Prayers For Rain Part 35

"Sad. Saddest person I come across in a long, long time. Dying from all that sad. I don't drink no more, but I'd sit with her some nights while she did. Sooner or later, she'd come on to me. One of the times I turned her down, she gets all nasty, starts insinuating that my equipment don't work. I go, 'Karen, lot of things got lost in that accident, but not that.' h.e.l.l, I'm still eighteen that way; soldier stands to attention when the breeze shifts. Anyway, I say, 'Look, no offense, but I love my wife.' And she laughs. She says, 'No one loves. No one loves.' And I'll tell you something, man, she believed it."

"No one loves," I said.

"No one loves." He nodded.

He scratched the crown of his head, looked around the barn as I picked up a framed photo from the top of the box. The gla.s.s had been shattered, and pebbles of it stuck in the frame's grooves. The photo was of Karen's father, wearing his marine best, holding his daughter's hand, both of them blinking in the glare.

"Karen," Warren said, "I think she was in a black hole. So the whole world's a black hole. She's surrounded by people who think love is bulls.h.i.t, then love is is bulls.h.i.t." bulls.h.i.t."

Another photo, gla.s.s also shattered. Karen and a good-looking, dark haired guy. David Wetterau, I a.s.sumed. Both of them tanned and dressed in pastels, standing on the deck of a cruise ship, eyes a little gla.s.sy from the daiquiris in their hands. Big smiles. All was right with the world.

"She told me she'd been engaged to a guy got hit by a car."

I nodded. Another photo of her and Wetterau, more pebbles of gla.s.s falling to my hand as I lifted it. Another set of big smiles, this one taken at a party, Happy Birthday streamers hanging behind their heads, stretched across someone's living room wall.

"You know she was hooking?" I asked as I placed the photo on the floor beside the other two.

"I figured," he said. "Guys coming over a lot, only a couple of them coming back a second time."

"You talk to her about it?" I lifted a stack of collection notices mailed to her old address in Newton, a Polaroid of her and David Wetterau.

"She denied it. Then she offered to blow me for fifty bucks." He rolled his shoulders, glanced down at the frames on the floor. "I should have kicked her out, but, man, she seemed kicked enough."

I found returned mail-all bills, all stamped with red lettering: RETURNED DUE TO LACK OF POSTAGE RETURNED DUE TO LACK OF POSTAGE. I put it aside, removed two T-shirts, a pair of shorts, some white panties and socks, a stopped watch.

"You said most guys never came back. What about the ones who did?"

"There were just two of 'em. One I saw a lot-little redheaded snot about my age. He paid for the room."

"Cash?"

"Yup."

"The other guy?"

"Better-looking. Blond, maybe thirty-five. Would come by at night."

Underneath the clothes, I found a white cardboard box about six inches tall. I removed the pink ribbon on top and opened it.

Warren, looking over my shoulder, said, "s.h.i.t, huh? Holly didn't tell me about those."

Wedding invitations. Maybe two hundred, written in calligraphy on pale pink linen: DR. AND MRS. CHRISTOPHER DAWE REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR THE WEDDING OF THEIR DAUGHTER, MISS KAREN ANN NICHOLS, TO MR. DAVID WETTERAU ON SEPTEMBER DR. AND MRS. CHRISTOPHER DAWE REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR THE WEDDING OF THEIR DAUGHTER, MISS KAREN ANN NICHOLS, TO MR. DAVID WETTERAU ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1999. 10, 1999.

"Next month," I said.

"s.h.i.t," Warren said again. "Little early to have had 'em, don't you think? She'd have had to order them eight, nine months before the wedding."

"My sister ordered them eleven months in advance. She's an Emily Post kind of girl." I shrugged. "So was Karen when I met her."

"No s.h.i.t?"

"No s.h.i.t, Warren."

I placed the invitations back in their box and tied the ribbon neatly back on top. Six or seven months ago, she'd sat at a table, smelling the linen, probably, running her finger over the lettering. Happy.

Underneath a crossword puzzle book, I found another set of photos. These were unframed, in a plain white envelope bearing a Boston postmark, dated May 15 of this year. There was no return address. The envelope had been mailed to Karen's Newton apartment. More photos of David Wetterau. Except the woman in the photos with him wasn't Karen Nichols. She was brunette, dressed all in black, a model's thin frame, an air of aloofness behind her black sungla.s.ses. In the photos, she and David Wetterau sat at an outdoor cafe. They held hands in one. Kissed in another.

Warren looked at them as I shuffled through them. "Ah, that's not good."

I shook my head. The trees surrounding the cafe were stripped. I put the liaison at sometime in February, during our balmy nonwinter, not long after Bubba and I had visited Cody Falk, and right before David Wetterau got his skull crushed.

"You think she took them?" Warren asked.

"No. These shots were done by a pro-telephoto lens shot from a roof, perfect framing of the subjects." I leafed through them slowly so he could see what I meant. "Zoom close-ups of their hands entwined."

"So you think someone was hired to take those."

"Yeah."

"Someone like you?"

I nodded. "Someone like me, Warren."

Warren looked at the photos in my hand again. "But he's not really really doing anything wrong with this girl." doing anything wrong with this girl."

"True," I said. "But, Warren, if you received photos like these of Holly and a strange guy, how would you feel?"

His face darkened and he didn't speak for a few moments. "Yeah," he admitted eventually, "you got a point."

"The question is why why someone would give these photos to Karen." someone would give these photos to Karen."

"To screw with her head, you think?"

I shrugged. "That's definitely a possibility."

The box was almost empty. I found her pa.s.sport and birth certificate next, and then a prescription bottle of Prozac. I barely glanced at it. Prozac seemed the very least she would have been ent.i.tled to after David's accident, but then I noticed the date of the prescription: 10/23/98. She'd been taking an antidepressant long before I met her.

I held the bottle in my palm, read the prescribing doctor's name: D. Bourne.

"Mind if I take this?"

Warren shook his head. "Be my guest."

I pocketed the vial. All that was left in the box was a sheet of white paper. I turned it over and lifted it out of the box.

It was a page of session notes bearing Dr. Diane Bourne's letterhead and dated April 6, 1994. The subject was Karen Nichols, and it read in part:

...Client's repressive nature is extremely prominent. She seems to live in a constant state of denial-denial of the effects of her father's death, denial of her tortured relationship with both mother and stepfather, denial of her own s.e.xual inclinations which in this therapist's opinion are bis.e.xual and bear incestuous overtones. Client follows cla.s.sic pa.s.sive-aggressive behavioral patterns and is wholly unaccepting of any attempts to gain self-awareness. Client has dangerously low self-esteem, confused s.e.xual ident.i.ty, and in this therapist's opinion, a potentially lethal fantasy version of how the world works. If further sessions do not yield progress, may suggest voluntary committal to a qualified psychiatric hospital...