The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  And in his mouth and hair.

  Before Ardennes and Belleau Wood,

  Where mustard smoked the blue to gray

  His eyes had sparkled with new day

  As such a boy's forever should.

  But fire and gas and rifle shot

  Blew out the light that twinkled there.

  Smoke now sole tenant of his hair,

  Eyes he cannot talk about.

  And so tn spring, as things renew,

  He sits in silence as he stares

  At flowers blooming in red flares,

  With eyes of shaded, shattered blue.

  I had no idea what middle-school poetry should be like, though I could see plenty wrong in Katherine's poem: lines of awkwardly inverted syntax, strained rhymes. But "sole tenant of his hair" showed promise in a girl of twelve, and so it didn't surprise me that the next citation had her winning another contest a year later, and after that, at seventeen, a scholarship to the state university.

  Six years passed before she appeared again, this time on the pages of the newly established Winthrop Examiner. She was now twenty-three, and in the photograph she stands before a modest farmhouse, her arm embracing an old man in a wheelchair. The headline reads LOCAL POET GROWS OWN FOOD, and the accompanying story details Katherine's return to Winthrop after college, the fact that she has begun to publish her poems in small literary magazines, "a simple life," as the profile writer rather bucolically describes it, "lived at the pace of the seasons, where words are allowed to grow slowly, like the crops."

  It was a typical local-color puff piece, clearly admiring of Katherine's embrace of rural life, complete with an inventory of her garden vegetables, even a recipe for what the writer called "poet's stew." It was all quite idyllic, with no hint that Katherine was anything but a small-town girl who'd made a tiny mark, was living as she liked, and seemed happy to be doing so.

  All of which made the next reference more jarring: LOCAL WOMAN VICTIM OF ATTACK.

  It had occurred on August 27, 1982, at the farmhouse where she'd lived alone following her grandfather's death. The time was approximately six thirty in the evening, and she'd just gotten home from taking her friend's son to a local fair. According to the article, Katherine had been attacked in the garage, her friend's son asleep in the backseat of the car. She had been assaulted with a knife, the paper said, but gave no further details of the attack. The "unknown man," as the paper called the assailant, had worn a black ski mask and had evidently left her for dead on the cement floor of the garage.

  Subsequent editions dealt with the investigation, which had turned up nothing, so that within a few weeks all references to the crime had faded from the pages of the Winthrop Examiner, save a strange little summation of the case, an article by—of all people—a summer intern with the paper who seemed, at least from the sadly sympathetic tone of his report, to have been moved not only by what had happened to Katherine, but also by the terrible nature of what had followed:

  This may well be the last you hear of Katherine Carr, for according to her friend, she no longer writes poetry. Miss Carr, herself, refused to be interviewed for this article, but we are informed that she has sold the farmhouse she once shared with her grandfather and now lives in town, at an address we have been asked not to disclose. Although not technically housebound, she is variously described as "enclosed," "reflective," and "reclusive." Thus, although she remains with us, it might be said that Katherine Carr has vanished.

  Not a bad final line, I thought, staring at the byline, so that it didn't surprise me that the reporter who'd written it had later risen to become the Examiner's editor-in-chief.

  "So, did you ever meet her?" I asked Wyatt in his office an hour or so later.

  He shook his head. "No, but the people who did said nice things about her."

  "Like what?"

  "Well, the way she took care of her grandfather, people admired that," Wyatt answered. "That's the sort of person she seemed to be, a natural caregiver."

  "She sounds a bit saintly," I said suspiciously.

  "She must have had her faults," Wyatt said. "But when I did the piece on her—that little one you read—I couldn't find anyone who had anything bad to say about her. They just said she was 'nice' or she was 'kind.' The way people speak of the dead."

  "Someone must have known her," I said.

  "Yeah, who?" Wyatt asked. "Katherine's parents were killed in a car accident when she was three. After that she lived out in the sticks with her grandfather. She was homeschooled for the simple reason that he'd been crippled in World War I. Bad legs. Bad eyes. She was with him all the time." He looked at me pointedly. "But the old man had died, and Katherine was beginning to come out into the world. That's what makes what happened to her such a lousy break. Because she'd started to come into town, attend concerts, chat with whoever was around. You know, have a normal life." He shook his head. "Then she got traumatized by some bastard, and after that she was sort of a ghost." With that, Wyatt gave me one of his worldly reporter sighs. "You'll never get ride of human violence, George. But take heart, the animals have it even worse."

  Now clearly launched into another subject, Wyatt had gone on to give a particularly lurid account of the animal world, the gang rapes carried out by mallard ducks, the murder rate among ground squirrels, and normally I would have gone on with my daily routine after leaving his office, perhaps headed directly to my desk and put the finishing touches on a piece about the town's new candy store. But something about Katherine—or perhaps about Alice—had gotten under my skin, so I strolled out of the office and sat down in one of the little benches at the side of the building. The town was at its customary level of bustle, and the ordinary noise and traffic, the flow of people, the sound of idle chatter, should have drowned out any further thought of anything save the day ahead, the tasks before me. And yet I found myself thinking about Wyatt's last remarks, his assumption, all but universally agreed upon, that nature is morally blank, the animal world simply a matter, as Wyatt said, of fang and claw.

  Which it certainly is, and yet, with Wyatt's voice still echoing in my mind, I suddenly recalled a moment when something unexplainable had happened in that world. At the time I'd hardly noticed it, so that recalling it so vividly now struck me as mysterious in itself, our memories like ghosts in a million-roomed house, wandering purposelessly until suddenly, miraculously summoned.

  It had been late in the day, in a Ugandan village where my bus had broken down. I'd long ago forgotten the name of the village, but the windless, stifling heat had been impossible to forget. It had risen in hellish waves from every available surface, the flat clay square of the market, the hoods and fenders of the few disabled cars, the corrugated tin roofs of the houses and vegetable stands. I'd just slumped beneath the paltry shade of the appropriately named fire tree when I first caught sight of the dogs, a pack of them, scrawny and ravenous, their eyes ablaze for the smallest rotten morsel or rancid drop of water. It was the leader of the pack that held my attention. He seemed to take no notice of the small army of gnats and flies that swarmed about his long black snout, drinking when they could from whatever tiny pool of moisture his mouth provided. The other dogs trotted behind, a minion of short-legged, pug-faced mutts, not one of whom bore a shadow of their leader's bearing, the way he sometimes stopped abruptly, held his head very still, his ear cocked attentively, as if listening to the distant muezzin's call to prayer.

  For a time, the pack loped along the periphery of the square, sniffing the ground, the entrances of shacks and stalls, seeking whatever tiny residue of nourishment that had survived the heat and dust and endless trample of the crowd. They found nothing, but kept looking, sniffing the earth desperately as they made one round, then another, in a fruitless circle that seemed driven by nothing beyond the simple, unwilled drive to live.

  "Did you know that mallard ducks rape their females so ruthlessly they're often drowned in the process?" Wyatt's voice came to me as if from some middle distance be
tween where I sat on a bench in immaculate Winthrop and the dusty swelter of that now-vividly-recalled Ugandan afternoon. "And did you know that if we applied the same murder rate to squirrels that we do to humans, they'd annihilate a city the size of Houston every night?"

  Wyatt had said these things as I'd sat in his office moments before, and they were no doubt true, but even as I recalled them now, I saw the kitten appear as it had those many years before, a tiny ball of complete innocence that inched out from beneath one of the matoke stalls, pink, hairless, with eyes that had not yet opened, so that it had no idea of the famished world it had crawled into, nor the stark gaze of the dogs when they caught sight of it.

  The stillness of the dogs lasted only the barest instant before they bolted forward, blurred by speed, a cloud of toxic dust blowing across the arid square.

  The kitten had managed to angle halfway back under the floor of the shed when the first dog came in at a low crouch, snarling madly as it grabbed the kitten by the ear and flung it to the side, where it rolled into the open air, the rest of the pack now spiraling around it, but without attacking, as if in the throes of some sacrificial rite, circling and snarling with heads thrust upward into the stifling air, poised to make the dive, tear their helpless prey apart, but somehow relishing their power in a malevolent instant of suspension.

  Suddenly the leader burst through their circle and stood over the flailing kitten, staring at the other dogs with a look of unyielding authority. The dogs first slowed, then came to a halt, waiting now, shifting left and right, heads bobbing, staring at the kitten but afraid to fall upon it.

  For a moment, everything seemed to stop. Not just the dogs in their confused shifting, nor the kitten as it pawed the dust blindly, but the whole agitation of the village, the shuffling feet, the rippling air, even the great white clouds that floated above it all.

  In that stillness, the leader communicated his command, and on it, the other dogs turned reluctantly and broke free of the circle and went about their rounds again, sniffing and growling among the now-reanimated village. He did not look down at the kitten, nor make any gesture toward it. He didn't lick it or nudge it back under the shed. After all, he was not Lassie. Instead, he simply stepped away from it and continued on his way, now trailing the others, and never looking back, so that I was left to ponder what might explain such unexpected behavior, save the existence somewhere deep within the animal darkness of a spark inexplicable to us, an unseen star within the moral void.

  "George?"

  The voice whisked me back to the cooler reaches of North America. "Yes?"

  "What were you thinking about?"

  It was Arlo. He'd spotted me sitting in front of the newspaper office and strolled over.

  "You looked like you were in a trance," he added now.

  "I did?"

  "What were you thinking about?"

  I could have said "Uganda" or "a dog," but it seemed to me that I'd been thinking about neither of these. "How little we know," I said. "I was thinking about how little we know ... for sure."

  But even this didn't seem exactly right in terms of the true direction of my mind.

  "How little we know about what?" Arlo asked.

  I knew the answer that would most appeal to him, and so, quite cynically, I gave it.

  "About Katherine," I said.

  Arlo smiled appreciatively. "Well, why don't we try to learn some more?"

  9

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, we turned onto an unpaved road that wound along a small stream lined with dry reeds. There was no discernible breeze, but they swayed anyway, and a whispery moan rose from them, barely audible, but insistent, like long rows of mourners locked in eternal grief. It was an unsettling vision. To avoid it, I switched my attention to the road ahead, watching silently as it continued along the course of the stream then curled abruptly back upon itself and disappeared into a high green wall of forest.

  The farmhouse was a plain wooden structure with a low roof and attached garage. It was typical of the time in which it had been built, with a low ceiling and small windows, not a place for weekenders in need of a summer house, but what remained of a working farm, with a barn at some distance behind the main house, along with various pens and stalls.

  We got out of the car, and the sheer richness of the air swept over me: the smell of grass and fields, the thick forest beyond them. I recalled how often smells returned me to places, and sometimes even to people, the dusty smell of Spanish villages, the flower shops in Paris. Celeste had used a particular soap, which had coated her body with the subtle aroma of lavender. Teddy's breath had been buttery, like movie-house popcorn.

  However, it was Katherine who came to me now. I could almost feel her in the little breeze that whirled around me, a farm girl who mowed the lawn and gathered eggs and probably napped in the hayloft of the old barn that stood not far from the house.

  But there was also a disturbance in this idyll, one that had to have been there for anyone who read, who peered out at the horizon, felt the wonder of the world.

  "I'll bet she was tired of this place," I said. "I'll bet she wanted to travel around, see Paris, Rome." I looked up into the wide blue sky. "I can almost feel it."

  "Feel what?" Arlo asked.

  "Her yearning," I said. "To get away. A feeling that she was trapped."

  Arlo looked at the farmhouse. "Audrey owns the place now," he said. He began walking toward the house. "She comes up here from time to time." He stopped and nodded toward the garage. "There's where Katherine was attacked." His eyes grew quite intense, like a slow-burning ember. "She started to put the key in the door. That's when he came up behind her."

  We reached the entrance to the garage and stood, facing the door that led into the house.

  "Audrey's son was sleeping in the back of the car," Arlo went on. "She didn't want to wake him. They'd had a long day, going to the fair just outside town, doing the rides, cotton candy. He fell asleep on the way home."

  "So he didn't see anything?" I asked.

  "Slept through it all," Arlo answered.

  He moved forward, and I followed him until we reached the back of the garage. He pointed to the step that led into the house. "This is exactly where thè attack took place." He nodded toward the front of the garage, a distance of perhaps forty feet. "That's where Katherine was when Cody finally woke up and found her. In the police photos, there's a wide swath of blood that leads from the step here to the front of the garage." He looked at me. "Katherine had dragged herself all that way." He seemed briefly in awe of this feat. "Her tracks told the story. She was chasing him. For all she knew, she was bleeding to death, but she kept chasing him, George." His tone hardened. "And she never stopped chasing him."

  I recognized Arlo's admiration for Katherine's determination. This was the mysterious "something" Katherine had written in her blood, a heroic, but probably dazed attempt to pursue the man who'd attacked her.

  "Katherine wasn't the usual victim," Arlo added. He remained silent for a time, as if studying the distance Katherine had dragged herself in fruitless pursuit of the unknown man who'd attacked her. "Do you ever go back to Jefferson Street, George?" he asked finally. "Jefferson between Park and Lansdale?"

  Teddy had disappeared between these two streets.

  "No," I said.

  "I think Katherine would have gone back to Jefferson Street if Teddy had been her son. I think she would have revisited all the places that reminded her of him. Just like she came back here."

  "But why did she come back here?" I asked.

  "To get her strength back, that's what she told Audrey."

  Arlo only watched silently as I glanced about.

  "Maybe she was looking for clues," I said. "Actually trying to track down the guy who attacked her. Like finding a matchbook he left behind. Some hopeless thing like that."

  "Well, it's true," Arlo said. "You always hope that you might stumble onto something." He looked at me disconsolately. "Or maybe it's just a hope for
hope you're looking for."

  With no further word, he returned to the events of the attack, walking me through it step by step before he stopped suddenly, drew a photograph from his pocket and handed it to me.

  It was a picture of Katherine after the attack, lying in a hospital bed, her head bound tightly in white cloth, little visible but her purple, swollen eyes.

  "It's the last photograph that was ever taken of her," Arlo said. "After the attack, she wouldn't allow anyone to take pictures of her. Not even Audrey."

  I tried to imagine Katherine from the little I'd read of her story: a young woman just on the verge of living a full life, but whom an unknown man had cast into a darkness as deep as a bottomless pit.

  "She must have been very angry," I said.

  Arlo nodded. "Like you are, George," he said.

  And he was right, of course. Rage had long seemed the only emotion I had left, and it was perhaps that still-burning fuel that urged me to Jefferson Street an hour or so after Arlo dropped me off at the paper.

  Normally, I would have gotten in my car and gone directly home. But the visit to the farmhouse—my first visit to an actual crime scene in many years—turned my thoughts not just to Teddy, but the last place he'd been seen alive.

  But why had I come there? That was the question I asked myself as I got out of my car and looked up Jefferson Street that night. Had I come in a hopeless search for clues? No, not at all. For I well knew that the man who'd taken my little boy was far beyond my reach, perhaps had never been within it save for those few brief moments when he'd actually been on Jefferson, somewhere between Park and Lansdale, or on some nearby side street, a man on foot, draped in a yellow rain slicker, passing this house, then that one, converging on a distant corner, a briefly halted school bus, two little boys, both laughing, one reaching to pull the bill of the other's red baseball cap, then one little boy, left behind by the other, waiting for his father as the storm raged around him. But Teddy's father had remained at 237 Jefferson, a tiny pink Victorian, where he'd stood in the front room, staring out the window, thinking not of the promise he'd made to his little boy that very morning, nor of the present rain and thunder, but of distant Extremadura in the desert wastes of Spain.