She's Not There
Authors: Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
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Contents
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With love and affection
I would like to dedicate this book to
Maryann, Susan, Joan, Nancy,
Amy, Nora, Melanie, and Kara.
1
I stood outside on the long wood porch. The morning sun had burned off most of the haze. The day would be warm but not muggy. Maybe the curl I had to my hair, far more fanciful than usual, would calm itself. Long spiraling tendrils sticking to my mouth are not as adorable as
Vogue
magazine would have people believe.
I could see Joe's cat, Spike. Actually, his fat, furry, marmalade tail, upright in the high grasses a few yards away. He was happy. Hunting. Then eating. He'd eat most of the game he snagged, leaving just the internal organs in a little pile for us right in front of the door. I'd been forewarned, so I always managed to step over the gift rather than in it. Joe has great respect for these acts of generosity so he doesn't mind the cleaning-up part. Joe is attached to this old tomcat, who yowled during our entire two-hour flight from Washington to Block Island. The yowling was nothing compared with the stench of the prodigious amounts of urine, doo-doo (Joe's term), and vomit Spike produced. Joe told me not to worryâthere was a guy at the landing strip who would clean his plane.
“Fumigate it too, hopefully.”
No comment.
“Maybe you should add a little Dramamine to his kibble.”
Joe put the plane into a steep bank.
I took one of the bikes leaning against the side of the cottage and walked it up the grass-matted path to the unpaved road. I was thinking, It's Bastille Day. This is the kind of thing I've had on my mind during the few days spent away from my FBI choresâ
It's Bastille Day, how interesting
. When I'd admitted such a thing to Joe he said, “Told you so.” I'd forgotten one of his many exhortations on the pleasures of his hideaway: “The best part of Block Island is its ability to turn your brain cells to mush,” a sensation I was positive I could not experience. And I was surprised it could be true of Joe Barnow, chief field adviser for the ATF, a brilliant and aggressive fellow when it came to serving justice. I never dreamed he'd be right. But there I was, thinking about Bastille Day and not much else.
The sound of Joe's little Cessna replaced the stillness all about me. He was off for a few hours on an errand. I shaded my eyes and looked up. The sun was dazzling. Climbing into the sky, Joe tipped a wing at me. Spike raised his head above the weeds and looked up too. So maybe Joe was tipping his wing to his cat.
I got on the bike and bumped along till the track merged with Coonymus Road, which led toward the old harbor on the other side of the island. The first half mile of Coonymus wasn't paved. The rest of it was, but barelyâa network of gaping fissures and a mass of potholes. Block Islanders don't patch the asphalt all that often unless the state of Rhode Island really pushes them. They don't like tourists racing all over the place in cars. Tourists should walk. Joe bragged that you could walk the perimeter of the island in eight hours. That had me worried. I'm a city girl. Hearing that, I'd felt trapped before the plane ever took off from Dulles. But the sea did not trap me. The world seemed expanded, in fact, and I liked the place more and more each day, mushy brain cells and all.
I navigated through and around the obstacle course that was the road, guiding the handlebars with my right hand and holding a mug of coffee in my left. I took a sip whenever there was a smooth stretch. Look, Ma, no hands. Imagine thatâme being giddy. At one point I stopped on a rise, one of the highest points on the island: a hundred and fifty feet above sea level. I looked north across the landscape dotted with restored farmhouses and new million-dollar vacation homes. Joe told me the natives had done the restoring and then sold off their surrounding acreage to developers for a ton of money. He said the only difference between Block Island today and Block Island twenty-five years agoâbesides the fabulous new “cottages,” including his ownâwas that the islanders no longer drove beatup red Ford pickup trucks with the mufflers hanging off. Now they owned Cadillac Escalade EXTsâ“they come with leather upholstery and Bose sound systems”âsilver being the most popular color, with gold detailing of their own design and the capacity to haul 8,500 pounds, though there was nothing to haul and no place to haul it. “This used to be an island of fishermen whose wives farmed their own food and raised cows.”
“So what do they do now?”
“Whatever they want.”
The low coast of Rhode Island lying almost flat on the horizon twelve miles across the Atlantic was blurred. The haze still hung over the mainland. Washington was probably 97 degrees in the shade with a humidity just shy of rain. Ha-ha on them. Block Island was as remarkably beautiful as Joe had promised, hills and vales and young trees, none high or full enough to obscure the view. I would have to ask him where the real trees had gone. A tiny breeze blew one of the tendrils that had escaped my scrunchie out of my mouth. I got the bike moving again.
I passed the Pleasant View, a rickety farmhouse not restored but reconfigured into a B&B. The view from the front was the road to the town transfer station; from the back, “a stand of hoary willows and soggy bogs” was how Joe had put it. Then the poet had smiled at me. “There's always going to be the other side of the tracks, no matter your paradise.” I thought, I suppose so.
No one was up and about yet. At this particular B&B, most tourists slept far later than I was able to; Joe said the Pleasant View clientele were heavy drinkers who missed the last ferry and had very little money left over after an evening at the Club Soda. They crashed there, four cots to a room, $25 per cot. “Block Island has many facets,” he had said by way of explanation, when we'd driven by the first time and I'd asked, “What's that, a flophouse?” And so I learned that one of Block Island's many facets was a metaphorical railroad track.
Gulls were swarming a hundred yards past the Pleasant View at the corner of Coonymus and Center Street. (Not seagulls. I had learned from Joe, that the
sea
in seagull is redundant. “There are no gulls in Peoria,” he'd said.) A cemetery was at the corner there, an Indian cemetery, mostly little rocks sticking up here and there to mark a body. No headstones in the traditional sense. Someone had put up a small sign asking those passing to remember the souls of these departed Narragansetts, the first inhabitants of Block Island, which they called Manissees.
“Then why is the road by that lighthouse called Mohegan Trail then?”
“Because that's the place where the Manisseeans pushed the invading Mohegans over the bluff and into the sea.”
Oh.
When he showed me the cemetery, Joe said, “The Manisseeans are extinct, of course.” Of course. Then, “There are a few slaves buried here too.”
“Slaves?”
“They were leased.”
Leased?
I'd started to say, but he'd turned my attention to another point of interest. Many facets, indeed.
Now, gazing at the swirl of white birds, it took my mushy brain cells a few moments to recollect that bees swarm, not birds. There were dozens of them, and more were coming in from all directions. They made a god-awful racket, worse as I came closer. They did that kind of thing on the harborside when the fishing boats dumped out leftover bait. Just not this many. The gulls' wings were flapping so rapidly I could hear the beating over their raucous cawing.
They were circling above something lying in the crossroads in front of the cemetery. I slowed just enough to keep the bike from falling over. Where Center Street met Coonymus lay a lumpy mound. It was white, almost as white as the gulls, and it shone in the bright morning light. I couldn't make out what it was in the blinding glare of the sun. I came to a stop, put my feet down, and once again had to shade my eyes with my free hand. Then I got the bike moving again, pedaling closer, scaring off all but a few particularly brazen birds.
It could be a beached seal, I thought, its color washed out by the sun. Joe and I had come across one on a deserted west side beach. But how could a seal wash up here, so far inland? A good
mile
inland. Obviously, it wasn't a seal. The mush was clearing from my brain; I knew what I was seeing.
The mound was a body. Or was it two bodies, intertwined? I pedaled closer. No, it was not two bodies, it was an overweight adolescent girl, naked, her large limbs wrapped grotesquely around her torso. This was not typical rigor mortis: it was as if every muscle in her body had cramped and spasmed and then stayed spasmed. I stopped the bike. She was not entirely naked. A few shredded edges of her clothesâthe waistband of her shorts, the collar of her T-shirtâlifted in the breeze. A very big girlâfrom the camp, I thought. Joe had mentioned something like that, not too far away. She was not one of the four campers we'd seen yesterday at the harborside, walking down the ferry ramp amid the day-trippers. This was a different girl.
Her long lovely strawberry-blond hair fanned out from her terribly twisted face.
I thought three things in a row: First, she was dead; second, Joe hadn't come upon her; third, the gulls hadn't drawn blood. The first meant there was nothing I could do for her. The second meant she'd been lying there for a very short time. The third, she'd been dead too long for the gulls to make a meal of her. Gulls do not hesitate when a fisherman tosses a fish he isn't interested in, but if he simply drops it at his feet, the gulls are out of luck. By the time he packs up and leaves, the fish is no longer suitable. Put it together and she'd been killed elsewhereâat least an hour ago, probablyâand dumped here.
I got off the bike and let it fall, forgetting I had a coffee cup in my hand. It fell, too, and smashed. The gulls screamed and, disappointed to begin with, reversed direction. So did I. I ran back to the B&B and threw open the door. The proprietor was right there, about to go out herself. Joe had dropped in to say hello to her on our first day and to introduce me. She'd given him a big hug and ruffled his hair like he was five years old. Aggie.
