Stone Cove Island (7 page)

“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.”

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 standing. 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.

“Oh. It’s an island history project I’m thinking about.
Did you guys ever hear about this girl who was murdered in the late eighties?”

“No,” said Lexy.

“Island legend,” said Abby. “It’s like the black anchor myth. People talk about it but it never happened.”

“This happened,” I said, opening the yearbook. “Her name was Bess Linsky. You never heard about this either?”

“There is no way there could be a murder here and we wouldn’t all know about it. This island is tiny.”

“Seriously,” I told her. “There were tons of news stories. You can look it up.”

Lexy looked pained. “God. One more thing I can’t Google. Is your Internet back up?”

“No,” I said. “But the library’s might be by now.” I didn’t think I should mention Jay. The paper was, in actuality, the only place where the Internet connection was working. “What’s the black anchor myth?”

“Oh,” said Abby. “It’s this thing they say about the old days, when the island was much more uptight. There used to be a book, like a registry of people who lived here. They say if you did something upsetting—something people didn’t approve of, like wearing white after Labor Day or maybe making bathtub gin; I don’t really know what qualified—someone would secretly deliver a black anchor to your house and that meant get off the island. You’re no longer welcome. And they’d scratch your name out of the registry.” Abby was from a very old Stone Cove family. They weren’t well off, like the Penders, but they went way back.

“Shut up. There’s no registry book,” said Lexy.

“I know. I said it was a myth.”

“That’s creepy,” said Colleen. Her family was newer to the island. Her parents had grown up in Gloucester and then moved here once they were married. “Even if it’s not true.”

Colleen had picked up the yearbook and was flipping through it. “Hey, awesome hair!” she said pointing at Cat Pender’s picture. “Don’t ever tell her I said that. Let’s see whose dad was cutest in high school.” She continued to page through. “Uh-oh. Eliza, I think that prize goes to you.” There was my dad, looking so young and so hopeful. Looking at the picture made my eyes start to prickle and tear. What was wrong with me? There was something about his expression, something that was lost now. Or maybe gained. He looked not necessarily innocent but not … careful. That was it. Like Bess, his face was completely open, ready to face the future.

“Holy cow,” said Lexy. “She’s right. Your dad was a fox.”

This was making me so uncomfortable. “Right. Ick. I have to get to fourth period. Meredith’s probably waiting.”

“Say hi to Charlie,” said Colleen.

“What?” I said, thrown by the non sequitur.

“I saw you guys at the diner the other day,” she said. “I guess maybe he is a joiner after all.” I tried to return a cool, “ha-ha, very funny” smile, but the heat I felt all the way to my ears probably undermined the effect.

“See you guys,” I managed, and bumbled out of the library.

Meredith hadn’t heard about the murder either. It was starting to seem impossible that the island could keep such a public secret. I could understand why at the time,
the scariness of the event combined with the potential scariness for the island’s reputation had made people shy from the topic, but it had been twenty-five years, one generation agreeing not to talk resulting in the whole thing being excised from the island’s history. I literally could not find one kid in school who knew anything about Bess.

I had English lit last period. Mr. Malloy pulled me aside as I was leaving and asked me to stay for a minute. I nodded to Meredith to go ahead without me. English was one of my best subjects, so I wasn’t worried that I was in trouble exactly, but I did wonder what he could want. He sat down backward in the desk in front of mine to face me.

“Eliza. The school is in some turmoil, as you know, what with getting back to work after the storm, and the added complications of our housing situation here.” I wondered if he’d heard about cleanup day, and was going to ask me to help organize something here at school.

“There is a lot of tension, a lot of rumors circulating, as I’m sure you’ve seen for yourself.” I nodded. Now I did wonder if I was in trouble.

“So,” he continued. “Today I heard buzzing around school concerning a rumor related to old island history. When I asked the student, she told me you had brought her the story. I want to suggest that this is perhaps not the time to stir up old pains, given the new pains we are all experiencing.”

“Okay,” I said. I looked directly at Mr. Malloy to try to figure out why this would upset or anger him, but his eyes were soft. “It’s not a rumor though. I read about Bess’s murder. It was all over the press.”

“Stories like that can start to feel like ghost stories after a time,” he said. “Even if they started as something real. I’m only telling you this to help you. When people are under a lot of stress, they can overreact to things they don’t want to hear. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.” It did. “Can I ask you something though?”

“Of course?” He said it like a question.

“Did you know Bess Linsky?” He was not one of the oldest teachers, but old enough to have been here in 1989 if he’d come to Stone Cove High early in his teaching career.

“I did. She was in my class one of my first years teaching here. She was an exceptionally bright girl.”

“Did you—what do you think happened to her?”

He was silent. I felt awkward suddenly, like I’d asked too personal a question. He seemed to be thinking the same thing.

“I think,” he began. “I think there is no way we can ever know.”

AFTER SCHOOL, I DIDN’T
know what to do with myself. Sailing practice had not started up again. The marina slips were still trashed and the boats weren’t back in the water yet. If they didn’t get them in soon it would be too late before it was too cold. Instead of heading downhill to my own house, I walked up, along Hill Road, which ran along the golf course past the Anchor Club. The club was housed in a beautiful building, huge and shingled and over a hundred years old. Famous architects who’d built grand houses in places like Newport, the Hamptons, and Fishers Island had
designed it. Honestly, it was by far the grandest building we had, and not quite in character with the cottagey feel of the rest of Stone Cove.

In the center of the lawn was a giant anchor. It was black, but that was because it was made out of iron, I told myself, pretty standard for any big anchor. If there really had been a mysterious “Black Anchor Society,” it had nothing to do with the Anchor Club, which was just a country club for golf, tennis and croquet—not that you could call that a sport. I wished, not for the first time, that my grandmother was still alive. She—my mother’s mother—had been a potter and a great storyteller and a completely independent spirit. I could have asked her about the black anchors or about Bess without any shushing or sidestepping. She would have told me anything I wanted to know.