Free She's Not There by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

her to Providence.
    We headed toward the door. The little bell up above had been wrapped in duct tape. I knew something was amiss but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it till just then—the little bell hadn’t tinkled when we’d walked in. Willa saw me looking up at it. “Bell was bothering Jake.”
    We went outside into the hot sun. Out around the store, the sidewalk was giving off a glare in the white light. Joe said, “Fitzy has a point. It’s hot. How about a swim instead of a walk?”
    Sounded good to me.
    *   *   *
    We went to the bathhouse at Crescent Beach, changed into bathing suits, and stepped over the strand of cobblestones, smooth almost circular granite disks, pastel-colored, once harvested by islanders in the nineteenth century. They were shipped across the narrow band of sea to the mainland and then sent north to Boston, south to New York and Philadelphia, all the way down to Washington and beyond—Charleston and Savannah—where they were used to pave the city streets along the eastern seaboard. Our first time on the beach, Joe told me it was good luck to find one as close to a perfect circle as possible and take it home. I found a dozen in about two minutes. He’d laughed.
    Now we walked across the just-warming sand. Joe said there used to be more sand and a lot fewer cobbles, but the island had lost most of the sand to the perfect storm, which exposed the cobbles beneath.
    â€œReally? The perfect storm?”
    â€œThe very one.”
    We had the long curving expanse of beach to ourselves. We swam about a yard before the oatmeal dragged us to a stop. We put off swimming. Instead, we lay on the beach blanket Joe had dug out of the back of the ragtop and watched as the Point Judith ferry showed its great hulk, bearing down from around the cliffs at the end of the beach. We would soon be inundated with merry day-trippers. We agreed we wanted more beach time but without the volleyball games, so we got back in the jeep and drove to the northern tip of the island, Sandy Point. Leading out to the point was a two-mile sand spit. I hadn’t been there yet. We found a few mopeds parked where the road ended, overnight tourists from one of the inns. We stopped the jeep beside the mopeds and walked along the spit past four vacationers, who nodded at us from their blankets. We didn’t stop until we were twenty yards from the point, the whole stretch deserted. Joe spread his blanket.
    He said, “Beautiful.”
    â€œYes.” But my enthusiasm had diminished to its former state.
    â€œLook, Poppy, the very end of the spit is a gull rookery. See that thing sticking up?”
    I did. It looked like a wide dead tree trunk, all its branches eaten away.
    â€œThe remains of an old lighthouse. It’s completely covered with guano. They nest in there.”
    â€œI don’t see many gulls.”
    â€œHatching season is almost over. Not many young left in the nests. Except for the last of the new parents, they’re all out doing what gulls do: scavenging.”
    I didn’t say that I’d seen some very frustrated gulls disappointed in their scavenging routine twenty-four hours earlier.
    Joe was lying on his back, propped up on his elbows. So was I. “Poppy…”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou’ve left something out, haven’t you?”
    ATF. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. His job was detecting secretive behavior. For example, why was David Koresh secretive? That was an easy one. Because he had an arsenal so extensive it could have equipped an army division.
    I closed my eyes, let the sun sink into my pores, and officially allowed myself to think, to observe more closely what I’d seen, if only from memory. Scrolling. Immediately, a frame of the film came to me. The girl’s hands. She’d torn her clothes off herself. It was why the trooper had made sure to wrap one of her hands at least, even if he