'That's what's left of Fulraine Steel, once one of the great mills here. Last twenty years the steel business has gone to hell. Most steel's imported now or made in energy-efficient plants. But there was a time when those ruins were alive with smelters, when black smoke and cinders poured out of the stacks. The smell pervaded the city. You couldn't walk the route we just took without getting cinders in your eyes. It was dirty here, also rich, a place where wealth was created beyond men's dreams. Iron ore and cola came downriver on barges. Steel was forged, then shipped back out to the world. Steel is what made this town… and for a while ruined it too.'
The restaurant we choose is a noisy yuppy hangout, filled with affluent young people talking and laughing – stockbrokers, attorneys, ad execs. As we walk in, a few people, recognizing Pam, follow us both with their eyes. Passing a table, I pick up a snatch of conversation about the Foster trial:
'It's the money. Jury'll see she did it for the money,' a young man tells his date.
'She'll walk. Reasonable doubt,' his companion replies.
We find a secluded booth in back, order pasta, salad, and a bottle of wine, then gaze into one another's eyes.
'Funny how I keep wanting to flatter you, David,' she said. 'you bring out the nice girl in me, I guess.'
She asks me about past relationships. I describe my brief failed marriage, aimless dalliances, numerous ruptured love affairs. When I ask about hers, she tells me she lived with a guy the last four years, a news producer for another network whom she met when she first moved to New York.
'We broke up this winter. It was pretty traumatic. Lots of quarreling about who owned what and who'd get to keep our great apartment on Riverside Drive. After torturous negotiations, I bought him out, then decided I didn't want to live there anymore. Too many memories. So I took the CNN job in D.C. and put the apartment up for sale. Now he says I only wanted it out of spite.'
She asks about my life in San Francisco. I describe my loft on Telegraph Hill, the view over the Bay, and how in the early morning the sun seems to rise in slow motion before my bay windows, radiating light so blinding I'm forced to run away. I tell her about my pair of big World War II-vintage tripod-mounted binoculars installed beside my drafting table in the bay, which I use to watch ships come and go during the day and to scan the city for interesting dramas at night. I tell her I'm something of a voyeur and that she's right, I do have a busy hand. I tell her about my hundreds of sketchbooks, how together they constitute an enormous incoherent diary of my life – places I've visited, people I've met, situations I've observed. It's as if, I tell her, I'm seeking to draw some kind of definitive scene, which, when sketched, will solve a mystery I seem to have spent the better part of my life puzzling out. I tell her I don't know what this mystery is, nor why I feel compelled to solve it, but that I believe its source is here in this city where I was born.
She goes quiet after that, making me think I've spoken with too much candor. Then suddenly her face breaks into the warm smile that makes her so effective on TV.
'I wish like you I'd come here on a quest,' she says, 'instead of to cover some scummy trial.' She locks eyes with mine. 'Like I said, David, you're a pretty interesting guy.'
We grin at one another, slurp up our spaghetti, devour our salads, work our way methodically through our bottle of wine. The, like lovers, we slowly make our way back to the Townsend along lonely Riverwalk lit by gracefully turned streetlamp candelabra, breathing air that smells of iron and dead flowers, arms loosely embracing one another's waists.
3
A man and a woman are making love…
The phrase haunts me, seems to follow me around like a shadow. I want to put faces to these people. All I'm drawing now are their heads lost in shadow. I want to see them clearly, hear their voices, the rhythm of their breathing, the thumping of their hearts. Most of all, I want to see their eyes.
This morning I ask Townsend Hotel management to move me to a lower floor. The desk is happy to oblige as most guests prefer the upper floors with views. But I want the sound of the streets and the strange play of light that comes from passing traffic in the night.
I'm delighted when they offer me a room on the second floor. It takes me but fifteen minutes to move. After stowing my clothing, I post several of my drawings of the lovers on the wall facing the window.
Tonight, with the rooms lamps off, I study them as cars come and go, casting headlight beams into the room. These beams hit the eyes on my drawings filled in with graphite pencil. The graphite reflects the light, the eyes glow, and then, as the cars pass and the headlight beams cross the space, the eyes move, they come alive!
The Fulraine kidnapping: I'm sitting in the local archives room of the Calista Public Library across from Danzig Park, going through old file folders containing yellowed clippings culled from The Calista Times-Dispatch.
An odd aspect, one I'd forgotten, was that the Fulraine infant was not kidnapped in the traditional sense. There was never a demand for ransom. Rather Belle Fulraine disappeared at the age of three, along with a recently hired au pair, never to be seen again.
This au pair, Becky Hallworth from Dorset in England, turned up dead a week later, her nude torso (missing head and hands) washed onto the eastern shore of Delamere Lake. For several days her torso remained unidentified, causing the police to dub her the ‘Lady of the Lake.’ When, finally, an ID was made, based on freckles and birthmarks viewed in a pornographic film in which Becky, unbeknownst to her agency and employers, had recently performed, the implications of the kidnapping grew grave.
Could little Belle have been rented or sold by Becky to purveyors of child smut and Becky killed because, due to the prominence of the Fulraine family, her collaborators in the crime were frightened by the unexpected heat? If so, where was little Belle now? Had she too been killed? Would films or photographs turn up on the underground pedophile market in which the innocent child would be shown abused?
I read all the clippings, then carefully study the accompanying photographs.
The Fulraines were quite a pair. In one picture of the couple, Barbara, though in grief, exudes extraordinary glamour. Her haunting, almond-shaped eyes and well-modeled mouth, pale skin, and luxurious wavy, dark hair make her appear more like a movie star than an aggrieved local socialite. Standing beside her, Andrew Fulraine exhibits matinee idol looks. Steady eyes, squared-off jaw, hair meticulously combed back, his physiognomy speaks of willfulness and power, a refusal to be broken no matter the depth of his pain.
Little Belle is appropriately cute and vulnerable, while the older Fulraine sons, my schoolmates, six-year-old Robin and seven-year-old Mark, combine the manly demeanor of their father and the soft, exotic beauty of their mom.
In another photo of Barbara alone, she's handsomely dressed in a light cashmere crewneck sweater with a single strand of pearls about her graceful neck – so different from her garb in a photograph in my possession that shows her in quite a different frame of mind.
Finally, there's Becky Hallworth in whose lightly freckled countenance I detect the seeds of the Fulraines' misfortune. There's definitely something ‘off’ about the girl, a glint of craziness in the eyes, of slutty fiendishness in the mouth, of come-hither-and-be-damned in the grin. I ask myself how closely the Fulraines interviewed her and whether they were so dazzled by her schooled British accent and peaches-and-cream complexion that they neglected the most elementary of precautions – checking the girl's references.
Strangely Waldo Channing's column on the subject is the most poignant in the folder. I say ‘strangely’ because Waldo's columns tended to be pretty superficial stuff. Yet every so often, particularly when people he cared about were involved, he managed to rise to the occasion:
It's been a year since my dear friends, Andy and Barb, lost their child. When I write that word ‘lost’ I feel a great throb in my chest, for of course little Belle Fulraine wasn't lost at all. She was taken. And therein lies the tragedy.
‘Tragedy’ is a term I don't use lightly. Those of you who regularly drop in on This Department know I generally concern myself with the lighter side of life. Who's who, who's been seen with whom, who's been doing what. I write about theater, film, and cabaret, love gained and lost, weddings and divorces, tales of our Fair City, its
