The Whole Truth (23 page)

"You probably want to know all about it, right?" he asks me.

"About how Johnnie disappeared, you mean?"

"Yeah. I'll let Katherine tell you, herself."

"It's late, will she still want to talk tonight?"

He gives me a quick look. "Kimmie told me they would stay up all night, if that's what it takes. You're the first link they've ever had to him since 1976. They want to know everything you can tell them about him."

I wince. "None of it's good."

"Well, let's just think of the boy as a prisoner of war for right now, how about that?" the retired deputy advises me. "He was taken, he may have been tortured, he was brainwashed, and now he's coming home. Is it any wonder if he's not the same man he would have been?"

"That's a very humane way to look at it, but I doubt that his victim's family will agree with you. They could say, he still had choices. They could say, not every prisoner of war becomes a murderer."

"I wouldn't expect them to see it any other way."

"You know that he's never coming home, Jack."

"I know, but the Keplers don't. You're going to have to tell them."

I turn and look out the window, feeling my heart sink again.

"Before I left home," I say, "I stopped by to visit the parents of the little girl Ray killed. Of course, they hate him. They wish the judge had killed him when she shot him, and since she didn't, they hope some bounty hunter gets him, and if that doesn't work, they'd like to kill him themselves. Natty's mother told me she would be happy to flip the switch on the electric chair, or inject him with chemicals to kill him."

"If I were them, I would, too. Did you tell them about the Keplers?"

"No. I'm not sure why I didn't, except that it seemed too much to expect any sympathy out of them." I look over at him, and when I see that he is nodding in agreement, I add, "It's difficult to put Natty's mom and Ray's mom in the same picture."

"Like I said, I can't get my brain wrapped around it."

When he pulls into a driveway beside a small frame house, I ask, "Is this where it happened, Jack?"

"Yep. She's never moved. He disappeared from this very front yard."

"How can she stand to keep living here?"

"She wants everything to be the same, if he tries to find her."

"But didn't she think he was dead?"

"I guess mothers don't think that way."

"And she was right, all along."

He makes a move to open his door, but I stop him. "Can we wait just a minute? I need to absorb this." When he looks puzzled, I say, "So I can report what it's like here, for my readers. I know this sounds weird, and I don't want to keep them waiting, but I need to soak up the atmosphere. I need to do things like estimate how much the trees have grown in twenty-two years, and compare the way the house looks today with photographs of how it looked back then."

What I don't tell him is that I need to try to feel the sensation of tragedy rise in my own body, to attempt to get a hint of what it must have felt like in this house, on that day.

"I know, this must seem like a very strange way to make a living."

"I like your books," he says, surprising me. "You do a good job getting things right about law enforcement. If this is what it takes for you to do that, that's fine with me. My job was pretty strange, too, when you get right down to it."

After a few moments, I am able to say, "Thanks, let's go."

I have never met three more nervous women than Katherine Kepler and her daughters. Kim and Christie sit protectively on either side of Katherine on a couch in their mother's living room. Their brother Cal hangs back, standing in the doorway between that room and the dining room with his hands in his pockets and an angry frown on his face. The youngest of the siblings, Christie, looks scared to death, as if she's afraid that her murderous missing brother may come bursting into the house at any moment and kill us all.

We sit on furniture and are surrounded by decorations that have literally not been altered for twenty-two years. She has covered up worn places with doilies, patched scratches with dye, and repainted the walls the same colors over and over.

All three women are dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts, and the family resemblance is strong. At first glance, they look like three sisters, and it's a little eerie to realize that's because the real sisters have aged naturally, while their mother has tried to hold age at bay. Cal is tall and thin, with dark hair and dark, hollowed eyes, and a stiff, reserved air about him when he shook my hand in greeting. He wears black trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt, and looks as if he came directly here from the telecommunications office where he works.

Kim keeps an arm around her mother's shoulders.

Katherine weeps off and on through the telling of her story.

"It was a beautiful day. November twenty-second, thirteen years after President Kennedy died. It had snowed, but the sun was shining. Johnnie was so excited about the snow, and he couldn't ¦wait to go out to play in it. I had him enrolled in afternoon kindergarten, so we could have nice mornings together after he got up. You know, without all that tension of trying to get a small child awake and fed and dressed when he's still half-asleep. Do you have children, Ms. Lightfoot?"

"Please, call me Marie. No, I don't."

I'm recording the conversation, with their permission.

"Oh, well, I put all my children into afternoon kindergarten, except for Cal, who was an early riser."

"So, John wanted to play in the snow?"

"Yes, and Cal wanted to stay home, of course, and play in the snow, too. But I put them all in the car and took him to school, and Johnnie and Christie and I drove back home. And since we still had on our boots and coats and everything, I stayed outside with them for a little while, and we made snowballs, and even started a snowman. But it was still early, so it was kind of cold, and I made them come in to get warm again." Her face crumples, and I feel as if I can see twenty-two years of suffering in it as Katherine weeps, and her daughters hand her tissues. "He was just getting over an ear infection, and he still couldn't hear very well out of one ear. It has always bothered me terribly that I couldn't recall which ear it was, isn't that crazy?"

I feel such a shock on hearing this woman say that her son had an ear infection that had left him temporarily unable to hear.

The parallel with Natalie Mae McCullen is eerie.

"And then," Katherine goes on, "after he disappeared, all I could think about was, who was going to take care of him, if he was sick? I couldn't bear the idea of him being sick, or hurting, and I wasn't there to comfort him."

She takes a shaky breath, before continuing.

"After breakfast, Johnnie wanted so badly to go back outside again and play, and I thought that was all right."

Katherine looks first at Jack, then at me.

I get the feeling that even after all this time, she's still looking for someone to convince her that she didn't do anything wrong, and I am painfully reminded of Susan McCullen. Twenty-two years from now, will Susan still be blaming herself because she wanted to love her husband on the night her daughter died? Speaking up so quickly that it sounds as if he has said similar things many times before, Jack Lawrence assures her, kindly, "You can't keep a little boy inside when it snows, Katherine."

"No, I suppose not," she says, drying her eyes again.

It is heartbreakingly sweet, I think, how the retired deputy plays his part in a chorus whose purpose is solely to comfort a mother of a missing child. He's a widower, he told me, and I suspect he's half—or more—in love with Katherine Kepler.

The end of her story comes with horrifying speed.

"So I dressed him up warmly again, and sent him outside to play."

I wait for the next sentence, but there isn't one.

A silence grows in the room, filled with implication.

"You mean, that was ..." I can't bring myself to say it.

"I went to put my own coat and boots back on," Katherine says, "and when I went outside, Johnnie wasn't there. The tracks of his boots went out to the curb, and then they stopped, and that's all there ever was. He had a little plastic snow shovel that he took with him."

I feel grief rise in my own throat.

"Mrs. Kepler—"

"Katherine, please."

"Katherine." I take a breath, then say it all in a rush. "When the Florida cops went through Ray Raintree's belongings, they found a toy shovel."

"Oh, my Lord, was it red?"

My eyes sting with tears. "Yes."

"It's Johnnie!" Katherine springs up from the couch, sobbing and staring about wildly, as if he might suddenly appear in front of her. "I know it's my boy."

While her daughters embrace and comfort her, Katherine's other son, Cal, turns and disappears into the back of the house. He doesn't return until I begin, hesitatingly, to tell them about the man I know as Raymond Raintree. They don't ask about Natty McCullen, and I can't bring myself to mention her. When I finish, holding back little else, because the women beg me not to, Katherine Kepler says, "It doesn't matter what he's like now."

But standing in the dining room doorway, Calvin looks as if it matters to him a great deal. As if sensing his hostility, Kim looks back over her shoulder to glare warningly at him. Even with that, he bursts out with his first words since I arrived. "Mom, how can you say it doesn't matter? He killed somebody. He's a terrible person now. He isn't the sweet little boy you remember, he's a pervert, a murderer, and we ought to stay as far away from him as we can get."

"You just don't want to spend the money to defend him!" Kim accuses.

"Nobody can defend him," Cal shoots back. "He's guilty. He's going to die in the electric chair, if some cop doesn't shoot him first. She didn't tell you that, did she? These guys, they don't make it back alive. Just forget it, if you think you're ever going to see him again. I don't know why you'd want to, anyway."

"Cal, shut up," his youngest sister pleads, looking frightened.

His mother goes to him, and attempts to enfold his tall, stiff body into an embrace. I watch Katherine whisper something to her son, but it doesn't calm him. He gently pushes away from her, and rushes toward the back of the house again. In a moment, we hear a back door open, and slam, and then a car starting in the driveway.

His mother, who is crying again, says to her daughters, "Please don't be mad at your brother. Give him time. It's very hard for him."

I think it is unbearable for all of them, and that it is only going to get worse. They sit back down, and now I interview the women at length. We look at dozens of photographs of all of the kids when they were children. When I see pictures of Johnnie Kepler, I can hardly fathom the tragedy that is going to happen to the smiling little boy. I see pictures of his father, Fred Kepler, who was an ordinary-looking man, not very tall, and a bit pudgy. Several photographs show members of the family with an orange-and-white cocker spaniel dog.

"This dog!" I exclaim, excited. "He remembers this dog."

Katherine's eyes widen. "He does? He remembers Daisy?"

For a moment, I am almost sorry I said it, because of what I have to say with it. "He told me that he doesn't have any memories from his childhood, except he recalls an orange and white dog."

"He doesn't remember anything else . . . me?"

Tears come to my eyes again on behalf of the pretty woman seated beside me, looking through the albums. "Maybe he remembers more than he told me he did." I don't want to offer false hope, but given Ray's talent for lying, it could be true.

When I compare their age-enhanced photo to my own memories of Ray's appearance, I see no difference between them at all.

"It's him," I confirm to Katherine, feeling a kind of dreadful awe. "It really is him."

His mother nods, as if she's always known.

Very late, I walk Jack back to his truck in the driveway, on the pretext of having left a notebook in it. There are tall gangly trees around the property, and their leaves are clapping together in the warm wind with a sound like soft applause.

"Cottonwood trees," he says, when I ask about them.

We stand together for a moment in a meditative silence while the cottonwood trees applaud our thoughts. It looks so different here, from Florida. I am acutely, claustrophobically aware of being in the very center of the country, equidistant from oceans. Even the grass beneath my feet is remarkably different from the saw grass I'm used to. This is thinner, more delicate, softer under my shoes. There's more wind out here in Kansas, just as Dorothy found out in The Wizard of Oz, and it never seems to stop blowing. But when it brushes my skin, it's not all that different from home: as humid as walking into a bathroom after somebody has taken a hot shower.

"I could never live in Florida," Jack remarks. "Too darn hot." "What do you call this?" I retort as I stand there sweating beside him. "Florida's not any warmer than this, and we've got the water close by."

"Yeah, I guess that would help some."

There's something I still have to say.

"There's one thing I didn't tell them, Jack. I didn't say how Ray looks now. Photos of him now don't even begin to tell the whole story. You'd better prepare her, if she ever gets a chance to see him in person. It's not like he's maimed, or deformed, or anything. It's . . . it's hard to explain to people about Ray's appearance. How do you say to a mother, here's your grown son who still has all of his fingers and toes, he hasn't had his face blown off, nothing like that, but nobody can stand to look at him?"

I take a deep breath, remembering my own impressions.

"What you ought to tell her is, if the Devil had a son, this is what he'd look like, like some kind of strange, slimy evil creature." I shake my head. "No, that's not true, either. I make him sound like the creature from the black lagoon. He's just a normal-looking human being, only . . . he's not."

As he waits patiently, I try again.

"I think I'd tell her that Ray has a kind of odd appearance that you can't tell from the pictures you've seen on television. It's like there's something wrong with him, but you can't exactly say what." And then I finally blurt out the truth. "Ray is repulsive, Jack. He's one of the most repulsive human beings I ever saw.