Multiple Wounds

by Alan Russell

  “I know ’em, but it’s not like we’re drinking buddies.”

  “What do you think of the way the board’s changed over the years?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I hear it’s gone establishment. Ties instead of tie-dyed.”

  Martinez didn’t seem convinced. “The faces might have changed, and there might be more suits now, but it always remained Bonnie’s show.”

  “There’s a saying that power corrupts.”

  Martinez laughed without much mirth. “There’s also a saying that poverty sucks.”

  “Did Bonnie like being wined and dined by the money set?”

  “My grandfather used to tell me that to meet the nanny you kiss the child.” With his large hands Martinez pantomimed rocking a baby, then opened up the gesture to include a very feminine body.

  “What’s your grandfather’s saying got to do with Bonnie?”

  “You play the game if you want the sweets. Bonnie knew what she wanted, but she wasn’t a sellout.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted artsy-fartsy shit, but more than that she wanted a neighborhood with hope. I remember one meeting she said she didn’t want no reservation thing happening.”

  “Reservation?”

  “Yeah. She said the ReinCarnation Foundation was supposed to be working for the neighborhood, not thinking it should bulldoze it and push everyone off to a reservation somewhere.”

  “She said that in a board meeting?”

  Martinez nodded his head.

  “What was the reaction of the rest of the board members?”

  “They all agreed with her.”

  “You remember any bitter arguments during your time on the board, any enmity?”

  Martinez shook his head. “Nothing like that,” he said.

  In the silence that followed Martinez picked up his hammer, started maneuvering it in his hands. He looked over to Cheever to see if he had any other questions. Cheever shook his head to indicate he didn’t.

  Martinez walked back to the car he had been working on and stood over its fender. “I worked late last night,” he said. “I was sort of hoping the slasher might pay me a call.”

  He raised the hammer and then started pounding again. Cheever wondered if all the muscle work was necessary. Power tools had supplanted much of his John Henry kind of work a long time ago. But a look at Martinez’s face made Cheever decide his hammering was necessary.

  IT WAS ALMOST three o’clock when Cheever returned to his desk. Mary Beth had left two new stickies atop his paperwork. One showed a phone in the heavenly clouds. The heading said: “Things to Do.” The first item on the list was Call Dial-A-Prayer. Beneath that Mary Beth had written: Was given some rush jobs this morning. There’s not a prayer of a chance I can get the job finished today.

  The second sticky looked like a recent addition. The top border read, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” while at the bottom it concluded, “But I Planted Violets.” Mary Beth had crossed out Violets and written in Carnations. As if that wasn’t humor enough for one sticky, she had also added: To Under A. Cheever: You do intend to justify my efforts by reading all of this someday, don’t you?

  To avoid the possibility of any more sticky sermons, Cheever picked up the folder and started his reading. Mary Beth had provided him with lots of copies of articles and obits, and he began sifting through the pages.

  What struck Cheever was that yesterday’s news looked all too current. San Diego’s climate had remained consistently good over the years and its professional sporting teams consistently bad. There had been talk about building a new San Diego airport back then, just as there currently was. Politicians had railed about the need for better border sewage treatment in the nineties just as they were today.

  But the timelessness, Cheever knew, was really an illusion. He kept being surprised by the passage of years and kept asking himself whether it was possible that the stories he was reviewing could have really happened so long ago. The articles took him back. Some of the memories he would just as soon not have dredged up, like the Monday when sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer shot and murdered a principal and a custodian, and wounded eight elementary school students and a San Diego police officer. The murderer wasn’t much more than a girl herself and had justified her sniper attack by saying, “I don’t like Mondays.”

  Cheever continued his reading.

  Amidst all the history, Cheever didn’t expect his own past to surface so emphatically. He caught his breath while scanning the copy of August 11th’s obituary page. Her birthday he remembered: May 16. Every year since Diane’s death he had approached that day with certain trepidation. The day meant more to him than the more recognized birthdays, like Lincoln’s and Washington’s and King’s. Probably even Christ’s. But he had never tried to memorialize the day Diane had died, must have blanked it out on purpose.

  It was a short obituary, as obituaries go. What could you expect for a five-year-old? There was no banner headline saying: SHE LIKED MONDAYS. But she had. She liked all days, and she would have liked to have had more of them. The obituary didn’t say that Diane’s favorite color was blue, or that she loved chocolate ice cream, or that she had never met a dog she didn’t want to bring home. It didn’t mention much more than her cause of death and where the memorial service was being held and where the family requested donations be sent. There was no picture of Diane. Cheever counted up the words. Her life had been summed up in sixty-eight words.

  Name that tune, he thought.

  Cheever read her obituary a second time. He was listed as one of the survivors. Maybe that was something he needed to remind himself. “She is survived,” her obituary read, “by her parents, San Diego Police Officer Orson Cheever and his wife Karen.” Minutes passed and Cheever still couldn’t bring himself to continue with his reading.

  How was it, he wondered, that he and Helen and Rachel continued to be stuck in a limbo of the past, and that whenever they tried to get sprung they were somehow pulled back? Cheever didn’t ascribe much to the supernatural, but there seemed to be this synchronicity between the three of them, this loop of past and present. Even his investigation was intertwined: Was he looking into the murder of Bonnie Gill, or the disintegration of Helen Troy, or examining the threads of his own existence?

  For an hour Cheever sat there, the obituary of his daughter held in his hands. The other team members came and went. He heard himself answering their questions, and talking with them, even if he really wasn’t aware of what he was saying. Some part of him continued to work the investigation with the team, even if most of him was working through his feelings of twenty years past.

  He finally put the obituary aside and went on with the reading, but he didn’t escape very far. Kathy Dwyer had turned up missing right after his daughter had died. She was a six-year-old who had vanished from her Pacific Beach house. Cheever remembered very little about Kathy’s disappearance, but he had been in a fog for weeks after Diane’s death, able to work and function, but just barely.

  Kathy’s disappearance was front-page news for a week. The search for her had continued long after the newspapers stopped printing their stories. As the months and years passed, Kathy became a ghost, surfacing only when there was a tragedy of a missing child. Mary Beth had included all the Kathy Dwyer articles over the years. There was lots of rehashing and speculative ink, but not much else.

  Her disappearance nagged at Cheever. He assumed Kathy’s history clung to him because she was close to Diane’s age. Or maybe it was just that she was a missing little girl like Graciela Fernandez. But at least Graciela’s body had been found, even if her murderer hadn’t. Assuming Kathy was long dead, that meant another murderer had gotten away with killing a little girl. That pushed his buttons. There were nights Cheever still stayed up thinking about Graciela. He hadn’t given up on her case and he never would. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t ready to retire. Somebody needed to remember.

  There was somethin
g about Kathy Dwyer that also stirred up memories of his own daughter. He wasn’t sure of the connection, save that Diane had died and Kathy turned up missing at about the same time. The girls were close in age, but physically they didn’t look at all alike. Diane’s hair had been a light brown, and she had her mother’s olive complexion. Kathy was a redhead, very fair and freckled.

  Red hair and freckles. Like Bonnie Gill. And Caitlin.

  Cheever went back into the pile of copies and carefully reread all of the Kathy Dwyer articles. Kathy’s mother had told police that at the time of Katie’s disappearance she was wearing a yellow dress with red polka dots. The image played on Cheever’s mind. Somewhere he remembered seeing an outfit just like that. And then it came to him. He had seen that dress on the statue of the crying little girl at the gallery.

  He started scribbling furiously on a pad, connecting his words with lines: Caitlin—Statues—Dress—Little Girls—Murder(s)? He turned the page and started working on another chart, but didn’t get very far. He had only jotted down the words Gallery and Pacific Beach when he remembered how Jason Troy had said his family had lived in Pacific Beach. Cheever took a long breath. His hands were wet. An electrical charge seemed to run along his spine and then emptied into him. It was hard enough working one jigsaw puzzle. But now he had the feeling he’d been working several with all the pieces mixed up. Getting that first match, he knew, was often the hardest. Sometimes the rest of the puzzle followed from there.

  It was too late in the day to get the investigative reports on Kathy Dwyer’s disappearance. Everyone in Records was gone, and besides, the twenty-year-old files would have been shunted off to some storeroom in the hinterlands. Though SDPD purged most of its files after seven years, missing persons that remained missing were supposed to be treated like unsolved homicides, with the cases never officially closed.

  Cheever began writing down a new copping list. He needed to get the names of the detectives who had worked the case. He wanted their reports and observations. He wanted their suspicions, the kind of things they wouldn’t have written down. But it was already four thirty, and he had promised he would take over the care of Helen at five o’clock.

  Still, he couldn’t resist making one phone call. Professor Troy wasn’t happy to hear from him. “I have nothing to say to you, Detective. For whatever reason—How do they say it?—you seem to have it in for me.”

  “Two questions...”

  “I’m leaving...”

  “Did Helen know a girl named Kathy Dwyer?”

  There was a long moment of silence. Cheever feared Troy had hung up. But then he said, “Kathy Dwyer?”

  “She was around Helen’s age. She was the little girl who turned up missing twenty years ago.”

  “Kathy Dwyer,” he said again.

  “She lived on Diamond Street. That would have been near to where you lived.”

  “Ohhh,” he said, as if remembering. “Katie.”

  Katie. When said aloud, Cheever thought of Caitlin. “You knew her?”

  “Not really. But I remember the search...”

  “Did Helen know her?”

  “They were acquainted.”

  “What do you remember about her?”

  “You have far surpassed your two questions, Detective.”

  “It’s important that I hear your recollections of Katie Dwyer.”

  “That’s ancient history, Detective Cheever. Now please don’t bother me anymore.”

  Cheever listened to a click, then was forced to speak to a dial tone.

  “Odd,” he said. “I thought a professor of classics would be interested in ancient history.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  The nurse was an older black woman who carried herself with the authority of someone who had put in a lifetime of nursing service. She wore a white uniform, crisp almost to the point of cracking, both cleanliness and starch apparently being next to godliness. Cheever had seen nuns’ habits that looked less intimidating.

  “I’m your relief,” Cheever said.

  The woman nodded, then turned her thick glasses to her watch and looked at it in silent reproof. Cheever was four minutes late. Her bag was packed and ready. She draped it over her arm, but before giving up her post she passed on the news of her watch.

  “Not a word out of her,” the nurse said, pointing in the direction of the living room. “Mind you, I’m not complaining.

  “Her appetite’s just fine. She ate some cereal this morning, and had a cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch. Had some fruit too, an orange and a banana.”

  “Did you have to feed her?” he asked.

  “No need. You put the spoon or the food in her hand and she takes over from there.”

  “What about going to the toilet?”

  “You take her there and sit her down. She knows her business.”

  The nurse sensed his apprehension. “She went about a half hour ago. You’re safe for a while.”

  Until Rachel got home, Cheever hoped. “Sounds like she listened to you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t a matter of listening. Nature was doing the talking. But she can hear well enough. We went outside for a time and sat. Might still be out there ’cept she didn’t like it when those big parrots came around and started making all sorts of noise.”

  “Parrots?”

  “That’s what they looked like. All sorts of colors they were, and big as hawks.”

  Cheever figured it was time for the nurse to get a new prescription for her glasses. “She didn’t like those birds?”

  “Not at all. I could tell she was all bothered by them, so we came on in.”

  “How’d you get her to go with you?”

  “Just took her by the hand. She’ll follow you like Mary’s little lamb if you just take her by the hand.”

  The nurse demonstrated on Cheever, taking his hand and then patting it. “Don’t worry, child,” she said, “you’ll do just fine.”

  The starched uniform had fooled him, he thought. As the nurse left, Cheever tried to think how long it had been since anyone had called him “child.” He felt like she had given him a shot of Ponce de Leon tonic and bestowed a blessing at the same time. The nurse’s absence accentuated the quiet. In the silence of the house, Cheever trepidatiously made his way out to the living room. Helen didn’t turn at his approach or acknowledge him in any way. She took up very little space on the sofa, had huddled into herself. Her eyes were open, but unmoving. She was looking off somewhere into the distance.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She didn’t respond to his greeting, just continued to stare out the large bay window. Cheever remembered how Rachel had seated herself next to Helen and started talking. His idea of a conversation was to ask questions and get answers. Apparently he’d have to find a new way of communicating. It was time he learned anyway.

  “I’ll join you if you don’t mind,” he said.

  If Helen did, she didn’t say anything. Feeling stupid, Cheever sat down on the sofa. It wasn’t as if Helen was going to pat a pillow and motion for him to join her. He really didn’t even know what he was doing. He wasn’t Rachel, for Christ’s sake. For a few minutes he joined Helen in just staring out the window, then, hesitantly, unsure of what to say or how to say it, he started talking aloud. It was like speaking to God, Cheever thought, something he had only tried a few times in the last twenty years. The problem he’d had with addressing God was that he could never be sure if he was talking to himself or if he was making some grand connection. Like now.

  “I don’t know where you are, Helen, but I hope it’s somewhere safe. I can understand your seeking a refuge. I’m beginning to understand a lot of things about you. If I had lived your life, I’d sure as hell be on Olympus, or wherever you are.

  “There are a few earthly worries you needn’t concern yourself with, like Cerberus. Earlier this afternoon I fed and walked him and I can tell you that he misses you. It was clear I wasn’t much of a
substitute for you. He let me pet him and tell him what a fine dog he is, but he knew it wasn’t the real thing.”

  Cheever exhaled a lot of air. It wasn’t so difficult talking about animals. Talking about Helen—talking about himself—wouldn’t be so easy.

  “I should tell you that Cerberus wasn’t the only reason for my going to your loft. Cops are terrible snoops, you see. I hope you don’t mind, but last night and today I spent time looking at your paintings and statues. You told me about that statue Pygmalion made, how he called her Galatea, and how she miraculously came to life. Well, the more I look at your art, the more it’s been coming alive. You might not be talking, but it is. Your art speaks for you, all of you. It does your storytelling, and reveals some of your history, and does your weeping.

  “I remember the first time I saw your statues at the gallery. They pissed me off. I have this antiquated view that art should be uplifting. But I can understand how it would be hard to do Disney when you’re in the middle of Hades. That’s the landscape you’ve had to work from, isn’t it?

  “I still don’t understand everything, Helen. I’m hoping you’re going to fill in the blanks for me real soon. The more of your art I look at, the clearer everything becomes. And the more horrible.

  “I think I admire you more than any person I’ve ever known, Helen. You’re like this boxer who keeps getting up. You’ve been battered and bruised. You’ve taken more punishment than anyone should ever have to, and you’re still not through. Somehow you keep answering the bell.”

  In his own life Cheever wished he had been as valiant. Rachel had said that multiples often avoided reality because reality offered them only pain and hurt. They compartmentalized feelings and responses to survive. He had done the same, only not to the extent that she had.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on things you’ve tried to tell me, not only the art but everything. One time you said, ‘If I accept their pain, she won’t hurt anymore.’ I didn’t pick up on that then, but now I understand that you were telling me you had seen more than one person being hurt. By taking on their pain you were paying a penance of sort. Your three stigmata should have shown me that. Two of the wounds were for Bonnie Gill, and I think the third was for a little girl named Katie Dwyer. She was redheaded like Bonnie, and had freckles, and I think Caitlin saw someone do something terrible to her, maybe something like what happened to Bonnie Gill. Hygeia wasn’t only taking on the wounds of the dead, she was taking on the psychic scars of a personality. The pain that a little girl couldn’t handle was accepted by another better equipped for that kind of hurt.”