I'd also seen the same look in those who'd suddenly had to recognize the culpability of a loved one, a son who'd raped a neighbor's child or a daughter who'd joined some mind-robbing cult, the sense that an invisible malevolence coiled deep within the heart of the very things that had previously seemed utterly benign.

  "It isn't easy for me to talk about this," Cody added. "It's never been easy."

  I led him into the tiny living room that overlooked the street. There was a sofa and a couple of chairs, a small table, a lamp, all of them scavenged from local thrift shops, a stripping down that no doubt appeared consciously imposed, like a punishment.

  "Please, sit down," I said.

  Cody lowered himself into one of the chairs. "Mother told me that you were looking into Katherine's case. I'm sure you'll be the last person who does that, so I wanted you to know what I think about it."

  I knew a story was coming. I leaned back in my chair, as if with a book in my hands, the first page not yet open.

  Cody's opening line was better than I'd expected.

  "You know, Mr. Gates, with a small turn of the screw, anyone can do anything."

  Then he took me back in time.

  It was late on a summer day twenty years before. He'd come to spend the weekend with Katherine, something he'd often done as a boy.

  "My father and mother got divorced when I was three," he said. "After that my father more or less disappeared." He glanced toward one of the photographs on the little table behind my desk, Teddy and I making a snowman on the front lawn of the house on Jefferson Street. "So Katherine did a lot of the father-son things with me. She'd come over to Kingston and take me to the movies or to a ball game, things like that."

  On the day of the attack, she'd picked him up in Kingston, he said. Then they'd driven back to Winthrop.

  "There was a fair going on," Cody said, "one of those traveling things, with rides and games. We got there late in the afternoon."

  He was clearly conjuring up that moment twenty years before, a dark return, as I could see, but one to which he appeared to have grown accustomed, like a man grown used to a cave he'd first entered fearfully, but now could navigate without dread.

  "I remember that I was a little afraid of the whole thing," Cody went on. "The people and the noise. So I grabbed Katherine's hand."

  "Just like she writes in her story," I said.

  "Yes," Cody answered. "A lot of what she writes is true."

  "But not all?"

  He was clearly surprised by my question. "Well, the ending, for example."

  I told him that I hadn't yet read the ending, and why, that a little girl and I were reading it together and that I thought it best not to get ahead.

  "You want to keep the mystery going, I guess." Cody smiled. "Don't we all?"

  I shrugged. "Anyway, I promised myself that I wouldn't skip ahead."

  "Good," Cody said. "I'm glad you haven't. Because it'll make what I have to tell you more ... believable." His expression turned quite grave. "Because there are things Katherine left out, Mr. Gates. Things that aren't in the story she left behind."

  But rather than go further into the "things Katherine left out," Cody returned to the day in question, the day of the attack, detailing his and Katherine's movements through the fair, then their return to Katherine's car for the drive to the farmhouse, where he'd curled up in the backseat and gone to sleep.

  "I remember that she closed the car door very softly," Cody told me, "but I was always a light sleeper, and it jarred me awake. You know, it was just that little click a car door makes. But it was enough. I don't know if I opened my eyes, but I know I was awake."

  Awake enough to hear Katherine as she made her way toward the entrance to the farmhouse, then to hear another set of footsteps—moving quickly, rushing forward, louder—so he'd opened his eyes.

  "I saw a blur," Cody said. "Something moved past the car window. Very fast. Like I said, just a blur. I couldn't have identified anybody. I always knew that." A desperate quality came into his voice. "I was just a kid. I got scared."

  And so he'd remained in the backseat of the car and listened, terrified, a shivering little boy.

  "I couldn't move," he said. "If I could have moved, I would have looked out and maybe seen his face."

  I felt myself hurled back to the very moment I'd tried earlier to avoid, so that I once again heard the thunder that had broken over the little pink Victorian, followed by rain, the way I'd reluctantly gotten up from my desk, walked to the window, looked out to see a figure in a yellow rain slicker, drawing ever nearer as it moved up Jefferson Street, the face too distant, a bluii but which might have become starkly clear had I held my place at the window rather than returning to my work, the line I'd half-written and wanted to complete: The winds of Extremadura blow...

  "I heard her groan," he said. "I heard him say, To‹ bitch!'"

  And then, locked in helpless childhood terror, Cody had listened at full volume to the building outrage.

  "It was over very fast, I guess," Cody said. "But it seemed like a long time to me, and it must have seemed like an eternity to Katherine.'"

  When it was over, and he knew the unknown man was gone, Cody had gotten out of the car, expecting to see Katherine by the door, but instead found her at the entrance to the garage.

  "Her hand was stretched out like she was grabbing for something," Cody said.

  "For the guy who attacked her," I said, "according to Arlo McBride."

  It struck me that Cody had not actually told me anything new, at least nothing that changed any aspect of what I'd read thus far in Katherine's story or heard from Arlo. He seemed suddenly aware that this was the case and quickly moved forward in time.

  "You know what Katherine was like after that," he said. "Closed off. Isolated."

  I nodded.

  "Her mind changed—that's my point," he added. "It got really dark."

  He was moving toward his point, but still reluctant to make it, like a man afraid of the one true thing he knows.

  "It's something my mother won't admit about Katherine," he went on. "How angry she was."

  He paused briefly, like a man at the edge of a threatening forest, then went on.

  "I know that my mother told you that she believes that Maldrow murdered Katherine," he said. "She's told me the same thing. She believes that somehow Katherine found out that he was a con man, that he was just using her. He was afraid she would expose him. So he killed her." He shook his head at what he obviously considered a ludicrous theory. "I don't believe that at all. In fact, I don't believe Maldrow ever existed."

  He made a point to pause before continuing, so that I knew he'd arrived at the moment in his story where the screw made a turn.

  "I w
as thirteen when I saw Katherine for the last time," Cody said. "I'd taken a bus from Kingston. Normally, I would have walked from the bus station to her house on Gilmore. But she called and said she'd meet me at the bus stop."

  There was nothing unusual in this, I thought. Katherine had walked the streets of Winthrop before, had never been entirely housebound.

  "And she did meet me," Cody said. "Right at the edge of the park."

  They'd ambled away from the bus stop, then up one side of Main Street, to where the Winthrop Hotel stood in its faded grandeur at the corner of Cantibell and Main.

  "We went into the hotel and Katherine walked over to the desk clerk and asked if he had the schedule for the Route 34 bus," Cody continued. "The one that goes by where the old slaughterhouse once was. " He peered at me intently. "Have you read the part where Katherine mentions the slaughterhouse?"

  "Not yet."

  His expression turned grim. "You will," he said.

  Then he returned to his own narrative.

  "Well, the desk clerk had all the local bus schedules, and he found the one Katherine wanted and gave it to her," he said. He seemed still a bit surprised by the oddity of what had happened next. "Katherine looked at it closely. Then she said, 'Let's go for a walk, Cody.'" He stared at me unbelievingly. "It was getting dark, and Katherine had never liked to be out at night. Not since the attack. But we went on that walk."

  They had gone down Main Street, Cody said, Katherine in charge of the pace, which was very slow.

  "There was something sad about it all," he added. "She was walking very slowly, and as she walked, she glanced into the shop windows. She'd gone into the shops all her life. Long before the attack. This was her town, and I got the feeling that she was saying good-bye to it."

  Occasionally she'd reached out and touched his hand, Cody said, a soft, airy touch, sad and wistful. "Like she was saying good-bye to me, too."

  But Katherine's mood had not been all wistfulness. He'd seen a curious sense of purpose, as well, as if she'd had a list of things she had to complete, a person on a mission that had a definite end.

  "From time to time, she glanced at her watch," he went on. "And sometimes she seemed to be pretending that she'd found something interesting in one of the shop windows. A pair of earrings, or something like that. But it was all an act, I think, because she was trying to make sure that she got to where she was headed at just the right time. Which was the park. That little stone grotto."

  Here—at just the place where Katherine would later last be seen alive—they had sat down.

  "We talked for a while, then Katherine sort of went into herself, the way she did sometimes," Cody said. "I've often remembered that the little grotto was where she was last seen alive, and that it was also the place she went to at the end of her story, the place where she departed."

  Departed. It struck me as a strange word, but I had no context for it and let it go.

  "Anyway, we sat on the bench for about five minutes, and it seemed to me that she was waiting for something," Cody said.

  He'd had no idea what Katherine was waiting for until the 34 bus stopped at the edge of the park.

  "I didn't even notice the bus until I saw that Katherine was looking at it," Cody went on. "Then I looked over and saw a man get out of the bus and walk into the park."

  He was tall and skinny, Cody said, a taut wire of a man who strolled into the park and slumped against a tree, facing the river, smoking a cigarette.

  "He was in his forties, something like that." Cody shifted slightly, like a man in the hot seat, feeling the pressure to be exact. "He didn't look like he was just hanging around, this guy. He looked like he had a place to go, but the bus had gotten him there too early. He had a few minutes to kill, so he was having a smoke. He didn't look like he'd come to meet anyone else, and I don't think he would ever have noticed Katherine if she hadn't stood up, almost like someone in a trance, and taken a couple of steps toward him."

  She had risen in a slow, steady movement, Cody said, like someone lifted by an invisible hand, and there, by the grotto, with her back straight and her face uplifted, she had stared directly at this man.

  "He was about twenty feet away, and he was just sort of glancing around. But at a certain point, he looked over in our direction."

  It was then, Cody said, that Katherine had done the strangest thing of all. "She stared at him, really stared."

  The air around us seemed to darken suddenly, though I knew that it hadn't, that this perceived change of shade was only the result of the change in tone that had accompanied his words.

  "It was like she knew it was him," Cody said. "That this was the man she'd come to see."

  "But who was he?" I asked.

  "I think he was the unknown man Katherine wrote about in her story," Cody answered. "The man she thought had attacked her. I think she'd studied him by then, his movements, tracked him or something, so that she knew he took this bus, and when he got off it."

  "But how would she have known this was the man who'd attacked her?" I asked.

  "She wouldn't have to know it," Cody said. "She'd only have to believe that it was him."

  "How did the man react?" I asked.

  "He just nudged himself away from the tree, turned around, and headed toward town. Katherine watched him until he disappeared around the corner at the end of Main Street." Cody shrugged. "She never mentioned him or gave me any idea about who he was. He just walked around the corner and vanished."

  "Did you ever tell the police about this?"

  "I didn't think anything about it at the time," Cody answered. "It was only later, when my mother hatched this weird theory that Maldrow had killed Katherine, that I remembered the man in the park, and that he looked a lot like the guy Katherine described when she wrote about the unknown man. That he was skinny, a smoker." He paused a moment then added, "And I thought to myself, 'She saw him. She recognized him.'"

  With this, I thought Cody had reached the end of his story, and felt a vague disappointment that there'd been so little to it, as if only something miraculous could shed more light on whatever it was that had ultimately happened to Katherine.

  There was more, however: a twist that brought him back around to the first thing he'd said to me, how with a slight turn of the screw, anyone could do anything.

  "And I think she did recognize him, Mr. Gates," Cody said. There was an ominous quality to his voice now, a dark undertow. "And because of that I think my mother got the whole thing backwards. The police, too. Maybe everyone was wrong about Katherine. Wrong about her killing herself and wrong about her being murdered. Wrong about what really happened." He watched me silently for a moment, then said, "Because I saw her face when she turned around after looking at that man. And it wasn't the face of a victim. It was the face of a woman who intended to get even."

  This was certainly a dramatic conclusion, but it also left something out.

  "Then what happened to Katherine?" I asked bluntly. "If she didn't kill herself or wasn't murdered. Why did she vanish?"

  He appeared to see Katherine as she'd turned back toward him that day, a vision that affirmed what he had come to think about her.

  "Two people usually 'vanish' after a murder," he said. "One of them is the person who was murdered, so that person vanishes into a grave." His gaze intensified. "The second is the murderer, who also vanishes ... if he gets away with it."

  16

  SO THAT WAS CODY'S theory, that Katherine had found the man who'd attacked her five years before—or at least convinced herself that she'd found him—and after that, like: some black-draped woman in a noir potboiler, murdered him and ... departed.

  It was certainly a twist, as Cody had telegraphed in his opening remark, but I didn't believe a word of it, and because of that I might simply have thanked Cody for telling me his story, filed it away in some corner of my mind, and otherwise forgotten it. There have always been tales in which the unlikely is all that offers itself by way of resolution,
the delayed letter the misplaced note, the unexpected encounter. But unlike those stories, Cody's theory of Katherine's disappearance was one that could to some extent be tested, and for which evidence could be found.

  "So, was a middle-aged man murdered in this area around the time of Katherine's disappearance?" I asked Arlo when he met me for coffee the next morning.

  I had just told him what Cody had told me the night before, even emphasized its weirdest implication: that Katherine was, herself, a murderer who'd gotten away with it rather than a woman who'd been murdered.

  Arlo shook his head. "Nobody was murdered."

  "So what Cody thinks couldn't possibly be true," I said.

  "You mean that Katherine killed the man she thought had attacked her, then escaped by vanishing?" He shrugged. "I guess anything's possible, but it's a pretty wild theory."

  "Too bad," I said. "Because it would certainly have made for an interesting twist in the story."

  Arlo looked at me quizzically. "Why are you looking for a twist?"

  "Because of Alice," I said. "She's read a lot of mysteries, and my guess is that most of them have had pretty unsatisfying twists. You know the type, where the murderer reveals all the intricacies of his crime while he holds a gun on the protagonist. Then the hero kicks beach sand in the murderer's face and grabs the gun. The End."

  Arlo took a sip of coffee. "I wish I had a better twist to offer," he said. "But facts are facts, and nobody was murdered at around the time Katherine disappeared."

  "But there was an assault," I said. "Around the time Katherine disappeared. It happened not far from Gilmore Street. To a guy mentioned in Katherine's story."

  "Ronald Duckworth," Arlo said. "How did you know about that?"

  I told him about my encounter with the woman with the flashlight, my subsequent trip out to Potter's Lake, the bizarre tale Duckworth had related to me.