Stone Cove Island

It was my fault that she was murdered. The night Bess died, she left the bar at the marina late. She would have had a couple of drinks, not enough to get drunk. She would have danced, maybe with Jimmy, maybe with Nate, maybe with an older guy we didn’t know. She would have walked home alone. Unless I was sleeping over, she always went home alone. She was mad at me that night. I knew that, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t go out
.

I got into bed early but couldn’t sleep. My skin was itching and my ears were ringing. I was probably still awake while it was happening. Bess always told me to snap out of it, that it was just one of my moods and I needed to get hold of myself. But when I looked in the mirror, I saw black hollows that should have been my eyes. My skin was puffed and pale. I was so ugly. I couldn’t stand the idea of people looking at me. I needed to be alone, where no one could see me. So I couldn’t go to The Slip with Bess
.

The Slip was our diviest bar, and not the atmospheric kind of divey. There were wobbly plastic deck chairs, sticky folding poker tables. The finish on the floor had worn off, replaced with a years-deep varnish of soaked-in beer. Someone had strung some thick,
knotted rope around the walls in a lazy nod to the nautical theme. It was gross, but they didn’t card there. In town, the bars had to protect themselves. They had the summer tourist business to worry about. It was way too risky getting busted for letting kids in. But tourists would never make it out to The Slip, so no one there ever paid attention
.

Sometime after midnight, Bess would have left
.

I went over and over it in my head, realizing I’d never know the real story. It wasn’t far to the bungalow she shared with her mom, halfway between the marina and East Beach. She might have had that lame Phil Collins song stuck in her head. We hated that song so much. We used to sing it to each other as a joke, howling into hairbrush handles and making gooney faces like we were in some lame romantic comedy, then collapsing in hysterics on Bess’s bed
.

Or maybe—and I preferred this version—she had been singing that Sinéad O’Connor song she loved. Bess had a nice voice. The song was everywhere that summer, about how all the flowers had died when Mama went away. Bess loved the way that “Mama” was wedged into the line like an upbeat afterthought. She thought it sounded like a bubble popping. She was good like that at describing things. After she pointed that out, I could never hear the song any other way
.

Bess had been too good a swimmer to drown. I don’t mean too good a swimmer to get caught in a riptide; she was too good a swimmer to go swimming alone on a moonless night in the remorseless Atlantic Ocean. She was smart and she was sensible
.

Her clothes were found in the lighthouse, covered in blood. Her killer had cut off all her hair. Some people said a huge anchor had been painted across the front door of her house. Others said that
was only a rumor. I wouldn’t know; I didn’t go to her house again after that night. Her body was never found
.

Her mother, Karen, refused to talk about Bess afterward. She got rid of all her stuff. I wanted to keep something to remember her, but Karen said no. Maybe she knew what I knew: Bess had been scared before she died. She had shown me—just me, she swore
—
the letter
.

I only read it once. I didn’t copy any of it down. But I can still remember every word. “Uninvited guest,” it began and then later, “down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.” The more I tried to push that line from my mind, the more fiercely it returned, and with it her face. I hoped he had not done anything to her face
.

I should have gone with Bess to The Slip that night. I should have told someone about the letter. But I never did
.

Of course we knew that Hurricane Victor was going to be a big storm. But there hadn’t been a storm like this in anyone’s living memory, so we weren’t prepared for the damage it would do.

I live on a small island a few miles off Cape Ann, about an hour north of Boston. Our closest mainland towns are Rockport and Gloucester. When you grow up on an unprotected island facing Atlantic storms, you’re supposed to know what to do when things get serious. But we’d had so many false alarms, so many calls to evacuate to the mainland, only to return to find no damage or, much worse, that thieves had taken advantage of a day they knew they could work pretty much undisturbed. No one on Stone Cove Island evacuated for a storm warning anymore.

The morning after, I opened the front door to find a fifty-foot oak tree lying across our porch. I squeezed through the narrow gap the tree allowed and stood outside. Its trunk came up to my waist. The island was silent, as though all the sound had been sucked away by the force
of the hurricane as it ripped through. There were no birds chirping, no insects. I couldn’t even hear the waves, though I could imagine how wild the ocean must be.

I
could
hear my mom, banging pots and dishes inside as she worked herself into a panic, trying to figure out how to make breakfast in a kitchen with no power or water. She was the oatmeal-and-eggs type, not the cold-cereal type, and definitely not the roll-with-the-changes type. Dad was asleep. He’d been up all night, moving furniture up to the second floor as the water rose, trying to make extra sandbags out of freezer bags and flour, taping and re-taping the windows as the wind sucked the glass in and out.

Who knew glass could bend like that? The porch light lit the pea-soup-green night, and the trees screamed as they blew sideways. No wonder the big oak had come down. It was amazing more trees hadn’t. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I’d finally nodded off on the floor in my room, well away from any outside wall. My bed and the rug in my room were soaked. The rain had poured under the closed bottom window forming a waterfall, as if someone was holding a hose to the glass. I was scared, but I knew my dad was busy doing all he could to keep the house together, and my mom would make me more freaked out, not less. So I just lay there, waiting for it to be over. I tried pretending it was tomorrow already, and that all this was behind me.

“Eliza?” I could hear my mom calling me from the kitchen.

“I’m out front, Mom. Just checking things out.” I didn’t mention the oak. My dad’s best at handling bad news with her. “I’m going to walk into town and see how everyone is.
Maybe they have power. Do you want me to get coffee or anything if they have it? Or more bottled water?” She was a worrier, so bottled water was one thing I was pretty sure we had plenty of.

“Eliza, no. I don’t want you going out there alone,” she called back. The clattering in the kitchen was getting more frantic.

“It’s fine, Mom. The storm’s over.”

“What if a branch falls? It’s not safe for you to be out there. Nate?”

I heard my father’s exhausted voice from the next room. “Let her go. She’s fine. Eliza, walk down the middle of the streets, stay out of the park and don’t go near the water. Get extra batteries from Harney’s if he’s not sold out.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep, or so I guessed. It was a familiar pattern: Mom, looking for a reason to panic; Dad, reeling her back in. I hadn’t figured out his magic formula. Usually my attempts to calm her down only made things worse.

I turned my attention back to the oak and to how I was going to get off the porch. The trunk was wide and blocked my view of everything beyond it. I was dreading what I would find on the other side, but putting it off would only make my imagination run wild. It was better to face it, however bad things might be, then figure out what to do next.

I threaded my way to the edge of the porch, grabbed a sturdy branch, climbed out and dropped to the ground. It wasn’t that difficult, but coming and going this way would not work with groceries. The bay window off the kitchen
would have to become our temporary entrance, unless Dad wanted to get into it with the back door. Its seized-up lock hadn’t worked since I had been in fourth grade. I looked out at the formerly cozy little street, and felt like Dorothy landing in Oz.

SUMMER IS OUR BIG
season. Growing up on the island, you get used to the time before Fourth of July and the time after. It’s like living on two different planets. In the off-season, you can ride your bike across the whole island until your fingers are frozen to the handlebars and not see another person. There is only one school with about forty kids in each grade. We all go there, our parents went there, and mostly their parents did too. The ferry runs once a day and when the harbor is iced over, there are lots of weeks it doesn’t run at all.

In the summer, crowds stream off the ferries hourly. They juggle beach chairs, umbrellas, Radio Flyer wagons packed with groceries for their summer rentals. The inn is full. People pack Water Street, the main drag that curves along the harbor, wearing bathing suits under their T-shirts and sundresses, licking their dripping ice-cream cones. By the way, don’t ever let anyone talk you into working in an ice-cream parlor as a summer job. It sounds fun, but it’s actually grueling, charley-horse-inducing work. I always go for day camp counselor: sailing, Capture the Flag, and campfire songs.

You would think summer would be our total focus, that we would be holed up like hibernating bears waiting for beach weather, but it’s not like that at all. You get used to
the silence and sense of belonging that we few residents have. It’s like throwing a party. You’re excited before, decorating and getting things ready. It’s fun while the party lasts, but eventually you just want the guests to go home so you can put on your pajamas and sit around the kitchen, rehashing the highlights.

That morning, Stone Cove Island didn’t look like any version of itself I’d ever seen before, summer or winter. Our street was smothered with downed trees and broken branches. It would be a while before any cars could make it through. My dad had said to stick to the middle of the roads, but I had to zigzag around or climb over whatever blocked my way. I couldn’t choose the path. I turned down the hill toward Water Street, my breath catching in my throat. It felt like watching a movie about someone else’s ruined life. Houses were missing roofs, walls were caved in. In some cases, only the rubble of the brick foundation was left. Furniture, clothes and belongings were scattered everywhere.