Cattie sighed, wishing she could exit the head of school’s office without encountering the adults, but they’d effectively made themselves a gauntlet on the other side of the closed door. Eventually somebody knocked on it—Ms. Windhall had to, because, well, it was her office. With her she brought Ito Black, the only student at school any of them could recall seeing Cattie speaking to in her first weeks here. He was the gay boy on a hardship scholarship from only forty miles away in New Hampshire who wished to become a fashion designer. He was seventeen, had already swept the school fashion show two years running, and had latched on to Cattie because he had heard her one day in band, honking away on a borrowed, crappy saxophone. He wanted her to work up some sort of musical accompaniment to a winter collection for small children. Her playing reminded him of the way a three-legged elephant walked, he said. His freewheeling creativity, his out-and-out silliness, interested Cattie; he followed her around without her permission, liking her against her wishes, just like her old next-door neighbor friend Ralphie, the tagalong. She who never smiled, seen now everywhere pursued by the boy who couldn’t stop grinning. He was the only one she personally told that her mother had died, there in the office, the two of them now outnumbering the adults in the room, effectively sending the head of school away once more, Cattie a frightening figure, it seemed, her orphaning a form of empowerment.
Even when he wept, clutching her head awkwardly from a standing position, Ito smiled. It was as if some significant nerves and muscles had been severed around the bottom half of his face, leaving him afflicted with inappropriate, even frightening, glee.
“Boo!” he said through this toothy rictus. “It’s so bad!”
“I don’t want everyone to know.”
They found out anyway. They loved to hug you, those private-school people. They loved a reason to actually discern her, finally, invisible, stone-faced Cattie. But before their sympathy could grow epidemic, she left, driven by Ito to his stepsister’s home in Montpelier. Ito said that Cattie reminded him of Joanne; for a few days Cattie tried to see what it was about the petulant stepsister that she resembled. Joanne rolled out of bed pissed off every morning, as if the night had served her up one bad dream after another, as if people had been insulting and blaming and humiliating her for hours, as if she’d been waiting on them and was exhausted, along with being unappreciated. Gradually, however, over the course of the day, her mood improved, until, by evening, she was somewhat conversant, pleased to be watching television, smoking cigarettes, eating the only kind of food she kept in her kitchen, either snack- or industrial-size everything, and drinking diet beer.
“How come you aren’t going home?” Joanne asked, on the third evening of their odd cohabitation.
“I don’t have any relatives. I’m afraid somebody will put me in a foster home.”
“I was fostered,” Joanne said, suddenly pissed off again.
“No offense,” Cattie said. On the rare occasions she opened her mouth, in went her foot. “But I’m from Texas, you know.”
“Ah,” said Joanne, suddenly understanding everything, insult forgotten. The East Coast thought very little of Texas, Cattie had discovered. When she hadn’t displayed much of a drawl, her new classmates seemed disappointed. What good was she, if not to provide novelty, to spice up and enrich their experience?
Like most children (surely like most children, she reasoned; perhaps like no other children, she feared), Cattie had often fantasized that her mother died. Maybe it was this elaborate and frequent imaginary scenario that now accounted for her relatively affectless reaction to the reality. She’d played out too many times her own lostness—walking bereft in the night of the big city, positing an existence of need and wits—for the fact to totally distress her; she and her mother were the only two members of their family; some part of Cattie’s fictional narrated life had maybe already taken in and adjusted to orphanhood. She had, perhaps, foreseen it too clearly, and could not now claim surprise. And her new roommate Joanne seemed okay with that. She was passing time, not paying attention particularly to what or who walked through her door. Along with Cattie, there was a man in the attic who’d been in the army, off to war. Cattie heard him at night when he came down the foldout stairs in the hallway ceiling, crawling quietly from his hideout to eat some snack food, shower, clack away on the Internet for a while, then creep back up.
“PTSD,” Joanne hissed knowingly. Cattie had no idea what she meant.
The room Joanne had assigned to Cattie was a child’s bedroom. She slept on a single bed under a pile of dusty quilts. The bedroom had belonged to a boy, who was maybe eight or ten, and whose boyhood had been captured and preserved at least twenty years in the past. A stereo turntable and a collection of story records, Disney sound-track albums from movies Cattie had grown up watching on video. The Jungle Book, Dumbo, The Aristocats. Tunes she turned on when she went to bed, strangely soothing as they scratched and popped along at low volume. Also empty boxes of Legos, the pieces themselves fashioned into a chaotically colored simple house. A set of Hardy Boy books. Stuffed animals that smelled of mold and whose plushness had been worn flat by time, perhaps by affection. Whose room had this been? Not Ito’s.
Joanne daily donned her waitress uniform and grumbled out the door, slamming it behind her. Cattie would then always look up, toward the ceiling, tuned abruptly to the other human presence in the house, the man in the attic. She was not sure what she’d do when her cash ran out, the five hundred she’d wisely withdrawn and hoarded since arriving at St. Christopher’s, now to be parceled out sparingly until she decided what next. When asked, Ito had told the head of school he’d accompanied Cattie on foot to the double-wide bar at the edge of the village, top of the list of places in the village students had been warned to avoid, where she’d probably hitched a ride with a logger in one of their ubiquitous thundering trucks. That would send her south, back to Houston. Who would think to look north and west, over in blameless Montpelier, upstairs at a shabby house near the bottom of a hill right alongside the train tracks? Why would anyone run away there?
Cattie wondered herself, after a couple of weeks. Could foster care be much different? Dwelling with strangers, one a grumpy woman, the other a vaguely scary, shadowy man? Wasn’t that sort of the hallmark of foster care?
Ito’s visits were what kept her at Joanne’s, provided a routine and purpose to her days. The house itself was not very welcoming. Its rooms were dim, its windows filthy in the way of the neglected aquarium, and the assortment of furniture not just ugly but uncomfortable or broken or bad smelling, stuff that had been discarded, second-, third-, fourthhand stuff, warehoused here rather than being hauled to the dump. Joanne had inherited the home and its contents from one of the parents that the two stepsiblings did not share, a father gone in the usual gone-father way, off with a new wife, having left his first set of children the way he had his belongings, trading up. Joanne was trapped here by finances, not ambitious enough to pull herself out of a hand-to-mouth existence, her gesture toward a savings account the recent development of tenants, her nod to possible change the ancient For Sale by Owner sign teetering in her yard. “It’s totally don’t ask, don’t tell,” Ito gleefully explained to Cattie. “She can’t be harboring a fugitive if she doesn’t know you’re a fugitive.”
“I always heard that ignorance of the law was no excuse.”
“Bliss, dude,” Ito corrected. “Ignorance is bliss.”
“Your stepsister is not blissful,” Cattie told him. He came as often as he could, parked in the alley alongside the house, and then wandered with Cattie around Montpelier’s downtown for a few hours. Ito’s car was a forbidden thing, unknown to the school administrators or his parents, left when he drove back to St. Christopher’s behind the village bakery whose owner didn’t mind.
Ito loved the subterfuge he’d engineered for Cattie, his small part when he joined her. She wasn’t sure what she’d do without his energy for the project. Go back to Houston? Finish the ye
ar at boarding school? Her mother had made no excuses about their lack of family; Cattie’s father was literally unknown to her, one of three—bad, worse, worst—possibilities, men from her promiscuous and renounced past. “Wasted,” Misty said of her own youth, dispensing with it. She had been raised by her grandmother in Kansas, and the old woman had died many years before Misty had left her old hometown of Wichita, never to return. Theirs was a corrupt bloodline, Cattie was given to know; the closest kin Misty had was a cousin who, during the final encounter, had attempted to kill her, leaving her with a broken nose and a concussion. “The only reason he didn’t succeed is because the phone rang, broke his concentration. I’m a person who actually was saved by the bell. You call that family? You want anything at all to do with that bullshit? ’Cause I sure don’t.”
When she found out she was pregnant, Misty had quit drinking. Until Cattie left town, she had been sober. Maybe that one night, that one phone call, was her only lapse. Cattie was not unhappy to have erased the drunk message, yet the fact remained: her mother had been alive, and sober, when they lived in the same place.
“Don’t you love it here?” Ito shrieked.
“I don’t love it here,” she replied, and he laughed as if she were joking, bluntness her brand of deadpan wit.
Montpelier absorbed them, clerks greeted them when they came through doors, Ito always eliciting a smile, a free cookie, a bit of banter in the music shop, the outdoor store, the antique emporium—snotty barista, self-righteous hippie, dumb kayaker, deaf old lady. He found all novel human traits hysterically amusing, as if he were living in a cartoon, where unexplained action and nonsequitous dialogue were the norm, where violence and tragedy need not lead to tears. He trod lightly, he skimmed like a water walker, he smiled and chattered like a monkey and then moved on. He had a very short attention span, so although he asked a lot of questions, they never tired Cattie. From him she had not had to hide her nonplussed response to her mother’s death. She supposed this could actually be what those school officials had assured one another was shock. Eventually shock would wear off. But her mother had never trusted melodrama, and Cattie had grown up keeping her cool. Not so Ito. You might think somebody as flagrant and noisy as he would irritate people, but the opposite seemed true. He radiated too much cheer, too wide a smile, too contagious a curiosity. People reflexively smiled back.
And after his visits, off he went back to what they called St. Sincere. Everyone was so serious there, so concerned, from the head of school to the groundskeeper. Cattie had never been to school as a customer before. Before, it was always as an annoyance, an obstacle to a clean floor, impediment to a quiet hallway, interruption to a perfectly lucid lesson plan.
On Friday, during her last shift at the restaurant, Joanne asked Cattie to come help her vacuum and scrub and refill. The manager took Fridays off; Joanne accepted Cattie’s help as partial rent payment. They also stole food, which was easier to do with an accomplice. The last bag of trash they left in the Dumpster was perfectly edible goods; later, they returned to retrieve it, spirit it home in Joanne’s back seat. Frozen burgers, chocolate wedge the size of a brick, a thousand catsup packages.
Aside from Ito and Joanne, Cattie had no other encounters. When Dick Little the Houston insurance agent phoned, she didn’t answer. “Whoa,” he said, the first time he heard her message. It always drew a grown-up’s comment. His lispy southern voice was soothing to Cattie, no disputing that; she had to admit that she missed the languid drawl of her hometown. The school also called, the brisk head of school and the soppy band teacher, both itching to scold her phone etiquette. By now her disappearance was registering with all the strangers who thought they knew her, that force field of adults, no doubt phoning one another, too, a crisscross of calls, a peculiar net overhead, yet still unable to locate or trap her. She listened to their voices on her machine, erasing before they finished speaking. Only her mother’s message did she save, over and over, every day. She waited always for that pause, in between the righteous rage at Cattie’s lateness, at Cattie’s endangering herself out there in the perilous night world, in the streets among cars and men, bad drivers and bad desires, with the endless possibility of collision and injury and death, and then the switch, the hesitation, and next the awareness that Misty was an aged miscreant herself, nearly a chuckle, the little comic self-check. Who was she to judge? the hitch said to Cattie, who was this pot to name the kettle black? And this was the small vacillating space that roused a flutter in Cattie’s esophagus, just behind her ribs and in her throat, trapped moth, powdery wings.
CHAPTER 3
THE WICHITA SERIAL KILLER was back. Every morning, every night, the self-named BTK appeared once more in the news; for twenty-five years he’d lain dormant. Incarcerated, the city speculated: insane asylum or correctional facility; how else to explain the hiatus? Once, it could have been plausible that he’d moved on, to another town, to another smorgasbord of potential victims. In leaving, he might have changed his methods, no longer binding, torturing, killing, but some other set of signature initials. Strangling, dangling, mangling, the SDM of, say, Sioux Falls or Grand Rapids.
Nobody believed he’d have reformed. Neither did anyone really want to think he’d one day conveniently, coincidentally, have died. And of course bad guys did not simply disappear.
There would always be bad guys; evil was one of the rules.
At the nursing home the occupants—those who were free to come and go, those who were not—gathered around the television news at dusk the way their ancestors had around campfires, convening to bask in the glow, compare notes, agree and disagree, recall and invent, horrified and thrilled to have their despicable killer indisputably returned. For a little while it overrode the other monotonous sounds of the place: the moaning and complaint that came drifting out of one room or another, all the time, day and night; the Haitians’ lilting voices in the break room; the security person’s ludicrous buzzing walkie-talkie; the burbling oxygen tanks, beeping monitors, clattering carts; the creaking old building itself, former private psych hospital from the 1970s, as it stood up to the relentless prairie wind—all faded under the shrill sense of a more pressing alarm.
In the circle of the lighted screen tonight were: the former university professor and her visitor; the former city magistrate who now cradled a scruffy stuffed animal on whom she bestowed constant maternal affection; the former housewife and mother who was now known only as The Woman Who Wept; the former school-bus driver and Girl Scout leader who read the same line of her children’s book over and over again, “Jesus loves the little children”; the former college student, a too-young brain-injured girl, no more than thirty years old, who was an advertisement for motorcycle helmets; the three look-alike old men, former minister, postman, Cessna engineer, lined up now in Barcaloungers like benched players on the team of the curmudgeonly, murmuring their bitterness and complaint; and the keepers, in their colorful pajama-like scrubs—the obese white lady who was in charge, the tattooed Chicano intern, and the kind Haitian woman who was fixing the hair of the unkind Haitian woman. All over town, people sat, together or alone, to study their local celebrity, that naughty prodigal son.
This was the hour Catherine Desplaines chose to visit her mother. From watching crime drama, she had learned to spread mentholated ointment beneath her nose when entering a fetid space. She had a gag reflex like a cat’s.
“Grace Harding,” she said to the lumpy security person at the front desk. Probably a woman, given the Christmas ornament earrings, two plastic Rudolphs with blinking noses. They flashed intermittently, the only less-than-dull aspect of the woman, who wasn’t even reading a magazine. Just looking blankly at the parking lot she faced, the tin-pan-colored December Kansas sky. Was she medicated? Contemplative? Merely depressed, as any person might be, by her job? No. She was watching the news, which was reflected in the glass of the door, the talking head on the giant screen behind her, the excited newscaster who’d not yet been born when the
BTK was first around.
Guests were supposed to check in; residents were not supposed to leave without paperwork. Yet there were no other signatures besides Catherine’s on today’s roster. The woman had not met her eyes when she punched in the code on the door’s outside keypad. The numbers, inside and out, made a song, a simple tune that could have been easily decoded, had anyone been paying attention, had anyone wanted to break in or out. It was always on Catherine’s mind to mention this flimsy arrangement to somebody, merely suggest they change the code now and then. But to whom would she take her thought? Certainly not the security guard.
She heard that tune at night sometimes, just running through her head, reminder of the grim place her mother had ended up.
“I like your earrings.”
“Hmm,” the guard replied, still studying the reflection just over Catherine’s shoulder.
Catherine moved timidly around the woman. She tried never to make trouble here. She wanted no bad feeling to surround her mother, nothing for this security person, nor the caretakers or volunteers or administrators, to hold against her. The home wasn’t classy enough to require kindness from its employees or residents. Only the most modest of efforts had been made to hide its institutional aspects—standing lamps in some rooms to take the place of the overhead fluorescents; a volunteer harpist who arrived on Tuesdays to roll her battered instrument out of its closet, ready to play for whomever requested it; and the three fat cats who lived in the television lounge, leaping lazily from lap to lap, heavy staticky creatures who’d been rescued from their Alzheimer’s-afflicted owners. Did they mind that they had several different names? That they, like the others who lived here, could not step outdoors at will? That every now and then they would be injured by an errant cane or wheelchair or walker?
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