Stone Cove Island (5 page)

“It happened when we were in high school,” he began again, once he seemed to have decided on a route. “Your mom had a best friend—we were all friends with this girl Bess. She was a great girl. Difficult family life though. Our senior year, Bess drowned at East Beach. Now, I don’t want to scare you, but at the time, it seemed likely that she was killed.” He waited, checking in to see that I was still with him. I was.

“Willa—your mom—never really got over this. It’s something that upsets her a lot to think about. It took a long time before she could get past it.”

“Why have I never heard about this?” I asked. Poor Mom. If anyone was not cut out to survive her best friend’s murder, it was Willa Elliot. I felt a momentary softening of my perennial frustration.

“Well, to be honest, the whole island had a hard time getting over it. Not only was it terrible to lose this young girl that everybody loved, but it brought so much bad publicity and pressure. You know what it’s like here, Eliza. So many people survive only on the island’s success as a tourist destination. The pain about the murder, and the gossip and fear about whether
the island would survive the bad press—it split people apart and it’s still … I know twenty-five years is more than a lifetime to you, but people still really do not like to think about it.”

“So, you think this is a letter from her killer?” The question popped out of my mouth before I’d even fully formed the thought.

“No.” Dad gave me a patient smile. “No, I definitely don’t think that. Who even knows when it was written? I bet it was someone with an active imagination, somebody who knows the island lore and was bored. I think it’s absolutely nothing. Really.” He handed it back to me, to show he was done thinking about it.

“Dad,” I said. “What happened to her?”

For a moment, he almost looked like he might tell me. Then he said, “Please don’t bring this up with your mother. It was so hard for her the first time losing Bess. I don’t want her to have to go through it again.”

“Okay,” I said. What else can you say when your dad asks you something like that?

THAT NIGHT, I LAY
in my sleeping bag on the still-dry edge of my bed. I could hear my parents through the wall in the next room. My mom was crying, half wailing and half whining. It was hard to make out her words.

“Nate. It’s my fault. You know it’s my fault,” was what I thought I heard.

But it didn’t sound like my dad was comforting my mom. He sounded angry. “God damn it Willa!” he shouted. His voice had no trouble penetrating the wall. “I will not go
through this again. She is gone. You want to do this again, you do it by yourself.”

THE NEXT DAY WAS
sunny, crisp, and beautiful, as though the storm had never happened. I woke up early and lay for a long time, listening to the birds chirp outside my window. All night I had been in a half-sleep limbo, and now I was both exhausted and wide awake. It was pointless to stay in bed. I took a quick shower and dressed, feeling jittery. A short, bleary bike ride later I was at the Picnic Basket, buying coffee and a pumpkin muffin and listening to Nancy lecture on the differences between the FEMA of hurricane Katrina and the FEMA of now, and how Congress better not get in the way of us getting the disaster relief we needed before next summer.

I thought of asking Nancy what she remembered about Bess and the murder. But then I thought of my dad, his angry tone last night, and what he had said about people’s reluctance to talk. I decided I was better off finding out as much as I could on my own first. I could feel myself starting to obsess, but I couldn’t help it. My mother had a secret she’d never shared. Her best friend had been murdered, and she had never even mentioned it. It was so spooky, as though the ghost of this girl no one wanted to remember had been walking the island all these years, and only now I could feel her presence. People really did know how to keep their mouths shut around here. But at what cost? Was that why my mom was such a high-strung ball of nerves, even before Hurricane Victor?

I imagined Meredith murdered and wondered,
Would
I ever get over that?
My life would be ripped apart. Would I talk about it? Or would I pretend it never happened? I was pretty sure I would talk about it, but you never really knew what you would do in extreme situations until those situations sought you out.

I had only two pieces of information to go on: it was an infamous murder that took place on the island (how many could there be?), and the dead girl’s name was Bess.

At the library, I was briefly stymied by the fact that the Internet connection had not been restored, though the power had. Mary Ellen, however, the wispy, gray-haired, always-smiling librarian, was able to introduce me to the old way of storing news stories: microfiche, rolls of film you unspooled on a light table in a headache-inducing blur. If you wanted August of 1990, for example, you had to let every section of the whole daily paper zip past you to find the one relevant story you were looking for. Mary Ellen seemed thrilled that somebody was actually willing to put in the time to do research the old-fashioned way. How did people survive without search engines?

Two hours later, I had found eight stories on Bess Linsky, but there were many more I hadn’t yet unfurled. Unlike Google, I had to read through each one before I could figure out if it was relevant. Each story ran a version in some varying size of her school photo. Her hair was shaggy, chin-length and brown. Her eyes were large and open, with thick lashes, their expression kind. For some reason she reminded me of a doe, surprised in the woods. Her nose turned up and had a dust of freckles across it. She was smiling. She had no idea what was going to happen to her.

She was so pretty, I thought, and she looked so friendly. Or was that just what we projected onto a photograph of someone we knew was dead? Eventually I shut my eyes and pushed aside the microfiche rolls. I couldn’t look at that picture anymore without conjuring the rest of her life. I saw her walking home from school with my mom, eating late-night fries in the diner—maybe sailing the same Mercury sailboat I’d learned on at camp, helping her dad hose down rental boats in the marina.

I felt seasick. I needed fresh air.

On the steps out front, I found Charlie Pender. He greeted me with that warm, unguarded smile of his. But he looked as if he hadn’t slept or even changed his jeans. Circles ringed his bleary brown eyes. His hair was rumpled. Things must have been worse at the inn than I’d realized.

“Oh, hi,” I said, a little surprised to see him, though I wasn’t even sure how he would have gotten off the island at this point. “You’re still here.” It sounded like a question, or worse, an accusation, which was the last thing I intended.

“Yeah. I’m still here. Sorry I missed your big cleanup. I was trying to work things out with the
Boston Globe
all day. I told them I needed to stay, at least for a couple of weeks, to help my family get things working again.”

I felt an awful swirl of happy for me and bummed for him at this news. Instead of what I meant, I muttered, “It wasn’t my day. It was for the island.” How did I have any friends? It was inconceivable. But Charlie was too nice to take the bait.

“It
was
your day. Look how much you put into it.”

I sat down next to him. “Yeah, well, it turned out to be super weird. I wish you had been there.”

“Why?” he asked. “What happened?”

I explained about finding the letter and my parents’ reaction. Then I showed it to him.

His eyes lingered over the blue paper for several minutes. He chewed his lip, his brow furrowed. I found myself looking at his hands. They were rough and chapped, like everyone else’s on the island, everyone still struggling to clean up.

“Whoa,” he finally breathed, handing it back to me.

“Did you ever hear anything about this?”

“No. Definitely not. Which is weird, right?”

“That’s what I thought. So that’s what I’m doing here.” I stretched, working out the kinks in my back from having sat hunched in the same position for so long. “Scrolling through microfiche to find out what I can.”

“Microfiche. Ouch. Jay made me learn how to do research on that at one point. He thought it would be good for me to know how to use it.”

I managed a grin. “Awesome. Does that mean you have some leftover Dramamine you can give me?”

“Sorry.” He laughed. “Just stare at the horizon until you feel better.” That was an old sailing trick.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Come on,” he said. “I can lend another pair of eyes.”

Back in the library, Charlie helped me operate the rickety system, pointing out dozens of more stories, both local and national. We tried to organize them by date. The murder had occurred on August 17, high tourist season. There were
lots of Op-Ed pieces, reactions from island visitors and locals. There was also an article in the
Providence Journal
featuring a quote from Charlie’s grandfather: “It’s certainly tragic. I hope that they find the girl. But one accident is no reflection on the magical retreat that is Stone Cove Island.”

“He started the inn,” said Charlie, by way of explanation. He sounded slightly embarrassed at his grandfather’s cold tone, not that I could blame him. “I’m sure it was pretty bad for business that summer.”

“I would guess.”

By mid-September, the story abruptly died out.

There were no more tourists around. The police had no new information. Suddenly island business owners “could not be reached for further comment” and residents “declined to be interviewed.” Newspapers referred to old information and prior interviews and then seemed to give up. A girl swimming out—or being dragged out—into the ocean was unlikely ever to be found again. That made logical sense, but there was something horrible about abandoning the search for the truth so easily.

“It says they found her clothes covered in blood,” I mused, stretching again. I was ready for more fresh air. “And her hair had been cut off. Couldn’t they test the DNA and see if anyone else’s samples showed up?” I thought about how sickening those details were. There was something about the killer removing her hair … such an intensely cruel and humiliating gesture.

“I don’t know when they started using that in investigations exactly. We should look that up too.” Charlie took out a small notebook and jotted something down.

“Do you always carry that around with you?” I asked. What I really wanted to ask was:
Why are you helping me and why are you being so nice?
But I could tell he was as disturbed and intrigued by Bess Linsky’s murder as I was. The secret had been kept from him, too, and the Penders were at the top of the island’s social hierarchy. Maybe his parents had their own reasons for wanting to forget.

“I never go anywhere without my notebook.” He glanced up from the page. “It’s weird that a huge story like this faded so fast, don’t you think?”

“I was just thinking the same thing. But I guess if there’s no new information, what can they say? They can only rehash the story so much.”

He nodded, his tired eyes distant. “It seems really quick to just let it go a month later. It’s almost like they made a decision together to stop talking.”

“People were probably scared. About what happened to Bess and about what would happen the next summer if no one showed up.” I could almost understand the immediate reaction better than the decades of silence that followed. Shaking off the aches, I turned back to the machine. Fresh air could wait. “Let’s look at local stories from the next summer and see what happened afterward.”

We scrolled through the
Gazette
as well as the papers from Gloucester, Salem, Boston, and Providence. There was almost no mention of Bess, and no stories with new information. But it was hard to tell, going through the microfiche, what we were overlooking.

“I am so missing Google right now,” said Charlie. “Can I see the letter again?” We reread it together.

“What’s with the nursery rhymes? It’s like it’s right out of an eighties serial killer movie.”

“I know,” I said. “And then the rest of the stuff about judgment? That feels more like a religious freak. They don’t seem like the thoughts of the same person.”

Charlie made another note. “We should look into serial killers from around then just in case there’s something that fits, like chopping her hair off. We’ll have to wait till we can get online though. It’s too random, looking this way.”

“We could find out more about her though. Old school newspapers? Or yearbooks?”

“Good idea. We can find out what kind of person she was, who she hung out with, what kind of activities she was into.”

“Charlie, you really never heard about this? Before today?”

“No. Had you?”

“I think it’s so weird. My mother was apparently best friends with her. Your parents know everything about the island. People like Nancy and Greg? Kids at school? It’s like the biggest thing that’s ever happened here before last week, and no one talks about it? I never thought of Stone Cove as a place with dark secrets.”

Charlie rolled his eyes. “What?” I asked.

“Not you. This place. It might not be a dark secret. Maybe some kids at school do know about it. Maybe we just never happened to hear. I wonder if her mother still lives here.” I noticed the way Charlie looked to the side and up slightly, through his lashes, when he was really thinking.

“We would know that. And she never spoke to reporters, so it’s not likely she would be around talking about it now.”

Charlie nodded. I could see he was considering the angles. “It’s a good Nancy question.”

“True. If anyone is going to talk …”

We walked to the periodical room, where one of the librarians pointed out where the yearbooks were kept. We grabbed a thin stack of them: Bess’s and our parents’ year, the previous year and the year after. As I sat down, I felt a prickling of the hair at the base of my neck.

“I can’t believe something like this could happen here,” I said. Charlie nodded. He had flipped to the section about the senior class and was scanning the pages for Bess’s image.

Because Stone Cove High was small, each senior had three pages devoted to his or her school career. There was the portrait page (tense grin, eyes focused too high, swirly mauve pull-down backdrop). The next page detailed accomplishments (usually people really milked it, listing activities they’d started and quit after one meeting, or activities everyone in the class was required to do). The most important was the “collage page.” This was meant to show off your personality with cool quotations (Kurt Cobain’s lyrics were the most popular), demonstrate how many friends you had (either in volume or by proximity to popular kids) and immortalize great moments (
“Dudes, Lone Rock Bar ’89! Never forget!”
).