Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Strange: the killer didn’t bury her.

Strange: to hate another human being so much.

Hope to Christ she was dead by the time he began with the ax...

“Now you have a friend, dear. Kyle is your friend.”

The victim had been between eighteen and thirty years old, it was estimated. A size four, petite, they’d estimated her rotted clothing to have been. Size six, a single open-toed shoe found in the gravel pit. She’d had a small rib cage, small pelvis.

No way of determining if she’d ever been pregnant or given birth.

No rings had been found amid the scattered bones. Only just a pair of silver hoop earrings, pierced. The ears of the victim had vanished as if they’d never been; only the earrings remained, dully gleaming.

“Maybe he took your rings. You must have had rings.”

The skull had a narrow forehead and a narrow, slightly receding chin. The cheekbones were high and sharp. This would be helpful in sculpting the face. Distinctive characteristics. She’d had an overbite. Kyle couldn’t know if her nose had been long or short, a pug nose or narrow at the tip. In the sketches they’d experiment with different noses, hairstyles, gradations of eye color.

“Were you pretty? ‘Pretty’ gets you into trouble.”

On the windowsill, the dead girl’s hair lay in lustrous sinuous strands.

Kyle reached out to touch it.

Marriage: a mystery.

For how was it possible that a man with no temperament for a long-term relationship with one individual, no evident talent for domestic life, family, children, can nonetheless remain married, happily it appeared, for more than four decades?

Kyle laughed. “Somehow, it happened.”

He was the father of three children within this marriage, and he’d loved them. Now they were grown — grown somewhat distant — and gone from Wayne, New Jersey. The two eldest were parents themselves.

They, and their mother, knew nothing of their shadowy half sister.

Nor did Kyle. He’d lost touch with the mother twenty-six years ago.

His relationship with his wife, Vivian, had never been very passionate. He’d wanted a wife, not a mistress. He wouldn’t have wished to calculate how long it had been since they’d last made love. Even when they’d been newly married their lovemaking had been awkward, for Vivian had been so inexperienced, sweetly naive and shy — that had seemed part of her appeal. Often they’d made love in the dark. Few words passed between them. If Vivian spoke, Kyle became distracted. Often he’d watched her sleep, not wanting to wake her. Lightly he’d touched her, stroked her unconscious body, and then himself.

Now he was sixty-seven. Not old, he knew that. Yet the last time he’d had sex had been with a woman he’d met at a conference in Pittsburgh the previous April; before that it had been with a woman one third his age, of ambiguous identity, possibly a prostitute.

Though she hadn’t asked him for money. She’d introduced herself to him on the street saying she’d seen him interviewed on New Jersey Network, hadn’t she? At the end of the single evening they spent together she’d lifted his hand to kiss the fingers in a curious gesture of homage and self-abnegation.

“Dr. Cassity. I revere a man like you.”

The crucial bones were all in place: cheeks, above the eyes, jaw, chin. These determined the primary contours of the face. The space between the eyes, for instance. Width of the forehead in proportion to that of the face at the level of the nose, for instance. Beneath the epidermal mask, the irrefutable structure of bone. Kyle was beginning to see her now.

The eye holes of the skull regarded him with equanimity. Whatever question he would put to it, Kyle would have to answer himself.

Dr. Cassity. He had a Ph.D., not an M.D. To his sensitive ears there was always something subtly jeering, mocking, in the title “Doctor.”

He’d given up asking his graduate students to call him “Kyle.” Now that he was older, and had his reputation, none of these young people could bring themselves to speak to him familiarly. They wanted to revere him, he supposed. They wanted the distance of age between them, an abyss not to be crossed.

Dr. Cassity. In Kyle’s family, this individual had been his grandfather. An internist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, whose field of specialization had been gastroenterology. As a boy, Kyle had revered his grandfather and had wanted to be a doctor. He’d been fascinated by the books in his grandfather’s library: massive medical texts that seemed to hold the answers to all questions, anatomical drawings and color plates revealing the extraordinary interiors of human bodies. Many of these were magnified, reproduced in bright livid color that had looked moist. There were astonishing photographs of naked bodies, bodies in the process of being dissected. Kyle’s heart beat hard as he stared at these, in secret. Decades later, Kyle sometimes felt a stirring of erotic interest, a painful throb in the groin, reminded by some visual cue of those old forbidden medical texts in his long-deceased grandfather’s library.

Beginning at about the age of eleven, he’d secretly copied some of the drawings and plates by placing tracing paper over them and using a felt-tip pen. Later, he began to draw his own figures without the aid of tracing paper. He would discover that, where fascination gripped him, he was capable of executing surprising likenesses. In school art classes he was singled out for praise. He became most adept at rapid charcoal sketches, executed with half-shut eyes. And later, sculpting busts, figures. His hands moving swiftly, shaping and reshaping clay.

This emergence of “talent” embarrassed him. To obscure his interest in the human figure in extremis, he learned to make other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other.

It would turn out that he disliked medical school. The dissecting room had revulsed him, not aroused him. He’d nearly fainted in his first, pathology lab. He hated the fanatic competition of medical school, the almost military hegemony of rank. He would quit before he flunked out. Forensic science was as close as he would get to the human body, but here, as he told interviewers, his task was reassembling, not dissecting.

The skull was nearly completed. Beautifully shaped, it seemed to Kyle, like a Grecian bust. The empty eye sockets and nose cavity another observer would think ugly, Kyle saw filled in, for the girl had revealed herself to him. The dream had been fleeting yet remained with him, far more vivid in his mind’s eye than anything he’d experienced in his own recent life.

Was she living, and where?

His lost daughter. His mind drifted from the skull and on to her, who was purely abstract to him, not even a name.

He’d seen her only twice, as an infant, and each time briefly. At the time, her mother, manipulative, emotionally unstable, hadn’t yet named her; or, if she had, for some reason she hadn’t wanted Kyle to know.

“She doesn’t need a name just yet. She’s mine.”

Kyle had been deceived by this woman, who’d called herself “Letitia,” an invented name probably, a stripper’s fantasy name, though possibly it was genuine. Letitia had sought out Kyle Cassity at the college, where he’d been a highly visible faculty member, thirty-nine years old. Her pretext for coming into his office was to seek advice about a career in psychiatric social work. She’d claimed to be enrolled in the night division of the college, which turned out to be untrue. She’d claimed to be a wife estranged from a husband who was “threatening” her, which had possibly been true.