I Am No One You Know (25 page)

His lips brushed against the woman’s cheek, in passing.

I
N
P
ROFESSOR
C
ASSITY’S
spacious high-ceilinged office adjacent to his laboratory there was a sofa. Old, battered, but comfortable, having been put to variegated pragmatic uses over the years. If needed, he could sleep there.

“N
OW 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, hair styles, gradations of color of the eyes.

“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: so soft.

M
ARRIAGE: 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 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.”

T
HE 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.

Yet not clearly, for her face was in shadow. That hazy-gray shadow where fluorescent lighting doesn’t reach. A perverse and sickly sort of shadow like a gauzy forgetful mind. Nor was her voice clear. She stood about fifteen feet from Kyle in the doorway leading to his office. Turned slightly at the waist as if she’d only just noticed him, or if she meant to show her small but pointed breasts, her slender waist. A man’s hands could fit around that waist. In her ears glittered silver hoop earrings. Her smile was sweetly shy, hesitant. Her chin was narrow
as a child’s, her nose was small and snubbed. Her skin was pale, smooth, luminous. Her hair in a wavy, lustrous tangle fell past her shoulders and looked as if it had just been brushed.

Dr. Cassity! Dad-dy. See, I revere you?

Kyle woke, startled. His head had slumped forward onto his crossed arms, he’d slept at his workbench beneath glaring fluorescent lights. Against his warm forehead, an impress of bone fragments. He rubbed his face, his dazzled eyes.

Wanting to protest, nothing like that had ever happened to him before.

T
HE 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 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 was 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. That such things should be! That such things should be allowed! Someone, a man like Kyle’s own grandfather, had the privilege of taking up a sharp instrument and making an incision in human flesh and beginning to cut…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 pencil. 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.

“My hands just move, I guess. They have their own way of thinking.”

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.

It would turn out, 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 re-assembling, not dissecting.

T
HE 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 onto 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.

Kyle had been flattered by the young woman’s attention. Her obvious attraction to him. In time, he’d given her money. Always cash, never a check. And he never wrote to her: though she left passionate love notes for him beneath his office door, beneath the windshield of his car, he never reciprocated. As one familiar with the law he knew: never commit yourself in handwriting! As, in more recent years, Kyle Cassity would never send any e-mail message he wouldn’t have wanted to see exposed to all the world.

He hadn’t fully trusted Letitia but he’d been sexually aroused by her, he liked being in her company. She was a dozen years younger than he, reckless, unreliable. Not pretty, but very sexual, seductive. After she vanished from his life he would suppose, sure, she’d been seeing other men all along, taking money from other men. Yet he accepted the pregnancy as his responsibility. She’d told him the baby would be his, and he hadn’t disbelieved her. He had no wish to dissociate himself from Letitia at this difficult time in her life, though his own children were twelve, nine, five years old. And Vivian loved him, and presumably trusted him, and would have been deeply wounded if she’d known of his affair.

Though possibly Vivian had known. Known something. There was the evidence of Kyle’s infrequent lovemaking with her, a fumbling in silence.

But in December 1976 Letitia and the infant girl abruptly left New Jersey. Even before the birth Letitia had been drifting out of her married
lover’s life. He’d had to assume that she found another man who meant more to her. He had to assume that his daughter would never have been told who her true father was. Twenty-six years later, if she were still alive, Letitia probably wouldn’t have remembered Kyle Cassity’s name.

“N
OW: TELL US
your name, dear.”

After a week and a day of painstaking work, the skull was complete. All the bone fragments had been used, and Kyle had made synthetic pieces to hold the skull together. Excited now, he made a mold of the skull and on this mold he began to sculpt a face in clay. Rapidly his fingers worked as if remembering. In this phase of the reconstruction he played new CDs to celebrate: several Bach cantatas, Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, Maria Callas as Tosca.

E
ARLY IN
O
CTOBER
the victim was identified: her name was Sabrina Jackson, a part-time community college student studying computer technology and working as a cocktail waitress in Easton, Pennsylvania. The young woman had been reported missing by her family in mid-May. At the time of her disappearance she’d been twenty-three, weighed one hundred fifteen pounds, her photographs bore an uncanny resemblance to the sketches Kyle Cassity and his assistant had made. In March she’d broken up with a man with whom she’d been living for several years and she’d told friends she was quitting school and quitting work and “beginning a new life” with a new male friend who had a “major position” at one of the Atlantic City casinos. She’d packed suitcases, shut up her apartment, left a message on her answering service that was teasingly enigmatic.

No one had heard from Sabrina Jackson since. No one in Atlantic City recalled having seen her, and nothing had come of detectives questioning casino employees. Nor did anyone in Easton seem to know the identity of the man with whom she’d gone away. Sabrina
Jackson had disappeared in similar ways more than once in the past, in the company of men, and so her family and friends had been hesitant at first to report her missing. Always there was the expectation that Sabrina would “turn up.” But the sketches of the Toms River victim bore an unmistakable resemblance to Sabrina Jackson, and the silver earrings found with the remains were identified as hers.