15

All the storm cells made their way out past the horizon by morning and the air was clear, the sky the color of Rebekah’s eyes, the ocean like ink. Mick’s forecast had finally come about. It was the kind of day Block Island brochures crow about. So finding Jake didn’t take very long. It turned out he had other haunts he enjoyed visiting besides the old South Light, besides the cliff looking east out over the ocean by Joe’s cottage, besides the girls who had simply aroused his curiosity. He also liked to sit and gaze upon the electrical tower near the Western Road, at the turnoff to the track called Tughole Way. His body lay on the ground just beneath. He’d succeeded in sabotaging the transformer, but he’d made one mistake and touched a wire, drawing the last volts of electricity to Block Island into his body.

The night before, when Tommy had me crushed up against him and I’d screamed and screamed for Jake to help me, he’d set out to do it.

At Richard’s Patio, Mick said, “Matter of throwing a switch if you know where it is. That’s why the power got restored so fast. One of the boys just climbed on up there not long after we lost it and got the power goin’ again. Too dark to see Jake right then, though.”

Willa became hysterical at the news, so Fitzy had to take her to the clinic and have the doc give her a shot. She didn’t get to learn all that had happened until later: what Tommy had forced Jake to do; how Jake had somehow figured out that he could rectify what he’d wrought. To find a sense of morality his demons hadn’t quite obliterated.

Ernie made us breakfast after they’d all done their best to sympathize with me. Aggie invited me for a cup of tea any time. Then, with that duty out of the way, I listened as they agonized over all of it. Billy said, “It was because we didn’t know what we’d do with Jake. How could we take care of him? So now they’re both gone. Who’d have thought it?”

I drank my entire cup of coffee. I couldn’t make sense of what Billy had said, so I asked Mick to tell me.

“Mick, what did Billy say?”

Mick used almost the exact same words, but not quite. “What would we have done with Jake if it were true?”

Vague little clicks came together in my brain. “Mick, I’m sorry—if what were true?”

Billy explained more carefully. “He means when we figured out it was Tommy. That’s when we didn’t know what to do. Not that we were sure it was him, no, ma’am. Couldn’t prove anything. But Tommy turning out to be an outsider and all, I guess we should have known even sooner.”

Mick said, “Him turning out to be adopted and all.”

I must have appeared utterly dense because Mick tried to explain again, kept at the point they were trying to make so I’d understand. “See, we figured we should say something to the authorities. Maybe go to the trooper. But he beat out the ban and was gone. It’s like I’m tellin’ you, we had no proof. And the thing is, who’d watch Jake? I mean, it’s not like the boy took to any of us.”

Ernie said, “Willa wanted to. Willa always wanted to. She pressed me. But I’m too old to be feedin’ meals to someone in his condition. Tommy had to dress him, bathe him—all that stuff you have to do when someone is—well, you know. When I was at the doc’s yesterday trying to help him with Jake, I kept sayin’ to him, ‘Where the hell’s Tommy?’ He didn’t know. Nobody knew. Then those campers came barrelin’ in, told us another one was gone. The little one. That’s where Tommy was.”

I turned to Joe. “Did you think Tommy was the one?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why did you run away?”

“Because I didn’t want to know who they thought might have done it. Our whole community was—”

“Community? What whole community? The community is a lunatic asylum.”

Jim Lane’s kid said, “I’m not a lunatic.”

“You will be if you don’t get out.”

Mick protested. “But Poppy, we saw the girls were watched over. I mean, once he tried to kill the young one. So’s he couldn’t do it to anyone else until the ban was lifted. That girl who went out in the storm, the one who went after Tommy—we didn’t think the girls would figure it out. We thought they would trust the law and stay put at the camp. She didn’t stay put.”

“What about me?”

Their eyes shifted away. Then Billy brightened. “Well, you’re alive, right? Besides, we couldn’t’ve stopped you. Carol tried, said so. Willa did too. Tried to keep you up there at the camp. But that girl, the one who went after Tommy on her own? You were up there with her. How come you couldn’t keep her from going out?”

I was on my feet, but just as I’d stood up, the little bell over the door tinkled and my stomach turned over. I felt myself cringe exactly the way Jake had not too many days ago. It was Fitzy. He stopped short at the sight of me. “Now what?”

None of us said anything.

Fitzy said to me, “Just hold that thought, Poppy,” and to Ernie, “I need to speak to you.”

“Is Willa all right?”

“Come on outside.”

They went out the door and I watched the bell bumped by the door and waited for the tinkle, all in slow motion, and when the sound came, it was a tone from hell. Poor, poor Jake. I was hearing the little bell the way he heard it. So sensitive to sound. To the point of agony. He was the only one besides Tommy who had any idea of the suffering Tommy’s victims endured. But Jake had fought the demons and beaten them.

Fitzy came back in alone. I was sitting down again, too tired to vent my fury, too depressed to tell Joe what I thought of him. I was completely wrung out. Fitzy pulled up a chair. He said to Jim, to Billy and Mick, to Aggie, and to the taxi brothers that Ernie needed them. “He’s in the store.”

One by one they left, without so much as a glance my way, except for Jim. Jim Lane’s kid hefted his bag of paraphernalia and said to me, “They just didn’t know what to do.”

I said to Joe, “You tell him.”

“They knew what to do, kid. She’s right. Get away from here.”

He followed the others, one last glance at me over his shoulder.

Joe went behind the counter and brought the pot of coffee over and a cup for Fitzy. He poured out the last of the carafe. He said, “What’s going on, Fitzy?”

When he said that, I found I didn’t want to know. So maybe it had been a first for Joe, too, like it was for me, right then—not wanting to know. But with me it only lasted a second. It had taken a few days for Joe to come to his senses—when it was too late.

Fitzy downed his whole cup as he was wont to do, put it down, and said, “I just cooked my insides.” He helped himself to what was left of my orange juice. Then he said, “I spent the night looking through Esther’s stuff. Figured someone had to know it could have been Tommy.” I made some kind of noise, sort of like hah.

Joe told him what hah meant, which was the very thought Fitzy had asked me to hold. Fitzy just shook his head. Then he said, “It was that family tree, Poppy. Tommy had been on an earlier version, but not the one you saw. Esther found out he was not his mother’s child but had been adopted. She told everyone too. I know that because she told Willa. I asked Willa about it. She told me that’s when they suspected Tommy: when they learned he was an outsider. If you feel any better, Poppy, that’s what they based their suspicions on. Wouldn’t quite have held up in a court of law in Rhode Island if it had been ours.

“But listen, guess who is on that tree? Poppy, remember the blank line?”

“Yes.”

“That was for Jake’s mother. I kept going through the stuff until I found the papers that legalized Tommy’s taking the wardship of Jake from the state. Jake was illegitimate, and even though everyone knew he was a foundling, that he’d been abandoned, they never thought he’d been abandoned by one of them. I would guess the psychiatrist, being a medical doctor after all, probably delivered Jake and kept the identity of the mother secret.”

I listened. I felt I was in a trance by the time he got to that part. I said, “Fitzy, Willa was standing right over us when we were looking at Esther’s clippings. At the picture of Tommy when he was a little boy. We showed it to her. She spilled the coffee she was pouring. She’d seen those clippings before. Probably at Esther’s. Right when we were sitting here looking at them she probably realized who the boy was. Who he grew up to be.”

“Yeah, well, that’s moot. Here’s the point I’m making. Willa was Jake’s mother.”

Joe said, “No.”

Fitzy said, “Yes.”

I told Joe to stop saying no to everything.

Fitzy just ignored him. He said, “Willa told me Tommy hated her when she was a girl.” He leaned back in his chair. “But hated her for what? Did he know she was pregnant?”

I said, “Maybe. But I know what she was trying to tell you. She’d attempted to comfort the girls one day—told them she was overweight when she was their age. That’s why Tommy hated her.”

Fitzy reverted to his usual expression of frustration. “Shit.” Then he said, “Willa would not be found out. She would not admit to being Jake’s mother. Not then, not ever. The thing is, what would have happened if she had? Would Ernie have beaten her to death, for Christ’s sake? Drowned her? Left her? What was she so afraid of that she’d actually go and poison Esther? What century are we living in here?”

We looked to Joe. He hadn’t an answer. He said, “I don’t know. I don’t understand.”

Fitzy said, “Me neither. But mine’s not to understand. I gotta go. Meet the plane. Take Willa in.” He stood up. He put his hand on my shoulder, the injured shoulder. He patted it very gently. “So long, FBI.”

I stood up, too, and he put his arms around me. My shoulder protested, but I stayed in his hug for a long while.

*   *   *

I called my favorite shrink on the question Joe couldn’t answer. He found it all quite fascinating. “The group of people you have on that island, isolated as islanders are, is probably the closest thing to children of slaves that exists. They’ve been deprived over generations. And when there’s a maelstrom of secrets, collective paranoia, an overreaching umbrella of shame—well, put it together and you can conclude a psychopathy, particularly if you add to the mix the humiliation and guilt connected to a child born of illegitimacy. Born of rape.

“Poppy, your Willa has led a double life. That alone can drive you bonkers. I’ll vouch for that myself.”

He could vouch for it because he was a noted criminal profiler, a respected psychiatrist who happens to have an acute gambling addiction. I thought, There sure are a goddamn lot of addictions out there, though none could come close to Tommy’s. To kill his persecutors.

He said, “Her whole life was a web of secrets. But then it was finally all over. She’d found legitimacy with her husband and, because of Joe’s efforts to restore the islanders’ property rights, a life she could officially claim. She and her husband owned a home, they had their store, the coffee shop. But Willa also had an irrational terror of losing it all if Ernie found out that Jake was her son. Especially if he found out who the father was. Who was the father, Poppy?”

“We don’t know.”

“You will. You will see the thing that is askew.”

I only needed to hear him say it, and I knew what was askew. The blank line on the genealogy for Jake’s mother was to protect Willa. There was no blank line for the father, though, because Esther didn’t know who he was when she’d drawn the tree.

The shrink listened to my brain whirring, and then he said, “Had to be the killer, I take it.”

“Yes.” Willa had been the first to trigger Tommy’s madness but he stopped short of killing her.

“Why hadn’t he killed the girls the year before? When the camp first opened?”

“Not triggered fully. But in anticipating their return, he became uneasy—agitated. At some point last winter, the trigger released and he devised a way to wipe out his tormenters. On the back of that poor fellow, Jake.”

“So, Poppy, this Willa knew her place. And I come from a culture of people who thrive on knowing their place. There’s nothing new there as far as I’m concerned. The thing is, why would the dead woman want to betray Willa’s secret?”

I thought about why Esther would do any such thing.

“Poppy, was she blackmailing Willa?”

“No. Yes. Sort of. Esther—the dead woman—knew Tommy couldn’t care for Jake any longer. She figured his mother should. Esther was a hard, judgmental woman. She threatened Willa with exposure if she didn’t perform her duty. After all, Jake was one of them. Tommy was the outsider, something she’d recently come to understand. Jake’s mother had to take over. It was an empty threat. The genealogy’s blank links proved that. Willa didn’t bother to take Esther’s version of the family tree once she saw that Esther hadn’t actually intended to expose her. She left it. How terrible.”

“Poppy, harsh judgment is how people are kept in their place. Esther learned that. Still, there may have been a secondary blackmail going on. Esther may have insisted Willa tell her who the father was. If Willa wouldn’t take care of Jake, his father should.”

I thought about it. Enough to make me shudder. “Yes, she probably threatened Willa. And Willa knew that somehow Esther would find the answer. Maybe thought she already had.”

“Then there it is.”