The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  Why did I think of these creatures that morning? I don't know, save that in some way the thought of them directed me to the odd fact that a person once written about, whether a Visigothic chieftain or an old gray-haired rickshaw pulley is never completely missing, while a boy like Teddy, too young to have been recorded by anything other than the memory of those who knew him, is well and truly gone, or at least will be when the last of those who could recall him is gone, too.

  This was not a comforting thought, of course, but such thoughts always plagued me on Teddy's birthday, so this particular dark meditation hardly surprised me. And so, as I'd done on other such occasions, I retreated to my work: little articles for the Winthrop Examiner, a form of journalism that was far from Orwell, to say the least, but which paid my rent and put a drink on the table at O'Shea's and by its sheer redemptive triviality, daily saved my life.

  On that particular morning I had a profile to write for the Weekend section of the paper, this one on Roger Beaumont, the choirmaster of the local Episcopal church. It was the sort of assignment I was usually given at the paper: light stuff, often upbeat, as if Wyatt Chambers, the paper's editor suspected that my troubled soul was too frail for the dark side, or any story that touched upon it. And so it was the occasional admiring profile that usually landed on my desk, like the one about ninety-three-year-old Eleanor Graham's tireless commitment to her rose garden, or some equally affirming piece, the story, for example, of a hardworking Vietnamese immigrant who'd won the lottery.

  The subject of my current piece had enjoyed the rare good fortune of both loving his work and making a living at it. In the slanting light that came through the front window, I typed out the first line of the profile, careful in my initial identification to use the all-but-obligatory phrase "much admired."

  I finished the piece an hour later, glanced up from the laptop, and thought suddenly of Arlo McBride, probably because having finished one profile, I was already searching for the next one. In any event, he kept returning to me as I worked on other assignments that day, the opening of a pet store, the proposed restoration of the town bandstand. For the most part, he was like a little tune playing in my head, though at other times his presence seemed more real, like someone watching me from behind the slightly parted slats of Venetian blinds or through the tiny crack of a surreptitiously opened door.

  Later that afternoon, I turned in my piece on the choir director to Wyatt, then, as always, waited as he read it.

  "I hear the triumphant chords of the Ode to Joy, George," he said as he placed it in the slot for copyediting. "And you managed to omit the fact that dear Roger is quite the dancing queen." He sat back. "Care for a drink after work?"

  "No, thanks," I said, my usual late afternoon numbness coming on. "Maybe another time."

  And so, after leaving Wyatt, I drove out to the little cemetery where Teddy's remains, such as they were, had been buried. It was a practice I'd maintained since his death, though a decidedly muted one, void of emotional histrionics, that banging drum of grief. There was no talking to my dead boy, no conjuring up of his spirit.

  In fact, I didn't even bow my head when I visited Teddy's grave on these annual occasions, for all sense of prayer had left me the moment I was certain he'd been murdered. Before that time, for all the weeks between his disappearance and the discovery of his body, I'd prayed with the ferocity of a faithless man, prayed for faith and that little sprig of hope that bloomed inside it. I'd pledged all sorts of eternities, a soulful tithe of obedience. As Faust had sold his soul to the devil, I'd offered mine to God, or Providence, or anything else it might be called, but which, for me, boiled down to whatever had the power to intervene on my son's behalf. If it had had an elephant's head on an obese body, as Shiva's son Ganesha does, I wouldn't have cared. I would have bowed to Baal in any form, dropped to my knees before any Golden Calf. I would have lit every candle in St. Patrick's, piled bags of grain on the pagoda scales, marched to Samara with my back whipped raw—anything, anything, for a single answered prayer: Bring him safely home.

  But all that was over now, and so I didn't linger at the cemetery for any longer than it took to read his name on the stone, have a few grim thoughts, feel that jagged edge of anger that accompanied my every memory of him.

  Following that small wrathful interval, I headed home, where I expected to have a quickly prepared dinner, read a while, and after that go to bed, the routine of a solitary. Nor do I think there'd have been any change to that routine had I not glimpsed a road sign I'd never noticed before, but which suddenly flared so brightly out of the descending shade that even its black letters appeared briefly illuminated: Gilmore Street.

  I recalled that Arlo McBride had mentioned it when we'd spoken briefly in O'Shea's. Gilmore Street, he'd said, between Cantibell and Pine. Perhaps I could begin the profile with that very conversation: how it had happened by accident, just two men who'd run across each other in a bar.

  But I knew I shouldn't get ahead of myself. McBride might not be interested in a profile, might be a very private man, or one with secrets. Still, a little background material wouldn't do any harm, showing interest in a story that clearly interested him.

  With that thought, I turned onto Gilmore, now looking for another street sign. I found Cantibell after only a couple of blocks, and up ahead, easily visible beneath a pale streetlight, the sign for Pine.

  I pulled over to the curb midway between the two streets, then got out and stood looking south, to where Gilmore came to a dead end, then north toward the river. The little rock grotto where Katherine Carr had last been seen was only a short distance away, a stroll I estimated at no more than twelve minutes.

  I stopped in mid-thought, surprised that I'd quite unconsciously calculated the time it had taken for a woman I'd never known to take her final walk. Why had I done that? I had no answer, save that the curious impulse I'd followed had seemed to come from that strange inner sanctum where our dearest hopes and darkest fears reside like a quarrelsome couple in a monstrously cramped bed, every movement of the one a discomfort to the other.

  I sank my hand into the pocket of my jacket and looked at the houses that fronted Gilmore Street. They were quite unassuming: all of wood, with small front lawns shaded by large trees. A few had painted wooden shutters with matching trim. Most were lined with bushes and shrubs that had been planted along the front and sides. The grass was green and thick, and at one house, a motionless sprinkler rested near the middle of the yard, a bright red hose snaking from it to an outdoor nozzle a few yards away. It was a neighborhood of families: kids playing in the street, parents calling from front porches at the end of day, not the usual choice of a single woman. In fact, it was exactly the sort of neighborhood I'd fled after Teddy's death—fled wisely, it seemed to me, since there is nothing more heartbreaking than the sounds of other people's children when you have lost your own.

  I turned back to my car. Before getting in, I looked up Gilmore again, now thinking of Arlo McBride, the missing woman he'd mentioned in O'Shea's the night before. The street's lovely trees and neat little houses gave no hint that anything tragic had ever happened here, an ordinariness that suddenly returned me to a moment years before, when I'd found myself off the coast of Saipan, staring at the cliffs from which Japanese parents, fearing the atrocities they were certain American troops would visit upon them, had hurled their children, then leaped themselves. American sailors had watched through their binoculars as the tragedy unfolded, helpless to save the panicked parents or to draw their eyes away from the dreadful scene itself. But years later, as my ship drifted by, the cliffs betrayed nothing of those terrible events. They were craggy and rather squat, not at all impressive. I had stood on the Cliffs of Moher, tentatively neared the fearful precipice at Slieve League. Saipan's heights were nothing in comparison. It was only my knowledge of what had once happened there that gave them resonance, the suffering that had topped those undistinguished cliffs, parents with babies in their arms or holding the hand
s of small children, all that pain hovering on that rocky ledge.

  But something tragic had also once touched Gilmore Street, and thinking that, my feet now on the same pavement a missing woman had once walked, I suddenly imagined her moving past the same modest houses, the only difference being that it had been about midnight when she had taken her lonely walk, and so most of the windows would have been dark, most everyone inside already sound asleep.

  Even so, someone had once known the fate of this missing woman, and for a moment I imagined him waiting behind the wheel of a beat-up old sedan. As if I were an invisible presence in the backseat of that same car, I saw his broad shoulders, large ears, and thick, muscular neck, followed the curl of cigarette smoke that twined around him, heard the caught breath when he spotted what had surely been his prey.

  But this was, itself, an odd surmise, I realized. For I knew nothing of how or why or by what circumstance this missing woman had vanished. And certainly I had no idea if there'd ever even been such a man lurking on this street, or if so, whether he'd had any of the stereotypically brutish physical characteristics I'd given him. I knew only that such men had always existed and always would, and that many years after Katherine Carr's disappearance, on a different street within this same small town, one such man had spotted a little boy with blond curls standing at a bus stop, glancing about, waiting for his father, wondering how long he'd have to wait in this pouring rain.

  3

  GIVEN THE DARK turn of my mind, I might have predicted another sleepless night. The surprise, instead, was that I slept, and that in the torment of that sleep, held captive by it, I dreamed of Teddy's capture.

  It was an imagined scene I'd successfully avoided most nights, but which, on this occasion, drifted through my mind as if carried on the same mists that bore the Burannis' mythical child-stealers over the jungle floor.

  I saw my son as he got off the bus that gray afternoon, followed invisibly behind as he chatted briefly with a neighborhood friend. In my dream, his lips are moving and his head is thrown back in a laugh, but there is no sound. It is as if I'm watching a silent movie.

  The exchange ends with some little grade-school joke and an affectionate tug at the bill of my son's red baseball cap as the two boys part, Jimmy Dane heading off to the right, his home only a block away, while Teddy remains in place, standing near the bus stop, waiting for me because a sudden storm has broken and earlier that morning, I'd promised to pick him up if it rained.

  He straightens his cap as the storm intensifies, now with occasional lightning, which always scared him more. In my dream, the streets clear abruptly, people vanishing not into cars and houses, but simply disappearing, as if effervesced by the rain itself, the street now deserted save for Teddy and a figure whose approach I see over my son's shoulder, a man in a yellow rain slicker^ his right hand sliding beneath it, as if reaching for something tucked under the opposite arm.

  In this vision, I reach for my son's shoulder but I have no body, no hand to draw him beneath my own protective arm. Again and again I grab for him, but my hand passes through his flesh and so I cry out in warning.

  But there is no sound, so that my scream falls silently on a world gone deaf. Then—quite suddenly—I hear the rain thudding against the sidewalk and slapping through the trees. I try to scream again, but before I can release my warning, I am drawn up and away, as if seized by a vertical thrust of wind, Teddy now visible far beneath me, growing smaller and smaller until, like a bird circling high above, I see a red dot touch a yellow slash, then disappear inside it.

  I awoke from this dream exhausted by my own powerlessness, all the energy that had been drained by its vision of futility, like an armless man forever reaching and reaching, but with no hope of gaining a grasp.

  I glanced at the clock. It was just after midnight, and I'd actually fallen asleep while working on my latest piece, an old woman's triumphant struggle to hold on to her house against the encroachment of developers. She'd been a talkative sort, as I'd discovered, who'd often interrupted the interview with questions of her own, most all of them about my past. I'd told her that I'd once been a travel writer, but that those days were behind me, that I'd settled in Winthrop some years before, and planned to stay here.

  "And are you a family man?" she asked.

  "I once was," I told her, then quickly glanced at my notes. "So, when did you first hear that Allied Properties was interested in your house?"

  And so on and so forth, until I'd gathered enough material to write the piece whose final page had gleamed from my laptop screen as I'd awakened quite suddenly later that same night.

  What to do till dawn? More than to be or not to be, that is the question. My answer to it had long been O'Shea's.

  I was there ten minutes later, in my usual booth at the back, watching the men at the bar, always with an eye to singling him out, something that would catch my eye, some little trinket I might have given Teddy in the past, a piece of jade from Hong Kong, for example, or some figure carved from amber I'd bought at Cracow's central market, cheap souvenirs of my traveling life, entirely unnoticed by everyone else, but to me proof enough of what he'd done to my little boy.

  It was a totally hopeless scenario, of course, but I'd never entirely stopped harboring the notion that the man who'd killed my son would one day walk into my sights. I'd even played out the details of what I'd do next in order to make sure that he didn't get away. First, I would engage this man in idle talk, find out where he lived. At some point after that, I would carry out his execution: shoot or stab or strangle him, and by that murder save someone else's little boy as I had failed to save my own. I knew this was a typical Hollywood ending, but fantasy is grief's nearest companion, and this miraculous act of retribution had been my chief fantasy since Teddy's death, the only one that gave me energy, pumped life into my inner world, the prospect of murder working in me like a heater in a stone-cold room.

  "My God, George!" Charlie Wilkins came up from behind me and slid into the booth. "Did you sleep in your clothes?"

  He was a fellow reporter at the Examiner, the type the paper called on for breaking news of fire and accident, but who was never assigned features because Wyatt had never had much regard for him as a writer or a man. He'd been married twice, but had been "bitched out," as he put it, both times, the children he'd spawned with these two women now located at a place he identified only as somewhere out west.

  "So, you working on anything?" he asked.

  "The old woman who beat Allied Properties," I said. "I finished it a few minutes ago."

  "I read your piece on the pet shop." He laughed. "Very cuddly, George."

  "For cuddly, I'm your man," I told him.

  He laughed again, the easy laugh of a man who considered himself something of a worldling, at least by Winthrop standards.

  "I had an idea for a piece on that brothel over in Kingston," Charlie added. "Wyatt said I'd have to find a human-interest angle in it, but I haven't found one yet."

  A waitress came over. I was set. Charlie ordered a beer.

  "You hit many places like that, when you were globe-hopping?" Charlie asked. "Brothels?"

  By globe-hopping, Charlie meant the time before Celeste and Teddy, when rattling trains and chugging riverboats had been my only homes.

  "Yeah, I saw a few brothels," I answered.

  Some had been more memorable than others, but only one came to mind at that moment, an undistinguished dive in the whorehouse district of Nuevo Laredo, the haunt of bikers and college-boy one-nighters, along with the usual border flotsam. He'd come in with an eerie sense of being himself unreal, a man, dressed to the nines, his shoes brightly polished, hair slicked back in a full, slightly graying pompadour. For five consecutive nights I'd watched him take the dimly lighted dance floor, wheel and turn whatever bar girls took his fancy, teaching them the steps and in the process irrigating their parched souls with humor and compliments and what seemed a strangely genuine regard. Then, like a prince on the m
idnight, he'd leave them with a nod and, strangest of all, a soft kiss on both eyes—not a whoremaster, this one, but a feeder of hungry hearts.

  "I read about the ones in Thailand," Charlie said. "Crazy, man. Girls smoking cigarettes with their—"

  "At least those girls are inside," I interrupted dryly. "Not like the ones who work along the Trans-Africa Highway."

  With that, I told Charlie the story of a truck stop in Uganda, a shack of corrugated tin that dispensed beer, smokes, canned meat, and various supplies pilfered from hijacked trucks bearing First World charity, barley, sorghum, baby formula in huge vats. The girls had stretched themselves out on cardboard pallets behind a mound of trash nearly six feet high, the grunts of their johns clearly audible above the idle of diesel engines. Since then, efforts had been made to educate them, at least as far as AIDS was concerned, but I had little doubt that the next generation of doomed girls was already at work on the usual cardboard pallets. The people who covered this part of the world had shared a single, hopeless code for the intransigent horror of the place: AWA: Africa Wins Again.

  I took a quick sip of scotch when I finished the story. "So, what else is new?"

  Charlie shrugged. "I had another idea besides that whorehouse in Kingston," he said, "but Wyatt wasn't crazy about that one, either." He took a doleful sip from his glass. "There's always something missing in my stuff. That's what Wyatt thinks."

  I knew that this "missing something" was the beating heart of a story, and all that bore the reader toward it, a somberness within the pace and a gravity within the words.

  "Anyway," Charlie said. "I thought I might write a feature on this girl who has progeria. You know what that is?"