She's Not There (6 page)

Fitzy looked at me. “This isn't how I usually operate.”

We had our tea.

There were footsteps coming down a staircase on the other side of the kitchen wall. Aggie got up and went through the curtain. We listened to her explain to the guest what he had to do. She apologized. He pretty much grunted in response and came back with her. He was classically unattractive: beady eyes, huge nose, no chin, and his ears stuck straight out at right angles to his head. He was recently showered and shaved, his sparse hair parted on the side and combed straight down to his ears. He had on a clean T-shirt and shorts, both wrinkled and shrunken.

Aggie said, “Martin, this is the law.”

The beady eyes shifted from me to Fitzy. “Recognize you both.”

Aggie said, “Tea, Martin?”

“Wouldn't mind.”

Martin sat down with us.

“Tell me,” Fitzy said, “about the girl you dated from the camp.”

He answered in about as straightforward a way as possible. “I picked her up. She was hitchhiking. A lot of them do that. I would too if I were trapped in the middle of a swamp.”

Aggie explained, “Camp is smack between the two biggest swamps we got.”

“I bought her a clam roll. She was starving. There was a party here that night. I invited her. She came, but not because of me. She didn't give a hoot about me. She came for the food and the beer. She had no money. Her parents—she said her parents were mad because she wouldn't lose weight, so they sent her to the camp. She said … let's see … she said she was incarcerated against her will without due process.”

Fitzy asked, “Her name?”

“Rachel.”

“Last name?”

“Never told me.”

“What about the dead girl?”

“What about her?”

“Did you invite her here too?”

“Nope. I gave up on it. Girls don't much like me.”

Fitzy said, “They don't much like me either. The important thing is this: Did Rachel take drugs? And did she tell you where she got them? Beyond pot, let's say.”

“No.”

I asked him how he could be so sure.

“This is a blue-collar place, ya know? Beer is what people take on Block Island, not cocaine. I've never understood why anyone would need to do anything beyond drinking beer to be happy.”

Aggie piped up. “Go fishing, I'd say. Martin caught me a big striper yesterday. We had a swell dinner last night, didn't we?”

Martin said, “Thanks to your cookin', Aggie. I'm supposed to meet some friends now at the harbor. The idea is to catch more stripers today.”

“These friends stay here?”

“Day-trippers.”

“Do these friends date the campers?”

He shook his head. “No way.”

Fitzy told Martin to go fishing. We heard him go off on a moped. Fitzy said, “Maybe she did bring drugs from home.”

“Why don't we go talk to the camper? Rachel.”

Aggie said, “I'd give those girls a little time, Poppy. They're probably mighty upset.”

Fitzy stood up. “We won't see them before breakfast, I'm starved.”

*   *   *

Our breakfast place was called Richard's Patio. Joe and I had breakfast there our first two mornings but had skipped yesterday because Joe went to get the cello. It was how Joe said we'd start most of our days. The clique of regulars who had breakfast at Richard's Patio were Joe's island friends. No one else, Joe explained, knew or cared that the little breakfast joint existed, not even most other islanders. The year-round population of Block Island was around seven hundred, and all but a dozen of those were landowners. The landowners had sold off bits and pieces of their holdings to people who used to go to Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket only to disapprove of the ever-growing crowds spoiling their enchantment. So they'd island-hopped to the Block instead, where whalers had never lived, never built gorgeous mansions with widow's walks, and never left behind scrimshaw—since, at the time, Block Island didn't have a harbor. Now there was an artificial one plus a once landlocked pond that engineers had opened. The yachts had poured in and the sailors bought up the farmland hastily offered for sale and built new vacation homes, over a thousand of them in the last twenty-five years. Now, according to Joe, there were 688 Block Islanders with a lot of money in their pockets, plus the dozen others who'd never owned land—Billy and Mick, for example, who kept the 688 in lobsters; or Willa, who sold them milk and bread; Esther, who painted and lived on handouts; a few others. As for the new seasonal homeowners, if they wanted white asparagus, they packed it in their suitcases or they revved up their 58-footers and made a quick trip to the mainland.

Tourists who actually did notice Richard's Patio were turned back by Pal, Willa and Ernie's dog, a fierce-looking Doberman-shepherd mix who loved to let fly with a wicked growl. But Joe told me to look close and I would see he was too old to do any harm. He had no teeth. The regulars meant to have a respite from the people they waited on all day long, one way or another. On this day, Joe thought we should be sure to have breakfast there before we left because the regulars would want to know what happened. He said, “Why not let them know the death of the girl was as terrible as the rumors they've heard or whatever it is they're imagining? They'll want to do their duty as good citizens. Someone is selling drugs on the island, so they'll want to find him. Then we'll say our goodbyes.”

I agreed, and then I asked about the nouveau-riche 688. “Wouldn't they want to do their duty too?”

Joe explained how the 688 escaped the tourist-infested Block Island summers. “They're in the Dordogne.”

Richard's Patio hadn't been Willa and Ernie's idea. The real Richard was an entrepreneur who'd rented Willa and Ernie's empty cottage behind the store. He converted it into a tiny restaurant with a pretty patio outside, paved it with bricks, set out a couple of white wrought-iron tables, and put tubs of flowers all around. But no one came. Richard hung on for two seasons, the second only because Willa and Ernie refused to charge him rent. The million-dollar-vacation-home owners, his intended market, seldom managed actually to fit in a trip to Block Island, what with their own summers in the Dordogne. There was nothing he could do to change the Budweiser-and-burger taste of Block Island's blue-collar day-trippers. It cost eight dollars and took one hour to get to Block Island from the mainland on the ferry. A ferry to the more chi-chi Massachusetts spots cost twenty-five and meant a serious battle through the heavy traffic making its way up the Cape. So Richard finally called it quits and moved on to Nantucket.

Willa and Ernie sold the wrought iron tables, threw out the planter tubs, and put back their garbage cans and Pal's doghouse. But they left Richard's restaurant untouched, except for the addition of a counter and four stools. Richard hadn't taken his Josef Albers prints with him, so blocks of bright colors decorated the walls, except in one corner where Ernie had thumbtacked a curling photo of the 1967 American League champions, the Red Sox, a yellowed pennant that read
YAZ
—400
HOME RUNS
—3000
HITS
, and a handmade sign, big letters: YANKEES SUCK.

The coffee shop was open from six to ten in the morning. Willa and Ernie thought of it as a kitchen where friends could feel free to stop by to eat—friends and any guests these friends might bring along was what Joe told me, but I believe he was the only one who ever brought a guest.

Fitzy and I passed the doghouse and Pal, snoozing in the sun. Fitzy said, “Hey, mangeball,” and Pal lifted his head just long enough to bare his gums and growl.

I said, “That wasn't nice.”

Fitzy said, “I'm not nice. They hate me in this place.”

“Joe says they're going to want to know what happened yesterday.”

“So tell them.”

Joe was already there at our table, the regulars at their usual places. Billy and Mick were on their stools at the counter eating bacon and eggs. If when they'd finished breakfast they didn't find customers waiting for them out on the pier by the
Debbie
, they'd go shoot pool, a dollar a point. There was a sign at the pier that read
FISHING EXCURSIONS LEAVE AT
10
AM. ADULTS
$25,
KIDS
$25. Billy and Mick were dependent on the same market that Richard had been, but they also attracted fishermen who stayed at the three big inns, which made their enterprise profitable. Joe sometimes played pool with them. He said they'd been exchanging the same money back and forth for years, taking turns bragging about skunking each other.

Jim Lane's kid was at a table surrounded by his paraphernalia. He was the boy I'd seen each day selling postcards at a card table in the harborside parking lot—postage included. Since not having a stamp was the main reason tourists didn't buy postcards, he had a good thing going. Each night, he carted his stuff home so as not to interfere with the town ordinance requiring him to pay a kiosk fee for a permanent stand. This annoyed the off-island merchants who sold postcards in their summer-only souvenir shops, but their protests fell on deaf ears. Jim Lane
père
was the mayor. Mayor Lane—presently in the Dordogne—bragged that his son was saving his postcard money for college.

I'd asked Joe, “Where can you go to college on postcard money?”

“University of Rhode Island.”

Jake was at his usual table, without the constable though. Tommy dropped him there, made his rounds, and then came back to help Jake with his breakfast. Jake wouldn't eat unless Tommy was there to help him. Now Jake was fiddling with some copper wires and a circuit box while he waited. Willa didn't care if Jake sat there all day, as long as he didn't start any fires with her electrical equipment. The story of Jake, according to Joe, was that someone found a baby forty years ago on one of the boats in the dead of winter, and Tommy took him in. By the time the authorities from Providence got wind of it, Jake was already a toddler, and when the social worker arrived and saw the child had an awful lot wrong with him and she would have no chance of finding adoptive parents, he became a foster child in Tommy's care. What was then called a ward.

Another thing I'd asked Joe was, “Did anybody bother to try and find the child's parents?”

He said, “Who knows? This being Block Island, Poppy, no one asks. People respect one another's desire to keep private matters private.”

I said respect wouldn't have stopped me. Then I asked him about something I'd found curious: “Joe, how come none of the Richard's Patio folks are landowners? Speaking of boats, how'd they miss the boat?”

“Well, they're landowners now. Aggie bought the farmhouse. Willa and Ernie bought the store. Billy and Mick bought the
Debbie
after all these years. And Esther—”

“The
Debbie
isn't land.”

“It's a long story. There are always going to be the haves and the have-nots.”

“Like there's always a wrong side of the tracks.”

“Yes.”

He expected me to respect his desire to keep their private matters private, so I saved it. I'd be disrespectful another time when his heels weren't quite so dug in.

Now, Joe stood up and held a chair for me. Fitzy and I sat down. “How'd it go?”

Fitzy said, “It didn't.”

Ernie called out from behind the counter, “Three coffees comin' up.”

Fred Prentiss from the liquor store was always the first one there before he opened up. He didn't like to eat breakfast at home: too many kids. He was not a native, even though he'd married a Block Islander and had lived on High Street for over twenty years. His wife was descended from original settlers, and she'd made it clear to Willa and Ernie that Fred was to be welcomed at the coffee shop. His Red Sox cap, an attempt to be one of the boys, didn't cut it. He also wore new brightly colored polo shirts with the Sears lizard on the pocket. The shirts fit tight across his chest. He lifted weights. The regulars couldn't stand him. He was at the counter, an empty stool separating him from Billy and Mick. It would remain empty.

When Joe told me the history of Fred, I'd said, “Why didn't they tell Fred's wife to take a flyer?”

“Poppy, there's a certain hierarchy here. She's blueblood. One of the haves. This is really small-town America. You know how it is.”

“No. I don't.”

“Then count your blessings.”

The town's two taxi drivers would be in from seven-thirty until quarter to nine. First they'd take tourists from the seven o'clock ferry to the inns and then get back to the harbor and be ready for the next ferry at nine. They were brothers. Joe said they worked from April 1 to November 1 and then they took the money they'd made and went to Florida. I said, “What if someone needs a taxi after that?”

“No one does. No tourists off-season. The restaurants don't have heat.”

“What do the taxi brothers do in Florida?”

Joe thought about that. “I have no idea.”

“Aren't you curious?”

“Not really.”

Because of our timing this morning, we were missing the taxi brothers.

The other customer was Esther, who sold the framed maps and articles I'd been on my way to look at when I found the body. As always, she sat alone in the far corner reading, today an old book with a broken spine. I had the feeling she listened to everyone's conversation even if she didn't join in. FBI agents recognize that ability in others since they have to train at it so hard themselves. Esther was a fixture, along the lines of an unlit, unfussy lamp.

Fitzy turned toward her. “Hey, Esther, come join us.”

Esther looked at him as if he were a gnat and then went back to her book.

Fitzy laughed. “She won't take me up on my offers of dinner and dancing either.”