“Anyway, they were showing everything, practically porno flicks, right there on HBO. Lots of huge boobs and dirty jokes and people humping each other, and sexy stuff, and I was just sitting there getting horny as hell. But I thought Sue was already asleep, and she hates it if I wake her up to screw.”
But then he heard the toilet in their bathroom flush.
“I knew she was up. Hot damn. I flicked the tube off and hustled my young butt down the hall. God, I never gave the kids a thought, you know?”
Or the door locks, either.
“I just wanted to get there before she fell back to sleep.”
If the security of their home passed through Tony’s mind at all that night, he only thought he’d get to it later, afterward. Only, Tony fell asleep right after they made love.
Their front door was locked. Susan had seen to that earlier when she had looked outside to make sure the kids had driven their assorted rolling toys into the garage.
“Everything was in,” Susan remembered, and I wrote down. “So I closed our front door and bolted it. I went into the family room and saw that Tony was watching Leno—he loves the opening monologue—so I kissed the top of his head, and he gave me a pat on my hair. I told him I was pooped, and I was going to bed.”
They said good night to each other.
There was no talk of lovemaking.
“The twins had woken everybody up at dawn that morning,” Susan said. “I don’t recall why, just sheer energy, I think. It’s like they’re only wired to sleep a few hours at a time. Anyway, we’d had a few nights in a row of that, and I’d had it. I really needed some rest.”
But she didn’t get to sleep right away.
“I don’t know what it was, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I think I was worrying about all our bills and should I get a job and how much would child care cost, or should we just get out of this house, rent a little place where we could live more cheaply.” Susan tossed and turned a bit. Then she got up to use the bathroom.
“It wasn’t all that late. Eleven-twenty. I looked at our clock that glows in the dark. I got out of the bathroom and here came Tony slipping in the door. He took off his pants and I could see right away what he had in mind.” Susan smiled faintly, but it didn’t last. Her mouth began to tremble as she told what happened next. “I thought, what the heck, I can’t sleep anyway, and it’s been awhile.”
She said, “We tried to be quiet, but there was a point where we got to laughing about some dumb thing and I swung my leg out and managed to knock into my bedside table.”
Susan had several books piled there, novels she was hoping to get to. Her romance-loving sister had pressed them on her, saying she’d love them. The accidental kick jarred the table, which was all it took to topple the precarious pile of books.
“They really crashed,” Susan said. “We held our breath, to see if it woke anybody up.” Her eyes filled, overflowed, as she told the story. “We didn’t think it did. We didn’t hear any of the kids make a noise.”
Within moments, she estimated, Susan and Tony were sound asleep, nestled in their favorite sleeping posture, with her head on his left shoulder and her right arm across his chest. They both thought that what probably happened was that the vibration of the books falling woke Natalie in the next room. Her bed lay up against the very wall the books had crashed into. She couldn’t hear the noise, but the little girl was almost as attuned to vibrations and subtle movements as hearing people are to sound. To her, vibration was sound.
I would never divulge that truth in a book.
They hadn’t been shy about telling me, but how would that be for them? To have everyone picturing them horny, laughing, careless, making the noise that may have awakened their daughter in the next room? I know that Susan can’t stop putting cause and effect together. Her thinking goes: If she and Tony hadn’t moved into that house, they never would have fallen into the temptation of living beyond themselves, and if they hadn’t gotten into so much debt, she wouldn’t have been awake that night worrying about money.
Tony wouldn’t have heard her moving around.
They wouldn’t have had sex.
The books would have stayed on the table.
Natalie would have continued sleeping in her bed.
Ray would have motored right on past their dock.
It could very well be that something else had awakened Natalie that night, but there was no convincing her mother or father of that. Susan and Tony hated Ray, but they blamed themselves.
No, I won’t write that, I think again as the airplane flies me to the Midwest. Who needs to know that? I don’t think anybody does. So, they’re human. He wanted to make love with his pretty wife. They enjoyed it enough to get a little carried away. So, every couple should be so lucky to have a robust sex life.
Both of the McCullens implied to me that was the last time they ever made love. And I’ll never write that, either. Besides, it might not be true. I can’t always trust the people I interview to tell me the whole truth even when they think that’s what they’re doing. People forget, they gloss over, they get things wrong. And people do lie to me. Sometimes they know it’s a lie, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I recognize it as a lie, or I get lucky and uncover the truth, and sometimes I don’t. I hate to find out later, after a book is published, and then have readers, reviewers, or cops correct my mistakes.
If I’m going to publish this story about Raymond Raintree being Johnnie Kepler, it had better be ironclad true, is my thought as the plane descends toward the runway. If it isn’t, I will have no ending, no identity for the killer, no motive, no scene of the crime, no idea where Ray is, and the victim’s parents don’t want to be in the book.
Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
I feel panic rise, and try to calm myself by remembering there are worse things in life than missing a deadline. And I am just about to hear of one of them. I reach for my lipstick and hairbrush, and mentally prepare to meet a retired deputy sheriff by the name of Jack Lawrence.
8
Raymond
“I can’t get my brain wrapped around the new facts.”
The retired deputy drives me south from Kansas City International Airport in a two-door green Ford pickup truck. He’s got the air-conditioning going full blast at first, so we have to raise our voices to hear each other talk. Outside the truck windows, it’s still eighty-seven degrees at nine o’clock in the evening, and even the inside of the truck door is warm to my touch.
“For so many years, I have been thinking of Johnnie Kepler as an innocent little boy,” he tells me. “I felt so bad for him, and for his family. They’re such good people, especially his mom and that older sister of his, Kimmie. I won’t speak of his father, because we don’t know what it would have been like to walk in that man’s shoes. But now here we are with this news that the little boy we all mourned is still alive. Only he is a grown man who is supposed to have abducted another child, like somebody did to him. It is very confusing, and upsetting, very.”
“I’m sure it is, Jack.”
Around us, I can see nothing except highway, dark open fields, and well-lighted strip malls. The man himself is tall, lean, courtly. He carried my overnight bag for me, opened the passenger door, and helped me up with a firm hand on my elbow. He has a superb posture that pulls my own spine up straighter, but his face sags comfortably into bags and jowls, and his thinning gray and brown hair looks as if it could use a patting down. I’m guessing his age to be near seventy, which would put him in his late forties when the boy disappeared.
By the time I have been in his company for fifteen minutes, I feel as if I have known him for fifteen years. As I often do when I meet a nice man of his age, I wonder what my own life might have been like if I had been adopted by someone like this, instead of by my mother’s sister and husband. I shake off the sentimental day-dream in order to pay attention to the words of this man who, after all, I don’t really know at all.
“You prob
ably want to know all about it, right?” he asks me.
“About how Johnnie disappeared, you mean?”
“Yeah. I’ll let Katherine tell you, herself.”
“It’s late, will she still want to talk tonight?”
He gives me a quick look. “Kimmie told me they would stay up all night, if that’s what it takes. You’re the first link they’ve ever had to him since 1976. They want to know everything you can tell them about him.”
I wince. “None of it’s good.”
“Well, let’s just think of the boy as a prisoner of war for right now, how about that?” the retired deputy advises me. “He was taken, he may have been tortured, he was brainwashed, and now he’s coming home. Is it any wonder if he’s not the same man he would have been?”
“That’s a very humane way to look at it, but I doubt that his victim’s family will agree with you. They could say, he still had choices. They could say, not every prisoner of war becomes a murderer.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to see it any other way.”
“You know that he’s never coming home, Jack.”
“I know, but the Keplers don’t. You’re going to have to tell them.”
I turn and look out the window, feeling my heart sink again.
“Before I left home,” I say, “I stopped by to visit the parents of the little girl Ray killed. Of course, they hate him. They wish the judge had killed him when she shot him, and since she didn’t, they hope some bounty hunter gets him, and if that doesn’t work, they’d like to kill him themselves. Natty’s mother told me she would be happy to flip the switch on the electric chair, or inject him with chemicals to kill him.”
“If I were them, I would, too. Did you tell them about the Keplers?”
“No. I’m not sure why I didn’t, except that it seemed too much to expect any sympathy out of them.” I look over at him, and when I see that he is nodding in agreement, I add, “It’s difficult to put Natty’s mom and Ray’s mom in the same picture.”
“Like I said, I can’t get my brain wrapped around it.”
When he pulls into a driveway beside a small frame house, I ask, “Is this where it happened, Jack?”
“Yep. She’s never moved. He disappeared from this very front yard.”
“How can she stand to keep living here?”
“She wants everything to be the same, if he tries to find her.”
“But didn’t she think he was dead?”
“I guess mothers don’t think that way.”
“And she was right, all along.”
He makes a move to open his door, but I stop him. “Can we wait just a minute? I need to absorb this.” When he looks puzzled, I say, “So I can report what it’s like here, for my readers. I know this sounds weird, and I don’t want to keep them waiting, but I need to soak up the atmosphere. I need to do things like estimate how much the trees have grown in twenty-two years, and compare the way the house looks today with photographs of how it looked back then.”
What I don’t tell him is that I need to try to feel the sensation of tragedy rise in my own body, to attempt to get a hint of what it must have felt like in this house, on that day.
“I know, this must seem like a very strange way to make a living.”
“I like your books,” he says, surprising me. “You do a good job getting things right about law enforcement. If this is what it takes for you to do that, that’s fine with me. My job was pretty strange, too, when you get right down to it.”
After a few moments, I am able to say, “Thanks, let’s go.”
I have never met three more nervous women than Katherine Kepler and her daughters. Kim and Christie sit protectively on either side of Katherine on a couch in their mother’s living room. Their brother Cal hangs back, standing in the doorway between that room and the dining room with his hands in his pockets and an angry frown on his face. The youngest of the siblings, Christie, looks scared to death, as if she’s afraid that her murderous missing brother may come bursting into the house at any moment and kill us all.
We sit on furniture and are surrounded by decorations that have literally not been altered for twenty-two years. She has covered up worn places with doilies, patched scratches with dye, and repainted the walls the same colors over and over.
All three women are dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts, and the family resemblance is strong. At first glance, they look like three sisters, and it’s a little eerie to realize that’s because the real sisters have aged naturally, while their mother has tried to hold age at bay. Cal is tall and thin, with dark hair and dark, hollowed eyes, and a stiff, reserved air about him when he shook my hand in greeting. He wears black trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt, and looks as if he came directly here from the telecommunications office where he works.
Kim keeps an arm around her mother’s shoulders.
Katherine weeps off and on through the telling of her story.
“It was a beautiful day. November twenty-second, thirteen years after President Kennedy died. It had snowed, but the sun was shining. Johnnie was so excited about the snow, and he couldn’t wait to go out to play in it. I had him enrolled in afternoon kindergarten, so we could have nice mornings together after he got up. You know, without all that tension of trying to get a small child awake and fed and dressed when he’s still half-asleep. Do you have children, Ms. Lightfoot?”
“Please, call me Marie. No, I don’t.”
I’m recording the conversation, with their permission.
“Oh, well, I put all my children into afternoon kindergarten, except for Cal, who was an early riser.”
“So, John wanted to play in the snow?”
“Yes, and Cal wanted to stay home, of course, and play in the snow, too. But I put them all in the car and took him to school, and Johnnie and Christie and I drove back home. And since we still had on our boots and coats and everything, I stayed outside with them for a little while, and we made snowballs, and even started a snowman. But it was still early, so it was kind of cold, and I made them come in to get warm again.” Her face crumples, and I feel as if I can see twenty-two years of suffering in it as Katherine weeps, and her daughters hand her tissues. “He was just getting over an ear infection, and he still couldn’t hear very well out of one ear. It has always bothered me terribly that I couldn’t recall which ear it was, isn’t that crazy?”
I feel such a shock on hearing this woman say that her son had an ear infection that had left him temporarily unable to hear.
The parallel with Natalie Mae McCullen is eerie.
“And then,” Katherine goes on, “after he disappeared, all I could think about was, who was going to take care of him, if he was sick? I couldn’t bear the idea of him being sick, or hurting, and I wasn’t there to comfort him.”
She takes a shaky breath, before continuing.
“After breakfast, Johnnie wanted so badly to go back outside again and play, and I thought that was all right.”
Katherine looks first at Jack, then at me.
I get the feeling that even after all this time, she’s still looking for someone to convince her that she didn’t do anything wrong, and I am painfully reminded of Susan McCullen. Twenty-two years from now, will Susan still be blaming herself because she wanted to love her husband on the night her daughter died? Speaking up so quickly that it sounds as if he has said similar things many times before, Jack Lawrence assures her, kindly, “You can’t keep a little boy inside when it snows, Katherine.”
“No, I suppose not,” she says, drying her eyes again.
It is heartbreakingly sweet, I think, how the retired deputy plays his part in a chorus whose purpose is solely to comfort a mother of a missing child. He’s a widower, he told me, and I suspect he’s half—or more—in love with Katherine Kepler.
The end of her story comes with horrifying speed.
“So I dressed him up warmly again, and sent him outside to play.”
I wait for the next sentence, but there
isn’t one.
A silence grows in the room, filled with implication.
“You mean, that was . . .” I can’t bring myself to say it.
“I went to put my own coat and boots back on,” Katherine says, “and when I went outside, Johnnie wasn’t there. The tracks of his boots went out to the curb, and then they stopped, and that’s all there ever was. He had a little plastic snow shovel that he took with him.”
I feel grief rise in my own throat.
“Mrs. Kepler—”
“Katherine, please.”
“Katherine.” I take a breath, then say it all in a rush. “When the Florida cops went through Ray Raintree’s belongings, they found a toy shovel.”
“Oh, my Lord, was it red?”
My eyes sting with tears. “Yes.”
“It’s Johnnie!” Katherine springs up from the couch, sobbing and staring about wildly, as if he might suddenly appear in front of her. “I know it’s my boy.”
While her daughters embrace and comfort her, Katherine’s other son, Cal, turns and disappears into the back of the house. He doesn’t return until I begin, hesitatingly, to tell them about the man I know as Raymond Raintree. They don’t ask about Natty McCullen, and I can’t bring myself to mention her. When I finish, holding back little else, because the women beg me not to, Katherine Kepler says, “It doesn’t matter what he’s like now.”