The Fate of Katherine Carr, Page 3

  "The premature-aging disease, right?"

  Charlie nodded. "Yeah. She's twelve now, but she looks like an old lady." He glanced at his watch like a man always on the clock, though I knew he wasn't. "Heart disease takes them out." He went on with a few more details about the progress of progeria, then added, "Sandra Parshall, the woman who runs Brookwood Residential, she says the kid's brilliant. Reads all the time. Murder mysteries, stuff like that. She likes coming up with better endings than the authors were able to think up." He smiled. "A little genius, that's what Sandra says."

  Charlie's beer arrived. He took a sip. "I could tell Wyatt liked the idea, but figured I wasn't the guy to write it." He grew quiet for a moment, thinking something over. Filially he said, "So, would you like to do it, George, a profile of this little girl?"

  I shrugged.

  "You got something better on the line?"

  I'd not planned to say what I said next, since I never talked about Teddy, and didn't on this occasion, either, save that what I said struck me as somehow about him, too. "You know Arlo McBride?"

  "An old cop, yeah. Used to work for the state police."

  "Missing Persons," I said. "He's evidently still thinking about a woman who disappeared twenty years ago."

  Charlie laughed. "Old cops are always mulling over old cases."

  "Exactly," I said. "So I thought I might do a profile of him. Just the type you mean: old detective, obsessed with an unsolved case. People can never get enough of that."

  "Yeah, but it's not a cuddly piece, George," Charlie said.

  "I thought I might give it a try, though," I said tentatively, by no means convinced.

  Charlie laughed. "Kiss your St. Jude medal first."

  Normally such an allusion would have vanished from my mind, but I suddenly thought of St. Jude, so strikingly handsome in official church portraits, long reddish hair, the glow of health in his rosy cheeks, a serene smile and eyes far too untroubled for the role he'd been assigned: patron saint of hopeless cases.

  Then another face abruptly came to mind: my father's, as he lay in his final illness, his white hair combed back, though left with a curl that hung raffishly over his forehead. We'd been talking of his own checkered past when the question came to me: "What did you struggle most against, Dad?"

  His answer had struck me as so darkly resigned to the human fate that my eyes had suddenly glistened. "The inevitable," he'd said. Something in my father's remembered tone at that moment reminded me of Arlo, the murky world of missing things, how sad it always is, the unresolved.

  "Her name was Katherine Carr," I said. "The missing woman Arlo keeps thinking about. She lived here in Winthrop and was some sort of poet, evidently. Not famous or anything like that, of course. Arlo says she published her stuff in little literary magazines."

  "Good name for a poet," Charlie said with a wide grin. "Alliterative."

  At that instant, a first line came to me: Katherine Can's name was as lovely as her fate was grim. I knew it wasn't good enough to make the final cut, but it didn't seem bad for a starter.

  "Yeah, it is a pretty name," I said. "Katherine Carr."

  In a certain kind of story, she might have materialized suddenly at that moment, a figure in a shadowy corner appearing only for an instant, alluringly, of course, like a tantalizing flash of snow white ankle at the hem of a Victorian dress. But the possibility of such apparitions meant nothing to me then, and so I saw only the space where Arlo McBride had once stood, now empty, with no hint of his afterimage in the air^ and certainly none of the missing woman he could not get off his mind.

  4

  IT WAS ARLO HIMSELF who was on my mind the next morning. His name was in the phone book. I waited until it seemed late enough to call a retired man, then dialed the number.

  "It's George Gates," I said when he answered. "We talked for a little while at O'Shea's."

  His voice was oddly weighted, like one suddenly drawn into a dark contemplation.

  "Yes," he said. "About your son."

  "And your work, too," I said. "A case you recalled. A missing woman."

  "Katherine Can;" Arlo said.

  There are certain ways a man may say a woman's name. It can be said with love, either passionate or long-enduring. Or it can be said with bitterness, as the names of women sound in the mouths of scorned men. But it was neither love nor bitterness I heard in Arlo's voice. There was nothing fraternal or avuncular about it, either and certainly nothing paternal, no hint of the melancholy loss that tinged Teddy's name on the increasingly rare occasions when I spoke of him. If anything, it was a strange uncertainty I heard when he said her name, the way one might speak of something that had both real and imagined qualities, like Innisfree or Xanadu.

  "I'm interested in..." I stopped because I knew I couldn't say "Katherine Carr," because no magazine, or even the local Weekend Section of the Winthrop Examiner would be interested in a case as cold as hers, one in which there was no hope of resolution, thus, from my point of view, a story doomed to hang, with no ending to nail down, and thus, by common lights, unsatisfying. But as I'd said to Charlie Wilkins, there might be interest in a profile of an old detective obsessed with an unsolved case. Such tales were familiar, of course, but they also possessed a certain deathless appeal: elements of mystery and intrigue along with the always-popular notion of a hero-cop, relentless, high-minded, unselfish. I didn't know if Arlo McBride was such a man, but finding out if he were, or at least learning enough for me to write about him as such, seemed worth a try.

  "I'm interested in, well, you, Arlo."

  "Me? There's nothing interesting about me, George."

  It was a blunt statement, beyond further discussion. If I wanted to write about Arlo, I would first have to show some interest in the case that haunted him.

  "Okay," I said cautiously. "Katherine Carr. Her case will never be solved, right?"

  "Not by me, that's for sure." Arlo's tone was completely genuine, with no hint of modesty, let alone false modesty.

  "But you never forgot it?" I asked.

  Arlo didn't answer immediately, and because of that I felt that my hold upon him was tenuous, our discussion one he might at any moment bring to an end.

  "Do you ever think of reopening it?" I asked quickly.

  "Reopening it?"

  I felt a tug on the line, reeled it in gently.

  "At least we could talk about it at some point," I said. "You could tell me what you know about her."

  There was another brief pause before Arlo spoke again. "I should tell you about Katherine, George," he said.

  His voice struck me as unexpectedly urgent, but not in the way of alarm. It was too quiet for that, too carefully considered, his urgency not the product of some unanticipated threat or of something coming suddenly to a boil. It was more like the urge to make an admission, though not the confessional sort, a penchant, say, for licking high-heeled shoes. With Arlo, I decided, the secret would more likely be professional, that he'd missed a vital clue, mislaid a critical piece of information, and due to that misstep, however inadvertent, the case of Katherine Carr would forever go unsolved.

  "But first you'd need to read her story," he added.

  Outside my window, a bird suddenly took flight. I don't recall whether it was large or small, dull or brightly colored, a sparrow or a jay. I know only that as it took wing, I felt rather like a child in a fairy tale, halted where the road forks: one path familiar, the other unknown.

  "Her friend Audrey has all the stuff Katherine wrote," Arlo added. "You'd need to talk to her at some point if you get interested."

  As if it were being played out in my mind, I watched the child at the fork in the road take its first step down the unfamiliar path.

  "I'd like to hear a little more about it," I said.

  There was a pause during which I knew that Arlo was considering my answer. I guessed that it was probably some all-but-inaudible tone in my voice rather than anything more concrete that would decide the issue f
or him.

  "How about the Calico," he suggested finally. "At two thirty?"

  I arrived at the Calico at 2:15. It was a large steakhouse, but nearly deserted at such an early hour, the only customers a couple of dark-suited businessmen nursing gin and tonics. The lounge was tarted up in cowboy motif, with longhorns bolted to the wall behind the bar. Other ranch droppings were scattered all around, saddlebags, spurs, a rusty hand water pump and trough, even a holstered six-gun, its barrel no doubt run through with a metal screw or plugged with wax. It was entirely phony, of course, and it reminded me of a similar place I'd seen in, of all places, Vienna, only on this occasion there'd been an Alpine motif, with skis and snowshoes and thin layers of ground Styrofoam to simulate snow. I'd come there to meet a doubtful character who'd claimed to be the inspiration for The Third Man, a swindler who said he'd run the table on a whole host of prominent Eastern Bloc officials. The scheme had involved a shimmering mother lode of diamonds pilfered from the death camps, already an old, almost-always-false story, but to which had been added a macabre detail, the "fact" that this treasure trove of jewels had been buried in infant caskets in village churchyards throughout Eastern Europe, all under the same name, Otherion, which was, according to this tale, the elf translation for Victor. Elf? It was, of course, a far-fetched tale, but I was young and curious and open to the most outlandish hopes, and so had agreed to the meeting.

  The Third Man had never turned up, but during the course of a long evening, another gentleman had: large and barrel-chested, but with abnormally short legs, so that despite his size, he appeared oddly dwarfish. He said his name was Max, and never went further as far as identification. He'd spoken excellent English, complete with little Briticisms like "ever so much" and "to hospital," without the American "the." We'd hit it off instantly, as strangers sometimes do, especially strangers who are traveling and thus have little time to grow to like one another, so that it is either done quickly, this give-and-take of affection, or not done at all.

  In any event, the evening passed into early morning, the streets of Vienna now deserted, I at last ready to depart when Max said, "Do you want to see the dark side?"

  "The dark side?"

  "Of Vienna." Max smiled. "The Viennese demimonde."

  I nodded, though with a twinge of apprehension, now wondering for the first time if this huge man might be the elfish Victor. It was not a question to which I ever found an answer. I know only that for the next few hours Max made good on his promise, leading me past the Plague Monument and far from the grand boulevard of the Ring, into a criminal shadow world, smoke-filled gambling dens and the back rooms of fences and shylocks, the countinghouses and securities exchanges of a secret economy of black-market goods and laundered money, the traffic of arms and drugs and forged documents.

  It was dawn by the time this presentation of Max's Viennese Mahagonny came to an end. By then we'd taken a cab into the hills overlooking Vienna, where we stood peering down upon the whole sleeping city as the first rays of dawn rouged the waters of the Danube Canal.

  "Thanks for the tour, Max," I said.

  He smiled, then waved me toward his little gray Citroën for the drive back into town. As I got out at my hotel, he offered his hand. "Always remember, George," he said. "The Unseen." And with that, he drove away, leaving me with nothing but the dark phantasm of a storied evening made all the more mysterious by the fact that I'd never seen Max again, never heard his voice or received a note in the mail, a character who'd made himself perfect, as it struck me suddenly, by vanishing.

  "George?"

  Vienna dissolved before me, and I was once again rooted in place, staring up at Arlo McBride.

  He was wearing black pants and a light blue shirt, his shoes black and carefully polished, nothing rumpled about him, nothing in disarray. He might have been a retired military officer or the head of a small company. It was the sort of dress that carried a purpose, and in Arlo's case it seemed to insist that he was a down-to-earth, no-nonsense kind of man. That had been my impression all along, however, so it seemed strange that he'd found the need to declare it.

  "Thanks for coming," I said.

  I'd expected an exchange of pleasantries, but from the moment Arlo took his seat, it was obvious that he hadn't come for an idle chat. Rather, he appeared to be scouting the territory, a man on reconnaissance, the proposed mission by no means certain.

  "I worked the original case," Arlo began. "We had a few leads, but nothing came of them, so that in the end all we had left were the writings Katherine left behind."

  "Which Katherine's friend has," I said.

  "Audrey," Arlo said. "I talked to her last night. She's very wary about giving Katherine's story to a reporter. But I told her about you, about your ... tragedy. It was something the two of you have in common, it seemed to me, a lost loved one. So she's willing to give you some of what Katherine wrote, but she won't give it all to you because she's afraid you'd leap to judgment."

  "Judgment about what?"

  "About Katherine," Arlo answered. "Audrey doesn't want anything crazy written about her." He took an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. "Audrey said I could give you this. It's the opening chapter of her story and a few poems Katherine wrote when she was young. She said the poems would give you an idea of what Katherine was like."

  I took the envelope and put it in the now-battered leather briefcase my father had given me years before, and which had tramped with me about the world.

  "They found the story and one last little poem in the house after Katherine disappeared," Arlo added now. "The poem didn't have anything to do with what happened to Katherine, but the story did, so that's what we looked at when we were trying to find out what happened to her."

  "Did they find anything else?" I asked. "In the house, I mean?"

  "You mean clues?" Arlo asked. He shook his head. "Well, there was no sign of a struggle, if that's what you mean."

  "So, the cops, they—"

  Arlo lifted a hand to silence me. "We'll talk after you've read the stuff I just gave you."

  We didn't discuss anything having to do with Katherine after that. Instead we talked quite amiably about his own background, the long years of law enforcement, work he'd found frustrating and at times fruitless, save for occasional moments he described simply as "unexplainable."

  "Unexplainable in what way?" I asked.

  "The way some' kid will turn around at just the right moment, see a guy coming out of the woods," Arlo answered. "That's how they caught Whitey Lombard last month."

  The Examiner had detailed the arrest of Whitey Lombard aka John Merrill Hersh aka Edgar Price, an itinerant day laborer who'd murdered a farm girl in a neighboring county, and who might have gone on to murder many more had a boy on a bicycle not glanced toward a break in the forest as a man stepped out of it.

  "The kid turned around at just the right moment," Arlo added. "He said it was like he got tapped on the shoulder like someone said, 'Look there.'"

  "Even killers have bad luck, I guess," I said.

  "Seems so, yes," Arlo said.

  Then, as if cued by manners, he turned the topic to me.

  "So, what other stories are you working on, George?" he asked.

  "I haven't got anything pinned down at the moment," I answered. "But maybe something about a girl who has progeria. Premature aging. A very bright girl, by all accounts. She's over at Brookwood. Doesn't have much time left, evidently."

  Arlo's gaze was the opposite of searing, or even penetrating. There was something almost feathery about it, though this seemed carefully controlled, his eyes like heated objects he kept at a distance from whatever he looked upon. "How old is she?" he asked.

  "Twelve," I said.

  Charlie had added a few other details before I'd left him at O'Shea's, so to keep the conversation rolling, I related them to Arlo: how rare progeria was, only about a hundred people living with it at any given time.

  "They have tiny, pointed noses,
these kids," I added. "Which makes their eyes seem enormous."

  Arlo asked no questions, so I just kept going.

  "By the time they get to middle school, they're old," I said. Old, often breathless, I added, and incontestably dying of the cardiac disease that would kill most of them either before or shortly after they reached early adolescence.

  "What about their minds?" Arlo asked.

  "Clear as a bell," I answered. "To the end." Thus, although old in body and appearance, I went on, a victim of progeria died with all the torridly hopeful expectations of a wildly youthful heart. They did not become forgetful, as old people often did, nor lose a whit of their own identities. To the last breath, they knew who they were and where they were and exactly what was happening to them.

  Arlo remained silent for a few moments before he asked another question.

  "What is it about this story that makes you want to tell it?"

  I hadn't known what attracted me to the story before Arlo's question, but suddenly I did. "Living without hope," I answered.

  "Katherine was like that," Arlo said. "At least until—"

  He stopped abruptly, clearly realizing, as I saw, that he'd inadvertently returned us to the original subject of our meeting, a place he didn't want to go. "The girl you may write about," he said quickly. "What's her name?"

  Her name, as it turned out, was Alice Barrows, and Sandra Parshall, Charlie's neighbor, was very forthcoming about her when I called Brookwood Residential later that day.

  "Her father deserted the family early on, and her mother died last year," she said. "Alice has been at Brookwood ever since." There was a pause before Sandra added, "I think you'll find her very interesting."

  "In what way?"

  "Her intelligence," Sandra answered. "She has a very high IQ, but there's more to her than that. She has tremendous curiosity. She's mature, and she faces the hopelessness of her situation with this"—she stopped and searched for the appropriate word until she found it—"this ... stoicism."