She's Not There (22 page)

Fitzy leaned into me. “Now we know which guys are bald and which ones have hair.”

The men did look odd without their Red Sox caps.

Esther was in the choir too, unrecognizable, chin up, singing her heart out. Fitzy whispered some more. “Where's that woman coming from anyway?”

“My guess, the throes of depression, same as you.”

“Why do you want to get personal with me?”

“Because I like you.”

“Well, anyway, now it's obvious what attracted me to Esther: we're both depressed. What's the attraction between you and the ATF? Just sex?”

All right, I would stop getting personal with him.

When the chorus was in the middle of “Joyful, Joyful,” the doors were thrown open, sent banging against the walls. The next organ chord was discordant and the voices of the chorus petered out. Jake had burst through the doors and was running down the aisle. He ran in a manner not unlike a centipede that had just had a rock removed from its back, and he was babbling something incomprehensible. The minister came down from the pulpit, met Jake just shy of the altar, and led him up the altar steps to a chair. But he wouldn't sit down. Tommy extricated himself from the row of choristers and joined them. Jake started babbling more fervently, a string of words all running together. The minister spoke softly to Jake, asking him to slow down. He patted his hands, but Jake wrenched himself away.

Joe whispered to me. “Never touch an autistic. Besides that, they're atheists.”

“Who says?”

He spoke even lower. “I looked into it because Tommy could never get Jake to church. Jake doesn't identify with morality. If an autistic wants something, he takes it.”

“Maybe an autistic just doesn't understand the concept of ownership.”

Fitzy leaned over. “Maybe autistics are heathen communists.”

I said, “Churches are noisy, that's all. Music and bells—to say nothing of the odor of incense.”

Joe: “All I know is, Tommy felt better, knowing it wasn't Jake's fault.”

The minister stepped aside. Tommy talked to Jake. And then Jake spoke again, the way he normally did, haltingly. One word, then the next, in a monotone. Tommy nodded to him and then led Jake back down the aisle and outside. The tourists stared.

The minister returned to his pulpit. He said, “Gentlemen. Ladies. I must make a troublesome announcement. Jake came to us tonight with a message. The girls at Camp Guinevere visited the South Light this afternoon under the auspices of the Coast Guard in residence. Then they hiked down the Mohegan Bluffs and walked back to the campground via the beach trail. I am afraid one girl has not been accounted for.” He spread his arms. “We must find her.”

Except for Fitzy whispering to me, “Scratch the chorus,” the silence to follow was the kind found only in a church full of people waiting for the next thing to happen—for the priest to put away the wine, the bride to come down the aisle, or the coffin to arrive. Then the organist banged out another one of her loud chords and the choir went into action, pulling off their robes, dashing off the altar, down the aisle and out onto the street. Many of the members were part of the rescue brigade. Willa had sworn, “Next time we hear about a girl missing, we're going to find her.” She'd meant it. She'd seen to volunteers patrolling the camp at night, too. “Can't trust that Irwin,” she'd told me.

But they didn't find the missing girl. She'd already been rescued while we were all still inside the chapel, just about the time Jake was delivering his mayday. When we arrived at Fitzy's they were on his front porch, knocking on his door. The rescuers were an attractive couple wearing top drawer sailing clothes and boat shoes that cost as much as plane tickets from New York to LA. No socks. The woman had her arm around the girl, who had the hiccups.

Fitzy got them inside, the girl into a chair. He scrounged around the bedrooms for two more chairs for the couple. Joe and I took up our spot in the corner again.

Fitzy said to the girl, “Are you all right?”

“No. I am totally not all right.”

“What's your name?”

“Catherine Powers. Everyone calls me Cass, like Mama Cass. Just as fat, but I don't intend to choke to death on a ham sandwich. I will never forgive my parents for this. Never.”

He asked her if she wanted something to drink. She said, “Yeah, I'll have a Bud.”

“You'll have a glass of water.”

He filled a glass and handed it to her. “Drink this, and try to calm yourself. I need to know what happened. Start at the beginning.”

Cass guzzled the water, then banged the glass down on Fitzy's desk. He filled it again for her. She stared at the glass for a moment and then she began. “That bastard Irwin made us hike all the way to the lighthouse today—no exceptions. Seeing that we stay together the way everyone wants so we don't all turn up totally dead. There was no bribing the counselors to get out of it. And there won't be. Not anymore. They're real nervous, too.

“So we get to this frogging lighthouse—we must have hiked an hour in the burning sun—and they actually expected us to climb the goddamn thing. Like, all the way to the top. Hel-
lo?
”

She downed another glass of water. “We're talking about a thousand steps, minimum.
Winding
steps. I thought I was going to blow lunch just looking at them. Bedsides that, we'd just climbed the platforms up the side of Mohegan Bluffs, and there were about a million of those. We refused to do it. So can you
believe
one of those fart-sack Coast Guard guys told us we would be able to see Massachusetts from the top of the lighthouse. Oooh,
exsqueeze
me! What are those guys, totally clueless? We're supposed to get all hot and bothered over
Massachusetts
? I told him, Who the hell
cares
about Massachusetts? I told him to
fuck
Massachusetts. But the shithead made us go up anyway. He got us in single file, one at a time, because the stairs are narrow and we're fat.
Mis
-take! I ducked out of line. I hid in the Coast Guard quarters on the first floor.”

She pointed to her glass. Fitzy filled it again. He said, “Thank you.”

She said, “Whatever.”

With her third glass of water finished, she banged the glass on the desk again. Fitzy refilled it. He said, “You're gonna be peein' all night, kid.”

I said, “Where was the Coast Guard when you were in their quarters?”

“With the counselors.” Her hiccups were gone. “It was a conspiracy. They sent us all up those
crummy
stairs while they went
swimming
. The lighthouse station has a
pool
. So they go for a swim while we're supposed to sweat our brains out climbing up
twenty million stairs
. Motherfuckers.”

Fitzy told her to stay calm. She said, “I'll never be fucking calm again.”

I asked her, “But Cass, why didn't you go back when the rest of the girls did?”

“Because I fell asleep. First thing I did was raid the Coast Guard's refrigerator. They had a ton of bologna. Oscar Mayer. And a whole shelf of Wonder Bread. I had a few sandwiches, then I ate their jar of mayonnaise. Hellmann's, my all-time favorite food. Wait till they go to make one of their bologna sandwiches. Sur-
prise
! Then I fell asleep on their couch. Like, we're up all night talking about picnic man, the guy Stupid saw, trying to figure out who he is, since obviously
you
can't.” She looked from Fitzy to me. “And neither can you.”

Fitzy said, “Just keep to the story.”

“You got a candy bar or anything?”

“No.”

“Shit.”

“What happened after you woke up.”

“I didn't wake up till it was starting to get dark. The place was empty. Everybody was gone. So I called a taxi to come and get me. The driver told me to walk out to the road and he'd meet me there because there's a gate across the drive. I took a big knife with me just in case the taxi driver invited me on a picnic. I went out to the road, waited around, and then I saw this guy hiding under some bushes. He looked like the psycho murderer in
Halloween III
. He comes crawling out of the bushes straight toward me, so I started screaming my freakin' head off. I totally forgot I had the knife. I must have dropped it. I ran back to the lighthouse, but the door had automatically locked behind me and I couldn't get back in. So then I ran around behind the lighthouse where the platforms go down the cliffs and I could hear this guy clumping after me. The thing is, I'm screaming and he's screaming too. I mean, he's chasing me and
he's
screaming. But I didn't look back, I just ran down. I could've broken my neck but at least I wouldn't have had my clothes pulled off—nobody was going to turn me into a human pretzel.” She looked from Fitzy to the couple sitting next to her. “And then these people saved me.”

Fitzy turned to them. “Want to give me your take?”

The gentleman sailor was ready with his perspective. “Well, where Cass left off, that's where we came in, like she said. Me and … my wife. I'd anchored the boat just off the cliffs. We heard this god-awful screaming. Sounded like banshees. Shit. We nearly jumped out of our skin.”

Fitzy said, “Why weren't you at the marina?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

The woman said, “We wanted some privacy.”

Fitzy's eyebrow went up. He couldn't help it.

I said, “How did you get to her?”

The skipper said, “First I put my spot on the stairs and then I saw her coming down. I was worried she was going to kill herself. We're talking a very steep cliff. I got in the dinghy and reached the beach just as she got down there, and she was pretty much hysterical and falling down and told me the guy who killed the campers was after her. I figured she was delirious. Whoever was chasing her must have taken off when he saw my light, because there was no one behind her.”

He glanced at Cass. “I mean, I believe what she said.
Somebody
must have been chasing her, but he probably gave up when he saw us. So I got her into the dinghy and zipped back to my boat, and we brought her around to the harbor, where everybody and their brother was looking for her. They're looking for her under
parked cars
, for Christ's sake. Geniuses. I asked for the police station and they sent us here.”

Cass said, “Listen, can we get back to normal? I've got to see my friends at camp. They must think I'm dead somewhere in a swamp. Plus, I want to brag about the food I scarfed up, courtesy of the Coast Guard.”

Fitzy said, “Getting back to normal. Sounds great to me.”

He called Irwin, who arrived ten minutes later in the van. Irwin had two campers from Merlin House, where Cass bunked. When she saw them she said, “Am I, like, totally gonzo to see you guys.” They were gonzo to see her too, because they both started crying and then Cass was crying too, and a lot of hugging went on before Irwin could get them out the door. Before he did, he turned to us. “I'm not the ogre you've made me out to be.”

Once they were all in the van, the yachtsman leaned back in to his chair, stretched his legs straight out in front of him, and said, “Well, that was fun.” Then he confided in us. “I'll tell you, folks, when we had the light on her and we could see her coming down the platforms—I mean, she scared the shit out of us she was making such a racket—I said to my … uh, friend here—I mean, my wife—‘Christ, the circus must be in town.' And how she didn't capsize the dinghy, believe me, I'll never know. So what's the story? Some guy is going around selling lethal drugs to girls at a fat farm?”

Fitzy said, “Yes.”

The yachtsman faced his friend/wife. “Where were we heading next, Orient Point?”

The woman stood up. “Yes. And I say full speed ahead, captain. Roger and out.” She saluted.

Fitzy took their names and they made their escape. He said, “We all know who was chasing her, right?”

I said, “Jake. He was probably taking one of his walks.”

Fitzy picked up the phone and dialed Tommy. “Gotta tell him to keep a rein on that guy. I'll be out, middle of the night, can't sleep, and I'll see the locals drivin' all over the island real slow. Used to stop them but I always got the same answer: looking for Jake. Usually find him in some bog taking a radio apart. Then they go tell Tommy where he is. Tommy comes out and gets him.”

Esther was at Tommy's. Jake was home and she was helping out. She told Fitzy that Jake liked to go to the lighthouse and watch for the beam to come on. Jake told her he'd scared a girl who was in the lighthouse, but she'd gotten on a boat. Jake never meant to scare anyone. Jake wouldn't hurt a soul. And right now, Jake was still shaking like a leaf. Tommy was trying to get him into bed.

Fitzy hung up. He said to Joe and me, “Thing is, do we figure the retarded guy's the serial killer?”

Joe said, “He's not retarded, he's autistic. An autistic pushed to his limit will try to kill anyone persistent about breaking into the isolation chamber he's built for himself in order to cope. Notice I said
try
. Well, they don't succeed. They'll do something like hurl a pair of scissors at you from a hundred yards. Their throwing range is maybe two feet and not necessarily in the intended direction. They're impotent when it comes to the violence they wish they could perpetrate, so they can survive without tremendous anguish. Unless we're talking a crying newborn. That's easy. They'll throw a crying baby out the window. Documented, by the way. The sound of crying is impossible for them to handle. Autism can be true madness.”

I said, “You found all this out for Tommy?”

“Yes. If he was to care for him, he had to know.”