Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  At first there didn’t seem to be anything promising in it, just Amy’s past income tax information and paperwork that she’d had stored at the dorm. As I flipped past manila files labeled “Education Expenses” and “Income,” I found a pocket-size notebook, bound in rust-colored parchment paper and secured with an elastic band. Most of the pages were empty. I turned to the inside front cover. There, in proper Catholic schoolgirl script, it said, “Diary, Amaryllis Del Arte.” I slouched down against the cool concrete wall with my knees bracing my arms to read.

  The diary covered two and a half years, beginning with Amy’s sixteenth birthday. It ended more than a year before the rape. I pictured her teenaged face scrunched with concentration as she penned the opening pages, careful not to make a mistake. As she filled in later pages, the pen had moved more quickly, trying to keep up with the rush of emotion and thought she was trying to get down. A prayer for our parents. Reflections on anger and selfishness and the impermanence of life.

  Later pages were crowded with what I thought were fantasy stories. A bareback ride in the moonlight. The straining of a taut denim thigh thrust against her. Had Amy confined her promiscuity to the fantasy stories in this diary? Or had she purposely lived out the erotic and dangerous deeds our parents had forbidden when they were alive?

  Amy wasn’t a virgin on the night she was attacked. I knew that. She was as showy and lush as her flower namesake and had attracted the attention of one boy after another growing up. She seemed to go through men like they were trial magazine subscriptions.

  I knew now that Amy had not checked into that motel alone. What did that mean? Had she been looking for the fantasy lover she wrote about? Did she go there with him or meet him there? And what had happened to change that fantasy to a nightmare?

  I ran a mental slide show of my own romantic history. While it wasn’t as littered with broken hearts as Amy’s, it was certainly as colorful and sincere.

  It was Michael Hawke who taught me how to be a woman. Curly brown hair as soft as a spiderweb, and when the sun was behind him it looked like a halo. We were sixteen, and I had just gotten over my crush on Enrique Garza. I grew to know the backseat of Michael’s Nash Rambler like the contour of my own face.

  He had a way of holding close without confining, ties that didn’t bind. I remembered the evening that we spread a blue serape on the desert ground to watch the sun go down. Michael’s tall champagne-colored Afghan hound, Sedona, threatened to run each time he picked up the scent of something interesting on the wind. Michael placed a rope in a wide circle on the ground and the dog settled down. It wasn’t a leash or a wall; it was a protective circle, like soft arms around us that comforted us in our freedom.

  All that ended when Michael died at the age of twenty, the victim of an untended strep-throat infection. It was the first time I ever heard the phrase “only the good die young.” Giulia, overhearing that well-meant banality, turned to the speaker and said, “Horseshit.”

  The doorbell rang. Strike was right on time. I wondered which Anthony Strike it would be today. The one who worked for Whitcomb, Merchant & Dryer? Or the one whose eyes grew soft at the thought of the damage that had been done to a little sister.

  11

  By Wednesday I still didn’t have any more news about Cates or about the investigation of Amy’s rape, but I got a new assignment from one of our current clients, a local chemical manufacturer who needed posttrial interviews of his jury.

  They’d recently lost a case where their tanker truck crashed and contaminated the groundwater in a small Arizona community. Unexplained rashes and infections had blossomed in the area, and one baby died. Since there was every likelihood that other suits would now crop up, they wanted to know how the jury had reached its verdict. How did they react to the lawyers for each side? What evidence did they find most compelling in reaching their decision? The company planned to be better prepared for the next lawsuit. I jotted down the questions I would ask when I phoned the jurors.

  Every time I tried to get rid of the Cates file, Jessica had another reason that she couldn’t handle it. It seemed that she even scheduled dental surgery to be unavailable. In truth, my attempts to hand over the file were now all for show. I needed to stay close to the case to find out as much as I could about Raymond Cates.

  Selena, Enrique, and I had agreed to meet at Aunt Giulia’s on Thursday for a Fourth of July barbecue. I pulled into the trailer park late in the afternoon, raising a scorpion tail of dust in my wake. Fifteen trailers huddled together, radiating heat like giant loaves of freshly baked bread.

  The two trailers next to Giulia’s had tiny white picket fences around their bases, a plaintive reminder of the Ozzie and Harriet houses they emulated. In true Arizona style, one had a six-foot lawn of Astroturf and the other a gravel forecourt that had been spray-painted green. The proud but dusty marigold outside Giulia’s trailer door was a vanquished queen in a conquered land.

  I had marinated a flank steak, and the Garzas were bringing salmon, salsa, and summer squash, in keeping with the S theme of the day. Giulia was in charge of dessert and was making strawberry shortcake “with one blueberry on top, so it will look flag-colored.” Even the oleanders, those perennial don’t-worry-about-me-I’ll-be-fine plants, were drooping in the heat. We draped ourselves on bench seats and folding chairs inside the trailer and downed cold beers and tortilla chips until the sun set and it was cool enough to go outside and light the grill. Jorge and Carlitos, Selena’s twin boys, played cowboys and Indians in the bedroom.

  Although we talked about everything from day care to dieting, the conversation kept returning to Raymond Cates. Giulia had done a computer search at the Daily Star for information about Cates and his family, and she had turned up innumerable good works by Cates senior. There wasn’t much information about Raymond Cates except one story that declared him one of Tucson’s most eligible bachelors in 1994. The story described his wealth, his trim good looks, and his skill as a cowboy on his father’s ranch. Was there a tie to the Nogales rodeo there? Maybe I could talk to some of the rodeo organizers, find out if they knew Cates.

  Enrique’s information was more disturbing. Because he hadn’t found any specific information about Cates, he decided to investigate attacks similar to Amy’s in the area. Almost three hundred rapes were reported in and around Tucson each year, but his search of sheriff’s department records found eight women in the last ten years who were assaulted and raped by an object or a weapon. All eight cases were unsolved.

  Enrique flipped through his notebook and tapped his finger at several of his scrawled notations. “They used a variety of weapons on these women: knives, guns, bottles, a broom handle, and in this—oh, geez—a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary.” He took a final swallow of beer.

  “Let’s go talk to these women. Find out if they have anything in common,” Selena said.

  “Don’t you think they’ve been through enough?” Enrique said, slamming the notebook closed and covering it with his hands. “If we find any similarities, I’ll take it to my boss, but otherwise we leave these women alone.”

  Selena and I nodded, ashamed that we were so willing to put our own needs before those of women who had already been hurt so badly.

  “Start with the gun or knife attacks,” I said quietly.

  Enrique summarized the details he’d copied from the police files. The first victim was a thirty-year-old single mother from Sells who was raped in a grocery store parking lot. His notes said that she saw her attacker, but I didn’t know how much good that would do us. The attack was almost ten years ago.

  The second was a preteen who was kidnapped while walking home from school and who escaped after two days of savage abuse. We probably shouldn’t even be talking to her without her parents’ permission, even though she would be an eighteen-year-old now.

  The third was a University of Arizona coed attacked on campus in December four years ago, and the fourth was a tourist from New Mexico who was attacked in her fi
rst-floor hotel room. All four were raped with a gun or a knife.

  “There’s no clear pattern,” I said. “The cities and kind of locations are varied. Two rapes were in warmer months, the others in November and December. Even if we include Amy’s attack on the same time line, the attacks aren’t evenly spaced apart—or even on the same day of the week.”

  In two cases the women got a good look at the attacker, and Enrique had photocopied the sketches. To me, all police sketches look like Mr. Potato Head, and these were no different. The eyes, nose, and cheeks were graceful generic arcs. Be on the lookout for a benign alien race.

  “Maybe there’s some other common denominator that we’ve overlooked. Maybe he didn’t use a knife or gun every time,” I said.

  Enrique protected his notebook from my prying eyes and flipped another page. “Here’s one. A student nurse from Marana who was picked up in a bar and attacked by a man who had given her a false name. He raped her with a beer bottle.” He kept his eyes down while he read, unwilling to face us with the brutal facts.

  “And this one, the victim of the broom-handle rape. She’s from Phoenix. Came to town for the International Mariachi Conference a year ago May and said her attacker wore cowboy boots and a Stetson hat.”

  He ran his finger down the page of notes. “Oh, yeah, and this one. A stripper who was attacked as she left work.”

  It was a long shot that any of these cases could help us find or confirm the name of Amy’s attacker. I’d heard that only one rape in four is even reported. What were the chances that I’d find someone who was attacked by the same man who had tried to kill Amy? But I had to start somewhere, even if it meant invading these women’s privacy. Oh, God, I didn’t want to hurt them. They’d already been through so much.

  When Enrique went out to grill the salmon, I replaced his black spiral-bound notebook with a similar one that sat next to Giulia’s telephone. Each time he glanced through the half-open door he saw that notebook, undisturbed, right where he’d left it. I surreptitiously jotted down the details from all eight attacks and passed the list to Selena. In his typically diligent fashion Enrique had included their addresses and phone numbers in his notes as well. Maybe we could find them. I knew Enrique was right. We shouldn’t bother these women. But I convinced myself that if their rapists could be found and made to pay, they’d thank me for it.

  I replaced Enrique’s notebook, and we took plastic lawn chairs outside to watch the fireworks that were set off from “A” Mountain. Since Giulia’s trailer was almost at the base of the mountain, we had to look straight up past the white-painted boulders forming the massive letter A that gave the peak its name to see the brightest, highest displays. Jorge and Carlitos clapped for each burst of light and booed at each thunderous dud. When the show was ending, I gave Enrique and Giulia a hug and walked to the Jeep. Selena, under the pretext of carrying leftovers, came with me.

  In hushed tones we agreed to split up the list of victims and start our interviewing the next day.

  I craned my neck to admire the final burst of pyrotechnics overhead and thought about the investigation we were starting. Maybe I was lighting the fuse on my own fireworks with this. Or maybe the fuse led to dynamite.

  12

  Selena arrived early the next morning with squealing brakes. Gravel sprayed like buckshot from the tires. She had dropped the twins off with her mother. The car must have felt lighter—faster—to her, unencumbered by motherhood.

  “How are the boys this morning?” I asked.

  “We had to have another discussion about why their daddy can’t live with us, but I think they’re going to be okay.”

  The seven-year-olds would probably be all right, but I wasn’t sure about Selena. She had married Travis in her early twenties, and this was her first year away from the wrath of his fists. Over the years, I had watched him isolate her from her family and friends but was helpless to provide the support she needed to leave him. Selena, too, had cowered in his presence and tried to patch things up even after he incinerated all her clothes in an effort to keep her at home. She found the strength to leave him only when his anger cost her her right eye.

  Since the Fourth of July fell on a Thursday this year, a lot of people would be off work Friday, enjoying a longer-than-usual holiday weekend. Maybe we could find some of these woman at home.

  We sketched out a grid of the eight attacks based on as much information as we could remember from Enrique’s notes. We filled in dates, locations, circumstances, what weapon was used in the rape, and any details about the attacker that the women had reported.

  There were three cases we decided not to pursue at all. The young girl who had been kidnapped and held for two days said that her attacker was definitely a Latino, and she’d helped with an artist’s rendering that looked nothing like Cates.

  Another attack looked so dissimilar, and so sad, that we couldn’t imagine following up on it. Beatrice Bonair, a seventy-two-year-old winter visitor to Tucson, had been attacked at the Benedictine Chapel in December of 1998. She was the victim raped by the plastic statue of the Virgin Mary, and Enrique had made a note that she had committed suicide a few months later. I didn’t think her family could provide any more details, and this didn’t feel like the same man who had attacked Amy, anyway. Clearly, evil came in more than one shape and size.

  We also gave up on the tourist from New Mexico. She was still listed in the Albuquerque directory, but the person who answered the phone said she was traveling overseas and would be gone for the next three months. I’d come back to her later if I had to.

  That left five possible cases that could help us. When we divided the list between us, Selena volunteered for the Sells and Marana interviews, although that meant she would have to drive a hundred-mile semicircle west of the city. I agreed to take the Tucson victim and contact the woman from Phoenix.

  I didn’t want to bring the rape back to life for these women, but they might be able to remember something they hadn’t told the police.

  I also wanted to know if Raymond Cates might have been their attacker and for that I used a black-and-white photo of him. I was enough of a researcher and close enough to the legal profession to know that simply showing them Cates’s picture would never stand up in court as a positive identification. So Selena and I pawed through two weeks’ worth of newspapers and clipped photos of other men we could include in this makeshift photo array. We created two cards with five photos each. All the pictures were of white men between twenty-five and forty-five, with no facial hair. Cates’s picture was in slot number four.

  I didn’t want to phone ahead in case these women chose to leave or not answer the door once they knew what my questions were. But my first interview was with Mary Katherine Carruthers, the U of A coed who had been attacked on campus four years ago, and I didn’t know where she lived now. Enrique’s notes had shown her address as a residential dormitory on campus, but that address wouldn’t still be good four years later.

  I started in the most obvious place: the phone book. An M. K. Carruthers was listed on Fort Lowell. I tried the number, and when a young woman answered, I asked for a fictitious Dr. Brewer. I thanked her politely when she told me I had the wrong number. The age of that voice sounded right. It was a good possibility that M. K. Carruthers was the Mary Katherine I was looking for.

  I’ve always thought that using only initials is a dead giveaway that you’re a woman living alone. My college friend Lynette Grissom, a wispy, blond, single woman from Alabama, lists her address and phone number under the name Rocco Trujillo. She never gets any heavy breathers.

  Mary Katherine’s current house was almost ten miles from where her attack had taken place, but you could see that it was not that far away in her mind. Intricate wrought-iron bars and boulder-size bushes of thorny cholla cacti covered the windows. A menacing growl became frenzied barking when I rang the doorbell.

  I took an involuntary step back when she answered the door. She was short, with rolls of fat thr
eatening even her man-size T-shirt and shorts. Eggplant-colored bags sagged under her eyes, and her gaze skittered from me to the sidewalk to see who else was there. I recognized a rape survivor.

  “What do you want?” she asked from behind the wrought-iron safety gate. A Doberman pinscher quivered with restrained power at her side.

  “I’ve come about something that happened to you four years ago… .”

  “Who are you? Where did you get my name?” Her alarm was building. I had to talk fast before she shut me out.

  “I’ve been talking to the police.” Well, Sheriff’s Deputy Enrique Garza, anyway. It wasn’t a total lie. She started to close the door.

  “I’m trying to find my sister’s rapist. We can’t let them get away with this.”

  She started to dissolve. Tears welled up in her eyes, and her shoulders hunched into a shape I could have recognized in the mirror. Depression as anger turned inside out. She gave the dog a complicated hand signal and opened the door.

  The room was coal-mine dark, with curtains blocking both the sunshine and the view of barred windows. She waved me toward a couch and sat in a straight-backed chair with her hand on the back of the dog’s neck. Her solace of choice was Cheetos; a half-eaten Costco-size bag of the orange worms graced the coffee table.

  “I don’t talk about that time,” she said.

  “I understand. I’d feel the same way. But I really need your help.”

  She looked down as if the answers were to be found in her lap. “He hurt me, you know. He did things to me that will never go away.” She stopped, then heaved a sob. “I’ll never have children.”

  A briny smell of regret rose from her in waves. I crossed the room and knelt at her feet, stroking her hand and keeping a wary eye on the silent and attentive Doberman.

  “Did you get a good look at him? Did he say anything?” I needed to prompt any memory she might still have of that night. Maybe something she forgot to tell the police.