She's Not There (10 page)

“So after she went to town, she'd spend a few hours and then hitch a ride back. She was one of the oldest girls. Nobody worried about her.”

“Was the counselor the last to see her?”

“Yeah, the last from camp. But she'll never admit it. She left Dana with some kids just off the ferry. After taking Dana's twenty bucks, the counselor returned to camp to see if there were any more fares. Everyone knows it.”

“Irwin ended up firing her?”

Samantha said, “Yeah, right.”

“She's his favorite. She has very large breasts.”

Samantha agreed with her friend's assessment. “It's all true, everything we told you. We don't know what happened to Dana. We only know she wasn't a druggie. But the thing is, someone's been spying on us. We had to hang a blanket over our window. Even though it's really hot in our house. I mean, we're nervous, you know?”

“Who would spy on you?”

Christen said, “I guess any one of the dorks who lives in this stupid place. I mean, Block Island is
nowhere
.” She looked at Joe. “No offense.”

“How do you know someone spied on you?”

“Because there are these beach roses in front of the window, those things with the humongous prickers. There's this little space where someone pushed them apart, and underneath on the ground are all the petals.”

Samantha said, “Christen has this uncle who's a lawyer in upstate New York. So she knows a lot about cop stuff.”

Christen said, “He's fat too.”

Joe got up and went in the house. He came out with a box of Dove Bars from his freezer. There are four Dove Bars in a box. Joe and I were still trying to get the wrappers off ours when the girls were holding bare sticks. We offered them ours. I said, “It's okay. We all overeat when we're stressed.” They took the Dove Bars. Then I said, “I'd like to see where this spying went on, if you don't mind.”

They didn't. It meant they'd have a ride back. They'd been too polite to ask.

Samantha said, “Thank you. I sure was afraid of hitchhiking. Even if there are two of us. I've never hitchhiked before.”

Her friend said, “This camp, I tell you, is entirely full of wimps.”

They would hang in their house—Lancelot—till the rest of the campers returned. They weren't worried that the counselors would have missed them, and so what if they did. Their friends would not betray them. “Even if the counselors gave a damn,” Christen said, “which they definitely don't.”

We parked along the road and took a path behind the camp through the swampy growth to the back of Lancelot House. Christen and Sam bunked with six other girls and one counselor.

They showed us the window where they had definitely been spied upon. Neither Joe nor I touched anything. But we noted the threads on the thorns and the faint footprints in the soggy dirt beneath. The threads were thick and coarse. Grey. Someone knew he'd need heavy work gloves to part the rose canes. Joe said to me, “We'll tell Fitzy to come have a look.”

Christen said, “Who's Fitzy?”

“A police officer.”

She smiled. “Well, that makes me feel better. I didn't know we had any of those on the Block. I mean, besides that lame constable.”

Samantha said, “Christen, at least he checks on us once in a while.”

“I wasn't talking about his personality, Sam. Then there's that weirdo he's always dragging along behind him. Jesus.”

I felt uneasy leaving them. A voyeur is more than meets the eye. I asked what they'd do until the other campers returned. Christen told me they had their laptops and they'd keep barraging family and friends with e-mails until someone came and got them or sent a plane ticket. I asked her how they charged the batteries. She said they had a generator that powered a light from eight until ten at night. Two hours. She pointed to the center of the ceiling at the bare bulb hanging by a wire. “That's the light. We take turns charging our laptops, and when Irwin leaves the camp we bribe the counselors and use his phone jack.”

The girls thanked us for the use of the phone and lunch.

Back in the ragtop Joe said, “Good kids, aren't they? They shouldn't be living this way.”

“Great kids. And, no, they shouldn't.”

*   *   *

We stopped at Fitzy's on the way home and told him all that the girls had revealed to us. Fitzy said, “That's it, time for me to head on up to that camp, cut to the chase, and have a look around. Take a few pictures of the footprints, extract a couple of threads from the thorns.” He said to me, “You come too. We'll look up Martin's friend Rachel.”

“Okay.”

“Joe?”

“One visit per season to Camp Guinevere. You two go. I'll plan my afternoon. It's my vacation, something I can't seem to impress upon people.”

I said, “Pick me up, Fitzy. The girls are all on a hike so give me an hour. I need to take a shower and change.” To Joe, “We shouldn't be long.”

“Sure. No problem.”

*   *   *

When Irwin let Fitzy and me into his Quonset hut, he looked me up and down once more. “You're from the state, aren't you, Mrs. Everett?”

Fitzy said, “The only thing you need to know is that she's with me. I need to talk to a camper named Rachel.”

Irwin looked past us through the window. “They're all coming back from their hike now.”

The campers were a sweltering mass, breaking up, dragging themselves back to their houses. He went to the door and called to a counselor. She came trudging in.

“Do we have a Rachel?”

“We have two.”

“Run out and grab them before they head to the showers.”

He brought a couple of plastic chairs in off his porch. A minute later, the two Rachels stood in the doorway. One was the girl Joe and I'd seen coming off the ferry with three others, the one who argued with a counselor, refusing to get in the van. She looked just as furious now as she did then. Irwin told them to come in and sit down. The other Rachel did and the furious Rachel said, “I need a shower.”

Fitzy told them who he was. He crooked his finger at the reluctant Rachel, and she came in too. He got right to it. “I know you're tired out, but this won't take long. I need to ask you a couple of things. Did either of you kids go to a party at the Pleasant View Inn?”

The belligerent Rachel folded her arms across her chest and didn't answer. The other one said, “Hey, are we, like, material witnesses?”

“I'm here to see if I'll be needing any of those.”

She said, “This is so, like,
Whoa
!”

“Just answer the question.”

“I'd love to go to a party, let me tell you.”

Fitzy looked at the other girl. “What about you?”

“Yeah, I did. So what.”

“Did Dana Ganzi go too?”

“No.”

“Were there drugs at the party?”

“There was a case of Saint Pauli Girl. Tasted like rotgut.”

I asked, “So what happened to Dana?”

She said, “Who cares?”

The other Rachel looked at her. “You're such a shit, you know that, don't you?” Her fellow camper ignored her. So she said to me, “We don't know what happened to Dana. She was a nice girl. She shared a Twinkie with me when we first got here.” She gazed at Irwin for just a moment. “We were just beginning to realize the meals here wouldn't be enough to fill a mouse. Dana only had one Twinkie and she broke it in half.”

The other Rachel said, “She never shared anything with me.”

“I wouldn't share anything with you if you paid me.”

The other Rachel uncrossed her arms, gave the girl the finger, and walked out the door. Irwin got up and went after her, hurling a few threats.

The Rachel with us said, “Not to worry. She's all bark and no bite. Pathetic. Anyway, I'm leaving tomorrow morning. I got a check from my parents in the mail today. I'm going into town, cash it, and get home. I'd wanted to come here. I wanted to spend the summer losing forty pounds. But this place hasn't exactly measured up to the brochure.”

Fitzy said, “How tall are you?”

“Five-ten.”

“Keep the forty pounds. You look good.”

“No, I don't. I've got shoulders like my brother. He's a linebacker. I'd be real popular if girls played football.”

Fitzy said, “What about hockey?”

She laughed. “I live in Tucson.”

“Go to a hockey camp for the rest of the summer. In Minneapolis.”

“Well.… Who knows? Maybe I will.”

We shook her hand and she was gone. Bounded out the door.

I said to Fitzy, “You're a cop because you want what's right, don't you?”

“That's what you want, ain't it?”

“I do.”

“Good. Let's get out of this rat hole.”

But before we left the rat hole, Fitzy got a camera out of his car and took a few pictures of the footprints under Lancelot's window. He took some of the threads hanging from the rose canes too.

*   *   *

The next morning, Fitzy was at Joe's door first thing. “Thought I'd catch you before you went to the Patio. I just had another visit to the camp, talked to a few campers, to Irwin. Yesterday I couldn't trust myself to deal with the guy. I might have strangled him with my bare hands. Figured Poppy would want to hear about how things went.”

We invited him in. Joe had just made coffee. We took our cups and went out back and sat in Joe's comfortable wicker chairs. Fitzy took in the view.

“Not too shabby.”

Joe thanked him.

He said, “Someone who likes overweight girls has been watching them through that window. So basically I threatened Irwin. I told the bastard to get a security guard up there and then open an account at Willa's Grocery, and I would check personally on the camp's tab. Prick is giving those girls powdered milk to drink, and he's got this huge closet full of big cans of beef stew. I read the label. First ingredient: water. I told him I'd arrest him if he didn't get some fresh food in every day. Christ almighty.”

“Can you force Irwin to hire a security guard?”

“Of course not.” I hadn't thought so. “He won't, either. But I tried. So here's the other reason I came calling.”

He leaned back in his chair and put his feet on Joe's table, which was an old sea chest that liked having feet on it. “Commissioner called me. Gave me the general drift of the preliminary autopsy report. You interested?”

I just raised an eyebrow.

“The girl died about two hours before you nearly ran your bike into her, FBI. The body showed no needle marks, and no drugs were found in her system. Apparently, she'd given all her pot away at the Club Soda, hadn't saved any for herself, just like the campers told you and then told me. What the bartender told me too. Also, she was intact. No sign of sexual abuse. But drugs weren't ruled out altogether—something about the degeneration of the central nervous system and internal damage to hollow organs, and to her heart. So some quiet drug that affects your spinal cord, your lungs, your heart, and then vaporizes can't be precluded. Never heard of a drug like that before, though, have you?”

We both said no.

“So I says to my commissioner, who's reading all this to me, Since when do seventeen-year-old girls have weak hearts? And what's a weak heart have to do with the central nervous system degenerating? And he says, Well, she was carrying a lot of weight. I says, so am I. Then I ask him—just between the two of us, I says—what he thinks caused damage to her hollow organs, et cetera, and he says it all might be connected to bulimia. I says, What bulimia? She was five foot two and weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. He says they don't know her past history. Fuck.”

I asked, “Do you know the number offhand?”

“What number?”

“The Commissioner's phone.”

He held his coffee aloft. “Here's to you, FBI,” he said and then gave me the number.

I identified myself to the Commissioner's secretary, told her who I was, and where I was calling from. Within a minute I was talking to the Commissioner of the Rhode Island State Police. I explained to him that I was vacationing on Block Island, and I was the one who had come upon the body of the dead camper, Dana Ganzi, and that I'd like to speak with him about her.

He said, “Fitzy told me there was an agent on the island. I thought he was bluffing, trying to influence me in the way he is especially good at.”

“He wasn't. But I'm not official yet, so perhaps it was part bluff.”

He said, “Fitzy is a great manipulator.”

“Listen, I need a favor.”

“I figured that.”

I asked if he would fax everything he had to my office, including the preliminary autopsy report, plus the results of the toxicological and microbiological tests as they came in. There was a long silence. Then he said, “Agent, after Fitzy questioned the results of the report, I looked at them a little more closely. Personally. I made a point to have a look at photos of the body. To tell you the truth, I'm curious myself. Already asked to have more than the usual tests performed on the girl. So I'll be glad to accommodate you.”

After I hung up, I reported to Joe and Fitzy. Then I called Delby. I dialed while Joe explained to Fitzy who Delby was. Delby Jones, formerly a girl singer with every light jazz band coming through DC, presently my assistant and single mother of three—little girls who spend most of their time in our day-care center, where Delby has lunch with them every day, twelve to one, no matter what. At her job interview, when I'd listed my requirements, she'd listed hers. They were all connected to the needs of her daughters. They came first. But the FBI would be a very close second, she'd promised, in deference to her own priorities. Her references all raved about her organizational skills, her loyalty to her various managers, her intelligence and practical wisdom. I'd said I was impressed and then I'd said, “You've had a lot of different employers.”