The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  It was a rather fancy word, I thought, though I couldn't have imagined one more calculated to draw me in. Of course, I also knew that it had a range of interpretations. Alice might simply be shy or prone to silence, either of which could easily be mistaken for fortitude in the face of trouble.

  "So, do you want to meet Alice?" Sandra asked.

  I knew that it wasn't really my kind of story, a dying girl, even a smart, mature, stoical one, but I recalled my earlier conversation with Arlo, knew that a feature article about him was anything but certain. A fallback position seemed well advised. "I could drop by after work," I said.

  It was nearly five when Sandra Parshall received me in her small office at Brookwood Residential. She was a woman in her late thirties with somewhat lusterless brown hair, cut in a way that was ruthlessly indifferent to style.

  "I read that piece you wrote about the choir directory" she said. "It helped me decide."

  "Decide what?"

  "That you're the right person for Alice to talk to," she said. "Frankly, I wasn't sure about Charlie, but I wanted someone to write about Alice, and I didn't know anyone else to ask." Her expression had a hint of warning. "I don't want a carnival show made of her. She's not some kind of circus freak." She smiled suddenly. "But like I said, that piece of yours about , the choir director, it made me think you're the right person for Alice. One line in particular."

  She saw I had no idea what line I'd written in my piece on Roger Beaumont that had convinced her that I was the right person to tell Alice Barrows's story.

  "You were talking about the voices of the choir," Sandra said. "About the voices the choir director brought together those harmonies, and you said that sounds may go on forever because sound is a wave. And I thought, Alice won't go on forever, not like a beautiful sound, going out into space. But she's here now, and she's a very interesting person, and people ought to know she was here before she goes. I've told her all this, even mentioned that you might be interested in talking to her. She wasn't crazy about the idea, but she wasn't completely against it, either." She leaned forward. "She doesn't want to get close to anyone, and so she keeps to herself. She never goes into the dayroom, and takes all her meals alone."

  "So what does she do all day?" I asked, already beginning to doubt that Alice would be a good subject for a profile.

  "She reads," Sandra answered.

  "Mysteries, mostly, according to Charlie," I said. "He told me that she likes to find solutions that are better than the ones the writers came up with."

  "That's right," Sandra said. "But Alice also spends a lot of time on her computer." With that she smiled one of those institutionally bright smiles, all ribbons and bows, the cheery expression of professional caregivers, rosily painted over masks of sheer dread. "She's in her room," she said. "Shall we go?"

  She was sitting in her bed, tapping at a laptop, when we came into the room. For a moment, she didn't look up, but instead kept her attention trained on the computer's softly glowing screen, her brow quite deeply furrowed, eyes squinting, like someone trying to bring a blurred image into focus. Teddy had had a similar focus, his concentration oddly like hers, so that quite without willing it, I connected Alice to my lost boy, though distantly, in the way we occasionally glimpse some aspect of a dead person—the glimmer of a smile, the arch of an eyebrow—in the face of a still-living one.

  "Good afternoon, Alice," Sandra said in an upbeat tone that seemed remarkably cheerful in light of what appeared before us, Alice Barrows in the fullness of her affliction, her legs curled beneath her, almost doll-like in her smallness.

  Alice slowly drew her attention from the computer, though with a strange sense of this being a worrisome experience, as if she were being forced back into a world she did not welcome.

  "Hello," she said coolly.

  "Hi."

  She said nothing further, though she seemed to be taking my measure in some way. Then, to my surprise, she glanced toward the window at her right in the pointed way that instantly called my attention to its peculiar ironies.

  Like one silently instructed to do so, I looked toward where she indicated, and saw several mythical creatures of colored glass, all of them strung from the top of the window, so that the light passed through them, dappling Alice's white hospital gown and bedding and even the room's interior walls with pastel leprechauns and munchkins and unicorns, along with several different renderings of Tinkerbell.

  "My mother liked this kind of stuff," Alice said. "I keep them to remember her."

  It was not these fanciful creatures that grabbed my attention, however but a painting, clearly printed from the Internet and taped to the wall beside the window, a grim, Hieronymus Bosch sort of rendering that showed a group of child-stealing changelings, all of them laughing demonically as they stuffed a little boy, terrified and crying, into a burlap sack.

  "That's pretty disturbing," I said, though lightly, merely as a way of engaging her.

  Alice watched me intently. "It happens, though. Kids are taken."

  And I thought, She's looked me up on that computer of hers. She knows about Teddy.

  I decided that if she were baiting me in some way, I wouldn't take the bait.

  "Yeah, it happens," I said with an indifferent shrug. "But why dwell on it?"

  Alice didn't answer, and so we simply stared at each other until Sandra Parshall leaped into the breach.

  "Alice, as you've probably guessed, this is Mr. Gates," she said brightly. "The man I mentioned to you, the one from the paper."

  Alice continued to stare at me, though exactly what she was in the midst of evaluating I couldn't guess, for all she could have seen was a man of normal height and weight, wearing a jacket and open-collared shirt,'completely ordinary in appearance.

  The sight that confronted me, however, was anything but ordinary, for Alice Barrows, twelve years old, looked like an old woman. But that was only the beginning of what progeria had done to her. Her chin came to a point as sharp as a whittled stick, and her head seemed to bloom from it like a misshapen flower from a tiny vase. Her eyes were brown and very large, the skin around them deeply creased, her face a web of wrinkles. It was the same with her hands, blue veins bulging from pale, almost translucent flesh, without liver spots, but appearing ancient nonetheless. She was completely bald, a condition she made no effort to conceal, no hat nor cap nor bandanna, so that the top of her head shone softly beneath the lamp, her skull somewhat oblong, with two delicately molded ears protruding from either side like tiny mushrooms from pale bark.

  Sandra looked back and forth between us. "Well, I don't think you need me anymore, so I'll just be on my way."

  And with that, she was gone, so that Alice and I now faced each other without an intermediary and with little clue as to how we should proceed, or even if we should.

  Finally I said, "I understand you're quite a reader." I glanced at the bookshelf beside her bed. It was about four feet high and filled to overflowing with books, most of them mysteries of the familiar sort: Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, along with Tales of Poe, the only hardback on the shelf. "I see you like mysteries."

  "My mother wanted me to read only books with happy endings," Alice said. Her tone was guarded, as if she were being gingerly probed for information she preferred to withhold. "I do research, too. On the Internet."

  "What kind of research?" I asked.

  Rather than answer she asked a question of her own: "Sandra said you wrote a book. Is that true?"

  "Yes."

  "What's the title?"

  I had a feeling that Alice already knew the answer to this question, but I answered her anyway.

  "Into the Mist," I said.

  "What's it about?"

  "Unsolved mysteries," I told her.

  "Like murders?" she asked.

  "In some cases," I said, "but sometimes it was just a person who vanished, or a body that could never be found. People like Judge Crater."

  Before I could say more, Alice g
lanced down at her computer screen and began tapping. "Joseph Force Crater," she read when the page loaded. "A New York State Supreme Court judge."

  "That's right," I said, now quite certain that Alice's only companion was her computer, its mechanical light wholly neutral, an eye that did not look back, see a wizened girl, feel pity or revulsion.

  "Disappeared in 1930," Alice added, still looking at her computer screen. "Never seen again." She looked up. "What do you think happened to him?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Perhaps he ran away. Perhaps he was murdered. But solving the cases isn't what my book is about."

  She looked at me quizzically.

  "It's about the need to find an answer," I explained. "Or maybe just to hope for one."

  "An answer for what?"

  "For things that disappear. Like Judge Crater."

  "Or the Lost Colony," Alice said. "Have you ever been there? Where they all disappeared?"

  I nodded. "When I was a travel writer."

  Alice drew in a long breath, a slight wheeze at the end of it. "I'd like to travel," she said.

  "Where would you like to go?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "Just away from here."

  Her voice was small, a kind of human chirp, and when she spoke, tiny vertical creases appeared above her upper lip. But there was a terrible resignation in it, too, like the voice of an executioner whose condemned prisoner was herself.

  "Just away from here," she repeated, then started to say something else, but stopped, her face growing abruptly fearful as her hand lifted slowly to her nose, the drop of blood that suddenly oozed from it. She drew back her hand and stared at the red tip of her finger.

  "I'm bleeding!" she cried sharply.

  I stood up, but did nothing, so that I must have appeared entirely frozen as a large black woman in a green uniform rushed past me and swept Alice into her arms. "I'm bleeding!" Alice cried out again as she was whisked from the room, her large eyes peering at me from over her fleeing shoulder, a bloody tissue in her wrinkled hand, reaching out, hopelessly reaching out into nothingness, as I had a thousand times imagined Teddy reaching hopelessly for me.

  5

  BLOOD IS A GREAT awakener of dormant memories. Driving away from my brief encounter with Alice Barrows, I recalled a murder room I'd once visited as a cub reporter bent on seeing everything a grim world had to offer. "It's a slasher killing," warned the head of the cleanup crew I was writing about. Then he opened the door, stepped back, and let me in. "The messiest kind."

  Which was true enough, as I discovered, for the walls and ceiling and bedding of the room had looked not just bloodstained, but lathered in blood, as if the room itself had bled. For an instant, as I'd watched Alice disappear into the bathroom down the hall, I'd felt somehow in that murder room again, her bloody handkerchief mysteriously connected to that earlier blood-drenched room, so that for a dreadful, chilling moment, it had seemed a broken, blood-fed weave, this life, a vast and impossibly intricate system of ruptured arteries and veins.

  At home, the small red light was flashing on my answering machine. I pressed the button and listened. It was a recorded message, something about car loans.

  I deleted it, walked over to my desk and, as I often did, drew open the drawer and stared at Celeste's wedding ring, remembering her, then Teddy. Often these were pleasant memories, though tinged with loss; remembrances of trips I'd taken with Celeste, or of little outings with Teddy. But that evening, it was the day of Teddy's disappearance I recalled, the promise I'd made to pick him up at the bus stop if it stormed, the unavoidable fact I hadn't, and that that decision, taken casually as it had been, had made all the difference.

  In the midst of this memory, I glanced at my briefcase and seemed to feel something stir inside it, stir almost physically, like a tiny, long-dead animal now mysteriously returning to life.

  I opened it and took out the envelope Arlo had given me earlier that afternoon. Inside the envelope, I found two other envelopes, one marked "poems" and the other marked "story." I opened the poems envelope first, probably because it was considerably thinner, or perhaps because I'd never been a particular fan of poetry, and like one who prefers icing and so eats the cake part first, I wanted simply to get through the poems in order to get on to the story.

  There were only seven poems inside the envelope, ¿11 of them photostats of handwritten manuscripts, so I had no idea if any had ever been published. None was dated, but the poems themselves had the feel of youth about them. For the most part, they were nature poems of the type familiar to anyone who'd read Wordsworth's "Daffodils." Reading them, I imagined Katherine in anachronistic hippie attire, skipping through flowery fields in an ankle-length peasant skirt. She didn't claim to wander lonely as a cloud, but forest rambles and bird sightings punctuated her poems, and she often lapsed into adoration of a natural world whose beauty and benevolence she apparently did not doubt.

  Were they any good, Katherine's poems? Not particularly, though of the type, they weren't bad, at least insofar as her rhymes rarely sounded forced and she kept the beat of the lines in firm control. Beyond such technical matters, there was a pronounced sweetness of heart in the sentiments she expressed, so that I got a sense of her as a kindly spirit, harmless to living things.

  It was all very bright and young and full of extravagant hope, and I expected more of the same when I turned to her prose, but instead found something quite different in the opening section of the "weird little story" she had left behind:

  NOW

  Maldrow's world is filled with sharp and blunt objects, knives, saws, ice picks, bricks and bats, crude instruments of murder, beside which a bullet, quick and clean, seems almost a leaden mercy. Now various murder scenes wash through his mind, rocky crevices and isolated trails, byways and ravines, rain-soaked fields. He sees a bicycle rudely tossed into a ditch, a small red wagon turned upside down in a rushing stream, a metal merry-go-round creaking in a deserted playground, carrying like the last offering of a lazy Susan, the gutted remnants of a beheaded doll. With these scenes, he recalls the ones suffocated by pillows and the ones hung in cellars, the ones later sunk in rivers and tossed into culverts, in death mere debris.

  It is not for nothing, Maldrow thinks, that all man's fairy tales are crimes.

  He closes his eyes. It is so hard now, living in this world's furiously overheated room. He tunes his hearing to its highest amplitude and listens to the heavy rain outside. He hears its countless drops explode on the street beyond the window, hears other drops as they splash into the leaves and branches of the trees that line the street. He hears the drops as they gather in a teeming army and charge down the gutters and into the sewer drains. Grotesquely amplified in this way, the sound of the swirl reminds him of the cheer that rises from the ogling crowd when the guillotine blade whispers down and the head thuds into the basket.

  In the beginning, the painful keenness of his hearing had almost driven him mad. Like a man wired to a superpowered amplifier, he'd heard the heartbeat of birds as they soared above him, the gulp of forest carnivores devouring their prey, the scratch of worms as they inched through the soil beneath his feet. But later he'd found this same keenness comforting, a way to clear his head of horror, let him hear the world of ordinary movement: the tunneling of ants, the building of nests, actions stripped of murderous intent.

  Now he hears the front door of the bar open, footsteps draw near, a brush of air, the clever ruse of blood and tissue, the whispery counterfeit of breath.

  "Maldrow?"

  Maldrow opens his eyes, studies the Chief's face, sees other faces, as if in pentimento; all the great criminals whose faces he would recognize instantly should they miraculously rise from their graves and stroll into this bar: Gilles de Rais with his spiked beard, Peter Kürten's clean-shaven features, the flinty stare of Albert Fish.

  "You look tired, Maldrow," the Chief says.

  Maldrow glimpses his own features in the glass. It is difficult for him to comprehend his years
, though he appears a man in his mid-forties, still relatively youthful, a quickness in his eyes. To himself, however, he is not just old, but ancient, a figure carved from long-weathered stone, incalculably aged by the grim archive he carries. Now it is murder rooms that flash through his mind: the dank chambers of Čachtice, the dungeon at Malemort, the crimes committed in these places long ago avenged, though others, committed elsewhere, still await such vengeance.

  "She is found," Maldrow tells him.

  The Chief appears unconvinced.

  "She has great strength," Maldrow assures the Chief. He sees the dead eyes of the survivors, the shine scooped out of them, wounds that never heal. Mrs. Budd stares emptily out her window; Frau Ohliger weeps eternally at the front of the cathedral; the crowd waits silently as the diggers do their work around the tower of Machecoul. "Most people don't."

  The Chief makes a small adjustment to his wire-rimmed glasses. "She will need great strength, of course."

  Maldrow lowers his gaze to the scarred surface of the table. A name has been carved into the wood, the letters cut deep in quick, violent thrusts. He runs a single finger along the letters of the name, sees the face of the one who carved it, his small, angry eyes, the way his lips curled downward with each dig of the knife.

  "So," the Chief says. "Tell me her story."

  Maldrow twirls the glass in his hands and watches the amber liquid swirl around inside it.

  "Her name," Maldrow begins, "is Katherine Carr."

  It was a cryptic beginning, I thought as I turned the page, but not unfamiliar, two men in a bar, engaged in mysterious conversation, the true direction of which would no doubt be revealed in the end. Nor did I find it jarring that "Katherine Carr" had entered the story as a character. Other writers had done the same thing: written about themselves as characters in their own fiction, a familiar device one either found annoying or didn't, and went on from there. As a literary technique, it was far from innovative, and so it didn't surprise me that with the next page, the story took a predictably backward step in time, and with a change from third-person to first-person narrative voice moved us from "Maldrow" and "the Chief" inside a bar to "Katherine" inside her own head: