She's Not There (4 page)

I returned to scrolling. Yesterday I'd said to Joe, while we watched the overweight girls with their burdens of backpacks and suitcases, “Poor kids. Can't be overweight in America, can you?”

“Nope.”

“One of them looks a little young.” She wasn't nearly as tall as the other girls. They all had on athletic shirts but her—one read
GREENWICH HIGH RUGBY
. The smallest girl wore a T-shirt with a Barbie face smiling out from it.

“Yeah, she does. Is that a doll under her arm?”

It was a vintage Cabbage Patch Kid. My assistant at the FBI has three small daughters, so I've picked up some data along those lines. “Definitely a doll.”

Joe said, “The camp is supposed to be limited to teenagers.”

The day-trippers, who were standing around debating about which beach to go to or wondering aloud as to how speedily they could make their way to a more refined tourist site, stopped to stare at the girls. Jim Lane's kid had been joined by a few friends, and they were snickering as well as staring. The constable stared too. Only Jake, studying one of the batteries in his box with intense concentration, was not. When Joe had introduced me to Jake—who never looked up at me—he'd said, “Jake is Tommy's ward.” Then, when we were out of Jake's earshot—though it's not unusual for people to treat a mentally handicapped person as if he were deaf—I said, “What do you mean, he's a ward? The guy must be forty years old.”

Joe didn't know the exact circumstances. He only knew Tommy took care of Jake. He said, “You just accept things on the island the way they are, Poppy.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

Okay. “What is a ward, anyway?”

“It's a term no longer in use except on Block Island.”

“Sort of like, say,
constable
.”

He smiled. “Sort of.”

After picking up the beer, Joe was about to turn the key in the ignition when something banged the side of the jeep. A big red-faced man had smacked it. He had on a rumpled and dirty police uniform—sloppy chop, I'd thought. Now my scrolling through yesterday halted again: the trooper was as disheveled then as he had been this morning when he stepped out onto the police station porch and zipped his pants.

After banging Joe's ragtop, he said, “Man, those girls are an eyeful. How the hell are ya, Joe?”

The smile Joe gave him translated to distaste. He said, “Hey, Fitzy, back again?”

“I am. Assigned to the Block once more, lucky me.”

Joe turned to me. “This is Francis X. Fitzgerald, Rhode Island state trooper, and how he got this cushy job only he knows. Fitzy, this is my friend Penelope Rice. Poppy.”

The cop looked me up and down. “Damned sight better-lookin' than the previous one.”

Nice. So I said, “Been working all night?”

Without a pause: “Slept in my uniform. Had a little party, went on longer than I expected.”

Joe started the engine. “Gotta run, Fitzy. See ya around,” and the jeep skidded away from the curb. Joe's nose was wrinkled like he was smelling something bad. He said, “Guy's an alcoholic. Loves to jar me. Me and everyone else. The Rhode Island State Police put him out here last couple of summers to keep him the hell out of everyone's way. I guess they hope he'll dry out.”

“Why doesn't the Rhode Island State Police fire him? I would.”

“That's because you're from Washington, not Rhode Island.”

Joe detoured via a little side street to point out Fitzy's office. “The reason he's never in the office is because he'd have to deal with the rookie cop they assign to him. New rookie every year. Fitzy considers it the only fly in his ointment.”

Back on the harbor road, we passed the camp van stopped on the side of the road. One of the four overweight girls stood by the open passenger door arguing with another girl, a skinny one, the driver. The skinny girl was yelling and waving her arms. “You're supposed to come right to camp, so you
can't
take a cab. You have to come with us!”

“I'll find my way to that camp when I'm good and ready.”

“But I'll get in trouble.”

The camper said, “Tough shit.”

“I don't like your attitude much.”

“Oh, fuck off.” And the camper stalked past us, back toward the harbor, where there were two cars with the word
TAXI
hand-painted on their doors.

The Cabbage Patch Kid looked out at us through the rear window of the van. He was hideous. The camper holding him—she couldn't have been more than ten or eleven—shook his arm up and down. I looked at Joe. “Trying to make friends.” We both waved back. Joe maneuvered the ragtop around the van. He said, “Wonder what started that altercation.”

“Maybe the camper couldn't deal with sharing a ride with that satanic doll.”

We drove up the hill and along the cliff edge and then across the middle hump of the island until we came to Joe's cottage on the southwest shore—isolated, beautiful, and a great place to unwind is what Joe kept insisting. At the time, he'd been right about that. I'd agreed to one week, not the two weeks—at least ten days—he'd originally tried to talk me into. His argument: “Poppy, don't look upon it as a vacation. You are recuperating from a concussion and ripped tendons in your ankle. Recuperating from injuries suffered on the job is not vacationing, even if you choose to do it on a spectacularly attractive island.” My argument: “I already have recuperated. And since I'm not looking upon it as a vacation—I do not
take
vacations—I am calling it a forced leave.”

Actually, I planned to jump ship whenever the hell I felt like leaving. Therefore, I sympathized with the overweight camper, the one who had gone for the taxi. Sometimes I get tired of butting heads with Joe, who is just as stubborn as I am. Once my assistant said, “What, are you both Leos?” I'd said, “Maybe he is. I'm a cynic.”

After our morning encounter with the overweight camp girls plus both ends of the Block Island law enforcement spectrum—a constable always accompanied by his autistic ward and a wrecked state trooper—I'd been quite content to spend the rest of the day hiking the cliff edge with Joe, followed by an afternoon of lolling around on lawn chairs: reading, snoozing, drinking Grey Goose and tonic with lots of lemon and lots of ice, and then watching the sun drop into the sea. Once it was dark, we killed the lobsters, ate them, made love, and slept like rocks in the moonlight coming through Joe's windows. Reminded me of home. I've never gotten around to putting up blinds in my apartment in the five years, almost six, I've lived in DC, so I was used to streetlights instead of a dark bedroom. Maybe that did it, a reminder of home. Suddenly ten days away—maybe even two weeks—was beginning to sound very doable.

And then, early this morning, the first thing Joe said before he left for the airstrip was, “It'll be a warm one. Muggy now, but the humidity'll lift and a little wind will come up.” He'd stood at the window, which was fitted with murk instead of moonlight. I'd thought, I am now thinking in boat terms. Then he said, “Yet another pretty day, rest assured.” And I'd believed him. “Just more day-trippers than usual, Poppy, escaping the mainland heat. We'll have to go to the farthest reaches of the Crescent. Day-trippers never get out that far.”

We'd planned on a day at the beach. Swimming
and
kayaking
and
picnicking. But first Joe had to gas up his Cessna, fly to the mainland, and pick up a cello. I'd said, “A cello?” and he explained that one of his fellow summer residents played with the Boston Symphony. The cello had been overhauled, and Joe volunteered to get it for him. “You'd like this guy a lot, Poppy, but you won't meet him. He'll be too busy practicing.”

I said, “There are quite a few weird people around here, aren't there? Even the transients.”

“The guy is a dedicated musician.”

“I was talking about the guy who flies around fetching cellos.”

“I'll be back with a filled picnic hamper.”

The plan was that I would bike into town during the cello flight to buy presents to take home. There was a place just past the edge of town that sold framed maps, charts, various nautical records, and clippings from yellowed newspapers marking historical events. Joe had one on his wall. The headline read:
KITTY HAWK, MAN'S FIRST SUCCESSFUL FLIGHT
. It wasn't a shop, it was a woman's home. The woman framed the charts and clippings. The frames had style. “They aren't plastic molds with starfish embossed in the corners like the cheap prints for sale at the souvenir store. Like you get in Nantucket,” said Joe, always defending his territory. He warned me it would be a little difficult finding the house. “Esther doesn't really like customers.” I'd met Esther, an artist, forced to find a way to stay off welfare so she could devote herself to her painting. She didn't sell her paintings, though. She preferred to keep them, Joe said, or throw them away if she wasn't happy with them. She was a misanthrope. Only a few tourists managed to find her house. Joe had written out the directions.

So he drove off and I had slept another hour, fixed breakfast, and taken a shower. It was nine-thirty. Sleeping late was not necessarily a bad thing. In DC I didn't sleep, I worked.

Then I'd gotten the bike and left on my ill-fated shopping jaunt.

Now, sitting on the chaise with Spike, I just wanted to get back to Washington and chat up my director before filing a request to open an investigation into what killed that girl. Get to the topflight men and women at our crime lab and tell them to give Officer Fitzgerald of the Rhode Island State Police whatever he needed. Once I described to them the condition of the body I'd come across, they wouldn't hesitate for a minute. They'd be raring to go.

3

I have seen plenty of dead bodies since the day I finished law school. I first saw corpses in my initial job as an assistant DA in the Bronx. I went on to examining crime scenes, where I looked upon more dead bodies as a prosecutor in Florida. I have witnessed executions. When I was director of the FBI crime lab, before my present job there as a special investigator, I'd attended autopsies and watched my technicians observe remains and then comment on those observations before conducting their dissections. I watched them while they closely examined both entire organs and cross sections of tissue samples under their microscopes, and then we'd study images of all pertinent body parts projected onto wall-sized screens, where they'd zoom in until the skin looked like a crocheted doily. But I have never discovered a body. People chance upon bodies under terrible circumstances; a surveyor traipsing through a stand of oak trees comes upon a sex-crime victim under a pile of leaves and debris; a parent finds her child motionless in a crib, dead of
SIDS
; a husband discovers his wife in the garage, seated calmly behind the wheel of the car, the ignition still turned on but the car out of gas. So many instances which, suddenly, I could clearly identify with.

As I slowed my bike on Coonymus Road, registering what was right there before my eyes, not believing it for several moments, I'd been horrified. Now, hours later, my stomach was still in knots. Every bit of me was unsettled. On my lap, Spike did what he could, purring more soothingly, blinking up at me, commiserating. I stroked him and stroked him, enjoyed feeling his utterly relaxed muscles under the sleek smoothness of his kitty fur. Then his ears pricked up. He tensed and I heard what he had heard first with his big sensitive ears—the sound of the Cessna's engine as, overhead, Joe brought the plane into Block Island air space. Joe had pointed out the plane's unique little sputters to me when we'd taken short jaunts. So I waited—that was all I could do—though Spike leaped to the ground and dashed around the cottage. In ten minutes I heard the squash of the ragtop's wheels rolling down the sandy path and, a short time later, the squeal of its brakes on the graveled area at the foot of the rutted track.

Joe ran from around the corner, Spike right behind, and they stood in front of me.

“My god, Poppy, I am so sorry.”

“You already heard?”

“On my radio.”

He sat right down on the slate next to the chaise and took my hand. He said again, “I'm sorry.”

Spike nudged him and Joe scratched the back of the cat's neck.

I said, “I swear to God, I've spent my entire adult life looking for trouble. Actually, I spent my childhood the same way. Now I get paid to look for trouble. But for the few days that I was determined
not
to look for trouble—here on Joe Barnow's island paradise—trouble has found me. Maybe that's why I have an irrational fear of vacations. Trouble finding me means I'm not in control.”

Joe said, “We'll go home.”

“Thank you.” He kept patting me and scratching Spike. I said, “Joe, she was all twisted up. Like some kind of human corkscrew.”

“I know. I heard that part too.”

“Ecstasy—or whatever designer drugs kids are taking—which one does that?”

“When I get back, I'm going to find out.”

“Unless my lab beats you to it.”

“The race is on, then.” He took my hand in both of his. “Poppy?”

“What?”

“First let's have the day we'd planned. We'll go to the beach, break out our picnic … We'll talk about it. Tomorrow morning we wake up, fly back. Start some serious research.”

After you speak with people who have found bodies, you suggest they just go home, be with their loved ones, try to take it easy, and they always say,
Okay
. Dazed. And I found myself saying, “Okay.” I wasn't dazed, though. I'd said it to temporarily brush him off. I was conflicted. I told Fitzy, the cop, I'd be here. But nothing concrete. I could be with him from my office, be of assistance by telephone.