Bound (11 page)

The four of them had visited the old mining towns, staying at former brothels, panning for gold, riding a narrow-gauge train, hiking to the tops of mountains. Misty was the willing rube newly exposed to room service, to artichokes, to word games in the car and card games in the hotel. The photographs from that trip filled an album, one that was shelved in Grace’s room at the home, its label reading 1976, the bicentennial. On the Fourth of July, there’d been a morning parade in Ouray, thrilling military jets buzzing the crowd, then fireworks later in Crested Butte. Catherine and Misty had spent the day sneaking drinks and carving their names in whatever surface they could find. The highway Misty had fatally driven off had been on their Colorado tour, not far from Telluride, where they’d crept out during their overnight stay there and met up with some local boys, skateboarders happy to share their beer and cocaine. “The thing is,” Catherine went on to her mother, “it seems she has a daughter. A fifteen-year-old girl. And for whatever reason—I really cannot guess what reason, it is truly baffling—she named me as guardian.” Her mother’s lips had parted, as they did when she wasn’t vigilant, and her entire face appeared to melt. The effect was to immediately soften her aspect, make her vulnerability paramount, frightening, as if she might topple right over, as if the melting were general. Catherine pursed her own lips to alert her, and her mother quickly clamped her jaw back into place, blinking, taking in the news.

Now a rap came on the antechamber door. “I’ll tell you the rest later,” Catherine said, hoping this would prove sufficient distraction for her mother’s final hurdle in this day of humiliation. What would she be thinking as she slipped under the anesthesia, long-forgotten (good riddance, bad rubbish) Misty Mueller back in her head, reconfigured now as a person in the past tense (bless her heart, poor thing)? Misty on their Colorado tour, roughly the same age then as Misty’s daughter was now, and Misty dead, arriving there in advance of Dr. Harding, out of sequence?

Catherine pondered the connections, pins on a map, coincidences and repetitions, tenuous links, Catherine the fifteen-year-old girl: herself then, and someone else now.

It reminded her of the way she and Misty had met another group of boys, a group here in Wichita. The two of them had been on the telephone, Misty in her grandmother’s garage on the greasy wall-hung model, Catherine in the upstairs hall outside her bedroom, lounging on her back with her feet up the wall. Her mother had a special frustration with those black heel smudges. The girls talked; they’d been talking all day, passing notes, sharing lunch, meeting between classes at their next-door lockers, riding home from school in Misty’s car, then not an hour later, armed with snacks and a beverage, were back in contact. “What can you possibly have to say?” her mother would complain. “Can you conceive of no better way to spend your time?”

“Shhh!” Misty had interrupted Catherine one day. “Listen.” And Catherine could hear another conversation, very faintly, two men talking and laughing. The girls began shouting into their phones, yelling at those men busy with their own call, screaming until the men finally heard and understood. They shouted back; numbers were exchanged. Other calls were made. And hence began Catherine and Misty’s long and crooked association with Lyle Skinner and his gang of locally grown cohorts. Of course such an alliance would begin with crossed wires.

She had not thought of Lyle in years. A meeting was arranged after that first conversation. Lyle. He was a slacker, a loser, a complete disaster. Yet Catherine and Misty couldn’t have been convinced of that, chirpily arriving at the appointed time and place, that spring evening at the 7-Eleven. He was better for having been found over the phone line, faint voice in the distance like the murmuring of the devil. To that voice they attended. Later met his dope-smoking friends, men who hadn’t finished high school and certainly weren’t going to college. Eventually, they would find jobs, shave their scraggly beards, quit selling weed and start selling, say, weedkiller, down at the Ace. But for then, they were the girls’ dark secret, their attractive nuisances. Those men believed Catherine and Misty were already in college. They believed they were of age. They believed, no doubt, that the girls were idiots for thinking so highly of them, as no girl their own age would give them the time of day.

Catherine and Misty began to join them every weekend at the grungy college bar called Lucky’s, across from the U, flashing their fake IDs. This bar was a couple of miles from Catherine’s house, a place where you threw your peanut shells on the floor, markered witticisms on the bathroom stalls, left deafened from the overloud live bands, and where Catherine insisted Misty park around back, since Professor Harding’s students lived in the neighborhood.

Also in that neighborhood was the victim whose house was plowed under, the absent address Catherine had just today driven past. Once a place in view of the bar’s parking lot. The BTK could easily have been among the lone men who were always drinking away their afternoons at Lucky’s, slumped there, waiting for dark; when he taunted the media, after the woman’s death, he claimed that he’d first spotted her picking up her mail, and he could have done that from the Lucky’s parking lot.

Again Catherine experienced the sensation she had for months now, the strange dreamy memory of the past, something that she had not really revisited in many years. That period of time when she and Misty had been friends, when the killer had been out there occasionally making an appearance in their world, and also Misty’s rights to the initial killings since he’d picked her neighbors to begin his campaign. Later, Catherine had been able to brag that it was Yasmin Keene whose class he had to have attended. Hints, threats, arrogance and menace. Together the girls were proud of his obviously having wandered the Lucky’s terrain, no doubt glancing at the two of them some evening, weighing their worth as future victims. Why hadn’t this truly scared Catherine, back then? Why hadn’t she wondered if the killer were Lyle, or one of his hopeless friends, those unsavory men whose ratty apartments and trailers she and Misty had so mindlessly visited? Perhaps the girls had been too far habituated to their own dramatizing and fictionalizing and exaggerating. Their conversations always escalated into wild speculations about their teachers and family members and classmates—they told themselves that the algebra teacher was sleeping with a cheerleader, that Misty’s parents were actually alive, that Catherine’s mother was a lesbian and loved her colleague Yasmin. Dr. Keene: they snickered helplessly about her and her horrible black walking stick. Was this how they’d been so cavalier concerning the serial killer? His extremity merely another wild tale to be told? Or was it the fact of their friendship, the two of them, unalone in the world, and somehow thereby impervious? Protected?

But maybe everyone in town felt some peculiar affinity with him? Certainly her stepdaughter Miriam was obsessed.

Catherine sat with others in the recovery area of the clinic, in a plastic seat near a bed, behind a curtain. This waiting was a living purgatory, its passage unregulated by the ordinary measure of minutes. They stretched, they expanded, they went backward. She felt her own tremendous solitude connect with that of the other waiters, her depressed boredom commingle with theirs. For her private entertainment, she imagined it was Oliver who was lying on the table in a flimsy nightgown, the tubular apparatus en route to his bony backside, prepared to make its snaking trek inside him. “I admire your optimism,” she could say later, blandly, when he came home woozy and sore, surely feeling thoroughly defiled.

Soon her mother would be wheeled to this makeshift stall, lifted to the bed, coming slowly out from under anesthesia while Catherine watched. Her mother was the only one to whom she could speak about Misty as a girl, yet even her mother had not known Misty, not really. She’d seen what a mother would see: her daughter’s unfortunate best friend, a casualty of many circumstances, including poverty, orphaning, and simple neglect. Genetically, she’d be inclined to addiction; socially, toward unenlightened attitudes. Her mother’s sympathy would not be for the girl herself, but for the larger doomed demographic the girl represented. Professor Harding, had she language, would announce to Catherine that it didn’t surprise her to hear of Misty’s end. She’d say, if she could, that it was upsetting but not unpredictable.

“Mom,” Catherine said, when the double doors flew open to reveal her on the wheeled bed. She was still asleep, her features pale and slack as death. Catherine recalled her father, his body at the mortuary covered by a sheet, leaving his head floating there; her mother looked just like that.

“She did fine,” the orderly pushing the bed claimed. But how would he know?

The last place Catherine wished to visit was the site of the first killings. Her mother sedated in the passenger seat, Catherine parked in front of the house where Misty had lived. She’d driven by here often without actually thinking of Misty. How could that be? The house and the neighborhood had been here, faithfully, reliably, for all these years, and yet she could not recall the last time she’d looked with intention at what she passed through. This was a route to a branch of the public library where she occasionally drove her mother, to the organic meat market Oliver had bankrolled, to the bungalow of Yasmin Keene. The grown-up habit of taking this street had erased the adolescent one, the former destination had become a place she passed by without thinking.

The first victims were a family; the only multiple killings. Misty’s home, the little drab pair of boxes (formerly the gray-green of cement block), had been painted cream, trimmed in burgundy, reroofed in black. At the curb, two black posts with lights, a motif of colonialism. Somebody was reclaiming this neighborhood, one home at a time, accessorizing and trimming, hanging window boxes and filling them with flowers, erecting short ornamental fences that would keep in or out nothing. At Misty’s, there was now an official driveway instead of the muddy patch that had slopped into the yard and up to the door. The place no longer resembled the encampment that it had twenty-five years ago, a site best approached wearing work boots. When Catherine had visited that home, there had been sometimes furniture in the yard and car engines in the kitchen, inside-out, outside-in, one of Misty’s uncles or cousins or honorary relations either reclining out front with a beer or dressed in a grimy jumpsuit, armed with a wrench, twisting something greasy and mechanical at the dining table. The family ate carryout; the refrigerator was full of beer and live bait. The photo albums featured dead elk, rows of rainbow trout, vehicles covered in mud, evidence of exploits out in mother nature, not a human face anywhere to be found, only their bloody tools to illustrate scale.

Hatchet, shotgun, hunting knife.

The dogs pressed their noses against the car windows, optimistic; there was a park here now. “No, my friends,” Catherine told them. “Sorry, just looking.” Young trees were tethered to the ground, waiting to grow thick enough to withstand the Kansas wind. She shivered and turned up the car’s heater, aware that the chill running through her was not about the weather. This park was named the same thing as the school that had once stood here, the elementary school where Misty and Catherine had met those many years ago. The school was utterly gone, deemed too expensive to repair, too inefficient to replace, too shabby to convert. Catherine had driven by here when the wrecking ball and earthmovers were in action. It was a job that took only a few days. Now there was a swimming pool and a rec center, a parking lot and these brave little sticks, future shade trees. All of it prettily corralled inside a loop of sidewalk. Not a single person in sight—a few geese poking at the fence surrounding the empty pool; ahead there was a yellow street sign especially for the birds, a crosswalk warning. Misty’s family would have shot such a sign full of holes; Misty’s family might have shot the geese themselves.

When the old elementary school had been there, Misty attended because she was in its district, within spitting distance. Out her front door she would have run every morning, crossing the street and entering the building thirty seconds after exiting her own house. Catherine, however, had been imported, bussed over from five miles away because she was bright, designated “Accelerated,” and this was where the program sent her. Her, and fifty-nine other “Accelerated” students, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children who stood quivering at their various bus stops, a daily commute of thirty halting minutes each way, a plan meant to fill the emptying classrooms, the school’s neighborhood aging, its former parents now grandparents or ghosts, its small children grown and gone, its older ones delinquent.

Misty hadn’t been in the Accelerated program; she and Catherine had been enemies, generally, back then, the Regulars versus the Accelerateds. For the three years of Catherine’s gifted education, she and her cohorts suffered the taunts and jeers of the neighborhood children. Onto the buses they clomped each afternoon, taking their elevated seats, watching from their Accelerated windows as the Regular gangs dispersed below into the small houses, or through the canal where fetid water ran, into the great cement drainpipes to smoke cigarettes and draw pictures of purported sexual acts and shout foul echoing words. On Fridays, if you happened to be in sixth grade, you could take yourself to Pizza Hut for lunch, and there the Accelerateds would suffer the thrown crusts from the Regular tables, the savage wrath of the average children, and the stifled anxiety of the freakish ones, the ones designated special. No adult, either customer or employee, ever felt like identifying with the Accelerateds, standing up for them or quelling the abuse. Catherine remembered that, the aggrieved expression her group encountered: they were stuck up, sissies, pussies, pathetic. In some other food chain, they would be cut from the herd. Small consolations were offered at home; their parents might routinely promise that adult life would be different, when the tables would naturally turn.