She's Not There (2 page)

Now Aggie smiled at me and said, “Hey, honey, c'mon in. I was just about to go see what the hell was perturbin' the gulls”—she squinted at me—“but first I'm goin' to have to ask what's perturbin' you? You seen a ghost?”

She wore a housedress, the kind I suppose you can buy only in a Wal-Mart. Instead of the top two buttons, a rhinestone brooch was holding the front of the dress together.

I said, “Don't go out there. Just call that cop in town.”

“What cop?”

“The one from Providence. There's a body out in the crossroads.”

She hustled to the window. “I don't see no body.”

“Aggie, where's your phone?”

She pressed her face against the glass, craning her neck. “Whose body? Not one of ours, I hope.”

“A girl. A girl from the camp.”

“A girl? Dear God! What, was she hit by a car? Damnable tourists. I'm always the first to say—”

“I know. Aggie, the phone.”

She came away from the window. “Don't you worry now, I'll call over to Tommy's. Forget about that state cop. Hung over at this hour.” She was probably right. I'd met him the day before, on duty for the summer season. He was completely played out. Tommy was the island's constable.

Aggie picked up a table phone from behind her counter and set it in front of her. She dialed and waited. She looked up at me. “All bloody, was she?”

“No.”

Then Aggie spoke into the phone, slowly and clearly, the way a person talks to someone suffering from dementia. “Jake? Now Jake, honey, this is Aggie …
Aggie
. You listen to Aggie very carefully. Get Tommy. Tell him to hurry up to my place. Pronto. We got an emergency. Tell Tommy it's an
e-mer-gen-cy
. So what did Aggie say we got, Jake?” She waited. “That's right. Good boy. An
e-mer-gen-cy
.” She hung up. She said to me, “Jake'll understand enough to get him. Tommy'll come up here by way of the crossroads. Hope he don't bring Jake along.” I'd met Jake. He lived with the constable. Jake was particularly deranged.
No
, Joe had said.
Autistic
.

The pitch of the gulls' cries had ratcheted up many decibels. Aggie headed toward the window again. “Buncha new gulls are headin' in. I was hopin' none of my guests would wake up for a while. That way I can tell 'em they missed breakfast. Won't sleep through this kind of racket, though.” She glanced nervously at the stairs behind her. Again, she asked me, “Hit by a car, was she?”

I started to say no to her question. The body would have been far less gruesome if it had been hit by a car, if there were blood all over her. Blood is normal, a contorted musculature is not. So this time I said, “Yes.” It worked. She cringed and pulled away from the view out the window.

My guess was that a drug or combination of drugs had killed the girl. There had been no wounds or any signs of asphyxia, nothing around her neck, no marks. Some drug—or else a mix of several—had devastated her central nervous system violently contracting every muscle. What drug or drugs might cause so tortured a death I had no idea. I depended on my crime lab to answer questions like that. I wished I was one of those people who could honestly say, Where do the kids get this stuff? I already knew the answer. They get it from hard-core addicts who sell drugs to make money to buy drugs for themselves. Where the addicts get the drugs from is always the more imperative question, one Joe Barnow is paid to figure out.

Aggie said, “Goddamned tourists drivin' around here like we was Boston. Least they're killin' their own.”

My look stopped her short.

“Sorry, Poppy. Joe would understand. And you bein' his guest and all, I figured…”

Joe would understand? Block Islanders felt a big affection for him. Joe goes to the island in winter too. Spends long weekends whenever he can. When island kids get sick, he flies them to the nearest mainland hospital, even through blizzards. Well, they may have accepted him, but they were sure wrong to think he'd concur that it was better for a kid from the mainland to die of an overdose than a local kid to die from appendicitis.

Aggie said, “A couple of those girls have been here, partyin' with my guests. I had to call the camp to come get them. Drunk. Young. Say, Poppy, would a cup of tea settle you some?”

I tried to muster a reassuring smile. “No, thanks, Aggie. Another time.”

She tilted her head a little and started for the door. “I hear Tommy's truck.”

I stepped in front of her. “I'll go. That way, if your guests do wake up, you can try to keep them from going down Coonymus. For now.”

“Well, you and Tommy come in then, have some tea. After.”

I went out the door. The constable's pickup appeared over the rise, the old red variety. Not a native, I supposed. No land to sell. He stopped just short of the crossroads, rolled slowly forward, and parked, damaging any sort of tire tracks or debris left by whoever dropped the body. He wasn't used to this kind of thing. In one of Joe's many riffs about the glory of Block Island, he'd told me there was no crime. “No skunks, no snakes, no fences, no banks, no lawyers, and, best of all, no crime.” The elderly constable had volunteered to enforce town statutes, that's all.

Tommy got out of the truck and stood next to the body. I walked toward him. He put his hands on his knees and bent down to have a closer look. Then he became aware of me. He stood straight again. He said, “You the one found her, miss?”

“Yes.”

He squatted all the way down. It wasn't easy for him. He stared at the dead girl. He pushed a strand of hair off her face. Her mouth was open as far as human jaws allowed. She'd died screaming. What drug could do that?

The constable pulled himself back up to his feet. “Thought I should confirm the death. By the look of her, no need bothering to feel for a pulse. She's gone.”

“I think you should call the state trooper.”

He was staring into my face intently. He knew he should, too. He sighed. “I'll have to stay with the body. I don't have one of those car phones. You drive a standard?”

I could, but more damage to the scene wouldn't help.

“Tommy, why don't I have Aggie call him?”

He squinted. “Trooper don't answer his phone much before noon anyway.”

“Isn't there another trooper with him?”

“Officer Fitzgerald takes the phone off the hook.”

“I'll go. I'll ride my bike.”

“All right, then. Best you do that. And miss?”

“Yes?”

“Notice anything strange around here? Seen anything before Aggie called me?”

“No.”

He looked up at the gulls and then back at me. “Been dead long enough to put off the birds, I'd say.”

I didn't tell him I agreed. Since I arrived, I'd kept mum about what I do for a living. I don't enjoy being a conversation piece. Now Tommy had nothing more to do or say. He was not a policeman, he was the equivalent of a meter maid. He knew he had to wash his hands of whatever had happened to the girl and leave things to the police, even if the police consisted of a man, the likes of Officer Fitzgerald. Francis X. Fitzgerald of the Rhode Island State Police. Fitzy, Joe had called him. Plus there was a rookie supposedly learning the ropes.

The constable lived at the intersection down where Center crossed Old Town Road, halfway to the harbor. I reached it in minutes and slowed at his house, which had a little addition attached to its left side. Literally attached—a shack was nailed up against the house that seemed as though it were pulling away. Jake lived in the tacked-on shack. He was standing on the sandy untrimmed lawn, which was littered with electrical equipment, fiddling with a pair of BX cables. Jake was a savant. Joe told me at Christmastime he wired the whole island. Tourists returned over a period of a month to see his decorated tree at the harborside made entirely of piled-up driftwood and so bright with lighting you could make out the glow from the mainland, his display of singing angels strung above the town hall, and Santa and his sleigh plus all the reindeer led by Rudolph arched across the nearest rise of cliff.

Jake watched me, his eyes directed at the front bike tire. I called out to him. “Everything will be all right. Tommy will be back soon.”

I got a response. “Would not take…” and he touched his chest. Jake didn't use names or pronouns, according to Joe. Then he turned away and looked down at his cables, twisting them again.

“He'll be back soon.”

I raced down Old Town Road to the harbor and turned into a little side street Joe had taken the day before. A sign in front of a small cottage read
RHODE ISLAND STATE POLICE SEASONAL
. It was not a conventional police station, just a temporary trooper's residence, a ramshackle wood-frame house that served as an office too. It looked deserted. If it was deserted, I'd try the clinic at New Harbor. Maybe I could get the doctor to look at the body. Hopefully, he'd know what to do as far as getting someone official out to the island. Joe had picked one hell of a day to go dashing off to the mainland.

I threw down the bike and ran up onto the trooper's porch, opened the ripped screen door and knocked, waited, and knocked a little harder. I thought I saw movement over at the window. I let the screen slam shut, stepped off the little porch, and went to it. Trooper Fitzgerald's haggard, scowling face was up against the glass. I jumped. He gaped at me. The man was not wearing a shirt. I banged directly on the windowpane, hoping it wouldn't break. Maybe hoping it would. He grimaced. Then he shouted at me, “Hold on, goddamn it.”

He disappeared and I went back to the door. After a few minutes I pretty much started bashing on it again, a vicarious bashing of the idiotic man himself. Finally, he threw the door open and stood there on the other side of the screen. His eyes were red and watery. He had a shirt on now; he was buttoning it. His fly was open. He ran his fingers through his dirty hair.

Finally he said, “This better be good.” He narrowed his eyes. “You're that ATF guy's latest, aren't you?”

I decided to act as though I'd never seen him before. “Are you the trooper?”

He smiled. “No. I'm Blackbeard the pirate.”

I smiled back. “Oh. Well, there's a dead girl lying on Coonymus Road, twenty yards down from the B and B. But she needs a police officer, not a pirate.” I turned toward the porch steps. The hell with him. I'd have to take over myself. I knew I wasn't meant for vacations.

“Don't move.” I turned back. “What dead girl?”

“I wouldn't
know
what dead girl. She's quite overweight. I'd guess she must be from the camp.”

“What the hell was she doing?”

“Doing? You don't understand. She's dead. She—”

“I mean, what
did
she do? Step in a pothole and break her neck?”

I said, “She was naked.”

“Naked?” He started ripping through his hair again. “Shit.”

“Tommy's with her. He's the constable.”

“I
know
who Tommy is. Listen, she wasn't just spaced out, was she? That so-called constable sure as hell wouldn't know the difference between croaked and high.”

“I would.”

“Would you? Your boyfriend teach you a few things like that?”

Two tourists, running along the road, looked over. I said, “Officer, the area needs to be cordoned off before some jogger heads up toward Coonymus.”

“Yeah.” He zipped his fly and shoved the screen door open. I stepped back in time not to get hit with it. He looked toward the joggers. “Goddamn show-offs. Want everyone to notice their tight little asses. Sight of some dead girl might get a few of these nutcases off the highways.”

Highways.

Then he mumbled something about his rookie gone patrolling and how he would have to find him. He said to me, “Go in my office and call that slob that runs the B and B. Tell her I'll be there in five minutes and not to go near the body. Not to let any of those derelicts who stay with her near the body either. Then call Doc Brisbane at the clinic and tell him to get the hell up to Coonymus Road with his van and not waste any time about it.”

He stomped down the porch and went to his car. It was unmarked. He got in, started it, and shot off down the road.

I did what he'd asked me to do, went inside and found his phone. First, Aggie. She told me the guests were all on the porch, didn't want to miss anything. “Too scared to go near the body, though,” she said. “Not to worry. Tommy covered her with a blanket, so it's really all right, Poppy.”

No, that wasn't all right. Extraneous fibers now in place.

I dialed the operator and told her I needed Dr. Brisbane and to put me through right away; it was an emergency. Block Island had a local operator, and the call would go faster through her than if I dialed my way through information. It didn't occur to me that my speaking with her meant the entire island population would know about the dead girl in a few short minutes.

When she got me connected, I told Brisbane's nurse who I was and said I needed to speak to the doctor. She said, “Is Joe all right?” I didn't think I'd met her but she knew my connections. I said no, and she cut me off before I could say anything else. “Sorry, the doc is seeing a patient.” Whether
I
was all right or not didn't seem to matter.

“Listen, it's the state trooper who needs the doctor. And he needs him now.”

She said, “Fitzy? What's he got, the DTs again?”

I told her about the dead girl and where her body was located. The nurse said, “Omigod. I'll get Doc up there now.”

I went out, climbed on my bike, and headed back toward Aggie's B&B. Uphill. Took me a bit longer than it had to come down.

The maddened gulls were still circling and squawking. I stood my bike up next to Tommy's pickup, near the body. If Trooper Fitzgerald had half a brain, was even a marginally competent police officer, he'd have a fit over the blanket.