by Lee Martin
Only a few months before, in March, the biggest news in town had been the high school basketball team winning the state championship. There was a parade down High Street. It was Sunday, and the team and cheerleaders rode on fire trucks. Sirens blew. The cheerleaders waved green-and-white pom-poms. The players, many of them in their green letterman’s jackets, held the championship trophy aloft. Fans lined the parade route and later crowded into the high school gymnasium, where the coach and several of the players spoke to their adoring fans.
The next day, Monday, the Evening Register reported that Mrs. Madeline Brokaw had picked the year’s first ripe tomato. She found a volunteer plant in her backyard in early December, dug it up, put it in a flowerpot, carried it into her house, and set it near a south window, where it would get sun. It grew to be five feet tall, and on March 10, she picked the first tomato. It was a Golden Boy, she reported. A yellow tomato, sleek and bright, large enough to cover her palm.
That was the news folks talked about: the basketball team, the first ripe tomato, hamburgers five for a dollar at the Dog ’n’ Suds, the grand opening of the Super Foodliner, the Carnival of Spring Fashion show at the high school.
But now, on this Thursday morning in July, all anyone could think about was Katie Mackey. Downtown, all the stores were closed. Everyone who was able was out in the rain with the search parties, sweeping through the fields and the woods. They could tell, though no one had the heart to say it, that the storm was one of those cloudbursts that came after a string of humid days, came as a torment really. Soon the clouds would break, and the sun would come out and heat up all that rain. The ground would steam, and the temperature would inch back up into the nineties. The gnats would come out, and the horseflies. The searchers would slog through the mud, hold the sting of sweat in their eyes. Soon there would be search dogs, and airplanes with infrared sensors, and Margot Cherry, who claimed she could see in her head what everyone had missed with their eyes.
But first there were these people out in the downpour, these gray figures, shoulders hunched against the rain, and what no one spoke was the secrets they carried in their hearts, the weight of all their sins. That day and all the days after, every bit of wrong they’d ever done was knotted in their chests. What they thought, but never said, was this: It should have been any of us but her. If God had any interest in punishing the wicked, it should have been us. They had gone about their business the evening before, not taking note of that girl, that man, that bicycle, that truck. Only now were they starting to come forward, to say what they remembered, hoping that they weren’t speaking too late.
AT THE Mackey house, the grandfather clock in the foyer was ticking, its pendulum swinging back and forth. Patsy, who had been awake all night, opened the cabinet and threw the lever that stopped the works. It was two minutes after seven.
“I couldn’t stand it,” she said in a quiet voice, hoarse and weary. “That noise.”
All night, Gilley had listened to her crying, praying, bargaining with God. If only he would bring Katie home to them, she would never again let her out of her sight. And she would tell Junior exactly how she felt about that night in Indianapolis, and she would admit her sin—right now she’d confess it, and please, dear God, wouldn’t he forgive her and see to it that Katie was safe? At one point, she got down on her knees at the back door where Katie’s sandals were still on the mat, and she pressed her hands together and held them at her chest, and her lips moved so quickly with her prayer that Gilley couldn’t tell what she was saying in her fast, desperate mumble of words. He didn’t know what she was saying, and he didn’t know what she meant about that night in Indianapolis or what she had to confess. He had his own guilt. At the supper table, he had told his father that Katie hadn’t taken back her library books that day, and that had started the chain of events that had brought them, finally, to this moment, two minutes after seven on a Thursday morning in July, when the rain was falling and they had no idea where Katie was.
He tried to comfort his mother. He rubbed his hand in slow circles over her back, telling himself to remember this, to memorize the way it felt to touch her with tenderness, to store it away so he would know it all through the years, no matter what happened from this point on. This touching, this love: he wanted it to be theirs forever.
“They’ll find her,” he said. “They have to find her.”
At first, after they had discovered Katie’s bicycle in front of the J. C. Penney, Gilley had told his father that maybe she had left it there and walked home. “The chain’s off,” he said. “She couldn’t get it back on.”
“She would have pushed it,” Junior Mackey said. “Don’t be stupid.”
By this time, the library was closed. As they walked around the courthouse square, Gilley imagined that at any moment they would see Katie gazing in a store window, enchanted with something that had caught her eye, or at the Rexall Drug on the penny scale that would tell her weight and fortune. “Gilley, Gilley, Gilley,” she would say the way she always did whenever she wanted to show him something. “Look.”
At the Rexall, there was no one but the pharmacist and the high school girl who worked the cosmetics counter. Neither of them had seen Katie.
“Well, she’s somewhere,” Junior said, and the pharmacist, a round-faced man who wore a red bow tie, said he was sure she’d turn up soon. “Kids,” he said, and then he shook his head.
But she didn’t turn up. She wasn’t at Rene Cherry’s house or the city park or the Dairy Queen. Later, after they had given up and called the police, Gilley stayed with his mother, as his father ordered, while Junior rode through the Heights in a police car, revisiting with Chief Evers all the places where Katie might have gone.
All night, police cars cruised up and down the streets in the Heights and downtown around the square and out Tenth Street past the glassworks. They knocked on people’s doors. Have you seen this little girl? they asked, showing them Katie’s school picture, the one Patsy had given them from her photo album. In the picture, the ends of Katie’s hair curled over her shoulders and onto the front of her jumper. Her blouse was covered with a pattern of roses and daisies. Her hair was pinned back at the temples with two gold barrettes, as it had been that evening when she had ridden away to the library. The next afternoon, the picture would be on the Evening Register’s front page. Her round face and big eyes. A pretty nine-year-old girl, grinning to beat the band.
It was 7:05—Gilley checked his watch—when the front door opened, and his father, water dripping from him, stepped inside. He didn’t bother to wipe his feet. He walked straight to Patsy and took her in his arms. He had his eyes closed, and Gilley could tell he was squeezing his mother so tightly that it was uncomfortable for her. She put her hands against his chest and tried to push herself free.
“Is it Katie?” she said. “Gil, is it some news about Katie?”
Gilley felt as if the house were shrinking, the walls closing in on them. He waited for his father to answer, and when he did, what he said was this: “Patsy, they’ve got a man. The police. They picked him up in Gooseneck.” Junior was speaking calmly, as if he were explaining how glass was made, or the way to read a green before making a putt. He had spoken to Gilley in those same hushed tones more than once on a golf course, encouraging him to keep his cool, and now he was doing the same with Patsy. “They think he knows something. This man. They’re talking to him now.”
Patsy broke away from Junior. “Did he take her? For God’s sake, Gil, is that it?”
“They’re trying to find out.”
“I want to go there. To the courthouse.” She was already striding toward the door, which Junior had left open. Gilley watched the rain blowing up onto the porch, where one of Katie’s pencils, all silver-and-gold glitter with a troll doll on the eraser end, was getting wet. He wanted to go out and bring it in and comb out the troll’s hair and put it somewhere to dry, but his mother was already in the doorway. “I’m going to talk to that man. I’m going to ask
him what he’s done with my little girl.”
“Patsy,” Junior said. “I’ll take care of things. You stay here and leave this to me.”
“No.” She turned on her heel and pointed her finger at him. The word came out with a force that had been gathering through the long night. “You won’t tell me what to do. Not this time. Not like in Indianapolis.”
Gilley saw his father’s shoulders stiffen. “For God’s sake, Patsy,” he said.
“I mean it,” she told him. “I’m going to talk to that man.”
Junior followed her out into the rain. Gilley stepped out on the porch and watched them get in the truck and then drive away. He bent down and picked up the pencil. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something on the porch swing. It was a snapshot of Katie, the one that he had taken earlier that summer with his Polaroid camera. She had been sitting on the stone bench between the two Japanese maple trees in their backyard, and the sun had been slanting just so through the low branches so that the light fell over her, and her hair shimmered. She was sitting on the bench with her back against one of the trees. Her bare feet were on the bench and her knees were drawn up to her chest. She had on a pair of pink-framed sunglasses, and later when she saw the snapshot, she said she looked just like a movie star. She loved that picture, she said. Loved it, loved it, loved it, darling Gilley, because it made her look a little bit like Marcia Brady—well, almost—and everyone knew how pretty and popular she was.
All summer, the picture had been tucked into the corner of Katie’s dresser mirror, but now here it was on the porch swing. Gilley picked it up, and when he did, he noticed that on the back, in a handwriting he didn’t recognize, someone had written with what he could tell was the rich indigo ink of a fountain pen: Katie, Age 9.
BY THE TIME Junior and Patsy got to the courthouse, the rain had stopped. The sun broke through the clouds. When Junior got out of the truck to follow Patsy up the courthouse steps, he had to shade his eyes with his hand.
“Patsy,” he said. “Patsy, wait.”
She marched ahead of him, her arms swinging. In the truck, she had said, “I won’t have another child taken from me. I won’t.”
Finally, he caught up with her on the steps. He grabbed her arm and swung her around, more roughly than he had intended, and that force broke her. She leaned into him as if her spine had turned to dust. He took the dead weight of her in his arms and he held her while she wept. He held her, and he said very quietly, “We’ll do whatever we have to, Patsy. I swear that to you, whatever it takes to bring Katie home. Believe me, whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”
She clutched the front of his shirt. She balled the material up into her hands. “That man,” she said. “I want to look that man in the eyes. I want to ask him what he knows.”
Raymond R.
PROVE IT.
Mr. Dees
I STOOD IN my kitchen with Tom Evers, and I told him as much as I could stand to say. Yes, it was true that I’d told Raymond R. about the way Katie had struck my fancy. Such a darling little girl. Who couldn’t help but love her?
“But Tom,” I said, “you know me. Do you really think I’m the sort of man Clare Wright claims I am?”
“Right now I’m just asking questions,” Tom said. “I’m just trying to find out what’s gone on.” He was facing me, but I could tell his eyes were glancing around my kitchen, taking everything in, and for an instant, I wondered if I’d forgotten anything. That rose petal, that fluff of hair. Then I remembered the snapshot, the one of Katie sitting on that stone bench. I’d looked for it earlier and hadn’t been able to find it. I had no idea where it had gone. “Mister Dees,” he said, “I need to know where you were last night.”
“I told the officer who came here. Tom, I was home last night. I was right here preparing lessons.”
“Is there anyone who can vouch for that? Anyone see you out in the yard maybe? Anyone call you on the telephone or see you in the house?”
It pained me to have to answer that question. “Tom,” I said, “I don’t have many friends. I pretty much keep to myself.” He studied me for a good while. “Is there call for me to prove something?” I finally asked him.
“I can’t say that there is. No, I can’t say that. I’m just trying to eliminate whatever I can. You understand? Some people say you were a friend to this Raymond Wright.”
“He’s done some repair work at my house. Not long ago, he gave me a ride home from the Moonlight Madness Carnival. Neighborly things like that. I wouldn’t say exactly that we’re friends.”
“I’m just trying to whittle things down, trying to learn what happened to Katie Mackey.”
“I understand that, Tom. Like I said, Katie is a splendid little girl.”
“If you know of anything that might help me, I trust you’ll let me know.”
“Believe me, Tom. If I had something to tell you, I would.”
I didn’t tell him about the nights I hid myself away and watched the Mackeys in their backyard. I didn’t tell him about taking the petal from Patsy’s rose or the fluff of hair from Katie’s brush—thank goodness Clare hadn’t said anything to Tom about that—and I didn’t tell him about the time that summer when I went into Katie’s room.
It was only that one time. Trust me; this is true. It was a Sunday morning, and I knew the Mackeys would be at church. It was easy to get into the house. Most folks in our small town only used their locks when they went away on vacation. I opened the back door and stepped inside.
It was quiet there: the refrigerator humming, the grandfather clock in the foyer ticking—so quiet that I could hear the chains and gears in the clock as the weights rose and fell.
I stood at the foot of the stairs. I had waited in this foyer more than once that summer, eager for Katie to come down for her lesson, but this morning I was free to go wherever I chose. I could imagine that this was my home and soon it would be filled with the sounds of my family: Patsy’s sharp, bright laugh; Gilley’s rock-and-roll music playing on his stereo; and Katie—oh, my dear, dear Katie—she would come hopping down the stairs, singing some silly rhyme:
Eenie, Meenie, Disaleenie
Ooh, aah, Gotchaleenie
Hotchy Totchy
Liberace
I love you!
I laid my hand on the stairway railing, put one foot on the carpeted runner, and then it was easy—one foot after the other, climbing the stairs to Katie’s bedroom.
The house smelled of roses—vases and vases of roses—but in Katie’s room the scents were more varied, and to me, who had never lived with a child, more exotic. There was a necklace of candy beads and a chain woven from Fruit Stripe gum wrappers, bottles of Avon Sweet Honesty cologne and Maybelline Rose Lustre nail polish, modeling clay and rub-on tattoos, crayons and Magic Markers, construction paper and paste, stuffed bears and snakes and dogs.
I memorized each scent. I took my time. I told myself I would never do this again, never be in this room. That certainty made me bold, and I opened her dresser drawers. One held neat stacks of shorts and tank tops and T-shirts; in another were balls of socks and tights. A third drawer was for her camisoles and underpants, and I know you expect that I lingered there—pervert that you’ve surely decided I am—that I pressed my face into cotton and rayon, perhaps even wadded up a pair of panties and stuffed them into my pocket. I know you expect the worst of me. I’d be ashamed to have the thoughts that you do now.
The truth is this: I was a man who didn’t know what to do with his passion. I was a teacher of mathematics, and numbers taught me that there was always an answer. Noodle around long enough, and I could solve any problem. But this love I felt for Katie, this child I wished were my own—that was a knot I couldn’t untangle. I was trapped in it, helpless. I trembled with the thought of how far I had gone. There I was in her room, overwhelmed. Me, a decent man. You have to believe me. I have nothing to offer as proof except the rest of my story.
I closed her dresser drawer, the wooden runners s
quealing just a bit, and that’s when I saw the picture wedged into the corner of the mirror: Katie sitting on a stone bench in her backyard, smiling at the camera, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. It seemed that she was smiling at me, and I couldn’t help myself. I plucked the picture from the mirror and slipped it into my pocket before stepping out into the hall.
A door opened before I could make it to the stairs, and Gilley came out of his room. He was in his boxer shorts and bare-chested, his hair tousled from sleep. I remembered how kind he had been to me when I had asked him whether I could take home the jackets from Penney’s and then return the ones I didn’t want. How he had trusted me.
“Mister Dees?” he said, his voice full of surprise and wonder, and I knew immediately that I could tell him any lie, and he would believe me.
But you, I won’t lie to. Don’t worry. You, I’ll tell the truth. Every bit of it. No matter if you want it or not.
Gilley
IT WAS THE Sunday before Katie disappeared. I woke and heard a drawer open and close and then footsteps in the hall. I thought I’d slept so long that everyone was back from church. Normally, I would have been with them, but instead I’d slept in and finally my parents had given up on rousing me.
When I got out of bed and went out into the hall, I was surprised to see Mr. Dees about to go down the stairs.
“Mister Dees,” I said, and he turned to me, a sheepish grin on his face.
He said, “I was just using the bathroom while I waited for Katie. I let myself in. I’m here for her lesson.”