Arlette dared not reveal such terrible—perverse—unmotherly thoughts to anyone: certainly not to Zeno, or to Juliet.
Not even to her sister Katie Hewett who was three years older than Arlette, the most sensible of women, an assistant superintendent of Carthage public schools whose ability to perceive subterfuge, obfuscation, and deceit in the most guileless of individuals was legendary.
Katie squeezed Arlette’s hand, frequently.
Katie hugged Arlette, so hard her ribs ached.
Katie kissed Arlette on the side of the face, a hot wet kiss that seared.
As if wanting Arlette to know: she understood.
Only once did Arlette say to Katie, in the fifth or sixth week of the search, in a weak abashed voice as the two sisters prepared a meal in the Mayfields’ kitchen while in another room Zeno was speaking rapidly on his cell phone, in the tone of a man accustomed to giving orders: “Oh Katie, I am trying, Katie. You know, I am trying. I won’t ever give up. He would never forgive me, if I did.”
Still, Arlette placed calls to the missing cell phone.
Just to punch in the numbers. Just to listen, breath withheld, for the ghost-ring.
In the Carthage Post-Journal there were ever briefer articles, on inside pages, on the “ongoing search” for nineteen-year-old Cressida Mayfield, and at the conclusion of these articles was the reiterated statement that “no arrests have yet been made” and that the police investigation was “continuing.”
Rumors flourished: that Brett Kincaid had been arrested finally, not on suspicion of having had something to do with the disappearance of his former fiancée’s sister, but on a complaint of a neighbor that the young man had “shoved him and shouted at him” outside their house on Potsdam Street; that a “young girl’s body” had been found in a landfill, near Wild Forest, eight miles east of Wolf’s Head Lake where a sprawling enclave of Adirondack Hells Angels lived; that Juliet Mayfield, former fiancée of Corporal Brett Kincaid, had resigned her position at the Convent Street Elementary School and was moving away from Carthage—Couldn’t bear the shame.
So far as Arlette could determine, none of these rumors was true.
Though it was true, Juliet was thinking of enrolling in a master’s degree program in education, at Plattsburgh—sometime.
Not giving up her teaching job in Carthage but commuting, once a week to a night-school class.
And very possibly it was true, Brett Kincaid had gotten into some sort of shouting match with a neighbor.
And very possibly—“a young girl’s body” might have been found in a landfill near Wild Forest, if not at the present time, sometime ago. Or sometime to come.
ANOTHER RUMOR WAS that Marcy Meyer had had some sort of “nervous collapse” in Ogdensburg, in the week following her return for her second year in the nursing school.
This was in late August. The nursing school term began earlier than the university.
Arlette called the Meyers’ home, and Marcy’s mother answered.
Mrs. Meyer said that Marcy had had an “accident”—she’d fallen down a flight of stairs dragging a suitcase up to her room on the third floor of the nurses’ residence.
She’d been unconscious for several minutes. She’d sprained an ankle and dislocated a shoulder bone. She’d been in such pain, even with painkillers, the nursing school had insisted that she take off the fall term and return home.
Arlette stammered how sorry she was to hear this terrible news!
“Should I come over to see her? Is there anything I could do to help?”
Linda Meyer, whom Arlette had known in high school, not well, for they’d belonged to very different circles, hesitated a moment before saying, with finality, “No. That isn’t necessary, Arlette. Seeing you would just remind Marcy of Cressida and she’s had enough of that.”
ZENO HAD SPOKEN with Marcy Meyer several times.
Arlette had had the idea—(she hadn’t wanted to ask her husband)—that his visits were upsetting to Marcy, who’d been questioned for more than one session by police detectives.
Marcy had been “devastated” by her friend’s disappearance. But Marcy had been “shocked” and “bewildered” when she’d learned that Cressida hadn’t returned to her home, but had gone to Wolf’s Head Lake, seemingly to meet with Brett Kincaid, after leaving the Meyers’ house.
There was the possibility, you would not want to label it a fact, that Marcy Meyer’s closest friend had lied to her.
The last time Zeno had spoken with Marcy, soon before she’d left for nursing school at Ogdensburg, he’d returned to Arlette to say that, he might be imagining it, but it had seemed to him that Marcy was just slightly jealous of—someone—or something—in Cressida’s life.
Arlette had thought of course: Brett Kincaid.
Zeno was sitting on a leather sofa in the living room. Rubbing his face so vigorously, thumbs against his eyes, Arlette could hear the eyeballs moving in their sockets in a way to make her shiver.
“Get me a beer, Lettie. Please! I’m just too—God-damned—fucking—tired to get one myself.”
Yet, fired with a new idea, a new and not yet demonstrably futile idea regarding their lost daughter, Zeno spoke rapidly, even zestfully.
“Marcy finally told me—which I don’t think she’d told the police—that, that night at her house, she’d thought that Cressida might have made a call on her cell phone at one point, or possibly the cell phone had been set on vibrate, since it didn’t ring, and Cressida might have had a call on the phone, which she took in another room—(they’d been in the dining room, at dinner, with Marcy’s parents and her grandmother, and Cressida had excused herself as if she were going to the bathroom)—but since she wasn’t at all sure, and was so confused trying to remember, answering questions put to her by the police and trying to remember every desperate thing, she didn’t think that she could tell them this. ‘It’s like I might have imagined it. It’s like I have been thinking about that night so much, my brain is spilling over with false memories, I don’t dare tell the police, they tape every word, it would become permanent and could never be erased.’ And Marcy was trying not to cry, you know how we always think of Marcy as so healthy, sturdy, what is Cressida’s description—stalwart and true of heart, like a wildebeest—but here was poor Marcy looking as if she’d lost ten pounds, and so anxious—‘You know how furious Cressida would be with us, if she knew we were talking about her like this . . . Trying to remember every syllable of what she’d said, and every kind of speculation . . . ’ And Marcy did start to cry, and I held her hands to comfort her. And I guess I cried, too.”
“NOTHING CONCLUSIVE. But probably, nothing significant.”
For weeks police kept Cressida’s laptop. Presumably a computer forensics specialist was examining it.
But at last the laptop was returned to the Mayfields with a report that their daughter didn’t seem to have been involved in any unusual or risky Internet activities. She’d used her laptop for academic research primarily; her school papers were neatly filed by course titles; her email correspondence was nothing out of the ordinary—much of the mail was impersonal, from St. Lawrence University. She seemed to have few friends, and these were young women—predominantly, Marcy Meyer.
No secret life! Somehow, this saddened Arlette.
But really, no: this was a relief.
“Your daughter has a limited social life, judging from the email record. Does she have a boyfriend, that you know of?”
Arlette shook her head, no. Zeno frowned and did not reply.
Arlette was grateful for the detective speaking of their daughter in the present tense: Has. Does. Is.
“What about here in Carthage, in high school maybe—was there anyone?”
Arlette hesitated as if having to think. But the answer was no.
“Was Cressida interested in—involved with—girls? Would you know about that, if she was?”
Arlette hesitated again. A flush rose into her face.
Ze
no said, in a neutral voice: “You mean—‘lesbians’? You think my daughter is a ‘lesbian’?”
“Would you be in a position to know, if she was?”
“That’s a hard question to answer, officer! As you’ve phrased it.”
“Arlette, what do you think?”
What Arlette thought was No. My daughter could not love anyone like herself.
“I really don’t think so. Cressida has girlfriends as other girls her age do. In some ways, as we’ve tried to explain to you, she was—is—a very young nineteen. She’s always been smart, precociously smart, but she spends most of her time inside her own head—she isn’t so aware of people, as her own thoughts. She isn’t—I guess you’d say—very mature.”
Arlette spoke haltingly. It was a terrible thing for a mother to so betray her daughter, to strangers!
A swift vision of Cressida’s pale furious face, lifting to Arlette.
“Mrs. Mayfield, apart from Kincaid and his friends, one of the last people who saw your daughter that night is this girl ‘Marcy Meyer.’ How close are they?”
“They’ve been friends since grade school. But not really—from Cressida’s perspective, certainly—close.”
“And you would know that, Mrs. Mayfield, how? Exactly how would you know that?”
How did Arlette know anything about her daughter! The detective’s questions were unanswerable.
“From remarks Cressida has made. From the fact that Cressida seems to forget Marcy for periods of time. It’s Marcy who has to contact her.”
“And if they were in contact now—just assuming, for a moment, that your daughter is alive, somewhere”—how frankly Detective Silber spoke, how matter-of-fact the leverage of if—“is it possible that Marcy Meyer would keep this contact secret? If Cressida asked her not to, she wouldn’t tell you?”
Arlette and Zeno turned to each other, confounded.
No idea how to reply.
ENTERING CRESSIDA’S ROOM. She’d knocked—but too lightly for Cressida to hear, evidently. Which was a mistake. And there was Cressida in flannel pajamas half-lying/half-sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard and her knees awkwardly apart, and raised; and a notebook—more precisely a journal with a marbled cover, which Arlette hadn’t ever seen before—positioned in such a way, against Cressida’s knees, so that she could write in it. And Cressida glared at Arlette, and dropped the journal onto the bed, partly hiding it with a comforter; in that instant, Cressida was furious, saying rudely: “Go away! You’re not welcome here! No snooping here!”
Cressida had been eleven or twelve at the time.
Arlette had retreated, stung.
She’d never seen the hard-covered journal again. She’d rarely entered Cressida’s room again. And this was so embarrassing to her, like the accusation of snooping, the rudeness of her own daughter for which (she believed) she was herself to blame, she’d never told anyone: not a woman friend, not her sister Katie, not her husband Zeno.
NINE WEEKS, TWO DAYS after her disappearance it was revealed: in the afternoon of July 9, a physical therapist at the Carthage Rehabilitation Clinic named Seth Seager, who’d worked with Brett Kincaid at the clinic for several months and was on friendly terms with him, happened to see Cressida Mayfield in the Carthage CVS on Main Street. Cressida didn’t know Seth Seager but he knew her, or knew something of her, as the smart one of Zeno Mayfield’s two daughters. He called out hello to her—she seemed suspicious of him at first—but then, when he identified himself as a new friend of Brett Kincaid’s, from the rehab clinic, her manner changed.
“There was something about Cressida—I really liked her. She reminded me of a cousin of mine, a girl, kind of a tomboy-type, but smart—and smart-mouthed. And that’s a kind of girl I like. I mean, a kind of girl that’s cool. Like, she isn’t waiting for you to compliment her or say nice things to her—she knows a guy isn’t going to do that. Most guys are not going to do that. ’Cause she isn’t the kind of girl a guy would be attracted to, in that way. But I liked Cressida a lot, and I think she liked me. And I told her, Brett Kincaid plans on going out that night, to the Roebuck Inn with some friends, he’d invited me and I told him no thanks, that scene wasn’t for me. (Sure, I’d told Brett it wasn’t a great idea, drinking while he was taking those meds, but Brett just shrugged and laughed, ‘What the hell. I’ll be OK. And if not—what the hell.’) And Cressida asked this funny question—if Brett was ‘celebrating’—and I said I didn’t know, what would he be ‘celebrating’?—and Cressida said, ‘He’s not getting married.’ Well, I’d heard about this, but not from Brett; Brett would not ever talk to anybody at the clinic about any personal thing, so I didn’t know what to say. And Cressida said, like she’d had a change of heart, and was sorry what she’d said to me, ‘I didn’t mean it, I know Brett must feel bad—both of them must feel bad. I’m sorry what I said.’ And she was looking like she’d start to cry, which is not what you expect from such a cool girl, the kind that never cries, or anyway not when you can see her. ‘He wouldn’t do harm to himself, would he?’ she asked me, which was a weird thing to ask, something we don’t talk about, like, y’know, you don’t talk about guys who kill themselves after they start to get better, lost their legs, or have to wear a colonoscopy bag, or brain-damaged so they can’t speak a sentence anyone can comprehend, and once they get a little more in control of their lives they kill themselves, or have an ‘overdose’ or a ‘fatal accident’—so I said, ‘Hell, no. Not Corporal Kincaid, no way.’ And she said, ‘So he will get through it, you think?’—she wasn’t being sarcastic, or joking, but looking at me like I could really answer this question for her; and I said what we all say in rehab, ‘Sure he will! One day at a time.’ ”
The detectives to whom he’d made this statement asked Seth Seager why he’d waited so long to contact them.
Shamefaced he said, he didn’t know.
He said, well maybe—he hadn’t wanted to “make things worse” for Brett Kincaid who’d already been fucked-over in Iraq.
He said: “Then I was always thinking, telling myself—Cressida would come back. She’d have been away somewhere, and she’d come back. And she’d explain what had happened. And Brett wouldn’t be blamed, or arrested. And I wouldn’t have to get involved, myself.”
Detectives asked Seager how he thought Cressida had gotten to the Roebuck Inn from Fremont Street in Carthage, a distance of approximately nine miles. He’d laughed saying, “If she’s anything like my cousin Dorrie she’d have stuck out her thumb and hitched a ride on Route 33. Seems like everybody’s going out to the lake, Saturday night in July.”
September 15, 2005. Caught amid rocks and rusted iron pipes beneath a bridge in Sackets Harbor, thirty miles west of Carthage where the Nautauga River emptied into Lake Erie, a curious mummified object was found by a twelve-year-old boy who hauled it to shore with a pole: it would turn out to be a girl’s sweater, mud-colored, stiff as a board. The boy brought the mummified sweater home to show his mother—he’d known about the missing girl and the twenty-thousand-dollar reward.
Next day, one of the Beechum County detectives called the Mayfields and asked them to please come to headquarters. An article of clothing had been found in Sackets Harbor, on a bank of the Nautauga River, they hoped the Mayfields might examine, to see if it might have belonged to Cressida Mayfield.
In Zeno’s Land Rover they drove to the building on Axel Road: Zeno, Arlette, Juliet.
Zeno said: “It’s too far away—Sackets Harbor. That isn’t likely.”
When Arlette didn’t respond Zeno said: “Sackets Harbor is too far away. This is a waste of time.”
In the backseat of the Land Rover Juliet sat with her arms folded tight across her chest, shivering, yet uncomplaining, in the blast of air-conditioning Zeno had released.
It had been weeks since the Mayfields had entered the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department. Detective Clement Lewiston was waiting for them, to escort them into a room where, on a table, the mum
mified sweater had been placed. Whatever its original color had been, the sweater was the color of dried mud now. It was too small for an adult woman—too small, Arlette saw with relief, to have belonged to Cressida. Zeno peered at it, frowning: he’d never seen it before, he was sure. Arlette touched it with a forefinger, undecided. It wasn’t a woolen sweater—hardly a “sweater” at all—only just something with sleeves, a cardigan, of some synthetic material like nylon, Orlon. It scarcely had stitching. It was obviously very cheap. Only two little broken buttons remained and its buttonholes were caked with mud. Arlette said, relief in her voice: “No. This is nothing of Cressida’s.”
But Juliet, who’d removed her dark glasses when she stepped into the windowless room, leaned over the mummified sweater for some seconds, staring. Since her younger sister’s disappearance, Juliet had lost weight: her cheeks were thinner, her eyes were ringed with strain. In an undertone Zeno was speaking with Detective Clement Lewiston, words Arlette couldn’t hear. She’d been feeling faint since entering the room and decided it was the brackish river-smell of the mummified sweater that was making her sick.
Almost, it was time to depart. Arlette would have liked to grab at her husband’s arm, to pull him to the door. And she’d have liked to haul Juliet away, too.
“Yes. This is it. This is Cressida’s sweater—the one with the black-and-white stripes.” Juliet spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “If you look close enough you can see the stripes. It used to be my sweater—I gave it to Cressida. Or, Cressida took it from me. It was too small for me. So I’m sure. This is Cressida’s. There’s no doubt about it, Detective—this is my sister’s sweater, she was wearing the night she was taken from us.”
SIX
The Corporal in the Land of the Dead
July 2005–October 2005
JESUS! WHAT THEY’D DONE.
What they’d done was.
Held her down. Jammed a rag into her screaming mouth.