Prayers for Rain (14 page)

There was a barn out back, about three hundred yards from the rear of the motel, past a blighted grove of bent or broken trees and a small clearing dyed black with motor oil. Warren Martens propelled his wheelchair through decayed branches and the mulch of a few seasons’ worth of unraked leaves, the litter of nip bottles and abandoned car parts, and the crumbled foundation of a building that had probably died somewhere around the time Lincoln did, as if he were riding atop a lane of fresh blacktop.

Holly had stayed back in the office in case anyone showed up here because the Ritz was full, and Warren led me out the back and down a wooden ramp toward the sagging barn where he stored the contents of abandoned units. He got ahead of me in the grove, pumping those wheels until the spokes hummed through crackling leaves. The leather back of his chair had a Harley-Davidson eagle sewn into the center and bumper stickers affixed on either side of the bird:
RIDERS ARE EVERYWHERE; ONE DAY AT A TIME; BIKE WEEK, LACONIA, NH; LOVE HAPPENS
.

“Who’s your favorite actor?” he called back over his shoulder as his thick arms pumped the wheels over crackling leaves.

“Current or old-time?”

“Current.”

“Denzel,” I said. “You?”

“I’d have to say Kevin Spacey.”

“He is good.”

“Fan of his since
Wiseguy
. ’Member that show?”

“Mel Profitt,” I said, “and his incestuous sister, Susan.”

“Well, all right.” He tipped a hand back and I slapped it. “Okay,” he said, getting excited now that he’d found a fellow cine-geek out here in the dead trees. “Favorite current actress, and you can’t say Michelle Pfeiffer.”

“Why not?”

“The babe factor’s too prevalent. Could skew the objectivity of the poll.”

“Oh,” I said. “Joan Allen, then. You?”

“Sigourney. With or without automatic weapons.” He glanced over at me as I caught up, walked alongside him. “Old-time actor?”

“Lancaster,” I said. “No contest.”

“Mitchum,” he said. “No contest. Actress?”

“Ava Gardner.”

“Gene Tierney,” he said.

“We might not agree on specifics, Warren, but I’d say we both got impeccable taste.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” He chuckled, leaned his head back, and watched the black branches roll overhead. “It’s true what they say about good movies, though.”

“What do they say?”

He kept his head tilted back, kept thrusting the wheelchair forward as if he knew every inch of this wasteland. “They transport you. I mean, I see a good movie? I don’t
forget
I don’t have legs. I
have
legs. They’re Mitchum’s because I’m Mitchum and those are my hands running down Jane Greer’s bare arms. Good movies, man, they give you another life. A whole other future for a while.”

“For two hours,” I said.

“Yeah.” He chuckled again, but it was more wistful. “Yeah,” he repeated, even more softly, and I felt the sharp tonnage of his life roll over us for a moment—the broken
motel, the blighted trees, the phantom limbs at thirty, and those hamsters climbing their hamster wheels back in the office, squeaking like mad.

“It wasn’t a motorcycle accident,” he said, as if answering a question he knew I wanted to ask. “Most people see me, they think I dumped my hog on a turn.” He looked back over his shoulder at me and shook his head. “I was shacking up here one night when it was still Molly Martenson’s Lie Down. Shacking up with a woman wasn’t my wife. Holly shows up—all piss and vinegar and fuck you, motherfucker—and she throws her wedding ring at me in the room and bolts. I go chasing her. There wasn’t no fence around the pool then, but it was still empty, and I slipped. I fell in the deep end.” He shrugged. “Cracked myself in half.” He waved his arm at our surroundings. “Got all this in the lawsuit.”

He wheeled to a stop by the barn and unlocked the padlock over the door. The barn had been red once, but the sun and neglect had turned it a sallow salmon, and it sagged hard to its left, leaning into the dark earth as if any moment it would roll onto its side and go to sleep.

I wondered how a cracked spine had led to the removal of both of Warren’s lower legs, but I decided he’d tell me if he felt like it, leave me wondering if he didn’t.

“Funny thing is,” he said, “Holly loves me twice as much now. Maybe it’s ’cause I can’t go out catting around no more. Right?”

“Maybe,” I said.

He smiled. “Used to think that myself. But you know what it is? What it really is?”

“No.”

“Holly, she’s just one of those people truly comes alive only when someone needs her. Like those midget pigs of hers. Simple bastards would die if left to their own devices.” He looked up at me, then nodded to himself and opened the barn door, and I followed him inside.

Most of the barn was a flea market of three-legged cof
fee tables, ripped lamp shades, cracked mirrors, and TVs with picture tubes shattered by fists or feet. Rusted hot plates hung from their cords against the rear wall alongside third-rate paintings of empty fields, clowns, and flowers in vases, all the surfaces soiled by orange juice or grime or coffee.

The front third of the barn, though, was a collection of discarded suitcases and clothes, books and shoes, costume jewelry spilling from a cardboard box. To my left, Holly or Warren had used yellow rope to cordon off a section neatly stacked with a never-used blender; cups, glasses, and china still in the boxes from the store; and a pewter serving plate that bore the engraving
LOU
&
DINA, ALWAYS-N-FOREVER, APRIL
4, 1997.

Warren saw me staring at it.

“Yeah. Newlyweds. Come here on their wedding night, unwrapped their gifts, then had this big blowout around three
A.M
. She takes off in the car, cans still tied to the rear bumper. He runs down the road after her, half naked. Last I ever saw of them. Holly won’t let me sell the stuff. Says they’ll be back. I say, ‘Honey, it’s been two years.’ Holly says, ‘They’ll come back.’ And that’s that.”

“That’s that,” I said, still a bit in awe of those gifts and that serving plate, the half-naked groom chasing his bride into oblivion at 3
A.M
., all those cans rattling up the road.

Warren wheeled to my right. “Here’s her stuff. Karen Wetterau’s. Ain’t much.”

I walked over to a cardboard Chiquita Banana produce carton, lifted the cover off. “How long since you last saw her?”

“A week. Next I heard, she dove off the Custom House.”

I looked at him. “You knew.”

“Sure, I did.”

“Holly?”

He shook his head. “She wasn’t lying to you. She’s the kind of woman puts a positive spin on
everything
. If she can’t, then it didn’t happen. Something in her don’t allow herself to make the necessary connections. But I saw the
picture in the paper, and it took a couple minutes, but I put it together. She looked real different, but it was still her.”

“What was she like?”

“Sad. Saddest person I come across in a long, long time. Dying from all that sad. I don’t drink no more, but I’d sit with her some nights while she did. Sooner or later, she’d come on to me. One of the times I turned her down, she gets all nasty, starts insinuating that my equipment don’t work. I go, ‘Karen, lot of things got lost in that accident, but not that.’ Hell, I’m still eighteen that way; soldier stands to attention when the breeze shifts. Anyway, I say, ‘Look, no offense, but I love my wife.’ And she laughs. She says, ‘No one loves. No one loves.’ And I’ll tell you something, man, she believed it.”

“No one loves,” I said.

“No one loves.” He nodded.

He scratched the crown of his head, looked around the barn as I picked up a framed photo from the top of the box. The glass had been shattered, and pebbles of it stuck in the frame’s grooves. The photo was of Karen’s father, wearing his marine best, holding his daughter’s hand, both of them blinking in the glare.

“Karen,” Warren said, “I think she was in a black hole. So the whole world’s a black hole. She’s surrounded by people who think love is bullshit, then love
is
bullshit.”

Another photo, glass also shattered. Karen and a good-looking, dark haired guy. David Wetterau, I assumed. Both of them tanned and dressed in pastels, standing on the deck of a cruise ship, eyes a little glassy from the daiquiris in their hands. Big smiles. All was right with the world.

“She told me she’d been engaged to a guy got hit by a car.”

I nodded. Another photo of her and Wetterau, more pebbles of glass falling to my hand as I lifted it. Another set of big smiles, this one taken at a party, Happy Birthday streamers hanging behind their heads, stretched across someone’s living room wall.

“You know she was hooking?” I asked as I placed the photo on the floor beside the other two.

“I figured,” he said. “Guys coming over a lot, only a couple of them coming back a second time.”

“You talk to her about it?” I lifted a stack of collection notices mailed to her old address in Newton, a Polaroid of her and David Wetterau.

“She denied it. Then she offered to blow me for fifty bucks.” He rolled his shoulders, glanced down at the frames on the floor. “I should have kicked her out, but, man, she seemed kicked enough.”

I found returned mail—all bills, all stamped with red lettering:
RETURNED DUE TO LACK OF POSTAGE
. I put it aside, removed two T-shirts, a pair of shorts, some white panties and socks, a stopped watch.

“You said most guys never came back. What about the ones who did?”

“There were just two of ’em. One I saw a lot—little redheaded snot about my age. He paid for the room.”

“Cash?”

“Yup.”

“The other guy?”

“Better-looking. Blond, maybe thirty-five. Would come by at night.”

Underneath the clothes, I found a white cardboard box about six inches tall. I removed the pink ribbon on top and opened it.

Warren, looking over my shoulder, said, “Shit, huh? Holly didn’t tell me about those.”

Wedding invitations. Maybe two hundred, written in calligraphy on pale pink linen:
DR. AND MRS. CHRISTOPHER DAWE REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR THE WEDDING OF THEIR DAUGHTER, MISS KAREN ANN NICHOLS, TO MR. DAVID WETTERAU ON SEPTEMBER
10, 1999.

“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: