I heard the back door, my dad coming, stomping mud off his feet. I was about to be out of time, but I’d already broached the topic. It would seem weird if I brought it up again later. Mom would wonder why I was suddenly so interested in Cat Pender. So I pressed on, deciding I would make it quick before he came in.
“Were you guys friends? Did you hang out much?”
“It was so long ago, I don’t really remember. We were never that close.”
“No?” I asked. Three musketeers! I thought, seeing the caption in my head. “So you didn’t really know her? It’s such a small school. I mean, it was even smaller back then, wasn’t it?”
She turned to look at me, but when I met her eyes she seemed to be looking through me. Haunted was the word that came to mind. At the same moment, my dad walked in. He looked at my mom, took in her state of mind instantly and said, “Eliza, shouldn’t you be getting ready for school tomorrow?”
It came out rushed and harsh. I opened my mouth to answer at the same time he remembered. “Oh. Not till Tuesday. Right. Well, I’ll finish up here.” It was Saturday. I wouldn’t have had school anyway.
“Willa?” he asked. “We almost done here?” My mom nodded and didn’t say anything more. I went to my room.
Around eleven, my dad poked his head in to check on me and say good night. I was under my quilt, reading Into the Wild, dressed in the long underwear I usually used for skiing. Without any heat, the house was cold and damp. Salty lay at the foot of my bed, hogging the covers. He had agreed to come out of hiding, but was still on high alert for any reason to retreat to Mom’s closet.
“Eliza. You know I asked you not to bring up Bess with your mom.” He had his disappointed dad voice on.
“Dad, I didn’t.” He looked like he didn’t believe me. He was waiting for me to say more.
“I asked her about Cat. You know I’ve been hanging out with Charlie Pender a little this week?”
“Yeah.” He smiled slightly. “I had kinda noticed that.”
“So, I just realized his mom and Mom were probably in the same class. I mean, your class. I was just asking Mom if she’d known her in high school.” It was a lie, but a very white one.
“If she’d known her?” The way he said it emphasized the silliness of the question. There had probably been less than forty people in their class.
“Well, obviously she knew her,” I said. “I just wondered, I don’t know, whether they were friends, what Cat was like. She’s intimidating, don’t you think? Kind of hard to figure out.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Next time ask me. I was in the same class. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Good night, kiddo.” He started to close my door.
“Wait!” I called. “You didn’t answer my question. So, what was Cat like? Were they friends? Was she different in high school?”
He came back into the room, but looked like he didn’t want to.
“Yeah, they were—well, there was a whole gang of kids, you know, with your mom, and that girl Bess. Cat was part of it. A whole crowd of people. I can’t really remember who was close with whom. It probably switched around a lot. You’re in high school. You know how that goes.”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t. I’d had one best friend since first grade. “You were friends with Bess?”
“Yeah.” His expression softened, remembering. “She was such a smart, funny girl. She had a hard time. She and her mom weren’t really from here. I don’t think Bess ever felt like she fit in. And she liked to argue. If she had her own idea about something, she wanted you to hear her out, to the end. Other kids took that the wrong way sometimes. Thought she was pushy, where she was just up for a good debate. She was a great friend for your mom that way, always made Willa stand up for herself. It was a terrible thing. Really, one of the most terrible things I’ve been through, including September eleventh.”
“What was Mom like?” I asked. More than anything, I wanted him to keep going.
He laughed, a wry laugh that sounded more like a harsh exhale. “I don’t know, Eliza. The same. People don’t change that much. You, for example, are exactly the same impulsive, impatient little Tasmanian devil you were as a toddler.”
“Thanks,” I said. He was a skilled subject changer.
“Tasmanian devil in the best sense of the word, of course.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “And that’s two words.”
“Oh, hey,” he said, like it was an afterthought. “One more thing. Can I have that letter you found?”
“You said you thought it was nothing.”
“I do think it’s nothing. But I still think we should give it to Officer Bailey, so she can be the one to decide it’s nothing.”
“Okay,” I said. “I almost gave it to her that day I found it at the lighthouse. But I thought she might laugh at me.”
“Well,” he said. “Now she can laugh at me. But I wouldn’t want either of us to get in trouble if it did turn out to be something. You know?”
“Yeah. That makes sense.” I hesitated. “Dad, do you mind if I find it in the morning for you? It’s in my backpack with all my books for school. I have to dig it out of a pile of stuff.”
“Yeah. No problem. You get some sleep.” He blew a kiss from across the room, then clicked off the hall light before shutting my door and padding away down the hall. I liked it that I had the kind of dad who could install a sink or break up an old driveway, but would also blow kisses good night or rub your feet if they hurt after ice-skating. After he was gone, I switched on the reading light by my bed and pulled my math notebook out of my bag. The letter was in the drawer of my nightstand, right on top. I took a pen and started to copy it down on a square-ruled inner page of my calculus book.
“HOW CAN A SIMPLE, innocent question like ‘Were you friends in high school?’ inspire so much ducking and covering?” I asked Charlie the next morning over coffee at the diner.
“I know,” he said. He looked fresher today, eyes brighter, his hair still wet from the shower. “When I asked my mom, I somehow ended up with a long list of the guys she’d dated or who had wanted to date her.”
I laughed. “What did she say about my mom?”
“Nothing,” he said. “She said ‘Of course! She was a sweet girl! We were all friends, the whole gang of us. You know how small that school is.’ ”
“Did you tell her about the letter?”
“No. I was going to bring it up, but based on how well it went just asking her about someone who’s still alive, it didn’t seem like I was going to get anything asking about someone who was murdered.”
“What about your dad?”
“No way. You know him. He’s like the Stone Cove Island cruise director. He’s already trying to spin how the hurricane is going to be great for the island’s local businesses. You can’t get a straight answer out of him. He only wants to talk about good news.”
“Right,” I said. “So no one wants to talk about Bess, and no one wants to talk about anyone who was friends with Bess and no one wants us to talk about Bess to anyone else. I just think that’s bonkers.”
“Maybe our moms are embarrassed that they’re not friends anymore. Who said don’t talk about Bess to anyone?” he asked.
“My dad.”
“No one told me not to.”
I smiled. “Tricky. What were the Hardy Boys’ names again? I’m kind of getting a Hardy Boys vibe from you right now.”
“Did they even have their own names? I was more of a Nate the Great kid.”
“Right. I read those books. We call my dad that sometimes.” I took a sip of coffee. It was good. The diner made arguably the best coffee on the island, even if the food was only okay. Outside the window, crews with scissor-lift trucks were cutting huge, half-downed trees into little pieces. There was going to be no shortage of firewood this winter, at least.
I looked across at Charlie, who was watching me, waiting for me to say more, but not in
a way that was uncomfortable. It was odd, really, that it wasn’t uncomfortable. It felt like we’d been doing this forever. He was funny, I thought. Much funnier than I’d ever realized when we were in school together. Weirdly, he made me feel funny too. I’d never thought of myself as funny.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “I wish there was someone else we could show the letter to. Someone who would actually talk to us.”
“There is,” said Charlie. “Jay.”
IT WAS A GOOD idea. I had given the original letter to my dad that morning over pancakes—Dad had rigged a propane hookup to our gas stove, so my mom was happily back on hot breakfast duty—but I had my calculus-book copy with me. I jumped up, ready to follow Charlie, then realized he was still sitting.
“We should pay first, don’t you think?”
“Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Right. Yeah.” He signaled to Kelly, the waitress, who’d worked the off-season for as long as I could remember. I sat back down.
“Do you think I’ll get in trouble with Officer Bailey for not taking the letter to her when I found it? That was why my dad thought we should turn it in.”
“Do I think you’ll get in trouble with Officer Bailey?” Charlie laughed. “Didn’t she used to babysit for you?” She had, when I was in first or second grade. She hadn’t been much fun as I remembered, but she was single, available and you couldn’t really be any safer than with your own police bodyguard, right?
We walked over to the Gazette office. When we got there, Jay and Sparkler were working on closing a story for that afternoon’s edition. Lawrence, Jay’s proofreader, was there too, going over final copy. Jay welcomed us with a nod but stayed focused on his task. Sparkler trotted over, his nails click-clicking against the floor and kind of leaned against my knees. He was heavy and fleshy, where Salty was wiry and dense. I reached down and scratched in front of his ears. For some reason, I didn’t want to show Jay the letter in front of Lawrence. Charlie seemed to have the same instinct, because he vamped on and on about the weather radar, FEMA gossip, ferry news and complaints about insurance companies he’d been hearing around town until Lawrence was gone.
“So kids,” Jay said, rolling his chair closer to where we were standing, without getting up. “What can I do for you? Social visit? Or do you have a hot news tip for me?”
“Sort of neither,” I began. “We wanted to ask you about something.”
“Shoot,” said Jay. “Not literally, of course.” Charlie rolled his eyes. He’d had a lot more exposure to Jay’s goofy sense of humor than I had and therefore had a lower tolerance.
“It’s about the Bess Linsky murder,” said Charlie. “You remember it? You were here then, right?”
“Do I remember it? Yeah. Biggest story/non-story the island ever had. I was deputy editor then. We had an actual staff in those days, before the Internet took over.”
“Why do you say non-story?” I asked.
Jay looked exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot. “Well, maybe it was just timing. The murder—drowning. Whatever position you want to take on it. It happened in high season, August. It got to be really big news, really fast. The … consensus, I guess you’d have to call it … of people here—year-rounders, I mean—was that if the story didn’t quiet all the way down during the off-season, the island was likely to have no future seasons. Ever.”
“What?” said Charlie. “Didn’t people want to know what happened? What about Bess’s mother? She must have wanted to know.”
“The mother moved to Gloucester right after it happened. I think that was the last straw for her, after Bess’s dad, Grant, drowned. She was done with the island. There were no other relatives, just Grant’s brother, Paul—from the marina, you know? But he’s an unreliable witness or plaintiff or just about anything, right?”
I’d heard of Grant Guthy. He had owned the boat rental shop at the marina when my parents were kids. There were still pictures of him on the walls of the boatyard, holding a big fish, a big grin through his blond handlebar mustache. He was always photographed laughing or winking, usually in a loud print shirt. I could think of one where he wore a puka shell necklace, toasting the camera with a beer. From the little I’d heard of him, he was a partier, never married, good-looking and a flirt. I always thought he looked more like he belonged in a marina in San Diego or Hawaii than in a rocky cove in New England.
“People weren’t clear on whether it was an accident or an actual murder,” Jay went on. “They were never going to find her body. People sort of decided, better to save the future than solve the past.”
“They found her hair chopped off and her clothes covered in blood and they thought it might be an accident?” I said in disbelief.
Jay shrugged. “I never said that was what I thought.”
“And her dad drowned too?”
“Boating accident. Much less surprising, if you knew the guy.”
“So you looked into it at the time? Bess, I mean?” asked Charlie.
“Sure,” said Jay. “I tried to. But I was met with, let’s say, strong resistance. As in, suddenly it went from everybody was talking about it to no one was talking about it. But that’s typical Stone Cove. I’ve kinda learned my lesson by now. And anyway, it’s water way under the bridge. You do know that it happened more than twenty years ago, right? What made you dig it up now?”
“We’d never even heard about it,” I said. “Until I found this.” I handed him my notebook, opened to the page where I’d copied the letter. “It’s not the original, obviously. I found it cleaning up the lighthouse.”
Jay took the notebook and scanned it. “Oh,” he said. “Wow. Okay. Where’s the original?”
“I gave it to my dad. He said we had to give it to Officer Bailey.”
For a moment, Jay stood quiet, thinking. “Interesting. What did she say about it?”
“Nothing,” I answered. “I mean, she hasn’t talked to me about it yet.”
“No? Huh. Okay. Listen, I’m going to give you two some advice that would get me kicked out of the New England Press Club if anyone heard it, but here it is: people did not want to talk about it then. That was made clear to me at the time. Twenty-five years later, and on the heels of a major hurricane, people are really not going to want to talk about it. I just want to prepare you for the reaction you’re likely to get if you go showing this around the island. I’m not trying to tell you that you should or shouldn’t.”
Charlie and I waited for him to go on. He didn’t.
“Don’t you want to know what really happened?” Charlie said at last.
“Off the record? Of course I do.” He went to a tall filing cabinet and riffled through the back of a drawer. Then he dropped a file folder, filled with scraps of paper and faded from green to a pucey, rotten lemon color.
“Here. My notes from the time. It’s in bits and pieces, but you’re welcome to look through them. They don’t leave the building and I’m not officially helping. I really don’t think there’s anything to be done at this point anyway, or I would help.”
“What if it was someone on the island?” It was a chilling thought, and I wasn’t sure why I said it. Why should it be someone from the island? It could have been anyone, some random summer tourist Bess met in town. Or someone who came over on the ferry, looking for young girls to lure to the lighthouse.
Jay laughed. But it sounded off, like someone faking a cough. He looked away from us and started sorting papers on his desk. “It wasn’t anyone from the island,” he said. “Trust me.”
SIX
If school on Tuesday felt weird for me, I could hardly imagine how weird it felt for Colleen and Abby and the other families sheltered here and wandering down the hall to first period. We weren’t actually allowed into the gym—provisions were being made to hold team practices in the school yard, on the town green or at the Anchor Club, depending upon the sport—but it was awfully hard not to wonder what was going on in there. I was thankful, for the hundredth time, that our house was still sta
nding. I was prepared to use the back door and live with mold forever, as long as I didn’t have to camp out at school.
All morning, the teachers made a point of not talking about the hurricane and pretending things were normal. At eleven, I had a free period and I ducked into the library by myself. Meredith was occupied with AP Spanish. The school library kept a complete set of yearbooks too, and I easily found Bess’s and pulled it off the shelf.
I stared at her picture. Her face was so open and yet unreadable. Was she hiding some illicit romance? A drug problem? A jealous rivalry? Some secret dark side? All appearances said no. Was she merely unlucky? In the wrong place at the wrong time? I scanned her activities. Theater and swim team. She was a good swimmer. Did that mean she was unlikely to drown or more likely to go for a swim by herself under dangerous conditions? I reminded myself about the hair and the blood. There was no way her death could have been a drowning accident. I only looked up when Lexy Morgan, Abby Whittle and Colleen walked in. Abby was wearing pajama pants. Like many of the kids camping out in the gym, she’d shown up to class like that. The teachers glared but seemed to feel too guilty to say anything under the circumstances, so they let it go. The girls saw me and wandered over to sit at my table. I closed the yearbook.
“Hey,” I said as they joined me.
“Hey,” they said back.
“Abby, is it like a giant sleepover in there?” I asked.
Abby grimaced. “Yeah. We’re cooking FEMA s’mores every night. You should come hang out.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “This sucks.”
“Yeah. It does. But on the plus side, I can get up half an hour later for school.”
“Well, there’s that,” said Lexy. Her family had lost the candy store, but not their house. “Whatcha doing, Eliza?” I looked down at the yearbook sitting in front of me. Suddenly I felt self-conscious that about my obsession with this long-dead girl, in light of the immediate troubles now facing all of us. I improvised.
Stone Cove Island Page 5