This emergence of “talent” embarrassed him. To obscure his interest in the human figure in extremis, he learned to make other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other.
It would turn out that he disliked medical school. The dissecting room had revulsed him, not aroused him. He’d nearly fainted in his first, pathology lab. He hated the fanatic competition of medical school, the almost military hegemony of rank. He would quit before he flunked out. Forensic science was as close as he would get to the human body, but here, as he told interviewers, his task was reassembling, not dissecting.
The skull was nearly completed. Beautifully shaped, it seemed to Kyle, like a Grecian bust. The empty eye sockets and nose cavity another observer would think ugly, Kyle saw filled in, for the girl had revealed herself to him. The dream had been fleeting yet remained with him, far more vivid in his mind’s eye than anything he’d experienced in his own recent life.
Was she living, and where?
His lost daughter. His mind drifted from the skull and on to her, who was purely abstract to him, not even a name.
He’d seen her only twice, as an infant, and each time briefly. At the time, her mother, manipulative, emotionally unstable, hadn’t yet named her; or, if she had, for some reason she hadn’t wanted Kyle to know.
“She doesn’t need a name just yet. She’s mine.”
Kyle had been deceived by this woman, who’d called herself “Letitia,” an invented name probably, a stripper’s fantasy name, though possibly it was genuine. Letitia had sought out Kyle Cassity at the college, where he’d been a highly visible faculty member, thirty-nine years old. Her pretext for coming into his office was to seek advice about a career in psychiatric social work. She’d claimed to be enrolled in the night division of the college, which turned out to be untrue. She’d claimed to be a wife estranged from a husband who was “threatening” her, which had possibly been true.
Kyle had been flattered by the young woman’s attention. Her obvious attraction to him. In time, he’d given her money. Always cash, never a check. And he never wrote to her: although she left passionate love notes for him beneath his office door, beneath the windshield wiper of his car, he never reciprocated. As one familiar with the law, he knew: never commit yourself in handwriting! As, in more recent years, Kyle Cassity would never send any e-mail message he wouldn’t have wanted to see exposed to all the world.
He hadn’t fully trusted Letitia, but he’d been sexually aroused by her, he liked being in her company. She was a dozen years younger than he, reckless, unreliable. Not pretty, but very sexual, seductive. After she vanished from his life he would suppose, sure, she’d been seeing other men all along, taking money from other men. Yet he accepted the pregnancy as his responsibility. She’d told him the baby would be his, and he hadn’t disbelieved her. He had no wish to dissociate himself from Letitia at this difficult time in her life, though his own children were twelve, nine, and five years old. And Vivian loved him, and presumably trusted him, and would have been deeply wounded if she’d known of his affair.
Though possibly Vivian had known. Known something. There was the evidence of Kyle’s infrequent lovemaking with her, a fumbling in silence.
But in December 1976, Letitia and the infant girl abruptly left Wayne, New Jersey. Even before the birth Letitia had been drifting out of her married lover’s life. He’d had to assume that she had found another man who meant more to her. He had to assume that his daughter would never have been told who her true father was. Twenty-eight years later, if she were still alive, Letitia probably wouldn’t have remembered Kyle Cassity’s name.
“Now: tell us your name, dear.”
After a week and a day of painstaking work, the skull was complete. All the bone fragments had been used, and Kyle had made synthetic pieces to hold the skull together. Excited now, he made a mold of the skull and on this mold he began to sculpt a face in clay. Rapidly his fingers worked as if remembering. In this phase of the reconstruction he played new CDs to celebrate: several Bach cantatas, Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth symphonies, Maria Callas as Tosca.
Early in October the victim was identified: her name was Sabrina Jackson, a part-time community college student studying computer technology and working as a cocktail waitress in Easton, Pennsylvania. The young woman had been reported missing by her family in mid-May. At the time of her disappearance she’d been twenty-three, weighed 115 pounds, photographs of her bore an uncanny resemblance to the sketches Kyle Cassity and his assistant had made. In March she’d broken up with a man with whom she’d been living for several years, and she’d told friends she was quitting school and quitting work and “beginning a new life” with a new male friend who had a “major position” at one of the Atlantic City casinos. She’d packed suitcases, shut up her apartment, left a message on her voice mail that was teasingly enigmatic: “Hi there! This is Sabrina. I sure am sorry to be missing your call but I am OUT OF TOWN TILL FURTHER NOTICE. Can’t say when I will be returning calls but I WILL TRY”
No one had heard from Sabrina Jackson since. No one in Atlantic City recalled having seen her, and nothing had come of detectives questioning casino employees. Nor did anyone in Easton seem to know the identity of the man with whom she’d gone away. Sabrina Jackson had disappeared in similar ways more than once in the past, in the company of men, and so her family and friends had been hesitant at first to report her missing. Always there was the expectation that Sabrina would turn up. But the sketches of the Toms River victim bore an unmistakable resemblance to Sabrina Jackson, and the silver earrings found with the remains were identified as hers.
“Sabrina.”
It was a beautiful name. But Sabrina Jackson wasn’t a beautiful young woman.
Kyle stared at photographs of the missing woman, whose blemished skin was a shock. Nor was her skin pale, as he’d imagined, but rather dark, and oily. Her eyebrows weren’t delicately arched, as he’d drawn them, but heavily penciled in, as the outline of her fleshy mouth had been exaggerated by lipstick. Still, there was the narrow forehead, a snub nose, the small, receding chin. The shoulder-length hair, wavy, burnished brown, as Kyle had depicted it. When you looked from the sketches drawn in colored pencil to the actual woman in the photographs, you were tempted to think that one was a younger, sentimentally idealized version of the other, or that the two girls were sisters, one very pretty and feminine and the other somewhat coarse, sensuous.
Strange, it seemed to him, difficult to realize: the skull he’d reconstructed was the skull of this woman, Sabrina Jackson, and not the skull of the girl he’d sketched. Always, Sabrina Jackson had been the victim. Kyle Cassity was being congratulated for his excellent work, but he felt as if a trick had been played on him.
He contemplated for long minutes the girl in the photographs who smiled, preened, squinted into the camera as if for his benefit. The bravado of not knowing how we must die, how our most capricious poses outlive us. The heavy makeup on Sabrina Jackson’s blemished face made her look older than twenty-three. She wore cheap, tight, sexy clothes, tank tops and V-neck blouses, leather miniskirts, leather trousers, high-heeled boots. She was a smoker. She did appear to have a sense of humor: Kyle liked that in her. Mugging for the camera. Pursing her lips in a kiss. The type who wouldn’t ask a man for money directly, but if you offered it she certainly wouldn’t turn it down. A small pleased smile would transform her face as if this were the highest of compliments. A murmured “Thanks!” And the bills quickly wadded and slipped into her pocket and no more need be said of the transaction.