Island of Bones (13 page)

Louis went through the glass doors of the Fort Myers Police Station, his notes on Emma Fielding in his hand. He didn’t have much to tell Landeta. Just that if Emma Fielding hadn’t been reported missing, she probably would have run away soon anyway. The question was, had Frank Woods played any part in her disappearance? Had he been able to lure a vulnerable girl with a promise of protection and security? But if she had gone willingly, why did Frank Woods keep the newspaper clipping?

At the top of the staircase, Louis saw a uniformed officer coming out of Landeta’s office, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Hey,” Louis said, “tell Detective Landeta Louis Kincaid is here to see him, would you?”

The officer stuck his head back in. “Mel, Kincaid’s here.”

“Tell him I’ll be a minute.”

Louis stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the lobby below. The minutes passed. Finally, he flipped open his notebook and read his notes on Emma, hoping maybe something would click. Nothing. Nothing but the same nagging question. Why
hadn’t Emma Fielding —- or her body —- resurfaced after thirty-four years?

He walked down the hall and took a drink of water from the fountain, then moved back to the stairwell. Landeta’s door was still closed.

His eyes drifted down the hall. Small white signs stuck out from doorways, labeling the offices, ANIMAL CONTROL. COMMUNITY RELATIONS. CONFERENCE ROOM. BURGLARY AND FRAUD.

At the end of the hall, there
was a sign for RECORDS, with an arrow to the right.

Louis looked back at Landeta’s closed door.
Screw this.

He walked down the hall
toward Records. A plump redhead stood behind the counter. Her name tag said GEORGIA.

“Georgia,” Louis said.

She smiled, her eyes almost disappearing into her freckled face. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Louis Kincaid. I’m working with the Chief and Detective Landeta. I was hoping you could help me with something.”

“Oh yeah,” Georgia said. “The Chief called us a few days ago. Said to give you whatever you want. What’ll it be?”

“Missing persons information.”

“From when?”

Louis pulled out the Xerox copies he had made of the index cards from Frank’s drawer. “Sixty-four, sixty-five—”

“Oh, wow. We don’t have those on computer. I’ll have to get into the storage, and I really can’t right now.”

“I’ll look.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should call Detective Landeta.”

“He’s in a meeting. I’m doing this at his request.”

She shook her head. “Boy, I know how that goes. I do lots of things at his request. Copy this, look for that, read me this. It’s like the man is helpless, for crying out loud.”

Louis nodded. “I understand.”

She leaned toward Louis, her breasts resting on the counter. “You know what we call him? Lemon-head. Kind of a combination of the yellow glasses and the bald head.”

Louis grinned. “About the files...”

Georgia waved him behind the counter. “C’mon. I’ll show you.”

Louis followed her to the back and down one floor of concrete steps. She used the keys on her belt to open a door marked AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY. The door creaked and stuck, like it hadn’t been opened in a while. Georgia gave it a shove with her ample hip.

“We call this place the dungeon,” she said. “We don’t put much stuff down here anymore, just the old junk and the cold cases.”

Georgia hit a switch. The fluorescent light overhead fizzed, popped, and finally flickered on. One of the bulbs was burned out and the other gave out a feeble greenish light
.

“The files are sorted by date. You should start back there by the window,” Georgia said.
“If you want anything copied, just bring it upstairs.”

“Thanks.”

Georgia left, swinging her keys and humming.

Louis He headed down the rows of old black file cabinets toward the small dust-veiled window at the back, scanning the cabinet labels as he went.
He heard a dripping sound and finally he saw an old janitor’s sink, black with grime and rust.

The label on the cabinet next to it was covered in dust and he wiped it clean. January-
February 1964. He had to give the drawer a hard yank before it finally opened with a scrape and a cloud of dust.

All he had
were
the girls’ first names, so he scanned the file folder tabs for a Cindy or Cynthia. Nothing.

He moved to the next drawer down. There was a Cynthia Shattuck
file in the middle of the drawer. Inside was a single piece of paper, the responding officer’s report. It was three paragraphs. Stapled to the inside of the folder was the same photo Louis had seen on the index card in Frank’s office, but it was the original and it gave him a better look at Cindy Shattuck.

She had been a plain girl, her thin blond hair worn in the poker-straight style favored by girls in the sixties. Her eyes were heavily lined in black and she was wearing a black turtle
-neck sweater, like she was trying to look like Cher or one of The Beatles’ girlfriends.

Louis scanned the police report. There was no follow-up report or disposition, so Louis assumed Cindy Shattuck had never been found.

He set the file aside. Looking around, he spotted a small stool and pulled it over and moved on to the next cabinet. After almost two hours, he straightened and rubbed his neck. His nose was stuffy from the mold and his head was pounding from trying to read in the flickering green fluorescent. But he had found all the girls.

Cynthia Shattuck. Bo
rn 1948, disappeared 1964. She would now be thirty-nine.

Paula Berkowitz. Bo
rn 1945, disappeared 1965. She would be forty-two.

Mary Rubio. Bo
rn 1957, disappeared 1973. She would be thirty.

Angela Lopez. Bo
rn 1967, disappeared 1984. She would now be twenty.

If any of them were still alive.

All the files had photographs of the girls stapled to the insides of the folders, the same photos that had been given to the newspapers, the same photos Frank Woods had hidden in his office. All the folders had missing persons’ reports but only two had follow-up interviews.

None had a disposition. None of these girls had been found.

Louis stared at the four files. So thin. So incomplete. Buried down here for all these years, untouched until now. Just like the skull.

He knew in his heart they were dead. But maybe he could try to bring them home. Scooping up the files, he went back through the rows of cabinets. Shutting off the light, he leaned into the door, push
ed it closed and headed back upstairs.

He started early again the next morning, the four folders on the passenger seat of his car. He had no particular reason for starting in chronological order of the girls’ disappearances, except that it seemed natural. Maybe he was looking for a pattern, a sense of what they had in common besides having vanished.

Cindy Shattuck had lived in Matlacha and had been reported missing by a girlfriend in the summer of 1964. Louis had been unable to find the girlfriend
but had finally
traced Cindy’s mother, Nancy Shattuck, to a home in Cape Coral. She was now Nancy Buckle, married to a land developer.

The Buckles lived in a new development, a place where any natural vegetation had been scraped away to make room for homes too big for their lots and too brazen to be called tasteful.

The Buckle home was a yellow, two-story mini-mansion. The lawn was the size of a putting green, and there was a sign in front that read ANOTHER STUART BUCKLE CUSTOM HOME.

Louis walked to the door, Cindy Shattuck’s folder in his
hand. He rang the bell and heard a few bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” jingle inside the house.

A woman appeared behind the door, her face close to the glass. Her
heavily lined eyes blinked several times when he held up his state-issued private investigator’s ID card.

He leaned close. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

The door swung open. She was a small woman, dressed in emerald-green capri pants and a blue-green sleeveless top. She had reddish brown hair that sprouted from her head like unraveled cassette tapes. She was in her fifties but clearly not happy about it.

“Mrs. Buckle?”

“May I ask who you are?”

“Louis Kincaid. Private investigator.”

“What are you investigating?”

“The disappearance of your daughter, Cindy.”

The raccoon eyes ignited with a flash of shock. “Excuse me?”

“Your daughter
, Cindy?”

“She didn’t disappear.”

Louis slipped the report from the folder. “According to this, she did.”

Nancy Buckle tipped a bright pink fingernail toward the paper. “What is that?”

“A report taken by the Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Matlacha. Her friend Doris reported her missing August twenty-third, 1964.”

“Doris was a stupid girl,” Nancy said, crossing her arms. “They both were.”

Louis tucked the folder under his arm and pulled out his small notebook. “Mind if I take notes?”

“Not at all.”

“So you’re saying Cindy didn’t disappear?”

“
No, I threw her out.”

“Why did you do that, Mrs. Buckle?”

“There were problems.”

“
What kind of problems? Drugs? School?”

Nancy Buckle’s expression soured.
“Men. The girl hung on every man I brought home. When she was little, they thought it was cute. Hell, even I thought it was cute. But when she turned sixteen, it wasn’t so cute anymore.”

“So you told her to leave?”

“Yeah. I caught her wagging her ass in front of my third husband Larry. Like the poor man could help himself with something like that prancing around every day in that little bitty place we had.”

Louis fought to keep his expression neutral. “Did she stay in Matlacha after that? Even for a while?”

“Have you ever been to Matlacha, young man?”

“Been through it.”

“Exactly. It’s a place you go through and keep going. I grew up there. I had Cindy at sixteen, and it was just her and me.”

And all the uncles passing through, Louis thought.

“Did she have a boyfriend she might have gone to?” he asked.

“Probably. I was waitressing at the Snook Inn and sometimes she helped out there. Lots of guys passed through
there -- tourists,
fisherman, locals. She could have hooked up with one of them.”

“What about her father? Could she have gone to him?”

Nancy Buckle gave a harsh laugh. “You kidding me? She never knew him. I told you, I was sixteen. Boys leave. They don’t hang around once they fuck up your life.”

The sun was suddenly very hot on his neck. He drew a thin breath and went on. “Did she take anything with her when she left?”

“She had nothing to take except some old shorts and T- shirts, and I certainly can’t tell you if she took any of them. I only know I threw a lot of shit out later.”

“Nothing personal? Jewelry?”

“You want to know how screwy this girl was? She took her damn sock monkey.”

“A stuffed monkey?”

“Yeah. Some old raggedy thing her grandma made for her before she croaked.”

Louis took a step back, suddenly anxious to get the hell out of here. Nancy Buckle watched him, the humidity starting to melt her makeup.

“If you see her,” Nancy said, fanning herself, “don’t tell her where we are now. Tell her I’m dead or something.”

Louis stared at her.

“I don’t want her coming around here, you know?”

Louis picked up the next folder off the car seat. Paula Berkowitz. Disappeared in 1965. She had been twenty, but still living at home with her parents on Pine Island.
She had worked as a checkout girl at the Winn-Dixie on Stringfellow Road. Her parents reported her missing on a Sunday morning in July after they discovered an open window and untouched bed in her bedroom. The only thing missing, besides Paula Berkowitz, was one small suitcase.

The Lee County Sheriff’s office, which had taken the call, had chalked it up
as a runaway. Louis could tell that much from the paucity of information in the old report. The parents had insisted their daughter would never run off, but Louis knew what the police did -- that kids often did things mothers and fathers never saw coming.

He rechecked the address he had for Clara and Ed Berkowitz. Lucky for him, they were still living in the same house after twenty-two years. He pulled up to the neat bungalow and cut the engine. As with Nancy Buckle, he was
counting on catching the Berkowitzes off-guard. People had a way of saying things they didn’t intend to if you caught them unprepared.

He rang the bell. A moment later, the door opened and a woman of about sixty answered the door. She was small, with a neat nest of gray hair
,
and blue-gray eyes, which looked out at Louis suspiciously.

“Mrs. Berkowitz?”

She nodded, half hiding behind the door.

“I’m an investigator working for the Fort Myers police,” Louis said. “I would like to talk to you about your daughter Paula.”

“Paula was not my daughter,” she said. “My name is Ruth. Paula was my niece. I was married to her father’s brother, Harvey.”

“Are her parents home?” Louis asked.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Passed in eighty-one and eighty- three.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They left us this house,” Ruth said. “My husband, Harvey, passed in eighty-five. I live here alone.”

Louis didn’t say anything, disappointed. Ruth Berkowitz pushed open the screen. “It’s awfully warm today. Why don’t you come inside?”

Louis stepped in, grateful for the cooler air. He pulled out his notebook.

“Would you like to sit down?” Ruth Berkowitz asked. “I was about to have an iced tea and I can make one for you.”

Louis hesitated, looking at Mrs. Berkowitz’s eager face. It was plain that the woman wanted some company. “That would be nice, thank you,” Louis said.

He followed her into the small living room. It was done in bright blues with dozens of pieces of old blue and white china hung on the walls and lining shelves. A blue parakeet was chirping in its cage by the window. Mrs. Berkowitz disappeared into the kitchen and came back with two tumblers
of iced tea. Louis took his glass and thanked her. The tea had a sprig of fresh mint in it.

“Mrs. Berkowitz
—-” Louis began.

“Call me Ruth, please.”

“Ruth,” Louis said, setting the glass on a coaster. “Did your sister and her husband talk about Paula’s disappearance much?”

Ruth sat down in a blue wing chair, holding her glass. “In the early days, after her disappearance, they did.”

“So they never thought she left on her own?”

“Clara never saw Paula for the way she was, not even after the thing in high school.”

“What thing?”

Ruth hesitated then took a sip of her iced tea. “It was cruel, you know, one of those things kids do. Some boys made up
a game where the loser had to take the homeliest girl to some dance. Paula was the girl they chose. She found out later.”

Louis was writing.

“She was overweight, you see,” Ruth went on. “She had a sister who was thin as a stick, and well, you know, in the sixties, thin was everything. All the girls wanted to look like Twiggy.”

“Paula worked at the grocery store, right?” Louis asked.

Ruth frowned. “She did? Oh, wait...now I remember. Yes, at the Winn-Dixie. Clara thought if Paula had her own money it would boost her self-esteem. I knew it would take more than fifteen dollars a week to do that, but I couldn’t tell Clara that.”

Louis thought about his next question carefully before he asked it
. “Did she ever try to commit suicide?”

Ruth’s little eyes widened. “Heavens, I don’t think so. I’m sure Clara would have told me.” She paused. “But then again, maybe not. Back then, we didn’t talk about things like that much.”

“Do you know if she had any close friends?”

Ruth shook her head. “I was living in Minnesota then. I didn’t know Paula well. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe a boy? One boy who she was close to?”

“I would’ve heard. Paula getting a boyfriend would’ve been big news to Clara.”

“Is there anything else you can think of that might make a difference?” Louis asked.

Ruth thought for a minute, her finger on her powdered cheek. “I do know Paula desperately wanted children. When my daughter had her children, Paula would send her all kinds of baby things. She spent all of her work money on a baby she would never probably even meet.”

Ruth looked up at Louis. “Kind of sad, isn’t it?”

Louis pulled the Mustang into a driveway at 336 Isle of Capri Boulevard, stopping behind a monstrous RV with Florida plates. The RV was four times the size of the Chevy van that sat next to it, and much newer.

Louis climbed out of his car, and walked along the side, checking out the inside. It was prettier than most homes. Bags of groceries sat on the counter.

He looked up at the house just as a woman came out the front door. She was carrying a box of kitchen pans and utensils. She was probably forty-five, with a trim, tanned body. Her shoulder-length blond hair looked like satin and swung in sync with her hips as she walked. She saw Louis and stopped.

“Can I help you?”

“Louis Kincaid. I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for Julie Plummer?”

“I’m Julie,” she said, coming forward slowly. She stopped at the RV door.

Louis opened the door for her. She hesitated then set the box down just inside the door, turning to face him.

“Thanks.” She brushed her hair back. “Now, what exactly are you investigating?”

“The disappearance of Mary Rubio. You were listed as the reporting party on the police report.”

Julie looked at him blankly.

“Mary Rubio. The report says you were her foster mother.”

“Oh...Mary. Yes, I remember.”

How could she forget her so easily?

Julie brought up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she stared at Louis. “Why are you asking about Mary after all these years?”

“Her disappearance might be related to a new case,” Louis said. He pulled out his notebook. “Can you tell me anything about her? How she disappeared, her habits...”

Julie’s thin brows knitted into a frown, bringing a wrinkle
to
her otherwise placid face. “I only had Mary for a few months.”

“What was she like?”

Julie hesitated. “She was trouble. She was strange, emotionally unstable, disruptive, and depressed. In the short time I had her, she tried to harm herself at least a dozen times.”

“How?”

“She’d cut herself, on the arms and thighs. Once she pushed a lit cigarette into the back of her hand.”

“Did she ever try to harm anyone else?”

“No, just herself. Sometimes she would scream at the other kids for no reason. One time, she tied one of our toddlers to a chair and tried to force-feed him some oatmeal. Strange.”

“What was her background?”

“Before us?” Julie pushed her hair back from her face. “Well, she was born to an alcoholic mother, who started pimping her out at twelve for drug money. She ran away the first time at thirteen and again at fourteen. That’s when DCF pulled her into the system. We were her fifteenth foster home in two years. One family only kept her six hours.”