12

By morning, stranded tourists learned of the skeleton and began offering huge bribes to people with boats to smuggle them off the island. Some boat owners at the marina took them up on it, but they were all turned back. Billy and Mick gave it a try and met the same fate. That was why they arrived at the coffee shop late. They’d taken a hundred dollars apiece from four tourists and then had to give it back. They couldn’t wait to describe their adventure.

Mick said, “Coast Guard boat offshore carries a mean loudspeaker, let me tell you. Nearly blew my head off bellowing orders.” Mick curved his hands and held them to his mouth, forming a megaphone. He shouted, “Violating the ban means a fine, an arrest, and a quarantine on a private colony. Hell with that.”

“And the people we had on the boat—thought they were going to dump us overboard. Told us we were all crazy for living out here. Used to that, though.”

Ernie said, “How far’d you get?”

“Right about the spot where the Coast Guard used to catch up to us when we were runnin’ rum. ’Course they only caught us fifty percent of the time. Now they got radar.”

Fitzy said to me, “He’s talking about Prohibition. As if it were yesterday. These Block Islanders live to a ripe old age, don’t they? Buncha crooks.”

Billy, who heard him along with everyone else, said, “Times were pretty rough.”

“They’re still so rough you want to gouge tourists?”

“Who asked ya, fuzzbucket?” Billy and Mick chuckled together.

The little bell over the door, back up, taped, made its muted ding. Ernie had insisted, telling Willa that it was dangerous to spoil the boy—meaning Jake. Tommy had left Jake in Willa’s care again and he kept himself occupied taking an old radio apart. Now he let out a shriek. But it wasn’t the bell that did it. The three girls standing in the doorway must have scared him. He knocked his chair over and charged past them, out into the low glare of the morning sun. Willa made a move toward the door, but Ernie grabbed her arm. “Let him go.”

“Tommy will—”

“I’ll handle Tommy.”

Christen, Samantha, and Kate didn’t know whether to come in or go back out again. Elijah Leonard’s head was tucked under Kate’s arm, his face turned away. They hadn’t stolen the van this time. They were red and hot and sweating. Jim Lane called to them—“Hey”—no longer judging books by their covers, maybe.

Ernie said, “Never mind Jake, girls, he’s a nervous boy. Now get on in here and tell me what I can get you.”

Christen said, “We don’t want anything. Water.”

“Don’t be silly. Willa, get something up for these kids.”

The girls spotted Fitzy and me and hurried over to our table. Christen said, “We know who the skeleton is.”

Chairs scraped across the floor, making a circle around us, and Ernie dragged three more over for the campers. Willa got a pitcher of juice and a plate of pastries. I said, “Sit down, girls,” and Fitzy, “We’re listening.”

The campers drank the juice. Christen wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “See, there was this one girl who got here a week early, a week before camp opened. Her parents made special arrangements with Irwin. The mother was going to be in Paris and the father—who was divorced from the mother—was traveling on business, so Irwin agreed to—”

Kate interrupted. “Like, imagine what Irwin charged them!”

Then they all started talking at once. “He took her early. And when the first of the real girls arrived—six of them—the day camp officially opened, they met her. They said all she did was sit on the floor in the corner.”

“I mean, they tried to be nice, but she was completely stressed out. She was stressed out because she’d been on Irwin’s so-called twelve-hundred-calorie-per-day diet for a week and couldn’t get to extra food. She wasn’t able to sneak any in her suitcase. The girls gave her chips and cookies and everything—shared what they had—but she was wrecked.”

“When I got here I gave her a million Drake’s Cakes.”

“So then, all that week, there was a lot of commotion because the campers were coming in, and then at the end of the first week the six girls who were the first to get to camp realized that the actual first girl was gone. The girl who wouldn’t move from the corner. So they went to Irwin, and he told them she was a runaway. That she was with her father.”

“So this morning when we heard about the skeleton, we paid off the counselors to get the first girl’s application. And we called her mother, and her mother said that right after camp started, Irwin called her to tell her the girl had run away. The mother told us she ran away all the time. To her father.”

“So this time, the mother says, the father can handle her himself. The mother said, ‘I’ve had enough. I try and try but my ex-husband just keeps giving in to her.’ She kept saying stuff like that. Pissed. So we called him—the first girl’s father. In Santa Barbara. Well, guess what? She’s not there. She never was there either!”

“The first girl is nowhere!”

“She is, like, nowhere.”

“We were so totally crazed we went to Irwin to tell him what we’d found out but, guess what else? He’s gone. And the van’s gone, and he has a boat in New Harbor, so we bet that’s gone too.”

“And we bet he’s on it!”

“He’s, like, gone.” Kate’s blue eyes blinked and blinked. “He escaped! And … and…”

Christen said to her, “Stupid, try one of these. It’s really good,” and handed her a pastry.

She took a big bite then looked at it. “What’s in it?”

Ernie looked at it. “Prune.”

“Prune? Omigod, I’m eating prune.”

The two older girls were on a roller coaster. They were nearly hysterical, but they still were mothering Kate. I said, “Christen, did you do anything more, once you realized Irwin was gone?”

All three said at the same time, “Yes!”

Thought so.

“We looked through his office and we looked through his files and in his closets and everywhere. We found Erin’s stuff. Erin Seldes, that was her name. The first girl. Her suitcases were there, her backpack, and all the books on her school’s summer reading list were in a box with her name on it.”

“He hid her stuff.”

“So, see, Irwin must be the one doing it. He killed the first girl and then he killed Dana and Rachel, and now he finally figured he’d get caught because of the first girl’s skeleton.”

I said, “No. He just believed what he wanted to believe. That the first girl, Erin, had run away to her father’s.”

“Then why didn’t he send her stuff to her?”

“He would wait for instructions. He wouldn’t spend money shipping her things until he heard from the father. But he didn’t throw them away. He would have if he’d—Listen, who’s up there with the rest of the campers?”

“We’ve got two counselors left. They’re all together in the dining hall.”

Fitzy asked Ernie for his phone. He called the Coast Guard. The girls had been right about Irwin’s departure. The guardsmen had spotted him and warned Irwin to turn his boat back. He wouldn’t, so they were forced to fire across his bow. With that, he cut his engines. They detained him at sea, which is what the Coast Guard will do if it orders you to stop and you don’t. Not an empty threat, as with Billy and Mick, which they try first. But Irwin decided to take his chances even with the gunshot. They chased his boat, got up some reinforcements, surrounded it, and trained several guns at him. They followed orders to guard him while awaiting further instructions. They floated food and water to him. They floated metal containers for him to store his wastes. They threatened to shoot him if he urinated overboard.

Our three campers all felt good about that because they were convinced Irwin killed the girls. Not me. Not Fitzy either, I could tell. Because Irwin didn’t do it. It’s rare that grifters kill. They simply want more money than they can earn selling used cars. What they don’t want is trouble. But it was just as well to let the girls believe it was Irwin. They felt safer. They had simmered down.

Willa took the girls back to camp. She said she was going to call every one of the girls’ parents, and those who still remained reluctant about getting their kids after the ban was lifted—those were the ones she’d tell about the skeleton. “And if they still don’t agree to it, I’ll tell them they’ll be charged with endangerment to the welfare of a child by the Rhode Island State Police. You can do that, right, Fitzy?”

“You tell them that.”

She said to the girls, “I was fat when I was a kid. Then, one day, I guess when I was about your age, Christen, or you, Sam, I decided I just had to stop eating so much food. I didn’t lose weight, but I didn’t gain any more either. I stayed the same. Later, when I teamed up with Ernie, we got so busy with the store, I liked spending time taking care of the store more than eating. So I lost weight. Not enough to put me on the cover of Glamour. You can see that, but so what. And I didn’t even know I was losing weight till my clothes got too big. Someday, that’ll happen to you. Then … no more camps, see? Meanwhile, for now? Today? You girls eat. We’ll all eat. Or these pastries’ll be stale before you know it.”

She picked up a pastry. So did we. We would join in with the girls to support Willa’s theory.

Before she left, Willa told us she intended to stay with them, get a couple of women up there to join her. Then Jim Lane went with me to look for Spike. No luck. I watched him pedal away. Just a boy, but big and strong. Maybe not a wimp at all. Maybe he just pretended to be a wimp. Maybe he did sell the girls terribly tainted drugs. Maybe the other boy who’d been tortured a long, long time ago did not arrive on the island and end up killing the campers. Maybe it was this boy who did it. Maybe he found the skeleton because he’d put it there in the first place. Happens all the time.

*   *   *

I got Delby on the phone. “I need to know how long would it take a colony of gulls to strip a body of every shred of flesh. I need to know right away and I need to know definitively.”

“A colony of what?”

“Gulls. Seagulls.” I wouldn’t explain that “sea” was redundant.

She said, “I know just the place on Yahoo! to find out.”

She’d find an answer to a question like that faster at her computer than she would if she checked with the lab. I had to wonder if labs would eventually be replaced by search engines.

She called back within fifteen minutes and first verified a few facts. “Are you talking a large colony of seagulls?”

“Yes.”

“More than a hundred birds?”

“Yes.”

“A hundred will pick the bones clean in an hour. But was the body alive before the seagulls got to it?”

“I hope not.”

“Sorry, boss. Well, here’s the thing: seagulls don’t eat anything that’s been dead more than half an hour. A dead something in the sun, that is. In the shade, hour and a half. That would be at sixty degrees Fahrenheit, give or take. And here’s what I had the misfortune to find out without having to ask. Ninety-nine percent of all living creatures die by being eaten alive. How about that? Humans are the exception—they’re only rarely eaten alive—alligators, sharks, starving pet dogs, or zoo animals being the guilty parties. Man.”

Man, is right. Sometimes, while sitting on the chaise, I’d watch gulls carry crabs to the cliff edge, turn them onto their backs, and peck out their insides while their legs were flailing. And of course I thought of Spike, wherever he was, treating a small mouse like a soccer ball until he got bored and broke its neck.

I asked her, “You got all this on Yahoo!?”

“Yeah. Wonder what reference librarians are doing for work these days.”

“Thanks, Delby.”

“You want it, you got it, boss. Why I’m here. Listen, Auerbach’s got some stuff too—probably not from Yahoo!—and he’s really frantic so get ready. I’m putting him on.”

He came on. When he began speaking, his voice was rattling with excitement. “Poppy, I can be an idiot. I’m looking into wackos hitting steel barrels with crowbars when here is what I should have been looking into instead: sound the human ear can’t hear.”

Here we go. “Starting with, If a tree falls in the forest, et cetera?”

“Well … no. There’s no sound from the tree, period, if there are no sensory cells to—”

“Never mind, Auerbach. Just get back to where you were.”

“I was getting to sound waves. They are very important when it comes to the transmission of sound. Frequencies above twenty-thousand Hertz, which we can’t hear, will repel vermin and can dislodge the tartar right off your teeth. Too extravagant for your yearly trip to the dentist, though. And during the initial test trials of aircraft breaking the sound barrier wherein the crafts’ engines created no sound, there was the same trauma to both pilots and crew that occurred with World War One gunnery soldiers: chest-wall vibrations, gagging, respiratory rhythm changes. Once again, the military had to break out the sound protection devices, but this time they accidentally fell into an altogether different scenario. The military looked into creating ultrasound artificially. To use as a weapon. But it didn’t go anywhere, too costly. Just the research would have meant a significant budget increase. But here’s what did go somewhere. Infrasound!”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s sound waves with too low a Hertz measurement to be heard, waves that bypass the sensory cells. If the infrasound waves are directed at a victim with precision and intensity through a tube, the victim is very seriously injured. But if—”

“Auerbach, did you say a tube?”

“More a pipe, actually. Like an organ pipe. First thing that happens, the victim can’t breathe; his head pounds like he’s got a major migraine going; he has a panic attack and shakes like a leaf, he loses his ability to stand upright, he experiences extreme nausea and vomiting, and then he can’t move. If the intensity is increased further, his vision becomes blurred, he has seizures, he convulses, and finally the hollow organs actually rupture, starting with the organs of the ear.

“And get this, Poppy. Infrasound weapons have been made and tested. Pentagon supports it because sound tubes cost less than Bunsen burners and would be capable of controlling crowds so much more effectively than tear gas—only the bad guys would be throwing up all over themselves. Cool.”

His delirious voice reminded me of the campers. “Auerbach—”

“So, Poppy, these weapons are referred to as acoustic lasers and are patented under names like Consciousness-Altering Tubes and—here’s my favorite—Nervous System Excitation Devices. That one combines strobe lights with the infrasound and induces complete sensory disorientation. We tried it in Somalia, and so did the Brits in Ireland in the seventies. Trouble is, the offense was equally affected, the guys at the offensive end of the tubes. The sound protection equivalent of gas masks hasn’t been perfected.”

“Auerbach, tell me you don’t think we’ve got someone here with a Nervous System Excitation Device.”

“I’m never surprised by anything.”

I still am.

“Poppy, infrasound causes the organ of Corti—it’s in the cochlea—to be torn apart. I went back to tissue samples. The organs of Corti in the girls’ ears were torn into pieces so small you needed a microscope to see them.”

His voice was closing in at twenty thousand Hertz, easy. “Stop and listen to me. Stop.”

“Okay.”

“Could real sound, if it were horrendous enough, do that?”

“Poppy, I am talking about real sound.”

“And I’m talking about real sound to a layman.”

“Oh. Sorry. I haven’t got that information.”

“Then go back to the autopsy in Brazil.”

“Brazil?”

“The cop’s daughter who was killed in a steel barrel.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“In the meantime, Auerbach, what’s your guess? Was the Harvard doctor right?”

“You mean, can you kill someone by bashing a steel barrel with a crowbar if the victim is encased in the barrel? My guess is yes.” He sounded sad.

“Listen to me again, Auerbach. I know how things are. How there are some scenarios that are not as exhilarating as others. But exhilaration is secondary, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So when you hear galloping, check for horses before you run around looking for zebras. Mind, the zebra theory is still valid though, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You said infrasound bypasses the sensory cells, right?”

“Right.”

“And the girls’ sensory cells?”

He was silent.

“Auerbach?”

“Disintegrated.”

“You’ve done an incredible job. But keep your pants on.”

*   *   *

That evening, I said to Fitzy, “We’ve got to figure a way to get to Providence. We need to poke around there. We need to find out who those three sisters tortured. Delby can’t get an ID on that boy.” I didn’t see the percentage in filling him in on the ultrasound theory.

“If a police file on the case exists, it’s sealed.”

“We’ll unseal it.”

“We can’t get past the Coast Guard. I haven’t got a scuba diving certificate.”

I did. “Listen, I’m serious. Haven’t ships managed to get past military blockades?”

“Not lately. Radar detection is pretty advanced.”

“This isn’t a military blockade. There aren’t that many Coast Guard boats out there. Maybe fifty percent of attempts would succeed today too.”

He thought for a minute. Then he looked into my eyes. He grinned. “Poppy, forget it.”

“If they ran rum, they could run us.”

“Shit.”

We found Billy and Mick at the pool table at the Club Soda. When they saw us, they said, “Hey, it’s the law.”

Fitzy said, “We come to challenge you to a game.” He said to me out of the corner of his mouth, “Do you shoot pool, FBI?”

“I shoot everything that needs shooting.”

Fitzy and I were good. But they beat us. We bought them a round.

At the bar, lined up on stools, huddled together, we asked if it could be done. Based on the assumption that they hadn’t tried all that hard with the tourists.

They hadn’t. Mick said, “All the same, tough. Real tough.”

“See, we could do it if the sea was calm,” Billy said. “Boat with a real shallow keel, use a trawl engine, minimum noise—”

“Thing is, it would take six or seven hours to get across.”

“And we’d have to do it at night. If the wind isn’t too bad. Blowing in a good direction to boot.”

I said, “Well, it’s night. How do we find out if the wind isn’t too bad?”

Mick said, “You go down to the beach and squirt into the air.”

Oh, joy.

Fitzy said, “You’ll have to turn your back, Poppy.”

We all went down to the harbor. Billy said, “If it’s a go, we’ll cut the parking lot lights. A little confusion never hurts. Jake’ll do it for us.”

I turned my back. So did Fitzy. They tested the wind, zipped back up, and talked fisherman talk. The verdict was no.

Billy felt bad. “Sorry, Poppy. The wind over the water’s brisk. It’s the open Atlantic out there, not a lake. Maybe tomorrow night, right, Mick?”

“Yeah. We’ll try tomorrow.” They wanted to do it.

Fitzy said, “Thanks.” Then, “Poppy, let’s get these boys back to their game. Then I’m going to call in some chits.”

Within an hour, Fitzy had clearance to leave. He said to me, “Actually, I’m almost as good with a phone as you are. I just get lazy. I know a lot of secrets, Poppy. It’s what I do best—threaten people whose secrets I know. A hell of a lot of people are afraid of me. I swept the mob out of a place where they were more firmly ensconced than they are in Palermo. So just now I’ve promised a few active chiefs out there that I’m going to back off for a while. ’Course, I was lying. As if I’d back off from anything. I’m always amazed that these goons believe my bullshit. So they called in chits of their own. Pretty soon, next week probably, someone’s going to dip my feet in wet cement and throw me in the drink. But considering what my life has become, it’ll be worth it.”

“No, it won’t.”

But he was pacing, raring to go. I drove him to the airport. We waited there for a couple of hours, sitting in the jeep, looking at the stars, listening for the sound of an engine. Fitzy said, “Want to make out?”

I looked over at him. He’d crossed his eyes. I had an uncontrollable laughing fit. So did he. And then we ended up holding hands, saying nothing until the lights on the strip came on just long enough for a plane to come in. Before Fitzy left, during the time we were holding hands, I said, “I was interviewing this guy for a job once. He’d had surgery—it was obvious—for a harelip. It was the first thing that registered when I asked him to sit down. Then I began to notice how he had these great eyebrows that kind of went straight across. Then, as we talked, I became fascinated with his previous work, admiring of what he’d accomplished. And then his personality came through. He was not only cheerful, he was happy, I could tell. And when I saw him the second time, when I got to tell him he was hired, I realized after he’d left the office that I’d forgotten about the harelip. I hadn’t noticed it. And until this minute, I realize I’ve never thought of it since. I’m not aware of it when I see him.”

“Poppy, what in God’s holy name are you talking about?”

“The girls. I was thinking about them. I was thinking about them without thinking they were fat. I’d forgotten the fat.”

He thought for a moment, then said, “I got a call once. Abandoned baby. I’m holding this baby and I’m describing him over the phone and when I was finished I was asked, ‘What race?’ I had to look down at him to say, ‘Black.’ I realized I wasn’t thinking black the whole time I had him. I was thinking baby.”

*   *   *

Once Fitzy was gone, I went back to Joe’s cottage and waited till morning to call Harry in Atlanta. I didn’t need to stir him from his bed for my hypothetical question.

When I asked it, he said, “No, Poppy. No one gets clearance under any circumstances. There is no clearance whatsoever when we issue a travel ban.”

“Sorry, my mistake.” I hung up. It was fortuitous that Fitzy could accomplish such a thing without Harry’s knowing about it. But I’d needed to make sure. Fitzy arrested wouldn’t help anything. Rhode Island might be the world’s smallest state but it’s got politicians who can get whatever they want done, one way or another. Texas can’t do that; I don’t know about Alaska. Fitzy could take care of himself.

I wouldn’t sit around doing nothing. Denying the killer could be one of the volunteers guarding the girls was worse than foolish. He was lurking, and vigilance was the order of the day. I wouldn’t even go to the Patio first; I ate two pieces of toast and threw a few things into a bag. Before I got in the ragtop I tried Spike yet again, shook his box of dry cat food. No big orange tail sprang up from the grass. If I left food out for him, every vertebrate and invertebrate on the island would be fighting for it. The gulls, of course, would be the big winners. So I compromised and left a bowl of water. Spike had had a lot of time sharpening his mouse trapping skills. He’d fend.

When I got to the camp, I found chaos. One of the girls was ringing the dinner bell, which happened to be mercilessly discordant. The rest were clumped in circles together on the grass in various stages of despair. The two counselors were trying to bring about some kind of control by screaming at them. Christen spotted me and came running. Her face was red. She blurted out, “It’s Stupid!”

I jumped out of the jeep. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s gone!”

“She can’t be gone.”

“Yes, she is. Because the freaking Cabbage Patch doll is gone too.”

“Where’s Willa?”

“We had breakfast, and then she went back to her store for supplies. She said she wouldn’t be gone long—told the counselors not to let any of us leave. While she was gone, Stupid snuck away. She told us she had to put Elijah Leonard down for his nap. That was half an hour ago. Longer, I think. We just realized she wasn’t here now!”

One of the counselors was wringing her hands together. “Everyone was cooperating. We never saw where she went!”

I looked around. The bell was quiet. The girls were stopped in their tracks, staring at me. I said, in my calmest voice, “I’d like to speak with the counselors.”

The hand-wringer and another girl stepped up to me. I told them I needed their help. The hand-wringer said, “We’re scared.”

Christen stalked up to her. “What the hell have you got to be scared of? You’re not fat!”

I put my arm around Christen. I asked the counselor, “Is the van back?”

“Yes. But it’s making a funny noise.”

“That’s all right. As long as it moves. I want you and three campers to drive to the clinic and tell the doctor about Kate.”

“Tell him about who?”

“About Stupid.”

I thought of sending the other counselor to Tommy, but he was still making sure the skeleton was left alone and somehow keeping Jake under wraps. I said to her, “I want you to get these girls into groups of four. Each group is to head off in a different direction and call her name. Maybe she misplaced her doll and she’s in the bracken or at the beach looking for him.” I was trying to sound rational but I knew Kate would have heard the camp bell if she was within half a mile of us. Maybe she was following the route she’d watched Rachel take, hoping to come upon the man with the picnic. “Be sure to go all the way around the point.”

I said to them, “She wouldn’t have gone off with someone. She knew better. We’ll find her. Christen and Samantha, you’re coming with me. Let’s get moving. Now.” But Kate didn’t know better. She was ten years old.

One counselor grabbed some girls and headed for the van and the other began counting the rest of them off. They formed their groups and hustled away.

Christen and Samantha got in the ragtop with me.

I started it up and took off. The first thing Samantha said was, “She doesn’t need food. Her grandfather sent her enough food packages to feed the whole camp. So she’s not out looking for the picnic man. And she never lost sight of that doll. Never. She went off with someone. It had to be someone she knew. Someone she trusted. Someone who promised her Drake’s Cakes because she’s finally out of them.”

Christen said, “Maybe that guy from the grocery store. Willa’s husband. He’s always nice to us. He’s always adding a few Drake’s Cakes to her bag when we can get into town. I mean, Stupid is obsessed. So maybe the guy promised her more.”

And maybe Esther had heard such a promise. And there wasn’t an opportunity to kill Esther via torture because there was no way to entice Esther to wherever he enticed the girls. But Ernie? And then I remembered all the Styrofoam boxes piled up on Esther’s kitchen table. He’d paid many a visit to her. I said, “We’ll start there, then, at the store. We’ll ask Ernie if he saw her this morning.”

Just Willa was in the store, stocking up for the girls as she’d told them. “What’s wrong?”

“Willa, one of the girls left the camp.”

“Oh, no!”

“Where’s Ernie?”

“He’s with Jake. Jake started having some kind of attack or something. Took him to the clinic.” Her eyes were wet. “Doc was going to force him to take a Valium. Which girl?”

Christen and Samantha both said, “Stupid.”

“Stupid? She said she was going to play cards with you kids.”

Christen put her hands to her mouth. “We didn’t let her play,” she wailed. Her bottom lip began to tremble.

I turned to Willa. “Go get Tommy and Ernie. Maybe the doc’s got Jake settled. Get Jim Lane’s kid. Get everyone. We have to find her.”

I hustled the girls back into the jeep. I could only hope that Kate hadn’t died yet. Maybe she was in the throes of whatever it was that killed the other girls. Maybe she could still be saved before he was finished with her.

I drove fast, and for the sake of the girls I stared hard at the road ahead of me, as if I knew where I was going. I asked myself, Where would the killer dump the body this time? Someplace different. Six islanders were patrolling Rodman’s Hollow, and Sandy Point was taken care of. Tommy would have sent someone there if he’d had to leave. So I didn’t head toward the long narrow spit of Sandy Point. I would drive to Joe’s side of the island, the southwest coast, sparsely populated—to the rocky unused beaches where his cottage perched above the Atlantic—and then I’d head north until the road ran out at the cut into New Harbor.

The road along the western shore was just inland, narrow but paved, high sea grasses on each side. I looked at Joe’s map. It was printed in 1953. Joe told me nothing had changed. The road didn’t have a name then and it didn’t now. Everyone referred to it as the Western Road. There were five unpaved tracks in addition to Joe’s that led away from the road to the sea. Once past the track to Joe’s, it took me two minutes to reach the one after his, Dickens Bluff. I turned onto it and drove to the shoreline, where it ended at the edge of an eroded clay cliff. There was nothing but a long tumble of charcoal gray dry muck reaching right into the water. The stuff looked like the deep innards of the earth, something no one was ever supposed to glimpse.

The next track was Dory’s Cove Avenue. Avenue. Incredible. Maybe a joke on Dory. Wasn’t a dory a boat? I took it. There had been a cove, but it was full of the charcoal clay, a sandy beach turned into a muddy ugly flat. Nothing was there.

The next track was unnamed and led to what had been a lifesaving station, swept out to sea by a storm in 1867. The storm had also swept out the beach, and a rocky shoal now jutted out of the water. Joe had shown me the original foundation of the station. He’d wanted to build there. No go, too exposed. I turned the jeep around.

I sped along. The elevation lessened. I could see the ocean glimmering to my left. Two tracks remained. At the end of the next one, Clay Head, the head itself had eased away to sea level. There was a wide beach, big waves. Bikes were parked by the side of the track. At least a dozen people were belly-boarding. Joe and I had gone surf casting there. I put the jeep in reverse.

Christen said, “This is taking so long.”

“I know.”

I looked at my watch. It just seemed that way. We’d left Willa’s less than fifteen minutes ago.

I looked at the map. One track left, Tughole Way. This tughole was abandoned—barren, no more peat. At the corner was the soaring electrical tower, the transformer that directed electricity from the mainland to the island. I jammed the accelerator to the floor, reached the track in another minute, and took a left by the tower. Tughole Way ended in a cleft carved right through the center of another wide beach. The cleft was full of rocks, coated with clinging blackened seaweed. The cleft kept going right into the sea, another rut gouged out by the ancient glacier. It acted as a funnel, sucking in debris, seaweed, mounds of shells and piles of driftwood. A large old piling, ripped from a dock somewhere, ten feet long and two feet around, lay a few feet from the encroaching tide.

Christen said, “I hear something.”

We all did, a soft sound intermittent with the crashing of the waves.

“It was a gull, Christen.” A ring of them, overhead, were scoping out the beach. I turned off the engine and they came in lower, cawing at one another. We listened carefully and then we heard the sound again, louder. And longer. It did sound like a gull, one of their more terrible calls. But it came from the other side of the driftwood. I could only imagine the very worst, that the gulls had found her before we had, had completed their diabolical feeding, and that there would be another skeleton behind the length of piling. What had Delby said? An hour and a half.

I leaped over the jeep door and ran, shouting at the girls to stay where they were, but Christen was already out. I couldn’t stop her. We left Samantha to extricate herself from the backseat.

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.”