The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  In that state, shaken by those fears, I came to realize that there is a terrifying uncertainty in every oddly open door, in every object that appears in a place different from where it was last set down, in every disappearing key and earring. But stranger still is the play of mind that asks of every ordinary object, every fork and tweezers, In what dark ways might these be used? and by that turn imagines every drop of water as a drowning pool and every falling leaf as cover for a shallow grave.

  But for all that, I had come this far, forced myself to address these fears, and so felt bound to proceed.

  I got out of my car and headed toward Maldrow's trailer. A wind rose around me as I closed in upon his door. It was sudden and I felt curiously stirred, like an animal awakened. It blew a low, tumbling wall of leaves and forest debris over my feet, then twisted and coiled upward with such violence I thought of the dust devils that blew up in the desert wastes, spun viciously for a moment, then tore apart in their own furious gusts.

  I stopped a few feet from the door, now feeling even more like an intruder. But Maldrow had summoned me here, and I could not turn and leave. Suddenly I felt a force like a hand at my back. It pressed me forward, so that step by reluctant step I closed in on the trailer's threshold, its interior now coming into view, revealing its own spectacular oddity, walls that fluttered like the wings of a thousand faded yellow butterflies. I thought what I saw must not be real, but merely a weird vision thrown up by my mind. And yet I inched closer, straining for a better look, the open door revealing more and more of the trailer's bizarre interior, my body growing more tense and fearful as I moved closer, so that suddenly, when the voice stopped me, I felt a wave of terror pass over me.

  "Katherine."

  I whirled around to find Maldrow standing behind me, a flashlight in his hand, its beam washing over me in a yellow wave.

  "You found me," he said.

  His jacket was slung over his shoulders like a cape, a pose that allowed the luridness of my own imagination full gallop, Maldrow now a leathery, night-bound creature, a vampire of popular myth, pale and fanged.

  "Good," he said softly.

  I felt my lips part, but no sound came from my mouth.

  Maldrow glanced down toward my still-trembling hands.

  "You must be cold," he said, then stepped around me, lifted himself onto the trailer's cement step, and opened the door. "Come in."

  Come in.

  Such simple words of invitation, and yet I suddenly envisioned legions of vanished women, the endless female slaughter, their bodies thrown in ditches, over bridges, eased from the sides of gently weaving boats. I saw them tossed into rushing streams, over granite cliffs, down dusty wooden stairs, saw them rolled up in carpets, blood-soaked quilts, glistening black plastic bags, saw them rudely covered with debris, stuffed into trunks, buried under slabs of hardening concrete. As from the end of an impossibly long tunnel, I heard their echoing pleas for help.

  "I can't," I told him. "I can't."

  Maldrow pressed the door farther open and stepped back to give me a full view of the interior of the trailer. "You have to see them all."

  At first it was revealed in tiny dots of color, like a pointillist painting. Then the separate dots came together, and I saw a strange mosaic of women's faces, all of them bearing the mark of their pain, the depth of their wounds, the sign of the slasher still in their eyes, a jagged scar left on their souls.

  "Come," Maldrow said quietly, then stepped back to let me enter. "Come and see what I have done."

  Alice looked up from the page and though her voice was weak, it seemed full of certainty. "Now I know the twist," she said.

  "What twist?"

  "In Katherine's story."

  I stared at her silently.

  "There were pictures in the man's room, remember?" she explained. "The room Maldrow took Katherine to see."

  "Yes, there were."

  "Pictures on the floor," Alice continued. "And around his bed. Pictures of women who..." She stopped and I saw a terrible revelation swim into her eyes. "I know who Maldrow is."

  I leaned forward. "Who?"

  Alice appeared surprised that I had not yet guessed the dark twist she had uncovered. "Maldrow," she said with that sparkle of discovery that follows the moment when one believes he has found a story's solution, "is the unknown man."

  Part III

  "Ah, so I was right, your story is really about Alice," Mr. Mayawati says with a broad smile. "How she solved Katherine's case." He laughs. "An excellent tale. And Alice must have been quite pleased with herself."

  Several parrots burst from the trees across the river, alarmed by something they sense or see, but which remains invisible to me.

  Mr. Mayawati follows their flight. "But it is sad, is it not, that Katherine fell victim to such a one as Maldrow?" He takes an immaculately white handkerchief from his pocket and swabs his neck and face. "Still, I think Alice must have been quite pleased when she discovered that Maldrow was the unknown man." He laughs deeply, sonorously, like the beating of a great drum. "Such a clever girl, your Alice. And such a clever resolution, no?"

  "A familiar one," I tell him.

  His face takes on the expression of one who thought himself clever, but now is not so sure. "Familiar? In what way?"

  "In that the presumed hero is revealed to have been the villain all along," I answer.

  "As Maldrow betrays Katherine," Mr. Mayawati says thoughtfully. "Ah, yes. Familiar." He returns the handkerchief to his pocket, though almost instantly his face blossoms again with tiny beads of sweat. "But there must be a solution, is that not so?" he asks with an overheated mournfulness. "And what can one do when one reaches the end of a story?"

  "But we haven't reached the end," I tell him.

  Mr. Mayawati is clearly surprised. "So Alice didn't find the-"

  "No." I glance ahead, over the boat's gently surging bow, to where a red post marks the extent of our inward journey. "There is more to the mystery."

  "More to the mystery." Mr. Mayawati removes his hat and fans his face. "So Katherine's story has a better solution than the one little Alice thought she had uncovered? A better ending?"

  "It depends upon who hears it," I tell him.

  Mr. Mayawati glances toward the front of the boat, the steadily narrowing river. "But we will soon reach the central station," he says anxiously. "And I have preparations to make."

  "Then make them."

  He appears to think that in some way he has offended me.

  "It is not that I don't wish to hear the rest of the story," he assures me. "It is just that I have so little time left to kill."

  "So little time left to kill," I repeat. "Yes."

  "But I do wish to hear the end," Mr. Mayawati adds quickly. Then, in a broad gesture of polite accommodation, he eases back in his chair, lifts his legs, and rests his feet on the boat's rusty rail. "So, tell me more of Katherine's tale. Or is the story really about Alice, as I suspect it is."

  "It is about both of them," I tell him.

  Mr. Mayawati brings his large hands behind his head and leans it back into their sweaty cup. "Then continue, please," he says.

  18

  "YOU ALWAYS LOOK for walls," Arlo said as we strolled down Main Street the next morning. "I noticed that in your book."

  He was right. There was always something about walls that intrigued me. Other travel writers loved towers, castles, cemeteries, found something more evocative in them than they found in other structures. But for me, as Arlo had correctly pointed out, it was walls. I recalled the thick defensive ones of Avila, how they rose like one vast shield out of the barren plain that surrounded them. The walls of Londonderry were gray and impenetrable, like the religious hatred they'd kept both out and in. The short, irregular walls of Inishmore mirrored the island's ragged poverty, so vast a labor, in such bone-chilling cold, with no end but bare survival. I'd even liked fallen walls, the ones that had enclosed Loudon, for example, where a doubter and a witch-hunting p
riest had once sat in the same room, as Huxley wrote, but not in the same universe.

  "Why is that, George?" Arlo asked.

  "I guess it's because they seem so real to me," I answered.

  "Of course, some are invisible," Arlo said. "Mental walls."

  We reached the bandstand and as we sat down on one of the benches that faced it, I thought of the night before, Alice's bleak revelation of Maldrow's villainy, the slow torture through which he seemed to be putting Katherine.

  "I had a mental block about Maldrow," I said. "It never occurred to me that he might have been the unknown man."

  "Who thinks that?" Arlo asked.

  "Alice."

  I knew that it was a melodramatic turn one either believed or didn't, as I went on to tell Arlo, but in Alice, I feared that it might have struck deeper than a story, and in that way touched upon the cat-and-mouse cruelty of life itself.

  "But life is cruel in that way," Arlo said.

  "Yes, it is," I agreed. "But I don't think a dying child needs to be reminded of it."

  "So what did you do?"

  "I reminded her that what Katherine had written was just a story. I told her that there was no evidence that any of it was true."

  Arlo looked at me darkly. "Then where is Katherine?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I admitted. "No one does, or ever will."

  Arlo made no argument against the hopelessness of this conclusion, and we moved on to other matters, mostly talk of Warren Maizey's capture, a case he'd never expected to be solved. Then, quite suddenly, he said, "Let's talk more tomorrow."

  He had never made an appointment before, and I wondered why he'd chosen to do so now.

  "At the diner, around noon?" he added.

  "Okay."

  With that he rose and headed out into the park, where, I noticed, he paused at the little rock grotto.

  I had just drawn my gaze away from him and settled it on the river when my cell phone rang.

  "George? Wyatt. I have a story for you."

  I assumed the new story would have to do with some new Store opening, or a lost dog, or perhaps a cat that had shown up suddenly after having been missing for days or months or years.

  "It seems that Hugo Tanner wanted to be cremated," Wyatt said.

  I saw nothing particularly newsworthy in this.

  "He wants his ashes scattered, and I thought you might be the guy to scatter them," Wyatt added.

  "Me? Why? I barely knew Hugo."

  "Well, he didn't have anybody else, evidently," Wyatt said. "And you wrote that profile, so I thought if you wanted to do the obit, it'd make a good ending. You with his ashes, scattering them to the wind."

  Wyatt was right. A somber ash-scattering scene would make a heaven-sent ending for the obituary of a nut. The problem for me was that such rituals had always struck me as the vain attempt of a transient creature to seek a famished immortality by mingling its powdery remains with the permanence of a planet that, if truth be told, was not permanent, either. That Hugo would embrace such a mystical contrivance with all his madly searching heart did not surprise me. There'd been hardly a fruitcake trail he hadn't followed to its bleak end, every paranormal idiocy, by his blurred lights, worthy of full investigation. Still, there'd been a likable quality to him, along with a curious lack of guile, and he'd been generous enough to allow me to write my profile of him despite the cold skepticism he must have seen in my eyes.

  "Okay," I told Wyatt. "I'll do it."

  "You can pick his ashes up tomorrow morning," Wyatt said. "They'll be at Robinson's."

  "Where does he want them scattered?"

  "In the river. By that little rock chapel."

  I glanced over toward that same location, expecting to find Arlo still lingering there, but he was gone.

  "The grotto?" I asked. "Why there?"

  "Who knows?" Wyatt answered. "Air. Water. The Elements. Reason wasn't Hugo's thing."

  He'd called himself a seeker, and the next morning, on the way to pick up Hugo's ashes, I remembered the way he'd met me at his door, then ushered me into the Sanctum.

  It had never been more than an old farmhouse, with a predictable warren of small rooms. There was a large enclosed porch, where, in the old days, a traveling stranger could find refuge for the night. Hugo claimed that strangers did occasionally make use of his porch, and for that reason he kept it stocked with a porcelain water bowl and clean towels, along with packs of beef jerky and a box of Ritz crackers.

  He had been an indefatigable forager of the town dump, gleaning clothes and furniture and bottles and pans on an almost-daily basis. From its smelly mounds, he'd retrieved, it was said, everything he needed, save for the food he ate. This he bought in bulk, enormous bottles of ketchup, for example, and huge cans of green beans and corn, along with family-size packages of preformed hamburger patties. He'd toyed with vegetarianism, he told me, and had briefly even been a vegan, an experience that had taught him only that he was a shameless omnivore. Nor had Hugo exhibited a particularly benevolent attitude toward those fellow creatures he did not actually eat. He swatted flies with delicious abandon, and once during our interview hurled a book at a scampering cockroach.

  "I'm not a goddamn hippie," he blurted at almost the moment I'd taken out my notebook. "Be sure you make that clear. I'm not a hippie. I'm a scientist!"

  But it was only weird science that had ever interested Hugo, a freakish fascination with bizarre forms of cosmic energy, the healing power of various rays of light. He'd studied hypnotism, he told me, and levitation and paranormal communications. "I go where others dare not go," he told me grandly, "into the Invisible."

  And then, of course, there was the matter of ghosts, all of whom were restless, according to Hugo. He called them Residuals and claimed that they were created by a force he'd named the Unresolved, an energy produced by the lingering pain of their unsolved murders. "There are no happy Residuals," he said. "Their substance is formed by violent death, and their job is to get even, make things right." He smiled. "I'm not New Age, George, I'm Dark Age."

  But for all that I remembered about Hugo Tanner, I knew that there was much I had forgotten, so I decided to revisit his house as a way of refreshing my memory of the place, and of him, before writing the obit Wyatt had just assigned to me.

  Hugo had made a point of telling me that he never locked his house, having nothing to steal, so it didn't surprise me that I had no trouble entering his Sanctum once again.

  Inside, I found the place very little changed from three years before, when I'd first written about him. There was the expected clutter, the stacks of books and magazines, the Dr. Frankenstein lab equipment, all of it scattered about randomly with no visible sign that Hugo had ever actually differentiated between a kitchen, a reading room, a bedroom, or an experimental laboratory.

  For a time I paced among the rooms, imagining the endless hours Hugo had spent in his crazed pursuits. Neighbors had long noticed that his lights often burned through the night, so there was little doubt that he had sleeplessly pursued his pseudo-scientific inquiries with a mad scientist's zeal. In one room I found vats of animal parts floating in formaldehyde, along with a vast collection of tiny bones—birds, for the most part—as well as a generous sampling of squirrels and mice. He had ineptly attempted taxidermy, and the reconstruction of skeletons, perhaps seeking the little room in which was sealed the spark of life he'd spoken of in the interview and which, in human beings, became the soul. Another room housed Hugo's collection of plants and seeds, and tray upon tray of withered vegetation, everything from orchids to lettuce, with little labeling done to identify what the now-dead organisms had once been.

  I found the remains of other scientific studies, dried animal skins hung on webs of gray cord, in another, a huge collection of what appeared to be soil samples. At the far back of the house, I opened a door to find scores of plastic models of various parts of the human body, the sort one saw in doctors' offices or bought in model shops. Visible Woman stoo
d practically holding hands with Visible Man, the tiny model of a human fetus lying at their feet.

  It was not an illuminating tour, of course, but it had served its purpose in refreshing my memory of Hugo's place, and so for that reason, was worth the effort. Still, I found no reason to linger after this brief tour, and so I turned and headed back toward the front of the house, idly glancing into one of Hugo's many overstuffed closets, which is where I saw it, dimly lit among the otherwise-indistinguishable clutter.

  A yellow rain slicker.

  There is such a thing as an arctic moment, when one not only feels the cold blast of a sudden shock, but that one's life has been blown around a corner by it, a coincidence so profoundly unlikely it seems both impossible and plotted from the beginning of time.

  And I thought, He's found!

  My fingers began to tremble, then my knees, then all of me, every squirming cell. For the prospect before me was both too horrible and too strangely hopeful for one body to contain.

  I don't know precisely when, but at some moment I began actually to move toward the open closet door, its packed, bulging contents, the little sliver of shiny yellow that shimmered among the dull dark woolens that surrounded and nearly smothered it.

  At the door of the closet, I leaned forward and parted the other coats and jackets Hugo had retrieved from the town dump over the years, reached for the slicker, and with a weird, unsettling tenderness, drew it out and cradled it, almost like a dead child, in my arms.

  At last I lifted it up and turned it slowly in the light, first pulling it open, then turning it inside out. What was I looking for? A laundry tag, perhaps. The owner's name sewn in the lining, or written on the inside collar with a ballpoint pen. Or was it some tiny drop of blood I sought? My last touch of Teddy.

  I found none of these things. The label was torn out. There was no name inscribed inside it. I found no drop of blood. And so at last I went through the pockets, now looking for a note, a card, a key, perhaps even the little red bird whistle Teddy had taken with him that morning, a trinket I'd bought long ago in Cracow.