The Fate of Katherine Carr

  The house where I'd stood at the window that afternoon was still the same shade of pink as when I'd left it, "cake-icing pink," as Celeste had called it. But now it reminded me of the pink of Casa Rosada, the government house in Buenos Aires before which the Argentine mothers had marched year after fruitless year, carrying pictures of sons and daughters who had disappeared. Like them, I wanted to lift a portrait of Teddy into the air, remind my former neighbors on Jefferson Street that they had lost one of their own, that there had been a crime in the neighborhood, and thus for all the sameness of this place, and at least for as long as I lived, it would never be the same any more than the farmhouse would ever be the same for Katherine.

  Suddenly, as if carried on that thought, I imagined her at the grotto, alone, her body almost motionless, eyes steady and unblinking. It was a melodramatic rendering, of course—and yet, by its very drama, this figment of my imagination urged me back to Katherine's peculiar story, so that when I finally returned to my apartment that night, it picked it up again:

  NOW

  Maldrow rolls the glass of bourbon between his hands, listening as a gust of wind splatters rain against the bar's front window, the sound of muffled gunshots. How many thousands has he heard, shots fired from rifles, pistols, tiny pearl-handled derringers yanked from ankle holsters? How many has he seen clutch the spouting wound as they fell over stools, tables, beds? How many have stumbled back into ditches, wells, pits, clutching at throats, chests, elbows, knees?

  "Katherine must feel it all," the Chief says gently.

  Maldrow glances down at the table. The jabs of the knife thrust eerily, and with each thrust he recalls the long hours of his education, the Chief beside him, taking him through vast epochs of travail, a river of blood they swam in together. Ages had seemed to pass while he listened, and now he suddenly feels the accumulated weight of that long absorption, a world of unhealed wounds, people pulled like stragglers from the herd, devoured by the wolves. The boiling flasks of François Prelati flash in his mind, the murder house on Bluebird Lane, the small chair that graced the living room of Ed Gein. How comfortably he must have sat in it, looking at his many souvenirs.

  The Chief watches Maldrow silently for a moment, then glances down at his hands. "Skin like jelly. Light goes through it. Not much left of ... what is it called? 'The vital spark.'" He looks at Maldrow pointedly. "Everything must be renewed, Maldrow."

  Maldrow straightens the photograph that rests on the table. In it Katherine is five years younger than she is now.

  "They look different after something happens," the Chief says. "Like people after a storm. Everything scattered, torn apart."

  Maldrow suddenly sees Katherine as she was a few days before, emerging from her house. At the edge of the porch she stops and looks across the street. He brings her face in for a closer view, notes the minute constriction of her eyes, the infinitesimally slight parting of her lips. "She sensed something on that first morning."

  "About you?" the Chief asks.

  Maldrow recalls the way Katherine looked as he approached her that same morning. "No, about herself." He sees Katherine's eyes suddenly fixed on him, her shoulders as she comes toward him, straightening her body and holding it firm, as if in preparation for some still-unknown task. "I could tell by the way she moved toward me that morning that she had learned something about herself."

  "What had she learned about herself?" the Chief asks.

  "That she wanted a different ending," Maldrow answers quietly.

  "To what?"

  Maldrow immediately sees it not as it was—an empty field—but as it had been that day five years before: Katherine strolling with a little boy, the swirling blue of his cotton candy, the flow of her long hair. "To her story."

  THEN

  I recalled the madly spinning lights, smelled the sugary sweetness of cotton candy, heard a calliope's jangling music.

  "This is where it was," I said.

  I could barely accept the fact that I was here, that Maldrow now sat beside me in the front seat of his car, that together we had driven through a morning fog, arrived at this place. He had called that morning, asked if he might pick me up. There was something he wanted to show me, he'd said. I'd agreed, then waited by the window, watching as a fog rolled in from the river, and out of which his car seemed suddenly to appear. He'd watched as I came down the stairs and gotten in his car. Then, without a word, he'd driven down Gilmore Street to Main Street, then out to where the fairgrounds rested in a morning haze, its abandoned field exactly what I now faced.

  "This is where it was," I said fearfully.

  Maldrow nodded, then got out of the car and strode a few feet away.

  I noticed that the last of the fog seemed to pull back as he made his way toward it, so that he looked like an old ship, battered but still pressing into a retreating harbor mist.

  "The entrance to the fairgrounds was over there," Maldrow said when I came up beside him.

  He placed his hand at my back and urged me forward, the two of us now making our way through what was left of the fog, so that for a moment I felt myself floating a few inches above the ground, rather than walking.

  "Your friend's son was with you," he said.

  I looked at my hand, astonished by the way the memory had returned to me not only through my mind, but physically, as well, the actual touch of Cody's small hand as he'd slipped it into mine, a touch so real I lifted my right hand and peered at it as if I expected to find the imprint of Cody's tiny fingers on my skin, miraculous as the Stigmata.

  "Tell me what you remember," Maldrow said.

  I closed my eyes and saw a short, plump man with a handlebar mustache.

  "He looked like he was from another century," I said, "the man who guessed Cody's weight. He was wearing a straw bowler."

  Maldrow nodded and together we moved forward again until I stopped at what seemed the exact place where Cody had paused at the entrance to a ride.

  "The man at the bumper cars was very friendly," I said. "Very tall. With a gap between his teeth." I played the whirl of the cars in my mind, Cody as he spun around its course, the wild excitement in his eyes. "I think that was his favorite ride. He looked disappointed when it was over." I glanced out over the field, the slowly dissipating fog. "After that I bought him a cotton candy." I recalled his small, delighted face as the man swirled the sticky, sugary mass onto a cardboard cone and handed it to him, a frothy mountain of blue. "Then we walked on down the fairway and stopped at the shooting gallery."

  Maldrow's eyes were deeper now, more sunken, as if the nearer we drew in upon the final moments of that day, the more solemn he became.

  "The sun was beginning to set," he said.

  I instantly felt the air cool around me, saw the air darken just a shade.

  "It was just after six when you and Cody headed back to the car."

  It was the last moment I'd felt at home in the world, the last time I'd felt the sun on my face.

  "Why did you bring me here?" I asked.

  His answer confirmed what I'd just felt. "So you could remember what you lost."

  I put down the final page of this last installment, rose from my desk, went to the window, and looked out over the same streets Katherine had walked some twenty years before. She had made a lonely reach to reclaim them, I supposed, though it was hard to grasp the mental rearmament she was attempting, her particular way of reentering the world, using a story as her portal, and in that story creating a man whose real purpose—regardless of how she had styled him—was somehow to rescue her from the clutches of the unknown man. I knew that in some way, Katherine's effort to write her way back into a normal life could be regarded as heroic. But in another way, it struck me as dismally inadequate. For what purpose could it serve to imagine a world more hopeful than the real one, where strangers swam out of the blue to offer a helping hand?

  I reached for the phone, planning to call Arlo, perhaps talk through this point, but the phone rang before I could make
the call.

  "George?"

  It was Alice, her voice clearly weaker than when I'd spoken with her earlier.

  "Are you okay?" I asked.

  "I'm in the hospital," Alice said, "I started bleeding again."

  There was a pause, during which I sensed that Alice was unclear as to how to proceed, or even what I was to her that she should have called me. Then, as if carried on a faint breeze, I heard Teddy's voice, the last words I'd heard him say, Will you come for me? and which seemed at that moment to be Alice's question as well.

  And so I said, "I'm on my way."

  Winthrop Hospital lay in a great expanse of open field about ten miles outside of town. It was built of pale yellow brick and had a flat institutional plainness despite the small circular fountain someone had had the foresight to place out front. The walls of the reception area were painted with a large mural that was meant to depict a beach at sunset, but whose jarring reds gave off an apocalyptic vision of earth abandoned after some hellish onslaught of war or natural calamity.

  People of various ages slumped in bright orange chairs, flipping through magazines or staring vacantly, like stunned animals. They had the look of people expecting either bad news or the darkly ambiguous sort, waiting, like their stricken loved ones, to find out the true constriction of the arteries, the size of the tumor, the spread of the disease, whether hope was real or false. Curled forward or slouched or nearly prone, with legs stretched like disembarking ramps across the rust-colored carpet, they seemed equally burdened by the very scheme of things, like prisoners sentenced for crimes they had not committed, nor in which they had even been complicit.

  "May I help you?"

  The voice came from a large man whose eyes were made unnaturally large and owl-like by the thick lenses of his glasses.

  "I'm here to see Alice Barrows," I said.

  The man clicked a few keys with his chubby fingers, the image of the console glowing eerily in the thick lenses of his glasses.

  "Pediatrics," he said. "Room 406."

  Pediatrics was a separate unit of the hospital, reached, as it turned out, by a wide corridor lined with stretchers and hospital beds and the slender chrome towers I recalled from my father's final hospitalization, a small city of them that had held instruments and monitors and all manner of plastic bags and tubing, and which he'd flailed against before his last sedation, hallucinating whole armies of wildly charging "Japs," a terrified young soldier, hopelessly hurling imaginary grenades and thrusting imaginary bayonets in these last moments of his consciousness, so that here, at the farthest reach of his life, he'd seemed still to be fighting hand to hand.

  Alice's room was at the end of the corridor, the door ajar, so that I heard the drone of a television. I knocked softly, then eased the door open and stepped into the room.

  "Hi," I said.

  Beneath the covers, Alice appeared even smaller than before, her eyes correspondingly larger, though her nose now looked more like a fleshy beak.

  "Hi."

  She nodded toward the television, where I saw one-of those periodic Amber Alerts, the face of a young girl, this one from Kansas, around eight years old and smiling in her school photograph. "A kid is missing," she said. "They say that if they don't find her in twenty-four hours, she'll probably be dead. Is that true?"

  "Yes:"

  Alice looked at me darkly, so that I knew she'd heard the sudden spark of anger in my voice. She started to speak, then stopped, thought something through, then drew my book from beneath the covers and peered at the jacket. "What kinds of stories do you like to read, George?" she asked.

  It struck me as an odd question, and I would have had no answer for her had I not in one of those peculiar movements of the eye, as if some invisible witness said, Look there, glanced out her window and caught the figure of a little boy in the distance, about four feet tall, with hair that blinked blond as he passed beneath a streetlamp.

  "I guess I like a story that has something mysterious about it," I said.

  A black car was parked a few feet ahead of the boy, but he moved toward it without noticing it there, his attention on something in his hand, a marble, perhaps, or a stick of gum ... mysterious."

  A man sat behind the wheel of the car, very still, his head lifted slightly so that he seemed to be watching the boy's approach in the car's rearview mirror. As the boy drew closer, he scooted over into the passenger side of the car, the one nearest the sidewalk, and waited.

  "And something..."

  The passenger-side door of the car swung open when the boy reached it, and the man scooted back behind the wheel to let the boy inside, the man, now quite obviously the little boy's father, come to retrieve his son from the bus stop and bear him safely home, as I had not done for Teddy.

  "...dark."

  "Are you reading a story like that now?" Alice asked.

  I thought of Katherine, the odd tale I'd been reading for the last few days, how peculiar it all was, the creepy conversation she'd written for Maldrow and the Chief, the ubiquity of the unknown man she had portrayed so forcefully, the way all of this suggested a life lived in a kind of no-man's-land between constant dread and sudden panic.

  "I think so," I told her.

  "What's it about?" Alice asked.

  What Alice wanted seemed very little, just a few added details about a story I'd been reading, and yet I was afraid that this particular story, with its flickering horrors and talk of blood, was too grim for a girl whose own dark fate was approaching quickly.

  "It's by a woman named Katherine Carr," I answered cautiously. "She wrote it, then disappeared."

  "My mother read me stories," Alice said. "Did you read to Teddy?"

  "Yes."

  "Will you read to me?"

  I saw a great yearning for connection in Alice's eyes, and knew absolutely that I felt the same, that in different ways both of us had been stripped of a vital spark that needed to be rekindled.

  "Katherine's story," Alice added. "Will you read it to me, please?"

  The forces that propel us toward this act or that one are unseen. For all their power, they remain intangible and invisible. We know only that they move us, as I knew at that moment that one of them had moved me; knew this absolutely and without the slightest doubt, though the only physical evidence I could have given for its unseen power was the promise that I made.

  "Yes," I said. "I will."

  Part II

  "Ah, so it is really Alice's story you are telling," Mr. Mayawati says with a show of literary insight. "Not Katherine's, but the little girl's." He smiles in proud appreciation of his discovery. He seems relieved that the story has moved in this direction, taken on a familiar form, strapped itself down, hemmed itself in, will now proceed in the lockstep of an established formula. "Nancy Drew, is she not a famous girl detective?"

  "She is, yes."

  "And little Alice is to be like her in your story, no? She is to be a 'Nancy Drew'?"

  Monkeys frolic in the trees on the near bank of the river, shrieking loudly and flinging themselves from limb to limb, so close to the boat I can almost hear their madly throbbing hearts. But it is Mr. Mayawati's unknowing heart that interests me now, the story he believes himself already to have figured out.

  "Nancy Drew," Mr. Mayawati says with a laugh. "She is very popular in my country. All the little girls read her adventures." He stops, as if to correct himself. "Of course, Alice is not pretty."

  "No, she isn't," I tell him.

  "But it is the heart one must look at," Mr. Mayawati adds quickly.

  "The heart, yes. Hers. Mine." I allow a dark glimmer to invade my gaze. "Yours."

  He looks at me with a sudden wariness, as if some unsavory aspect of himself has been revealed to me. "And all children are beautiful inside," he says.

  A crested eagle lifts from the green glove of the forest and begins its slow circle above us.

  "A girl of my village was a great reader of these stories," Mr. Mayawati goes on. "She was al
ways in the park. Always with her head in a book. It is a beautiful thing, is it not, a child reading?"

  "Beautiful, yes."

  Most of the morning mist has burned off now, the opaque green of the river flowing softly around us. Even so, enough dissipating fog remains to shroud the far shore in ghostly whiffs of cloud. It strikes me that I am no longer troubled by fog, or mist, or anything unseen.

  "And mystery games. She was fond of games, this little girl," Mr. Mayawati adds. "Perhaps your story is like a game of Clue."

  I offer no assurance that his supposition is correct, nothing in my voice or in my eyes that affirms what he clearly assumes. Mr. Mayawati sees this, and his confidence that he knows where the story is going instantly vanishes.

  "Or am I mistaken?" he asks cautiously.

  He notes the gravity of my gaze, its hint that the story's dark core has yet to be revealed. The bait I toss him is as old as Scheherazade. "Do you want to hear more?"

  Mr. Mayawati does not answer immediately, and in his hesitation I sense a subtle dread. "I hope I shall not be disappointed," he says distantly. "With the ending."

  "What ending do you want?" I ask.

  "The sort we all hope for," Mr. Mayawati says. "That the evil ones do not get away with their crimes."

  "Then you won't be disappointed," I assure him.

  "But there are many evil ones in this story," Mr. Mayawati says doubtfully. "None will escape?"

  My smile allays Mr. Mayawati's doubts and gives him hope that the story will have a happy ending. "Not a single one."

  10