Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

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:

…Client’s repressive nature is extremely prominent. She seems to live in a constant state of denial-denial of the effects of her father’s death, denial of her tortured relationship with both mother and stepfather, denial of her own sexual inclinations which in this therapist’s opinion are bisexual and bear incestuous overtones. Client follows classic passive-aggressive behavioral patterns and is wholly unaccepting of any attempts to gain self-awareness. Client has dangerously low self-esteem, confused sexual identity, and in this therapist’s opinion, a potentially lethal fantasy version of how the world works. If further sessions do not yield progress, may suggest voluntary committal to a qualified psychiatric hospital…

D. Bourne

“What’s that?” Warren wanted to know.

“It’s the session notes of Karen’s psychiatrist.”

“Well, what the hell was she doing with it?”

I glanced down at his confused face. “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”

With Warren ’s blessing, I kept the session notes and pictures of David Wetterau with the other woman, then I gathered the other photos, the clothes, the broken watch and passport and wedding invitations, and placed them back into the box. I looked in at what served as evidence of Karen Nichols’s existence, and I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger and closed my eyes for a second.

“People can be tiring, can’t they?” Warren said.

“Yeah, they can.” I stood and walked to the door.

“Man, you must be tired all the time.”

As he locked the barn back up outside, I said, “These two guys you said were around Karen.”

“Yeah.”

“Were they together?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

“Anything else you can tell me about them?”

“The redheaded guy, like I said, was a snot. A weasel. Kinda guy thinks he’s smarter’n everyone else. He peeled off a stack of hundreds when he checked her in like they were ones. You know? Karen’s all sagging into him, and he’s looking at her like she’s meat, winking at me and Holly. A real piece of shit.”