The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  Charlie was already at his desk when I arrived at the office a few minutes later.

  "Morning, George." He took a single sheet of white paper, crumpled it in his hand, and tossed it in a perfect arc toward the wastebasket a few feet away. "I was once pretty good at basketball," he said, though he seemed surprised that he'd actually made this latest goal. "But not pro material." He stared almost wistfully at the wastebasket, the paper he'd thrown into it clearly visible through its wire mesh. "Not even close to pro material." He appeared to pull himself out of an old dead dream, gripped his knees softly, and rose to his feet. "So, what are you working on now, George?"

  I shrugged. "Just Hugo Tanner's obit."

  Something in my tone clearly focused his attention. "What about that profile of Arlo McBride?"

  I shook my head. "It didn't go anywhere."

  "And that little girl with—"

  I recalled the way Alice's head had lolled the night before, almost too heavy, it seemed, for her to hold up. "She's almost gone."

  Charlie nodded. "You know, George, if you don't have anything on your plate, how about covering Warren Maizey's funeral? Wyatt tossed it to me, but I just got a great source on that prostitution ring in Kingston, and I'd already arranged for a meeting."

  "Where are they burying him?" I asked.

  "The town cemetery." Charlie glanced at his watch. "You'll need to be there in ten minutes."

  It would be a distraction, I realized, a way of chasing Alice from my thoughts, however briefly. "Okay," I said.

  A rather large crowd had already gathered by the time I arrived at the town cemetery, mostly reporters and local officials, but also a withered old couple who huddled together beneath a large elm and whom I recognized as the parents of Eden Taub. I'd seen their picture in the Winthrop Examiner, of course, but I think I would have recognized them anyway because they had a look I'd often seen in my bathroom mirror: grief that is also an accusation, a child death's for which, however inadvertent and unintended, one must finally be held responsible. I had little doubt that there were mornings when they rose from their beds and saw Eden as I'd so often seen Teddy, standing in the hallway or by a window, pale, silent as Teddy always was, though with a terrible question in his eyes: Why didn't you come for me?

  I felt a deep inner quaking, but suppressed it the way I always did, by concentrating on this latest assignment, the same means by which I held the ground I retook each morning, like a soldier in a battle that never ends.

  The crowd was raggedly composed, as I noticed, reporters idling together, officials huddled with their own kind. There was the usual scattering of the merely curious as well, townspeople who'd no doubt followed Eden Taub's case through the years, and had now come to see this bleak but final resolution of it.

  I took out my notebook and was scribbling various observations into it when the hearse bearing Maizey's body appeared in the distance. It passed slowly beneath the cemetery's iron gate, an old black relic from Robinson's Mortuary that probably had been selected for its sheer lack of elegance. Who, after all, could possibly care how Warren Maizey was delivered to the little slit in the earth that would eternally contain him?

  The crowd watched as the hearse made a wide turn, then circled around to where a group of gravediggers waited for it, all of them in ordinary work-clothes, open-collared shirts with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, laborers who'd probably been unloading bricks or lumber only moments before, Maizey's burial just another job.

  When the hearse came to a stop, the gravediggers closed in upon the rear door, then waited for the driver to come around and open it. When he did, they unceremoniously hauled Maizey's plain wooden coffin out of the back, heaved it onto their collective shoulders, then bore it to the grave with something a good deal less than military precision.

  At that point, the crowd closed in upon the grave. I did the same, and it was then I saw Arlo take his place at the head of what appeared to be a small contingent of retired detectives.

  He didn't see me in the surrounding crowd, or if he did, gave no indication of it. His head was bowed slightly, though clearly not in prayer. Instead, he seemed to be following Maizey's descent into the ground, for it was only after the coffin hit bottom and the lowering ropes had been pulled up that he lifted his head again.

  I'd expected a priest or some other religious figure to step forward at that point, offer a prayer, ask God to forgive even Warren Maizey's blackened soul. But to my surprise, it was Arlo who evidently had been designated to speak, probably by Eden's family since, as I now recalled, he'd been the lead investigator in their daughter's case. At any rate, as he stepped forward, his face was suddenly caught in a ray of sunlight.

  "I don't know why a man like Warren Maizey was ever allowed to live," he said. He glanced about the crowd, stopping from time to time at what I took to be a familiar face, perhaps some old veteran of the force, or one, like me, whose life he'd touched. "And more than that, I don't know why, given what he did to Eden Taub, he's been free all these years, became an old man, and finally got sick and died just like anyone else." He shook his head. "But when I think about Maizey never getting caught, I make myself think of something I once read. It was about a couple of young men. They were named Leopold and Loeb. They were an evil pair who killed a little boy, took his body out into the woods, stripped it, and dumped it in a culvert. At some point during all that, Leopold dropped his glasses near that boy's body, and because of that, he got caught." His gaze suddenly settled upon me. "Could it be that some unseen hand reached into that boy's jacket and flipped out that pair of glasses?" He held his attention on me a moment longer, and in that brief interval his eyes took on an odd twinkle. "That's my hope, anyway, and hope—or at least the hope for hope—is the one thing we should all still have at the end."

  "It comes from Katherine's story," Arlo said. "That Leopold and Loeb stuff."

  "It must be near the end of it, then," I said.

  "Yes, it is," Arlo said.

  We'd walked from the cemetery, taken a table at the small coffee shop, ordered, and after that talked briefly about Warren Maizey, which had finally led me to mention his talk at the gravesite.

  "We're almost at the end," I said. "Alice and I. Just one more section to go." I shrugged. "I hope it has a good ending, Arlo. Alice would be disappointed if it had some phony twist."

  "Phony twist?" Arlo asked. "Like what?"

  "Like if Maldrow ends up trying to kill her, and she knocks the gun out of his hand and kills him instead. That sort of typical mystery ending. Or somebody shows up to save Katherine in the nick of time. Somebody you wouldn't expect. The guy on the bus, maybe, who ends up the hero, somehow. Or even that creep, Ronald Duckworth." I thought a moment longer, then added, "Or Cody. Or Audrey. Maybe it turns out they've been running relay, keeping an eye on Katherine, so they're there to save her just in time. An ending like that would really disappoint Alice."

  Arlo peered at me silently.

  "It's worse, isn't it?" I asked. "Katherine's ending is even worse than the ones I've just mentioned."

  Suddenly Arlo seemed very weary, like a man who'd failed a vital mission. "Maybe you're not the right man to have read Katherine's story after all, George," he said. "Maybe you never were."

  For the rest of the day, I worked on Hugo Tanner's obit. First I reread my earlier profile; then I looked through the photographs I'd taken during the tour Hugo had given me of his place. The interior of his house had looked far different then, less cluttered and certainly less chaotic, though the first hints of Hugo's incontestable OCD were already beginning to show in five-foot towers of old magazines and milk crates overflowing with all manner of small bottles.

  I thought of all the bizarre formulas Hugo must have tried, the potions he'd concocted, always trying to prove the existence of paranormal communications, magical cures, unseen worlds. In the end, it had been an obsession that had expelled him from society, made him a freak. And yet, as it seemed to me, it was a freakishness
whose starry mantle he'd worn defiantly to the end.

  It was late in the afternoon before I finished the piece and took it in to Wyatt.

  "The curtains were sprinkled with glitter in Hugo Tanner's house," Wyatt read, "star-lit and sparkling..." He stopped, completed the first line silently to himself, then read it aloud, "... like the robes of Merlin." He smiled. "You're always good at first lines, George."

  "Sometimes they come quickly," I said, then heard that long-ago rumble of thunder and the thud of rain, along with the dry winds of Extremadura. "Sometimes they don't."

  Wyatt returned to the piece, read it through silently, then placed it in what he called the Ship and Bill file, which meant that it was ready for the copyeditor.

  "What do you think Hugo was looking for in all his crazy experiments?" he asked lightly, with no expectation of an actual answer, as one might ask why a particular lunatic had chosen to think himself Christ rather than Napoleon.

  And yet, I thought I had an answer, so I gave it.

  "He was looking for proof," I said.

  "Of what?"

  "The usual nonsense," I answered. "Angels, goblins, little people." I thought of Arlo's talk at Warren Maizey's grave. "The unseen hand."

  Wyatt shook his head. "But he never found any proof," he said. "So what, for all his effort, did he leave behind?"

  I looked at the one page I'd written: Hugo Tanner's fate recorded in a few short paragraphs.

  "Just the story of his search for it," I answered quietly, thinking of Katherine's story now, oddly dreading to read the end of it. "Nothing more."

  24

  ALICE WAS SLEEPING when I came into her room at just after eight that night, and I chose not to wake her. Instead I slumped down in the chair a few feet from her bed and waited. She now seemed smaller than ever, her wrinkled face barely visible in the depths of her pillow. Her breath was very weak and a little ragged, not unlike my father's, who, at nearly eighty, had been dying of the same terrible confluence of diseases that were killing Alice at twelve.

  In my past visits, she'd appeared quite calm, her body for the most part still; but that night, as I sat in the shadowy light of her room, she was quite visibly fretful, constantly jerking her legs or clenching her fists, so that she seemed tormented, either by dreams or by her body's unconscious-but-continuing desire to live.

  It was perhaps an hour before she opened her eyes, first languidly, then with what appeared to be a pure act of will.

  "Hi, George," she said softly.

  I nodded. "I didn't want to wake you."

  She labored to pull herself upright. I stood up, walked to her bed, took one of the pillows, and tucked it behind her back.

  "Is that better?" I asked.

  She leaned back into the pillow, her body so light it hardly made an impression in its folds. Her breathing was very soft, like her voice, and seemed hardly to carry the words she said: "Did you bring the end of the story?"

  "Yes." I pulled the chair close to her bedside and took the last of Katherine's pages from my briefcase. "Shall I read it now?"

  She nodded slowly, and I began:

  THEN

  At last I arrived at the little grotto beside the river where Maldrow had asked me to meet him. I'd vainly hoped to find him there waiting for me, but the place was deserted. I was alone in the river's mist.

  I don't know how long I waited, but it could not have been very long, certainly not long enough for me to doubt that Maldrow would come.

  But when he came, he seemed older than before, slightly hunched, his eyes sunken, his face a web of wrinkles.

  "How old are you, really?" I asked.

  Layers of secrecy seemed to peel away from him like old skins, and yet he made no effort to answer my question, but instead drew me beneath his arm and gently turned me toward the river. "This way," he said.

  We walked a few paces, then stopped. In the distance, through the gloomy mist, I could hear the lapping of the river, very soft and rhythmic, like a heart.

  For a little while, we stood in silence, facing the blank screen of the unseen river. Then Maldrow lifted his arm and pointed out into the thick, rolling fog that approached us. "Look there," he said.

  With that word, both fog and river vanished, and we stood in a shadowy wood.

  "Look there," Maldrow repeated.

  I looked in the direction he indicated and there, in the distance, saw two young men laboriously carrying what appeared to be an unruly bundle that shifted inconveniently as they hauled it forward, and which, at one point, caused one of the men to stumble.

  "Come on, Nat," one said. "Get a grip on the thing."

  The other did as he was told, reached firmly under the bundle, and drew it up again, this time almost to his shoulders, so that the mass inside shifted yet again, and from out of the covering, a small white hand suddenly emerged, the fingers still and curving inward toward the palm.

  "Got it?"

  "Yeah."

  "All right, let's go."

  They came forward again, tramping awkwardly through the tangled undergrowth, unused to such heavy labor, and resentful of it, but still closing in upon the shallow culvert where Maldrow and I stood watching them. They passed within a breath of us, but gave no notice of our presence, so that I knew we were as silent and unseen as a bird circling overhead.

  "You know who they are," Maldrow said.

  And, of course, I did, for he had told me of this moment many times: the look of the young men as they went about their work, undressing the boy, screwing the top off the jar of acid they'd brought with them, pouring it over the boy's face and genitals, the taller laughing as he did this, the other dancing away, slapping at his trousers.

  "Don't get that stuff on me!"

  The smaller young man's face soured. "It's hot." He stripped off his jacket and slung it across a fallen limb. "Come on, let's finish this up."

  Together the two completed the task, then stepped back to admire their work.

  "Perfect," the taller one said. "A perfect crime."

  Maldrow stretched out his hand as the smaller of the young men reached for his jacket and, with an invisible finger, he tapped at the pair of glasses that hung loosely from the pocket. The glasses slid smoothly from the pocket as the young man lifted the jacket, falling and falling until they came to rest in a bed of grass, the lenses glinting in the afternoon sunlight as the young men strolled away.

  I stopped reading, placed the latest page behind the others I had yet to read.

  "Do you get what's happening?" I asked Alice. "Do you get what Maldrow does?"

  Alice nodded gravely, her once-absorbing gaze now barely able to focus. "He makes sure people get caught," she said weakly. She seemed hesitant to add anything to this, but also compelled to add the thought that had so obviously come to her at that moment. "Bad people, like the man who took Teddy."

  "But he was never caught," I said in a tone considerably more bitter than I'd expected, and which I labored to control. I rustled the few remaining pages of Katherine's story. "There's a little more," I said, now so disappointed with where it was going that I wanted only to be done with it. "Shall I?"

  "Please."

  And with that I began to read again:

  The two young men continued to walk away, one of them laughing haughtily as the river fog drew in upon them and finally covered them, the blank wall of its thick mist now fully recomposed before me.

  "But that is not your mission, Katherine."

  "What is?" I asked.

  "To feel murder."

  A wave of cold swept out and enveloped me, a cold that deepened with each passing second, colder than an arctic blast, a cold that seemed to come from the unfeeling core of cruelty itself.

  I gasped as one might struggle to breathe in the last atom of oxygen from a block of ice, but the cold pressed in, my body paralyzed, as if already frozen in place, so that I could only watch as the air thickened into a wall of ice.

  "To feel murder a million mil
lion times."

  The wall of ice exploded like a mirror, filling the air around me with tiny shards of razor-thin glass, a swirl of glittering fibers, each point of light a single, dreadful image: Socks stuffed into a drainpipe. A freezer leaking water. Blood swirling in a toilet. A slimy pool. A murky well. Bleach on a tiled floor. A strand of blond hair caught on a briar. A half-filled sack of lime.

  And still the flashing images continued: The jagged edge of a shattered bottle. The dripping needle of a syringe. Hooks on a conveyor belt. Wet leaves scattered over plywood. A mound of clothes in a basement furnace. Rope hanging from a wooden beam. Wires dangling from a battery.

  The mirror shifted: A small white ankle lashed to a chair leg. A mouth stuffed with a red handkerchief. Trembling hands tied, chained, bound tight by black tape. By the millions, I saw the murdered where they lay in cellars, barns, attics, basements, their bodies dropped into mine shafts, tossed over cliffs, rolled into ditches and ravines, sunk in rivers, streams, and ponds.

  The mirror now flashed with desperate messages scrawled on mirrors, walls, doors; notes written in crayon or drawn on mist-clouded windowpanes, interrupted in their pleas, Help m—

  "Help me."

  The cloud vanished and became Maldrow.

  "And you will," he said.

  I felt a profound loosening of inward bonds and at the same time a sense of myself sweeping out and out, like a child stepping into a book and entering its world. At that instant, all the poisons of human life drained from me, all its bitterness and wrath. My earthly bonds released, and as their weight dropped from me, I felt myself slip beyond the downward pull of mortal life, felt a new gyroscope spin within me, a movement that seemed to fling silver droplets in all directions, filling both my inner and my outer space with a magisterial scope.