The Fate of Katherine Carr

by Thomas H. Cook

  I didn't speak, but Maldrow knew that I'd accepted the mission, that I would carry it out forever, vanish from my present life and step into a new one.

  For a long moment, we stared at each other silently and without motion, until Maldrow finally reached into the pocket of his jacket.

  "There must be resolution," he said, and with those words, drew out his closed hand and opened it.

  "He didn't get away with it, Katherine," Maldrow said.

  I stared at the gold ring in his hand, and knew absolutely that it was the one that had been stolen from me.

  "Take it," Maldrow said.

  I drew it from his hand, but had no need to look inside the band, for they were undoubtedly there, my initials, carved roughly as I had seen my grandfather carve them. For a time, I stared at the ring, knowing that it would be the last of my earthly possessions, the last of my human connections, the last I would know of true touch, this ring the only object I could take with me in my vanishing.

  "He didn't get away with it," Maldrow repeated. "Any more than Stanovich got away with it, or the man who killed my daughter. Any more than the man on the number 34, who burned that young woman. He will not get away with it because it will be you who comes for him."

  I felt as if a pair of dark wings had sprouted from my shoulders, a keenness in my eyes, the way they required neither sound nor movement nor color to find my prey, but only the heat of the one who was to be punished.

  "I'm ready," I told Maldrow.

  Maldrow touched my back. "Depart now," he said, "and restore the balance."

  Then, as if carried on a river of air, we moved toward the dark, flowing water of the river until we reached its bank. My feet were bare, though I had no idea where my shoes had gone. I could feel the cool water lapping at my toes, along with a great beckoning force, the end of my earthbound story, the stars gathering around me as I rose toward them, the earth now far below me, small and blue and streaked with clouds, until I reached the miraculous apogee of this flight, and from its zenith began my return to earth, knowing as I made my dark descent that somewhere out there, in ever-changing shape, unseen by the human throng, I would strike tonight.

  "The End," I said, then simply stared at Alice silently for a moment before I added, "J was hoping for a better ending, too."

  In fact, it seemed to me that the ending Katherine had concocted for her story could hardly have been worse: a scene of magical levitation that was ludicrous on its face, the sort of ending I would have expected from some cheesy fantasy writer, and because of which, I suddenly felt a deep disappointment in Katherine: not just as a writer, but as a person. Until this point, I'd admired the way she'd faced life with the starkness of one who, having faced it squarely, had every right to walk into the river, as I felt quite certain she had. Then, in a ridiculous, supernatural turn, she'd wrapped herself in the mantle of eternity, turned herself into a woman made more for rapture than reality.

  These were not thoughts I would have kept to myself, but before I could speak again, Alice released a long, weary breath and said, "I'd like to be like Katherine."

  "Like Katherine?" I asked. "In what way?"

  "Just let it go, the way she did," Alice answered.

  "Let what go?"

  "Life," Alice answered in a voice that was little more than a whisper. "Leave it all behind."

  At that moment, I realized the very different ways in which Alice and I each had received the ending of Katherine's story. For me it was one of supernatural transcendence, easy to dismiss and even hold in contempt. But for Alice, the ending had spoken of acceptance and surrender so that I suddenly recalled my father's last days, the way he'd fought to take just one more breath. He had struggled on by will alone, or perhaps simply the brute intransigence of this organ or that one, a heart that against all odds just kept on beating, lungs determined to pull in just one more gasp of oxygen.

  I knew that this was the kind of death Alice wanted to avoid, but I could find nothing that might move her closer to the letting go she sought, and which I found myself idealizing as an instant of complete serenity, her eyes and lips closing in some final, welcomed peace.

  She moved slightly, and with that movement, winced.

  "Do you need something for that?" I asked.

  For a moment she watched me thoughtfully, eyes very intent and oddly searching, though she also seemed reluctant to reveal what was on her mind.

  "I don't want to finish yet," she said finally. "With Katherine."

  "But we've read the whole story," I said. "There isn't any more."

  "You said there was a poem," Alice said. "A poem she left behind."

  "Yes, there was. But I don't have it."

  "I want to read it," Alice said. "I want to know..." She stopped. "I want to know what happened to her."

  It was a futile ambition, I knew, Alice's hope to move from guessing the ending of a little mystery story to solving the actual case of its vanished author. But she was dying, and I wondered if perhaps in these final desperate hours, she was even suffering from a vague dementia, so I said, "All right, I'll see if I can get it."

  My pledge clearly eased her. She drew in a long, delicate breath, and on that breath, closed her eyes. "Thank you, George," was all she said.

  She was quite obviously exhausted, so I left her a few minutes later, went to my car, and headed home.

  On the drive to my apartment, I considered Alice's passionate need to solve Katherine's case. I knew there was no possibility of her doing any such thing, so for a time I'd actually entertained the notion of fooling Alice in some way, at least to the extent of providing a solution of my own. Various schemes occurred to me. I could claim that something she'd said had led me to investigate further and that I'd miraculously uncovered new evidence, evidence I would provide myself: undiscovered chapters of her story that I myself would quickly write. The chapters would tell all, and thus resolve Katherine's story. Or I might claim that Katherine's lost ring had been found among the effects of some criminal who'd suddenly died in a neighboring town, proof that she had been murdered. If Alice appeared doubtful, I could use Celeste's ring as proof, say that Arlo had managed to get hold of it for me.

  But every scheme I came up with proved more ludicrous than the one before it, so I finally gave up and called Arlo.

  "We finished reading Katherine's story," I told him. "Alice isn't satisfied with the ending."

  "I see."

  "She wants to know what actually happened to Katherine," I added. "She wants to read the poem. You said she left a poem behind."

  "Yes, she did."

  "Alice wants to read it."

  "I'd have to check with Audrey before I could give it to you, George."

  "Could you do it now?" I asked.

  He heard the urgency in my voice. "She's that close, Alice?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay," Arlo said. "If Audrey says it's okay, I'll drop it at your place."

  "Good. Thanks."

  "Just don't get your hopes up, George, because that poem doesn't have anything to do with what happened to Katherine." His voice grew curiously taut. "It's not about her at all."

  25

  THERE ARE TIMES now when I let slip the reins of what I know is real, and release my own best hope like a white horse into a limitlessly open field. At those moments, I imagine Katherine watching from high above, like the soaring bird she wrote about, looking down, looking through, watching patiently as her plan unfolded, this most tender of her schemes.

  But that night, waiting for Arlo to arrive with Katherine's last poem, I felt only my great desire for Alice to find a satisfying conclusion to Katherine's story, one I couldn't find myself, any more than the police had found it, or Audrey or Cody, or anyone else who had tried.

  I had hoped it would be only a few minutes before Arlo slipped the poem through the slot in my door, but an hour passed, then another. After a time, I headed for O'Shea's.

  In some strange way, O'Shea's was where it had al
l begun, I thought, as I settled into my usual booth. It was here Arlo had first approached me, here we'd had our first quiet talk, here where he'd first mentioned a young woman who had vanished twenty years before. It was the place where Katherine's story had begun, as well, with Maldrow and the Chief seated in a back booth that might well have been the same one I was seated in at that very moment.

  I took a sip of my drink, my gaze moving about in the way Katherine had described Maldrow's, from the window, to the patrons at the bar, then back to the seat just opposite him, where the Chief had suddenly appeared, speaking the first line of dialogue in that melancholy way of his: You look tired, Maldrow.

  I'm sure I looked tired, too, though it was Alice's weariness that was my chief concern at that moment, the heaviness of each breath, how much she wanted to let go of life, simply step back into the fog as Katherine had.

  "Hello, George."

  I looked up to find Stanley Grierson standing at the booth.

  "Hey, Stanley."

  He had been my neighbor when I'd lived on Jefferson Street, a widower who now seemed locked in perpetual grief. His wife Molly had died a long, slow death seven years before, and after that, Stanley had kept pretty much to himself.

  "I like your stories in the paper," Stanley said. "It's a good job, being a reporter."

  I remembered when Bill Daugherty died. He'd been my father's best friend, an old hand at covering wars both hot and cold. At his wake in New York, a slew of aging reporters had come tottering in to pay their respects, foreign correspondents mostly, wearing trench coats and smoking Gauloises or some equally smelly foreign cigarette. One of them had come over to me and asked what I did for a living. I'd told him I was a freelance writer, but he'd seemed to hear something more august. "Reporter," he said, "comes from the Latin. Reportare, to bear away." He'd yammered on about something or other, but I'd looked over his shoulder to where Celeste stood across the room, pregnant with Teddy, careful about what she was eating, not drinking at all, because of the child she was carrying. And I'd thought, She knows. She knows what's worth bearing away.

  "I wouldn't go that far," I said. "But it puts food on the table."

  Stanley shrugged and took a sip from his beer.

  I would normally have said nothing more, but the expectation of Alice's death, the return to solitariness that would inevitably follow, urged me forward just enough to say, "So how have you been, Stanley?"

  Stanley seemed genuinely surprised that I'd opted to continue the conversation. "Okay," he said. "You know, missing Molly."

  There was little to be said in response to this, so I let my gaze drift away from him and down toward the table, old and scarred as I noticed, punctured and gouged out, sometimes words, sometimes numbers, and there, somehow more prominent than the others, more deeply and more violently dug, as if carved into the vital organs of the wood, a name that might have been the one Katherine had written of in her story, the one "Maldrow" had seen, carved angrily, as she'd described it, the carver's lips curling down with each dig of the knife.

  "What have you been up to?" Stanley asked.

  "Following the Flower Festival, the Chamber of Commerce," I answered in the idle way of simply keeping the talk going. "Reading a story this woman left behind after she vanished."

  "Left behind?" Stanley asked. "You mean, like a clue?"

  I realized that I hadn't thought of Katherine's story in that way before, and it all suddenly seemed terribly "genre" to me, a reporter with a tragic past reading a story written by a mysteriously missing woman that a retired detective had given to him. I wondered if I might find myself a character in some romance story next, or worse, in some fantasy, riding a winged white horse through starry worlds.

  I took a quick sip of scotch. "And writing a profile of a dying girl," I said. "She's sort of gotten to me."

  Stanley nodded heavily. "It never fills up, does it?" he asked.

  "What doesn't fill up?" I asked.

  "The space they leave," Stanley said. "The ones who've been taken."

  I heard Teddy's voice: Can you pick me up if it rains?

  "No," I said. "It never fills up."

  We talked on for a time, though not about anything I could later remember. Then Stanley rose and headed back to his empty house on Jefferson Street.

  As he left, it struck me that if real life worked like an inspirational story, then he'd have left me with some little nugget of wisdom he'd garnered from his hard experience, some life-affirming little lesson he'd learned from Molly's death, a remark that I could ponder, reshape, perhaps fashion into a plan of action with regard to Alice. But Stanley had had nothing of that sort to offer me, or if he had, he'd kept it to himself.

  I watched him leave, ordered another drink, then another, so that I was never able to say exactly when I left O'Shea's that night, or be certain—absolutely certain—of what happened after that, save that I headed home on foot, as always, and that at some point, I noticed the lights of the coffee shop at the end of the block, a woman in the window, reading to herself, noticed how her long silvering hair fell in a thick curtain over her shoulders and down her back, and how, when she saw me standing groggily in the rain, she closed her book and sat with her hands in her lap, so that she seemed to be waiting for me to come inside.

  I nodded toward the empty chair opposite her. "Do you mind?" I asked.

  "Not at all."

  I sat down and nodded toward the book she'd been reading, but which now lay closed before her.

  "Good story?" I asked.

  She looked down and one pale hand rose from her lap and tapped the book. "They're like ghosts, don't you think?" she asked.

  I took a sip of coffee and felt a little of my mental haze lift a bit. "In what way?"

  "Because they're the voices of the dead," she answered.

  "You could think of them that way."

  A smile played delicately upon her lips. "Yes." She turned the book toward me, opened it at where she'd placed a dark red ribbon, and pressed it toward me. "I'm reading this story at the moment."

  I took the book and glanced down at the title. "'The Last Leaf,'" I said.

  "O. Henry. Do you know it?"

  "Yes," I said. "It's about a dying—" I stopped, because something in her gaze stopped me.

  "Go on," she said.

  "A little girl who's dying," I said.

  "As are so very many," she said quietly.

  "More's the pity," I said, as if called upon to say it, so that the two of us now seemed to be speaking in the coded language of a long-familiar couple, one we by some arcane means mutually understood.

  I handed the book back to her. "It's a sentimental story. Sort of a lie."

  "I prefer to think of it as a hopeful fraud," the woman said. She tucked the book firmly under her arm. "Forgive me, but my bus is here."

  I glanced out the front window, and saw the Number 34 glide over to the curb.

  "It must be the last bus of the evening," I said.

  "It is, yes." She smiled. "Good-bye, then."

  I got to my feet. "Good-bye," I said.

  She offered a hand that seemed ivory in its whiteness, in its smoothness, with nothing to add to its ghostly pallor, as I noticed, save the slender glint of a plain gold ring.

  Arlo had still not dropped off Katherine's poem when I got home, so I grabbed my book on the Buranni and began to read about their belief that it was the unseen things of life that were most powerful. Life was invisible, as was Death, they claimed, nor could anyone see the force that allowed pain to radiate from one person to another, so that people could feel the loss and sorrow of others.

  I'd been reading for only a short time when I heard a car pull up outside. I went to the window, and looked down to see Arlo get out of a dusty old sedan. He had a plain white envelope in his hand, no doubt the poem Katherine had left with her story.

  I retrieved the envelope a few seconds later, took it back upstairs, opened it, and read the poem, hoping that Alice might
have been right, that something within its few lines actually revealed Katherine's fate.

  But Arlo was right: The poem had nothing to do with any of that. Not one word about Maldrow, or Katherine herself, or anything that might remotely suggest the circumstances of her disappearance.

  And so I folded the page and returned it to the envelope, convinced now more than ever before that there could be no solution to her case.

  26

  I DELIVERED KATHERINE'S poem to the hospital the next morning. Alice was still sleeping, so I left it on the table beside her bed, then went on about my day.

  As usual, I filled the hours with work, writing my piece on Warren Maizey's funeral first, an article that did not include my bizarre little visit to his hospice room, but focused on his crimes instead, how he'd been apprehended at last, though already dying by then, so that he'd quite clearly escaped punishment, Eden Taub's terrible death forever unavenged.

  By noon I'd turned it in, waiting as always while Wyatt read it.

  "Good," he said when he finished it. "Love the first line." With that he read it: "Warren Maizey's coffin was borne to the grave coldly and indifferently, with no sign of human feeling, as if in imitation of his life." He smiled. "Ouch!"

  "He didn't deserve any better," I said dryly.

  Wyatt slipped the pages into the Ship and Bill file. "So, who's next?"

  "Alice Barrows," I said. "When she dies."

  "And after that?" Wyatt asked matter-of-factly.

  I felt something very small give way within me, the crumbling of a little wall. "After Alice?" I said. "I don't know."

  For the rest of the day, as I worked my next assignment, a piece on the town's upcoming exhibition of local painters, I was seized with odd thoughts. They came the instant I was not otherwise occupied, came like bats, fluttered insistently. I thought of the Third Man, with his tale of diamonds stashed in tiny graves, the elfish name he'd manufactured for his tale, how eerie it all was. Then Max came to mind, my night in the Viennese demimonde, his injunction continually echoing in my mind, warning that I should never forget the Unseen. I thought of Celeste's encounter with a stranger who turned out to have shared her surname. In remembrance, I took again my long, winding drive up the Amalfi Coast, recalled again and again the eerie expanse that swept out from the Terrace of the Infinite. But each of these thoughts and recollections returned me inexplicably to Alice, so that by the time evening fell and I headed back to Gladwell Hospice, I felt that in some way I'd been with her all day.