The Stranger You Seek

28





Katherine Chambers had entered midlife plump and silver-haired. They had not wanted children, she told me, but at thirty-seven she became pregnant and everything changed.

“It’s not that I don’t consider myself a feminist, I do,” she said with no accent whatsoever. I couldn’t have guessed what part of the country she’d come from. She filled cups with flavored coffee from a glass coffee press. The scent of vanilla and hazelnut wafted through the room. We pulled out chairs at a round pine table. I could see the water beyond her kitchen window and the sand, golden brown and packed against the earth from last night’s rain.

“It’s just that I have this question about when life begins.” Katherine said it casually, as if we were discussing last evening’s storm. “No one seems to know. Not the scientists or the theologians. That put abortion way out of the realm of possibility for me.” She took a sip of coffee; a rueful smile played on her lips as she returned her mug to the table. “We thought about adoption, but as time went by Martin and I became terribly excited about having a child.… I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but you never expect to outlive your children. It’s something that comes as a complete surprise. Although I don’t suppose you could plan for something like that anyway.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t suppose you could.”

She fell silent, looked out the window at the row of live oaks.

The ocean was full today, rolling dark green and acting up a little. Hurricane season wasn’t over yet. So far this year the winds had all moved too far out to sea to make the Georgia coast. But there were reports of one not far off. Edward had formed near Jamaica, pummeled Cuba, ripped through the Keys, then moved back out to sea, where he was now patiently churning, regaining strength for another run at the coast. Watches were posted from West Palm to Jacksonville, Jekyll, St. Simons, Savannah, Hilton Head, Charleston, and the Outer Banks. I wondered how this would affect my departure on the little two-lane strip that winds around the island. I could hear Rauser saying, “It’s not all about you, Keye.” But I knew the truth. Of course it was.

“Is it true that the person who killed my daughter is responsible for all these other murders?” Mrs. Chambers asked.

“The evidence points to that, yes.”

“I read those awful letters to the police in the paper. They were very difficult to read.”

“I can’t imagine what that would feel like,” I told her. “I’m so sorry.”

Her eyes touched the ocean again, then came back to mine. “How can I help you, Miss Street?”

She led me into her living room. There was an oil painting over the fireplace, Jekyll Island’s lighthouse rising up above city skyscrapers, and below it, shadowy, gray-flanneled figures with briefcases, bent against the winter wind, heads down. Yellow cabs lined narrow streets.

“We moved here from Manhattan when Anne was sixteen,” Katherine Chambers explained. “I think she missed the city very much. She painted this then.”

“Talented,” I said as if I had a clue.

Two boxes sat in front of a coffee table, Anne’s possessions from her college dorm, Mrs. Chambers told me. I looked through everything as delicately as possible. She sat watching me, her face a little pale.

“May I borrow the yearbooks and the journal? I have yearbooks from the university but I’d like to see Anne’s.”

“Because they have messages inside from classmates and friends.” It wasn’t a question. “You think it was someone she knew.”

“Is that what you think?”

Katherine shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know. Anne was so secretive about her private life. Tallahassee might have been three thousand miles away for all we knew about our daughter’s life there.”

Secretive was the word her roommates had used too.

“So you don’t know if she was seeing anyone at school?”

“There were times when she didn’t call for a while. I told Martin that I thought she was having some sort of romance. You know how it is when you’re young and exploring. You don’t think you need anyone else when you’re involved. I had the feeling she was going from one relationship to another very quickly.”

I slid a picture of Charlie Ramsey across the table. “Have you ever seen this man?”

“No.”

“How about friends here on the island? Anyone who would have kept in touch with her while she was at school?”

“She was only here for one year and she wasn’t very happy. Anne couldn’t seem to connect with the kids here. There was Old Emma, though. My daughter seemed fascinated with her, but then half the island finds Emma fascinating. Anne walked down there in the mornings sometimes with breakfast for her and a thermos full of coffee. Barefoot.” She hesitated. Her smile flickered. “After dinner, she always gathered the leftovers and put them in the refrigerator until morning for Emma’s cats. Now we do it.”

“So Emma still lives here?”

“Oh yes. I think she’s been here her whole life, her and about a hundred and fifty cats. The road washed out some time ago, though. You’ll have to walk if you want to see her.” She handed Charlie’s photo back to me. “You’re not anything like they made you out to be on television. I’m sorry to bring that up, but I recognized you. We get all the Atlanta stations down here, you know.”

“Thank you for saying that. It’s not who I am now, but I was a functioning addict for years.”

“I’ve been sober since we found out I was pregnant with Anne. Thirty-five years. That pregnancy was a blessing to us in so many ways.”

I nodded and smiled. “Thank you, Mrs. Chambers. I’ll make sure Anne’s things get back to you safely.… I’m sorry about Anne. I’m sorry to come here and stir all this up again. If there’s ever anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call.” I handed her my card. She took it, and then, to my surprise, her fingers closed painfully around mine.

“Find this monster,” she urged me. “That’s what you can do for me, Miss Street.”

I followed the beach a quarter mile until it narrowed at a cluster of moss-draped oaks and a sandy path strewn with driftwood. As I walked, I imagined sixteen-year-old Anne Chambers coming here in the mornings, bare feet sinking into the sand, a foil-wrapped breakfast and a coffee thermos in her hands.

Emma knew I was there before I realized she was watching me. I was fascinated by her home—part folk art gallery, part salvage yard. Sinks and car seats, bumpers, bicycles, old windows, doors, high chairs—anything you can think of that might have once been abandoned—were piled, hung, or welded into elaborate sculptures in Emma’s little patch of sandy front yard.

It was beautiful … and hideous, and must have taken thirty years to collect and construct. From every cool, flat surface, languid cats lounged and stretched and watched me steadily with cautious feral eyes. The air was warm and sticky and the mosquitoes clearly had not been given their breakfast. The house was decades past due for a paint job. Salt air and time had stripped it down to raw wood. When I reached out to knock on the screen door, something moved just on the other side.

“What you wont?” She slurred a little—a backwoods Ozzy Osbourne. She had startled me, but I tried hard not to show it.

“I only see about twenty cats,” I said, and smiled. “I heard you had at least a hundred and fifty.”

A stained backwater grin glimmered faintly through the screen. “You comin’ for a readin’ or you wanna stand out there countin’ cats?”

“Oh, so you’re a psychic?”

The screen door was pushed open. Emma, I noticed at once, looked something like the bad witch after she’d started to melt. She was perhaps five feet tall, but you got the feeling she hadn’t started out that small. She gave me the once-over, pale eyes sharp and narrow and opportunistic, sized me up for what I was worth, from my shoes to my earrings and the watch on my wrist. She was curious about how much she could get out of me. I knew the look. I’d seen it in the city on people who live by their wits on the street. She sighed, disappointed, and stepped back inside. The screen slammed behind her.

I stood there on the other side for a few moments, unsure of what to do, then raised my voice a little. “Excuse me?”

“Come on,” she said. It sounded like Cah-moan.

I found her sitting at a round table covered by a heavy red tablecloth with gold piping and tassels. She had a deck of tarot cards in front of her. The inside of the house was as crowded as the yard and not as clean. Emma was obviously a trash picker from way back.

“Mix these up for me.”

I took the cards and shuffled them a little. “Actually, I just came to ask you some questions about Anne Chambers.”

“You don’t want no readin’, I won’t give you one. Fifteen dollars either way.”

“Her mother said Anne used to come here.”

Emma was silent.

“The girl who used to live down the beach,” I pressed on.

“I know who,” she grouched.

I set the cards across the table in front of her and withdrew my arm before she took a bite of it. I wasn’t sure Emma had had her breakfast either.

“Did Anne keep in touch with you after she left for college?”

No answer.

“Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”

She put the cards out and studied them for a long while. Somewhere in the back of my head the music to Jeopardy! began to play.

“I saw it. I saw it coming,” Old Emma said finally. “I warned her when she came for a visit that she was in danger. She didn’t believe me, said she was happy. Said they was in love.” She said it with a pinched smile, clasped her gnarled hands in front of her heart, and twisted her upper body back and forth as if she were hugging something mockingly. She drew it out too, the word love, so it sounded like la-ooove.

“So you’re saying it was serious?”

“I suppose you could call getting kilt pretty serious, don’t you?” She laughed. It was a wet, crackly laugh, and I was pretty sure she was now openly making fun of me. Her face split into a mass of deep sun wrinkles.

“Her mother didn’t mention it,” I said.

“Nuh-uh. She wouldn’t.”

I waited, but it didn’t appear more was forthcoming, so I stood and dug around in the pocket of my jeans until I found a twenty. “Do you know the name of the person Anne was seeing? She show you a picture of him or anything?”

“Nuh-uh,” Emma said. “But you been real close lately too.” Her voice was gravel.

“Close to what?”

Her eyes narrowed again. “Same one got Anne.”

A gypsy’s cackle tumbled out of her and turned into a cough so deep and damp it startled me. I dropped the twenty on the table and headed for the door. It was half off its hinges like everything else I’d seen of Emma’s world. I looked back at the filthy ashtray, the tarot cards on the table in front of her, the long curtain she used as a backdrop, the cheap claret rug. She was looking right at me when my eyes reached her sun-worn face.

“You eat p-ssy too?” she asked, and the dry lips split into a stained smile.

Eeewww! Okay, Emma’s crazy. I slipped through the screen door, went back outside where there was air and yard art and junk and cats. I was trembling, I realized, and annoyed that I’d let the half-packed old duffel bag get to me.

Emma pushed the door open behind me, flicked a cigarette into the sand, where it lay smoldering. Smoke, heavy in the wet air, burned my sinuses. She held up a card. It was the Hanged Man reversed.

“Your Mr. Fancy Pants, he don’t love you. He can’t love nobody but himself. But the po-lice man do. He love you,” she said, and having given me my twenty dollars’ worth, disappeared behind the screen.