“Next month,” I said.
“Shit,” 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 shit?”
“No shit, 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 sunglasses. In the photos, she and David Wetterau sat at an outdoor café. 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 café 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 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 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 passport 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 entitled 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 sexual inclinations which in this therapist’s opinion are bisexual and bear incestuous overtones. Client follows classic passive-aggressive behavioral patterns and is wholly unaccepting of any attempts to gain self-awareness. Client has dangerously low self-esteem, confused sexual identity, 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…
D. Bourne
“What’s that?” Warren wanted to know.
“It’s the session notes of Karen’s psychiatrist.”
“Well, what the hell was she doing with it?”
I glanced down at his confused face. “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”
With Warren ’s blessing, I kept the session notes and pictures of David Wetterau with the other woman, then I gathered the other photos, the clothes, the broken watch and passport and wedding invitations, and placed them back into the box. I looked in at what served as evidence of Karen Nichols’s existence, and I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger and closed my eyes for a second.
“People can be tiring, can’t they?” Warren said.
“Yeah, they can.” I stood and walked to the door.
“Man, you must be tired all the time.”
As he locked the barn back up outside, I said, “These two guys you said were around Karen.”
“Yeah.”
“Were they together?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”
“Anything else you can tell me about them?”
“The redheaded guy, like I said, was a snot. A weasel. Kinda guy thinks he’s smarter’n everyone else. He peeled off a stack of hundreds when he checked her in like they were ones. You know? Karen’s all sagging into him, and he’s looking at her like she’s meat, winking at me and Holly. A real piece of shit.”
“Height, weight, that sort of stuff?”
“I’d say he was about five-ten, maybe five-nine. Freckles all over his face, dweeby haircut. Weighed maybe one-fifty, one-sixty. Dressed artsy-silk shirts, black jeans, shiny Docs on his feet.”
“And the other guy?”
“Slick. Drove a black ’68 Shelby Mustang GT-500 convertible. Like, what, four hundred of them produced?”
“Around there, yeah.”
“Dressed rich-boy shabby-jeans with little rips in ’em, V-neck sweaters over white T-shirts. Two-hundred-dollar shades. Never came in the office, never heard him speak, but I got the feeling he was in charge.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Something about him. The geek and Karen always walked behind him, moved real fast when he spoke. I dunno. I maybe saw the guy five times, always from a distance, and he made me feel nervous, somehow. Like I wasn’t worthy to look upon him or something.”
He wheeled his way back through the black fields, and I followed. The day grew deader and more humid around us. Instead of pointing toward the ramp at the back of the office, he led me to a picnic table, its surface covered in small splinters peeking up out of the wood like hair. Warren stopped by the table, and I sat up on top, pretty sure my jeans would protect me from the splinters.