She's Not There (34 page)

I heard a low groan just as I reached the driftwood. A groan is not a noise any gull makes. The groan was human.

On the other side, Kate was on her side, lying still. Her hands were clapped over her ears, her eyes squeezed shut. Her clothes were torn, but she hadn't ripped them off. A gag was wrapped around her mouth. Something had stopped him. He'd brought her to the beach and left her the way you'd abandon a baby, as he'd done with the camper on Sandy Point—Erin, who was already dead.

I threw myself over the log and practically lying on top of her, pulled the gag out of her mouth, off her head. She let out a shocking, bloodcurdling screech, and then so did Christen, staring down at us from the other side of the piling. We were inundated with a horrible chorus of awful screeches from the gulls circling willy-nilly just above our heads. They came together and flew off over the ocean.

Kate began flailing wildly. She was freezing cold. I wrapped my body around hers. I looked up at Christen. “There's a blanket in the back of the jeep. Quick, Christen.” She was gone. The blanket would not warm Kate. But it would be the only way we could possibly carry her.

Kate started screaming, “Stop them! Stop them!”

I tried to pull her arms down but I couldn't; her muscles were spasmed.

Christen and Samantha were beside me. Christen let herself fall alongside Kate. She took the girl's face in her hands. She said, “Stupid, it's me. It's Christen. You're with us, with me and Sam.”

Kate wrenched herself away. The edge of a wave touched my leg. Whoever left her there had depended on the incoming tide to finish off his miserable deed. He'd thought of the old tughole but it was caved in and grown over. This littered beach, the rising tide, was simpler.

“Please, please, stop them,” Kate begged.

I let go of her. “Girls, we've got to wrap her in this blanket. Somehow. We've got to wrap her up as tight as we can and get her to the clinic.”

We tried. We couldn't do it. She was swinging back and forth, crashing against us. And then Samantha saw something down the beach. She backed away, stood, went stumbling toward the crevice that cut through the sand, and stopped just shy of the funnel of rocks. She picked up a large wet lump and ran back with it, dropped down beside Kate and pushed Elijah Leonard into the girl's face. “Look, Stupid. It's Elijah Leonard. He's here with you. But he's all wet. We'll have to put him under our hair dryer.”

She rubbed the doll against Kate's face. And Kate stopped struggling, though her entire body was shaking uncontrollably.

We laid the blanket out and rolled Kate and her doll onto it. We wrapped her up, tied the ends of the blanket into tight knots. I had Samantha shove her arms under Kate's neck and shoulders, Christen the same beneath her knees. I took the middle of her body. A wave came in and the blanket was saturated.

We couldn't lift her.

“We'll have to drag her.”

We each grabbed fistfuls of blanket and pulled. We got her a few inches along the sand. The waves were around our ankles.

Christen wailed, “We can't do it.”

“In ten minutes, she'll be under water. We have to at least get her around the driftwood.” We pulled. The blanket ripped.

Kate began to struggle again. She started to beg once more. Begging for whatever was happening to her to stop. Her friends had tears streaming down their cheeks. And then we heard the mopeds, three of them. We watched as each came skidding to a stop next to the jeep: three couples in their twenties, all sturdy and strapping, laughing and yanking their helmets off. One by one, their engines were silenced, and one by one they stopped laughing as they caught sight of us.

*   *   *

In front of his clinic, Brisbane injected Kate with a tranquilizer as she lay crushed across her friends' laps in the back of the ragtop. They were holding on to her for dear life. Within seconds she calmed, and then she was asleep. The doc said, “I'll take her in my van to the airstrip. Where's Joe?”

“He's in DC.”

“Okay, I'll get a plane from Providence if we don't find one.”

Carol was next to him. She said, “Doc, the ban.”

I ran into the clinic and called Atlanta. I don't know what I sounded like. I don't know how clearly I spoke. I don't know what threats I tried, but I made Harry understand that we had another victim who was seriously injured; she wasn't dead yet but she'd be dead if someone didn't get out to the island and take her to a hospital.

He asked me if there was an airport.

“A landing strip.”

“Get her there.”

He told me Kate would be taken to a Federal quarantine unit with medical facilities on Staten Island.

I said to him before I hung up, “I never knew about it.”

He said, “No one knows about it.”

I wondered if Fitzy knew about it.

We got Kate onto a stretcher and into the back of Brisbane's van. Before he drove off, the doc said to me, “She's just a little girl.” Christen and Samantha were looking at him, standing by the side of his driveway, exhausted, their faces completely drained of color. I said, “They're all little girls.”

 

13

Everyone was back at the camp. Willa was there too. They'd heard we'd found Kate and I told them she would soon be in the hospital. I didn't dwell on her condition. Carol had come with me. She would be in charge of the girls in Merlin House, Willa in Arthur, each with a counselor, and me in Lancelot. I would sleep in Kate's bunk. When we arrived, Willa stood with the two counselors in the front of the dining hall where they were having the campers put together pans of lasagna. I told them it was best if they all went back to what they were doing.

Christen was very quiet, disturbed, her friend Samantha now becoming the strong one. Christen had to go right to her bunk. Samantha and I sat with her. Samantha said, “See, Christen, the main thing is that Stupid is in the hospital. A special hospital. Get everything else out of your mind. She'll be all right.”

“She'll never be all right.”

“Yes, she will. Her grandpa will visit her there, bring her another suitcase of stuff to eat. Bring her big bags of you-know-what. And … she'll get counseling.”

“We should have watched her.”

“How could we have thought in a million years that Stupid would go off with someone? I mean, she was always hanging on one of us.”

“We didn't let her play cards.”

“But she was always
dropping
the cards because of Elijah Leonard. Maybe the picnic man was behind one of the Porta-Potties and grabbed her when she went to the bathroom.”

“She wouldn't even go to the Porta-Potties alone, and you know it.”

The two of them became quiet, contemplating their failure. I told them we should pack up Kate's things so they could be sent to her in the hospital. So they did that, glad to have something to do for her, stacking up her CDs and MP3 players and books. Folding her clothes, laying them in her suitcase.

The air felt heavy, the humidity thick. We heard a rumbling. Rumbling was not uncommon on Block Island. Storm clouds could suddenly cover a blazing sun, only to scuttle away just when you were sure the thunderclaps couldn't get any louder. There was another noise, louder yet, and we all jumped. But it was only Carol coming in, letting the door bang behind her.

“Poppy, Joe is on the phone in Irwin's office. Phone's full of static, but you'll be able to hear him.” Then she said to the girls, “Ernie is bringing ice cream later. The lasagna's almost done. Finish up and come to the dining room.”

I went with Carol and let them pack the rest. The sky outside was a sickly green. A wind was coming up and the bracken was rustling.

Inside Irwin's office, I picked up the phone. “Hello, Joe.”

He didn't say hello, he released a flood of explanation instead. “I was a fool. They're my family. They treat me like I'm a kid. I forget all my problems when I'm on Block Island. They never ask me how I can work for the ATF, how I can go around shooting innocent women and children. They're respectful. I didn't want to be a part of whatever was happening there. I didn't want to imagine that one of those people could be a sociopath.

“Poppy, this morning I went out to Dulles. I didn't know about the travel ban. I couldn't believe it. I called Harry. He refused to help me out. He said an exception was made for the girl only because it was a life-and-death situation and useful to their scenario medically. I said, ‘What girl?' I didn't know what he was talking about. He told me about Kate. Jesus God. I called him every name I could come up with, him and his damn travel ban. Didn't do any good, he refused to give me clearance to fly to Block Island. I called the hospital in Staten Island to see how she was.”

“What did they say?”

“Right now, she's sedated. Her family is there. Apparently a dozen of them.”

“Were her eardrums perforated?”

“No.”

That was something. “Was she able to—”

“No. When she speaks, she's incoherent. So I came to Providence to wait it out, met up with Fitzy at the airport. He can get us back over to the Block, ban or no ban—I'll never understand how—but there are storm cells everywhere. Flights are suspended for now anyway. We'll have to wait it out. A few hours, at least, probably more. So Fitzy and I got to talking. He told me about Esther's clippings. About the boy. I thought he'd lost his mind. But he hadn't.”

“I know.”

“Well,
I
know because Fitzy and I went to the place where they keep the old police files to see what we could find. That's where I am now, some warehouse in downtown Providence. The files are long gone, wasn't a matter of an open case. But as it turned out, we never would have had to look for anything after all. We just told the librarian about it, and he remembered the case. This librarian is quite an old fellow. One of his cousins used to work in Newport, used to take the family's guests fishing. The family of the three sisters. We're looking through a stack of papers now, to see where the psychiatrist went—”

There was a crack of lightning, a roll of thunder, and the line went dead. I stared at it and started pressing all the numbers, and then I smacked the receiver against the desk.

I looked up to see Carol standing in the door. She came over and patted my back. “Christen and Sam are with the others. Come eat with us.” She replaced the phone receiver. “I'm surprised the lines held out that long. First thing these electrical storms do is put out the phone system.” She turned on a light. “Generator's still going strong. Good for Jake. I had him come over yesterday to hook up something more powerful for the girls. Told Tommy it would give him something to do.”

“He could understand what you wanted?”

“'Course. Jake isn't dumb, just has some screwed-up circuits. Doc thinks he's always playing with wires and stuff because he's trying to get his own wiring in order. Doc's not all bad, Poppy.” But she didn't get any sympathy from me. “One of the girls showed Jake her laptop. You should have seen him. He didn't know what it was, but once he did, he liked it! Started doing things on it right away. But then it made a noise and he got scared. The girls felt bad. So they offered him some candy in return for fixing up the generator. Turtles. He took three. I didn't want them to think he was a hog, so I explained to the girls that thing he has about three. Explained it as best I could. I mean, you can imagine how hard it is to explain Jake to anyone. But they understood. Those girls eat in threes themselves. So they gave him three
boxes
. Jake put them under his arm, went running home, smiling ear to ear.”

A crackling jumble of lightning veined the sky, a mass of bright white capillaries. Carol ran out to the porch. I followed her. We stood and watched the light show. All the campers were at the windows of the dining hall, taking it in. “Summer storms do this sometimes, Poppy. The cells form up over our waters, and then these thick clouds gather above the bluffs. Sometimes we have a rain of lightning bolts, hitting the water, hitting us. Goes on and on. Then the clouds split open and we get a drenching. We pray for that part, the flooding. We're prepared here for flooding, but not the other, the lightning bolts that touch the ground. Our buildings are very old. The wood is dry as tinder. We can't do much about the flash fires popping up all over. We have to depend on the deluge to put them out.”

The entire island lit up. Carol said, “Get ready,” and her words were hardly out of her mouth when they were followed by the loudest and longest clap of thunder I'd ever heard. The girls at the windows stepped back. Carol said, “Mother Nature'll distract those kids from their worries.”

Huge drops of rain came pelting down. We dashed across the grounds while the sky lit up again. This time there wasn't a thunderclap; instead, a rumble of thunder rolled and rolled, its volume up and down, up and down. We reached the dining hall and stood on the porch. Carol said, “When the bolts hit the ocean close by us, they rebound from wave to wave across the water. Timpani. That's the name for it.”

“More like a cymbal player running amok.”

“Actually, timpani is good. Means the cells are staying over the sea. Ocean can't catch fire.”

“How long will it last?”

“It'll be all around us at least till ten tonight, midnight, a little later maybe; depends on how many cell clusters keep forming. Definitely clear out by dawn, though, just kind of peter out, you'll see. Let's hope a cell doesn't end up zeroing in on these barracks. One stab of lightning—they'll go up in thirty seconds.” I had already figured that, considering the warning Joe had given the girls about their candles.

The rain was coming down harder, blowing sideways.

“Carol, can we leave a light on in each of the houses all night?”