The Fate of Katherine Carr

Charlie must have seen the old hollowness settle over me because he moved quickly to change the subject.

  "Okay, so you didn't get an interview with Warren Maizey," Charlie asked. "But you saw him, right?"

  "Yes."

  "So, what did he look like?"

  He was lying on his back, I told Charlie, his body covered by a single white sheet that had been drawn up to just beneath his chin. Unlike the man Katherine had encountered on the bus, he didn't have a lean and hungry look. He wasn't tall, nor in the least imposing. Just the opposite in fact: a white-haired old man with what must have once been a handsome face. His eyes were closed, as were his lips, and his breathing was slow and even, the rhythm of a sleeping child.

  "Okay, so what did you do?" Charlie asked.

  For a time, I simply waited, I said, staring at the plump, peacefully sleeping figure in a bed, waited like one expecting some sort of revelation. But no revelation came; so, after a moment, I slipped back into the corridor and headed down it, past where the young policeman stood enthralled by the equally youthful nurse.

  "I'm guessing you didn't get anything out of him, then?" Charlie asked. "No comment from Maizey? No story?"

  I shook my head. "Only the feeling that I'd done something ludicrous."

  And it had been ludicrous, I thought now, my little detour into Warren Maizey's room, and for that reason I'd awakened the next morning with a sense of having been the victim of a fierce chicanery, like a man who, against his better judgment, bets his life's savings on a single lottery ticket and, quite predictably, loses.

  Charlie made no more of my visit to Warren Maizey's room. We went on to talk of other things, the story he was still working on about prostitution in Kingston, but which had been cut short by an odd disappearance.

  "Who's disappeared?" I asked.

  "Hollis Traylor," he said. "There's been no sign of him for a few days."

  "That's strange," I said. "I thought I saw him a couple of nights ago."

  "Where?"

  "He was driving past my window," I said.

  Charlie laughed. "Well, he must have kept on driving." He shrugged. "But people come and go all the time. Who knows where they went?" He smiled. "That's the strange part when it comes to a disappearance, don't you think? If they don't leave some clue, then you'll never know."

  The strange part.

  Sarah had used the same phrase, which was probably why I found myself turning it over in my mind after I left Charlie a few minutes later, and which finally took me back to my first trip to Kilimanjaro, how I'd trudged up its slowly rising slope like so many younger Americans before me, with a copy of Hemingway in my backpack.

  In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," he'd written about a leopard that had been found near the very summit of the mountain, a place the Masai called Ngaje Ngai, the "House of God." Harry Black, Hemingway's dying hero, asks himself what this leopard was seeking at such heights, and in the way the question is formed in the story, the meditative, near-terminal voice in which Black poses it, it does seem strange that a leopard would journey so far up the slope of Kilimanjaro, where there was no food, nothing to hunt. Black clearly finds it inexplicable, one of life's insoluble mysteries, the strange part we can never fathom.

  But, in fact, as I'd subsequently discovered on that first trek up Kilimanjaro, the leopard's presence on its upper slopes was no mystery at all. In fact, it was so wholly without mystery that a single question had settled the matter. Why do you think a leopard would come up so far? I had asked it of a local guide, and when I did, he laughed in a way that made it clear he was familiar with Hemingway's tale, and had been asked the same question by other fools like me. The leopard hadn't climbed toward the summit at all, he said. It had not been seeking anything because it had been long dead by the time it reached the higher elevations of Kilimanjaro. Masai tribesmen had carried it up the slope and left it as a sacrifice to mountain gods. They did this regularly. It was no more than a superstitious religious ritual. As for Hemingway, he could have solved the mystery of what the leopard was seeking simply by asking, the guide told me. Or perhaps Hemingway had asked, he went on, still laughing, but not liked the answer because it didn't fit his story.

  Possibly, I thought, both—at the time I'd met the guide, and later, when I'd written up the experience for a travel magazine. But now I wondered if Hemingway's posing of an almost-mystical question was evidence of a greater failing than simply that of a writer who for the sake of a story had decided to fudge the facts. Maybe for all his clear-eyed realism, Hemingway had been seduced by the need for a "strange part," or at least by the possibility of some unseen element of existence that remained hidden to us, but which animals might sense, and for which they might even "seek," as the Buranni by rituals and festivals sought the benevolent intervention of their cherished Kuri Lam.

  The problem was that I had sought it, too—this touch of the unseen—and that it was this seeking that had propelled me into Warren Maizey's room. But what had I been so intently hoping to find in that room that I now felt cheated in not finding it, and embarrassed that I had even tried, as if I were the dupe of some vast sleight of hand?

  For most of the morning I pondered that question, though it wasn't until I met Arlo for lunch that I brought it up again.

  "So what was I actually looking for when I went into Maizey's room?" I asked, after relating the entire tale of my visit there.

  "You were looking for evidence," Arlo answered flatly.

  "For what?" I asked.

  "That it's more than a story."

  I shook my head. "I'm not fooled by a story that easily."

  Arlo looked at me as if I were a child, easily misled. "You've already been fooled," he said. "Me, too."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Arlo shifted slightly. "Because we both thought Maldrow promised Katherine that he'd find the guy who attacked her."

  "He did."

  Arlo shook his head firmly. "No, George, he didn't. We got the idea he did. So did Audrey, I guess. But it doesn't really say that in the story."

  I didn't buy it. "But in the story Maldrow takes her to the fairgrounds," I said. "And to this house that—"

  "Maldrow never says whose house that is," Arlo said.

  "What about the guy on the bus?" I asked. "Isn't that supposed to be the actual unknown man?"

  "The guy on the bus is never identified," Arlo said. "And besides, the man she sees is a man who burned a girl to death. He's not the one who attacked Katherine."

  "Then who is he?"

  "I don't know," Arlo answered. "Maybe just her fantasy of a man who got away with something horrible like that."

  22

  KATHERINE HAD PLAYED AN INTRIGUING little trick upon her few readers, and I expected Alice to find Arlo's discovery of it at least somewhat interesting. But at the end of my narrative, she merely drew in a long, oddly hollow breath, then said, "What's the strangest thing that ever happened to you, George?"

  I knew instantly what the "strangest" thing had been. In fact, I'd told it to Charlie only a few hours before. Still, I wasn't sure if it was the right story for Alice under the circumstances because it was so hopelessly grim.

  Her gaze was insistent, however, and so I did.

  "I thought I saw him," I told her. "The man who killed my little boy."

  And he was there again, vivid in my mind, wrapped in a glistening yellow rain slicker, moving effortlessly down Jefferson Street toward where Teddy waited for me in the pounding rain.

  Alice's gaze was now quite intent. "When?" she asked.

  "The day Teddy disappeared," I said. "I was standing at the window, and I saw this man in a yellow rain slicker. He was walking down Jefferson Street, in the direction of the bus stop where Teddy was last seen."

  "You didn't see his face?" Alice asked.

  "No," I answered. "I was supposed to pick Teddy up at the bus stop. Before he left the house that morning, he'd said something about a storm coming in, and I'd told him that if there
were a storm, I'd pick him up. But it was just a few blocks he had to walk, and I figured the storm would blow over. So I turned away from the window before the guy got close enough for me to see his face."

  Turned away from the window and went back to my desk.

  "I'd been trying to come up with the first line of an essay on Extremadura," I told Alice, "a region of southerly Spain that's very spare, very poor, mostly dust and scrub plants."

  A landscape so bare and monochromatic, as I went on to tell Alice, that it had always struck me as ironic that it was from these barren wastes that Pizarro had drawn the young men who would later chop their way through the steaming jungles of South America. Almost none of these young men had ever returned to their desert homes, and it was the expression of that irony I'd been struggling with all that afternoon, the first half of a single line filtering endlessly through my head. The winds of Extremadura blow bitter, dry and piercing, like...

  The end of the line was still eluding me as I'd stood at the window, watching the storm, thinking I should retrieve Teddy, my eyes briefly following the floating blur of a yellow rain slicker.

  "Why do you think it was this man who killed Teddy?" Alice asked.

  "I don't have an answer for that," I admitted.

  "What makes it strange, then?"

  "That I've always believed that it was him," I answered. "Without any evidence, I mean. Just a feeling."

  Alice looked at the pages that remained of Katherine's manuscript. "Something you couldn't be sure of," she said.

  "That's right."

  "And so he got away," she added with a strange sad finality that seemed perfectly to anticipate the next words I read.

  NOW

  "Last call," the bartender says.

  The Chief looks at Maldrow gravely. "It is time," he says.

  Maldrow considers the ones before Katherine, the ones who'd almost reached this point, but who, in the end, had proven unfit. What was it they'd lacked? Some had loved life too little. Some had loved it too much. But the final failure had been a failure of belief. How many had mistrusted him? How many had whirled away at his approach? How many had not been able to take the horrors that had to be endured, and at the point the cup was finally passed, had refused to take it from him, drink the final draft.

  And in the end, he wondered, would Katherine do that, too?

  "The time has come," the Chief says.

  Maldrow sees the great hall again, the robed figures he has so many times imagined, taking in the Chief's eloquent argument that only those who had experienced the full measure of loss and grief, the towering fury of the unjustly injured, could be selected.

  "The passing," the Chief says.

  Maldrow feels a terrible weight press him flat against the hard ground, press his face into the pavement. Fingers close around his neck, sharp as talons. His screams rake the air, and in those screams he hears all the anguished panic of the slaughtered, the burned and scraped and cut and beaten, screams that ignite the air, bathing his skin in a lava flow of sound. The earth turns to quicksand, sucks him down and down into its suffocating depths so that he feels the hollow oblivion of the million million graves, the shivering cold of their untimely deaths, the hellish flame of their rage.

  "Last call," the bartender says again.

  Maldrow looks at the clock, considers the timetable, knows that Katherine should be leaving her house on Gilmore Street.

  He glances at the empty seat across from him, the Chief already fled, the final signal that the time has truly come.

  He rises as if lifted by a current of hot air. On the way out of the bar, he looks at the clock again to assure himself that there is such a thing as time. Then he steps out into the street and peers to the left, where at the end of Main Street he can see the little grotto in which Katherine Carr will meet her fate. He glances at his watch. Strange what they call it, he thinks. The witching hour.

  At the end of the section, I stopped and looked at Alice. She was staring at the pages with a curious intensity, as if something unexpected had occurred to hei; something she couldn't be sure of. "Go on," she said.

  THEN

  I startled slightly when the wind threw a scattering of raindrops against the window, then got control of myself, marched to the small table in the kitchen, sat down, and peered out into the night. I thought again of Maldrow, the way he drifted through time, weightless as the memory of something that never was. Could one live that way, I asked myself, forsaking all the promises of life, embracing darkness only, abandoning all one loved, and all by whom one had once been loved?

  The nature of what Maldrow had loved had been revealed to me only the night before, a long night of talking in the dark front room, shades drawn, as they always were, a cave of walls, drapery, tightly closed blinds.

  He told me of Yenna, the task he'd offered her, a dark mission she would have taken up without hesitation, and carried out without fear. Stanovich had foiled all that, striking before the moment came for Yenna to be taken up.

  "Did Stanovich get away with it?" I asked.

  Maldrow shook his head. "And neither did your unknown man."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I have evidence," Maldrow answered.

  "Show it to me."

  "I will, when the time comes."

  "I want to know now," I demanded. "You don't know what it's like to know he's out there, that this man who did this thing, that he—"

  "I do know, Katherine," Maldrow said.

  It was then he spoke of Amelia, his murdered child, the man who'd killed her so brutally, a man who, in the end, had not gotten away with it.

  "How do you know he didn't?" I asked,

  "The same way you will know," Maldrow answered. He started to speak, then stopped, waited a moment, then said, "Amelia. Innocent."

  A terrible sadness fell over him, all the weight of the world, or so it seemed, the memory of his daughter's death a bitter draft he had to drink again and again.

  Captured in that memory, he lowered his head. His body seemed to deflate, all his strength drain from him, so that he leaned to the right, as if toward an invisible pillow, a gesture of such brokenness that I gathered him into my arms.

  He rested there a moment, then lifted himself again. "Tomorrow night," he said. "At the grotto."

  "I'll be there," I said.

  And I will be, I told myself now.

  With those unspoken words, I stood up, walked into the living room, and sat down on the sofa. Rain fell noisily beyond the window, but I paid no notice. I could think of nothing but the eternal night that engulfed him, his mind a labyrinth of blood-soaked rooms. To live as Maldrow did seemed the most dreadful of fates: forever friendless, childless, without love, a figure cloaked in night—not just dark, but composed of darkness.

  The rain stopped suddenly, and I knew the time had come. I didn't bother to get a coat or an umbrella. There would be no need for anything save for the long dark shawl that would briefly protect me from the cold. At the door, I glanced back into the room, the desk in the corner, the small folder where I'd placed my story along with a final poem, my true core.

  I walked onto the porch, drew the shawl more tightly over my shoulders, then made my way down the stairs. At Gilmore I turned left onto Cantibell, then continued on until I reached town. The pale neon sign of the Winthrop Hotel swam into my view, and after it, around the near corner, the green shamrock that swung over the entrance of O'Shea's Bar. The time has come, I told myself. The time is now.

  On the dark wings of that thought, I lifted my head and steeled myself for what was to come. It was still lifted when I reached the river, drew in a determined breath, then made my way toward the grotto where, beyond it, I could see the steadily encroaching fog.

  I looked up from the pages, trying to gauge Alice's mood.

  Alice said nothing, and in that silence appeared deeply engaged in a strange contemplation. Then she said, "Not much left."

  "Just a few pages," I said. "
We can finish it tonight."

  Her eyes widened, like a child caught in the grip of some terrible foreboding. "No," she said. "I'm not ready."

  "But we're right at the end," I said.

  Her head lolled wearily to the left. The light seemed to have dimmed around her, so that her eyes were very nearly in shadow. Beneath the bedding, her body appeared impossibly thin, and as I gazed, a rush of searing rage swept over me, the burning, bitter certainty that we should never have lived at all if we had to live like this.

  "Not yet," Alice said softly. "Please, George, not yet."

  I tamped down the blazing wrath that seized me and swallowed it like a lump of coal. "Okay," I said. "We'll finish it tomorrow night."

  She nodded heavily. "Tomorrow night, yes," she said weakly. "Tomorrow night you can read the end."

  With that, she dropped her head, and seemed almost instantly to sleep. I came over to her gently, needlessly straightened her bedding. She gave no sense that she had felt my hands.

  I left her at that point, and headed down the corridor. The young policeman was at his watch, but as I passed I noticed that the door where he'd stood guard was flung open and that the room was empty.

  "I guess the bastard finally died," I said.

  The policeman nodded. "Natural causes," he told me with a hopeless shrug, "so I guess you have to say he got away with it."

  I glanced into the room, the bare walls and floor, and its emptiness seemed mine.

  23

  I HAD A RESTLESS NIGHT, and the next morning, blearily going through the usual routine, I felt somewhat like Katherine in the opening scene of her story, surrounded by her disturbing visions of the unknown man, save in my case it was not the man in the yellow rain slicker, but Alice who seemed everywhere around me, at my desk when I fumbled with a drawer, across from me at the breakfast table, waiting at the door when I grabbed my jacket and went out, her ghostly image so vividly in my mind that it seemed little more than a haunted house through which she roamed sleeplessly.