Her name was Caroline Carr, or that was what she said her name was. They had responded to an attempted B and E call at her apartment. It was the smallest apartment they had ever seen, barely large enough to contain a single bed, a closet, and a table and chair. The kitchen area consisted of two gas rings in one corner, and the bathroom was so tiny that it didn’t even have a door, just lengths of beaded string for privacy. It was hard to see why anyone might have considered it worth breaking into. One look around told them that the girl didn’t have anything worth stealing. If she had, she would have sold it to rent a bigger place.
But, in a strange way, the space suited her. She was tiny, just a shade over five feet tall, and thin with it. Her hair was long and dark and very fine, and her skin was translucently pale. It seemed to Jimmy that she might expire at any minute, but when he looked in her eyes he saw a real strength and ferocity at her core. She might have appeared fragile, but so did spider silk until you tried to break it.
She was frightened, though, of that he was certain. At the time, he put it down to the attempted burglary. Someone had clearly tried to jimmy the lock on the window from the fire escape outside. She had woken to the noise, and had immediately run to the phone in the hallway outside to call the cops. One of her neighbors, an elderly woman named Mrs. Roth, had heard her screaming and offered her safe haven in her apartment until the police came. As it happened, Jimmy and Will had been only a block away when the call from Central came through. Whoever had tried to break in was probably still at the window when the sirens began to sound. They filled out a 61, but there wasn’t much more that they could do. The perps were gone, and no harm had been done. Will suggested talking to the landlord about getting a better lock for the window, or maybe a security grille of some kind, but Carr just shook her head.
“I won’t be staying here,” she said. “I’m going to leave.”
“It’s the big city,” said Will. “These things happen.”
“I understand. I have to move, though.”
Her fear was palpable, but it didn’t seem to be controlling her. It wasn’t unreasoning, and it wasn’t merely an overreaction to a disturbing, if commonplace, incident. Whatever was frightening her, it was related only in part to the events of that night.
“Your father must have felt it too,” said Jimmy. “He was quiet as we drove away. We stopped to pick up a couple of coffees, and as we sat drinking them, he said: ‘What do you suppose that was about?’
“‘It’s going down as a 10-31. That’s all there is to it.’
“‘But that woman was scared.’
“‘She lives alone in a shoebox. Someone tries to break in, she hasn’t got too many places to run.’
“‘No, it’s more than that. She didn’t tell us everything.’
“‘What are you now, psychic?’ R a?’
“Then he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He just stared me down.
“‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I felt it too. You want to go back?’
“‘No, not now. Maybe later.’
“But we never did go back. At least, I didn’t. Your father did, though. He went back. He might even have gone back that night, after the tour ended.
“And that was how it began.”
Will told Jimmy that he didn’t sleep with Caroline until the third time they met. He claimed that it had never been his intention to get involved with her in that way, but there was something about her, something that made him want to help her and protect her. Jimmy didn’t know whether to believe him or not, and he didn’t suppose it mattered much one way or another. There had always been a sentimental streak to Will Parker and, as Jimmy liked to say, quoting Oscar Wilde, “sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism.” Will was having problems at home and he was still troubled by the death of Melanie Huntingdon, so maybe he saw the possibility of some kind of escape in the form of Caroline Carr. He helped her to move. He found her a place on the Upper East Side, with more space and better security. He put her in a motel for two nights while he negotiated the rent down on her behalf, then drove into the city one morning instead of taking the train and put all of her belongings, which didn’t amount to much, in the back of his car and took her to her new apartment. The affair didn’t last longer than six or seven weeks.
During that time, she became pregnant.
I waited. I had finished my wine, but when Jimmy tried to refill my glass I covered it with my hand. I felt light-headed, but it was nothing to do with the wine.
“Pregnant?” I said.
“That’s right.” He lifted the wine bottle. “You mind if I do? It makes all this easier. I’ve been waiting a long time to get rid of it.”
He filled the glass halfway.
“She had something, that Caroline Carr,” said Jimmy. “Even I could see that.”
“Even you?” Despite myself, I smiled.
“She wasn’t to my taste,” he said, smiling back. “I hope I don’t need to say any more than that.”
I nodded.
“That wasn’t all of it, though. Your father was a good-looking man. There were a lot of women out there who’d have been happy to ease him of some of his burdens, no strings attached. He wouldn’t have been obliged to buy them more than a drink. Instead, here he was finding a place for this woman and lying to his wife about where he was going so that he could help her move.”
“You think he was infatuated with her?”
“That’s what I believed at the start. She was younger than he was, though not by much and, like I said, she had a certain allure. I think it R a. I think was tied up with her size, and the impression of fragility that she gave, even if it was deceptive. So, yeah, sure, I thought it was an infatuation, and maybe it was, at the start. But later, Will told me the rest of it, or as much of it as he wanted to tell me. That was when I started to understand, and that’s when I started to worry.”
His brow furrowed, and I could tell that, even now, decades later, he struggled with this part of the story.
“We were in Cal’s on the night Will told me that Caroline Carr was convinced she was being hunted. I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t. Then I started to wonder if the girl had spun him some kind of line of bullshit. You know, damsel in distress, bad men on the horizon: shitty boyfriend, maybe, or psycho ex-husband.
“But that wasn’t it. She was convinced that whoever, whatever, was hunting her wasn’t human. She talked about two people, a man and a woman. She told your father that they’d started hunting her years before. She’d been running from them ever since.”
“And my father believed her?”
Jimmy laughed. “Are you kidding me? He might have been a sentimentalist, but he wasn’t a fool. He thought she was a wacko. He figured he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He had visions of her stalking him, arriving at his house decked out in garlic and crucifixes. Your old man might have gone off the rails a little, but he was still capable of driving the train. So, no, he didn’t believe her, and I think he started trying to disentangle himself from the whole mess. I guess he also realized that he ought to be with his wife, that leaving her wouldn’t solve any of his problems but would just give him a whole new set of them to deal with.
“Then Caroline told him she was pregnant, and his world collapsed around him. They had a long talk on the evening of her visit to the clinic to get checked out. She never even mentioned abortion, and your father, to his credit, never raised it either. It wasn’t just because he was Catholic. I think he still recalled that little girl buried under the pile of coats, and his wife’s miscarriages. Even if it meant the end of his marriage, and a life of debt, he wasn’t going to suggest that the pregnancy should be terminated. And Caroline, you know, she was really calm about the whole thing. Not happy, exactly, but calm, as if the pregnancy was a minor medical procedure or something, a thing that was worrying but necessary.
“Your father, well, he was kind of shocked. He needed some air, so he left her and went to take a walk. He decided, after thirty minutes of his own company, that he wanted to talk to someone, so he stopped at a pay phone across from her apartment and started to call me.
“And that was when he saw them.”