She's Not There (32 page)

“So this time, the mother says, the father can handle her himself. The mother said, ‘I've had enough. I try and try but my ex-husband just keeps giving in to her.' She kept saying stuff like that. Pissed. So we called
him
—the first girl's father. In Santa Barbara. Well, guess what? She's not there. She never was there either!”

“The first girl is nowhere!”

“She is, like,
nowhere
.”

“We were so totally crazed we went to Irwin to tell him what we'd found out but, guess what else? He's
gone
. And the van's gone, and he has a boat in New Harbor, so we bet that's gone too.”

“And we bet he's
on
it!”

“He's, like,
gone
.” Kate's blue eyes blinked and blinked. “He
escaped
! And … and…”

Christen said to her, “Stupid, try one of these. It's really good,” and handed her a pastry.

She took a big bite then looked at it. “What's in it?”

Ernie looked at it. “Prune.”

“Prune? Omigod, I'm eating
prune
.”

The two older girls were on a roller coaster. They were nearly hysterical, but they still were mothering Kate. I said, “Christen, did you do anything more, once you realized Irwin was gone?”

All three said at the same time, “Yes!”

Thought so.

“We looked through his office and we looked through his files and in his closets and everywhere. We found Erin's stuff. Erin Seldes, that was her name. The first girl. Her suitcases were there, her backpack, and all the books on her school's summer reading list were in a box with her name on it.”

“He
hid
her stuff.”

“So, see, Irwin must be the one doing it. He killed the first girl and then he killed Dana and Rachel, and now he finally figured he'd get caught because of the first girl's skeleton.”

I said, “No. He just believed what he wanted to believe. That the first girl, Erin, had run away to her father's.”

“Then why didn't he send her stuff to her?”

“He would wait for instructions. He wouldn't spend money shipping her things until he heard from the father. But he didn't throw them away. He would have if he'd—Listen, who's up there with the rest of the campers?”

“We've got two counselors left. They're all together in the dining hall.”

Fitzy asked Ernie for his phone. He called the Coast Guard. The girls had been right about Irwin's departure. The guardsmen had spotted him and warned Irwin to turn his boat back. He wouldn't, so they were forced to fire across his bow. With that, he cut his engines. They detained him at sea, which is what the Coast Guard will do if it orders you to stop and you don't. Not an empty threat, as with Billy and Mick, which they try first. But Irwin decided to take his chances even with the gunshot. They chased his boat, got up some reinforcements, surrounded it, and trained several guns at him. They followed orders to guard him while awaiting further instructions. They floated food and water to him. They floated metal containers for him to store his wastes. They threatened to shoot him if he urinated overboard.

Our three campers all felt good about that because they were convinced Irwin killed the girls. Not me. Not Fitzy either, I could tell. Because Irwin didn't do it. It's rare that grifters kill. They simply want more money than they can earn selling used cars. What they don't want is trouble. But it was just as well to let the girls believe it was Irwin. They felt safer. They had simmered down.

Willa took the girls back to camp. She said she was going to call every one of the girls' parents, and those who still remained reluctant about getting their kids after the ban was lifted—those were the ones she'd tell about the skeleton. “And if they still don't agree to it, I'll tell them they'll be charged with endangerment to the welfare of a child by the Rhode Island State Police. You can do that, right, Fitzy?”

“You tell them that.”

She said to the girls, “I was fat when I was a kid. Then, one day, I guess when I was about your age, Christen, or you, Sam, I decided I just had to stop eating so much food. I didn't lose weight, but I didn't gain any more either. I stayed the same. Later, when I teamed up with Ernie, we got so busy with the store, I liked spending time taking care of the store more than eating. So I lost weight. Not enough to put me on the cover of
Glamour
. You can see that, but so what. And I didn't even know I was losing weight till my clothes got too big. Someday, that'll happen to you. Then … no more camps, see? Meanwhile, for now? Today? You girls eat. We'll all eat. Or these pastries'll be stale before you know it.”

She picked up a pastry. So did we. We would join in with the girls to support Willa's theory.

Before she left, Willa told us she intended to stay with them, get a couple of women up there to join her. Then Jim Lane went with me to look for Spike. No luck. I watched him pedal away. Just a boy, but big and strong. Maybe not a wimp at all. Maybe he just pretended to be a wimp. Maybe he did sell the girls terribly tainted drugs. Maybe the other boy who'd been tortured a long, long time ago did not arrive on the island and end up killing the campers. Maybe it was this boy who did it. Maybe he found the skeleton because he'd put it there in the first place. Happens all the time.

*   *   *

I got Delby on the phone. “I need to know how long would it take a colony of gulls to strip a body of every shred of flesh. I need to know right away and I need to know definitively.”

“A colony of what?”

“Gulls. Seagulls.” I wouldn't explain that “sea” was redundant.

She said, “I know just the place on Yahoo! to find out.”

She'd find an answer to a question like that faster at her computer than she would if she checked with the lab. I had to wonder if labs would eventually be replaced by search engines.

She called back within fifteen minutes and first verified a few facts. “Are you talking a large colony of seagulls?”

“Yes.”

“More than a hundred birds?”

“Yes.”

“A hundred will pick the bones clean in an hour. But was the body alive before the seagulls got to it?”

“I hope not.”

“Sorry, boss. Well, here's the thing: seagulls don't eat anything that's been dead more than half an hour. A dead something in the sun, that is. In the shade, hour and a half. That would be at sixty degrees Fahrenheit, give or take. And here's what I had the misfortune to find out without having to ask. Ninety-nine percent of all living creatures die by being eaten alive. How about that? Humans are the exception—they're only rarely eaten alive—alligators, sharks, starving pet dogs, or zoo animals being the guilty parties. Man.”

Man, is right. Sometimes, while sitting on the chaise, I'd watch gulls carry crabs to the cliff edge, turn them onto their backs, and peck out their insides while their legs were flailing. And of course I thought of Spike, wherever he was, treating a small mouse like a soccer ball until he got bored and broke its neck.

I asked her, “You got all this on Yahoo!?”

“Yeah. Wonder what reference librarians are doing for work these days.”

“Thanks, Delby.”

“You want it, you got it, boss. Why I'm here. Listen, Auerbach's got some stuff too—probably not from Yahoo!—and he's really frantic so get ready. I'm putting him on.”

He came on. When he began speaking, his voice was rattling with excitement. “Poppy, I can be an idiot. I'm looking into wackos hitting steel barrels with crowbars when here is what I should have been looking into instead: sound the human ear
can't
hear.”

Here we go. “Starting with, If a tree falls in the forest, et cetera?”

“Well … no. There's no sound from the tree, period, if there are no sensory cells to—”

“Never mind, Auerbach. Just get back to where you were.”

“I was getting to sound waves. They are very important when it comes to the transmission of sound. Frequencies above twenty-thousand Hertz, which we can't hear, will repel vermin and can dislodge the tartar right off your teeth. Too extravagant for your yearly trip to the dentist, though. And during the initial test trials of aircraft breaking the sound barrier wherein the crafts' engines created no sound, there was the same trauma to both pilots and crew that occurred with World War One gunnery soldiers: chest-wall vibrations, gagging, respiratory rhythm changes. Once again, the military had to break out the sound protection devices, but this time they accidentally fell into an altogether different scenario. The military looked into creating ultrasound
artificially
. To use as a weapon. But it didn't go anywhere, too costly. Just the research would have meant a significant budget increase. But here's what
did
go somewhere. Infrasound!”

“Never heard of it.”

“It's sound waves with too
low
a Hertz measurement to be heard, waves that
bypass
the sensory cells. If the infrasound waves are directed at a victim with precision and intensity through a tube, the victim is very seriously injured. But if—”

“Auerbach, did you say a
tube
?”

“More a pipe, actually. Like an organ pipe. First thing that happens, the victim can't breathe; his head pounds like he's got a major migraine going; he has a panic attack and shakes like a leaf, he loses his ability to stand upright, he experiences extreme nausea and vomiting, and then he can't move. If the intensity is increased further, his vision becomes blurred, he has seizures, he convulses, and finally the hollow organs actually rupture, starting with the organs of the ear.

“And get this, Poppy. Infrasound weapons
have
been made and tested. Pentagon supports it because sound tubes cost less than Bunsen burners and would be capable of controlling crowds so much more effectively than tear gas—only the bad guys would be throwing up all over themselves. Cool.”

His delirious voice reminded me of the campers. “Auerbach—”

“So, Poppy, these weapons are referred to as acoustic lasers and are patented under names like Consciousness-Altering Tubes and—here's my favorite—Nervous System Excitation Devices. That one combines strobe lights with the infrasound and induces complete sensory disorientation. We tried it in Somalia, and so did the Brits in Ireland in the seventies. Trouble is, the offense was equally affected, the guys at the offensive end of the tubes. The sound protection equivalent of gas masks hasn't been perfected.”

“Auerbach, tell me you don't think we've got someone here with a Nervous System Excitation Device.”

“I'm never surprised by anything.”

I still am.

“Poppy, infrasound causes the organ of Corti—it's in the cochlea—to be torn apart. I went back to tissue samples. The organs of Corti in the girls' ears were torn into pieces so small you needed a microscope to see them.”

His voice was closing in at twenty thousand Hertz, easy. “Stop and listen to me. Stop.”

“Okay.”

“Could real sound, if it were horrendous enough, do that?”

“Poppy, I
am
talking about real sound.”

“And I'm talking about real sound to a
layman
.”

“Oh. Sorry. I haven't got that information.”

“Then go back to the autopsy in Brazil.”

“Brazil?”

“The cop's daughter who was killed in a steel barrel.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“In the meantime, Auerbach, what's your guess? Was the Harvard doctor right?”

“You mean, can you kill someone by bashing a steel barrel with a crowbar if the victim is encased in the barrel? My guess is yes.” He sounded sad.

“Listen to me again, Auerbach. I know how things are. How there are some scenarios that are not as exhilarating as others. But exhilaration is secondary, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“So when you hear galloping, check for horses before you run around looking for zebras. Mind, the zebra theory is still valid though, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You said infrasound bypasses the sensory cells, right?”

“Right.”

“And the girls' sensory cells?”

He was silent.

“Auerbach?”

“Disintegrated.”

“You've done an incredible job. But keep your pants on.”

*   *   *

That evening, I said to Fitzy, “We've got to figure a way to get to Providence. We need to poke around there. We need to find out who those three sisters tortured. Delby can't get an ID on that boy.” I didn't see the percentage in filling him in on the ultrasound theory.

“If a police file on the case exists, it's sealed.”

“We'll unseal it.”

“We can't get past the Coast Guard. I haven't got a scuba diving certificate.”

I did. “Listen, I'm serious. Haven't ships managed to get past military blockades?”

“Not lately. Radar detection is pretty advanced.”

“This isn't a military blockade. There aren't that many Coast Guard boats out there. Maybe fifty percent of attempts would succeed today too.”

He thought for a minute. Then he looked into my eyes. He grinned. “Poppy, forget it.”

“If they ran rum, they could run us.”

“Shit.”

We found Billy and Mick at the pool table at the Club Soda. When they saw us, they said, “Hey, it's the law.”

Fitzy said, “We come to challenge you to a game.” He said to me out of the corner of his mouth, “Do you shoot pool, FBI?”

“I shoot everything that needs shooting.”

Fitzy and I were good. But they beat us. We bought them a round.

At the bar, lined up on stools, huddled together, we asked if it could be done. Based on the assumption that they hadn't tried all that hard with the tourists.