Stone Cove Island (20 page)

I looked at Charlie, who every few seconds was turning back to check the clouds gathering behind us. They were far enough away that I didn’t think they were a serious threat, but the wind was strong and carrying them in our direction. It was possible they’d catch us before we reached Gloucester Harbor.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Looks okay,” he said, a little uncertainty in his voice.

My teeth were chattering and my back and ribs ached from bracing against the cold. The icy couple of inches of water in the boat had soaked my shoes. I wished for coffee and dry boots and suddenly wondered if this whole plan was half-baked.

FOR TWO HOURS WE
sailed like that, keeping the wind behind us, watching the storm clouds gain on us. My feet eventually went numb. I sat, holding the tiller and looking back over my shoulder.
Tigerlily
strained against the wind, which was a little too strong for her and the waves, which were a little too big, kept slopping more water into the cockpit. I kept one eye on the level of water in the boat. It was still a couple of inches. Nothing dangerous, but not exactly reassuring. We couldn’t afford to take on much more. The scuppers, which normally drained the boat, seemed to be clogged. Because we were so cold and because we had to sit still and keep the boat level, Charlie and I didn’t say much. When, a few minutes out, we’d needed to reef the sail—shorten it so it wouldn’t catch too much wind and overpower the boat—we’d traded off tying down the sails and steering without a lot of negotiation.

By the time I spotted land, I couldn’t feel my hands, either. I let out a little “whoop!” of triumph, and Charlie tried to match my excitement with a smile. But he looked miserable, hands and lips chapped, his eyes tearing from the cold.

I relaxed my frozen fingers a little on the tiller.

Bad move. The wind shifted to blow us from the side, hard. The sail whipped across the boat in a ragged jibe, flinging the boom and almost sending me into the water. I caught the line to the jib sail and kept myself aboard, but now no one was sailing the boat.

Tigerlily
leaned dangerously and water poured in over
the side. Thinking fast, Charlie uncleated the mainsail so the wind could spill out of it, releasing its hold on the boat, and grabbed the tiller, setting us back on the right course.

My legs were soaked despite my foul-weather gear, and there was about a foot and a half of water in the boat. We were still several hundred yards from shore.

“Bail!” called Charlie, grabbing a bucket. “I’ll sail the boat. Let’s get some of this water out.”

I grabbed a blue plastic bucket and started heaving water over the side, and kept it up for the next fifteen minutes as we limped into Gloucester Harbor.

We found an empty slip in the visitors’ dock. I was starving and wet and exhausted and freezing. The peanut butter sandwiches had ended up underwater. Originally our plan had been to find Karen Linsky’s house and go straight there, but now we were too wet, too cold and too bedraggled to show up on a stranger’s doorstep.

“My friend David has an apartment in town. Do you remember him? David Algado?”

I shook my head.

“He’s a couple of years older. Goes to Gloucester Community College. We can change there. He’d probably even let us stay over.”

I hadn’t thought about the possibility that we might need more than a day to find Karen, find Bess, and make it back to the island. But now that I did, it was obviously going to take longer than just the afternoon. We didn’t even have a way back to the island figured out. If the wind stayed out of the northeast, we were not going to make it back on
Tigerlily
, sailing into the wind. The idea
of spending the night with Charlie, and at Charlie’s older friend’s place kind of made me nervous. But I went with it. My dad was going to kill me when we got back.

“Okay. Let’s do that.”

DAVID WAS FINISHING UP
at work at a fish and chips shack near the marina, so we had to go there first. I lingered near the entrance, my stomach rumbling in the heavy aroma of grease and fried food. David seemed almost to be expecting Charlie. I wondered if he’d planned ahead for this without telling me. They exchanged a quick, hushed conversation.

I recognized David vaguely, but with his beard and scruffy hair and flannel shirt, he looked pretty much like every other college kid who partied on Stone Cove Island during the summers. He took off his apron and walked us to his apartment, without asking any questions.

The building was an ugly Victorian, four stories and painted a mustard yellow, with pinky-orange trim. Inside, it was messy—empty beer bottles and pizza boxes—but not dirty. He had two roommates, neither of whom was there. All the furniture was beige or brown, hand-me-down or thrift store sourced. So this was college life. In spite of the squalor, it had a cozy appeal. I wondered what my own dorm room would look like.

David gave us towels and I got out my one set of clean clothes—again, not thinking ahead—and took what felt like the greatest shower I’d ever had. After Charlie did the same, we went back to the restaurant, ordered fish and chips and asked David to show us where Prospect Street
was. Now that I was warm, dry and drinking coffee, the last thing I wanted was to go back out into the cold wind. But we’d already eaten up so much of the day.

Prospect Street was a short walk from the restaurant. I’d always thought of Gloucester as big, almost a city, but everything was centered around the harbor. It was still a real working port, rough and busy, not worried about pleasing tourists.

Karen’s street was wide and treeless, with low, squat houses painted grey or white and waist-high hurricane fencing out front. Together we walked up the concrete path to the front door. I was nervous and wanted to take Charlie’s hand but that seemed, I don’t know, unprofessional. The doorbell made a loud, aggressive buzz and then the door was opened by a woman who looked about my grandmother’s age, with dry, brittle hair dyed brown, wearing a pink-and-grey tracksuit.

“C’n I help yous?” she asked, looking at us without any curiosity or interest.

“Um,” I fumbled. “We’re looking for Karen Linsky?”

“Yeah.” This answer seemed to neither confirm nor deny. She stood there, waiting.

“I’m Eliza Elliot. We spoke on the phone. About Bess. Something else came up, that is—we found something and—” I was not going to explain it out here on the sidewalk. “And we were hoping we could talk some more.”

“We might have some new information about Bess,” Charlie added.

I half expected her to slam the door in our faces, but to my surprise, she opened it farther and nodded for us
to come into the dark hallway. We followed her back to a small kitchen that was surprisingly bright. Obviously all the light in this house came in through the back. It took my eyes a second to adjust. Karen poured hot water into an already in-use mug of tea and sat at the chipped linoleum table. She didn’t offer us tea or ask us to sit.

I stood there staring at the surface of the table, with its pearlescent swirls and plastic gold flecks. Finally we sat. Karen didn’t say anything.

“So,” I began. “Sorry we didn’t get to finish our conversation last time.” Of course, she had hung up on me, but now it seemed best to pretend it had been either my fault or by mutual agreement.

Karen nodded.

“We’re here because we think we might have some good news for you,” Charlie added. This was tricky, because if for some reason we were wrong about Bess, we were about to do a terrible thing to this woman. “We think it’s possible that Bess is still alive.”

Karen looked up from her tea with a start. “What do you mean, she’s alive?”

“There was a letter that was found recently—actually, I was the one who found it—a letter Bess got from the person who killed her. Did Bess show it to you at the time?”

Karen shrugged.

“Anyway, after that we came across some essays and things Bess wrote in school. Some of the lines in her writing were the same as in the letter.”

“How does that prove she’s alive?” Karen looked suspicious now. Her eyes went beady.

“If she wrote the letter herself, she might have set up the whole thing. To look like she was murdered,” said Charlie. It did sound slightly absurd, now that I heard someone else say it out loud.

“Why in the world would she do that?” Karen snapped.

“We don’t know,” I said. I waited for her to say something. She was thinking, running the possibility through her head.

“She didn’t kill herself,” said Karen as though we’d just insulted her or Bess.

“We don’t think that,” said Charlie quickly. “That’s not what we mean at all.” Karen took a sip of tea.

“I appreciate you kids taking an interest,” she said. “It’d be great if what you said was true. It really would. But it’s too late for Bess. You can’t bring her back. I accepted that a long time ago.” She put her mug down firmly on the table and looked directly at me. It seemed like our invitation to go. To buy more time, I asked to use the bathroom.

“Down the hall, on the right,” she said, waving one hand vaguely in that direction. Once I was back in the dark hallway, I took a gamble that I wouldn’t be visible from the kitchen and went instead into the room on the left, Karen’s bedroom. The room was neat, with a satiny bedspread in that same pink-grey she was wearing. She must really love that color. From the other room, I heard Charlie’s voice, keeping Karen’s attention engaged. I figured I had a few minutes to look around.

There was a dresser with an old-fashioned brush, comb and mirror set on it—very
Little House on the Prairie
—and on the wall above the bed, one framed poster from a museum
show of Monet’s sunflowers. On the bedside table were a couple of recent copies of
Us
and
People
magazines and a thick stack of newsletters, neatly stacked. As I moved closer, I saw they were from the Salem Public Library, going back about three years. I opened the top one and saw a letter from the head librarian gushing about all the exciting Halloween activities planned for October at the library. I wanted to open some drawers, but that seemed like taking it too far. Instead I just stood there, taking in the silence of Karen’s tidy, lonely life.

“You get lost, hon? It’s not that big a place.” Karen’s rough voice from the kitchen brought me back to myself.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. I’m coming.” Karen and Charlie met me in the hall—thankfully after I was out of Karen’s bedroom—and she walked us to the door.

“It really is sweet,” she said. “I appreciate your concern about Bess. I really do. But I learned to let it go years ago. There’s no reason for young kids like you to get all caught up in an awful story like that. It happened, and now it’s over.”

She didn’t ask to see the letter, or if she could keep Bess’s essays.

CHARLIE AND I WALKED
back down to the wharf and found a diner where we could talk, safe from the cold.

“Plan B?” Charlie asked as the waitress placed two mugs on our table. I had switched from coffee to hot chocolate with whipped cream. “She’s not going to help us find Bess. She didn’t believe anything we told her.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said.

“What do you mean? I expected her to jump all over any possibility Bess was alive. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless she already knows Bess is alive,” I said. “I went in her room. She had no pictures of Bess. No stuffed animals or trophies from school. Nothing with Bess’s name on it. You could imagine her being too upset to have any reminders of Bess around, but she wasn’t too upset to talk to us. She seemed surprised when we told her we thought Bess was alive, but not upset. Or hopeful.”

“So?” Charlie asked.

“So, maybe if she knows Bess is alive, maybe if she is still in touch with Bess, she doesn’t need pictures and trinkets to remind her of her dead daughter. She doesn’t need any kind of reminder.”

“What was in her room?”

“Not much. A museum poster. A stack of library newsletters. Nothing that helpful.”

“So how are we going to find Bess?” asked Charlie.

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to try to think like Bess would.”

Back at David’s, I texted Dad to tell him I was with Charlie and that I was too freaked out to come home. Charlie texted Jay, too—with the truth, just so that one person back home would know where we were.

I reread all of Bess’s papers and Mom’s diary, but nothing jumped out. David’s roommates were both home now and though they were nice guys, the apartment was small and I felt in the way. They sat on the couch watching a Patriots game while Charlie and I spread out our papers on the kitchen island and hunched over them, combing for clues.

“We should have asked Karen about their relatives. We don’t know anything about her family. She could have moved away to someplace a cousin or an uncle lives.”

“We could go back tomorrow and ask her,” I offered.

Charlie looked doubtful. “I think she’s pretty much done with us.”

“I wish I’d asked my mom,” I said. Charlie didn’t say it out loud, but I knew we were both thinking:
too late
now
. “There’s just … She could have gone anyplace.” He nodded.