The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  THEN

  I awoke with a start, like a panicked child, and immediately sought the familiar crack of light beneath my locked bedroom door, a tiny slit of light, but reassuring.

  You are at home, I told myself. You have not been taken.

  A second slice of light inched out from beneath a second door, the bathroom light I also never turned off, brighter and more harsh, like the light of examining rooms and dental chairs.

  I drew a deep breath, measured, calming. Look, you are breathing, I told myself, though the air itself scraped against my flesh like tiny needles.

  It was always this way in the morning, my first breath a panicked gasp. For I knew that he stood at the end of the bed, loose arms dangling, a glint of metal at the end of his left hand. But he wasn't just at the end of my bed, of course. He also slouched against the window, fingering its drawn curtains, and leaned hard against my closet door, and sat over there with his legs spread in the chair across the room.

  I pulled myself to my feet and walked quickly toward the bathroom. I knew he would be there, too, blocking my way, and that I would have to step through him, merge with him for an intolerable instant before I came out on the other side, and that at that instant I would smell his sweat, hear the beat of his heart, feel his blood surge as if it were mine. For they never leave you if they get away with it, and because of that you live imprisoned by an unsolved crime.

  But for all that, I did the things I had to do each morning: brushed my teeth, showered, dressed, did all these things beneath his gaze. While he watched, seated idly at the kitchen table, I ate a muffin over the sink, then stepped out into the lighted living room, where this same unknown man stood at the front door, legs spread wide apart, arms casually folded over his sleeveless T-shirt.

  I still had to go on, of course, hopelessly go on, and so once again I stepped through him, out onto the porch, then down the stairs, where I turned left and headed down Gilmore Street.

  I had made it halfway to Cantibell when I noticed Molly Vaughn talking to a tall, slender young man I recognized as Ronald Duckworth. As I approached, Duckworth said something to Molly, and her face suddenly soured as if she'd been slapped. Duckworth grinned and said something else. Then Molly whirled around and rushed away, moving quickly, fearfully, like some small creature from a spreading fire.

  "Hi," Duckworth said as I neared him. His greeting was like a hook in my mouth. "You live down the block, right?"

  I glanced away, and saw the same unknown man sitting casually on the hood of a car, slowly scratching his chest. His lean body was visible beneath a translucent shirt, the outline of his ribs pressed against tightly drawn skin. He wore jeans still stained with my blood, and there were small red droplets spattered across his shirt. Only his face, as always, remained a blur.

  When I turned back, Duckworth was still staring at me.

  "I'm late," I said quickly and rushed ahead, thinking now of a poem I'd once written about how desperately the first people must have needed words, how deeply they must have felt the lack of them, how locked in muteness they must have been, with only grunts to say, "I'm lonely. Please help me. I have lost the gift of hope."

  I don't know why but at the moment I put down this first section of Katherine's material, I thought of Maitland Island, a place I'd once written about. All kinds of exotic animals had been brought there, though only to be killed to provide heads for luxuriously appointed trophy rooms. The island had been very small, only three miles long and one mile across at its widest point, the animals set free to roam it, but continually pursued by wealthy, lazy hunters with high-powered rifles. Once released, the animals had darted about Maitland's scant acreage as they were stalked and occasionally shot at. Some were dispatched quickly, while others, the less seriously wounded, had briefly limped from place to place, daubing the ground with little drops of blood before they were brought down. Still others, the smaller and more fleet, had managed to evade the hunters for several hours, traversing the island again and again until it had finally dawned on them that there was no escape. By then they'd learned the island's spare dimensions, how utterly trapped they were, so that no matter what hill they mounted or along what beach they ran, they would never be outside the lethal range of their pursuers. As they tired, a terrible inevitability had settled over them. Some, as a last resort, had waded out into the sea, while others had finally lowered themselves to the ground, utterly exhausted, drawn their legs beneath them, and faced the wind silently.

  In the story, Katherine Carr's world was like Maitland Island, I thought, a place in which she darted about, but couldn't hide, and so always remained within range of the unknown man, the character she'd created, whether based upon herself or not, forever doomed prey.

  The character of Maldrow was harder to pin down, however, but there were concrete historical references in his part of the narrative, something I could sink my reporter's teeth into, and since I saw no other way actually to work up anything in regard to any later piece on Arlo, I started with them.

  I looked up Čachtice first, and found it to be a castle in Hungary that had been presided over by one Countess Erzsebet Bäthory, the Bloody Lady of Čachtice, considered the most infamous serial killer in Hungarian history, a woman who'd tortured and murdered hundreds of young women. Machecoul was the ancestral home of Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century slaughterer of young boys thought to be the first recorded serial killer. Albert Fish was also a serial murderer, mostly of children. He'd been captured at last in New York City, and executed at Sing Sing in 1935. "Clean-shaven" Peter Kürten turned out to be the "Vampire of Düsseldorf," a slaughterer of females, though not always children. He'd been guillotined at the comically named Klingelputz Prison in 1932.

  I'd just finished the last of my research when the phone rang. It was Arlo McBride.

  "Did you read what I gave you?"

  "Yes," I said, and rather than add something negative, or at least unenthusiastic about Katherine's poetry, I went directly to her prose. "She uses her own name in her story."

  "That's probably because some of it is true," Arlo said. "She was attacked by a man who was never caught."

  "Here in Winthrop?"

  "Outside town," Arlo said. "Her grandfather had died by then, so she was living alone in the farmhouse."

  "When was she attacked?"

  "Five years before she disappeared," Arlo answered.

  "What was the motive?"

  "True evil doesn't need a motive, George," Arlo said. "That's why it's true evil."

  "So it wasn't rape or robbery?" I asked.

  "The guy took a ring. A gold ring she always wore. It had been her grandmother's. He yanked it off her finger during the attack, but no one ever believed robbery was the motive. He could have robbed her without doing what he did to her."

  "Which was what, exactly?"

  "He beat her to a pulp. Then he took a knife and cut her upper arms and her legs."

  "Why not her throat?" I asked.

  "Because he wasn't through with her, I guess," Arlo said. "When he finished cutting her, he said, 'Don't forget me, because I'm coming back. And when I do, I'll finish the job.' My guess is that he said that to terrorize her. And it worked."

  "Pretty grim," I said.

  "Does that mean you don't want to read more of the writing she left behind?" Arlo asked.

  I wasn't sure I did want to read any more of it, but work is work and a man has to have an income. Other than Alice Barrows, I had no other prospects for a future profile, and from my last look at her, Alice might already be dead. And so if I had to read more of Katherine Carr's writings to get to Arlo, then read more of them I would.

  "No, I'd like to read some more," I said.

  "Okay," Arlo said. "I'll see that you get another installment."

  He made it sound like one of those serial novels so popular in the nineteenth century. Dickens had made a fortune stringing out his tales in monthly magazines. Katherine Carr was no Dickens, and although her pros
e was certainly a tad hothouse for my taste, I hadn't found it unbearably painful. I could take more of it.

  "You have a mail slot at your building, right?" Arlo asked.

  I was surprised he knew this, but then he'd been a cop for years, probably gone in and out of almost every building in Winthrop. "Yeah," I said. "It'd be okay to leave it there."

  We talked a bit longer about nothing in particular, and after that, I made my dinner, then read for a time. In the book the Buranni were carrying out their ancient rituals, reading the names of their murdered innocents and thanking the Kuri Lam for making the pit bottomless. It was a quite ludicrous ritual, of course, and in its ludicrousness it seemed only to underscore the futility of such primitive hopes for justice.

  In any event, I shortly grew impatient with the book, gave in to the same urge that had overtaken me almost every night since Teddy's death, and a few minutes later found myself at O'Shea's.

  6

  A WOMAN NAMED Stella Owens ran the place, the twice-divorced daughter of Gilly O'Shea. She was a large woman, with stringy red hair and watery blue eyes, exactly the sort of bar matron you'd expect to see in a run-down watering hole like O'Shea's, the one place in all of sunny, prosperous Winthrop that seemed still rooted in its own shadowy past.

  "Evening, George," she said as I came through the door.

  "Stella."

  "Want anything to eat?"

  "No, just a scotch."

  She poured it for me, then nodded toward the back. "Your booth's waiting for you."

  "Thanks."

  My booth was empty, but there were a few people at the tables, which was usually the case at this hour. But I was a lone drinker which my usual slouch made clear, so that I was surprised when someone said, "Hello, George."

  I looked up to find Hollis Traylor standing at the booth.

  "Hello, Hollis," I said.

  We'd briefly become acquainted after Teddy's death, when I'd tried to get over it by going to the Little League games he'd have played in that season had he lived. It hadn't worked, and I'd stopped going long before the end of the season. Hollis had been the coach of a rival team, and I wasn't sure we'd ever actually met, but he'd clearly recognized me from those games, mine the face of the stricken father he'd no doubt often seen on local television or in the paper.

  He slid into the booth, took a sip from the beer he'd brought with him, then set down the glass softly. "It's really something about the Wildcats, huh?" he said.

  He meant the team he coached.

  "They're headed for the state championships," Hollis added.

  I recalled him at the Wildcat games, rooting loudly for his team, one of those effusive, energetic personalities who seemed always on the edge of a jubilant cheer.

  "Fought their way up from tenth place," Hollis added with a boisterous laugh.

  I nodded. "Teddy played them in his last game."

  Hollis looked at me cheerfully. "Yeah, I know. He hit a home run."

  It was a memory some would have thought sweet, Teddy in his uniform, bat held high, swinging, connecting, the ball rising in a high arc toward center field. But for me it was poisonous, as most every memory of him was, the past a toxic blend of anger and regret.

  Hollis clearly saw all this. He shrugged. "No news, I guess," he said softly.

  "News?"

  "Developments, I mean." Hollis caught the fact that he'd perhaps misspoken. "I mean ... in the case."

  "You mean about Teddy?" I asked.

  "I'm sorry," Hollis said. "You probably don't want to talk about it." He waved his hand. "I understand."

  "There are no new developments," I said. "And there never will be any." I took a sip from my glass. "He got away with it."

  Hollis briefly stared into the sulfurous abyss he no doubt thought I was in, then glanced toward the front of the bar. "Starting to rain," he said, "I better be getting home."

  I finished one scotch, then another, the front of the bar slowly filling up with its nightly regulars along with the occasional out-of-towner who happened to have stumbled upon O'Shea's simply because it was near the train station. None caught my eye until, about halfway into my second drink, I noticed a woman in a dark corner near the front of the bar, alone, sitting silently, her dark hair falling to her shoulders in the way of forties femmes fatales. There was something that seemed of that earlier time in the coat she wore, as well, its faintly military cut. Her gestures held the same peculiar aura of the past, the way she kept her hands in her lap, the smooth, steady movement of her eyes, the fact that she spoke to no one and that no one spoke to her, as if she were visible only to me, a woman created from the shattered remnants of my own unsolved mystery.

  The only real mystery woman in my life was there when I arrived at my apartment a few minutes later, or at least the second installment of her story was, tucked neatly into the plain manila envelope Arlo had dropped through the mail slot and which one of my neighbors had politely picked up and placed on the small table in the foyer.

  Once in my apartment, I walked to my desk and opened it. Just as before, there were photocopies of a few sheets of lined paper, all written in Katherine's now-somewhat-familiar script, neat, but with the letters broken so that no word was ever entirely strung together. I'd done a piece on graphology some years back, and remembered that according to this admittedly far-from-exact science, such writing was a sign of creativity, the sort of fractured cursive one found in poets, writers, fabulists of all kinds, and which signaled that Katherine was, like them, a person who made things up.

  NOW

  "She lives alone," Maldrow says, as he begins Katherine's story. "She has no one." He recalls the many times he has stood outside the house on Gilmore Street, his gaze always on the door, waiting for her to come down the stairs, then following along, watchful, studying each movement, observing the clipped nature of her gait, noting how she passes almost invisibly among the others, so alone she seems more a distant planet than a person.

  "No relatives? No friends?"

  He has never seen a visitor from the village at the same house, never seen its door open to anyone save the single distant friend and the young boy she sometimes brings with her. And even then the visits are short, and no one leaves the house to stroll with her down Gilmore or Cantibell.

  "She has no relatives," Maldrow answers. "And her one friend lives a long way away."

  "How often does this friend visit?"

  "Rarely."

  "Always a planned visit?"

  "There will be no surprises," Maldrow tells the Chief.

  The Chief nods approvingly.

  "She is completely isolated," Maldrow adds. "There is no one who could help her."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "Yes."

  "But there are neighbors, are there not?" the Chief asks cautiously.

  "She's a stranger even in her neighborhood," Maldrow assures him. "People see her on the street, but they have no connection to her." Maldrow recalls his glimpses of Katherine on the street, the quickness of her stride, the sidelong and backward glances, the way she moves like a fleeing deer. "Fear is her only companion."

  "Ah, yes," the Chief says softly. "And a cold companion, that."

  "There is nothing warm in her life," Maldrow says. "Absolutely nothing to brighten it or relieve it."

  "Total shadow."

  Maldrow sees her do the things she must, walk the daylight street, make her way into the village, buy the few things she needs to sustain the thin line of her life. "She is like a woman who is already dead."

  The Chief glances upward, as if toward notes he expects to find written there, an immemorial catechism. "Is there nothing words can heal?"

  "She is beyond the reach of words."

  "Is there nothing love can find?"

  Maldrow shakes his head.

  "What binds her to the earth?" the Chief asks.

  Maldrow answers with the lines expected of him. "Her heart beats. She takes in air."

  "And b
eyond this?"

  "Nothing but fear and anger."

  The Chief glances toward the front of the bar, the few men seated there. "The basic requirements are met, then." He turns toward Maldrow. "But only the basic ones."

  "I know."

  "So now the hard part begins," the Chief says.

  "Always the hardest."

  The Chief stares at Maldrow knowingly. "So let us proceed," he says.

  THEN

  I marveled at the sheer casualness with which they strolled into the parking lot with large bags in their arms, the women of Winthrop. They didn't glance around or behind as they headed for their cars. They didn't hold their children tightly. They were skating over ice, but they were not afraid, because the ice had never cracked beneath them.

  But it had cracked beneath me, and since then there was only fear, leadenness, and dark, with everything fixed in heavy shadow, where you wait—in shadow—to be torn, shot, stabbed, beaten, hanged.

  I startled and jerked into movement. The task was to dash quickly down the street, dart from shop to shop, buy what I needed but take nothing with me, all of it to be delivered, left by the door, which I would open like a crab, grab with my pale claws, yank into the liquid cave, pull down and suction into my little shell.

  I went about my shopping, the unknown man visible at every turn, slumped against the milk case, the bread counter, the produce bins. He stood behind the cashier, watched as she counted out my change, then pointed through the window to the parking lot, where he already stood, leaning on a metal cart. As always, he followed me down Gilmore Street, too, a gauntlet of him, lounging in porch swings, leaning against trees. The multitude of him was like the separate straps of a lash.