The Dead Place (19 page)

Had he always intended to kill her? It occurred to him only after her death, when he thought about how carefully he’d sussed out her living situation, that he had chosen her deliberately. It had not been a random act of violence, but a deliberate conclusion to a relationship he’d cultivated purely so he could end it on his terms.

Now all he had of her was the little cross and sometimes, if he gripped it tight in his palm, he could get a faint picture of the shy face she’d worn when he first smiled at her.

It was easier with the photos and that’s why he took his time to get them right. He stepped out from behind the camera for a third time with only a slight sigh of impatience. The slave’s left hand had flopped forward, scattering the roses it held onto the floor. He carefully tucked the hand back into place, using a small foam block to hold it there. Then he had to arrange the nightgown to hide the block. Lastly, he gathered up the roses and arranged them in a pleasing fashion within her arms.

He hummed under his breath as his hands moved over her body. “Do you like Mozart, little one?
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
to speed your journey?” He laughed a little at his joke. It was satisfying to enjoy one’s work.

Just as she had watched Terrence Simnic, the neighbors now watched Kate. She could feel their presence behind the twitching curtains and slightly ajar doors of the homes on their block. Walking out to the car for her first, mandatory, appointment with a psychologist, she saw the old woman across the street come out of her house and stare openly.

Kate stared back defiantly until the woman looked away and pretended to be examining the pots of mums flanking her porch steps. Kate averted her gaze from Terrence Simnic’s house as she backed the Volvo down the driveway. He seemed to have vanished just like the girls she’d suspected him of taking. The floral van was parked in the driveway, but his other car, the ancient sedan, was gone and she’d seen no sign of it or him since her arrest.

He must have taken his sister with him. Perhaps they’d gone back to the group home where she lived, undoubtedly to escape the local media.

They’d camped out in front of the house for a solid week. Trucks double-parked along the sidewalk, reporters appearing regularly each morning, clustered like fungi along the edges of the lawn. They were gone now. A grisly accident on Highway 87 captured the short attention span of the reporters, and they abandoned the story of the dean’s crazy wife, leaving behind them a trampled lawn with crushed coffee cups and lipstick-stained cigarette butts.

A few days earlier, she’d tried to sneak out the back door to go to the grocery store, only to hear a high-pitched voice call, “There she is!” just before a young woman in a white suit came racing up the driveway, microphone outstretched, like a raptor alighting on prey. A cameraman lumbered after her. Other reporters jockeyed for second place, one man slipping in the dew-wet grass in his haste to reach her.

“Over here, Mrs. Corbin!”

“Where are you going, Mrs. Corbin?”

Kate couldn’t stop flinching at the snapping cameras, but she’d learned to walk to her car. Running just encouraged them to chase her. They’d reminded her of a pack of wild dogs.

Images of her arrest were added to the already abundant coverage of the disappearance of both Lily Slocum and Elizabeth Hirsh. Shots of her being led, handcuffed, into the station were played on every broadcast, along with a smaller smiling head shot that was at least three years old and must have been taken from a gallery brochure.

It was jarring to see images of herself on TV, but worse to see the footage of Ian, walking briskly toward his office with his head turned to avoid the camera, shoulders hunched and briefcase gripped tightly in his fist.

Even the
Times
ran a piece on it, thankfully small and buried in the middle of the Metro section, but complete with a bad photo of her hurrying into the police station with her hand blocking her face.

Everyone experienced humiliation at some point. Failed exams, entertaining disasters, a cup of coffee spilled down the front of a freshly starched white shirt while racing for the morning train. Kate could still remember the professor who told her when she was all of nineteen that she’d only ever be middling as an artist. The critique still burned, but his vicious assessment had hardened her determination, and at some point her desire to prove him wrong had become a work ethic that helped her succeed. However, this humiliation was different; there was nothing she could fight against.

She felt angry, the sort of cold anger that kept other feelings, like embarrassment, at bay. Some nights, she’d replay in her mind every single awful detail of her arrest. One of the worst things was that the police clearly thought she was crazy. One of them, the elderly sergeant, had even patted her shoulder when they returned her belongings. It didn’t help that Ian had promised mandatory therapy as a condition of the charges against her being dropped.

The psychologist, an older, Germanic-looking woman, had her private practice on the upper floor of a building just off Penton Street. Dr. Greta Schneider had short white hair and a soft face. The office was decorated in peaceful shades of yellow and blue, with comfortable armchairs and a Matisse reproduction on one wall. Yet Kate felt anything but relaxed. There was a chaise lounge available in the intimate grouping, and Kate wondered if anybody really lay down upon it to pour out his or her woes in a prone position. She avoided it, seating herself upright in an armchair and trying not to grip the sides.

“Tell me about yourself,” Dr. Schneider said after she’d asked some general questions, scribbling down the answers on a pad of paper that Kate longed to grab and read. “Problem with authority,” it probably read, followed by “exhibiting signs of dementia.”

“What do you want to know?”

The doctor shrugged. “Whatever you’d like to tell me.”

“Nothing,” Kate said, “I’d like to tell you nothing, but I realize that isn’t an option.” She laughed a little, but Dr. Schneider didn’t join in. She just watched Kate, an impassive smile on her face.

The silence was unnerving. Finally, Kate blurted, “Until ten months ago I would have told you that I was a reasonably successful artist with a great marriage and a happy kid.”

“But now?”

“Haven’t you been watching the news, Doctor? I was top of the hour a few weeks ago.”

“And how has that changed things?”

“What, having everyone think I’m crazy? How do you think it’s changed things?”

“Who thinks you’re crazy?”

“The police. The neighbors. My husband.”

The doctor made a note on the pad on her lap. Kate wondered what she was writing down. Was it a confirmation of her craziness? Sweat beaded the back of her knees and dampened her palms. She pressed them against her pants legs and tried to meet the doctor’s watchful eyes.

“Do you think you’re crazy?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know.” Did normal people triple-check the locks on their doors? Did normal people break into their neighbor’s homes? “I thought I had a good reason to go in his house.”

“Whose house?”

“My neighbor’s. Terrence Simnic. I had a good reason to go in there. I saw him take a woman in there, but the police wouldn’t do anything about it.”

“What did you want them to do?”

“Arrest him.”

“Why didn’t they?”

Kate felt as if she were back in school being asked to dutifully recite what the teacher wanted her to say. “Because she was his sister. I didn’t know that.”

She stared out the window through the half-open slats of mini-blinds. A small bird alighted on the barren bush outside, bobbing lightly on the thin branch supporting it. It looked as if a breeze could blow it away. So fragile, so vulnerable.

The doctor shifted in her seat and Kate turned back, struggling to explain. “I saw him take a woman into the house. I saw him carrying women’s clothes out of his house. He collected dolls that looked like the photo of the missing girl. He worked in his basement at all hours of the night. It all seemed very strange. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

The doctor made a noncommittal noise in her throat. It might have been a cough. “Let’s talk about you, Kate,” she said, speaking slowly in a low, melodious voice. “Let’s try and take the focus off Terrence Simnic and the death of Lily Slocum for a while.”

Greta Schneider’s eyes were watchful. They made Kate nervous, but then again she’d always felt nervous in therapy. She wasn’t comfortable discussing her life so intently. Her work, yes, but not her life. She could discuss her art and its influences, but she didn’t want to discuss her childhood, her marriage, or her parenting and have it all held up to examination.

At the end of the fifty-minute hour, Kate took the stairs down to the exit, passing the dentist office on the first floor. Ironic that both businesses shared the same building. Kate imagined she could hear faint drilling whenever the psychologist asked particularly probing questions.

For the first few days, when the phone calls from reporters were still coming, alternating with repeated knocking on their front door, Kate took to her bed. In this way, her arrest was similar to the first few days after she’d been raped. She pulled the covers over her head and tried to block out the sound.

It wasn’t a particularly great coping strategy, but it was a strategy and she hadn’t felt like coming up with a better one. She’d expected Ian to try and rally her, just like he had after she was raped, with aphorisms about what didn’t kill her making her stronger. However, he didn’t say anything, and that’s when she first realized that he wasn’t talking to her. Not real talking. He’d give her perfunctory greetings, say good night before he turned out his bedside lamp, but there’d been no real conversation since the angry confrontation in the police station when he’d accused her of trying to sabotage his career.

She’d been angry enough herself not to notice at first, but in the days that followed her arrest it became clear that he’d shut down. He was there physically, wasn’t keeping different hours, but he’d checked out emotionally and she didn’t know if he would ever come back.

It was a strange thing that a couple’s happiness could rest on how well they knew each other and what they did with that knowledge. Ian’s comments about her selfishness had hurt Kate like few other things in their marriage.

“What do you think about what he said?” Dr. Schneider asked when she’d slowly, painfully recounted the conversation.

“Why didn’t he ever tell me this before? If he really thinks he’s denied himself and his career for years because of me, how come we’ve never had any conversation about it?”

“So you think he’s not serious?”

“No, I think he hasn’t been honest with me about his feelings and now it’s all suddenly coming out because he’s angry.”

As Kate drove the long way home from town, away from the university and the possible prying eyes of Ian’s colleagues, she turned it over and over in her mind. Was it selfish to have stayed in New York all those years? It had certainly been more expensive, but had she really traded Ian’s happiness for her own?

If she had—and that was a big if—it certainly hadn’t been conscious. She had only followed her calling, pouring everything into her art with the same single-minded intensity she’d had since childhood. Was that so wrong? Had Ian felt excluded by that all these years?

She couldn’t help but remember the short biography that had accompanied her smiling headshot in gallery brochures. “Kate Corbin maintains a studio in Williamsburg and resides in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.” All the satisfaction contained in those few words. A full life, a complete life, the kind of life many people dreamed of having: a successful career, a good marriage, a healthy child. It had seemed solid, unassailable.

For a year she’d blamed the fractures in her life on those twenty awful minutes, considering them a demarcation between her old life and the new, but now she questioned whether the cracks had always existed in her marriage and what happened in the studio had just completed the job.

Unsettled and unhappy, she retreated to the studio when she got home, wanting to lose herself in painting, longing for the creative state where all that mattered was paintbrush and canvas.

She squeezed paint from thin tubes onto her palette and selected a brush to add another layer, dark green, to the river, painting in stripes of color that made it look as if the water were churning. The figure seemed to be struggling now to stay afloat. The face looked muddy, nondescript. Kate sat and stared at it for a while, trying to figure out what face wanted to emerge. Was it Lily Slocum anymore or was it Elizabeth Hirsh?

She couldn’t make it work, features emerging with fast brush movements only to be scraped away with a palette knife just as swiftly. It wasn’t distressing, she knew with a confidence born from many long hours that it always worked eventually.

It was a sunny, cold day, light moving through the window shades and bathing the wooden floor planks yellow. The soft hum of the electric heater provided a pleasant background lull. The strong, familiar scents of paint and linseed oil filled the air and mixed with the faint aroma of wood-burning fireplaces.

The shift in light alerted Kate to the passage of time. The stripes of color falling across the floor grew longer, now spilllling across the canvas. She switched on the lights and kept working. She came out of a creative fog to look at the clock, shocked to see that it was almost six.

Kate covered her palette and canvas and rushed her brushes into a jar she kept in the sink. Grace should have been home from her piano lesson by now. Why hadn’t she come out to say hello?

The kitchen was empty. “Grace?” Kate checked the table and the sink fully expecting to find a used glass and crumb-strewn plate since Grace never remembered to put her dishes in the dishwasher. The kitchen was spotless.

The first hint of anxiety flicked on like a pilot light in Kate’s stomach.

“Grace? Where are you?” She walked to the front of the house, hoping to see her daughter at the piano, but the lid was closed. She hurried up the stairs, moving briskly along the hall, already preparing to scold Grace for not telling her mother when she got home.

It was quiet, but Grace was probably plugged into her iPod. Maybe she was actually doing her homework. Kate gave a perfunctory knock on her daughter’s door before turning the knob.

The room was empty, the bed still the same heap of covers that Grace had left when she’d been forced out that morning. The flame in Kate’s stomach turned up a notch. She looked around, trying to assess from the mess whether Grace had come and gone. Maybe she’d actually gone somewhere with a friend. Only wouldn’t she have left her backpack behind? It was nowhere to be found.