"Sorry," I said immediately. "I didn't notice how late it was."
"Audrey called," Arlo said. "She told me she gave you the rest of Katherine's story."
"That's right," I said. "But I can't read it right away."
"Why not?"
"It's a little game I'm playing with Alice," I said. "The kid with progeria. We're reading the story together, and I don't want to get ahead of her. You know, because we're trying to solve it. She likes doing that sort of thing."
"There is no solution," Arlo said. "There is only ... hope."
Hope. It struck me as a curious word, though one often repeated in Katherine's tale, a strangely vague minor theme. "Hope for what?" I asked.
"Hope for hope," Arlo answered.
"But what is—"
"You'll see," Arlo said quickly, obviously determined to cut me off. "Or not."
He had quite obviously erected a wall to any further inquiry along this line, so I returned to my original purpose. "Audrey says the police believed that Katherine committed suicide."
"That's right," Arlo said. "They figured she probably walked into the river, swam out, drowned. The current is pretty swift. The body could have been carried a long ways."
"But Audrey thinks Maldrow murdered her."
"Audrey is a devout Catholic," Arlo said. "She doesn't want to think of her best friend in Hell."
"So what do you think happened, Arlo?" I asked. "You've never actually told me what you think."
"Because I don't know."
"But you must have run a few scenarios through your mind," I said insistently.
"Well, she may have simply left town," Arlo said. "People disappear like that all the time. Just vanish. Never seen again. But why would she have wanted to do that? And why would she have left that story behind?"
"So, do you think she killed herself?" I asked.
"She may have done that," Arlo said, "but if she did, where did she do it? Maybe she swam out into the river, but we never found her body, and we dragged that river again and again."
"That leaves murder," I said.
"Yes, that's true," Arlo admitted. "She may have been murdered, just like Audrey thinks, by a guy who drove away in a trailer or a car, then buried her in some remote place or simply dropped her into a river or a lake."
"Lots of possibilities, but where do they leave us?" I asked.
"They leave us with a mystery," Arlo answered quietly. "For you and Alice to solve."
A mystery to solve.
They were intriguing words, the sort that draw you in, and they lingered with me not only after I'd hung up the phone, but in bed later that night. In fact, they were still with me the next day, as I worked on a piece about summer gardening Wyatt had tossed me nearly a month before. Between the annuals and the perennials, heather and purple violets, I thought of Katherine walking into the river or, if not that, then of her shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, in just the ghastly way, and with almost the same dread, as I'd repeatedly imagined Teddy's murder both before and after his body had been found.
Once again, I recalled the bloody room I'd visited years before, the "slasher murder" that had been committed there, how its reek had lingered in the air, weighted it and shaded it and given it a troubling and unquiet feel, not exactly eerie, and probably more figurative than real, but a distinct sense of people at the jagged edge of things, a fatal instant of closed options.
I had no way of knowing if Katherine's life had been terminated by some similarly abrupt closure, though it would later seem to me that the possibility that it had had steadily deepened in my mind during the next few hours, sent me out walking briefly as evening fell, with no direction in mind, then out driving with the same sense of having no destination, a trail of thought and movement that ultimately wound me back to Gilmore Street.
Night had fallen by then, the street fixed in a darkness that was broken only by the faintly illuminated windows of other houses, along with the more distant light from the streetlights at nearby Cantibell.
I don't know how long I sat in my car that evening, staring silently at the house from which Katherine had vanished. I knew that criminals often returned to the scenes of their crimes, sometimes to relive them, sometimes to gloat at having gotten away with the terrible things they'd done. But I also knew that others returned for a completely different reason, returned, as we so often do in memory, because it was at this particular place that our lives veered off, sharply and irrevocably, and from there went wholly wrong.
"Are you looking for someone?"
An almost-blinding light suddenly hurtled toward me from the left, illuminating the interior of my car, a beam so intense it seemed almost instantly to raise the temperature of the air around me. The voice behind the light carried hints of both fear and aggression, like a small animal making a great, but empty show, before a vastly larger one.
"You've been sitting here a long time."
I shifted my head, trying to see a face behind the light, but the surrounding halo was too intense to penetrate.
Then the light pulled back and shifted to the right, revealing the face of a woman or, I should say, half a woman's face, as her right side was cloaked in the darkness of the hood.
"Neighborhood watch," the woman explained.
I knew that the Winthrop Examiner followed the police blotter carefully, reported every little blip of crime. There was no reason to keep watch on Gilmore Street.
"I'm George Gates," I told her. "I work for the Examiner."
The light drew back a bit farther, then angled away and toward the ground, the two of us now fixed in a faded beam. I got out of the car and nodded toward Katherine's house. "I'm working on a story about the woman who used to live in that house. Her name was Katherine Carr."
The light flicked off, so that we now stood in darkness, the woman's face visible only as a grayish smudge. We remained in the darkness for only the briefest moment; then the light came on again, but oddly angled, so that I could see only the right folds of the woman's hood.
"Have you lived around here a long time?" I asked.
"Always," the woman said. The gray blur of her face emerged from the blackness, lingered there briefly, swam back into darkness, then reappeared, now slightly more distinct so that I saw the creases at her eyes and around her mouth. "They never found her, did they?" she asked.
"No, she vanished."
The woman smiled, but faintly, edgily, without the slightest sense of amusement. "'The neighborhood freak' he called her."
"He?"
"The man who used to follow her," the woman said. "He lived on the other side of Gilmore Street. At the very end." Her voice tightened. "He called her a freak, but he didn't get away with it."
"What do you mean?"
The woman's smile did not so much trail away as drop off precipitously, like a body over a cliff. "I mean he didn't get away with it," she repeated.
I felt the small chill one sees in old detective movies, when the story opens slightly or takes an unexpected turn, usually by accident or coincidence, but at the same time in a way that seems eerily ordained, as if it were here, at precisely this spot in the tale, that the puppet master jerked the string.
The woman jiggled the light briefly, slices of her face dancing in and out of its yellow glow. "They found him all balled up in the alley behind O'Shea's." The lamp drifted to the right, leaving the woman in utter darkness. "After that he became sort of a hermit."
"Where is he now?"
"Potter's Lake," the woman said.
I knew it well. The police had dragged it in their hopeless search for Teddy.
"Does this man have a name?" I asked.
"Ronald," the woman said. Nothing broke the blackness that deepened around her, so thick and impenetrable she might, at that moment, have been only a voice. "Ronald Duckworth."
13
HE WASN'T HARD to find, but it wasn't until after work the next evening that I headed for the house on Potter's Lake. I'd worked all that
day in the midst of an ordinary world, surrounded by small-town merchants and laborers and politicians. I'd attended a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce and duly recorded its many services, then gone on to watch the mayor break ground for the new city hall. It was in every way a life lived in the open, the one I'd spent the day recording, and it was perhaps its stark visibility that seemed in gravest contrast to the man who drew back the door of the house on Potter's Lake, a man so gaunt he seemed almost intangible, the vague transparency of himself.
"Ronald Duckworth?" I asked.
He nodded very softly, barely a movement at all.
"My name is George Gates," I told him. "I'm a reporter for the Winthrop Examiner:"
He said nothing, nor made any move to step away from the door, allow me into the ramshackle house, little more than a fishing shack, he occupied on the banks of Potter's Lake. I was not even sure he'd heard me. More than that. He seemed in some way not actually to be there, a creature truly in the world, so that I recalled a story Celeste had once told me. She'd been standing along the sidelines of a college football game, glanced up into the bleachers, and seen a young man with hair so blond it was very nearly white. She'd smiled and waved to him warmly, a greeting he'd returned with no less a sense of old familiarity. A few minutes later, he'd joined her on the sidelines, where they'd talked just long enough, as Celeste said, to realize that they'd never met. There'd been no hint of flirtation in any of what passed between them. It was all, as Celeste put it, "like family." His last name had been Hamsun, like the famous Norwegian writer, and as their talk continued, they'd laughed at how strong it was, this feeling that they'd always known each other. Then they'd parted, never to meet again, so that it was years later, when Celeste was going through her dead mother's old letters, that she'd realized that her maternal grandfather had changed her name upon coming to America, changed it to Harris ... from Hamsun.
Facing me silently through a rusty screen door, Ronald Duckworth had that same sense of being more the faintly remaining residue of some long-ago eeriness than an actual flesh-and-blood human, being.
"I've come to talk to you about Katherine Carr," I told him.
He started to close the door, but the door stopped, as if an unseen bolt had shot up from the floor to keep it in place. Duckworth released an exhausted sigh, like someone giving in to a vastly unpleasant certainty, and with that, he stepped back and the screen door glided open smoothly, effortlessly, almost as if in response to the pull of something other than Duckworth's hand.
"Come in, then," he said in an utterly resigned tone.
I stepped inside and was immediately taken aback by the sheer austerity in which Duckworth lived, a single room with a wood stove, walls hung not with family portraits, but with hooks and nets and coils of fishing line. There was not so much as a calendar by which he could record the passage of his days. A few shelves held his store of canned goods—mostly beans, along with a few tins of coffee, salt, sugar. Everything in the room, the shelves, the few chairs, the two small card tables, lay beneath a gloomy patina of dust, and the single light that hung from the water-stained ceiling was without a shade. Small mounds of rusty hooks were scattered across the top of one of the tables. They'd been arranged by size, but none was very big. A rifle leaned in one corner of the room, but it was only an old .22 caliber, fit for nothing beyond birds and squirrels. Ronald Duckworth had clearly spent his life in pursuit of pitiably small game.
"I got a smoker out back," he said, like a man attempting to demonstrate that he had more than what he could show, a richer reserve of options, greater possibilities. "Who told you about me?"
"Someone I met on Gilmore Street."
Duckworth looked at me doubtfully. "There's nobody left on Gilmore that'd remember me."
"It was a woman," I said.
"A woman?" Duckworth dropped into one of the two chairs, a spindly rocker that like the other furniture in the room appeared to have been retrieved from the local dump. "Must be Edna May Gifford. Crazy old bat. That's the only woman I ever knew on Gilmore Street."
"Except for Katherine Carr," I said.
Duckworth winced, as if the sound of her name worked like a knife I'd jabbed him with. "I didn't know her. I just knew what everybody else knew about her."
"Which was what?" I asked.
Duckworth's small eyes narrowed, and for a moment I thought he might roll them toward the ceiling in a parody of thoughtfulness, but they held to me steadily, like tiny vises.
"I knew she kept herself locked up most of the time," he said. The thin slit of his mouth turned down at the edges, but it was not a sneer or a smirk, and there was nothing angry in his expression. Instead he seemed infinitely weary, though of what remained unclear. When he spoke, his voice held the same ragged emptiness. "She didn't go out except for these short trips to buy food and things. She was afraid of everything."
"Was she afraid of you?" I asked.
Duckworth glared at me. "I was in the hospital when she disappeared," he snarled. "I was there for nearly a week."
"Did the police ever talk to you about her? Were you a suspect?"
He shrugged. "She had my name in some writing she did. The cops came to see me, but I was in the hospital, so I couldn't have had nothing to do with whatever happened to her."
"Why were you in the hospital?"
"Because I got beat up." He appeared to be gathering the loose strings of a story in his mind, one I sensed he'd rarely told, so that as he began to tell it, I took out my notebook, suspecting that he was making it up as he went along and would tell it differently the next time, changes my notes would reveal easily. "Because this guy beat me up."
He stopped, took a quick breath, almost a gasp, like a swimmer coming up for air. At that instant he seemed like a man who felt himself utterly outside the world other people knew, his life lived at the whim of something beyond him, himself powerless against its brutal but unseen sway, waiting for it to come for him again as a man might wait in his cell for the torturer's return.
"He came out of nowhere," he said. "Just swooped down on me." He appeared to be astonished by his own words, like a man telling a story he knew to be true, yet could not believe. "That's what it seemed like, anyway. I was just going home from the bar."
"What bar?"
"O'Shea's," Duckworth said. "I used to work there, clean up the place. I was going home from work when he just swooped down."
Swooped? As a description it was so odd that I found myself imagining not a man at all, but some murderous bird of prey.
"It was in that little alley that runs from Pryor to Gilmore Street," Duckworth continued.
It was as if a terrible weight had fallen upon him from a great height, he said, a weight that had pressed him flat onto the gravelly earth of the alley, so that he'd felt his entire body reduced to powder beneath its enormity.
"I felt like a cracker in somebody's fist," Duckworth added. "Just a little cracker all crumbled up."
But the weight had pressed him down and down farther, until he'd felt "deeper than people in mines. Deeper than people under caved-in mountains and mudslides."
So deep, he'd begun to suffocate.
"I couldn't breathe. I was ... dead."
Then—abruptly—he was in midair, hurtling toward the cement wall that bordered the alley.
"It felt like I stuck to that wall, like a piece of gum, or like a tomato would, just smashed and sticking on the wall," Duckworth went on. "And while I was smashed up on that wall, it was like I was being shot and stabbed and strangled, all at the same time. Like I was being beat over the head and kicked in the ribs and had my knees busted with a hammer. And there was things being pulled over my head and tied around my eyes and stuffed down my throat, old rags that smelled like they was dipped in kerosene, and they exploded just like that, and it was like my whole face was peeling off in fire. Which I thought it was until—"
It stopped—abruptly stopped—the whole murderous machine suddenly turned off, all i
ts gears stilled, no humming motor, no whirling blades and blunt instruments, an infernal mechanism now motionless and silent.
"I wasn't getting hit with bricks and bats and hammers," Duckworth said. "No more stabbing me with knives and broken bottles or strangling me with all those different cords and ropes."
And so I thought Duckworth's strange story must surely be over at that point, but it hadn't ended for him yet.
"Then it was just the cold," he said. "This awful cold." He lifted his hand to the side of his face and jaggedly drew down a faintly trembling finger. "And it was like I was bleeding out. I could feel blood pouring down my face and soaking my shirt. It was like I was being drained." He turned his hand slowly toward me, the fingertip he dragged down the side of his face completely clean yet oddly glistening. "Then I just ... waited." Duckworth gazed at me with dark wonder.
"For what?" I asked.
He looked like a man confronting a truth almost too brutal to confront. "For nothing," he said. "From then on ... for nothing."
14
THE DRIVE FROM Duckworth's shack to Winthrop Hospital took me through the center of town, past the park, where the little rock grotto's appearance struck me as curiously sudden, almost like an apparition. I'd passed it many times, of course, but on this occasion I noticed its peculiar design for the first time, that it was not just a vaguely conical pile of stones, but a kind of outdoor chapel with a stone table at the center. There was a kneeling bench before it, also made of stone. There were no religious images in or around the grotto, but even so it gave off the sense of a place one might go in spiritual distress, so that I once again imagined Katherine on the last night of her life, pacing back and forth as the river fog closed in around her.
In an instant, I'd swept by it. The grotto vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and yet its afterimage was still floating through my mind when I got to Alice's room.
"Hi," I said.
She glanced at the clock that hung opposite her bed. "I didn't think you were coming." There was an unmistakable tone of resignation and acceptance in this, so that I sensed that she was long accustomed to promises made but not kept.
The Fate of Katherine Carr Page 11