A COLD, clear night. Clive left the Little Sweet and headed east for some time before coming to a stop; beneath the glare of a single post light, teenage boys, T-shirts billowing from their bodies, were playing basketball on a chain-link court. Off to the side, a few young boys of about five or six played their own small game. Clive stood with his hands resting against the fence and watched. What was it about this scene that so held his attention? I stood some distance away and watched him watching the boys. They seemed to strobe with toughness and sensitivity, the two forces held in an uneasy tension. A boy dribbled the ball gracefully between his legs one moment, barreled into a defender the next. One of the young boys imitated his movements, then forgot the game and stooped to examine the clover growing up through cracks in the blacktop. A man in a tracksuit swaggered down the street in front of me, a tuckered-out girl in a tutu asleep in his arms. On the sidelines of the basketball game, a boy, still in his school uniform, punched a square of gum out of a foil packet and placed it boldly, tentatively, on a girl’s waiting tongue.

There were girls and women, too, of course. Heading home from work in suits and pumps, in scrubs. Mothers with children. Clusters of adolescent girls with rhinestones on the back pockets of their jeans. But it was the men and boys I watched. I admit I had not done very much thinking about the inner lives of men. I was a girl with a sister. With my boyfriends, I saw now, I had never dug beneath the surface to find them where they hid. Perhaps I didn’t want their pain to compete with my own; perhaps my story, my tragedy, had a forbidding power over men, and I enjoyed that. Or perhaps, knowing that a man, or men, had killed my sister, I was afraid of what I might find if I looked too closely—gentleness that turned over to shame that turned over to rage; ugly, unshakable desires—qualities that might suggest a universal masculine poison I did not want to know about because it would doom me to be alone forever.

Clive continued down the sidewalk. He stopped at a newsstand and purchased a cup of coffee, which he drank as he headed north. A few minutes later, without breaking his stride, he tossed the dregs of the coffee into the street with a quick, dispassionate flick of his wrist.

THE MATERIAL on Alison was endless, so much it seemed I would never get through it. Information on Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie, by comparison, was thin at best. One day, I told my boss I needed to consult the archives at the New York Public Library to research some details about the Cornish coast in The Girl from Pendeen which she had asked me to confirm, and I spent the afternoon at the main branch, searching the catalog for anything I could find that mentioned Clive and Edwin. My first discovery was an academic text, Dark Travels: Thanatourism, Theory and Practice.

CONTENTS

PART 1: ASPECTS OF THANATOURISM

Mediations: The Living and the Dead in Public Space

Milking the Macabre: Ethical Considerations

Kitschification and Mass-Consumption

Hospitality in Hostile Spaces: Towards a New Model

PART 2: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

Genocide Tourism

Homicide Tourism

Disaster Tourism

PART 3: FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

To my disappointment, the book contained only the briefest relevant passage, from the chapter on “Homicide Tourism”:

… While Genocide Tourism is generally structured by government and nonprofit institutions, Homicide Tourism is often ad hoc, and thus represents an economic opportunity for independent local operators. Examples include Kristján Jóhannsson, who leads tours of Keflavik in southwest Iceland, a site of interest in the Guemundur and Geirfinnur case; and Desmond Phillips, whose guided tours of the island of Saint X include visits to the houses of Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson, suspects in the Alison Thomas murder, and a boat ride to the nearby cay where her body was recovered for a fish fry lunch. This essay will focus on the case of the Tyrolean village of Zinn am Alberg, which has rebuilt its local economy, previously dominated by dairy farming and the production of Tyrolean speck, around tourism related to the gruesome 1975 murders of the members of the Krenn family.…

The next few books were no more informative. An encyclopedia of unsolved mysteries. A media studies dissertation on the differing portrayals of black and white female victims of violent crime from 1970 to 2000. I had high hopes for A Handbook History of Saint X, the only book I’d been able to find that focused exclusively on the island. It turned out to be a self-published monograph by a retired customs worker named David Webster, a hundred spiral-bound pages, peripatetic and ambitious in its scope, with five-page chapters on such topics as the history of the salt trade and the entirety of Amerindian civilization on the island.

From Chapter 8, “1950 to the Present Time”:

… The death of Alison Thomas on Faraway Cay (see Chapter 11: Folklore), had effects upon our island as deleterious as any hurricane. It has been speculated that the closing of the Grand Caribbee and three restaurants on Mayfair Road in a single season may be entirely attributable to the aforementioned scandal. This scandal had the additional effect of dividing the island over the question of whether its primary suspects, Misters Hastie and Richardson, were the innocent victims of a scapegoating mission by the American press, or, alternately and, this author believes, accurately, the parties responsible for single-handedly causing an economic downturn that endured for years and bringing international notoriety to our island and its people.…

From Chapter 11, “Folklore”:

… Tales about the woman on Faraway Cay are prevalent. In the most widespread account of her origin, she washed up on Faraway many centuries ago in a hurricane. Nobody knows from where she came, but she can never return because as is well known, dark spirits cannot cross salt water, as a result of which she is trapped on the cay for eternity. She has white skin and long black hair and hooves for feet. Mention must be made of her odd gait, which appears in many versions of the tale, and is widely believed to be what draws people to her, as humans cannot resist that dash of salt in their sweet.

As the stories go, she lures people to cure her loneliness. She leads them across the cay and they give chase, desperate to touch some of her wildness. At last, she escorts them to the waterfall at the island’s center. She allows them to draw near, but when they reach out to grasp her, she slips away into the mist. They try to follow after her and are drowned. A popular version has it that a new goat appears on Faraway Cay for every person who vanishes there. It is said that you can see the humanness in their eyes.…

I shut the book in disgust. A woman with hooves for feet. Humans turned to goats. Had my sister’s body been dumped in that waterfall as some kind of sick joke? Look, the woman on Faraway Cay did it! Hahaha.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that, from the time I was a small child, I’d found some solace in the fact that Alison had been found somewhere so beautiful. How many small, unconscious coping mechanisms, how many pretty notions, would be taken from me before I uncovered the truth?

I opened Google Maps on my laptop, a self-punishing impulse—to lay eyes on it, to force myself to picture her there, her body beneath all that water for days. But Faraway Cay did not even appear on Google Maps. Where I knew the cay must be, there was only blue.

I FOLLOWED Clive for many nights and many miles. In all that time, excepting the evening when I called his name and he responded with such terror, I never heard his voice. His nights were composed of enormous stretches of silence, and this silence was now mine, too. I would return home near midnight and realize I hadn’t uttered a word since leaving work at five-thirty. Sometimes I would speak—“Hello, hello, hello,” “My name is Emily,” “Today is Tuesday”—just to prove to myself that I was still real. I did not hear him speak, nor did I observe any other evidence to suggest that his life connected meaningfully with anyone else’s. Clive Richardson was a man hiding in plain sight, drawing no attention and leaving no trace upon the minds of others. He was an island, isolated and impenetrable.