Carthage (15 page)

On the day following Labor Day 2005 another massive mailing of the
ENDANGERED MISSING ADULT CRESSIDA MAYFIELD
Web site flyer to households in Beechum, Herkimer, Hamilton counties.

What the price was, for such desperate mailings, fourth-class bulk mail regulated by the U.S. Postal Service and distributed to thousands of anonymous “homeowner” addresses Zeno never told Arlette and Arlette never asked.

Nor did Arlette ask what proportion of such mailings yielded any measurable responses at all—telephone calls, emails.

She didn’t remind Zeno of how ruthless he was, disposing of the fourth-class mail that crammed their mailbox. Such flyers, mixed with throwaway advertisements and local shopping weeklies, Zeno Mayfield would never have condescended to glance at, himself.

As if Arlette had voiced such uncertainties aloud Zeno said, defensively: “Granted, most of these are thrown away unread. But of thousands of flyers, if just one yields some crucial information—that will be worth it!”

OTHER LOCAL INCIDENTS
seized headlines and
breaking news
bulletins in Beechum County.

Drunks in a boating accident on Echo Lake. A domestic fracas spilling out onto a South Carthage street, three adults and a ten-year-old child killed in a blast of gunfire. Adirondack Hells Angels arrested in a methamphetamine lab raid by New York State Police at Independence River and of seven individuals taken into custody, three had been sought for questioning by Beechum County sheriff’s detectives in the Cressida Mayfield investigation.

“YES. IT HAS
BEEN HARD.
It has been . . .”

“ . . . but we’re hopeful, and very grateful . . .”

“ . . . so many people, many of them strangers, expressing support for us—for Cressida. So many volunteers, searching the Preserve . . .”

“ . . . do have faith, yes. Our daughter returning to us . . .”

“Yes it’s sad—the fall term is beginning at St. Lawrence, and she isn’t there . . .”

“ . . . Cressida loved her classes . . .”

“ . . . yes, they’ve promised . . . there will be a ‘breakthrough’ soon. They’ve been interviewing . . .”

“ . . . interviewing many people, they’ve said . . .”

“ . . . following ‘leads’ in other parts of the state . . .”

“ . . . people who’ve ‘sighted’ our daughter . . .”

“ . . . they mean well, but . . .”

“ . . . the police have brought Brett Kincaid back twice more to interview him . . . ‘Building a case’ takes time and if there’s a premature arrest . . .”

“ . . . will undo the work of months . . .”

“ . . . faith of course. We are not ‘religious’ but . . . we do have faith that . . .”

“ . . . our daughter will be returned to us.”

And there came Zeno, subtly corrective: “ . . . our daughter
will return
to us.”

Photographed close together, seated on a sofa in the living room of their Cumberland Avenue house, Zeno Mayfield’s heavy arm around his wife’s shoulders so that she had to brace herself against the weight.

And which interview was this?—of numerous “follow-up” interviews in the local media? The
Carthage Post-Journal. Watertown Journal-Times. Black River Valley Gazette
.

Zeno smiled stiffly for the cameras. Arlette could not bring herself to smile any longer—thinking of Cressida’s refusal to smile, for photographs.

One will be your obituary. Can’t smile for your obituary!

IN THE LOCAL
MEDIA
there was a brief flurry of excitement when the Hells Angels bikers with their outstanding warrants and previous police records for aggravated assault, drug trafficking, and theft were taken into custody by Beechum County deputies for “questioning”—but nothing seemed to have come of this, either.

HERE WAS
A
SECRET:
Arlette Mayfield did not truly
have faith
.

That is, faith that her daughter would be returned to her.

Almost from the start, after the first-day’s search had yielded so little, and certain facts had been revealed of Brett Kincaid’s involvement with Cressida, the boy’s facial wounds, the “fresh” bloodstains in the front seat of the Jeep, the boy’s guilty behavior, Arlette had thought
The worst has happened. He has killed her, because of Juliet. Because he hates us. He has killed her and hidden her away. And so maybe it would be a mercy not to find her.

Arlette dared not reveal such terrible—perverse—unmotherly thoughts to anyone: certainly not to Zeno, or to Juliet.

Not even to her sister Katie Hewett who was three years older than Arlette, the most sensible of women, an assistant superintendent of Carthage public schools whose ability to perceive subterfuge, obfuscation, and deceit in the most guileless of individuals was legendary.

Katie squeezed Arlette’s hand, frequently.

Katie hugged Arlette, so hard her ribs ached.

Katie kissed Arlette on the side of the face, a hot wet kiss that seared.

As if wanting Arlette to know: she understood.

Only once did Arlette say to Katie, in the fifth or sixth week of the search, in a weak abashed voice as the two sisters prepared a meal in the Mayfields’ kitchen while in another room Zeno was speaking rapidly on his cell phone, in the tone of a man accustomed to giving orders: “Oh Katie, I am trying, Katie. You know, I am trying. I won’t ever give up. He would never forgive me, if I did.”

Still, Arlette placed calls to the missing cell phone.

Just to punch in the numbers. Just to listen, breath withheld, for the ghost-ring.

In the
Carthage Post-Journal
there were ever briefer articles, on inside pages, on the “ongoing search” for nineteen-year-old Cressida Mayfield, and at the conclusion of these articles was the reiterated statement that “no arrests have yet been made” and that the police investigation was “continuing.”

Rumors flourished: that Brett Kincaid had been arrested finally, not on suspicion of having had something to do with the disappearance of his former fiancée’s sister, but on a complaint of a neighbor that the young man had “shoved him and shouted at him” outside their house on Potsdam Street; that a “young girl’s body” had been found in a landfill, near Wild Forest, eight miles east of Wolf’s Head Lake where a sprawling enclave of Adirondack Hells Angels lived; that Juliet Mayfield, former fiancée of Corporal Brett Kincaid, had resigned her position at the Convent Street Elementary School and was moving away from Carthage—
Couldn’t bear the shame
.

So far as Arlette could determine, none of these rumors was true.

Though it was true, Juliet was thinking of enrolling in a master’s degree program in education, at Plattsburgh—sometime.

Not giving up her teaching job in Carthage but commuting, once a week to a night-school class.

And very possibly it was true, Brett Kincaid had gotten into some sort of shouting match with a neighbor.

And very possibly—“a young girl’s body” might have been found in a landfill near Wild Forest, if not at the present time, sometime ago. Or sometime to come.

ANOTHER RUMOR WAS
that Marcy Meyer had had some sort of “nervous collapse” in Ogdensburg, in the week following her return for her second year in the nursing school.

This was in late August. The nursing school term began earlier than the university.

Arlette called the Meyers’ home, and Marcy’s mother answered.

Mrs. Meyer said that Marcy had had an “accident”—she’d fallen down a flight of stairs dragging a suitcase up to her room on the third floor of the nurses’ residence.

She’d been unconscious for several minutes. She’d sprained an ankle and dislocated a shoulder bone. She’d been in such pain, even with painkillers, the nursing school had insisted that she take off the fall term and return home.

Arlette stammered how sorry she was to hear this terrible news!

“Should I come over to see her? Is there anything I could do to help?”

Linda Meyer, whom Arlette had known in high school, not well, for they’d belonged to very different circles, hesitated a moment before saying, with finality, “No. That isn’t necessary, Arlette. Seeing you would just remind Marcy of Cressida and she’s had enough of that.”

ZENO HAD SPOKEN
with Marcy Meyer several times.

Arlette had had the idea—(she hadn’t wanted to ask her husband)—that his visits were upsetting to Marcy, who’d been questioned for more than one session by police detectives.

Marcy had been “devastated” by her friend’s disappearance. But Marcy had been “shocked” and “bewildered” when she’d learned that Cressida hadn’t returned to her home, but had gone to Wolf’s Head Lake, seemingly to meet with Brett Kincaid, after leaving the Meyers’ house.

There was the possibility, you would not want to label it a fact, that Marcy Meyer’s closest friend had lied to her.

The last time Zeno had spoken with Marcy, soon before she’d left for nursing school at Ogdensburg, he’d returned to Arlette to say that, he might be imagining it, but it had seemed to him that Marcy was
just slightly jealous of—someone—or something—in Cressida’s life.

Arlette had thought of course: Brett Kincaid.

Zeno was sitting on a leather sofa in the living room. Rubbing his face so vigorously, thumbs against his eyes, Arlette could hear the eyeballs moving in their sockets in a way to make her shiver.

“Get me a beer, Lettie. Please! I’m just too—God-damned—fucking—tired to get one myself.”

Yet, fired with a new idea, a new and not yet demonstrably futile idea regarding their lost daughter, Zeno spoke rapidly, even zestfully.

“Marcy finally told me—which I don’t think she’d told the police—that, that night at her house, she’d thought that Cressida might have made a call on her cell phone at one point, or possibly the cell phone had been set on vibrate, since it didn’t ring, and Cressida might have had a call on the phone, which she took in another room—(they’d been in the dining room, at dinner, with Marcy’s parents and her grandmother, and Cressida had excused herself as if she were going to the bathroom)—but since she wasn’t at all sure, and was so confused trying to remember, answering questions put to her by the police and trying to remember every desperate thing, she didn’t think that she could tell them this. ‘It’s like I might have imagined it. It’s like I have been thinking about that night so much, my brain is spilling over with false memories, I don’t dare tell the police, they tape every word, it would become permanent and could never be erased.’ And Marcy was trying not to cry, you know how we always think of Marcy as so healthy, sturdy, what is Cressida’s description—
stalwart and true of heart, like a wildebeest
—but here was poor Marcy looking as if she’d lost ten pounds, and so anxious—‘You know how furious Cressida would be with us, if she knew we were talking about her like this . . . Trying to remember every syllable of what she’d said, and every kind of speculation . . . ’ And Marcy did start to cry, and I held her hands to comfort her. And I guess I cried, too.”

“NOTHING CONCLUSIVE.
But probably, nothing significant.”

For weeks police kept Cressida’s laptop. Presumably a computer forensics specialist was examining it.

But at last the laptop was returned to the Mayfields with a report that their daughter didn’t seem to have been involved in any unusual or risky Internet activities. She’d used her laptop for academic research primarily; her school papers were neatly filed by course titles; her email correspondence was nothing out of the ordinary—much of the mail was impersonal, from St. Lawrence University. She seemed to have few friends, and these were young women—predominantly, Marcy Meyer.

No secret life! Somehow, this saddened Arlette.

But really, no: this was a relief.

“Your daughter has a limited social life, judging from the email record. Does she have a boyfriend, that you know of?”

Arlette shook her head, no. Zeno frowned and did not reply.

Arlette was grateful for the detective speaking of their daughter in the present tense:
Has. Does. Is.

“What about here in Carthage, in high school maybe—was there anyone?”

Arlette hesitated as if having to think. But the answer was no.

“Was Cressida interested in—involved with—girls? Would you know about that, if she was?”

Arlette hesitated again. A flush rose into her face.

Zeno said, in a neutral voice: “You mean—‘lesbians’? You think my daughter is a ‘lesbian’?”

“Would you be in a position to know, if she was?”

“That’s a hard question to answer, officer! As you’ve phrased it.”

“Arlette, what do you think?”

What Arlette thought was
No. My daughter could not love anyone like herself.

“I really don’t think so. Cressida has girlfriends as other girls her age do. In some ways, as we’ve tried to explain to you, she was—is—a very young nineteen. She’s always been smart, precociously smart, but she spends most of her time inside her own head—she isn’t so aware of people, as her own thoughts. She isn’t—I guess you’d say—very mature.”