She's Not There (38 page)

“Yes.”

We all stood facing one another. It was Fitzy who took a step forward. “You stumbled on him.”

I couldn't respond. I felt myself blinking back tears, tears of terror—delayed reaction—and I suddenly knew how lucky I was to be alive. Yes, I had stumbled on him.

“And you got him, didn't you?”

Christen was the one to throw her arms around someone. Around Fitzy. She said, “Yes! We got him! We fucking got him.”

He pulled her away so he could face her. “Tell me where he is.”

“He's—” And right then Christen came back to earth just moments after my own descent. “He's—” What had hit me hit her. She started to cry, and her crying became a wail the way children will wail when they're in total despair, the sound of absolute heartbreak.

Big girls do cry, but it takes a hell of a lot.

Now Fitzy hugged her back, took her into his arms. “You're okay, kid. And your little friend in the hospital's doing a lot better. Her grandfather came. That was all she needed. She doesn't remember anything that happened to her. She'll never remember, either.” He looked past Christen and into my eyes. He kept talking. “She asked about you and Sam and all the girls at the camp. The nurses are bringing Elijah Leonard rice pudding. Now you have to try and stop crying so you and Poppy can tell me everything I need to know.”

I said, “It was Tommy. That's all there is to know and you already know it.”

Fitzy said, “The psychiatrist never worked again. She brought him to Block Island where he'd be safe. Anonymous.”

Now Joe had something to say. “I'm sorry.”

I was getting really sick of his being sorry.

Fitzy said, “Block Island had been the psychiatrist's home. She was descended from one of the founding fathers. No one questioned her widowhood, which is what she told them. It was the psychiatrist's stuff that was left at Esther's years ago. Esther found the clippings in one of the bags.”

Suddenly, something was not right. Christen startled. Fitzy and Joe looked around. Then I was able to hear it—a strange whirring sound. Joe looked over my head toward town. I turned to see what he was staring at. One after the other, the harborside buildings came aglow; one after another the houses and inns in the center of town filled with flickering lights muted by the drizzle—all that was left of the storm. The power was reaching the million-dollar cottages, one at a time in a line coming toward us, electricity passing from one to the next.

Fitzy said, “Well, that should help.”

And Joe stared at me. “Poppy, what's the matter?”

Two strips of tiny blue lights came on at the landing strip just as electricity surged through the wires leading to Tommy's house, releasing an enormous cacophany of bells and whistles and infernal crashes that resounded through the night. Tommy had managed to break the window, after all.

Christen stared at me. She put her hands over her ears. We all did. And then Christen smiled and said, “Yes!”

Dogs began to bark, babies were crying, and gulls in great numbers rose from nowhere into the sky. Their screeching could not overpower the noise coming from Tommy's house. We ran to Fitzy's car and were at Tommy's in minutes. I told Christen to stay where she was. She did not protest; she was bent over, her hands still covering her ears.

Joe didn't move. “I'll stay with her.”

Fitzy followed me into the house and ran with me across the kitchen, through the hall, and down the cellar stairs. The noise was no less shocking than before, even though it was now dispersed into a much larger space. We pulled at the tool table and then the bookcase, exposing the window and the circuit board beneath. The window was smashed. I stared at the circuit board, a row of little glowing red lights. I began pushing switches. Splinters of glass cut my fingers. Fitzy stepped in front of me, grabbed the entire board and ripped it out. But one wire remained connected. And we listened to all that was left of the deadly recordings—strains of
Rhapsody in Blue
.

In the little window, jagged shards stuck up from its bent frame. We could see Tommy on the floor, rolled into a ball, moaning. There was blood everywhere. He had used a piece of the glass to slice his wrists.

We pulled and pushed at the bookcase until we could get into the room. The bolt on the door had been ripped away, but Tommy hadn't been able to push himself past Christen's barrier.

I sank down beside Tommy, pulled his hands from his ears, and cradled his head in my lap. Fitzy squatted down beside him too, picking up my T-shirt and my underwear from the floor to tie his gushing wrists.

Tommy's face was bone-white and soft, again the ghost of the child he'd been. I brushed a few wisps of hair from his forehead, just the way I had Kate's. His eyes opened. He said something, very softly; Fitzy told me later what it was. He'd said, “I didn't want to hurt you, miss.” But I couldn't hear him. I'd responded all the same. I said, “It's all right now, Tommy.”

He spoke again, his lips barely moving. Fitzy told me the rest of what he'd said. “That last one. She was just a little child. I didn't know.”

He shut his eyes. I said to him, “Tommy, it's all over now.”

It wasn't quite over, though. He said “Jake” before he died. I was able to read that word on his lips.

 

15

All the storm cells made their way out past the horizon by morning and the air was clear, the sky the color of Rebekah's eyes, the ocean like ink. Mick's forecast had finally come about. It was the kind of day Block Island brochures crow about. So finding Jake didn't take very long. It turned out he had other haunts he enjoyed visiting besides the old South Light, besides the cliff looking east out over the ocean by Joe's cottage, besides the girls who had simply aroused his curiosity. He also liked to sit and gaze upon the electrical tower near the Western Road, at the turnoff to the track called Tughole Way. His body lay on the ground just beneath. He'd succeeded in sabotaging the transformer, but he'd made one mistake and touched a wire, drawing the last volts of electricity to Block Island into his body.

The night before, when Tommy had me crushed up against him and I'd screamed and screamed for Jake to help me, he'd set out to do it.

At Richard's Patio, Mick said, “Matter of throwing a switch if you know where it is. That's why the power got restored so fast. One of the boys just climbed on up there not long after we lost it and got the power goin' again. Too dark to see Jake right then, though.”

Willa became hysterical at the news, so Fitzy had to take her to the clinic and have the doc give her a shot. She didn't get to learn all that had happened until later: what Tommy had forced Jake to do; how Jake had somehow figured out that he could rectify what he'd wrought. To find a sense of morality his demons hadn't quite obliterated.

Ernie made us breakfast after they'd all done their best to sympathize with me. Aggie invited me for a cup of tea any time. Then, with that duty out of the way, I listened as they agonized over all of it. Billy said, “It was because we didn't know what we'd do with Jake. How could we take care of him? So now they're both gone. Who'd have thought it?”

I drank my entire cup of coffee. I couldn't make sense of what Billy had said, so I asked Mick to tell me.

“Mick, what did Billy say?”

Mick used almost the exact same words, but not quite. “What would we have done with Jake if it were true?”

Vague little clicks came together in my brain. “Mick, I'm sorry—if what were true?”

Billy explained more carefully. “He means when we figured out it was Tommy. That's when we didn't know what to do. Not that we were
sure
it was him, no, ma'am. Couldn't
prove
anything. But Tommy turning out to be an outsider and all, I guess we should have known even sooner.”

Mick said, “Him turning out to be adopted and all.”

I must have appeared utterly dense because Mick tried to explain again, kept at the point they were trying to make so I'd understand. “See, we figured we should say something to the authorities. Maybe go to the trooper. But he beat out the ban and was gone. It's like I'm tellin' you, we had no proof. And the thing is, who'd watch Jake? I mean, it's not like the boy took to any of us.”

Ernie said, “Willa wanted to. Willa always wanted to. She pressed me. But I'm too old to be feedin' meals to someone in his condition. Tommy had to dress him, bathe him—all that stuff you have to do when someone is—well, you know. When I was at the doc's yesterday trying to help him with Jake, I kept sayin' to him, ‘Where the hell's Tommy?' He didn't know. Nobody knew. Then those campers came barrelin' in, told us another one was gone. The little one. That's where Tommy was.”

I turned to Joe. “Did you think Tommy was the one?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why did you run away?”

“Because I didn't want to know who they thought might have done it. Our whole community was—”

“Community?
What
whole community? The community is a
lunatic asylum
.”

Jim Lane's kid said, “I'm not a lunatic.”

“You will be if you don't get out.”

Mick protested. “But Poppy, we saw the girls were watched over. I mean, once he tried to kill the young one. So's he couldn't do it to anyone else until the ban was lifted. That girl who went out in the storm, the one who went after Tommy—we didn't think the girls would figure it out. We thought they would trust the law and stay put at the camp. She didn't stay put.”

“What about me?”

Their eyes shifted away. Then Billy brightened. “Well, you're alive, right? Besides, we couldn't've stopped you. Carol tried, said so. Willa did too. Tried to keep you up there at the camp. But that girl, the one who went after Tommy on her own? You were up there with her. How come you couldn't keep her from going out?”

I was on my feet, but just as I'd stood up, the little bell over the door tinkled and my stomach turned over. I felt myself cringe exactly the way Jake had not too many days ago. It was Fitzy. He stopped short at the sight of me. “Now what?”

None of us said anything.

Fitzy said to me, “Just hold that thought, Poppy,” and to Ernie, “I need to speak to you.”

“Is Willa all right?”

“Come on outside.”

They went out the door and I watched the bell bumped by the door and waited for the tinkle, all in slow motion, and when the sound came, it was a tone from hell. Poor, poor Jake. I was hearing the little bell the way he heard it. So sensitive to sound. To the point of agony. He was the only one besides Tommy who had any idea of the suffering Tommy's victims endured. But Jake had fought the demons and beaten them.

Fitzy came back in alone. I was sitting down again, too tired to vent my fury, too depressed to tell Joe what I thought of him. I was completely wrung out. Fitzy pulled up a chair. He said to Jim, to Billy and Mick, to Aggie, and to the taxi brothers that Ernie needed them. “He's in the store.”

One by one they left, without so much as a glance my way, except for Jim. Jim Lane's kid hefted his bag of paraphernalia and said to me, “They just didn't know what to do.”

I said to Joe, “You tell him.”

“They knew what to do, kid. She's right. Get away from here.”

He followed the others, one last glance at me over his shoulder.

Joe went behind the counter and brought the pot of coffee over and a cup for Fitzy. He poured out the last of the carafe. He said, “What's going on, Fitzy?”

When he said that, I found I didn't want to know. So maybe it had been a first for Joe, too, like it was for me, right then—not wanting to know. But with me it only lasted a second. It had taken a few days for Joe to come to his senses—when it was too late.

Fitzy downed his whole cup as he was wont to do, put it down, and said, “I just cooked my insides.” He helped himself to what was left of my orange juice. Then he said, “I spent the night looking through Esther's stuff. Figured someone had to know it could have been Tommy.” I made some kind of noise, sort of like
hah
.

Joe told him what
hah
meant, which was the very thought Fitzy had asked me to hold. Fitzy just shook his head. Then he said, “It was that family tree, Poppy. Tommy had been on an earlier version, but not the one you saw. Esther found out he was not his mother's child but had been adopted. She told everyone too. I know that because she told Willa. I asked Willa about it. She told me that's when they suspected Tommy: when they learned he was an outsider. If you feel any better, Poppy, that's what they based their suspicions on. Wouldn't quite have held up in a court of law in Rhode Island if it had been ours.

“But listen, guess who
is
on that tree? Poppy, remember the blank line?”

“Yes.”

“That was for Jake's mother. I kept going through the stuff until I found the papers that legalized Tommy's taking the wardship of Jake from the state. Jake was illegitimate, and even though everyone knew he was a foundling, that he'd been abandoned, they never thought he'd been abandoned by one of
them
. I would guess the psychiatrist, being a medical doctor after all, probably delivered Jake and kept the identity of the mother secret.”

I listened. I felt I was in a trance by the time he got to that part. I said, “Fitzy, Willa was standing right over us when we were looking at Esther's clippings. At the picture of Tommy when he was a little boy. We
showed
it to her. She spilled the coffee she was pouring. She'd seen those clippings before. Probably at Esther's. Right when we were sitting here looking at them she probably realized who the boy was. Who he grew up to be.”

“Yeah, well, that's moot. Here's the point I'm making. Willa was Jake's mother.”