I stood and walked to the window. The snowfall made the grounds look less forbidding, the trees less bare, but it was all an illusion. Things are what they are, and changes in nature can only hide their true essence for a time. And I thought of Caleb, moving into the comforting darkness of the forest as he raged at the death of his unborn child, betrayed by the too-thin, too-weak body of the woman he had protected and then inseminated. He took at least three after her in rapid succession, fueling his fury until it was spent, then hung them with his earlier victims like trimmings on a tree to be found by a man who was not like him, a man who was so far removed from him that he felt the deaths of each of these young women as a personal loss. For Caleb's was a world in which things mutated into their opposites: creation into destruction, love into hate, life into death.
Five deaths, but six girls missing; one remained unaccounted for. In my grandfather's file, her name had been marked on a sheaf of pages, upon which her movements on the day she disappeared had been minutely reconstructed. A picture of her was stapled to the corner of the bundle: plump, homely Judith Mundy, a hardness to her passed down by generations of people who had worked thin, unforgiving soil to create a foothold and scratch a living from this land. Judith Mundy, lost and now forgotten, except by the parents who would always feel her absence like an abyss into which they shouted her name without even an echo in reply.
"Why would this man do such a thing to these girls?" I heard Mrs. Schneider ask, but I had no answer for her. I had stared into the faces of people who had killed with impunity for decades, and still I did not know the reasons for what they did. I felt a pang of regret at the loss of Walter Cole as a colleague. This was what Walter could do: he could look inside himself and, secure in his sense of his own innate rightness, he could create an image of that which was not right, a tiny tumor of viciousness and ill will, like the first cell colonized by a cancer from which he could construct the progress of the entire disease. He was like a mathematician who, when faced with a simple square on a page, plots its progress into other dimensions, other spheres of being beyond the plane of its current existence, while remaining ultimately detached from the problem at hand.
This was his strength and also, I thought, his weakness. Ultimately, he did not look deeply enough because he was afraid of what he might find within himself: his own capacity for evil. He resisted the impulse to understand himself fully that he might understand others better. To understand is to come to terms with one's potential for evil as well as good, and I did not think that Walter Cole wanted to believe himself capable, at whatever level, of doing deeds of great wrong. When I had performed acts that he found morally unacceptable, when I had hunted down those who had done evil and, by doing so, had done evil myself, Walter had cut me adrift, even though he had used me to find those individuals and knew what I would do when I found them. That was why we were no longer friends: I acknowledged my culpability, the deep flaws within myself-the pain, the hurt, the anger, the desire for revenge-and all of these things I took and used. Maybe I killed a little of myself each time I did so; maybe that was the price that had to be paid. But Walter was a good man and, like many good men, his flaw was that he believed himself to be a better one.
Mrs. Schneider spoke again. "It was the mother, I think," she said, softly.
I leaned against the windowpane and waited for her to continue.
"Once, when this man, this 'Caleb,' was drunk, he told Miss Emily of his mother. She was a hard woman, Mr. Parker. The father, he had left them out of fear of her. She beat her boy, beat him with sticks and chains, and she did worse things too. And later, when she was done, she would hurt him. She would drag him by the legs, or the hair, and kick him until he coughed blood. She chained him outside, like a dog, naked, in rain, and snow. All this, he told Miss Emily."
"Did he tell her where all this took place?"
She shook her head. "Maybe south. I don't know. I think…"
I didn't interrupt as her brow furrowed and the fingers of her right hand danced in the air before me.
"Medina," she said at last, her eyes ablaze in triumph. "He said something to Miss Emily about a Medina."
I noted down the name. "And what happened to his mother?"
Mrs. Schneider twisted in her chair to look at me. "He killed her," she said simply.
Behind me, the door opened as a nurse brought in a pot of coffee and two cups, along with a tray of cookies, presumably at the instigation of Dr. Ryley. Mrs. Schneider looked a little surprised, then took on the role of hostess, pouring my coffee, offering sugar, cream. She pressed cookies on me, which I refused, since I figured she might be grateful for them later. I was right. She took one for herself, carefully put the rest in two napkins from the tray and placed them in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. Then, as the snow clouds gathered once again in the skies above and the afternoon grew dark, she told me more about Emily Watts.
"She was not a woman who talked very much, Mr. Parker, only that one time," she said in her carefully pronounced English, which still carried traces of her roots in her w's-"vas," "voman"-and in some of her vowels. "She said 'hello,' or 'good-night,' or spoke of the weather, but no more. She never again talked of the boy. The others here, if you ask them, even if you step into their rooms for a moment, they will talk of their children, their grandchildren, their husbands, their wives." She smiled. "Just as I did to you, Mr. Parker."
I was about to say something, to tell her that I didn't mind, that it was interesting, the least I could do, something half-meant and well intended, when she raised a hand to stop me. "Don't even begin to tell me that you enjoyed it. I am not a young girl who needs to be humored." The smile remained as she said it. There was something in her, some relic of old beauty, that told me that in her youth many men had humored her, and had been glad to do so.
"So she did not talk of such things," she went on. "There were no photographs in her room, no pictures, and since I have been here, since 1992, all she has ever said to me is, 'Hello, Mrs. Schneider,'
'Gutt Morning, Mrs. Schneider,'
'Is a fine day, Mrs. Schneider.' That was all, nothing else, except for that one time, and I think she was ashamed of it later, or perhaps afraid. She had no visitors, and never spoke of it again, until the young man came."
I leaned forward, and she imitated the movement, so that we were only inches apart. "He came some days after I made the call to Mr. Willeford, after I saw his notice in the newspaper. We heard shouting from downstairs and then the sound of running. A young man, a big man, with large, wild eyes, came past my door and burst into Miss Emily's room. Well, I was afraid for her, and for me, but I took my stick-"She pointed to a walking stick with a head carved into the shape of a bird and a metal tip at the end."-and I followed him.
"When I came to the room, Miss Emily was sitting at her window, just as I am now, but her hands were like, ach, like this." Mrs. Schneider put her hands flat on her cheeks and opened her mouth wide in an expression of shock. "And the young man, he looked at her and he said only one word. He said to her: 'Momma?' Like that, like a question. But she only shook her head and said, 'No, no, no,' again and again. The boy, he reached out for her, but already she was moving away from him, back, back, until she was in the corner of her room, down on the floor.