The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  According to her statement, Harriet Foster believed—was convinced, in fact—that Christopher had manipulated a prize drawing so that he would have a reasonable excuse to be alone with the state hospital camper Evie Hicks; so he might bring her into the camp van and drive her out beyond the confines of Kindermann Forest. His intention was to find a secluded area where he could molest or rape her. Wyatt Huddy had prevented this from happening.

  The charge wasn’t a complete shock to Marcy. (There’d been ugly rumors in the days following Wyatt’s arrest.) But lurking just beneath the calm tone of this statement was an awful insinuation.

  Yes, Harriet Foster admitted. What happened to Christopher Waterhouse was tragic. He’d died a violent and terrifying death. She’d been devastated to learn of it. More so, she’d been overwhelmed with remorse to realize she’d set the tragedy in motion by sending Wyatt Huddy out alone to search for the camp van.

  But beneath Harriet Foster’s supposed remorse, her apology—if that’s what it was—lay another line of reasoning, unaddressed, unwritten. What Wyatt Huddy had done upon finding the camp van may not have been wise or justified. But it may have been necessary.

  How wildly unfair this was. It was enraging, really, for Marcy to have to consider this accusation. To read the statement was to be lectured to in a tone that was deliberate and vaguely superior. Sentence by sentence, over the course of seven single-spaced pages, it all added up to a terrible and sprawling lie. (But—and this was hard to admit—she admired the statement, too. The patience it took to compose something this long and clear, the hours of hard work. It made you wonder: Where did a black nurse from the inner city learn to write this way?) If possible, she’d track Harriet Foster down and wave a mangled copy of the statement in her bewildered face. Look here, God damn it. I know what you’re up to. I know what you’re trying to pull here.

  All of which made for a very satisfying fantasy, but here at the kitchen table, reading the statement for the second and third times, she was more inclined to scream. She didn’t dare. Not in Dr. Lammers’s cool presence. With Dr. Lammers all the evidence had to be dispassionately considered. The pages of Harriet Foster’s statement needed to be set out before them on the table. All right then, they had to say and sip from their warm mugs of raspberry herbal tea. Let’s take a moment and break down the argument piece by piece.

  For instance . . .

  Less than an hour before the murder, Harriet Foster claimed to have stopped Christopher Waterhouse and Evie Hicks in the camp van. She said she’d tried her best to convince Christopher to leave Evie Hicks with her and drive to the Ellsinore Dairy Queen alone. But he could not be persuaded. He’d been extremely patient and polite, but this was a pretense; he barely listened to her. His attention was elsewhere. He put the van in gear and drove off. She ran after him. At the camp gate he turned right instead of left, and she knew then, beyond any doubt, that he did not intend to take Evie Hicks to Ellsinore. Instead he was driving east along County Road H looking for an isolated place to park the van.

  It was terrifying, she said, to realize his true intentions. There was no other counselor, no other staff member, whom Harriet could find to help her. She ran back to the infirmary. Desperate as she was, she made an appeal to one of the campers who happened to be staying that night in the infirmary: Wyatt Huddy, large, powerful, obedient.

  But this made no sense at all. In her previous affidavit—and in the affidavits she’d no doubt helped gather from others—Harriet Foster had insisted Wyatt Huddy showed all the signs and symptoms of a retarded man. Now she was saying she’d chosen him to be her hero?

  Another sip of tea. A shuffling of papers.

  “Not likely,” Marcy said, and Dr. Lammers nodded, perhaps in agreement.

  When you got right down to it, there was very little that could pass for evidence in Harriet Foster’s long statement. She saw this. Or she noticed that. Christopher Waterhouse had rigged a prize drawing. He’d turned right on County Road H. But could any of it be verified? According to Harriet Foster, two and half hours after Wyatt had gone off in search of Christopher, he’d come back to the infirmary in the camp van. Harriet had run out and thrown open the van door. And what had she seen? Wyatt Huddy scratched and disheveled and smeared with dirt. Evie Hicks strapped naked onto the bench of the van, her clothes piled beside her. She had the dazed look of someone who’d undergone a terrible ordeal. This was Harriet’s evidence that Christopher had molested or raped her.

  But really, Marcy insisted, it was important to look beyond Harriet’s easy explanations. Why not suspect Wyatt Huddy of this attack? He’d already proved himself to be a murderer.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Dr. Lammers said evenly. “It’s a valid possibility.”

  Marcy was so very glad to hear him admit this. But honestly, she’d’ve liked to have noticed a shred of intensity in his reaction, a trace of passion, for goodness’ sake. Without it, she worried that the cool sincerity of Harriet Foster’s statement had had its effect.

  They sifted through other documents. There were lesser topics to discuss. What had Marcy thought of the camp management? Linda Rucker? Very average, Marcy said. And what about Schuller Kindermann? Oh, there was something wonderful about Mr. Kindermann, she said, though she couldn’t at the moment articulate what it was. Instead she rose and put a half dozen cinnamon scones in the toaster oven. She was bundling up and filing away documents when the oven buzzer went off.

  Dr. Lammers, his scone lightly buttered and set before him, lifted a few broken crumbs to his lips. “Oh, that’s very nice, Marcy,” he said. “Thank you.” Whatever he’d just tasted seemed to stir him toward other thoughts. “But you never noticed any funny stuff, sexually I mean, with Christopher?” he asked.

  She didn’t need to hesitate. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not. We weren’t what you would call . . .” There was a word she couldn’t quite locate. “We weren’t ever dating,” she said. “We weren’t girlfriend and boyfriend.”

  But really, when it came to sex, what counted as funny anyway? There were always a few messy and confidential things young men liked to do that couldn’t easily be called normal. In these matters Marcy had some experience. She’d been thirty when she married Dr. Lammers. By then she’d had a number of relationships and had witnessed some noteworthy preferences and habits. For instance, she once lived with a sweet-tempered anesthesiologist in training who was a fan of the city’s modern dance troupe and liked, in the privacy of their bedroom, to strip naked and dance for her. He liked to be seen. Dr. Lammers, too, had at least one interesting inclination. On the second and fourth Saturdays of each month he preferred Marcy to dress in nothing but red panties and wait for him beneath the covers of their bed. He liked to pull back those covers and say, with a bemused expression, “Ah yes, the doctor will see you now.” A private little joke between them, certainly. But he seemed to relish reciting this line and indulging in an enthusiastic survey of her body. Wasn’t that a little funny?

  Less amusing was the fact that most of the young men Marcy dated had tried to lead her, wordlessly, into the realm of some new sexual practice. At least Christopher Waterhouse had come to her as a friend and, in the bright, romping light of the swimming pool deck, had been able to look her in the eye and speak honestly about what he needed. The problem, he said, was Linda Rucker. She’d been so intent and so very explicit about the sexual things she wanted him to do. A terrible picture had been created in his mind. It was warping his imagination. When he closed his eyes at night and tried to sleep, he saw Linda Rucker eager and unclothed and reaching for him. What he needed was an altogether different and more powerful image to take its place. He craved a strong reminder of what a beautiful woman looked like.

  Was Marcy flattered? Was she glad to have been asked? No, not really. But she must have been willing. The young woman she’d been then—the cheerful, eager twenty-two-year-old Marcy Bittman—must have thought it over and decided to accommodate her friend. Late in the afternoo
n, once the campers had finished for the day, and Harriet Foster and her son had completed their private swim and gone away, after the deck was hosed down and the water tested, she and Christopher stepped into the pool house supply room and closed the door. The physical part of what happened in that room was entirely Christopher’s doing. He had his lotion and a beach towel and his hand. It was Marcy’s task—her burden, too—to remove her one-piece suit. He liked her to stand in a certain way. This was uncomfortable, but only mildly so. It wasn’t as if he ogled or leered at her, but he did look up and reference her from time to time. And something else, too: he took her discarded swimsuit and pressed a particular section of it to his mouth and nose. So yes, maybe this act, the breathing in of her swimsuit, would qualify in Dr. Lammers’s view as funny stuff. For Marcy it was simply an embarrassment. She wore that suit all day long. If she hadn’t constantly been getting in and out of a chlorinated pool, she wouldn’t have let Christopher anywhere near it.

  They were together in the storeroom, in exactly this way, three times. Three afternoons in a row. It didn’t take long for Christopher to finish and clean himself up. Less than five minutes, surely. And after he finished, he was so authentically grateful. Thank you, Marcy, he said, thank you, though not in a way that was exaggerated or loaded with expectation. She nodded and got dressed and helped lock up the pool. Then they went back to their respective cabins, and a half hour later, when they saw each other again at the mess hall for dinner, Christopher would grin and raise one eyebrow a bit, and the meaning of this expression would come through so clearly. Yes, he was saying, what happened between us thirty minutes ago was a little odd, a little reckless, but I’m so glad to have gone through it with a trusted friend.

  All of which begged the question. Did she love him? Had she been lovesick for Christopher Waterhouse?

  Her most truthful answer? No. Not love. Though maybe something akin to love or something that, at the very least, carried an equal urgency.

  She recognized in Christopher a tendency she’d seen in no one else. Whenever he talked with the other counselors at Kindermann Forest, a part of Christopher, an awareness, was flitting around outside the bounds of the conversation. If you looked very closely, you could see that this separate part of Christopher was trying to study the manners and expressions of the persons with whom he talked. And in the moments after the conversation ended, you could see those learned expressions being played out faintly on Christopher’s face. He was schooling himself in how other people behaved and how they might feel.

  This particular longing she understood completely: she’d always had a hunch that what lay at the center of certain people—Dr. Lammers and Harriet Foster, just to name a few—was better and brighter and wiser than what existed at the center of herself. In the company of these people, she was always leaning forward a bit, trying to learn the secrets of what made them vivid and worthwhile.

  And to see the same tendency alive in Christopher Waterhouse? It was perhaps the most reassuring thing she’d ever witnessed.

  It seemed to Marcy they were very busy people that year—the year of opening envelopes and weighing evidence. She had her cooking and health classes, and Dr. Lammers had his endless roster of patients and interns to be trained and the opening of the third laser vision eye care clinic. Despite their hectic lives, Dr. Lammers did something exceptional: he took Marcy to Barbados for five sun-burnished and blissful days. Truly they needed this time together, more than they needed the bright weather and the exquisite staff service at their resort. What mattered most was that they could lie in bed or sit for a long dinner and speak their opinions of things without having to be so god damn fair-minded, so neutral and altogether dull. In Barbados they were candid. They were close. And they brought some of that closeness and candor back home into their daily life in St. Louis. They breezed by for a few happy weeks while the packets of evidence arrived in the mail and accumulated in a teakwood tray on the kitchen counter.

  The thought occurred to Marcy that she might sift through the envelopes on her own and weed out any documents that were distracting or inconsequential.

  She never did, though, and a few weeks later, when she and Dr. Lammers sat down to the kitchen table, the first item to spill from the envelope was a thick criminal case file from Pemiscot County, Missouri. It bore Christopher Waterhouse’s name.

  They opened the file and read the title of the topmost document: a record of arrest dated September 23, 1995, some nine months before the start of the Kindermann Forest State Hospital Session. There were other documents in this file—charges and incidents and reports that appeared to date back to Christopher Waterhouse’s early adolescence.

  A terrible sense of alertness came over Marcy. She managed to bring her full teacup to her chest without spilling a drop. “Let’s put this whole file aside for a moment,” she said. “Let’s put it aside and move on to something else. Can we do that, please?”

  “Well, I don’t—”

  “Please, Dean!”

  He looked up with an acute and wary brand of respect. After a moment, he nodded. They turned their attention to other envelopes and considered entirely different documents, most of them minor in importance. Petitions to delay. Petitions to seek a psychiatric evaluation of Wyatt Huddy. More significant, they found a memo from the prosecuting attorney, Henry Masner, to the defense attorney, Mackland Benders.

  —Mackland

  In regard to our earlier discussion.

  We’ll have it your way. I’m willing to drop second-degree charges and press for a diminished capacity conviction based on Wyatt Huddy’s limited IQ.

  I don’t foresee the Waterhouse family objecting to this change. Their enthusiasm for my prosecution case, or for anything involving their son, is mild at best.

  It gives me no satisfaction to prosecute Mr. Huddy on this charge. But necessary, I would think.

  Strange to feel this pity from Henry Masner, three years dead, reach them in the form of this memo. They placed it among the constellation of other documents. Then they arranged and bundled up various stacks of papers, and heated two soft pretzels in the toaster oven and served them with honey mustard. With nothing else left to consider, they turned their attention back to Christopher Waterhouse’s criminal case file.

  He’d been charged in September 1995 with sexual assault upon a thirteen-year-old girl, a neighbor in his hometown of Caruthersville, Missouri. The record of arrest described an adult male perpetrator sneaking into the girl’s home through a basement window, finding her second-floor bedroom, and performing an act of sodomy upon her. The victim claimed to recognize Christopher Waterhouse at the time of the attack. He’d been charged with first-degree sexual assault. After three days’ incarceration, he was released on bail. His court date had been set for November 1996.

  There were other reports in this file. A year earlier a girl Christopher had dated had made an unpleasant accusation: she’d been pressured during a college party to take part in a sex act involving multiple partners. No charges had come of this. She’d been distraught enough to contact the police and file a report, but she did not believe—or was not willing to believe—that what she’d been pressured to do qualified as sexual assault.

  A month prior to this Christopher had been cited for drunkenness and lewd behavior in the parking lot of an all-night convenience store.

  A year earlier he’d exposed himself to a group of teenage girls at a shopping mall.

  The file included several reports that dated back to Christopher’s years in junior high school. It seemed to Marcy that what these reports entailed might have been typical adolescent behavior—peering into neighbors’ windows, running about naked at night—if the behavior hadn’t been so frequent, the incidents so many.

  Was there a calm way, a fair-minded way, to talk about what these files contained? If so, Marcy didn’t know what it might be. Nor, it seemed, did Dr. Lammers. He’d been so fully engrossed in the final pages of the case file that, when he lifted h
is face up to her, his bespectacled eyes were pared down into a myopic squint.

  “Well . . . ,” he said at last. “Well, Marcy . . .” He shook his head, and the obvious satisfaction he took in his bewilderment, his speechlessness, irked her. He was such a fussy, childish man, such an innocent. It was maddening, the way he seemed to savor the shock he’d just endured.

  They waited patiently for each other to assemble their arguments. It was surprising, really. She was far more composed than she might have expected. She folded her hands and, in a voice that was level and instructive, said, “Do you know what I think, Dean? I think, if we try, we can consider all this with an open mind. We can put it in perspective alongside all the really good things, the outstanding things, we know about Christopher.”

  It wasn’t as if she expected him to agree. But the intensity of his reaction: his face, in the span of a few moments, turned a mottled red. “Do you understand what we’ve just read?” he said with such incredulousness, such breathy astonishment. “All these awful things?” For emphasis, he pinched a thick corner of Christopher’s case file. “What’s written down here is only the stuff he got caught doing. My God, Marcy. Imagine the things he got away with.”

  This was the last remark from Dr. Lammers that she was able to calmly absorb. After that she seemed to undergo a profound change: one moment coolly indignant, and the next wild and raving. It wasn’t like her. She shrieked out some terrible things. Horrible things, really. It was astonishing that such hurtful notions were lurking somewhere in her mind.

  They’d never had a fight remotely like this one. Dr. Lammers had never before stood so staunchly behind his supposed principles. He swore he’d never invest a dime of his money in honoring a person like Christopher Waterhouse. A person who happened to be a . . .