Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ to search her son’s room and he’d “made threats and threatening gestures” against her when she refused to let him into her house. And that he was “spreading malicious lies” about her son Brett who was a wounded war veteran, a hero, and had had nothing to do with his daughter.

      Because he’d “broken off a bad engagement” with Zeno Mayfield’s other daughter, that was one of the reasons Zeno had come to her house to threaten her.

      Zeno was informed of these charges by a Carthage police lieutenant he knew who dropped by the house to visit with him. Avoid the Kincaids, the lieutenant said. Avoid any situation where he was likely to be over-excited.

      Zeno, who knew the law, or should have known the law, understood the principle here. He was the father of the missing girl, he must not blunder into breaking the law himself.

      “But how can they just let him go? Not even out on bail? Why didn’t they arrest him?”

      “Because they can’t, yet. But they will.”

      Zeno felt a chill, hearing these words.

      “You mean, if Cressida is—isn’t—if she . . .”

      Zeno didn’t know what he was saying. He covered his face with his hands. His jaws had grown stubbly again, his breath smelled sour in his own nostrils.

      The Carthage PD lieutenant placed his hand on Zeno’s shoulder. This pressure, meant to be kindly, manly-kindly, remained with Zeno after the lieutenant himself had slipped away eager to escape the strained static air of the Mayfield household.

      Arlette was required to calm her ranting husband. Arlette who’d scarcely slept since 4 A.M. of July 10, now days ago, feared for the man’s high blood pressure, his audible shortness of breath, the quivering of his hands.

      “The fingerprints in the Jeep were hers. The hairs, for Christ’s sake! The bloodstains—probably. And ‘witnesses’ at the Roebuck . . .”

      “Yes. We know.”

      “ . . . how can they just let him go! And now he has a lawyer, and that self-promoting asshole Fisk will pay for his defense!”

      “Yes. But there’s nothing to be done right now, Zeno. Come here, sit down, let me hold you. Please.”

      They were regressing, in their marriage, long a marriage of mature and nimbly wise-cracking adults, to an earlier stage of wayward and desperate surges of raw emotion, even sexual need. Indignant and belligerent in public, Zeno was susceptible to weakness and trembling in the privacy of his home, in his wife’s consoling arms.

      Arlette thought I will have to prepare him for the worst. He can’t prepare himself.

      The blood test was inconclusive because, unluckily, there was no way to determine if the blood was Cressida’s. The single smudged fingerprint and the stray hairs were also “inconclusive” because there was no way to establish that these had been left in the Jeep on Saturday night, and not at another, earlier time.

      That was the point which Kincaid’s lawyer Pedersen was using, to argue that Cressida had been in Brett’s Jeep on an earlier occasion, and not on Saturday night.

      That is, not demonstrably on Saturday night.

      Because the scene had been crowded and confused, witnesses contradicted one another. Some claimed that they’d seen Cressida, or someone who closely resembled her, crossing the cinder parking lot at about midnight with Brett Kincaid limping and leaning against her, on their way to his vehicle; others claimed that they’d seen Cressida, or someone who closely resembled her, on the outdoor deck of the Roebuck, in the company of others, including, or not including, Brett Kincaid.

      No one would absolutely claim to have seen Cressida in Brett’s Jeep Wrangler.

      Witnesses spoke of “bikers” at the Roebuck. Deafening roars of their motorcycles, drunken shouts.

      Women who’d claimed to have seen Cressida in the restroom splashing water onto her face could not claim to have actually spoken with her—“It wasn’t like she was asking for anybody to help her, see. And she isn’t the kind of person you just tap on the shoulder to ask if she’s ‘all right’—you know she’d be offended.”

      Kincaid’s friends Rod Halifax, Jimmy Weisbeck, and Duane Stumpf, all in their mid-twenties, lifetime residents of Carthage who’d known Brett Kincaid at Carthage High School, were interviewed individually by Beechum County detectives. Of the three, Halifax and Stumpf were known to local law enforcement: already in high school they’d been arrested for fighting, destruction of property, petty theft and public drinking but their cases had been adjudicated in the county court without recourse to incarceration. Halifax and Weisbeck had been cited in complaints by young women claiming they’d been “harassed” and “abused” by them—but here too, charges were dropped or had evaporated.

      Halifax had enlisted in the Marines in November 2001 but had been discharged after twenty-three days at the Marine basic training at Camp Geiger, North Carolina.

      At about that time, in the fall of 2001, when Brett Kincaid had enlisted in the army, Weisbeck and Stumpf had applied to enlist too, but hadn’t completed their applications.

      With something of the earnest clumsiness of amateur actors whose scripts have been memorized Halifax, Weisbeck, and Stumpf gave accounts of Saturday night at the Roebuck Inn with their friend Brett Kincaid that were near identical: they’d arrived at the Roebuck in separate vehicles, they’d been drinking together since about 10 P.M., they’d moved from the outdoor deck into the taproom to be closer to the bar, at one point there’d been maybe a dozen guys with them, and girls; some of them old friends, and some virtually strangers; by midnight the place was really crowded and it was sometime then that “the Mayfield girl” showed up, alone; or it looked as if she was alone; nobody knew her (except Brett) since she’d been a few years behind them at Carthage High, and nobody had ever seen her before at the lake—“Like, she wasn’t the type to hang out there.”

      How long “the Mayfield girl” remained talking with Brett in a corner, maybe twenty minutes, or a half hour, they didn’t know. Or when she left. Or with who.

      Might’ve been bikers—there was a gang of them, Adirondack Hells Angels in the parking lot tearing up the cinders.

      But definitely it wasn’t Brett Kincaid she left with. Because they’d all left at the same time.

      And it wasn’t any one of them.

      “IF I COULD get my hands on them. Get them alone. For just five minutes. Just one of them. Just one.”

      “Yes but you can’t, Zeno. You know that. You can’t.”

      “Stumpf is the one who’d break first. Less than one minute. If I could just . . .”

      “Yes, Zeno. But you can’t. Please tell me you know this—you can’t.”

      Like a wounded buffalo, poor Zeno. Arlette tried to hold him, stroke his snarled hair, kiss his bristling cheek. She understood how sick at heart her husband was, how terrified of what awaited them, when he failed to push her away.

FIVE

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