There is a raggedness in such recoveries, of course, small bits of nearly rotted cloth, and a duskiness as well, the sad powder of disintegration. Beyond these, there is nothing but the brutal nakedness of bone. Arlo and I saw all these things during the next few minutes, but we saw something else as well, bits of dark fabric.
Arlo released a desolate breath. "I guess they've found her at last," he said.
Then one of the diggers reached down into the pit and came up with a Skull. It was caked with mud, but its shape was clear.
Carmine's laughter pealed over the river, into the woods, cut like a knife through all of us. "Just like I told you," he cried. "A bitch in heat."
The digger lifted the skull into the light, and with a cautious finger, probed its canine fangs.
***
"So we'll never know what happened to Katherine," I said to Arlo as we sat together at O'Shea's that same evening.
By that time, Carmine had admitted that it had all been a lie, his confessions only a playful ribbing of authority, Carmine himself guilty of nothing more than a bleak little joke.
"I guess not," Arlo said. He took a sip from his glass. "Or Hollis Traylor, either."
"Still nothing on him?" I asked.
"Nope," Arlo said. "But the cops found some horrible pictures in a fishing shack he had on the lake."
"Women?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Little boys. Tied up. Hanging. Internet-porn stuff. Tons of it." He shrugged. "Wouldn't it be nice to think that Katherine got him?"
"Katherine is long dead," I said starkly.
Arlo stared at his glass for a moment, then glanced up at me and noticed the desolate hopelessness that must have settled over me at that moment. "What are you thinking about, George?"
"Alice."
"What about her?"
"That she deserved a better ending," I said.
A chill had settled in by the time we left O'Shea's. Arlo pulled on the old trench coat he'd worn to countless murder scenes, the bloodied rooms and dank cellars and silt-laden streams and weedy ravines in which, for all time, the hapless dead have been laid to rest.
Arlo glanced into the cloudless sky. "Nice night."
"Clear as a bell," I said.
I offered my hand and we shook in silence, then turned away from each other and back into lives from which, as we assumed, both Alice Barrows and Katherine Carr would slowly but inevitably vanish.
My car was parked on a side street, but I wasn't in the mood to go home, and so, despite the chill I headed farther into town, then all the way down Main Street to where it ended, as it always had, in a park with that little rock grotto.
I sat down on a bench across from it and imagined Katherine on her final night, standing alone in the darkness, surrounded by mist. How strange, I thought, that it was in the most obviously fictional part of her story that she had predicted her actual end.
As I turned this odd circumstance over in my mind, I suddenly heard the sound of hydraulic doors.
I looked toward Main Street where the 34 bus had halted at a small white post. The windows were coated with a thin layer of dust from its mostly rural route, but still clear enough for me to see a single figure moving toward the front of the bus, head down, hooded, and who, on a cloudless, starry night, wore a yellow rain slicker.
And I thought, wildly and irrationally, like one suddenly lifted on an unseen wave, Could it be him?
I rose and stood motionless, like a man simultaneously jolted into action and frozen in place, half convinced that such a thing was possible, half convinced that it couldn't be.
By then the figure had stepped out of the bus and turned into the park, a yellow splash weaving among the trees in a shifting pattern that, for all its evasiveness, seemed oddly meant to compel my attention. For a few seconds, I watched as the figure swam in and out of view, still undecided as to what I should do. For what were the chances, after all, that this was indeed the man who had taken Teddy? No chance, I thought, no chance at all, and yet I couldn't rid myself of the steadily building but illogical hope that it was truly him, that the man who killed my son had by sheer coincidence come within my grasp.
And this time, I thought, he will not get away.
On the wave of that wholly unreasonable thought, I made my way into the deeper reaches of the park, watching as flashes of yellow weaved in and out of the shadows.
By now the figure had reached the river and was moving along its bank, though at a pace that had clearly slowed, so that I was suddenly no longer sure if I were pursuing the yellow rain slicker or if whatever evil coiled inside it had set a trap for me.
At that point I might have relented, since I was quite aware that I was being moved by an unreasonable impulse. But there are moments, stripped and pure, when your deepest pain asserts itself again, demands payment, explanation, or relief, so that you suddenly feel the kind of heedless passion that lovers feel, or men in battle, or those drawn by the pull of some great cause.
And so I continued on, quickening my pace, now closing in, as we both reached the stone jetty that stretched out into the night-bound flow of the river.
Suddenly an awesome rush overtook me, an anguished urge I could not explain any more than I could control it, a desperate need to make one final, frantic effort to set some small portion of things right not only for Teddy, but also for Alice in her fierce last hours, for my father in his deathbed rage, for Celeste in her early death, for everyone and everything on earth that had ever been caught in the web of life's immemorial injustice, the gharry horses and the gray-haired rickshaw pullers, the slaughtered slaves of Alaric and the desolate girls of the African road.
"Stop!" I cried. "Please stop!"
The figure in the yellow rain slicker stopped cold at my command, then turned to face me, standing motionless, waiting, as I approached.
The only light was a harbor light, its occasional flash a very poor illumination, so that I could make nothing out until a smooth white hand reached up and drew back the hood.
"Oh!" I breathed. "I'm sorry."
The woman's face remained in shadow, the revolving harbor light revealing one small feature at a time, an eye, a hint of lip, so that her face came to me in facets, as one sees bits and pieces in a cubist portrait, the whole connected more by the imagination than by anything actually seen.
"I hope I didn't scare you," I said.
"No," she said. She drew back a strand of streaked gray hair. "You didn't."
She glanced out toward the river, and I saw a shadowy profile that struck me as oddly familiar, then not familiar at all.
"It's just that I thought you were someone else," I said hesitantly.
The woman looked at me distantly, and yet with what seemed a terrible nearness, as if intimacy were a wave that traversed illimitable reaches of time and space in a single, incalculable instant.
"Who did you think I was?" she asked.
"A man I saw once," I told her. "He was wearing a yellow rain slicker. I've been looking for him for a long time." A shudder ran through my soul. "Because I believe he killed my little boy."
The harbor light swept over her, and in its rotation I saw she was regarding me quite fearlessly, as if I were someone with whom she had been long familiar.
"I know how you feel." The tone of her voice was like the touch of an unseen hand on my shoulder, soft and sympathetic.
"You want to know he didn't get away with it."
An odd, internal illumination now brought the woman's face into a vaguely bluish light and in that face I saw a great abundance of emotion: grief, pain, loss, pity, and at that moment, every weird, fantastic tale, every ghostly touch and freakish circumstance, every bizarre coincidence and inexplicable twist of fortune congealed in my mind so that I now felt myself poised at the edge of a strange precipice, facing out and beyond it into an unseen infinitude of possibility.
Katherine? I thought.
I never voiced the question, but in that impossible instant of susp
ended disbelief, I felt a great loosening of bonds, a terrible heaviness falling away from me, the vast weight of the real lifted momentarily on the wings of the miraculous.
I started to speak, but couldn't. I simply stood in the utter calm of this curious suspension, unable to move, unable to speak, as helpless as a glass figurine turning slowly in the wind.
From her place in the darkness, the woman watched me with what seemed a kind of love, though not that of a wife for a husband or a mother for a child. It wasn't the love of a sister for a brother or even a friend for a friend, but that strange, wholly invisible sense of connection the Greeks called agape, and without which, they said, one could not live a balanced life.
She lifted her hand and touched the collar of the rain slicker delicately. "The man it belonged to doesn't need it anymore," she said finally.
She stared at me silently, moving her fingers lightly over the lapels of the rain slicker, movements that seemed a kind of invisible writing, all our communication now like waves on a beach, moving into and over and around each other.
"Do you want it?" she asked.
She meant the rain slicker, and I suddenly thought of the little cross the Chief had offered Maldrow in Katherine's story, then of the ring Maldrow had given to Katherine, and as I let my gaze move to the yellow rain slicker, I felt utterly and beyond all understanding that here, being offered to me now, was the same dark proof.
"No," I answered, like one rejecting the pelt of a once-raging beast.
The woman nodded softly. "Perhaps we'll meet again."
"Perhaps."
She started to turn, but I drew her back with a question. "What happened to him?" I asked. "The man in the yellow rain slicker."
Her voice took on the hardness of metal upon metal. "He went for a drive one night. He was never seen again."
With that she stepped back with what I can only describe as an unearthly grace, turned slowly with no sense of effort, as if rotating in the air, then strolled away from me, deeper into the night, wisps of fog suddenly gathering around her, a mistiness that gave her a look so ghostly and insubstantial, she seemed hardly made of flesh at all.
Mr. Mayawati stares at me like one stricken, his gaze deeply troubled, like one no longer certain of the world, nor secure within it. His lips part, then seal, then part again. Finally he says, "The woman in the yellow rain slicker ... she was ... Katherine?"
When I don't answer, he starts to speak again, but falls silent, and remains silent for a long time, like a man pondering the consequences of a terrible miscalculation. Then, like a coward concealing a seizure of fear, he laughs loudly. "You did not see such a woman."
I offer no defense of my tale, make no gesture in regard to proof.
My silence only heightens the agitation I see in him.
"So it is your own story you are telling," Mr. Mayawati says, like one seeking to impeach the honesty of a witness. "Not Katherine's or Alice's."
When I only stare at him silently, he shrinks back like a small creature from a threatening predator. "But there are loose ends," he adds hesitantly. "For example, the woman in the coffee shop. And the woman at that house, and that other woman, the one on the street where Katherine lived. You do not tell us who they were."
I neither confirm nor deny this.
I sense the inward squirm of Mr. Mayawati's wormy soul, but give no sign of what I see in the fearful glint of his eyes, nor feel in the heat that comes from him, nor the horrid pungency it carries, the smell of bodies in decay.
Mr. Mayawati yanks his handkerchief from his pocket and swabs his neck and face violently. But it does no good; the sweat returns, so that he seems to be melting in the heat of a hellish inner fire. "You deceived me," he says in the slightly offended tone of a guileless man badly used. "You made me believe it was Katherine's story."
He rocks back in his chair like a man pushed by an unseen hand. "Then you made me believe it was Alice's story." Suddenly his eyes flare with an anger that is all bluster, a shield raised against his fear. "But it is your story, is it not?"
"No," I tell him quietly. My voice goes cold. "It is your story."
Mr. Mayawati laughs, but it is the panicky laugh of one gripped by a terrible anxiety. "My story? How could it be my story?"
I rise abruptly and walk to the rail of the boat. The water that flows beneath it remains impenetrable, the bow a blade that slices through only the thinnest layer of its opaqueness, reveals almost nothing of what lies beneath.
"Still, it is a very strange story, I will give you that," Mr. Mayawati says. He laughs again as he mops the relentlessly pursuing moisture that consumes his face. "Too strange to be believed."
I peer out into the jungle. Beyond the central station, the Buranni are already preparing for my visit, laying out their evidence, proof, they say, of the unseen, though it may only be evidence of how ardent it is, the human hope for miraculous intervention, relief, real or not, from injustice's anguished sting.
Mr. Mayawati squirms in his deck chair, starts to rise, then eases himself back into his seat. "The heat has made me ... uncertain of my..."
I know now that Mr. Mayawati's fear is not the fear of the innocent, for the innocent have no fear of justice, celestial or otherwise, of tribunals held in vast white halls, of sentences handed down.
I turn to face him and when our eyes meet Mr. Mayawati's features take on the frozen alarm of the suddenly recognized, those who stumble out of fields, wiping blood from their hands, to find not the empty road ahead, eyeless and uncaring, but a little boy glancing back at just the right instant, tugging at his father's coat. Look there.
"Uncertain of my..."
Mr. Mayawati falls silent, and beneath that silence, like a voice behind a curtain, I hear a little girl reading in the park, the one who was so lovely.
For a moment Mr. Mayawati stares at me with a strange recognition, and in the following stillness, I see his flabby shadow as it falls over the child, the sniff of her nose at the mingled smell of sweat and curry that came from him, the putrid, confident, ruthless, brutal smell they all have, the ones who think they got away.
"I do not believe your story," Mr. Mayawati declares firmly. He waves his hand. "Of course, I do not believe it." He rises as if rudely jerked to his feet and moves heavily away, toward the back of the boat, his eyes rising as he walks, lifting into the sweltering sky, where high above, a dark bird makes a long lazy circle.
"You don't have to believe it," I say softly, knowing that he freezes at the sound of my voice. "But then..."
He turns, his eyes all but liquefied by the terrible inferno of his own inner heat.
"But then ... what?" he asks hesitantly, fearfully, as if no longer certain of his fate.
I do not face him, but only smile. "But then ... you may be fiercely wrong."
Thomas H. Cook, The Fate of Katherine Carr
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