The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  I ONCE DROVE UP the Amalfi Coast, a road of legendary hairpin turns with little visibility ahead and a deep precipice alongside. At the end of that treacherous drive, at the top of a steep hill, there was a place known as the Terrace of the Infinite that looked out over the Mediterranean. On a clear day, it was impossible to tell where the sky met the ocean, so that you stared out into a perfect blankness, neither land nor sea. You knew that it was still out there, a whole vast world, but you couldn't see any of it. I remember thinking of Max as I stood there, what he'd said to me in Vienna: Always remember, George, the Unseen.

  I thought of him again when I headed for my car the next morning, and in thinking of him, considered just how crowded life is with unsolved mysteries: some trivial, that misplaced pen you never find; some far more grave, the murder of a little boy, the whereabouts of a missing woman.

  The road out of Winthrop took me along the river, past the little rock grotto where Katherine had last been seen. I imagined her shrouded in a melodramatic fog, arms folded over her chest, pacing back and forth before the grotto. Why had she gone there, I wondered, though without any actual expectation that I would ever know, and with the sense that my purpose that morning had little to do with the real Katherine, anyway. It was the rest of her story I was after, partly to keep Arlo on the hook, I suppose, but more because I'd promised Alice to read it to her and so now needed to get hold of it.

  I'd rarely been to Kingston. There was nothing there to attract the eye or the mind, and sad though it is, the story of a dying factory town is hardly news, the death throes of such a place no less familiar, empty stores on a once-thriving main street, the remaining commercial space given over to used clothes or pawnshops or storefront religion.

  As it turned out, Audrey lived outside town, in one of the few middle-class neighborhoods of this otherwise-declining town. The wood-framed houses of the surrounding neighborhood were quite large and sat on spacious lawns, everything neatly trimmed and well maintained, and which, in their false sense of invulnerability, reminded me of the life I'd lived briefly on Jefferson Street.

  Audrey's house occupied a corner lot. For a time, not knowing exactly how to approach her, I simply sat and peered at it. As a writer, I'd been a great visitor of houses made famous because some august person had lived or died there, but it was the Winchester Mystery House that came to mind now, that strange, rambling edifice that had once belonged to the heiress to the Winchester fortune who, after her husband died, had come to believe that she would live only as long as the house remained uncompleted, and so over a period of thirty-eight years, had obsessively added rooms, windows, staircases. By the time she'd died, the house had become a crazy warren of stairs that twined to nowhere, doors that opened onto walls, windows in floors and ceilings, the house at last nothing more than the weird architectural rendering of its owner's extravagantly funded hope for eternity.

  Even from the outside, Audrey's house offered a similarly odd sense of reflecting the mental state of the woman who lived inside it. The porch was adorned with sculpted figures, most carved from wood and more or less totemic. A large African mask hung beside the door, the face of a chieftain, predictably severe. The windows were hung with beaded curtains, rather than cloth, and instead of a traditional wooden swing, two brightly colored hammocks hung in either corner of the porch, though even these were different from the usual, brightly colored with thinner and more elastic strands, like the ones I'd seen in Cozumel and along the Yucatán.

  "I'm George Gates," I said to the woman who opened the door. "Arlo spoke to you last night, I believe."

  "Yes, Arlo called me," Audrey said. "He said you were interested in reading more of Katherine's writings."

  "Yes, I am."

  She was a tall woman, slender and elegant, with graying hair coiled in a neat bun. I don't know why, but I'd expected someone smaller and more ferocious, like a little dog that bites, so that Audrey now seemed less formidable and at the same time sadder and more resigned.

  "I don't let people read Katherine's story in order to mock her," she warned. "She made mistakes. But she doesn't deserve to be mocked."

  Arlo had told me very little about Audrey, that she'd married and had a son, then divorced and never married again. She had the firm look of a woman who could not easily be swayed from any set belief.

  "I thought you'd be older," Audrey said. "An older man."

  I shrugged. "Sorry."

  "Katherine would be in her early fifties now, had she lived."

  There was a sense of great loss in her tone, so that I naturally thought of Teddy, and at that moment imagined him not as he was at the time of his murder, but as he would be now, a blond-haired boy of fifteen.

  Audrey appeared to sense that I was thinking this, or something like it, that I'd returned to a tragedy that was closer to me than Katherine's.

  "You lost your son, Arlo told me," she said.

  "Yes. He was murdered seven years ago."

  "And they never found who did it," Audrey said, a fact Arlo had also clearly shared with her.

  "That's right."

  "Do you have any hope that he won't get away with it, the man who killed your son?"

  I shook my head. "No, I don't have any hope of that."

  Audrey opened the door farther and stepped back. "Good," she said. "It's better that way." She saw the quizzical look in my eyes. "To give up hope for some miraculous solution," she added. "Which is what Katherine should have done." She shook her head. "She'd be alive today if she'd been able to do that, Mr. Gates. She would have been alive and flourishing, but she chose the dark side, and fell in love with it."

  This was a cryptic remark, but one I thought it better not to pursue at such a moment, with the two of us still standing rather stiffly in the foyer, an atmosphere so brittle I found silence the best option.

  "Come in, then," Audrey said.

  I followed her down a short corridor and into a room furnished with heavy wooden furniture, a table with claw legs, a cabinet with beveled glass doors. A hooked rug woven in dark colors covered a good portion of the floor. Everything seemed weighted, somber.

  "You've read Katherine's early poems?" Audrey asked.

  "Yes, I have."

  "So you know that as a girl, she was all feathers and light," Audrey said in a tone that seemed less disapproving than melancholic, the regret of a grounded friend for the fate of a flighty one. "I used to call her that. Feathers and Light. A nature poet." Her features abruptly turned grim. "But Katherine discovered that nature had bacteria, viruses, that it kills you in the end. Being attacked taught her that life wasn't feathers and light. In that one regard, perhaps it was a good thing."

  I let this remark go by without comment.

  "You were a travel writer, I understand," Audrey said. "So you must believe in the kindness of strangers. Travelers have to depend on that sort of thing, isn't that true?"

  "Often, yes."

  Audrey shook her head. "But not all strangers are kind, are they?" She drew in a long, sad breath. "Katherine found that out," she added. "And if she'd lived long enough to say so, she'd have been a great writer."

  It was clear that Audrey ascribed, great gifts to her vanished friend, had gone far in the way of mythologizing her. It was a common response to sudden loss, and I immediately recalled a woman whose son had been killed in the World Trade Center. "He would have changed the world," she said. But he'd been in his mid-thirties at his death, a bond salesman, and perhaps a fine man in his own right, but surely not a maker of new worlds. I had tried to do just the opposite with Teddy, keep him in perspective, his later potential well within the human scale, his loss made somehow greater and more poignant to me because it was his loss of himself, and my loss of him, not the world's loss of someone who would have changed it.

  Audrey pointed to a chair. "Please," she said.

  I took the seat she indicated, then watched as she walked to the cabinet, drew open a drawer, and retrieved a thin stack of papers I
recognized as more of the same type that Arlo had given me, photocopies of ordinary notebook paper, the original manuscript no doubt tucked into a locked drawer or closed up in a safe. To this she'd added a few photographs of Katherine at various ages.

  "It's always good to have a sense of what a person looks like, don't you think?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said.

  "But it's really what Katherine wrote that matters." Audrey nodded toward the pages she'd just given me. "There's not much of it, as you can see." She returned to the sofa and sat down. "Do you know what her favorite poem was when she was a little girl?" Before I could answer, she began to recite: "'Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there.'" She stopped and looked at me sternly. "The problem is that this man was there." She saw that I found this remark perplexing, and drew the top sheet from the stack of papers in her lap and handed it to me. "This should explain it," she said.

  It was a poem called "Munch's Title," and it was clear that I was being instructed to read it before any further discussion would be allowed.

  A dealer called it Vampire,

  There was blood in her hair, he thought,

  Her embrace a death-grip,

  Fangs in her unseen mouth,

  The man draining pale

  As she held him, his ebbing life

  The food of her eternity.

  But Munch called it Love and Pain,

  Saw nothing supernatural in

  Our need to hold,

  No noose in circled arms,

  No brutal weaponry

  Behind the curtained lips.

  Love was sharp enough for Munch.

  No need for deathless spirits,

  Immortals spinning plots.

  As we are, we were enough for Munch.

  Perhaps even more than he could bear.

  "It's a love poem, don't you think?" Audrey asked when she noticed I'd finished reading it.

  "In a way, yes."

  "It's at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the painting Katherine is talking about," Audrey went on. "Katherine's grandfather took Katherine and me there. It was the last trip she ever took. After that, he became too weak for travel." She shrugged. "Anyway, the painting isn't all that much. It's quite small as a matter of fact. There's a man and a woman in it, just like Katherine says in the poem. They both look like they're sitting in the dark. The woman is sort of holding the man. She looks like she's comforting him. Which Katherine would do for anyone who needed it." She stopped, eyed me closely, then added, "You should take a look at that painting because you can figure a lot out by studying it closely."

  "A lot about what?" I asked.

  "About Katherine," Audrey said.

  Katherine's poem rustled softly in a breeze that suddenly swept gently through the window; nothing but a breeze, and yet it had the ghostly effect of those invisible fingers that dance along the keys of a player piano.

  Audrey settled the pages with a firm hand, and in that gesture I saw the hard realist Arlo had sketchily described when we'd talked the previous night, this woman who had worked in the slums of Hartford and New Haven, who had no doubt seen a great deal in life that was neither feathery nor light. There was nothing about her that seemed in the least fanciful. Rather she appeared almost to resent Katherine for vanishing, a hint of blame in almost every word she said, Katherine somehow the author of her own destruction.

  "Arlo never told me why you got in touch with him," I said.

  "Because I believe that the police were wrong," Audrey said. "In their eyes, Katherine was a female stereotype. A girl poet. A recluse. She couldn't have been stranger to them if she'd come from Mars. And so I wanted to give a different view of her. For the record, you might say." Her gaze grew intense. "What do you think happened to Katherine, Mr. Gates?"

  I shrugged. "I have no idea. I didn't know her. All I have is her story."

  "Her story, yes," Audrey said. "Other than one little poem, that was all she left, so the police focused on it right away."

  "And found nothing, I suppose?"

  "Nothing they could believe," Audrey said. "And so they decided Katherine had killed herself. Case closed." She watched me cautiously for a moment, then added, "The police thought he was just some character Katherine made up in her story. But what if he wasn't? What if he was real, the man she calls 'Maldrow'?"

  In the little I'd read so far, Maldrow had emerged as a vague figure, more or less fantastical. Audrey was clearly alluding to a very different type of character: not only real, but darkly so.

  "What if it was a con job?" Audrey asked. "This whole business of finding the man who attacked her. A con job from start to finish. Maldrow—or whatever his real name was—what if he was after her money? She didn't have any, really, but he may not have known that."

  I found that I had nowhere to go with this, for it all seemed too speculative, a reading of signs.

  "You can imagine how vulnerable Katherine must have been," Audrey said emphatically. "Lonely the way she was. Easy prey for a man like that." Her eyes glimmered with a spark of pride. "At least, at first. But Katherine would have caught on to him in the end." She pulled herself upright and her features grew stern. "And when she did, she'd have gone after him."

  I thought of the bloody crawl Katherine had made in pursuit of the unknown man who'd attacked her, and at least this last of Audrey's statements struck me as very likely true: that Katherine would not have allowed a second unknown man to escape her wrath.

  "That would be his motive," Audrey added grimly. "Because she saw through him and would have exposed him to make sure he never did it again, never took advantage of another woman. That would be the reason he killed her, because he knew she'd go to the police."

  To my surprise, I immediately imagined this hypothetical murder in a decidedly melodramatic scene: Katherine confronting her deceiver, revealing the whole scheme in what must have been a violent paroxysm of fury and hopelessness, the man who had betrayed her now fully exposed, listening as she raged, knowing he could do nothing to quell her anger, and so at last deciding what surely must be done.

  "But he'd be smart about it, wouldn't he?" Audrey continued. "He wouldn't have done it at her house, or anyplace around here. He had a trailer. It's in her story. My guess is that Katherine went there and told him she knew what he was up to. That's when he killed her. He did it in his trailer, then drove away. Later he buried her or put her in the river."

  It was the sort of explanation—a plausible motivation for murder combined with the opportunity both to commit and get away with it—that one might find in a typical murder mystery, but that didn't make it any less possible in real life.

  "Of course, that's not how Katherine's story ends," Audrey added with obvious reluctance. "In the story, Katherine never stops believing in Maldrow. As you'll see, when you read it."

  With that, I knew that she'd decided to let me read the rest of what Katherine had left behind.

  "But I don't think Katherine wrote that ending," Audrey added quickly.

  This was a supposition I hadn't heard before.

  Cautiously, I asked, "Well, if you don't think Katherine wrote the ending, who did?"

  Audrey didn't say the name as she handed over the rest of Katherine's tale, but I instantly envisioned it written on the walls and floors and mirrors and doors of countless murder rooms, the dying effort of innumerable murdered women to identify one they would not let get away, the letters of his name crudely drawn, glistening, forever dripping red: Maldrow.

  11

  IT WAS A NOIRISH little scenario, Audrey's portrait of Maldrow as a con man who'd chosen the wrong mark in Katherine and had consequently found it necessary to kill her. But that didn't matter to me as much as the fact that she had given me the rest of Katherine's story, a tale I could unwind to Alice, discuss and analyze as amateur detectives, perhaps conclude that it had been Colonel Mustard in the billiard parlor with a pistol, the two of us smiling at the end of it like satisfied players of Clue.


  Alice was not in the dayroom when I passed it, but other children were, mostly six- or seven-year-olds, though some were younger still. A few sat at tables, working puzzles or arranging blocks. Others were on the carpeted floor, playing with the various toys the children's ward provided. Their laughter was the laughter of children, bright and airy, but it didn't hide their grave infirmities, nor the effort they were making to put all that briefly out of their minds, to lose themselves in play. Watching them I could hardly imagine the crime that had been committed against them: murdered by their own bodies, so that they lacked even the figure of a stranger fleeing from them, someone still out there, whom they might yet track down. It was nature's bloody hand that attacked these children, and so in the darkest, deepest sense of things, no one would ever be made to pay for what had been done to them.

  Alice's eyes shot over to me when I came into her room, though with an energy that seemed already to have dissipated slightly by the time she spoke. "Did you bring the story?" she asked softly.

  "Yes," I said. I drew over a chair and sat down. "But I need to bring you up to speed on what I've read of it so far."

  Alice reached for the laptop on the table beside her bed, her slender arms little more than pale reeds, the weight of the machine almost too much for them to bear, though they did, in fact, manage to draw it into her lap.

  "Okay," she said as she turned it on. "I'm ready."

  For the next few minutes, and orchestrated by the steady tapping of Alice's fingers on the keyboard, I told her everything I'd learned about Katherine's life, all Arlo and Audrey had told me, along with what I'd picked up in the Winthrop Examiner. Then I went through everything I'd read in Katherine's story up to the point of meeting Audrey.

  Alice listened very attentively, rarely looking down to type. There was a strange hunger in her gaze, an eagerness to absorb each detail, so that I felt her mind had long been starved for such exchanges, the sound of a voice other than a doctor's, someone beside her in other than a professional capacity, speaking of something other than her affliction.