Bound (9 page)

Oliver now declined to retrieve his secret cell phone to read his Sweetheart’s text.
I am kissing our photo
, that message might say, alluding to the newspaper. On his public phone, he called Leslie to leave a message about her unwelcome visitor, that mess he had so easily disposed of. He considered leaving a message for Miriam, but then could not fashion a sensible straightforward admonition. She was an adult; he had failed her as a father; she was injuring her mother; her life was in danger. The enormity of her trouble—its duration and repercussions, its scariness—was daunting. And enervating.

After a few mindless turns down one empty street and another, Oliver decided to head home to Catherine. The day had started badly and only gotten worse. There at their house she would be waiting, she who would still be in her own bathrobe, drinking Irish coffee, smiling wryly, treating the newspaper accolade with kind and sardonic indulgence.

“My husband, the Wichitan to Watch,” she would say. “You and the BTK,” holding up two entwined fingers.

CHAPTER 8

I
T WAS NOT
legally binding. The expression itself interested Catherine. Legally. Binding.

One trademark of the serial killer’s methods was binding. Drawstrings, extension cords, scarves, pantyhose—whatever, it seemed, was at hand. Catherine lay in bed letting her thoughts circle and knot (
neckties
,
jump ropes, leashes
… ) while Oliver prepared for his workday.

He often reminded her that she was impetuous. Allowing this strange girl into their house would be, maybe, an example of that. He had had an operation after his second accidental child, with his second incorrect wife. Catherine had become a stepmother to those girls: Mary, whose artwork hung around her house yet whom she’d never met, and Miriam, of whom she had always been terrified. Thirteen years old when Oliver divorced her mother to marry Catherine, the girl was inordinately attentive to her young stepmother. She made Catherine nervous; no girl was supposed to love her stepmother. Everybody knew that. It was the presence of Miriam that eventually precluded the idea of adoption. There were enough of those apocryphal tales circulating among their group of friends, the damaged goods they’d invited unwittingly into their homes, gene pools contaminated by ignorance, addiction, desperation, and simple bad luck.

Miriam herself had seemed a cautionary tale, seemed so still. Once, she would have told Catherine any- and everything: her delinquencies and exploits, offered up in a child’s enthusiastic bragging manner, begging for Catherine to reply with her own confessions—like a big sister, perhaps. The girl had been so happy to spite her Pollyanna mother, to act as if she and Catherine were naughty cohorts. But Catherine had been attending to becoming a wife, not a sister, not a mother. Now Miriam skulked around the spa wearing the approved uniform but nonetheless looking anything but healthy, her skin sallow, her hair unwashed, an emaciated and angry and distracted girl, eyes dilated, thoughts uncharitable. She would never not be Catherine’s stepdaughter, Oliver’s daughter, that child they had failed.

“
You
,” Oliver would sometimes say, disciplining the dogs, “we can put down.”

That was the thing about choice, Catherine noted now: you could have too much of it. As an unready person, she’d had two abortions before marrying; when she found her husband, he was finished conceiving children.

“We should meet her before we say no,” Catherine said from the bed, Oliver’s large firm bed, its tight sheets, her voice still croaky. “Little Catherine, I mean.” She said it to see how her husband would react; because they’d had sex the night before, this was as charitable a mood she would ever find him in. On one hand could she count the serious disagreements in their marriage.

“That seems reasonable until you push the scenario a step further,” Oliver answered from his position at the ironing board; he licked his finger and tested the iron’s heat, a petite sizzle. “We meet her, and then we say no?” Last evening, fully in his cups at a dinner party, he’d presented the situation as conversation fodder. People had different responses. Some said they’d accept without thinking twice; others said they’d decline with the same haste. And a few, people like Catherine, had a provisional inclination.
If
, they said …

But if what?

“She’s a complete stranger.” Oliver stated this obvious fact for at least the tenth time, although he probably didn’t realize that. He stepped into his warm pants, folded up the ironing board, and opened the bedroom blinds behind him. There were moments he seemed to be making a physical point to Catherine, illustrating that he could move like a much younger man. He did this now. “Still winter,” he notified her.

“She’s not
exactly
a stranger,” Catherine said. There was Misty Mueller’s face, her perpetual sleepy expression, her lazy smile and crooked teeth. One of Catherine’s later boyfriends, during college, had said Misty reminded him of a basset hound, droopy, mournful, and resigned, preparing to emit a baying complaint. Catherine had laughed; she and her best friend had already begun, by then, to grow apart.

“Call Houston,” Oliver advised. “Get details. Maximum input.” This was how he handled all potential projects, asking for further information, waiting until everything was spelled out to him.

“I already have as much information as exists,” Catherine said. “There just isn’t any.” Over the phone she’d befriended the Houston State Farm insurance provider, Dick Little, who was fascinated by the girl’s absence, and the tragedy of the mother’s death. His first assurance to Catherine, before Catherine had had any notion to ask, was that his office was not treating the accident as a suicide.

“What if it
was
a suicide?” Catherine had asked.

Dick Little paused, perhaps suddenly aware that he had possibly overstepped his authority, had opened his big mouth when discretion was called for, then explained to Catherine that the insurance payout was significantly different in the instance of intentional death.

“Oh,” said Catherine. Of course. But how was it she hadn’t known about this? How had she gotten to be as old as she was without catching on to such a perfectly obvious clause as this? The sensation was not an infrequent one; it seemed others had come with their practical minds better prepared, or perhaps put into practice more often, challenged by the world at regular intervals. She could blame her bossy mother, she could blame her older husband, those loving protectors who’d apparently always simply handed her the fish rather than teaching her how to catch her own.

And it occurred to Catherine that Misty had also been one of those protectors, the less apparent yet necessary one in between, who’d shepherded Catherine from her childish life in her mother’s care to, eventually, her adult life in her husband’s hands.

It was Dick Little in Houston from whom Catherine learned that Misty had been a real estate agent.

“Real estate?” Catherine had said, surprised. But what job wouldn’t have surprised her? Misty had been adept at a great many things—hustling pool, scoring weed, forging signatures—but none of them easily translated into a viable grown-up career. They’d gone through high school getting teenage jobs together, then getting fired together—thieves at worst; insolent, irreverent, and careless, at best. For a single evening, they’d been professional babysitters at the eastside Holiday Inn, called to take care of the children of visiting strangers. Misty hadn’t known how to quiet the infant she’d been handed; her response was to put it screaming in the bathtub, shut the door, and turn up the television. When Catherine came from her own charges—three siblings two floors away—appalled at the scene, Misty had shrugged. She’d grown up without a mother, without a childhood of tenderness or spoiling, without even dolls on which to practice such things.

The baby had been rolling side to side in the tub, its large bald head bumping as it shrieked, hot, soiled, red. Damaged, Catherine feared, holding it fearfully to her pounding chest, soothing it, while Misty watched
Saturday Night Live
. Misty hadn’t understood why Catherine insisted they abandon the babysitting business.

Yet it was Misty who’d become an actual mother, finally, not Catherine. Catherine hadn’t even been an adequate stepmother, poor Miriam still a lost soul, sleeping with strangers, taking risks that terrified everyone around her. Sometimes it seemed she did the things she did in order to keep her family on alert. She’d not outgrown that teenage girl’s perverse pleasure.

Visiting the real estate company’s Web site, Catherine didn’t at first recognize her old friend smiling there among the others, her eyes skipping right over that coiffed lady in search of the person she knew. Then she repeated the process, seeking to penetrate the camouflage of the ordinary. And there she was: Misty’s hair streaked blond now, kept shorter, buoyed, curled at her temple and ears. Catherine leaned close to the lit computer screen, squinting into the cheerful face with Misty Mueller’s name below it. Her teeth had been repaired, and it was obvious that she was comfortable showing them, as she had never been before; she also wore glasses, frameless things that might have hidden the dark circles Catherine remembered. She’d grown older, had Misty, but it seemed that gravity had worked on her features in reverse, lifting and lightening what had been her previous expression. No one viewing this photograph would have been reminded of a basset hound. Furthermore, she had a long list of citations beneath her photo and had been what her company proudly named a “Harris County top producer” for the last decade.

This woman wouldn’t have put an infant in the tub and drowned out her cries with the sound of a television laugh track.

So there was that official information, and more like it. Then there was the much briefer résumé of her daughter, young Catherine who quite plausibly had been named for elder Catherine, guardian. The private school in Vermont continued to assure her that they were as concerned as she was about locating the girl, meanwhile never failing to mention that they were in no way responsible for her disappearance, that the code of conduct—contractual, it seemed—at St. Christopher’s strictly outlined the student’s willingness to obey it. They had this in writing, and would be happy to provide Catherine with a copy. “No thanks,” Catherine told the head of school. She conceived of a bias against the woman, merely from her tone of voice.

The police in both Texas and Vermont had been notified. The girl was a teenage runaway; it was an epidemic group. Her mother Misty had been one, once upon a time. Catherine had been her accomplice. They had an elaborate code for Misty’s collect phone calls from the road, different names given by Misty to indicate different locations or dilemmas; alternate responses, from Catherine, to signal the mood at home. Ludicrous convolutedness. Catherine had driven Misty to the Greyhound station in Misty’s car, and then parked the Buick back at East High. What had been the reason for her odyssey? Catherine could not recall. Might she have suggested it, herself, an adventure for Misty that would arouse her negligent grandma into action? Catherine had been invited along, and may even have feigned some temptation. But push coming to shove, she would never have gone. She’d have sent Misty, in her stead, to see what such a thing would become, her experimental surrogate, her guinea pig.

Her own version of scaring the grown-ups.

When the grandmother finally noticed Misty wasn’t home, when the school security patrol had finally tagged Misty’s automobile for the third day, that’s when the alarm was finally sounded. And then everybody suddenly realized that Misty was eighteen, and could not be officially designated as a minor. She became a missing person. And then she rode the Greyhound home, where nothing had changed except that she was further behind than usual in her classes, and there was a giant orange sticker on her windshield that wouldn’t come off. It stayed there for years, fading and shredding and peeling.

“Agenda?” Oliver asked Catherine, eyeing her from his bathed and ready position while she lay still rumpled in bed.

“Doctors, waiting rooms, bad magazines, insipid conversation.”
The annual humiliation
, her mother had named the day, long ago. Physical, bloodwork, pap smear, mammogram, colonoscopy: all scheduled in a row, one long day of undressing, probing, stirrups, plates, tubes. Catherine was her chaperone and driver.

Oliver offered his wife a Valium, then said, “I admire her optimism.”

“Meaning?”

He glanced over the pill bottle he’d extended to her. She could see him manufacturing a more diplomatic explanation than the true one: Why bother, he’d meant; a seventy-four-year-old invalid woman might just as well let nature take its course, rust or rot have its way with her like any old thing, untroubled by intervention.

“I don’t like it when you seem cold,” Catherine said; his postcoital cheer had gone. He withdrew the Valium. To distract her from his coldness, he bent over the bed and embraced her—aftershave, mouthwash, starch—and then he was overly solicitous of the dogs, encouraging them to see him to the back door, to follow his progress outside from inside as he walked to the front of the house, and then turning to trill his special whistle for them, the mockingbird run he could execute perfectly, knowing they would be watching from the glass front door, their nub tails twitching, their vocal cords gargling. This was all designed to endear him to Catherine.

Now she rose. Normally she would visit Oliver’s businesses, check in with his managers, catch up on the continuing human drama of his employees. To her he’d offered a few of those managerial jobs, restaurant or day spa or art gallery or martini bar, but Catherine preferred being his ambassador while he was off looking into the next venture. He not only made loans to the men and women who launched these projects, he trained the employees who would work there, his army of chic service industry drones. Catherine had been one herself, long ago. She’d been very good at it; it’s what she’d done after college, breaking her mother’s heart when she announced she had no intention of going to graduate school, she was done with book learning. She wanted, she must have argued, “real life experience.” She’d been raised by teachers, she’d been in school for as long as she could remember, she’d majored in education. Enough! Catherine had left the college dorm, rented an apartment, and gone to work for Oliver alongside his other devotees; from that institution she’d taken what she considered highest honors, graduating to become its guru’s wife.