Kate's Suicide

Kate's suicide is the culmination of a life lived in calculated cruelty and isolation. Having spent decades using her intelligence and lack of conscience to control and destroy those around her, she finally encounters a truth she cannot manipulate: the possibility that she has missed something fundamental about human goodness. Her death is not a moment of weakness but a deliberate, almost ritualistic act of self-erasure, carried out with the same cold precision she applied to every other aspect of her existence.

The Gray Room and the Final Preparations

In the weeks before her death, Kate had retreated increasingly into the gray room she had built as a lean-to onto her bedroom. The room had no windows, its walls painted a dark gray, and it was furnished only with a large chair, a reading table, and a floor lamp. She claimed the light hurt her eyes, but the room was in truth a burrow, a place to hide from the fear that had begun to stalk her. On the day of her suicide, after dismissing her staff with instructions not to disturb her until morning, she moved through her final preparations with methodical care. She went to her desk and, forcing her arthritic hand to write plainly, composed a brief will: "I leave everything I have to my son Aron Trask." She dated it and signed it "Catherine Trask." Then she poured cold tea into a cup and carried it to the gray room, setting it on the reading table. Before the final act, she attended to her appearance: she combed her hair, rubbed rouge over her face, covered it lightly with powder, and applied her usual pale lipstick. She even filed and cleaned her nails. These were not the gestures of a woman in despair but of one preparing for a ceremony.

The Capsule and the Ritual of Self-Erasure

Around her neck Kate wore a chain on which were strung two safe-deposit keys, a gold watch, and a little steel tube. From this tube she now shook a single gelatin capsule containing six grains of morphine—a good, sure margin. She smiled at it. The capsule was her final escape, her ultimate "Drink me" bottle, a reference to the Alice in Wonderland fantasy that had sustained her since childhood. As a little girl, Cathy had imagined that by drinking from a bottle labeled "Drink me" she could grow smaller and smaller, disappearing under a leaf or into an anthole, safe from the forest of enemies that surrounded her. Now, she put the capsule in her mouth and swallowed it with the cold tea. She forced her mind to stay on Alice, who was so tiny and waiting. But other faces peered in from the sides of her eyes—her father and mother, Charles, Adam, Samuel Hamilton, and then Aron, and she could see Cal smiling at her. His glint of an eye said, "You missed something. They had something and you missed it."

The Final Moments and the Disappearance

As the morphine took effect, a warm numbness crept into Kate's arms and legs. The pain was going from her hands. Her eyelids felt heavy. She yawned. She thought or said or thought, "Alice doesn't know. I'm going right on past." Her eyes closed, and a dizzy nausea shook her. She opened her eyes and stared about in terror. The gray room darkened, and the cone of light from the reading lamp flowed and rippled like water. Then her eyes closed again, and her fingers curled as though they held small breasts. Her heart beat solemnly, and her breathing slowed as she grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared—and she had never been. The body was discovered the next morning by Joe Valery, who found her in the gray room, her head deeply cushioned in the pillow, her lips bloodless, her eyes shining dully between half-closed lids. He knew she was dead.

The Aftermath and the Unfinished Business

Kate's suicide set in motion a chain of events that would reshape the lives of those she had abandoned. The will she left, leaving everything to Aron Trask, was discovered by Sheriff Quinn, who also found the safe-deposit keys and, in the bank vault, over a hundred thousand dollars in gold certificates—and nothing else but a marriage certificate. Quinn brought the will to Adam, who was devastated by the news and wept, crying "Oh, my poor darling!" The sheriff advised Adam to tell Aron everything, but Aron had already enlisted in the army and was soon to be killed in France. The money, earned from the exploitation of human weakness, would pass to the son who had been most horrified by the truth of his mother's life. Kate's death, like her life, left a legacy of pain and unresolved questions, a final testament to the emptiness of a soul that had chosen cruelty over connection and had, in the end, found no one to love and nothing to live for.