She's Not There (20 page)

Billy craned her neck toward us. “Was she a looker?”

Fitzy said, “Mind your business, old man.”

The phone rang, and Willa jumped off her stool. Ernie said, “I got it,” but she beat him there and picked it up.

The ringing agitated Jake. Tommy scolded, “Never mind about that, Jake,” but Jake put his hands over his ears and wasn't about to bring them down again.

Joe bent his head to me. “Jake's overly sensitive to touch, to smell, but especially to noise. I don't remember the phone ever bothering him, though. Guy gets worse instead of better.”

Willa said into the phone, “No kidding? Well, now we got some trouble, don't we?”

She hung up and made an announcement. “Someone from CBS is here, and a couple of local channels too. All kinds of cameras and stuff. Bad publicity.”

Her husband said, “Any publicity is good publicity, is what people say.”

The taxi brothers stood up. One had his keys out already. “If any TV people came in a boat, they're sure as hell goin' to need us. Maybe we got Dan Rather here.”

Jim Lane's kid gathered together his paraphernalia. “They'll interview me. I'm local.”

Billy said, “Sure. Me and Mick too. After all, we're Fred's friends.”

Mick said, “We are not.”

“But, see, that's what we'll tell 'em.”

They left and Aggie went with them, smoothing her flowered polyester folds and flounces.

Fitzy said, “I'm the one they'll want to talk to. But they'll never find me back in this place, that's for sure.”

Ernie asked Willa if she'd mind if he went down to the harbor.

“Go ahead. Tommy and Jake are all set. I got no one to feed now except Joe and company. Meet you in the store later. Tonight, I'll get to see all our stars on the TV.” But she scolded Ernie as he was going out the door. “Ernie, I told you not to set that phone ringer so loud.”

“It ain't that loud, Willa. Any lower and I can't hear the phone when the bacon is sizzling.”

“Then clean your ears.” She turned to Tommy and Jake. “Now, Jake, look at what Willa's doing. I'm turning down my phone ringer. Keep it real soft.”

Jake didn't look up at her but he whispered, “Soft.”

It turned out, the media—Dan Rather not among them, just a reporter and a camera guy from the CBS affiliate in Providence—were under the impression that Fred had been arrested for selling lethal drugs that killed two girls from out of state. When Ernie told them Fred was only invited to Providence for some questions because he was the one who found the second body, they headed out to see if there was someone they could interview at Fred's house. According to the taxi brothers, when the cameras arrived at Doris Prentiss's door, she threatened to throw a pot of boiling water at them if they didn't get off her porch. “They believed her, too. Might have been because she was holding a great big pot, steam comin' out the top.”

Then the TV people returned to the harbor and found the coffee shop regulars standing around the dock. Mick told them Fred was not a native Block Islander but rather a well-meaning damn fool. That he discovered a body, reported it, and was now in trouble because he forgot to identify himself when he made the phone call. The producer's face fell. Then Billy told them about the schoolteacher. That perked them up. They hastened to their boat so they could get back to the mainland and harass her.

I said, “Why didn't they go up to the camp? Expose it?”

“They didn't even know the girl was from the camp. Figured she was just another day-tripper. And her identity's not out yet either. Still haven't tracked down the parents. The TV folks only know a second teenager OD'd on the Block.”

While the gang was out posing for the cameras, Willa made us French toast. Fitzy said, “Not bad. Only burned on the one side.”

She was unfazed. “I try to remember to burn yours on both sides. You got lucky.”

I said to Joe, “Did you get done what you had to get done?”

“Not quite. There were illegals on the freighter, couple dozen of them. Most were dead, some only half dead. Captain knew nothing about the two tons of cocaine or the smuggled aliens. What else is new?”

While we ate, I told them our first priority was to get the girls off the island, which is what I intended to do as soon as Christen e-mailed me.

Fitzy said, “I'm workin' on that myself. The only other way to get the girls off this island is to get the camp closed. Social welfare department will have to take charge then, tell the parents they've got no choice but to get their girls home. I intend to see that happens before the day is out. Soon as you have that list, Poppy, I'll have a copy. We'll go at the parents from two very strong fronts.”

The coffee-shop door opened; the bell gave a little muffled tinkle. Doris stood there. She scanned the room until her gaze fell on Joe. She said to him, “I need a favor.”

“What can I do for you, Doris?” Joe's tone reflected some sort of devil-may-care attitude, as if there weren't a thing wrong.

“Fred has been released. I hope you don't mind flying over to Providence to get him. He's got five dollars in his pocket and I never let him have any credit cards.”

Joe told her that would be fine. Fitzy said, “And I need to hitch a ride with you, Joe. I should speak to a few people in person.
Threaten
a few people in person. I'll call you from there, Poppy. You can fax me the numbers.”

I told Joe I'd keep busy, bike down to Esther's, and finally buy the presents I wanted to take back home. Shopping instead of thinking even if my heart wouldn't be in it. Then see if the girls had sent me my e-mail. This time Joe wasn't concerned with how I'd entertain myself while he was flying to Providence. He was about as removed from me as he could get without being on the moon. I gave him the jeep keys.

Before Doris left the Patio she said to Tommy, “Constable, I've seen your boy wandering late at night. Get him on a curfew.” With that she was gone without bothering to say thank you to Joe.

“I do my best,” Tommy said, to no one in particular.

The bike was outside next to the doghouse. Fortunately, Pal wasn't guarding it very well, finding it sufficient just to growl at me a little more loudly than usual. I pedaled to Esther's. She had an easel set up on the porch. She was sketching something on a canvas with a pencil. She looked up. I got off the bike. “Hi, Esther. I'm disturbing you, right?”

“Right. What do you need this time?”

I pushed down the kickstand and set my bike up. I said, “Thought I could find something to hang on my walls back home. They've been empty ever since I moved to Washington. In the mood to show me what's for sale?”

She waved me to the screen door and I went in. “Go on into the living room. The bin is in the corner. There's maybe twenty-five things in it I'm selling. I'll be with you in a minute.”

Once inside, I felt free to put on all lights available. Her house was entirely overhung with heavy, overgrown shrubs. The branches lay all across the roof. I'd noticed the condition of the roof shingles—dark with mold and gummy with sap. I had no idea how she could paint with so little light. She couldn't very well paint out on the porch in winter. Then I looked around at the paintings. She'd either done them from memory or maybe she did do her work in the half-dark.

Esther painted seascapes—bleak, mean seascapes—deep troughs of black ocean between climbing, menacing, swollen swells. All the paintings were of the sea before, during, and after storms. The skies were the same color as the water, and the two met in sprays of foam and rain and wind. She could paint wind; I could see it. The waves were roiling, sexual; they sprang out of the canvas. All were empty of any sign of life. And that last is what I said to her when I felt her behind me.

She said, “I wanted to show the death and destruction that lies beneath our waters while depicting just the sea's surface. I want people to look at the painting and imagine what's down there. See the ribs of crushed ships, the bones of the drowned sailors.” She looked from the painting to me. “How nice that I'm obviously getting there.”

“You're beyond getting there, Esther. I'm feeling just what you're saying. Was Joe right when he said you wouldn't sell your paintings?”

“He was. I'll sell them if I get there.”

“I like them.”

“They're better than my last batch. Still, I'm not there yet.” She walked to the large bin in the corner. “Here's what keeps me off welfare. You're welcome to go through this stuff.”

The bin was six feet long and ran against most of the wall. It was made of used plywood, as were the dividers jammed inside. She'd framed old maps and charts, ancient newspaper and magazine articles, bits and pieces of obscure historical events. The pieces were both large and small, and there was a collection of framed poems, or what looked like stanzas from poems, just three-by-four inches or so. Joe had described the frames she'd made as lovely. I told her they were just that.

“I have a trusty little router. I enjoy sanding the wood, staining it. Mindless work.”

I flipped through the bin, but I was most taken with the poetry in the tiny frames that I could hold in the palm of my hand. I read one to myself:

Set at the mouth of the Sound to hold

The coast lights up on its turret old,

Yellow with moss and sea-fog mould.

Dreary the land when gust and sleet

At its doors and windows howl and beat,

And Winter laughs at its fires of peat!

She was watching me.

“Creepy, Esther.”

“Wonderfully creepy. From
The
Palatine
. John Greenleaf Whittier.” She dug through the bin herself and came up with another one. “A few other stanzas. Much nicer.” She read it aloud:

But in summer time, when pool and pond,

Held in the laps of valleys fond,

Are blue as the glimpses of sea beyond …

Then is that lonely island fair;

And the pale health-seeker findeth there

The wine of life in its pleasant air.

“Very pretty, Esther. What was the
Palatine
?”

“A wreck. Our most famous lost ship. There are hundreds of them under the sea by us. Those seas.” She pointed toward her paintings.

“So what happened to it that was special? I mean, that made Whittier write a poem about it and not the others.”

“The
Palatine
was a steamer from the Netherlands full of immigrants, bound for Philadelphia. Christmas week, 1744. Hit a shoal off Sandy Point. Almost everyone on board drowned or froze to death. Hundreds of people. For some reason, Whittier wanted to make villains of us all. He had a commercial bent as well as an artistic one, obviously. So he wrote an epic poem—the kind of poem some drunk could read aloud in a sailors' dive—about our setting out false lights and then waiting until a ship crashed into the offshore rocks. Waiting some more until the screaming stopped. Then once it was quiet, off we'd go to raid the ship.” She acted as if the scenario she'd described had happened yesterday. And she'd used the pronoun
we
.

Esther dug around in the bin some more and read on:

The eager islanders one by one

Counted the shots of her signal gun,

and heard the crash when she drove right on!

Into the teeth of death she sped:

(May God forgive the hands that fed

The false lights over the rocky Head!)

She looked up at me. “None of it true. The
Palatine
did crash and go down, and there were wreckers here, but they were pirates who'd set up a camp, hiding from the militia. Our country's first declaration of war was against the Barbary pirates. Us—the islanders—we saved the handful of survivors from the
Palatine
. Buried the dozens that washed up. The cemetery is over by Trustrum's Tughole. Near where the camp is, actually.”

“What's Trustrum's Tughole?”

“Trustrum Dodge owned the land. A swamp, really, with great depths of peat, far deeper than in Rodman's Hollow, much more extensive. A tughole is where peat is harvested. There are several of them. Block Islanders called peat
tug
, because you needed a team of horses to tug the clumps out. Tugholes were abandoned once we were able to heat with coal.”

“The graves are there?”

“Unmarked. Coffins were sheets of sail. We had no wood, no trees. I think I told you that … the other night. The tug took care of the bodies. Told you about that too, didn't I? But we still save sailors at sea. Saved ten people off a great big yacht last fall during a nor'easter. Water was still warm, lucky for them.” She shook a cigarette out of a pack. Lit it up. Held the pack out to me. She hadn't done that the other night.

“No, thanks.”

“Anyway, my earliest Block Island ancestor was saved from the
Palatine
.”

“You've traced your genealogy to him?”

“Her. Yes. A girl, twelve years old. She was one of four survivors. The other three didn't know who she was. Must have sailed in steerage. Couldn't speak English. Islanders took her in, revived her, nursed her—she was probably frozen solid—and adopted her. They called her Dutchy Kitten. I mentioned her to you, too. Her name was probably Katerina, I'd have to say. Islanders heard
Kitten
. She had many descendents, me included.”

I said, “Now that's what tourists would like. A family tree with Dutchy Kitten at the top. Maybe you could do it in needlepoint.” I smiled.

She laughed. I was surprised. I realized I didn't think she knew how to laugh until right then. But it wasn't a merry laugh, more a dutiful one.