The morning after the Squibnocket trip, I phoned Kathy Bannerman’s landlady. Her name was Elsie Cohen. I told her what I was doing and that I’d like to examine Kathy’s possessions.
“I’m afraid you’re about a year too late, unless you want a bottle of men’s cologne,” said Elsie Cohen.
“Come again?”
“After those detectives came around looking for her last August, I waited a few weeks in case Kathy came back, then when she didn’t I got in touch with Mr. Bannerman and packed everything of hers up and shipped it to him. I’d gotten his address from the detectives. A little later I found the cologne in the closet. I guess I should have sent it, too, but it didn’t seem worth it, so I gave it to my husband. But Bill isn’t a big cologne user, so we still have most of the bottle. Do you favor Enchanté?”
My ignorance of men’s cologne was quite profound. I had never even heard of Enchanté. I wondered if James Bannerman used it and, if not, who did.
“Do you remember anything about her other possessions? Anything that might give me some idea where she was going or who she might be seeing?”
“I didn’t read her letters or her other papers,” said Elsie Cohen in a voice that was suddenly a bit prim, “and there was nothing special about anything else she had. No snowshoes or scuba gear or ice axes, if that’s what you mean. Nothing exotic. Just ordinary things.”
“Did she ever talk with you about her life here on the island? People she knew or things she did? That sort of thing.”
“You mean like who wears Enchanté cologne? I’m sure I couldn’t say. I told those detectives everything I knew, but it didn’t seem to help them much. She worked with the local women’s service group and did some socializing with people I really didn’t know. Mostly down-island, I think.”
Down-island meant Oak Bluffs, Vineyard Haven, and Edgartown. Chilmark, West Tisbury, and Aquinnah were up-island, where there are no dance halls, clubs, liquor stores, or bars. Up-island people have to dissipate in private rather than in public places. Some of them only go down-island to buy liquor at the Edgartown and Oak Bluffs package stores, after which they flee home again, to peace and quiet.
Elsie Cohen didn’t know the names of any men Kathy Bannerman might have dated. I wondered if Bill Cohen and Kathy might have sneaked out a night or two, and, if so, if Elsie knew about it. You never know what goes on inside a marriage.
“Pa, can we work on the tree house?”
They’d been waiting patiently. “Sure.”
So we did that until noon, because life does not stop for major events, let alone small ones such as my search for Katherine Bannerman. We’re gonna stay and we’re gonna go, as Sweeney observed, and somebody’s gotta pay the rent, but that’s nothing to me and nothing to you.
After lunch, I got the kids into the Land Cruiser and headed for Edgartown, running various possibilities through my head as I drove.
When children or infirm adults go missing, it’s cause for concern because they’re often not mature or healthy enough to fend for themselves. Usually when healthy adults like Katherine Bannerman drop out of sight, they show up again and act surprised that anybody was worried. When that doesn’t happen, it’s often because they don’t want to be found. They’re fleeing debts or unwanted lovers or enemies or the cops, or they just want to leave their old lives behind and start again, and they’re willing to abandon their houses and families and friends to do it. Sam Spade once dealt with that sort of missing person. The irony was that the guy abandoned one family and lifestyle, then moved up the coast and created a new one exactly like his old one. Sam was both amused and bemused by the case.
Katherine Bannerman’s only motive, as near as I could tell, was boredom with her husband and her life.
Of course not all missing people disappear intentionally. In some cases some hunter’s dog, years later, brings his master a bone that the hunter recognizes as human and which, after the authorities finish their investigations, finally answers the question of what happened to so-and-so.
Martha’s Vineyard, with its wealthy and famous Summer People, has the same percentage of criminals as any other place, as the local cops, nurses, social workers, and lawyers can tell you. If you doubt it, just show up at the courthouse in Edgartown on a Thursday. Yeah, slimy things do crawl with legs on the Blessed Isle as well as upon the slimy sea.
The existence of snakes in Eden notwithstanding, murder is rare on the island, so it seemed unlikely to me that Katherine Bannerman had met with foul play. An accident, possibly, or some unexpected call back to the mainland that left her no time to inform friends or fellow workers, or some combination of both. Kathy hadn’t been brought to the hospital, and if she’d been killed in an accident, her body would probably have been discovered long since. There are a hundred thousand people on the island during the summer, and it was hard to imagine all of them failing to see a body if there was one to be seen. Still, you never know. I once talked to a guy who’d been to Africa, and he’d said you could be ten feet from a pride of lions and never see them.
I drove to the police station, once the finest on the island but recently challenged for that honor by the new station in Vineyard Haven. The Chief was in his office.
He looked relaxed for a change, another sign that most of the tourists had gone home for the winter. As soon as he saw Joshua and Diana, he opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a package of Farley’s gummy worms, the world’s finest. He had grandchildren about the same age as my children, and he knew how to be a kid’s best friend.
Joshua and Diana both accepted his offer and said thank you.
“How about me?” I asked.
“Oh, all right.” He held out the package and I took a half dozen lovely, bright-colored gummies.
“Easy there!” The Chief yanked his gummies back, took a handful, and put the rest back in the drawer.
“Thank you, Chief.”
“You’re welcome. What do you want? I know you want something, because you always do when you come in here. Say, would you kids like to have a tour of the building? Kit! Come in here a second.”
Kit Goulart, all six feet and 275 pounds of her, came in from the front desk. Kit and her husband were about the same size and looked like matched Percherons when they walked down the street together.
“What is it, Chief?”
“How’d you like to take these two tykes for a tour of the premises while I fend off their father, here.”
“Sounds like a deal.” She looked down at them and smiled a smile that would melt a tax collector’s heart. “I’m Kit. I work here. Do you want to see the police station?”
They did, and the three of them went off. The Chief looked at me. “Well?”
“A woman named Katherine Bannerman disappeared from the island last year about this time. Her husband has hired me to try to find her. I wonder if you remember the case.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Some agents from some big PI outfit in Boston were down here looking for her. As far as I know they never found her. You should be talking with the Chilmark PD, because she lived up there.”
“I’ve read the report that Thornberry Security gave to the husband. There wasn’t much in it that helps, but they seem to have done a pretty thorough job.”
“I’m not big on private eyes nosing around, but you’re right. They seemed pretty good. The Chilmark PD put out a GBC, but nothing came of it.”
I nodded. A General Broadcast Call would have alerted all of the island police forces to be on the lookout for the missing woman.
“Later,” said the Chief, “they put out Kathy Bannerman’s physical description on NCIC, in case she was on the mainland. Another zero. It’s a big country, and if she wanted to disappear, she could be anywhere.” He tapped a finger on the papers he’d been working on when I’d come in. “You were a cop, so you know people go missing more often than most folks would think.”
I did know that. In the United States, thousands of people disappear every year, for one reason or another.
The Chief went on: “Usually the missing people turn up safe and sound, but we don’t always learn that. During the last few years we’ve had a half dozen or so disappear off the island into thin air about Labor Day. I imagine most of them just went home and didn’t tell whoever it was that got worried about them, and then we didn’t get told, either. Unless they’ve committed a crime or are suspected of being victims of a crime, the authorities don’t really have a lot of reason to look for missing people.”
“And you don’t have any ideas about where I might look for this one?”
He shrugged. “Try back home with her husband.”
“He says she’s not there.”
Kit and the kids reappeared.
I got up. “Well, Chief, if you hear anything, let me know.”
“I will. You do the same. And don’t do anything that might hamper an investigation.”
“You can trust me, Chief.”
“Sure I can.”
After we left the station, the kids and I had ice cream cones, and as we walked back to the truck, we passed a shop that had expensive-looking soaps and lotions in its windows. Feeling serendipitous, I took the kids inside and asked the woman behind the counter if she had Enchanté.
She not only had it, but she let me have a sniff. “Would you like to buy some?”
“I don’t think it’s my fragrance. Do you sell much of this?”
“Usually to women who are buying it for men.”
“Do the men use it?”
She smiled. “You’ll have to ask the women.”
At home, filled to the brim, the tots were ready for naps. So was I, but I had a phone call to make first. So while they fell into those sweet swoons that the innocent enter so quickly, I got directory assistance for Storrs, Connecticut, and asked for the number of Frances Bannerman. No problem, since it’s a rare college freshman who doesn’t have her own phone these days.
A feminine voice answered on the second ring, and I asked for Frankie.
“Who’s calling, please?”
I told her my name and that I was calling from Martha’s Vineyard. That got me a “just a minute” and, in less than that, another feminine voice. “This is Frankie Bannerman. Have you found my mother?”
“No, but we’re looking. Maybe you can help.”
“Me? How? I haven’t seen Mom for over a year.”
“Your father told me that he hasn’t heard from her since she sent you a postcard from New York.”
There was a hint of a pause before she said, “That’s right.”
“No mail ever came from her to the house again?”
“No.”
It was not too great a “no.” In fact it was too small.
“Here’s what I know,” I said. “Your mom was writing to somebody, because she bought stamps here on the island. And she was getting mail from somebody because she had letters among the possessions that her landlady sent back to your father last fall. I also know that she loved you even if she had stopped loving your father, because she talked about you all the time.”
I paused and I heard her inhale sharply. But she didn’t say anything, so I went on. “And here’s what I think. I think she was writing to you last summer and that she probably sent the letters to you in care of your best friend. I don’t know who the friend is, but I can find out if I need to, so don’t deny anything if I’m right. I think you wrote back to her, and that those were the letters that were among her possessions when they were sent back to your father. I think that you were home when the package arrived and that you opened it and took out the letters before your father got home.”
Her voice was faint. “How did you know that?”
“Because he would have mentioned the letters if he’d seen them, and he didn’t. So you were writing to each other.”
“Yes. Mom didn’t want Dad to know anything about where she was or what she was doing. She was deciding whether to leave him. My dad is a nerd. All he does is work.”
There are worse faults in a man, I thought, and soon enough she’d surely find out about them.
“But the letters stopped coming last August,” I said.
“Yes. She wrote the last one just before Labor Day. She used to write every week. When her letters stopped, I wrote to her, but I didn’t hear from her anymore. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what happened to her. Do you know? Tell me, if you do.”
“I don’t know, but I’m trying to find out. I need information from you. Was she seeing anyone here on the island? A man, maybe? Someone she might have gone off with.”
“She said she was dating, but I can’t remember any names. She wanted me to burn her letters so Dad wouldn’t find them. I’m sorry now that I did.”
“Was there anybody in particular? Especially toward the end of the summer.”
“She never said anything that made me think she was going away with anybody, if that’s what you mean.”
“Maybe just some guy she was dating and liked.”
“Well, in one of her last letters she said she was playing tennis with a guy. She must have liked him if she’d do that, because she’d never played tennis in her life and always said it was boring. I guess she really was playing, because there was a tennis racket in the box we got from that lady.”
“Elsie Cohen?”
“Maybe that was her name. I don’t remember.”
“What did your mother say about this guy?”
“Just that she liked him and he was good-looking and he made her feel young. She got married right out of high school and never got a chance to be a single woman for a while first. She always told me not to make that mistake, and her letters made me think she was trying to make up for things that she missed because she married my clunky dad.”
“Think hard. Can you remember the man’s name?”
“No. I don’t think she ever told it to me.”
“Can you remember anything more she said about him? Looks or habits? Where they went, where they played tennis? Did they go dancing? Did they have a favorite place to eat? Anything.”
“I don’t remember anything like that. They played tennis and had dinner and went to his beach, but I don’t think she ever said where. I wish I’d never burned those letters.”
Amen to that, but it was spilled milk. “Did this man live on the island year-round?”
She paused for a minute. “I don’t know. I don’t think she ever said.”
“Does your father know about the letters?”
“No! She didn’t want him to know. I’ve never told anyone. Oh, my gosh! Are you going to tell him?”
“I don’t know yet, but I think you probably should. You may think he’s a nerd, and he may be just that, but he loves you and he loves your mother as best he can.”
“He doesn’t love anything but his work.”
“Does your father use a cologne called Enchanté?”
“Good grief, no. He only uses Old Spice. I should know. It’s the only thing he ever wants for Christmas.”
She had given me a little, but I didn’t think she had much more to offer. “I think you’re wrong about your father only loving his work,” I said. “Let me give you my telephone number. I want you to call me if you think of anything that might help me.”
“Let me find a pen… . Okay.”
I gave her the number, promised to let her know if I learned anything, and rang off.