Marrow Island

by Alexis M. Smith

  Before the meal was over, I had invited him to dinner at the cottage sometime.

  The receptionist-dispatcher at the front desk of the sheriff’s office told me I could “go get a beer” if I wanted, and she’d send Deputy Lelehalt over when he returned.

  “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” I noted.

  “Or coffee, whatever,” she said. “He gets lunch at the tavern every day. He’ll show up.”

  I had a bloody mary instead and made notes on the story that I wasn’t writing—that I wouldn’t write unless Katie told me I could—and made a list of questions: about squatters’ rights, about verbal agreements, about property trusts, and about the Swenson Trust in particular. Assuming Jacob Swenson had gone off the deep end and someone else from his family was to take over, there had to be some sort of legal standing for the Colony. Laws of adverse possession might apply, considering the amount of time and capital the Colony had invested in Marrow—these were laws I was vaguely familiar with from reporting on the guerrilla gardeners: community gardens that sprung up on disused property had a greater chance of survival the longer they were in use by the community without the title holder’s intervention. Combine that with the verbal agreement Jacob Swenson had come to—there had to be some kind of documentation, somewhere, in correspondence between Julia and Sister J., maybe? I might be able to make the case for the Colony in the right story.

  The only aspect that gave me pause was the mushrooms—psilocybin was a Schedule I drug, and the fruits of the mycelium were illegal to cultivate and possess. But they grew wild all over the Northwest, and their presence might be glossed over or explained away, so long as they weren’t harvesting them.

  Chris Lelehalt joined me at the bar at noon and ordered a burger to go and an iced tea.

  “Do you want me to come back to the station to give my statement?”

  “Sure.” He seemed to have something on his mind.

  “Can you tell me anything? His family has no idea where he is? Did he check himself into a hospital or something?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I’ve heard some things about his mental health—you know how people talk.”

  He nodded.

  “No, he’s not at any hospital nearby. Anacortes, Bellingham, Port Townsend. We even tried Everett and Mount Vernon, down to Seattle. And his car’s been parked in the garage for at least a week, probably longer. He’s a missing person.”

  “Do you have any leads at all?”

  “Are you asking as a concerned neighbor or as a reporter?”

  “A neighbor.” I didn’t hesitate but glanced down at my notes. I didn’t think he had seen them. He smirked.

  “I’m just kidding. We don’t really have any leads, just a history of mental illness and alcohol addiction. Crashed his car into a ditch a few years back—it’s all public record or common knowledge. Didn’t have any enemies, and we don’t have any witnesses to anything strange. Except you.”

  “I don’t have much to tell,” I said, waiting for him to ask me about my trip to Marrow. If Jacob’s alcoholism was common knowledge, it seemed like his relationship with the Colony would be, as well. “I’ve never even met him, that I can remember. Maybe as a kid?”

  “If you hadn’t trespassed, we still wouldn’t know he’s missing.”

  “I didn’t trespass.”

  He chuckled. “We’ll leave that part out of the report. But you’ve got nerve, checking up on a neighbor you’ve never met, after you’ve been back in town for, what? Twenty-four hours.”

  “Something like that.” He was angling for something.

  “Well, somebody from his family will be out if he doesn’t turn up soon. You might have a neighbor again before long.”

  “Do you think he’ll show up?”

  “I don’t like to speculate.”

  “What are you doing to find him?”

  “Couple of us spent the day walking the woods around the property and the shoreline around there. Aren’t a lot of places to go on Orwell, so next step is the other islands. We’re getting his picture out to law enforcement, the hotels, the ferry terminals, the Coast Guard, the media. After that . . . there’s a lot of water out there.”

  He watched my expression casually, glancing at me, but never looking at me straight on, catching glimpses of me in the mirror behind the liquor bottles on the other side of the bar.

  “You think you’ll be headed back to Marrow anytime soon?”

  I shook my head, looked him in the eye and held it, dared him to ask me something about the Colony. “I don’t know. I have some things I need to work on at the cottage.”

  He looked down at his hands.

  “Are you thinking of selling the place? Moving back?”

  “I’m considering all the options.”

  The waitress brought him a paper plate covered in foil. He finished off his drink and said, “Come on back to the station anytime to give your statement. I’ll just be having lunch.” I told him I’d be over when I finished my drink.

  I wrote my account of trespassing at Rookwood in about fifteen minutes. When I was done, Chris read through it and asked if there was anything else I wanted to add. I said no.

  “It can be anything—not just what you saw at the house. If you’ve heard anything, seen anything else that might pertain to the case.”

  My cheeks reddened slightly, and I forced myself to smile warmly at him. “Gotcha. I think that’s all I’ve got.”

  “You can add to your statement later, if anything else occurs to you.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I rose to leave.

  “Oh, Lucie, one more thing.” I turned around; he wore a goofy, sheepish grin that made him look ten years younger. “My mom asked after yours. When you talk to her, tell her Deb says ‘hi.’”

  “Of course, I will.”

  While my laundry was going at the Wash-O-Mat, I sat in the coffee shop with my laptop. I wanted to make sense of what I knew about Jacob Swenson and about the Colony. Katie had said that Tuck sometimes helped around Rookwood. Sister J. had known Julia. Maggie was a nurse—she may have tried to help Jacob. Then there was Katie, who had been in Rookwood often, when we were girls. I wasn’t sure about other members of the Colony, but I listed as many of them as I could. Tuck was at the top. But I didn’t know his full name. Basic search results for “Tuck + Marrow Colony,” and “Tuck + Orwell Island” brought up no matches. I tried the AP News Archive. I worked my way through different facts I knew about him. He had gone to UC Berkeley. He had protested divestment in fossil fuels. He had worked for Greenpeace. I tried “Tucker.” And that got me a piece from an article from thirteen years ago about activists arrested for blocking passage of an oil rig headed for the Gulf of Mexico. “Alex James Tucker, 22” was one of the activists arrested in the protest. There wasn’t a picture, so I did more searches under that name. The first hit was an article about an arson at a logging camp in northern California. I scanned the article—the crime had caused millions in damages to logging equipment and a truck driver had nearly burned alive while he slept in his cab. The crime was attributed to the Earth Liberation Front. A raid on a house in Arcata had led to warrants for three young men. “Alex James Tucker, 24,” was the only man not in custody. There was a mugshot from his previous arrest: a clean-shaven, young white guy in a polo shirt, more frat boy than salt of the earth; but the self-righteous pride in his blue eyes was the same. It was Tuck.

  The warrant had been issued ten years before. Tuck had been hiding from the FBI for the last ten years.

  I called the Colony’s number and left a message.

  “Katie, it’s Luce. I need you to call me as soon as you get this. Please. It’s important.”

  In my time reporting on radical environmentalists, I had heard stories of activists targeted as domestic terrorists, phones tapped by the FBI, houses full of sleeping families raided, and beloved family dogs shot. I had also heard stories of firebombs at car dealerships, sabotage on forest roads,
people chaining their necks to logging trucks. I tended to give the protesters the benefit of the doubt. The government did seem quick to label the burning of SUVs in Springfield, Oregon, as terrorism, while anti-government nuts who shoot at park rangers and set tripwires on public lands are called “militiamen,” like they were good old boys. But if Tuck had been hiding out on Marrow for this long, whether he was guilty or not—what might he do if Jacob found out he was wanted? What would happen to the Colony if Tuck was discovered?

  That night I tried to think about Carey, soothing my mind with fantasies of a lover. It had been so long since I had a body to attach my longing to. I wanted to feel something other than distress for Katie, for the story I couldn’t write, if it revealed what I knew about her husband.

  If Jacob had become as paranoid as Katie said, he might have fled the house in panic, afraid of some imagined threat. He might be living in the woods, in one of the smaller outbuildings on the estate—the potting shed, the old kiln. There were lots of places to hide from two deputies stomping through the underbrush. He might be watching me, waiting for me to leave to come out of hiding. He could be sneaking back into the house for food, for water . . . It sounded far-fetched. And with so much at stake for the Colony, why hadn’t they tried harder to get help for him? Had he really deteriorated so quickly? If he had found out about Tuck, an already-paranoid person might do something drastic, knowing there was a liar in his house.

  The doors were locked, my phone by my side.

  Katie would call. She would call me. And if she didn’t call, I would drive to Coombs’s house at dawn and ask him to take me back to Marrow.

  Twelve

  The Islands

  MARROW ISLAND, WASHINGTON

  OCTOBER 14, 2014

  THEY WERE CARRYING the body to the woods when I came over the hill. It was wrapped in a bolt of unbleached muslin, on a makeshift stretcher—two long poles of windfall spruce or cedar and a tarpaulin slung between. Six of the youngest and strongest carried it; among them I could see Elle and Tuck. Most of them didn’t see me. Those who did looked confused, probably unsure whether Katie had been in touch or whether Sister J. had invited me back. They made quick eye contact or nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  I hung back, following at a distance. The entire Colony processed through the fields, through the orchard, beyond the fence, into a wooded area I hadn’t investigated before. It was overcast, several layers of cold clouds soaking up with light. I watched one colonist after another disappear into the shadows of trees ahead of me, walking on after them, over a well-worn path, marked with cairns of river stones large and small. The stones glowed in the low light, against the brown and green of the forest floor. The path let out onto a narrow dirt road lined with rhododendrons and white birch, then a wide clearing that opened onto a bluff and the sea.

  Everyone gathered, leaving space between one another, some near and some far, from the place they had set the body down in the earth. As I approached, I could see a rough outline in the dirt from one edge of the clearing to the other, marking a rectangular field, and I realized that this had been the site of a house destroyed in the quake. This field was the foundation; I was standing at what was once the front door. The green expanse stretching off to the bluff, the yard; the dirt road, a dead end.

  There were plots all over, hidden in the weeds, but marked by small wooden carvings and driftwood sculptures. I counted nine, in various stages of heap and sink, the soil settled over some of the plots completely. And everywhere, mushrooms. Small, black caps like umbrellas beaten in the wind, similar to the Psilocybe Tuck had shown me before. Some sprouted at the edges of the graves, others in clusters over the heart.

  Sister stood at the head of the grave. I kept to the back but crept around to the other side so that I could see better. The body was still covered with the shroud. They lowered it gently into an oblong hole no more than three feet deep, on a bed of sawdust. Sister nodded, and Elle and Maggie pulled the shroud from the body. She was completely naked, the woman, gaunt and pale, skin dull like putty, eyes bulging under the lids, hands resting over her heart. Her white hair had been braided with flowers. She looked ancient, holy. We gazed at her silently for several minutes. Then, one or two at a time, people approached the grave, closed their eyes, and released bundles of flowers and shells and lichen over her. I felt my throat tighten. There were baskets of offerings. They tossed them over the body until she was covered almost completely. No one spoke, not even Sister. Only the tokens placed lovingly around her, the prayer was the act itself. Then each bowed a head to the dead woman. There was no song, no prayer. Then Elle and Tuck and the other bearers shoveled bark and soil into the grave, and after that laid branches and stones around the edges. The rest stood quietly, heads bowed or eyes closed, hands on hearts, until they had finished. Eventually, one by one, the colonists peeled off and began the walk back.

  I tried to shrink into the trees, but Katie saw me. Tuck looked up and followed her gaze. He looked weary, the hollows of his eyes almost bruised; he had been crying. He kissed Katie on the temple and followed the others back. I felt a pang of remorse for imagining the things I had about him, or for knowing what I knew about him. I watched them go and approached the grave. Katie and I stood on opposite sides.

  When the last person had disappeared into the trees, I spoke. “Will you talk to me here?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She stared at the grave. “You should have waited for me to call.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  I walked over to her, to see her face. I wanted her to see that I meant it—that I hadn’t come to intrude.

  “This is Sarah?” I asked.

  “She died night before last.”

  “That was the night of the harvest supper,” I said.

  Katie nodded.

  “You’ve done this before.” I looked around at the other graves. “Others have died here?”

  “You know people have died here, Luce,” she scoffed. She turned away from Sarah’s grave and wandered the plots.

  “Of course I do.” I said it softly, baffled by her tone, by the viciousness. “I meant at the Colony. This is—it’s shocking, Katie, to come across a funeral procession like this. And a burial ground; this is like a pioneer cemetery—is this even legal? Is this part of Sister’s mission?” I followed her across the plots, careful not to walk over any of the graves.

  “People die everywhere, all the time,” she said. “Death isn’t part of the mission; it’s part of life. We found a way to deal with it—a safe, humane, natural way. It may not be legal, but it’s what they wanted—to return to the earth, to continue to be part of the island, not pumped full of chemicals and artificially preserved.”

  She stared at her feet. We were standing at what would have been the back of the house, in the west corner.

  A bedroom, I thought. We’re standing in the bedroom. This is where the window would have been, looking out at the sea.

  I stood there and watched the clouds darken behind Waldron Island, until I noticed that Katie was still staring at our feet. I looked down. At first I saw nothing but milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, then I made out the indentation in the earth, the small black mushrooms pushing up at the edges, the tiny cairn, nearly swallowed by the grasses. But this one was so much smaller than the rest; it was the length of a shoebox. There was another to my left, only slightly longer. I searched the grass to the right, turned around to look behind us. This entire corner of the plot was marked with small graves. Some of them looked very old; only their cairns stood out.

  “Oh my god, Katie.”

  She wept and said nothing.

  “Are these graves?” I started to count them but stopped myself. “Katie, what the hell? Are these animals? Tell me they’re animals.”

  Nothing. Silence. She held her breath and wouldn’t look at me.

  “If they’re not animals . . . ?” I was shaking.

  “They’re babies.”
<
br />   I let this thought settle, the jaded journalist in me sorting through all the plausible reasons why they might have so many dead babies on Marrow.

  “How many are there?”

  “Six. This is Sucia. She was the last one. Her heart stopped beating at six months’ gestation. Her mother carried her for three months after that and delivered her dead.”

  “Who’s her mother?”

  “Me. She was mine.” She wasn’t crying anymore, but there was a distance in her eyes, her body and her mind were on different islands.

  “Jesus, Katie, why didn’t you tell me? When did this happen?”

  “In the spring, right before I wrote you.”

  I looked at her baggy overalls and sweater. The way she had grown into a woman’s body since I’d seen her last.

  “We were hopeful; conditions had improved so much. But all the early exposure must have built up. Ten years here, plus living on Orwell for the years after the quake—all the dispersants that washed ashore, you remember?” She looked at me again and I nodded. Her voice was low, firm. “The early exposure was the worst, before the remediation. Maggie was really careful about charting cycles. After a year or so, periods were irregular among almost all the women. Skipping months or bleeding every other week a little bit. Everyone was supposed to be practicing birth control, but accidents happened. Miscarriages are common everywhere, so it didn’t alarm anyone for some time. Maggie has herbal recipes for abortions, too. Some chose to go that route. But when the babies started dying in the womb or coming too soon—there weren’t that many, but enough—they knew. They knew.” She squatted and plucked the mushrooms from the grave. Put them in a small basket she’d carried shells in, for Sarah’s grave. She crawled around on her knees, plucking the mature mushrooms from all the graves.