Stone Cove Island

by Suzanne Myers

  The building was an ugly Victorian, four stories and painted a mustard yellow, with pinky-orange trim. Inside, it was messy—empty beer bottles and pizza boxes—but not dirty. He had two roommates, neither of whom was there. All the furniture was beige or brown, hand-me-down or thrift store sourced. So this was college life. In spite of the squalor, it had a cozy appeal. I wondered what my own dorm room would look like.

  David gave us towels and I got out my one set of clean clothes—again, not thinking ahead—and took what felt like the greatest shower I’d ever had. After Charlie did the same, we went back to the restaurant, ordered fish and chips and asked David to show us where Prospect Street was. Now that I was warm, dry and drinking coffee, the last thing I wanted was to go back out into the cold wind. But we’d already eaten up so much of the day.

  Prospect Street was a short walk from the restaurant. I’d always thought of Gloucester as big, almost a city, but everything was centered around the harbor. It was still a real working port, rough and busy, not worried about pleasing tourists.

  Karen’s street was wide and treeless, with low, squat houses painted grey or white and waist-high hurricane fencing out front. Together we walked up the concrete path to the front door. I was nervous and wanted to take Charlie’s hand but that seemed, I don’t know, unprofessional. The doorbell made a loud, aggressive buzz and then the door was opened by a woman who looked about my grandmother’s age, with dry, brittle hair dyed brown, wearing a pink-and-grey tracksuit.

  “C’n I help yous?” she asked, looking at us without any curiosity or interest.

  “Um,” I fumbled. “We’re looking for Karen Linsky?”

  “Yeah.” This answer seemed to neither confirm nor deny. She stood there, waiting.

  “I’m Eliza Elliot. We spoke on the phone. About Bess. Something else came up, that is—we found something and—” I was not going to explain it out here on the sidewalk. “And we were hoping we could talk some more.”

  “We might have some new information about Bess,” Charlie added.

  I half expected her to slam the door in our faces, but to my surprise, she opened it farther and nodded for us to come into the dark hallway. We followed her back to a small kitchen that was surprisingly bright. Obviously all the light in this house came in through the back. It took my eyes a second to adjust. Karen poured hot water into an already in-use mug of tea and sat at the chipped linoleum table. She didn’t offer us tea or ask us to sit.

  I stood there staring at the surface of the table, with its pearlescent swirls and plastic gold flecks. Finally we sat. Karen didn’t say anything.

  “So,” I began. “Sorry we didn’t get to finish our conversation last time.” Of course, she had hung up on me, but now it seemed best to pretend it had been either my fault or by mutual agreement.

  Karen nodded.

  “We’re here because we think we might have some good news for you,” Charlie added. This was tricky, because if for some reason we were wrong about Bess, we were about to do a terrible thing to this woman. “We think it’s possible that Bess is still alive.”

  Karen looked up from her tea with a start. “What do you mean, she’s alive?”

  “There was a letter that was found recently—actually, I was the one who found it—a letter Bess got from the person who killed her. Did Bess show it to you at the time?”

  Karen shrugged.

  “Anyway, after that we came across some essays and things Bess wrote in school. Some of the lines in her writing were the same as in the letter.”

  “How does that prove she’s alive?” Karen looked suspicious now. Her eyes went beady.

  “If she wrote the letter herself, she might have set up the whole thing. To look like she was murdered,” said Charlie. It did sound slightly absurd, now that I heard someone else say it out loud.

  “Why in the world would she do that?” Karen snapped.

  “We don’t know,” I said. I waited for her to say something. She was thinking, running the possibility through her head.

  “She didn’t kill herself,” said Karen as though we’d just insulted her or Bess.

  “We don’t think that,” said Charlie quickly. “That’s not what we mean at all.” Karen took a sip of tea.

  “I appreciate you kids taking an interest,” she said. “It’d be great if what you said was true. It really would. But it’s too late for Bess. You can’t bring her back. I accepted that a long time ago.” She put her mug down firmly on the table and looked directly at me. It seemed like our invitation to go. To buy more time, I asked to use the bathroom.

  “Down the hall, on the right,” she said, waving one hand vaguely in that direction. Once I was back in the dark hallway, I took a gamble that I wouldn’t be visible from the kitchen and went instead into the room on the left, Karen’s bedroom. The room was neat, with a satiny bedspread in that same pink-grey she was wearing. She must really love that color. From the other room, I heard Charlie’s voice, keeping Karen’s attention engaged. I figured I had a few minutes to look around.

  There was a dresser with an old-fashioned brush, comb and mirror set on it—very Little House on the Prairie—and on the wall above the bed, one framed poster from a museum show of Monet’s sunflowers. On the bedside table were a couple of recent copies of Us and People magazines and a thick stack of newsletters, neatly stacked. As I moved closer, I saw they were from the Salem Public Library, going back about three years. I opened the top one and saw a letter from the head librarian gushing about all the exciting Halloween activities planned for October at the library. I wanted to open some drawers, but that seemed like taking it too far. Instead I just stood there, taking in the silence of Karen’s tidy, lonely life.

  “You get lost, hon? It’s not that big a place.” Karen’s rough voice from the kitchen brought me back to myself.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks. I’m coming.” Karen and Charlie met me in the hall—thankfully after I was out of Karen’s bedroom—and she walked us to the door.

  “It really is sweet,” she said. “I appreciate your concern about Bess. I really do. But I learned to let it go years ago. There’s no reason for young kids like you to get all caught up in an awful story like that. It happened, and now it’s over.”

  She didn’t ask to see the letter, or if she could keep Bess’s essays.

  CHARLIE AND I WALKED back down to the wharf and found a diner where we could talk, safe from the cold.

  “Plan B?” Charlie asked as the waitress placed two mugs on our table. I had switched from coffee to hot chocolate with whipped cream. “She’s not going to help us find Bess. She didn’t believe anything we told her.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “What do you mean? I expected her to jump all over any possibility Bess was alive. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Unless she already knows Bess is alive,” I said. “I went in her room. She had no pictures of Bess. No stuffed animals or trophies from school. Nothing with Bess’s name on it. You could imagine her being too upset to have any reminders of Bess around, but she wasn’t too upset to talk to us. She seemed surprised when we told her we thought Bess was alive, but not upset. Or hopeful.”

  “So?” Charlie asked.

  “So, maybe if she knows Bess is alive, maybe if she is still in touch with Bess, she doesn’t need pictures and trinkets to remind her of her dead daughter. She doesn’t need any kind of reminder.”

  “What was in her room?”

  “Not much. A museum poster. A stack of library newsletters. Nothing that helpful.”

  “So how are we going to find Bess?” asked Charlie.

  “I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to try to think like Bess would.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Back at David’s, I texted Dad to tell him I was with Charlie and that I was too freaked out to come home. Charlie texted Jay, too—with the truth, just so that one person back home would know where we were.

  I reread all of Bess’s papers and Mom’s
diary, but nothing jumped out. David’s roommates were both home now and though they were nice guys, the apartment was small and I felt in the way. They sat on the couch watching a Patriots game while Charlie and I spread out our papers on the kitchen island and hunched over them, combing for clues.

  “We should have asked Karen about their relatives. We don’t know anything about her family. She could have moved away to someplace a cousin or an uncle lives.”

  “We could go back tomorrow and ask her,” I offered.

  Charlie looked doubtful. “I think she’s pretty much done with us.”

  “I wish I’d asked my mom,” I said. Charlie didn’t say it out loud, but I knew we were both thinking: too late now. “There’s just … She could have gone anyplace.” He nodded.

  I wandered the kitchen, pacing a little. Sometimes I find moving around makes my brain work better. David had a funny collection of coffee mugs on a shelf above the sink: lobsters with giant claws, a mug with jokes about Boston, a crossword puzzle mug, a lacrosse mug, and even the famous Stone Cove Island rose cottage mug. I felt a pang of guilt that I hadn’t even told Meredith where we were going, but I hadn’t wanted to get her in trouble for knowing and not telling anyone, especially with the police involved.

  Above the collection of mugs was a big map of Gloucester and Salem Sound tacked into the wall. I located Karen’s house on it, and David’s place, the street with the diner where we’d had hot chocolate, and the visitor’s dock, where I hoped Tigerlily was still tied up safely. On the very right edge of the map was Stone Cove Island. To the north was New Hampshire, only about an hour away, and to the south, Manchester and Salem. Between the two was an island colored in green, which meant it was a wildlife preserve or park. Great Misery Island and Little Misery Island floated side by side, just offshore from Salem. I laughed to myself about the names until I suddenly remembered.

  “Charlie,” I said. “Can you pass me Bess’s papers? Isn’t there one on The Scarlet Letter?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Here.” I knew that Hawthorne lived in and had written The Scarlet Letter in the town of Salem. Since Stone Cove didn’t have many celebrities of its own, all schoolkids were taught about famous locals from the area, which the island claimed as its own. Alexander Graham Bell, the painter Edward Hopper and Nathaniel Hawthorne featured prominently on this list, as did Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger, even though he was technically from Boston, but since the book was set in Gloucester, they counted him.

  I glanced down at Bess’s paper, “Pearl: Hester’s Curse and Salvation in The Scarlet Letter.” Pearl, I remembered, was Hester Prynne’s illegitimate daughter, the one who causes her village to pin the red letter A for adultery on Hester. We had read the book the previous spring. But that’s not primarily what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how the nickname Bess had given Stone Cove was Misery Island.

  “What’s up?” asked Charlie, interrupting my train of thought. “You’re a million miles away.”

  “Why is Karen going all the way to the Salem Public Library when she has a perfectly good library a block from her house? We passed it on the way from the harbor.” Charlie looked uncomprehending. “Bess had a thing about Salem. She identified with the main character in The Scarlet Letter. She was in The Crucible at school, that play about the Salem witch trials. She nicknamed Stone Cove “Misery Island.” It’s right here on the map. A little island off the coast in Salem Sound. And her mother subscribes to the Salem Public Library newsletter, even though I didn’t see a single book in her house, only magazines.”

  “She could get magazines at the Salem Library.”

  “Or at the Gloucester library, a block from her house.”

  “Well. It’s a good place to start, for sure.”

  “I wish we could go there right now.” We couldn’t do that of course. It was ten o’clock at night. But Charlie looked up the bus routes on David’s computer and found a bus that would get us to Salem the next morning. It was only forty-five minutes away. He Googled Elizabeth Linsky, looking for Salem addresses and, as expected, found nothing.

  “She could be married. Even if she’s not, I’m sure she would have changed her name. She’s supposed to be dead, after all. And I’ll bet half the women living in Salem are named Elizabeth.”

  “That’s probably true,” said Charlie. “But it’s not that big a town. We’ll just have to scope it out, see what we can find.”

  I knew he was right, but it was hard to be this close and not know for sure. I wished we had thought to bring a copy of the school yearbook with Bess’s picture. That might make it easier to recognize her.

  Charlie and I had bought some travel toothbrushes at the drugstore and I had a long T-shirt with me I could sleep in. David had generously offered us the sofa. He and his roommates had cleared out of the living room, but I could still hear them in their bedrooms, playing music, talking on the phone. One was working out with hand weights and they made a muffled, rhythmic clonk sound every time they hit the carpeted floor. Just knowing they were on the other side of the thin walls made me uncomfortable. I had never spent a whole night with Charlie, and I’d certainly never slept in the same bed as him. Not that we were going to actually, you know, sleep together, but I still felt jitters.

  I stayed in the bathroom a long time, brushing my teeth, staring at myself in the mirror and wondering how I’d gotten here. Had I really stolen a boat, sailed across open ocean in winter weather to chase after a dead girl? The person who would do that was not a person I recognized, just as I did not recognize my father as someone who would be part of some threatening, mafia-like group. Had he actually done terrible things? Or was the Black Anchor Society more like a fraternity, something he’d gotten into because his friends were doing it, because he was a joiner? I didn’t want to tell Charlie this but I suspected that if Jimmy was part of the Society too, it was likely he was running it. I couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t bring the same take-charge, can-do attitude he brought to every other project he took on.

  I imagined Lynn Bailey striding up to our front door to arrest my mother. What had made her decide to do that? Or had someone else suggested the idea to her? I had reread Mom’s diary again and again. There was nothing to implicate her that I saw. I thought of the LB my mom had written about, the lonely, outcast girl who longed to be included by the popular kids. Now she was the sheriff, officially in charge. But was that who she still was underneath? Had someone convinced her to go after my mother and she was just carrying out orders? If that were true, that had to rule out Dad, didn’t it? He would never allow my mom to be taken away and charged with something she didn’t do.

  I stayed in the bathroom so long that finally I heard a gentle tap and Charlie’s voice at the door.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m good. Just trying to put everything together and I think I got lost in my head somewhere. But I’m back now.” I opened the door and pulled the T-shirt down toward my knees, feeling shy. Charlie had arranged a layer of random blankets and pillows on the couch for us. It looked more like a squirrel’s nest than a bed, but seemed pretty cozy and warm, which was the main thing. Charlie was wearing a white T-shirt and boxer shorts. I couldn’t figure out if it felt weirder to look at him or not look at him.

  I climbed onto the couch first and Charlie followed, pulling the blankets up to our chins. The air in the living room was cold, but under the slightly itchy blankets, it was warm. The heat from Charlie’s skin radiated out and wrapped around me. I could feel every point where our bodies touched as though each was in close-up under a microscope: my stomach against his, his hand along the side of my thigh, the tops of my toes against one shin. Our faces were so close in the dark I felt the flutter of his eyelashes against my cheek. Charlie wrapped his free arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer, until there was no space at all between us. I looked at the gold flecks in his eyes, thinking I could count them.

  “This isn’t how I pictured our first night al
one together.”

  “Me neither.” I laughed. “Especially the alone part.” In the next room, the free weights clanked together and hit the floor with a soft thud. Whichever roommate that was had switched to push-ups, and we could hear the creak of the floor and the sharp “heh” of each exhalation. Charlie laughed too.

  “Yeah. The alone part, definitely. But I’m not complaining.” He kissed me.

  I didn’t really sleep. I drifted, waking periodically to think, “Oh. That’s my arm wrapped around Charlie’s ribs” or “Those are my feet, tangled with Charlie’s feet.” It was restful in its own way, a half-dream state that never went all the way to consciousness or unconsciousness. Charlie seemed to really sleep, but in the morning he seemed more tired than I felt. As soon as the hard light came through the blinds I was awake. Then I just lay there, alert, my eyes clear and wide open, as if I’d already had a few cups of coffee. I didn’t feel like I would need sleep again, ever. After what seemed like about an hour Charlie woke up too. He was groggy, eyes unwilling to open, burrowing back into the warmth of the blankets.

  “Hi,” he said, half asleep.

  “Hi,” I whispered back. “We’d better get going before these guys need their living room back.” Charlie nodded, eyes shut. It took another half hour or so for either of us to leave our nest on the sofa, pull on whatever clothes were dry enough to wear and slip out quietly, leaving a thank-you note for Dave.

  OUTSIDE IT WAS SO relentlessly cold I could feel the air freeze the insides of my nostrils each time I took a breath. Terrible weather for walking around Salem with no idea what we were looking for. I felt slightly better after coffee and oatmeal at that same diner, but was still kicking myself for not having planned better. Had I imagined Bess would be standing on the visitor’s dock, waving and ready to come aboard as we pulled into Gloucester? Of course we weren’t going to find her in one afternoon. We didn’t even know where to start, really. I was basing my whole theory on a school play, an eleventh-grade essay and a joke she’d made once to my mom. As we waited for the bus, I reached up and ran my thumb along the sharp underside of Bess’s necklace, willing some psychic connection to take place. Are you in Salem, Bess? Are you even alive? Not surprisingly, I got nothing back. Next to me, Charlie hopped from foot to foot, trying to keep warm, periodically tossing me a grin that said, This is so crazy, right?