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had luminescent green eyes, and unlike her chlorine-saturated hair they hadn’t faded the slightest bit with age. People actually found them a little unsettling. Laurel certainly did. She guessed that Katherine was fifty, not quite twice her age, but she was toned and trim and passed for a woman considerably younger. The two of them had swum together at the UVM pool for six years, ever since Laurel had returned to the water after the attack, meeting at the changing room weekday mornings at 5:45. Two decades ago, when Katherine was only a few years older than Laurel was now, Katherine had founded the homeless shelter—and she had created the institution virtually on her own. Laurel had always viewed this as a daunting accomplishment. She wasn’t quite sure she could start a lemonade stand on the sidewalk outside her apartment house on her own. Along with her twin boys in high school, Katherine considered the shelter her life’s work.
Katherine strode with her usual confidence into Laurel’s office a little before lunch on a Monday in September, cradling in her arms a beaten-up cardboard banker’s box. She dropped it with a small thud on Laurel’s floor, and then sank into the folding chair opposite her social worker’s industrial-strength metal castoff of a desk—a desk identical to the one Katherine used in her own, only slightly larger office.
“There was an envelope, too,” Katherine said, “but I forgot it on my side table. And you can’t believe the piles of newspapers and junk mail he managed to amass in a single year. The guy was an unbelievable pack rat.”
Katherine had a habit that some people (especially men) found annoying, but usually it didn’t bother Laurel: She would begin every conversation as if it had been going on for some time.
“Who?”
“Bobbie Crocker. You know he died yesterday, right? At the Hotel New England?”
“No, I didn’t know,” Laurel said, lowering her voice. When one of their clients died, they all grew a little somber. Sometimes it didn’t even matter how well they had known the person: It was the idea that they were the only ones who stood witness to that life at the end. They all keenly felt how small and spare and diminished that individual’s existence had become. “Tell me what happened?”
“You hadn’t heard?”
“I’ve been with clients or in meetings all day.”
“Oh, Laurel, I’m so sorry. God, I didn’t mean to break it to you this way,” she said. This might have been true, but Laurel knew it was also possible that this was precisely the way Katherine had meant to share this news with her. Because of her history, people either treated Laurel with excessive delicacy when something tragic or sad had happened, or they steamrolled clumsily ahead. Her sister, Carol, was the one who informed her that their father had died, and they must have been on the phone a solid minute before she realized that Carol was telling her in the most convoluted manner possible what had occurred. Her big sister was so evasive at first that for easily thirty seconds Laurel thought she was phoning with the essentially inconsequential information that their father was on a business trip overseas somewhere and they might not hear from him for a while. She honestly couldn’t understand why her sister was bothering to call at all. In the case of Bobbie Crocker’s death, Laurel suspected that Katherine may have chosen the opposite tactic, the inadvertent bludgeon, in which her strategy was to act as if Laurel already knew that one of their clients had passed away.
“Go on, talk. Tell me,” Laurel insisted, and Katherine did, beginning with the way another tenant had found Bobbie on his way to church, and ending with how easily—how tragically easy—it had been for Emily Young, his caseworker, and her to clean out his apartment on Sunday afternoon.
“Took about two hours,” Katherine said. “Can you imagine? Lord, when my parents die it will take about two years to go through all the stuff they’ve amassed in their lives. But a guy like Bobbie? The clothes went into a couple of plastic bags: the plastic bags for the Dumpster and the ones for the Salvation Army. And trust me: The ones for the Dumpster were a lot heavier. Mostly it was just newspapers and magazines.”
“Any letters at all? Any sign of family.”
“Nothing really. I mean, there were some snapshots in that envelope, but I only looked at them for a second. I don’t think they really had anything to do with Bobbie. You knew he was a veteran, right? World War Two. So he gets a little burial plot up at the cemetery by the fort in Winooski. There’s going to be a small ceremony tomorrow. Can you make it?”
“Of course,” Laurel said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“He was such a likable guy.”
“He was.”
“Though also a bit of a lunatic.”
“But a sweet one.”
“Indeed,” Katherine agreed.
“And for an old man, he sure had a lot of spunk,” Laurel said, conjuring a picture in her mind of Bobbie Crocker and recalling some of their last conversations. They were, invariably, as interesting as they were demented. They were not unlike the sort of banter she shared with many of the people who passed through the shelter, in that she could safely presume easily half of what he was telling her was a complete fabrication or delusion. The difference—and in Laurel’s mind it was a substantial one—was that victimization was rarely a part of Bobbie’s anecdotes. This was atypical for a schizophrenic, but she understood it was also likely that she only saw him at his best: By the time she met him, he was once again being properly medicated. Still, he seldom complained to Laurel or lashed out, and only infrequently did he suggest that he was owed anything by the world. Certainly, Bobbie believed there were conspiracies out there: Usually, they had something to do with his father. But as a rule he was confident he had dodged them. “The last time I saw him was two weeks ago at the walkathon,” she added.
“Remember what you talked about?”
“I do. He told me he’d been at a civil rights freedom march in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1963 or 1964. We were all about to begin—well, not Bobbie—and he was hovering at the starting line, savoring the crowds and the sunshine and the breeze off the lake. When I asked him to tell me more, he changed the subject. Told me instead how he started every Tuesday and Thursday with a bowl of bran flakes floating in exactly one-half cup of orange juice instead of milk, because he worried about his cholesterol. He said he cut the sweetness of the juice with a sprinkle of soy sauce. It sounded pretty repulsive.”
“You ever hear him bellow hello?”
“Absolutely.” It was common knowledge at the shelter that Bobbie’s voice, relentlessly booming even though he was now over eighty, was inappropriate anywhere but a ball game or a bar.
“Honey, I’m home…less!” Katherine roared suddenly, parroting Bobbie’s common cry—a sitcom dad amped on methamphetamines—when he would arrive at the shelter to see if any of the staff he knew were on duty that day. Apparently, he had used that line even when he really was homeless, when he first appeared at the shelter more tired and hungry than he’d ever been in his life. Even then he was no skittish stray cat.
Slightly paranoid and subject to occasional hallucinations? Yes. Skittish? No.
“He used to give me so much grief—”
“Good-natured, I hope,” Katherine said.
“Usually. Whenever he was hanging around the shelter and I was here he would tease me for being so green. I remember when we met he thought I was still in college. Couldn’t believe I’d been out for a couple of years.”
“He share with you any patented Bobbie Crocker wisdom?”
“Let’s see. He said I was too young to know the first thing about life on the streets. He told me the only truly safe drinking water left in Vermont was forty miles away in some spring that fed the Catamount River. He told me that Lyndon Baines Johnson—yes, the president—was still alive, and he knew where. He claimed he’d once partied for a weekend with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. And he said he grew up in a house that looked out across a cove at a castle.”
“I loved that man’s fantasies. So many of the people we meet think they’re Rambo or the pope. Or they have millions of dollars hidden in Swiss bank accounts. Or the CIA—or Rambo, the pope, and the CIA—are after them. Not Bobbie. He dreamed of castles. Gotta love it.”
“Well, he did see the devil,” Laurel said.
“Excuse me?”
“He only mentioned it to me once. But he told Emily, too. One time he saw the devil.”
“Did he say what the devil looked like?”
“He looked like a person, I think.”
“Anyone in particular?” asked Katherine.
“Someone he knew, I’m sure. But that would be a question for Emily.”
“How serious were the drugs he was taking when he saw him?”
“Maybe the devil was a woman.”
“Or her?” Katherine said, correcting herself.
“I’d say very serious. You don’t see the devil on Thunderbird.”
Katherine smiled ruefully, tilting her head back toward the screen in the one tiny window in Laurel’s office, hoping to catch a wisp of the wind. She was, it seemed to Laurel, summoning a memory of the man herself. Bobbie—and he was always Bobbie to the social workers and the residents of the Hotel New England—was a human skeleton when he arrived at the shelter, but he recovered quickly: One of the side effects of his antipsychotic was weight gain. He never became truly rotund, but within three or four months he had regained the paunch of the poor who live on fast food and the carb-laden breads and pastas that were heaped onto plates at the emergency day station and the Salvation Army. Food heavy enough to help the hungry feel full and keep warm. Lots of peanut butter. He’d shrunk with old age, but he still had presence and bulk. His face was hidden up to his eyes with a white beaver beard that retained a few small patches of black, but those eyes were what everyone noticed because they were deep and dark and smiling, and his eyelashes were almost girlishly long.
“He was quite a character,” Katherine purred after a moment. “Did you know he was a photographer?”
“I know he said he was,” Laurel answered, “but I don’t think there was much to it. I assume it was a hobby or something. Maybe a part-time job he had before his mind went completely. Shooting class pictures at elementary schools. Or babies at Sears.”
“There might be more to it than that. Bobbie didn’t have any cameras or photo stuff in his room, but he had these. Look in the box,” Katherine said, waving languidly down at the carton at her feet.
“These being…?”
“Pictures. Photos. Negatives. There’s a ton in there. All very retro.”
Laurel peered around the side of the desk. Katherine pushed the box toward her with her foot, so she could reach it and pull apart the top flaps. The first image Laurel spied was an eleven-by-fourteen black and white of easily two hundred teenage girls in identical white button-down shirts and black skirts on a football field playing with Hula-Hoops. It looked like it was some sort of halftime extravaganza: Synchronized Hula-Hooping, maybe. The next one, based on the modest two-piece bathing suit the subject was wearing, was from that same era: A surfer girl was posing atop her surfboard on the beach, pretending to ride an actual wave. Laurel picked it up and saw scrawled legibly on the back in pencil, “Real Gidget, not Sandra Dee. Malibu.” She thumbed through a few more, all black and white, all from the late 1950s or early 1960s, until she came upon one she thought might have been a very young Paul Newman. She held it up for her boss and raised her eyebrows.
“Yup,” Katherine said, “I think it’s him, too. Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the back. No annotation or clue.”
She put Paul Newman back in the box and pawed briefly through the prints. Toward the bottom, she discovered long strips of negatives, none of which had been placed in sleeves. Like the photos, they had been dumped unceremoniously into the carton.
“And you think Bobbie Crocker took these?” she asked Katherine, sitting back in her chair.
“I do.”
“Why?”
“They were in his apartment,” Katherine said. “And when he was brought in off the street last year, he had this old canvas duffel with photos in it that he insisted were his. I assume most of these were in it. He wouldn’t take a bed until he was sure that the lockers were safe—that his locker would be safe. He was literally going to sleep with them, but there were only top bunks left in the shelter, so he couldn’t.”
The homeless often brought an object or two into the shelter of totemic (and, to them, titanic) importance—that single item that either reminded them of who they were or what their life had been like before it began to unravel. A certificate from a spelling bee they’d won as a child. An engagement ring they’d been unwilling to pawn. A teddy bear—and even the veterans from the Vietnam and Gulf wars sometimes had a stuffed animal with them. Laurel had seen plenty of family snapshots in the mix that was checked into the lockers, too. But she’d never before seen anything that resembled either serious art or professional accomplishment. And she had taken enough photography courses and snapped enough pictures herself to know with confidence that these photographs were interesting from both a journalistic and an artistic perspective. She thought it was even possible that somewhere she had seen the image of the teen girls with their Hula-Hoops—if not this exact photograph, then perhaps one from the same shoot.
“Couldn’t someone else have taken the photos and given them to him?” Laurel asked. “A brother or sister, maybe? A friend? Maybe somebody died and left them to him.”
“Go talk to Sam,” Katherine said, referring to the manager who had been on duty the night Bobbie Crocker had arrived. “He knows more about Bobbie than I do. And talk to Emily. I’m pretty sure he’d told them both he was a photographer. Of course, he wouldn’t show them the pictures. Not ever. Apparently, no one could see them—or else.”
“Or else what?”
“Oh, who knows? Welcome to Bobbie’s World. Emily managed to sneak a peek at the pictures pretty soon after he first arrived, just to make sure that he wasn’t some horrid child pornographer. But you know how busy Emily is. The woman’s life is chaos. Once she saw they were innocent, she didn’t think about them again until she was going through his room with me yesterday.”