The Fate of Katherine Carr

  She struggled to lift herself when I came into the room, but failed, so that her head lolled backward into the pillow. "Can you just..."

  "Sure," I said as I rushed over and helped ease her upright. "Is that better?"

  "That's fine," Alice said. She drew a long breath, and seemed to deflate when she released it. "I had a bad night," she said.

  The simple act of speaking appeared to be a burden to her, a weight she found difficult to lift. She gave off a sense of utter exhaustion, deep and irrecoverable, a tiredness with being tired.

  "I could come back later," I suggested.

  She shook her head. "Did you read it?" she asked.

  "Katherine's poem, yes, I read it." I shrugged. "It has nothing to do with her story, or what might have happened to her."

  Alice handed me the poem. "Read it again, George." And so I did:

  Why credit only what we see,

  Believe what only seems to be,

  Choose the Visible's dark mire

  Over what our hearts desire?

  Better let our dreams remake

  A world not made for Evil's sake,

  But open to the tender hand

  That offers hope to hopeless man?

  What serves us better, doubt or hope

  As we walk the darkling path,

  Bestows on life an unseen scope,

  And offers us an end to wrath?

  "What do you think?" Alice asked after I'd finished.

  "It's singsongy," I said dryly. "And the beat goes off."

  "I mean, about what it says," Alice said.

  "It's silly," I said. "She wants us to believe in things we can't really believe in."

  "Like Maldrow," Alice said. "That there are these 'entities' out there who track down bad people and make them pay."

  "Exactly."

  Alice drew in a long, faintly wheezy breath, and shifted again. "Supernatural. Like Katherine becomes at the end."

  "That's right," I said. "People like to believe crap like that."

  I went on to describe the weird beliefs of the Buranni, the intervention of the Kuri Lam.

  Alice listened attentively, but pain and weariness continually distracted her, so that it didn't surprise me that she asked for no additional details.

  I handed the poem back to her. "How about you? What do you think about it?" I asked.

  "I didn't like it much," Alice answered. Her head drifted to the left and seemed to be almost too heavy for her to keep upright. "Sort of silly, like you said."

  "So we agree?" I said.

  "Not exactly."

  For a moment, I feared that Alice had done what anyone might in her condition: grasped at the straw Katherine offered at the end of her story, its vision of immortality, or a world beyond this one, Katherine sailing out among the stars.

  But what she said next put that fear to rest.

  "Katherine's not some kind of immortal," Alice added. "Not like she becomes in her story. But maybe she wants us to think she really is like that, off in the clouds with Maldrow."

  I was relieved to hear this, but since I had no idea where Alice was going at this point, I remained silent.

  "But maybe the poem tells us what really happened to Katherine," Alice said. "A better ending. Not that she was murdered or committed suicide."

  "Then why did she vanish?"

  "Because it was her only chance." Alice's voice was thin, but she was clearly determined to press forward with her discovery. "It wasn't much of a chance, but it was the only one she had."

  "Her only chance for what?"

  "To make us believe her story," Alice answered. "Maybe that was all she cared about. Maybe it was like her child, so she wanted it to live forever."

  "I don't know what you mean," I said.

  "That's what her poem says," Alice went on. "She wanted people to have hope that there were these things out there that helped people. Immortals who made sure people didn't get away with murder."

  "Like the Kuri Lam?" I asked.

  "Like Maldrow," Alice said. "Immortals like that. Which Katherine became, too, at the end of the story." For a moment, Alice remained silent, as if letting me think all this through. Then she said, "Maybe that's why Katherine disappeared."

  I looked at her blankly.

  "Maybe Katherine wanted people to believe that her story could be true," Alice said. "But she couldn't do that if she killed herself because her body might be found. And so she vanished. She had to vanish in real life because she vanishes at the end of her story. So for her story to be true, she had to disappear."

  "But where did she go?" I asked.

  "It doesn't matter where she went," Alice said. "The only thing that matters is why she did it." She sat back and drew in a long, difficult breath. "It's a fantasy she wants us to believe in, and so to give us a little evidence to hang on to, she went away." She smiled for the first time—a quick smile, but crowned with satisfaction. "What do you think?"

  I knew that in die usual mystery, a different ending would have been required, one far more dramatic and revelatory, Alice somehow able to discover what had actually happened to Katherine, whether she'd been murdered or committed suicide, her true end. But as I watched Alice rest contentedly, clearly pleased with the "solution" she'd come up with, I realized that no matter what had actually happened all those many years ago, it had ultimately been the fate of Katherine Carr to offer both the gift of a mystery and the satisfaction of its vaguely plausible resolution to a dying child.

  I smiled. "You're a true detective, Alice," I said quietly.

  I expected her to take this in the way I meant it, as a compliment to her powers of detection, the little elements she strung together from Katherine's poems, but instead she continued, "Teddy. You told me you were trying to finish a line the day he disappeared."

  I wondered if she were now trying to turn the tables on our own story, almost in the way of a sentimental tale, a dying girl's attempt to provide soulful balm to a tortured man.

  "Yes, I was."

  And like a figure in a science fiction novel, spiraling backward in a time machine, I returned to that earlier time and place. As if perched, birdlike, at the top of a bookshelf. I saw myself seated at my desk, staring at the opening line, half completed, needing an ending that would set the tone, struggling to find it as the first rumble of thunder passed over Jefferson Street and the first stormy rain lashed at the window.

  "The line was about Extremadura," I told Alice, "the very bleak arid part of Spain that sent so many of its young men with the Conquistadors. I'd written the first half of it."

  But I'd failed to complete the line, as I went on to tell her, so that it remained truncated, dangling, as disturbing to me at that moment as a half-severed arm.

  "When I heard the thunder and the rain, I got up and walked to the window."

  Where I'd stood, staring at the rain and listening to the thunder, recalling the promise I'd made to Teddy, but stymied by the uncompleted line, feeling it form somewhere within my mind, but still foggy and insubstantial.

  "I knew the end of the line was about to come to me. They come out of nowhere. You can't just summon them. I knew this one was coming, but I needed time ... just a little time."

  And so I'd turned and gone back to the page, turned just as from the corner of my eye, a slash of slick yellow swam out of the fog.

  "And so I didn't go get Teddy," I said. "Instead, I went back to my desk and reread the half-line I'd written." I could see it form in my mind, that still-uncompleted opening line: "'The winds of Extremadura blow bitter, dry and piercing like...'" I quoted. "That's where it stopped."

  Alice closed her eyes and drew in a ragged breath, one that seemed painful, an aching in the chest. "And you never found the end of the line?" she asked.

  "No, I didn't."

  Then the end of that long-sought line suddenly appeared like a ghost down a long corridor, always there, but invisible before now.

  "I just thought of it," I said qui
etly.

  Alice watched me silently, clearly awaiting my discovery.

  '"The winds of Extremadura blow bitter, dry and piercing like...'" I recited, "'...like the memories of lost sons.'"

  Alice was silent for a moment, and I expected her to make a comment about the line, tell me she liked it, or didn't. But instead she said, "I'd better get some sleep now."

  "Okay," I said.

  I started to rise, but she lifted her hand to stop me; then, with slow, heart-wrenching grace, she patted the side of her bed. "Just until I go to sleep," she said.

  I lifted myself onto the bed and gathered her into my arms.

  She remained in my arms, and if real life were a sentimental story, a peace would have settled over her during this time, and the many pains that afflicted her would have grown less pronounced and finally vanished altogether.

  But in fact, Alice never went to sleep, but continually awakened herself at the border of sleep, and from that border peered fretfully out into the darkness beyond the window, so that by morning, she seemed still to be searching through infinity itself, past moons and stars and planets, as if, in her final moments, she had grown dissatisfied with the very ending she had herself proposed, found it conjectural and implausible and so had ceaselessly continued to probe beyond it, reaching out and out into the nothingness that surrounded her, out and out until she herself was stretched infinitely thin, a tiny string of light that grew more frayed with each breath until—at last—it broke.

  27

  ALICE WAS BURIED the following Sunday, and a week later the piece I wrote about her was published in the Winthrop Examiner. In it, I connected the two stories that had each come to a strange conclusion with Alice's death. They had been oddly intertwined, and finally flowed together, I wrote, so that they'd finally become a single small stream of hope against hope.

  After that I took whatever trivial assignments Wyatt tossed me—a pet-shop opening, a wine tasting—and in that way resumed my life.

  Over the following months, Arlo and I met occasionally at the diner or O'Shea's, but after a time there was little reason to discuss Katherine or her story any further, so almost all mention of her came to an end.

  In October the creepy house off Route 34—presumably the one Katherine had used as a model in her story—was bulldozed to make room for a state tourist center. Later that same month, the single white post and small bench that had marked the bus stop where Maldrow had left Katherine off to face pure malice was replaced by a Plexiglas waiting area festooned with advertisements.

  Thus, by summer, only two physical reminders of Katherine remained in or around Winthrop: the house on Gilmore Street, which I never revisited, and the rock grotto I sometimes glimpsed as I drove through town, but to which I now gave little notice. For it had surely come to an end for me, I thought, Katherine's tale, an end so utterly final that by fall I rarely thought of her, nor had the slightest expectation that I would ever hear of her again.

  And so it came as a great surprise when, in July of the following year, one Anthony Ray Carmine was arrested in nearby Kingston. He'd lived in Winthrop some years before, he said. He'd worked at the marina that bordered the park, mostly washing boats. He'd always had a strange obsession for what he called "mysterious women," and by which he seemed to mean women who ignored him. He said he had murdered at least six such women in various towns throughout the state. He knew the names of his victims and the order in which they had been murdered. They had all been women who had been reported missing, and never subsequently found. The fourth name on his list was Katherine Carr.

  "Carmine claims to be a thrill killer," Arlo told me when we met to discuss this breaking news on the afternoon following his confession. "He doesn't beat his victims up or rape them. The thrill is in the killing. Always with a rope."

  I didn't need to hear any additional details, though I had no doubt Arlo had them.

  "In a way, I guess it's a relief to Audrey," I said. "Since the most important thing to her was that Katherine didn't kill herself."

  Arlo nodded, but there was doubt in his eyes. "Providing Carmine really did it."

  "You think he didn't?"

  Arlo shrugged. "I'd like to see the proof."

  "What would be proof?"

  "Her body. He says he took it downriver in the dead of night. No one saw him because of the fog."

  "And threw it overboard?"

  Arlo shook his head. "No, he says he knew the cops would drag the river, so he finally headed back to shore, waited until there was just enough light, then dragged it into the woods and buried it."

  "Where?"

  "That's what he's going to show the cops tomorrow." Arlo took a sip of coffee. "Do you want to come along?"

  I wasn't sure. It was the same dark journey I'd made after Teddy had been-found, and the prospect of repeating the experience brought back the utter hopelessness that had come upon me that day like a change of weather, a storm that never lifted or in any way moved on.

  But there are mysterious compulsions, a door we must unlock, a drawer we must open, because to do otherwise would be a dread admission that we do not want to know.

  Still, it was hardly an easy decision for me, one I thought over a moment before I finally resolved the matter.

  "I think so, yes," I told Arlo.

  He didn't seem surprised. "I thought you would. After all, you're a reporter."

  And to report, as I recalled the words of the reporter at my father's wake, is to bear away the truth of what actually is, dark though it may be.

  ***

  We left the next morning, Arlo at the wheel of his car, part of a law-enforcement convoy that included a crime-scene laboratory van. In near-military formation we wound north along the river, taking this turn then that one, often quite abruptly, with Carmine in the front car, no doubt enjoying his brief authority as leader of the pack.

  At a place called March's Crossing, we swung east and headed along the river's twining course until we reached a break in the wood, turned right, and moved a little farther on to where we finally came to a halt at the muddy edge of the embankment.

  Up ahead, a contingent of state troopers instantly surrounded the lead car so thickly that I was nearly upon it before I caught a glimpse of Carmine standing, legs shackled, but with his hands cuffed at the front, so that he could lift and lower them as he puffed a cigarette rhythmically. Clothed in an orange prison jumpsuit, he appeared somewhat smaller than I'd imagined, and very thin, so that he looked oddly starved of some vital element men needed in order to be men. "Ready, boys?" he asked with a crooked grin.

  Even in shackles, Carmine strutted like a little bantam rooster as he led us toward the riverbank. Two enormous troopers flanked him on either side, but beyond their orderly ranks utter chaos reigned. There were plainclothes detectives in summer suits, deputies from the sheriff's department, and lawyers from the district attorney's office, along with a select group of TV and print journalists, cameras and notebooks in hand, firing questions Carmine answered with smiles and winks and shrugs and nods, but without ever saying a single word.

  He didn't stop until he reached the water's edge, at which point he glanced left and right like a man trying to determine his position.

  There was a moment of suspension, Carmine silent on the riverbank, his head cocked first to the left then to the right, like a bird on the watch, until something caught his eye, and he said, "There it is." He grinned. "I wasn't sure it would still be there."

  For it had been twenty years, after all, and weather is weather, and time is no respecter of landmarks, nor of evidence, nor of permanence of any kind. And yet it was still there, according to Carmine, a metal sign that had been fresh-painted at the time, but which was now so rusted that its simple injunction could barely be read: NO DUMPING.

  "I thought that was funny," Carmine said with that same twisted grin. "'Cause dumping is exactly what I done."

  I looked at Arlo and saw that somewhere deep within the recesses o
f his own quiet reason, he'd wanted to believe that some element of Katherine's story had been true, that somehow she'd managed to escape so common a fate as murder, that he and Alice had shared in that spectacular hope for hope he'd earlier described.

  "You really don't want it to be Katherine, do you?" I asked.

  He turned to me and shook his head sadly. "No," he admitted. "No, I don't."

  We followed Carmine south along the embankment, past the ruined sign, and through a stand of reeds beyond it, where we at last arrived at a spot he appeared vaguely to calculate as the right one. "I don't know how deep it is," he said, "I dug it fast." He laughed. "Had to do something with the goddamn thing, right?"

  The diggers assembled on the spot and began their work, unearthing mounds of dark earth, everyone else to the side, watching. Carmine stood with his beefy escorts, smoking one cigarette after another. On occasion, his eyes would drift over in my direction, but they never lighted on me. From time to time he would follow the flight of a bird or glance toward some sound from the depths of the undergrowth, but otherwise he appeared hardly to be present at all until a question from the ranks of the idling reporters suddenly seemed to return him to a lost moment in his life.

  "So, Ray, tell us about the murder."

  He tossed his cigarette into the flowing water, and laughed at a joke that seemed to be only his. "She died like the bitch in heat she was."

  He started to say more, but one of the diggers called, "Got something!" At that instant, I saw Arlo's doubts dissolve in the same way my hope for Teddy had dissolved into the featureless mush that time and the river had made of him. Even so, he simply turned back toward the diggers and waited for them to complete their work.