Chapter 19

19

The next day, the police allowed the tours to resume. The income was too important to the tour operators, especially with a storm on the way. The day was beautiful in the morning, but apparently the storm was going to start rolling in in the early evening, and by nightfall we were going to be in some kind of swirling, biblical mess.

At this point, the search for Dr. Henson was all over the news. My parents called to check in, and I explained that she appeared to have had a paddleboard accident and that everything was, if not okay, then stable.

The cops stayed most of the day, coordinating rescue searches from the private dock. Divers swam all around the island in case she'd fallen along the shore. They swam under the docks of the boathouse. Every boat in the area was on the lookout for Dr. Henson. With every passing hour, though no one said it out loud, it was clear from their expressions that no one was looking for a living person.

We kept Morning House running as usual. Boats came and went. The day staff came in to sell tickets and hot dogs. Tom managed the boats. Liani managed the shoreline and outside. Van, April, and I managed the tours until the boats cut off at four. When not leading a tour, I was left to meander the first floor and answer questions. I had just dropped a woman and a small child by the bathroom door, when a different woman in a gigantic straw hat approached me. (The hat was influencer big—no one would wear a hat this size otherwise; it was as wide as a satellite dish.)

"Can you just take some pics for me?" she said. "If I pose over here? By the fountain?"

This was also a major part of the job—holding the phone, taking the photo or video. I followed her and waited as she arranged her pool umbrella of a hat and found the right angle at which to stand, face sliced by sunbeams. I watched her on the screen as she adjusted the top of her dress.

The camera. Dr. Henson's giant camera. Had I seen that in her room? I rewound the footage in my brain. I couldn't see it on the record of our midnight adventure, or my visit to her room when she first went missing. I hadn't been looking for it, so it was possible I'd paid it no mind, but I feel like I would have noted it.

"Ready," the woman said. From her tone, I gathered she had already told me this and I'd been zoning. I took her pictures. As I handed back her phone, the woman with the child exited the bathroom and told me that the pipes were backing up and there was a terrible smell. I went in to check and got a whiff of the putrid sewage smell. I'd gotten a bit of it in the shower that morning, but it was worse now. Another glamorous job, and not one that I knew how to handle. I suppose I would have asked Dr. Henson, but she wasn't here, so I went to Liani, as she seemed like the most responsible person around.

"I'll call the plumber in town," she said when I approached her with the problem.

This is what I mean about Liani—she seemed adult in ways I didn't understand. I'd never called a plumber. My parents had. But if something went wrong in our house, I told them about it. There was something so dignified about being the kind of person who could call the plumber and then search a body of water.

Again, I drove a toy car and couldn't even be trusted with a candle.

As the afternoon went on, the sky began to darken. The tourists went home, the police boat tooted back to shore, the plumber left us, and we were alone. I walked to the gift shop, but Riki had already closed the door. I continued up to the turret. She had been reading Dr. Henson's book and materials almost without pause since we'd gotten them.

"Hey," I said. "Did you see Dr. Henson's camera when we were in her room?"

"Huh? No. I don't know. I don't think so. Look at this."

She handed me her tablet and I sat on the floor and read.

REPORT OF OFFICER KELLEY OF THE CLEMENT BAY POLICE

At 6:45 p.m. a call was received from Albert Ulridge, butler of Morning House, Ralston Island. He stated that there had been an accident on the island, that Max Ralston, four-year-old son of Phillip Ralston, had drowned.

At 7:00 p.m. I took the launch to Ralston Island along with Officer Bellard. We were met at the dock by Ulridge, who took us inside to a dining room, where the body of a young child was on the table, covered with a cloth. Dr. Ralston had already conducted an examination and had declared the boy dead at 4:37 p.m. He explained that the child's nurse had fallen asleep and the child had wandered away. The household was all a bit drowsy from the heat. Everyone was roused and searched the house. Clara Ralston, one of the six older Ralston children, swam around and looked for Max. She found him in the lagoon.

I informed Dr. Ralston that all appeared to be in order, and we did not want to add to the suffering he was clearly experiencing. We did, however, need to speak to Clara Ralston to get her account of events. A member of staff informed us that the older children were all in their playhouse, a separate structure from Morning House. Someone was dispatched to bring Clara Ralston in. This person returned several minutes later and reported that no one could find Clara.

Dr. Ralston insisted that we should be given something to eat, as our dinner hour had been disturbed. Clara Ralston would be found and made available to us. We were taken back to the servants' area and served dinner along with the rest of the staff. After the meal, we continued to wait in the kitchen, as Clara Ralston had not yet been located. The cook, Mrs. Elisa North, said that Miss Ralston had an independent spirit and could be anywhere as she "swims like a fish." She suspected that in her grief, Miss Ralston had taken to the water to get out of the house and think.

One of the housemaids ran in and said that Clara Ralston had just returned to the house, wearing only a bathing suit and still wet. She had gone directly up the stairs, and she seemed "intent on something."

As we left the kitchen area, we heard screams coming from multiple directions, and we noted a commotion coming from somewhere outside the large sitting room. We went through this room and out a set of double doors, where we found the body of a girl on the flagstones. She was obviously dead.

William and Benjamin Ralston, two of the children, ran toward us. They had been coming back in the direction of the house at the time of the fall. Dr. Ralston ran to the body, checking for signs of life. There were none. The fall was not survivable.

We instructed some staff members to take Dr. Ralston back inside the house. I took William and Benjamin away from the area and asked them what they had seen. They stated that they were coming up the lawn, having heard that Clara had been found and was back in the house. As they approached, they saw Clara Ralston moving along the edge of the high balcony, some four stories above us. William noted that she appeared to be dancing. She then pressed herself against the balcony wall, before tipping herself over.

Along with the head gardener, Peter Morton, we wrapped Clara Ralston's body in bedsheets and carried her inside, while two under-gardeners dumped water on the patio to wash away the blood. Clara was placed next to her brother on the table. Both Officer Bellard and I could clearly smell alcohol coming from the deceased. It was a strong smell.

Between coming into the house in a wet bathing suit, her demeanor as witnessed by the maid, the dancing witnessed by William and Benjamin Ralston, and the strong smell of alcohol, it is reasonable to determine that Clara Ralston was grief-stricken and inebriated at the time of her death.

We left the island at 9:15 p.m.

I'm not a big true-crime person, but even I knew that this wasn't great police work. Or, as Riki put it a second later, "This is some real shit policing, huh? Let's just pick up this body and dump water all over the scene. And look at this note."

She flipped to another document and pointed to the top of one of the pages. Dr. Henson had written there: WHY ARE THERE NO PHOTOS OF THE SCENE?

"She's wondering what I'm wondering—why no one took photos of Clara's body."

"I guess because... it just happened? Everyone saw? And it was the past and no one did anything right?"

"Except that everything she has here in these files is like that. There were copies of the death certificates in her files, both signed by Dr. Ralston. They're each two lines long. Max's death was caused by drowning. Clara's from blunt force trauma from a fall. No blood tests. No photos. No other information. No questions. Yeah, the past is some bullshit, but they still took photos and made reports. In this case, they did weirdly little. And then..."

Riki ran her hand through her hair.

"Here's a copy of a telegram Phillip Ralston sent the next day to the butler of his house in New York City saying that they were coming home and that he should get the place ready for them. The next day. And the only direction you send about Morning House is to have the patio where Clara landed destroyed."

"You're saying..."

"What I am saying is that it seems pretty clear that someone in the house drugged everyone else, and when the others were sleeping, they took Max to the water and drowned him. Who would want to do that? Well, there are six older siblings here, six siblings who do what they're told and are good at everything, and then..."

She pulled up an image of the Life magazine article.

"They do all this work, and who gets to be the star of the show? Max. Spoiled Max. Max, the biological son of Phillip and his amazing wife. Was Max going to get most of the estate? In all accounts, Clara is the boss of the six older kids. She was like the captain. If something needed to be done, Clara did it. Something needed to be done about Max, so Clara took care of it for the sake of everyone. She restored the family arrangement. She got rid of the problem. She didn't jump off the roof because she was sad. She jumped because she'd just killed her brother, and then maybe got drunk, and then freaked the hell out. Because murdering someone is kind of intense. It has to be. And I think everyone knew what she did. So no one looked too seriously. No one took photos. They accepted the family account and closed the case."

The wind was kicking up. It whistled around the stairwell and shook the windows of Riki's room.

"Everyone in town thought something was up," she said. "It's like Dr. Henson said—the most evil stuff happens right out in the open."

"But what if that's all true?" I said. "What happens? What changes?"

"Nothing changes," she said. "It's... it's just the truth. We'll have the story. I mean, then there's this..." She showed me another image. "These are copies of pages from Phillip Ralston's diaries from 1914, from January and from April. Look at the corner of each one. Dr. Henson highlighted them."

In the corner of each entry there was a letter. A few E 's, a few G 's, A 's, H 's.

"It's a code for something. Who knows what the hell this is."

My walkie-talkie crackled to life.

"Marlowe?" It was Liani. "Can you come help get ready for the storm? Tom needs a hand with the chairs."

Riki was reading again. She waved me off, lost in the past.

When I stepped outside, I could see that the situation had changed. Before, it had been cloudy. Now the sky was green and the water rushed. A sharp burst of wind smacked me right in the face. April and Van were securing window shutters with rope. Tom was rolling a stack of chairs down to the basement on a dolly.

"Get all the cushions of the chairs on the side of the house," he said. "Put them in the blue tarps and push them inside the living room. We're short a tarp. Let me know if you see it."

I nodded and set to work. My eyes watered from the force of the wind. I untied cushions from chairs near the water's edge. A blast of wind came from behind, picking up one of the loose cushions and sending it into the water. By the time I got to it, it was four or five feet out, beyond my grasp. I debated climbing in, but having my boss disappear into the water made me recoil. I imagined her under there, looking up at me, her gray-white hair swirling up above her head. So close, and yet in a different world. The world of the water. Of death.

I wondered if I should tell the police about the camera, but they were not here to tell, and presumably everyone in town had more immediate worries with the arrival of the storm. The officers had left their cards, though. Maybe I should message them. Or had I seen the camera? Maybe it was right there, in front of me, and I simply walked past it.

Meanwhile, the cushion drifted peacefully away, carried on the current. There was no getting it back. There was something hypnotic about watching it go to start a new life somewhere.

I moved closer to the house, to the chairs around the porch and the busted-up patio. Another wind snatched at me, causing the cushions I was still holding under my arms to flap. I moved my arm to readjust them, but this made it worse, and also caused me to knock my walkie-talkie off my shorts. It dropped to the rocks and a piece flew off it—a little black dial cap.

I had to set all the stuff down, pinning the cushions under the chairs. I got down on the ground to look for the missing piece. This lower patio had been made of larger, flat stones. When it was broken up, it had been unevenly smashed into tiles and shards. It was a warren of tiny cracks. I didn't want to crawl around this, but I'd already lost a cushion and I didn't want to mess up any more Morning House stuff. I was sensitive to messing up other people's stuff. I picked through the rocks, lifting and poking. I found a worm, a bottle cap, a piece of broken ceramic, a little piece of white shell.

I was there, ass in the air, finding everything but this cap. The rain picked up a bit. I rubbed it off my face and kept looking until I finally found it, where it had bounced into a patch of grass. I was about to get up when my brain spun everything I had just seen around one more time. I bent back down and pushed away a stone at that place where I had seen the bit of shell.

I picked it up. It was tiny. Something about the shape of it reminded me of something. I held it closer to my face. I stepped inside, out of the wind, and stared at it harder. I took a picture of it and enlarged it. I googled. I examined it again.

I wasn't holding a piece of shell. I was holding a tooth.