The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  By the time I closed in on my house I was breathless, sweating, moving faster and faster until I noticed a car, old and dark and dusty, resting as if abandoned beside the cement curb.

  I froze like one suddenly encased in ice.

  The man who got out of the car wore a dark suit and a blood-red tie. He came toward me slowly. My mind seized. I steeled myself and waited.

  The man had almost reached me when he brought a single outstretched finger to the brim of his hat.

  "Good morning," he said.

  There was something in the way he looked at me, searchingly, but with a sense of familiarity, like a man who'd seen me before, or at least knew something of me. I wondered if we'd met, or even known each other at some point in the past. And yet, a sense of distance was still more powerful, and it was this distance that gave him the look of someone who had never lived in Winthrop, or had lived here so long ago that he was no longer accustomed to its people or their ways.

  "Katherine Carr," he said firmly, like a man determined to remind me that I was precisely who I was.

  "Yes," I said. "Do we know each other?"

  "I find missing persons," he told me.

  His suit was clean, but ill-fitting, and he had the faintly disheveled look of one often summoned in the middle of the night.

  "I don't know anyone who's missing," I told him.

  "Yes, you do." He looked at me with a terrible stillness. "He's been missing for five years."

  Odd though it seemed, I knew exactly whom he meant.

  "My name is Maldrow," the man added. "I'll talk to you again soon."

  With no further word, he walked back to his car and got in, facing forward the whole time, never looking back as he drove away. Watching, I felt my imagination flicker to life, and at that instant saw other conveyances trailing like prisoners behind him—carriages and wagons, horse-drawn coaches, then finally cars, all in a ghostly procession, without drivers, as if borne on an invisible wave, different years and models, foreign and American, going back for decades, some shiny new, others eaten through with rust, each of them fleeing some dreadful carnage, a slaughtered family or butchered child, their trunks packed with rope and masking tape and small strips of electrical wire, in one the rusty handsaw someone had neglected to wipe clean.

  It was indeed a weird little story, I thought, as I put the pages down, written with what seemed a great personal need to tell it. I'd seen this before, of course, writing as therapy, to fend off demons or keep one's center from exploding. I'd done a little of it myself after Teddy's murder, penned brief remembrances of him, imagined the life I thought he might have had. I'd held the Frisbee we'd tossed as if it were a magical door through which I might reach him, and even taken Celeste's wedding ring from the top drawer of my desk and turned it in the light like a man conjuring up the spirit of our lost child. But everything I'd ever written about Teddy had ultimately gone into the wastebasket, writing powerless to ameliorate the brutality of events or return a single particle of what had been lost, a grim lesson I was certain Katherine would ultimately have learned, and under the hammer of that lesson either stopped writing or changed the subject, perhaps penned a memoir or a mystery, her prose finally cooling like a body after death.

  Which was precisely what I told Arlo when I called him a few minutes later.

  "But Katherine was doing more than just writing about the way she lived," Arlo said. "She was changing the way she lived."

  "In what way?"

  "Well, for one thing, she went back to the farmhouse."

  Back to the place where she'd been attacked? That struck me as very strange indeed, considering the fact that if the first-person parts of her story were autobiographical, then Katherine had barely been able to summon the courage to walk the crime-free streets of Winthrop, much less revisit the place where she'd been attacked by the now-ubiquitous unknown man.

  "When did she do that?" I asked.

  "Not long before she disappeared," Arlo answered. "She told Audrey she had to do it."

  "Why?"

  "It was part of gaining her strength back," Arlo answered.

  "A pretty hard way," I said. "Of course, being a writer, she might have gone back to the farmhouse only in her imagination."

  "That's not what she told Audrey," Arlo said. "Katherine said she actually went back to the farmhouse."

  "But Katherine makes things up, doesn't she?" I reminded him. "She's a storyteller, after all."

  Rather than address this point, Arlo said, "You should go there, too. The scene of the crime."

  During my traveling years, I'd visited Drogheda and Auschwitz, along with countless other scenes of distant or more recent slaughter. I'd even found a strange allure in such places, as Hardy had found an austere beauty in prison walls. But that had been before Teddy, before the little boat of my life had run aground upon its own tragic shore.

  "I've lost my taste for murder scenes," I said.

  "Katherine wasn't murdered at the farmhouse," Arlo reminded me.

  "You know what I mean."

  "Yes, I do, but I still think you need to see it, George," Arlo returned insistently. "A sign of her character."

  I held my ground and said nothing.

  "Would it matter, George, if I told you that this sign was written in her own blood?"

  7

  STRANGE, BUT ARLO'S mention of Katherine's blood immediately returned me to Alice Barrows, a vision of her as she'd disappeared down the corridor and into the bathroom, a small, wrinkled face with blood dripping from her nose. It had not been the smoothest of first meetings, of course, and initially I'd even sensed something rather confrontational about Alice, or at least something that drove her to warn others away. But that had changed with the appearance of that first drop of blood, so that I'd seen the young girl in the old woman's body, the youthful panic beneath the ancient face, and in that sighting, brief though it was, felt something in me go out to her.

  And so, after making an appointment to go with Arlo to the farmhouse at which Katherine had been attacked, I hung up and dialed Sandra Parshall.

  "Is Alice okay?" I asked when she came on the line.

  "She'll never be okay," Sandra said. "She gets weaker with every episode."

  "Why does she bleed?" I asked.

  "Coumadin," Sandra answered. "It's a blood thinner she has to take."

  My father had taken the same drug, but it was not his long illness I recalled at that moment, but Teddy's, the one time he'd suddenly run a high fever, and briefly been hospitalized, how bare his room had looked when I'd entered it, how dim the light, the frightened look on his face before I came through the door, the vast relief that had swept over him when he saw me, how sweet it had seemed to me, the power to release him from his terror.

  "I'd like to visit Alice again, if she's up to it," I said.

  "I think she'd like to see you again, too." There was an unmistakable sense of surprise in Sandra's voice, as if she'd considered Alice's isolation unbridgeable before. "I think she liked you, George." Her words turned very nearly imploring. "And so I hope you come back to see her again soon, because at this stage..."

  Sandra's voice trailed off but her point could hardly have been more darkly blunt: like the tiniest microbe and the largest galaxy, Alice Barrows was dying at the hands of Time.

  "When can I see her again?" I asked.

  "Whenever you like," Sandra answered. "I wouldn't limit Alice's visiting hours."

  I'd heard a certain urgency in Sandra's voice as she'd said those final words, and so I left for Brookwood Residential as soon as I hung up the phone.

  Alice was reading when I came into her room.

  "Hi," I said.

  She was quite obviously surprised to see me.

  "How are you doing?" I asked.

  She lifted the book, a thin little paperback, and said, "It's not very good."

  I took the book from her hand. "Nero Wolfe," I said. "He's a detective, right?"

  Alice nodded. "Bu
t this other guy does most of the work. Wolfe mostly thinks." She drew the book from my hand and laid it down beside her. "Sorry about the other day." She seemed embarrassed by what had happened, though less for the bloody nose than her reaction to it. "It's this medicine I take."

  "Coumadin, I know," I told her. There seemed nowhere to go on such a grim subject, so I returned to the book. "Wolfe lives in New York City, doesn't he?"

  Alice touched her finger to her nose, checking for blood, as I supposed, a gesture she often repeated as we continued to talk.

  "In a brownstone," she said. "With ten thousand orchids." She frowned. "His address isn't the same in all the books. And I looked at this street map of New York on my computer, and if he really lived at some of those addresses, he'd have been in the Hudson River."

  I admired her sense of correctness, the reporter's eye for the careless error, and it struck me that she had no doubt listened to a hundred misdiagnoses, been countless times misinformed as to the full range of side effects, been offered scores of hopeful prognoses her illness had long since proven wrong, and that from these lapses in thoroughness or casual fudging of facts, she had developed a distaste for the slapdash and haphazard, felt affronted by it, knew with crystal clarity when she had been treated with condescension or contempt.

  She glanced at the book I'd brought with me. "Is that the one you wrote?" she asked.

  I stepped over to her bed and handed it to her. "I hope you like it."

  She gave the book a cursory glance, but said nothing.

  I took the chair nearest her bed and sat down. "Actually," I added, "I hope you respect it."

  She shrugged, and her eyes drifted toward the window like two tiny floating balloons. "It's probably good," she said. "You seem smart."

  I drew out a notebook and pen. "So, tell me about these glass figures." I looked from one to the other, taking in this unicorn, that angel. "You said they were your mother's."

  Alice looked at me severely. "Why did you come here?"

  I stared at her silently.

  "Because it's your job?" She saw that I was taken aback by the decidedly negative tone in her voice, but even so she didn't retreat from the demanding nature of her question, so that I saw just how utterly alone she was, visited only by people in white coats who probed and questioned her, people for whom her suffering was a job.

  "No, it's not because it's my job," I answered quietly.

  "What then?" Alice demanded. "Teddy?"

  So I'd been right. Alice had done her research, looked me up, found the newspaper coverage of Teddy's disappearance, knew when and from what place he had vanished, where he'd finally be found, seen the photographs that weren't too gruesome to print.

  "Maybe that's part of it." I shifted uneasily beneath her steady gaze. "Maybe I wanted to feel that again. A little taste of fatherhood."

  Alice took this admission in for a moment, then said, "I guess that's okay." She smiled softly, and now seemed somewhat more relaxed, as if some secret source of tension had been removed from between us. "Let's go outside."

  "Outside?" I asked.

  She drew herself up and pressed her back against the pillow. "To the garden. There's no air in here."

  There was a wheelchair in one corner of the room. I brought it over, then watched as she eased herself into it. Once this maneuver was accomplished, she plucked my book from the bed and tucked it into her lap. "Ready," she said.

  She directed me down the corridor, past room after doleful room of what were surely hopeless cases, the near-dead and the catatonic, people wasted by cancer, stroke victims tangled up in their sheets.

  The garden was small but well kept, with short hedges and comfortable wooden benches, all its paths and rest areas built for the wide turning axis required by wheelchairs.

  When we reached the garden, she asked me to face her chair away from the little fountain and all the sidewalks, a position she had no doubt chosen as a way of making herself as invisible as possible. Then she glanced down at my book. "So, I guess you've gone to lots of places?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Did you go to Lourdes?"

  "Yes."

  "My mother wanted to take me there. What's it like?"

  "It's very sad," I said. "Particularly the evening procession, when the people come hoping to be healed."

  "Where's the saddest place you ever went?" Alice asked.

  It seemed odd that we were discussing my life rather than hers, but it was clearly the way Alice wanted it, so I went along.

  "Kalaupapa," I answered for no real reason other than it was the first place that popped into my mind. "It's in Hawaii. It had been a leper colony since 1869, but there were only about fifty lepers left when I went there."

  It struck me that Alice might be in need of grim antidotes to her mother's determined and incessant upbeat. I had seen the same reaction in my father, his rejection of any comforting vision of this or any future life, an armor no hope-tipped arrow could penetrate.

  "It's a beautiful place, actually," I said. "Which makes what happened there all the worse."

  "Tell me about it," Alice said.

  And so I did.

  For unknown centuries, Kalaupapa had been a very remote and largely inaccessible fishing village on the island of Molokai, I told her, and it had been precisely this remoteness and inaccessibility that had made it so attractive as a leper colony. The sea cliffs that cut the village off from the interior were the tallest on earth, a full sixteen hundred feet. There were no roads leading out of the village, and for lepers, crippled as they were, with gnarled hands and feet and utterly wasted muscles, the narrow mountain trail that was the only route of escape would have been impossible.

  "So it was a prison," Alice said.

  "Yes," I answered. "With prisoners who arrived by boat, though it couldn't really be thought of as an arrival, since they were sometimes just tossed overboard."

  Alice stared at me gravely, but said nothing.

  "And it was salt water they were thrown into, of course," I added. "So, what with open wounds, the swim to shore must have been very painful—for those who could swim."

  But that had been only the beginning of their suffering, I told Alice, for once ashore, the lepers had found no shelters built for them, and so had lived huddled into small crevices cut out of the rock cliffs, with nothing but piles of leaves to protect them from the elements. There was no medicine, and often their supplies were thrown overboard rather than delivered, so that many of their provisions had either sunk or been swept out to sea.

  "And so they died of hunger and exposure," I said. "As complete outcasts."

  Because Alice continued to be interested in this narrative, I went on about the conditions at Kalaupapa, then brought the story around to the arrival of the saintly and celebrated Father Damien.

  "Things improved at Kalaupapa after he came there," I said. "He built homes and a church."

  At Damien's death, a similarly saintly priest had taken over Kalaupapa, I told Alice, and with him there had been further improvements until at last the ban had been lifted and the lepers allowed to leave.

  "Did they?" Alice asked.

  I shook my head. "Not many. By then most of them were quite old, and they'd lost touch with their families. A few left, but most of them never returned to their villages."

  "It's just as well," Alice said with a shrug.

  "Why do you say that?" I asked.

  She seemed surprised by the question.

  "Because if they'd gone back to their villages," she answered, "they'd have been the village freaks."

  8

  Village freaks.

  They weren't the last words Alice said to me that evening, but in one of those tricks of association by which thoughts are mysteriously linked, they brought me back to Katherine. Had she been a village freak, I wondered, made one by what an unknown man had done to her? It was the sort of question that only emphasizes how little one actually knows about any particular subject, of cou
rse, and it certainly had that effect upon me as I headed for work the next morning.

  Our search for knowledge is a great thing, of course, but it is also a peculiar one, rarely engaged in for its own sake. Certainly my decision to go to the town library to find out what I could about Katherine was anything but disinterested. For the most part, as I well knew, it was an effort to remove any doubt Arlo might have as to my interest in her, though at that point I still remained far more interested in him.

  The Winthrop Library was located in a stately mansion the Winthrop family had donated to the town to which they'd also given their name. Great Georgian columns rose high above a wide portico decked with white rockers in which readers lounged in the warm summer air. The building sat on a high hill, and from that position gave off a sense of peering dully down at the village in the way the billboard eyes of Dr. Eckle-burg, Fitzgerald's bankrupt optometrist, symbolically survey the "valley of ashes" at the tip of East Egg. It had the same unsettling silence, too, a passive, indifferent God distantly observing our felonies and misdemeanors, the great sprawling train wreck of human life, though not particularly interested in how it happened or why, nor in the fate of those on board, God as the "absentee landlord" of deist theology, either unwilling or unable to intervene in the poor play of earth.

  I had no trouble finding what I needed. I simply typed "Katherine Carr" into the Search Catalog blank, and a short list of citations popped onto the screen. The first mention of her was far from unexpected: GIRL POET WINS TRI-COUNTY CONTEST.

  The year was 1973, so that my first glimpse of Katherine showed a slender teenaged girl in a white blouse and dark skirt. She was standing on a small stage, clutching a plaque to her chest, smiling. She'd won the "Eighth Grade Creative Writing Competition" with a poem called "My Grandfather's Eyes." In a sidebar, the paper had printed her poem in full:

  All his history is there,

  In little orbs of cracked blue sky,

  A farm boy's blink, grain in his eye,