The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Joyce Carol Oates The Skull

From Harper’s Magazine

Contrary to popular belief, the human cranium isn’t a single helmet-shaped bone but eight bones fused together, and the facial mask is fourteen bones fused together, and these, in the victim, had been smashed with a blunt object, smashed, dented, and pierced, as if the unknown killer had wanted not merely to kill his victim but to obliterate her. No hair remained on any skull fragments, for no scalp remained to contain hair, but swaths of sun-bleached brown hair had been found with the skeleton and had been brought to him in a separate plastic bag. Since rotted clothing found at the scene was a female’s clothing, the victim had been identified as female. A woman, or an older adolescent girl.

“A jigsaw puzzle. In three dimensions.” He smiled. Since boyhood he’d been one to love puzzles.

He was not old. Didn’t look old, didn’t behave old, didn’t perceive himself as old. Yet he knew that others, envious of him, wished to perceive him as old, and this infuriated him. He was a stylish dresser. Often he was seen in dark turtleneck sweaters, a wine-colored leather coat that fell below his knees. In warm weather he wore shirts open at the throat, sometimes T-shirts that showed to advantage his well-developed arm and shoulder muscles. When his hair had begun to thin in his mid-fifties he had simply shaved his head, which tended to be olive-hued, veined, with the look of an upright male organ throbbing with vigor, belligerence, good humor. You couldn’t help but notice and react to Kyle Cassity: to label such a man a “senior citizen” was absurd and demeaning.

Now he was sixty-seven, and of that age. He would have had to concede that as a younger man he’d often ignored his elders. He’d taken them for granted, he’d written them off as irrelevant. Of course, Kyle Cassity was a different sort of elder. There was no one quite like him.

A maverick, he thought himself. Unlabelable. Born in 1935 in Harrisburg, Pa., a long-time resident of Wayne, N.J.: unique and irreplaceable.

Among his numerous relatives he’d long been an enigma: generous in times of crisis; otherwise distant, indifferent. True, he’d had something of a reputation as a womanizer until recent years, yet he’d remained married to the same devoted wife for four decades. His three children, when they were living at home, had competed for their father’s attention, but they’d loved him, you might have said they’d worshiped him, though now in adulthood they were closer to their mother. (Outside his marriage, unknown to his family, Kyle had fathered another child, a daughter, whom he’d never known.)

Professionally, Dr. Kyle Cassity was something of a maverick as well. A tenured senior professor on the faculty of William Paterson University in New Jersey, as likely to teach in the adult night division as in the undergraduate daytime school, as likely to teach a sculpting workshop in the art school as a graduate seminar in the School of Health, Education, and Science. His advanced degrees were in anthropology, sociology, and forensic science; he’d had a year of medical school and a year of law school. At Paterson University he’d developed a course entitled “The Sociology of ‘Crime’ in America” that had attracted as many as four hundred students before Professor Cassity, overwhelmed by his own popularity, retired it.

His public reputation in New Jersey was as an expert prosecution witness and a frequent consultant for the New Jersey Department of Forensics. He’d been the subject of numerous media profiles, including a cover story in the Newark Star-Ledger Sunday magazine bearing the eye-catching caption “Sculptor Kyle Cassity fights crime with his fingertips.” He gave away many of his sculptures, to individuals, museums, schools. He gave lectures, for no fee, throughout the state.

As a scientist he had little sentiment. He knew that the individual, within the species, counts for very little; the survival of the species is everything. But as a forensic specialist he focused his attention on individuals: the uniqueness of crime victims and the uniqueness of those who have committed these crimes. Where there was a victim there would be a criminal or criminals. There could be no ambiguity here. As Dr. Kyle Cassity, he worked with the remains of victims. Often these were badly decomposed, mutilated, or broken, seemingly past reconstruction and identification. He was good at his work and had gotten better over the years. He loved a good puzzle. A puzzle no one else could solve except Kyle Cassity. He perceived the shadowy, faceless, as-yet-unnamed perpetrators of crime as human prey whom he was hunting and was licensed to hunt.

This skull! What a mess. Never had Kyle seen bones so broken. How many powerful blows must have been struck to reduce the skull, the face, the living brain, to such broken matter. Kyle tried to imagine: twenty? thirty? fifty? A frenzied killer, you would surmise. Better to imagine madness than that the killer had been coolly methodical, smashing his victim’s skull, face, teeth, to make identification impossible.

No fingertips — no fingerprints — remained, of course. The victim’s exposed flesh had long since rotted from her bones. The body had been dumped sometime in the late spring or early summer in a field above an abandoned gravel pit near Toms River in the southern part of the state, a half-hour drive from Atlantic City. Bones had been scattered by wildlife, but most had been located and reassembled: the victim had been approximately five feet two, with a small frame, a probable weight of 100 or 110 pounds. Judging by the hair, Caucasian.

Here was a grisly detail, not released to the press: not only had the victim’s skull been beaten in, but the state medical examiner had discovered that her arms and legs had been severed from her body by a “bluntly sharp” weapon like an ax.

Kyle shuddered, reading the report. Christ! He hoped the dismemberment had been after, not before, the death.

It seemed strange to him: the manic energy the killer had expended in trying to destroy his victim he might have used to dig a deep grave and cover it with rocks and gravel so that it would never be discovered. For, of course, a dumped body will eventually be discovered.

Yet the killer hadn’t buried this body. Why not?

“Must have wanted it to be found. Must have been proud of what he did.”

What the murderer had broken Dr. Cassity would reconstruct. He had no doubt that he could do it. Pieces of bone would be missing, of course, but he could compensate for this with synthetic materials. Once he had a plausible skull, he could reconstruct a plausible face for it out of clay, and, once he had this, he and a female sketch artist with whom he’d worked in the past would make sketches of the face in colored pencil, from numerous angles, for investigators to work with. Kyle Cassity’s reconstruction would be broadcast throughout the state, printed on flyers and posted on the Internet.

Homicides were rarely solved unless the victim could be identified. Kyle had done a number of successful facial reconstructions in the past, though never working at such a disadvantage. This was a rare case. And yet it was a finite task: the pieces of bone had been given to him; he had only to put them together.

When Kyle began working with the skull in his laboratory at the college, the victim had been dead for approximately four months, through the near-tropical heat of a southern New Jersey summer. In his laboratory, Kyle kept the air-conditioning at 65 degrees Fahrenheit. He played CDs: Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the “Goldberg Variations,” performed by Glenn Gould, most suited him. Music of brilliance and precision, rapid, dazzling as a waterfall, that existed solely in the present moment; music without emotion, and without associations.

The hair! It was fair, sun-bleached brown with shades of red, still showing a distinct ripply wave. Six swaths had been gathered at the crime scene and brought to his laboratory. Kyle placed them on a windowsill, where, when he glanced up from his exceedingly close work with tweezers and bits of bone, he could see them clearly. The longest swath was seven inches. The victim had worn her hair long, to her shoulders. From time to time, Kyle reached out to touch it.

Eight days: it would take longer than Kyle anticipated. For he was working with exasperating slowness, and he was making many more small mistakes than he was accustomed to.

His hands were steady as always. His eyes, strengthened by bifocal lenses, were as reliable as always.

Yet it seemed to be happening that when Kyle was away from the laboratory, his hands began to shake just perceptibly. And once he was away from the unsparing fluorescent lights, his vision wasn’t so sharp.

He would mention this to no one. And no one would notice. No doubt it would go away.

Already by the end of the second day he’d tired of Bach performed by Glenn Gould. The pianist’s humming ceased to be eccentric and became unbearable. The intimacy of another’s thoughts, like a bodily odor, you don’t really want to share. He tried listening to other CDs, piano music, unaccompanied cello, then gave up to work in silence. Except, of course, there was no silence: traffic noises below, airplanes taking off and landing at Newark International Airport, the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears.

Strange: the killer didn’t bury her.

Strange: to hate another human being so much.

Hope to Christ she was dead by the time he began with the ax...

“Now you have a friend, dear. Kyle is your friend.”

The victim had been between eighteen and thirty years old, it was estimated. A size four, petite, they’d estimated her rotted clothing to have been. Size six, a single open-toed shoe found in the gravel pit. She’d had a small rib cage, small pelvis.

No way of determining if she’d ever been pregnant or given birth.

No rings had been found amid the scattered bones. Only just a pair of silver hoop earrings, pierced. The ears of the victim had vanished as if they’d never been; only the earrings remained, dully gleaming.

“Maybe he took your rings. You must have had rings.”

The skull had a narrow forehead and a narrow, slightly receding chin. The cheekbones were high and sharp. This would be helpful in sculpting the face. Distinctive characteristics. She’d had an overbite. Kyle couldn’t know if her nose had been long or short, a pug nose or narrow at the tip. In the sketches they’d experiment with different noses, hairstyles, gradations of eye color.

“Were you pretty? ‘Pretty’ gets you into trouble.”

On the windowsill, the dead girl’s hair lay in lustrous sinuous strands.

Kyle reached out to touch it.

Marriage: a mystery.

For how was it possible that a man with no temperament for a long-term relationship with one individual, no evident talent for domestic life, family, children, can nonetheless remain married, happily it appeared, for more than four decades?

Kyle laughed. “Somehow, it happened.”

He was the father of three children within this marriage, and he’d loved them. Now they were grown — grown somewhat distant — and gone from Wayne, New Jersey. The two eldest were parents themselves.

They, and their mother, knew nothing of their shadowy half sister.

Nor did Kyle. He’d lost touch with the mother twenty-six years ago.

His relationship with his wife, Vivian, had never been very passionate. He’d wanted a wife, not a mistress. He wouldn’t have wished to calculate how long it had been since they’d last made love. Even when they’d been newly married their lovemaking had been awkward, for Vivian had been so inexperienced, sweetly naive and shy — that had seemed part of her appeal. Often they’d made love in the dark. Few words passed between them. If Vivian spoke, Kyle became distracted. Often he’d watched her sleep, not wanting to wake her. Lightly he’d touched her, stroked her unconscious body, and then himself.

Now he was sixty-seven. Not old, he knew that. Yet the last time he’d had sex had been with a woman he’d met at a conference in Pittsburgh the previous April; before that it had been with a woman one third his age, of ambiguous identity, possibly a prostitute.

Though she hadn’t asked him for money. She’d introduced herself to him on the street saying she’d seen him interviewed on New Jersey Network, hadn’t she? At the end of the single evening they spent together she’d lifted his hand to kiss the fingers in a curious gesture of homage and self-abnegation.

“Dr. Cassity. I revere a man like you.”

The crucial bones were all in place: cheeks, above the eyes, jaw, chin. These determined the primary contours of the face. The space between the eyes, for instance. Width of the forehead in proportion to that of the face at the level of the nose, for instance. Beneath the epidermal mask, the irrefutable structure of bone. Kyle was beginning to see her now.

The eye holes of the skull regarded him with equanimity. Whatever question he would put to it, Kyle would have to answer himself.

Dr. Cassity. He had a Ph.D., not an M.D. To his sensitive ears there was always something subtly jeering, mocking, in the title “Doctor.”

He’d given up asking his graduate students to call him “Kyle.” Now that he was older, and had his reputation, none of these young people could bring themselves to speak to him familiarly. They wanted to revere him, he supposed. They wanted the distance of age between them, an abyss not to be crossed.

Dr. Cassity. In Kyle’s family, this individual had been his grandfather. An internist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, whose field of specialization had been gastroenterology. As a boy, Kyle had revered his grandfather and had wanted to be a doctor. He’d been fascinated by the books in his grandfather’s library: massive medical texts that seemed to hold the answers to all questions, anatomical drawings and color plates revealing the extraordinary interiors of human bodies. Many of these were magnified, reproduced in bright livid color that had looked moist. There were astonishing photographs of naked bodies, bodies in the process of being dissected. Kyle’s heart beat hard as he stared at these, in secret. Decades later, Kyle sometimes felt a stirring of erotic interest, a painful throb in the groin, reminded by some visual cue of those old forbidden medical texts in his long-deceased grandfather’s library.

Beginning at about the age of eleven, he’d secretly copied some of the drawings and plates by placing tracing paper over them and using a felt-tip pen. Later, he began to draw his own figures without the aid of tracing paper. He would discover that, where fascination gripped him, he was capable of executing surprising likenesses. In school art classes he was singled out for praise. He became most adept at rapid charcoal sketches, executed with half-shut eyes. And later, sculpting busts, figures. His hands moving swiftly, shaping and reshaping clay.

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.

The skull was gone from Kyle’s laboratory. There would be a private burial of Sabrina Jackson’s remains in Easton, Pennsylvania. Now it was known that the young woman was dead, the investigation into her disappearance would intensify. In time, Kyle didn’t doubt, there would be an arrest.

Kyle Cassity! Congratulations.

Amazing, that work you do.

Good time to retire, eh? Quit while you’re ahead.

There was no longer mandatory retirement at the university. He would never retire as a sculptor, an artist. And he could continue working indefinitely for the State of New Jersey since he was a freelance consultant, not an employee subject to the state’s retirement laws. These protests that rose in him he didn’t utter.

He’d ceased playing the new CDs. His office and his laboratory were very quiet. A pulse beat sullenly in his head. Disappointed! For Sabrina Jackson wasn’t the one he’d sought.

“Officer. Come in.”

The face of Sabrina Jackson’s mother was as tight as a sausage in its casing. She made an effort to smile, like a sick woman trying to be upbeat but wanting you to know she was trying for your sake. In her dull eager voice she greeted Kyle Cassity, and she would persist in calling him “Officer,” though he’d explained to her that he wasn’t a police officer, just a private citizen who’d helped with the investigation. He was the man who’d drawn the composite sketch of her daughter that she and other relatives of the missing girl had identified.

Strictly speaking, of course, this wasn’t true. Kyle hadn’t drawn a sketch of Sabrina Jackson but of a fictitious girl. He’d given life to the skull in his keeping, not to Sabrina Jackson, of whom he’d never heard. But such metaphysical subtleties would have been lost on the forlorn Mrs. Jackson, who was staring at Kyle as if, though he’d just reminded her, she couldn’t recall why he’d come, who exactly he was. A plainclothes officer with the Easton police, or somebody from New Jersey?

Gently, Kyle reminded her: the drawing of Sabrina? That had appeared on TV, in papers? On the Internet, worldwide?

“Yes. That was it. That picture.” Mrs. Jackson spoke slowly, as if each word were a hurtful pebble in her throat. Her small warm bloodshot eyes, crowded inside the fatty ridges of her face, were fixed upon him with a desperate urgency. “When we saw that picture on the TV... we knew.”

Kyle murmured an apology. He was being made to feel responsible for something. His oblong shaved head had never felt so exposed and so vulnerable, veins throbbing with heat.

“Mrs. Jackson, I wish that things could have turned out differently.”

“She always did the wildest things, more than once I’d given up on her, I’d get so damn pissed with her, but she’d land on her feet, you know? Like a cat. That Sabrina! She’s the only one of the kids, counting even her two brothers, made us worry so.” Oddly, Mrs. Jackson was smiling. She was vexed at her daughter but clearly somewhat proud of her too. “She had a good heart, though, Officer. Sabrina could be the sweetest girl when she made the effort. Like the time, it was Mother’s Day, I was pissed as hell because I knew, I just knew, not a one of them was going to call—”

Strange and disconcerting it was to Kyle, the mother of the dead girl was so young: no more than forty-five. A bloated-looking little woman with a coarse ruddy face, in slacks and a floral-print shirt and flip-flops on her pudgy bare feet, hobbled with a mother’s grief like an extra layer of fat. Technically, she was young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

Well! All the world, it seemed, was getting to be young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

“I’d love to see photographs of Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson. I’ve just come to pay my respects.”

“Oh, I’ve got ’em! They’re all ready to be seen. Everybody’s been over here wanting to see them. I mean, not just the family and Sabrina’s friends — you wouldn’t believe all the friends that girl has from just high school alone — but the TV people, newspaper reporters. There’s been more people through here, Officer, in the last ten, twelve days than in all of our life until now.”

“I’m sorry for that, Mrs. Jackson. I don’t mean to disturb you.”

“Oh, no! It’s got to be done, I guess.”

The phone rang several times while Mrs. Jackson was showing Kyle a cascade of snapshots crammed into a family album, but the fleshy little woman, seated on a sofa, made no effort to answer it. Even unmoving on the sofa, she was inclined to breathlessness, panting. “Those calls can go onto voice mail. I use that all the time now. See, I don’t know who’s gonna call anymore. Used to be, it’d be just somebody I could predict, like out of ten people in the world, or one of those damn solicitors I just hang up on, but now, could be anybody almost. People call here saying they might know who’s the guilty son of a bitch did that to Sabrina, but I tell them call the police, see? Call the police, not me. I’m not the police.”

Mrs. Jackson spoke vehemently. Her body exuded an odor of intense excited emotion. Hesitantly Kyle leaned toward her, frowning at the snapshots. Some were old Polaroids, faded. Others were creased and dog-eared. In family photos of years ago it wasn’t immediately obvious which girl was Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson had to point her out. Kyle saw a brattish-looking teenager, hands on her hips and grinning at the camera. As a young adolescent she’d had bad skin, which must have been hard on her, granting even her high spirits and energy. In some of the close-ups, Kyle saw an almost attractive girl, warm, hopeful, appealing in her openness. Hey: look at me! Love me. He wanted to love her. He wanted not to be disappointed in her. Mrs. Jackson sighed heavily. “People say those drawings looked just like Sabrina, that’s how they recognized her, y’know, and I guess I can see it, but not really. If you’re the mother you see different things. Sabrina was never pretty-pretty like in the drawings, she’d have laughed like hell to see ’em. It’s like somebody took Sabrina’s face and did a makeover, like cosmetic surgery, y’know? What Sabrina wanted, she’d talk about sort of joking but serious, was, what is it, ‘chin injection’? ‘Implant’?” Ruefully, Mrs. Jackson was stroking her chin, receding like her daughter’s.

Kyle said, as if encouraging, “Sabrina was very attractive. She didn’t need cosmetic surgery. Girls say things like that. I have a daughter, and when she was growing up... You can’t take what they say seriously.”

“That’s true, Officer. You can’t.”

“Sabrina had personality. You can see that, Mrs. Jackson, in all her pictures.”

“Oh, Christ! Did she ever.”

Mrs. Jackson winced as if, amid the loose, scattered snapshots in the album, her fingers had encountered something sharp.

For some time they continued examining the snapshots. Kyle supposed that the grief-stricken mother was seeing her lost daughter anew, and in some way alive, through a stranger’s eyes. He couldn’t have said why looking at the snapshots had come to seem so crucial to him. For days he’d been planning this visit, summoning his courage to call Mrs. Jackson.

Mrs. Jackson said, showing him a tinted matte graduation photo of Sabrina in a white cap and gown, wagging her fingers and grinning at the camera, “High school was Sabrina’s happy time. She was so, so popular. She should’ve gone right to college, instead of what she did do, she’d be alive now.” Abruptly then Mrs. Jackson’s mood shifted, she began to complain bitterly. “You wouldn’t believe! People saying the crudest things about Sabrina. People you’d think would be her old friends, and teachers at the school, calling her ‘wild,’ ‘unpredictable.’ Like all my daughter did was hang out in bars. Go out with married men.” Mrs. Jackson’s ruddy skin darkened with indignation. Half-moons of sweat showed beneath her arms. She said, panting, “If the police had let it alone, it’d be better, almost. We reported her missing back in May. Over the summer, it was like everybody’d say, ‘Where’s Sabrina, where’s she gone to now?’ A bunch of us drove to Atlantic City and asked around, but nobody’d seen her, it’s a big place, people coming and going all the time, and the cops kept saying, “Your daughter is an adult’ and crap like that, like it was Sabrina’s own decision to disappear. They listened to her tape and came to that conclusion. It wasn’t even a ‘missing persons’ case. So we got to thinking maybe Sabrina was just traveling with this man friend of hers. The rumor got to be, this guy had money like Donald Trump. He was a high-stakes gambler. They’d have gotten bored with Atlantic City and gone to Vegas. Maybe they’d driven down into Mexico. Sabrina was always saying how she wanted to see Mexico. Now — all that’s over.” Mrs. Jackson shut the photo album, clumsily; a number of snapshots spilled out onto the floor. “See, Officer, things maybe should’ve been left the way they were. We were all just waiting for Sabrina to turn up, anytime. But people like you poking around, ‘investigating,’ printing ugly things about my daughter in the paper, I don’t even know why you’re here taking up my time or who the hell you are.”

Kyle was taken by surprise, Mrs. Jackson had suddenly turned so belligerent. “I, I’m sorry. I only wanted—”

“Well, we don’t want your sympathy. We don’t need your goddamn sympathy, Mister. You can just go back to New Jersey or wherever the hell you came from, intruding in my daughter’s life.”

Mrs. Jackson’s eyes were moist and dilated and accusing. Her skin looked as if it would be scalding to the touch. Kyle was certain she wasn’t drunk, he couldn’t smell it on her breath, but possibly she was drugged. High on crystal meth — that was notorious in this part of Pennsylvania, run-down old cities like Easton.

Kyle protested, “But, Mrs. Jackson, you and your family would want to know, wouldn’t you? I mean, what had happened to...” He paused awkwardly, uncertain how to continue. Why should they want to know? Would he have wanted to know, in their place?

In a voice heavy with sarcasm Mrs. Jackson said, “Oh, sure. You tell me, Officer. You got all the answers.”

She heaved herself to her feet. A signal it was time for her unwanted visitor to depart.

Kyle had dared to take out his wallet. He was deeply humiliated but determined to maintain his composure. “Mrs. Jackson, maybe I can help? With the funeral expenses, I mean.”

Hotly the little woman said, “We don’t want anybody’s charity! We’re doing just fine by ourselves.”

“Just a... a token of my sympathy.”

Mrs. Jackson averted her eyes haughtily from Kyle’s fumbling fingers, fanning her face with a TV Guide. He removed bills from his wallet, fifty-dollar bills, a one-hundred-dollar bill, folded them discreetly over, and placed them on an edge of the table.

Still, the indignant Mrs. Jackson didn’t thank him. Nor did she trouble to see him to the door.

Where was he? A neighborhood of dingy wood-frame bungalows, row houses. Northern outskirts of Easton, Pennsylvania. Midafternoon: too early to begin drinking. Kyle was driving along potholed streets uncertain where he was headed. He’d have to cross the river again to pick up the big interstate south... At a 7-Eleven he bought a six-pack of strong dark ale and parked in a weedy cul-de-sac between a cemetery and a ramp of the highway, drinking. The ale was icy cold and made his forehead ache, not disagreeably. It was a bright blustery October day, a sky of high scudding clouds against a glassy blue. At the city’s skyline, haze the hue of chewing-tobacco spittle. Certainly Kyle knew where he was, but where he was mattered less than something else, something crucial that had been decided, but he couldn’t recall what it was that had been decided just yet. Except he knew it was crucial. Except so much that seemed crucial in his younger years had turned out to be not so, or not much so. A girl of about fourteen pedaled by on a bicycle, ponytail flying behind her head. She wore tight-fitting jeans, a backpack. She’d taken no notice of him, as if he, and the car in which he was sitting, were invisible. With his eyes he followed her. Followed her as swiftly she pedaled out of sight. Such longing, such love, suffused his heart! He watched the girl disappear, stroking a sinewy throbbing artery just below his jawline.