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Whys this so good? No. 73: Carol Smith and thecipher in Room 214

by Alan Huffman | March 12, 2013

In all likelihood, The Cipher in Room 214 began with a fairly empty notebook. Most

stories do, but in this case it probably looked like it was going to stay that way. The

quotes that the Seattle Post-Intelligencers Carol Smith got from available sources, about a body

discovered at an upscale hotel, were clearly thin. There were fe w illuminating or evocative details.

What was known was that an anonymous woman, of indeterminate age, had died alone, by her

own hand, in a room at Seattles Hotel Vintage Park, leaving behind a brief and unrevealing suicide

note. She had given a false address and possessed no ID. There were no signs of a struggle. She

had checked in under the alias Mary Anderson and had, based o n forensic evidence, favored

Estee Lauder lipstick and velour outfits of black, navy and various shades of green (this was 1996;

the story ran on Oct. 6, 2005). From all appearances, she had read the Bible before she died the

23rd Psalm, to be exact, which is the one about the Lord protecting you as you walk through the

valley of the shadow of death.

Basically, that was it. The details were wanting. The overarching narrative

was MIA.

Would the desk clerk perhaps have something to add? No, the last person

to see Mary Anderson alive recalled nothing exceptional about her.

It might have ended there, with a newspaper brief: Mary Anderson

(possibly a pseudonym), age and hometown unavailable, died of an

apparent suicide on Oct. 9, 1996, in room 214 of the Hotel Vintage Park.

She leaves behind no known survivors. Interment in Crown Hill Cemetery,

paid for by King County.

But how could you leave it at that? Surely there was more. And if there

wasnt more, why wasnt there? At some point, Smith decided to push on

not to the next story in her queue, but to wherever Mary Ande rsons

cryptic tale might lead. What she came up with was a profound and

haunting story that owes its power to its very lack of information.

Rereading the story today, when so many peoples lives are aggressively tracked in real time on

Facebook and Twitter, it seems unfathomable that Mary Anderson could have vanished, in plain

view, without any record other than of her death, and likewise that Smiths story could succeed so

well without benefit of so much that seems crucial. If this were a work of fiction, the blanks could

have been filled, but as a work of journalism it would seem to be destined to fail. Yet Smith

decided to follow the story wherever it went, and found that its frustrating blanks which were

otherwise impediments to our understanding were in fact the story. Smiths newspaper article,

later anthologized in Volume 1 ofThe Best Creative Nonfiction, embraces the storys dead spaces

the way great music incorporates silence. Smith is open to more than meets the eye, and what she

found was not what might have been expected, nor even what she was looking for. The story

works because it is open, honest and accurately told, yet unbound by a conventional host of facts.

When confronted with the gaping mystery of life, we all have a tendency to either look away or to

try to impose our own measure of understanding, whether it is accurate or not. Part of a writers

role is to help frame things, to organize the barrage of often inscrutable information into acoherent, manageable narrative. Particularly for a journalist, whose job it is to deliver the who,

what, when, where, how and sometimes why, it is tempting to try to commandeer a narrative that

is as incalcitrant as Mary Andersons to either dismiss it or make it work for us. Even when we

choose to proceed, we may overemphasize the known as a way of minimizing the unknown

(represented by those empty pages), or to understate the storys importance due to our inability to

properly tell it. Sometimes we force things. Smith does not. She chooses to highlight the few

salient details that float, untethered, like unnamed stars, then to descend into a succession of

alluring box canyons, in which we encounter others who are literally attempting to describe the

unknown. She explores the void through the story of a woman who personifies it.

It was a risky approach, but it works because it focuses on what matters most on the wanting

itself, which is rarely so vividly conjured, even in painstakingly informative works.

The Cipher in Room 214 is not what we have come to think of as conventional narrative

nonfiction (if there is such a thing). Smith does not dazzle us with decorative reportage or fact-

based literary prose, though there are a few nice, telling descriptive passages. Neither does she

make her own presence known. She breaks from the nonfiction paradigm by stepping into the

margins of the verifiable world. Her story reads like reporting yet doesnt gloss over the spacesthat would normally be occupied by facts; instead, she highlights those spaces, which creates a

level of suspense more often reserved for fiction.

Anderson, for her part, may have intended to magnify the void, to have been purposefully obscure

in the end. Either way, that void is what ultimately interests Smith, who might have been expected

to be at odds with it. Together, she, Anderson and a group of concerned officials raise a litany of

questions, each one leading to another, accompanied by a precious collection of curious details. In

that manner Smith manages so keep us engaged, and without a hint of artifice or imposition.

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good?" -- Carol Smith and "The

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She writes:

If there was anything out of the ordinary about the womans arrival at the Hotel

Vintage Park in downtown Seattle that autumn day, it was only the weather a near

record 80 degrees. That much is recorded.

The woman herself slipped by unnoticed. She had called an hour or so earlier to

reserve the room. She took a cab, got out around the corner with two bags and

walked into the lobby alone on Oct. 9, 1996.

She signed the register Mary Anderson. No one spotted the hesitation marks in her

handwriting.

There were no tags on her luggage.

The desk clerk, Smith notes, recalled no accent, nor anything to make her seem out of place in theluxury boutique hotel. The woman appeared normal neatly groomed, with an expensive, olive-

green woven-leather purse, and paid $350 in cash for two nights in what Smith describes as an

elegant room at the end of a long, richly carpeted hallway. That hallway, in this story, is the portal

to the void:

This is where the trail of Andersons life ends. No one knows precisely what

happened next. Was she absorbed in the final details of erasing her identity

perhaps flushing away a drivers license and address book, r ipping the label o ff a

prescr iption bottle? Did she anticipate the confusion her act would cause? Did she

have second thoughts?

What we do know is this: She made no phone calls. Ordered nothing from room

service. Instead, in some unknown sequence, she put out the Do Not Disturb sign,

applied pink lipstick and combed her short auburn hair. She wrote a note on hotel

stationary, opened her Bible to the 23rd Psalm and mixed cyanide into a glass of

Metamucil.

Then she drank it.

In the note, addressed To whom it may concern, Anderson wrote simply that she had decided to

end her life and that no one was responsible for her death. She added, P.S. I have no relatives.

You can use my body as you choose. She signed it Mary Anderson.

After she failed to check out of the room, the hotel staff bypassed the lock and found her propped

against pillows, a King James Bible clasped to her chest. The room was neat and orderly a detail

that, given Andersons inexplicable death by poisoning, seems to mock our need to impose order

on the story. Andersons obsessive ordering is the readers enemy, but what are we to do

capitulate to the chaos of the unknown? Giving the two equal weight, Smith compels us to read

on:

And yet her death raises other questions: How can a person live to middle age

without leaving any ties to the world? What about her dry c leaner? The cosmetics

counter lady? Did they wonder about a troubled woman in their midst?

Somewhere, someone must realize that she doesnt come around anymore. To push

through life and touch no one, to develop no gravity that pulls anyone else into your

orbit, seems impossible.

And yet:

Even in her death, Mary Anderson has traction, a pull on certain strangers.

In her interviews with the people mostly government employees who wander those box

canyons, Smith found that, like us, they appear to be at once drawn to and repulsed by the

unknown. There is the former chief investigator for the King Count Medical Examiners Office who

ordered Andersons embalming and burial, who remained haunted by the questions surrounding

her life and death. The investigator, Jerry Webster, used all the available tools in his effort to

discover Andersons true identity, which was, after all, part of his job. But it clearly wasnt just a

job. He had a deep, abiding need to find out. Im convinced she left us clues to who she was, and

we missed them, Webster laments. He and other investigators tried to trace Andersons clothing

and makeup to their point of purchase, to no avail. They published an artists rendering of her face.

They checked the address she gave, which did not exist. Another investigator wondered if she had

intentionally sought to challenge them to figure out who she was. Her age was estimated at

between 33 and 45, and an autopsy concluded that she had been in good health, had had cosmetic

surgery and a copper IUD implanted in her uterus, and had never borne children. That was it.

Smith uses the familiar journalists tools to frame the mystery, providing facts about missingpersons and clinical depression, and at one point resorting to uncharacteristic and, under the

circumstances, strangely intrusive speculation. Ultimately, her research leads her, and us, back

to the unfathomable mystery of Andersons life and the deliberateness of her death. Though by

now were already acutely aware of it, she reminds us, The mind wants to make sense of it, to

find a reason.

In the end, Anderson won. No one found out who she was. There was no funeral service, and she

was buried in an unmarked grave, which she shares with an indigent man. Yet Josh Quarles, the

front desk manager at the hotel, who found her body, and otherwise recalls nothing remarkable

about her, tells Smith, Ive thought about her a lot over the years. It shouldnt be that easy to just

disappear.

In the introduction to the anthology where her story was reprinted, Smith is quoted: In many

ways, the story of Mary Anderson is the antithetical newspaper story. There was no news peg.

There was no resolution. And yet, she notes, Readers connected with the questions it raised

about who we are, and how we live in the world. To me, there is no higher calling for creative

nonfiction. Smiths piece is a fact-based paean to the unknown. It works because she is restrained

in her account, though not utterly detached in that the questions she raises are existential notsomething normally explored in journalism. She wants to know what happened, as everyone does,

but she recognizes that sometimes the truth falls between the lines, in what is, for whatever

reason, and perhaps of necessity, left out.

Alan Huffman has contributed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the Los Angeles Times; the New

York Times, Outside; Smithsonian; andWashington Post magazine, as well as to numerous

websites including the Huffington Post andThe Daily Beast. A former reporter for the Clarion-

Ledger, he is the author of five nonfiction books: Ten Point,Mississippi in Africa, Sultana,Were

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uettel/


3/3



2013 City & Regional Magazine Awards finalists

(Part 1: Feature Story)

With Nobody, and his la test, Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer, which

was published this month.

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