“Yeah?” said Lowery.
“Girl’s a virgin. Of course there might have been some other form of sexual contact, but somehow I don’t think so.”
By now the press had gotten the photograph and were running it incessantly. When more details of the story came out, the district attorney’s office settled for slavery charges against Edgar and reduced the second-degree murder charges against Catherine to a hundred sixty-seven counts of manslaughter. Lowery drove up to Malibu to see her again on a shiny blue fin-de-June day. Sitting by her bed watching her dream, he said, Wherever it is you are now, girl, don’t come back. You won’t like it here if you do.
When she opened the door of the cell he was hunched on the floor asleep. She stood beside him and waited for him to wake. He stirred and opened his eyes; he looked as though he didn’t believe he saw her.
She knelt and watched his hands. He held them open before her and then dropped them and said something to her she didn’t understand. Somewhere behind her a door closed, and there was a wiry little man with red hair outside the bars who appeared very startled to see her. He said something and approached the door and then turned and left.
She looked at the prisoner; his face was bathed in the purple light of the sun going down. He moved toward her slowly: he’s afraid he’ll frighten me, she thought to herself—as though anything can frighten me now. He was very near her, and the shadows of black bars rose through the purple light on his face. Looking at him closely, she realized he didn’t seem so much like the other one. He was tired and gray and his eyes hummed with something sad; he looked at her in a way no man had ever looked at her, not held by her face but rather as though he was the poet of a different destiny, of a different choice made long before, who had never consumed so easily his own vision. His eyes said, I was born in America. They said, I believed one was guiltless as long as his faith was true; I thought the act of treachery was beyond those who did not know its name. I never thought treachery was like a face. I never thought it was something one wore whether he knew it or not.
Better, she wanted to say to him, that faith betrayed you rather than you betray it.
For a while he held her, just by the arm. Then he let go, and she realized she’d been cold from some ocean breeze through some open window. She pushed the cell door and walked to the dark end of the hall, where she turned to look at him once more. The cell door swung back and forth but he didn’t move from his place. She heard footsteps. Lieutenant, she heard someone say. Lieutenant?
“Lieutenant?” Lowery shifted in his chair, opened his eyes. Catherine was still lying on the bed in front of him, her eyes still moving. An orderly was touching him on the shoulder. “I think you nodded off, Lieutenant,” he said. Lowery rubbed his brow with his hand and said to himself, I thought I could investigate where every sharp detective would like to investigate. But the only place I went was cold, from a Malibu ocean breeze through an open sanitarium window.
Lowery returned two days later. Nothing had changed. A week later, after the story had finally dropped out of the papers, he came back. Catherine was still lying on the bed. “If anything,” said one of the doctors, “she seems to have slipped further.” The dreams? said Lowery. “Her eyes are going a million miles a minute,” said the doctor. He looked spooked.
Lowery went to sit by her again. He loosened his collar and examined her a long time, exploring her countenance for a clue. The sun dropped into the sea and, as had happened before, he dozed. When he woke it was dark outside and the bed before him was empty.
He jumped to his feet. He called an orderly and the orderly came running into the room. Before Lowery said a word the orderly took one look at the empty bed and disappeared. In twenty seconds he was back with two other orderlies, a nurse and the doctor. “I fell asleep for about fifteen minutes,” said Lowery. “She was gone when I woke.”
The two new orderlies took off. In the hall the lights went on and another troop of nurses arrived. The first orderly went to the window by the bed and looked out. “Ten-foot drop,” he said. “She didn’t go this way.”
Lowery wasn’t so sure. He went to the open window and stood in the Malibu ocean breeze looking at the edge of the Malibu cliffs. After a moment his eyes narrowed. “There’s someone out there,” he said.
There’s someone out there, she heard someone whisper, and she ran down the path of the cliffside to watch a ship not foundered on the reefs of her childhood but rather sailing past, teeming with the blind of paradise. When she reached the sand she found it empty, but she saw his form in the water, swimming to shore. The night was dashed with waves. If he were to crawl onto the beach and collapse on his face she would run to him and say, But nothing swims in the dust. But he did not crawl and he did not collapse. He sailed to her; he knew the water; he strode from the sea. She hid the knife in the
