The reporter’s voiceover. Mayhew at the podium. The Kilpatricks entering the room.
Neither Claire nor Lydia could stop watching. They were both transfixed by Eleanor Kilpatrick’s outburst, the way she traced an X on her belly when she said her daughter had been branded.
Claire paused the video. Eleanor Kilpatrick froze on the screen. Her mouth gaped open. She had her right hand pressed to the left side of her belly, slightly off-center, just below her ribs.
Lydia said, “Her breasts were mutilated.”
“I know.”
“Her stomach was branded with an X.”
“I know.”
Exactly like the second girl in Paul’s movies.
The one who looked like Anna Kilpatrick.
IV
Do you remember that article you wrote for the school newspaper when Timothy McCorquodale was executed? He was sentenced to death in the 1970s for murdering a white girl he’d seen talking to a black man in a Midtown Atlanta bar. You were hard pressed to understand why a white girl talking to a black man engendered so much rage. I was both proud and hopeful that you didn’t understand this insipient sort of racism. Your mother and I grew up during the last gasps of Jim Crow. We marched for equal rights, but that was easy to do when all of our friends and fellow students were marching right alongside us.
I remember talking to your mother about your article, in which you editorialized that while McCorquodale deserved to be punished, society did not have the right to put him to death. We were so proud of you for believing the things that we believed. We, too, shared your outrage at the thought of a man being electrocuted for kidnapping, raping, torturing, and eventually murdering a seventeen-year-old girl.
I was thinking about your article this morning when I drove to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. You might recall from your research on your story that this is the location of Georgia’s death row. I’m not sure why your article came into my mind as I drove through the front gate, and while I am still proud of you, I have understandably changed my mind about the death penalty. The only reservation I have now is that I feel the parents should be given the option of flipping the switch.
A few years after you disappeared, a postal worker named Ben Carver was sentenced to death for murdering six young men. (He is a homosexual, which, according to Huckleberry, means he is not attracted to murdering young women.) Rumors have it that Carver cannibalized some of his victims, but there was never a trial so the more salacious details were not made public. I found Carver’s name in the sheriff’s file ten months ago, the fifth anniversary of your disappearance. The letter was written on Georgia Department of Corrections stationery and signed by the warden. He was informing the sheriff that Ben Carver, a death-row inmate, had mentioned to one of the prison guards that he might have some information pertaining to your disappearance.
Huckleberry made a note that he followed up on the lead, but Carver told me himself that the sheriff never paid him a visit. Of course, I visited Ben Carver. In fact, I have been to the prison a total of forty-eight times in the last ten months. I would visit him more, but death-row inmates are only allowed visits once a week.
Sweetheart, I am sorry I haven’t told you about the visits until now, but please keep reading and maybe you will understand why.
On visiting day, Ben Carver and I sit across from each other like fish in a tank separated by a wire mesh between us. There are tiny holes in the mesh. The visiting room is loud. There are roughly eighty men on death row and for many of them, their only contact with the outside world is their mothers. You can imagine that much emotion is on display. Ben Carver’s mother is too elderly to visit him anymore, so it’s just me he sees. I have to bend down and put my lips close to the metal, even though I can see the black grime from where thousands of mouths have been before mine.
AIDS, I think. Hepatitis B. Herpes. Influenza. Mononucleosis.
And still I put my mouth to the screen.
Carver is a charming man with a soft voice. He is courteous and attentive, which I wonder about, because is this his natural disposition, or has he read too many novels about Hannibal Lecter?
Regardless, he always expresses great concern for my well-being. “You look tired today,” he’ll say, or, “Are you eating enough?” or, “You might want to talk to your barber about your hair.”
I know he flirts with me because he is lonely, just as I flirt back because I want to know what he knows.
So, we talk about everything but you.
He has almost perfect recall for movie dialogue. Casablanca. Gone with the Wind. Midnight Cowboy. Monty Python. Then there are the books he’s read—most of the classics, Anne Rivers Siddons for the Atlanta connection, Barbara Cartland for romance, Neil Gaiman for fantasy. I have had more conversations about The Celestine Prophecy than I care to mention.
I do not tell your mother about these conversations, and not just because she thinks The Bridges of Madison County is sentimental tripe. She has held firm to her refusal to hear about what I call my extracurricular activities and what she calls my fruitless quest. Absent this subject, there is very little for us to talk about anymore. We can only rehash for so long old memories of agonizing camping trips and Tooth Fairy adventures and heated parent–teacher conferences. Your sisters have started their own lives. They have found their own friends, started to build their own families outside of us. Your mother has my (inferior) replacement and I have? …
Can I admit to you that I am lonely? That every morning I wake up to a sparse, empty bedroom and stare up at a yellow popcorn ceiling and wonder if it’s worth it to get out of bed? That I can’t bear the thought of seeing my toothbrush standing alone without your mother’s? That I have two plates, two spoons, two forks, and two knives not because I need that many but because I could only find them in pairs? That I have lost my job? That I have finally lost your mother? That I have stopped asking your sisters to visit because every conversation feels like I am dragging them down underneath the ocean?
So maybe you can understand why discussing movies and literature with a convicted serial killer became such an important part of my life. Here is a reason to bathe. Here is a reason to put on shoes. Here is a reason to leave the house, drive the car, go somewhere else other than my one-bedroom apartment that feels as much like a prison cell as anything you could find at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.
I know Ben is stringing me along, just like I know that I am letting myself be strung. It baffles me that the only times lately that I don’t think about you are the times I am debating Joyce with a likely cannibal. Isn’t the point of my visits to find out what Carver knows? To track down whatever rumor he has heard so that I can finally know what happened to you?
But I have this nagging feeling that he knows nothing about you.
And I have an even deeper nagging feeling that I do not care.
So this is what I do: I tell myself I am studying him. Is this the sort of man who took you? Was your abductor as kind to you in the beginning as Ben Carver is kind to me? Did he take you because he wanted you all to himself? Or did he take you because he wanted to hurt you?
Then I ask myself what would happen if that grimy metal mesh were taken away. What would a man like Ben Carver do to me if there were no guards posted, no barrier between us? Would he explicate Spenser’s Faerie Queene or would he cut me open and sample a sliver of my pancreas?