But standing in the dining room doorway, Calvin looks as if it matters to him a great deal. As if sensing his hostility, Kim looks back over her shoulder to glare warningly at him. Even with that, he bursts out with his first words since I arrived. “Mom, how can you say it doesn’t matter? He killed somebody. He’s a terrible person now. He isn’t the sweet little boy you remember, he’s a pervert, a murderer, and we ought to stay as far away from him as we can get.”
“You just don’t want to spend the money to defend him!” Kim accuses.
“Nobody can defend him,” Cal shoots back. “He’s guilty. He’s going to die in the electric chair, if some cop doesn’t shoot him first. She didn’t tell you that, did she? These guys, they don’t make it back alive. Just forget it, if you think you’re ever going to see him again. I don’t know why you’d want to, anyway.”
“Cal, shut up,” his youngest sister pleads, looking frightened.
His mother goes to him, and attempts to enfold his tall, stiff body into an embrace. I watch Katherine whisper something to her son, but it doesn’t calm him. He gently pushes away from her, and rushes toward the back of the house again. In a moment, we hear a back door open, and slam, and then a car starting in the driveway.
His mother, who is crying again, says to her daughters, “Please don’t be mad at your brother. Give him time. It’s very hard for him.”
I think it is unbearable for all of them, and that it is only going to get worse. They sit back down, and now I interview the women at length. We look at dozens of photographs of all of the kids when they were children. When I see pictures of Johnnie Kepler, I can hardly fathom the tragedy that is going to happen to the smiling little boy. I see pictures of his father, Fred Kepler, who was an ordinary-looking man, not very tall, and a bit pudgy. Several photographs show members of the family with an orange-and-white cocker spaniel dog.
“This dog!” I exclaim, excited. “He remembers this dog.”
Katherine’s eyes widen. “He does? He remembers Daisy?”
For a moment, I am almost sorry I said it, because of what I have to say with it. “He told me that he doesn’t have any memories from his childhood, except he recalls an orange and white dog.”
“He doesn’t remember anything else . . . me?”
Tears come to my eyes again on behalf of the pretty woman seated beside me, looking through the albums. “Maybe he remembers more than he told me he did.” I don’t want to offer false hope, but given Ray’s talent for lying, it could be true.
When I compare their age-enhanced photo to my own memories of Ray’s appearance, I see no difference between them at all.
“It’s him,” I confirm to Katherine, feeling a kind of dreadful awe. “It really is him.”
His mother nods, as if she’s always known.
Very late, I walk Jack back to his truck in the driveway, on the pretext of having left a notebook in it. There are tall gangly trees around the property, and their leaves are clapping together in the warm wind with a sound like soft applause.
“Cottonwood trees,” he says, when I ask about them.
We stand together for a moment in a meditative silence while the cottonwood trees applaud our thoughts. It looks so different here, from Florida. I am acutely, claustrophobically aware of being in the very center of the country, equidistant from oceans. Even the grass beneath my feet is remarkably different from the saw grass I’m used to. This is thinner, more delicate, softer under my shoes. There’s more wind out here in Kansas, just as Dorothy found out in The Wizard of Oz, and it never seems to stop blowing. But when it brushes my skin, it’s not all that different from home: as humid as walking into a bathroom after somebody has taken a hot shower.
“I could never live in Florida,” Jack remarks. “Too darn hot.”
“What do you call this?” I retort as I stand there sweating beside him. “Florida’s not any warmer than this, and we’ve got the water close by.”
“Yeah, I guess that would help some.”
There’s something I still have to say.
“There’s one thing I didn’t tell them, Jack. I didn’t say how Ray looks now. Photos of him now don’t even begin to tell the whole story. You’d better prepare her, if she ever gets a chance to see him in person. It’s not like he’s maimed, or deformed, or anything. It’s . . . it’s hard to explain to people about Ray’s appearance. How do you say to a mother, here’s your grown son who still has all of his fingers and toes, he hasn’t had his face blown off, nothing like that, but nobody can stand to look at him?”
I take a deep breath, remembering my own impressions.
“What you ought to tell her is, if the Devil had a son, this is what he’d look like, like some kind of strange, slimy evil creature.” I shake my head. “No, that’s not true, either. I make him sound like the creature from the black lagoon. He’s just a normal-looking human being, only . . . he’s not.”
As he waits patiently, I try again.
“I think I’d tell her that Ray has a kind of odd appearance that you can’t tell from the pictures you’ve seen on television. It’s like there’s something wrong with him, but you can’t exactly say what.” And then I finally blurt out the truth. “Ray is repulsive, Jack. He’s one of the most repulsive human beings I ever saw.”
Even in the darkness, I can see that he looks shocked.
After a moment’s thought, he says, “To you and me, maybe. But not to his mother.”
But I wonder if even a mother’s love can be that strong.
He has told me that he retired to ten acres of woody, uncultivated Kansas grassland, with a retinue of greyhound racing dogs. That’s where he’s going now, he says, as we walk around to his side of the truck.
“They’re retired,” he explains. “Like me.”
“I’m ready to retire for the night,” I admit, wearily. “But I still have some writing I want to do.”
He holds out his hand for me to shake.
Surprised, I take it and find it firmly grasped.
“This has been good for them, Marie. I’m awful glad you came.”
“Thank you. I’m glad they’ve had you all these years.”
He releases my hand, and says with painful regret in his gruff voice, “Not that I did a darn bit of good.”
“That’s not true, Jack. You’ve given comfort. And you never stopped looking for him. That’s got to have meant a lot to them.”
“I guess I can stop now,” he says, sadly.
I wave him off, after he promises to come back early in the morning.
The sisters could talk all night, but Katherine won’t let them, saying that their guest needs to get some sleep. Their guest agrees with her. She sweeps the “girls” out the door to their own homes, and then Katherine graciously installs me in a little bedroom, handing me my own fresh towel and bar of soap.
“This was Johnnie and Cal’s room,” she tells me.
“Oh, Katherine, are you sure you want me in it?”
She nods. “Nobody’s slept in it since then, so you’ll be the first.” A wave of sadness crosses her face. “Well, except for me. I’ve slept in here a lot, although I’d just as soon the girls didn’t know. But it’s time for all that to change now.”
“You’re sure? I’d be glad to sleep on the couch.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” She smiles, gently. “It’s all broken down. Cal wouldn’t sleep in his room after Johnnie left, so I let him sleep on the couch. He slept there clear through high school, if you can believe that, and piled up his clothes against the wall in the dining room.” She pauses, and sadness creases her face again. “I imagine Cal resents Johnnie in ways I don’t know anything about, but that’s just the way life is for this family.” Her eyes are clear, their expression brave. “That’s just the way life is.”
I am without words in the face of her kindness and courage.
It is a very small house, with two other small bedrooms, so closing up one whole room meant quite a lot in terms of sp
ace. She has used the girls’ bedroom for storage, as if it wouldn’t matter if she changed that one room before Johnnie came home.
When she leaves me alone, and quietly closes the door behind her, I feel as if I have been given permission to spend the night in a shrine. It is dusted, it is clean, and except for the fact that everything in it looks thirty years old, it might have been lived in yesterday.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away . . .
I have forgotten to tell her about Ray’s guitar.
A note to myself: Tell them in the morning.
Her central air-conditioning system is blowing cool air through wall vents, so I can’t open a window in Ray and Cal’s bedroom. I wish I could, because even as hot as it is, I’d like to go to sleep to the sound of the wind blowing through those cottonwood trees.
On the other hand, I can’t afford to fall asleep yet.
I work until 3 A.M., and when I am finished, I have a whole new chapter that I could never have predicted:
While Florida searched for Ray Raintree, the solution to the mystery of his identity began to unfold in a place most of the cops had never heard of . . .
9
Raymond
An aroma of sausage wakes me up at 7 A.M.
After I shower and get dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, I follow my nose into the kitchen where I find Katherine watching television as she fries potatoes and onions in a cast-iron skillet. She’s bare legged and barefoot, in a denim skirt that falls to just above her knees and a plain, sleeveless white cotton shirt worn loose over her waistband. From the back, she could pass for sixteen, and even when she turns around, she still looks younger than I feel on two hours of sleep: When I write late, I’m always too wired to fall right to sleep, and last night was even worse than usual. A TV weatherman tells us, “Our humidity is an exact match for our temperature today, folks. Ninety percent humidity, ninety degrees of temperature, which makes our heat index—”
“I wish they’d never invented those heat and wind chill indexes,” Katherine remarks, with a smile of greeting for me. She reaches over to turn down the sound on the TV. “Weren’t we already miserable enough without that? Does it make you feel any better, Marie, to know that it’s actually more like a hundred degrees outside, instead of just ninety?”
“No, it does not. Good morning, Katherine.”
She nods me toward a coffee pot, and I help myself. Then I go lean my back against a counter near to her, so we can talk while she cooks.
“Scrambled, all right?”
“Scrambled is wonderful. You don’t have to go to so much trouble—”
She laughs a little. “Yes, I do. If I don’t keep busy every second until I get to see Johnnie again, I will go insane, and my children will have to commit me.”
I smile sympathetically. “Then cook away.”
She lifts sausage patties out of the skillet with a spatula, then pours an egg mixture in and starts to stir it. I can’t recall the last time I fixed more than cereal and grapefruit for myself for breakfast. There’s a curtained window at my back, but when I turn around to look, all I see is her backyard and the house and backyard of her neighbor behind her. I feel claustrophobic again at the thought of all the houses and all the land that radiate in every direction away from here. Kansas feels too much like the core of the universe to someone like me who is used to living on the edge of it.
We share a silence for a moment until I notice she is looking uneasy. I wait, and finally she says a fragment of a sentence, “The little girl that Johnnie killed.”
I start to feel too queasy to eat the food she’s fixing.
She doesn’t look up as she stirs the eggs with a fork. “Jack won’t tell me what he did to her, so I think it must be something really bad. What did he do?”
“It is bad. Are you sure you want me to tell you?”
Katherine picks up a block of orange cheese and begins to scrap it over a grater, so flakes fall on top of the eggs. “I want to know.”
“He took her from her home, in a boat.” I take a breath, then get it over with quickly. “He killed her by putting pressure on the carotid artery in her neck. That’s what he did to her.”
She compresses her lips, not looking at me.
“That’s the worst of it,” I say, “but the next thing I’m going to say sounds worse. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Did he rape that child?”
“No, no he didn’t, there wasn’t any sexual assault.”
She begins crumbling one of the sausages into the egg mixture, and hiccups a sob, and then makes a heroic effort not to keep sobbing. I reach over and touch her back.
“What did he do?” she asks me, her voice breaking.
Oh, Jesus, I don’t want to tell her this! “He used some kind of thin probe, which he inserted into her nose after she was dead, to scoop out a portion of her brain.”
Finally, she gives up all pretense of cooking.
“Our medical examiner believes that Ray stole her pineal gland.”
“Her what?” Her mixing fork clatters into the skillet. She turns toward me, and I move her gently aside, and quickly grab a pot holder to remove the eggs from the heat so they won’t burn. She lets me take over. “For heaven’s sake, why would he do something like that?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“What in the world’s a—what did you call it?”
“Pineal gland. It’s the smallest endocrine gland in our bodies.” I point to my own temple. “It only weighs about a gram. It’s up here, in the middle. To be perfectly precise, it’s between our cerebral hemispheres, and right above the third ventricle of our spinal column.”
“What’s it for, for heaven’s sake?”
“It secrets melatonin which is a derivative of an amino acid called tryptophan.” I haul out the facts, hoping that if I pile on enough of them they will defuse the terror. “Some people think it has something to do with the onset of puberty.” I try to remember what the medical examiner has said, and what else I’ve learned in my own reading. “At one time, people thought it was like a valve in the brain that controlled our memories.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like a gate, that lets us remember some things, but not others.”
“Is that what it does?”
“I guess not.” I shrug apologetically. “I wish I knew more. If we understood more about the pineal gland, we might have a better idea of why Ray took it.”
“There can’t be any reason for anything like that,” she whispers, in a shocked voice. “Oh, that poor child!” She stares at me in horror. I don’t know which child she means, but she could well mean both of them. With a cry dragged from her heart, she exclaims, “Oh, her poor mother!”
The only one of us who can truly understand how Susan McCullen must feel is Katherine Kepler, the mother of the man who killed her daughter.
Jack Lawrence arrives in time to sit down with us to a breakfast neither Katherine nor I are able to enjoy. He’s wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt, pressed blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots, and his hair sticks up in a couple of places as if he slept on it wrong. His face looks fresh and moist, and recently shaved. Katherine appears glad to load up his plate, and he appears grateful to be fed by her.
“So he got away,” Jack comments to me.
“Yes,” I say, fiddling with my coffee cup.
“They shouldn’t have let that happen.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Jack.”
“How did it happen?” Katherine wants to know. I thought I’d emptied my memories of everything about her son last night, but there was still the murder to discuss, and now this.
Jack said, “I heard that he played unconscious, and the medical attendants let their guard down, that’s when he made a run for it.”
“More or less.” I glance at Katherine, and then decide it is condescending to think of protecting this woman who has already survived so much trouble. “He went
for a deputy’s gun, and wounded the deputy, and his own lawyer, and a couple of paramedics.”
“Johnny was a bright little boy,” Jack observes, “wasn’t he, Katherine?”
“Yes,” she says, softly.
Somehow, I’m not surprised to hear this. There were moments of sharpness to Ray, even intelligence and canniness, mixed in with the strange fugue states he got in sometimes when he seemed almost retarded. We sit silently for a moment while Jack eats, and they seem to be lost in thought about the child and the man.
“Are those people okay?” she asks me.
“Ray hurt them pretty bad, but they’re recovering.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Where do you think he’s gone, Marie?” Jack asks.
“I don’t know, because I don’t really know anything about him, except that the last place he worked was the Checker Crab Company.” After a moment, I say, “I don’t have a real clear story in my mind about Johnnie’s father. Would you mind telling me a little more about him?”
“Fred?” she says, looking surprised. “I don’t think much about Fred anymore, it’s been so long ago. What can I tell you? He was a decent husband and father, I guess, until Johnnie disappeared, then Fred just kind of went to pieces. He started drinking, and wasn’t any use to anybody.”
“I couldn’t stand the man.”
She stares over at Jack. “You couldn’t?”
“No, I thought he was spineless, and he didn’t offer any kind of support to you, when you were suffering so much.”
Katherine looks touched, and reaches over to pat his hand.
“I never knew you felt that way about Fred, Jack.”
He nods. “I’m afraid I carry grudges, especially against him.”
“And you don’t have any idea where he went?” I ask them.
“I never heard from him again,” she says.
“I didn’t look real hard,” Jack says.
Katherine looks at him as if she’s seeing him for the first time, and then she laughs a little. “You didn’t?”
“I thought it was good riddance, Katherine.”