She's Not There (27 page)

I went in the kitchen. Joe had everything so Jake was probably right—just a matter of locating what you wanted. There was a bottle of chocolate syrup on a shelf on the refrigerator door. The bottle was glass. It wasn't Nestlé's Quik. The syrup was imported from Switzerland.

I was still stirring when I brought the chocolate milk to Jake, sitting there on the hard slate. I took the spoon out and handed the glass to him. He handed it back. We made three exchanges. Then he said, “Spoon.” I gave him the spoon. Another three exchanges. He licked it clean, three licks. I said, “Would you rather sit in a chair?”

“No.”

I sat down in mine. He took three slow spoonfuls of chocolate milk and then drank the rest in three gulps, knocking the glass back as if he were drinking shots of whiskey. He banged the glass down on the slate, picked it up, banged it down again, picked it up, banged it down. Joe has serious glasses. They don't break easily.

Now Jake sported a chocolate-milk mustache. I studied his face. He could have been the boy in the newspaper, I thought, but that was because his face was so childlike.

“Jake, does Tommy know you're out?”

“Don't know.”

Couldn't care. Amoral but always truthful. No reason to deceive. Joe had told me another time that Jake did not anticipate.

“Will he worry about you?”

“Don't know.”

Jake didn't comprehend caring that someone might be worried about him. That was not his problem. He had enough problems keeping chaos out of his head by doing everything three times.

He stood up. “Going now.”

Joe said he didn't use pronouns or names. Too intense.

“All right. I could give you a ride.”

He cringed. “No.”

He walked around the cottage to the drive instead of going back to the path. He'd walked around the cottage before. Probably many times, a place where no one would talk to him, try to get him to say a pronoun. Joe told me he'd see Jake around the cottage once in a while, walking the paths once it was dark. “Until I started bringing Spike. The noises animals make are difficult for him.” Joe had felt bad about it.

Now Jake stopped and looked over his shoulder at me. Not at my face, but at a spot just above my head. “Fanks.” He pointed a finger at me. My guess, a replacement for not being able to say my name. And he couldn't pronounce
th
, couldn't say
thanks
. Neither could Delby's youngest. Immaturity, not autism. But Jake wasn't three years old.

“You're welcome, Jake. Jake?”

He looked at his shoes.

“Jake, have you seen anything strange? Do you know what happened to the girls from the camp?”

He didn't answer.

“Do you watch the girls through their window sometimes?”

“Yes.”

Then he bobbed up and down, turned, and galloped away, arms akimbo.

Had a camp girl said something, done something, that Jake couldn't tolerate? Could he have killed those girls in some mad-genius way? No. No reason to deceive.

Could he have grabbed Spike and thrown him over the cliff? I should have asked him.

*   *   *

Fitzy, the next morning, over yet another breakfast, knew all the particulars on the sisters who had tortured the little boy. First of all, the whole thing was true. The case was sealed, though. There was no identifying the boy. The reporter hadn't wanted to do that. Fitzy said, “But I'm starting the tape unrolling so the homicide department may be able to get the information for us. The guy who runs the dead files room is in his seventies now. Maybe he'll remember some old fisherman who's been coming to Block Island every year during striper season who may have been that kid.”

“This is striper season, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“How long to unroll the tape?”

“That's the problem. Unless we find another dead girl, I'll have to steal the tape. The number three is important when it comes to investigating a serial killer officially. Our number is two. I can only hope the killer is so old he'll just kick the bucket and our troubles will be over. Then all that would be left would be to prove that what we know to be true is true, and then we can give the parents of the dead girls the answer they're sorely needing. Part of it anyway. That they were murdered. We won't have to say how.”

Somewhere behind the facade, Fitzy was one sensitive man. Unrealistic, too. They go together. That was probably what had led to his downfall. Taking to drink didn't help.

“The footprints at Rodman's Hollow were Fred's. The one's under the camp window are generic. Rubber fishing boots.”

I lowered my voice. “They were Jake's.”

Fitzy didn't lower his. “What?”

“I ran into him and asked.”

I told Fitzy about Jake's visit with me.

“He didn't answer when you asked him what happened to the girls?”

“No. He must know something. But as to what happened to them, Jake doesn't know or he'd have told me. Joe was right. Not a thread of compunction. I think he's like Esther. He watches, but he doesn't delve. In his case, delving would disrupt his compulsions.”

“She delved inadvertently.”

“True.”

He scanned the breakfast regulars. “Where is Esther anyway?”

They were all there but her.

We wondered about Esther out loud to Ernie when he trundled our coffee over to us. He said, “Thinkin' about that myself. Maybe she's workin' on some picture and can't tear herself away. Or caught a cold, who knows? Or she's still upset after seein' that body.” He turned to his wife. “Hey, Willa, how about we make a little something for Esther. Poppy wouldn't mind taking it over.” Back to me. “Right, Poppy?”

“I wouldn't mind at all.”

Willa jumped off her stool. “Esther would call if she wanted something. I'm going to the store.”

She took off her apron, hung it on a hook, and left. Ernie said, “She's got a lot of produce comin' in today. As if Esther'd call. I'll make a little something for her. My wife gets nervy when she's under pressure. And Esther—ya know, she's startin' to—never mind.”

Fitzy said, “I'll take the breakfast over to her. See if she'll give me the time of day.” Poor Fitzy. As if the only sort of person he might have a chance with was a depressed misanthrope. “But you come too, Poppy, otherwise she might not let me in the door, breakfast or otherwise.”

“Okay. Maybe we can push her on figuring out where she came up with those clippings.”

“Yeah, we'll do that.”

As we were finishing our own breakfasts, Ernie gave us a Styrofoam box of French toast and sausage.

Fitzy said, “This smells good. Tomorrow, instead of bacon, I'll have sausage. Don't let me forget, Ernie.”

“Gotcha.”

Fitzy patted his beer gut. Then he said to me, “Where the hell do you put all the food you gorge, FBI?”

“Eating is only my second priority. Give me a choice between a doughnut and a bike ride, I get on the bike.”

“I'd take the doughnut in a minute.”

I shrugged.

“Goody Two-Shoes, aren't you?”

“You asked.”

“So let's give Esther her breakfast before I open this box and sneak out the sausages.”

Esther was not on the porch. We knocked, waited, and then went in. Maybe she did have a cold. Summer cold. The worst kind.

The door off her porch into the living room was opened. I stepped across the threshold and stopped. Fitzy walked into me. But instantly, he saw over my shoulder what had stopped me. Esther's body was sprawled across the floor, twisted and contorted, arms wrapped around her torso, her legs bent up. Her clothes, though, hadn't been ripped away. Her face was mottled, and copious amounts of saliva had dried on her chin and cheek and on the floor beneath her face too.

Fitzy and I reacted in the same way. We turned toward each other, face-to-face. We said nothing. We breathed each other's air. And then we both went to Esther and knelt on either side of her. Fitzy was the first to speak. He said, “Jesus Christ.”

He laid the Styrofoam tray with Esther's breakfast on the floor. He said, “Poison.” Then he bent her left arm and moved it down to her side. No cadaveric contractions. “Copy cat.”

“Yes. Except the killer didn't know about the bells.”

“That's right.”

“Esther found out other things too, didn't she? Not just the story of the boy.”

“I'd say so. Not inadvertently either.”

“I'm sorry, Fitzy.”

“Yeah.”

Fitzy looked more carefully into Esther's face, gazing down at her intently without speaking. He was not studying her face for forensic information; he had the crux of that at a glance. He was mourning her death.

“Fitzy, did you ever discover a body before? I mean, without a dispatcher first reporting a homicide? Without benefit of an anonymous call?”

“No.” He looked up at me again.

“That's what happened to me. A few days ago.”

“But you didn't know her.”

“So it's much worse for you. Take a minute.”

I stood and stepped away, looked around. The sale bin had been emptied, the framed souvenirs scattered over the floor. The papers from Esther's stack of folders were strewn everywhere. The folders had names on them. All our names. Esther collected information. Great hobby, a lot cheaper than most. Dangerous, though.

“Fitzy, whoever did this probably found what he was looking for.”

“Probably. I'll have to go through all the stuff anyway.”

He stood too. We went through the house, room by room. Esther was not a neat housekeeper. You can't vacuum and dust if you're a painter or there'd be no time to paint, or to think about what you're painting. And she certainly didn't have the money to hire someone to clean for her. Several Styrofoam boxes were still on the kitchen table from her other meals. She was sloppy, but it was clear her killer hadn't needed to tear the rest of Esther's house apart to find what he was looking for. She held the spirit of organization. Everything he might have been interested in was in that plywood bin or in the box of folders.

I started going through the scattered clippings on the floor, positive that what we needed to find was already gone. But Fitzy was right, he'd have to pore over all of it. Sometimes what is left in a robbery leaves an investigator able to guess at what was taken.

I opened a file with my name in it. There was one page. She'd written my name, that I was an FBI agent, and that Joe Barnow was in love with me. I showed it to Fitzy. “Why would she want to do this?”

“Maybe she didn't like crossword puzzles … television … who knows?”

I picked up Fitzy's file and handed it to him. He opened it, read his paper, and did that smile, one corner of his mouth tilted up. He chose not to share with me what Esther had written about him.

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and picked up the phone. Fitzy described to his commissioner what we'd found. He talked to several different people after that, assuring a few that the body was accessible, it was not down in a swamp. It wouldn't be long before the state police helicopter was making its way back to Block Island. I listened to all he was saying in bits and pieces while I looked through Esther's papers. I didn't read the file with Joe's name. I didn't want to intrude. The Rhode Island investigators would do that. It would take many days and a lot of shoe leather before any of it might lead to whoever wanted to shut her up forever.

I spotted a genealogy. The title on the file was
DUTCHY KITTEN
. Esther had already done what I'd suggested, only not in needlepoint. With pen and ink she'd drawn a fine and many-branched family tree, tall and wide. A majestic tree, the kind that won't be found on Block Island for a lot of years, however long it takes a young sycamore to reach forty feet. In the file with the drawing of the tree, on several sheets of paper, she'd written a narrative, putting a story behind the names sprinkled amid the tree's branches. I read the first line and was sucked in.

Four years after Dutchy Kitten was rescued from the wreck of the
Palatine
, she'd given birth to a baby girl named Cradle. Esther noted that the islanders probably could not say the baby's real name just as they didn't understand her mother as a child when she'd tried to tell them her name was Katerina. Esther guessed the child's actual name could have been African.

African? I read on. On the tree, Cradle had no last name. Her father's name was next to Dutchy Kitten, though there was no marriage date. His name was Orange; he was the same age as Dutchy; both estimated to be sixteen at the time of Cradle's birth. The date of Orange's death was just a few days after Cradle was born. I flipped to the narrative and found an explanation of his suicide. Orange had been a slave leased to Captain Ezra Dodge. He'd killed himself because the lease was about to expire. He wanted to avoid being sent back to Virginia. He was buried in the Indian cemetery where Dutchy later built a shack for herself and Cradle just a few feet away from where he lay. Dutchy's grave was dug next to his sixty-seven years later.

Cradle married the grandson of Orange's temporary owner, Captain Dodge, an original settler. They'd had twelve children; three survived.

I went back to the tree. From Cradle and Hiram Dodge came a line of descendents through to the present day. All the names on the tree were the names of settlers and their descendents—Dodges and Littlefields, Howes and Motts, names engraved on plaques all over the island. Some of the living descendents had asterisks next to their names. I went to the bottom of the page; those were the people presently living on the island. The list included all the Richard's Patio regulars: Ernie and Willa, Billy and Mick, Tommy and the taxi brothers, Jim Lane, Esther herself, and Aggie from the Pleasant View. Even Jake. But Jake's parents had blanks where their names should have gone. Esther had chosen to make Jake part of the lineage. Next to his birth date:
Adopted
. Also listed, with a tiny sword next to the name, was Joseph Barnow. The sword reference at the bottom of the page noted that he was a seasonal resident. Joe had been visiting Block Island all his life because he was connected to it by blood.