This is a popular joke here and I don’t mind it. The things the police handle on this island are mostly small. Mr. So-and-So cut down Miss So-and-So’s sugar-apple tree. A scuffle at Papa Mango’s. Floyd Vanterpool operating an unlicensed taxi again. We do see a few cases of domestic trouble each year.

Much of my job involves helping our children here grow up safely and become upstanding citizens, and I like this work. Every year I visit the island primaries and teach a lesson on bicycle safety. For my demonstration I ride a small pink bike with streamers on the handlebars, and this always receives a good laugh. When children see me around they shout, “Officer Roy!” “Officer Roy!” just to say hello.

When the young folk have a late-night bacchanal on Little Beach I have no choice but to bust it up, but I try not to be too cross with them when I do so. I try to remember that I limed on Little Beach myself in my time. While they clean up their rubbish I make jokes. If I see a boy and girl coming out of the bushes together I say, “She out of your league, man!” If I see a boy who’s small for his age I say, “Who invited this nursery child to the party?”

If I see some youths clustering outside Perry’s in the Basin I pull up beside them and say, “This is loitering. I’m going to have to write you up.” You should see how some of the toughest ones look like they might soil themselves until I start laughing.

“Aw, man, don’t do that shit to we!” they say, but they’re not really mad.

“Do it up, Officer Roy!” they beg when I prepare to drive away. “Please, Officer Roy?” I turn on my lights and my siren and drive off to their cheers. I have a rapport with them, you could say. I watch these kids grow and I play my part.

Edwin and Gogo—I used to shoo them away from the radio tower when they were snot-nosed little boys. I came up with Gogo’s daddy, God rest his sweet soul. I pulled those two and their hooligan mates over for drunk driving all the time and took them in to sleep it off. I never saw it as punishment. I never wrote them up. I was protecting them from their young stupid selves, like pulling a baby back from the water’s edge. My wife and I couldn’t have children. The island children are my children.

I must have picked Edwin and Gogo up a hundred times before that night. That’s how I know something happened and they were part of it. Because the ninety-nine other times I pulled them over, on the drive to the station they joked with me and made chitchat. But that time, the night Alison Thomas died, neither one of them said a word.

EMILY OF PASADENA

ON MY FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN, after my father took a picture of me on our front steps in my purple overalls and before I climbed onto the yellow bus, my mother prepared me for Cody Lundgren. She squatted so her eyes were level with mine and told me that there would be a boy in my class who was different from other children, and that I must not be afraid of him, but, on the contrary, must treat him with special kindness. With a child’s logic, I assumed this was simply one more part of going to school. In kindergarten, one rode the bus and learned to read (though I already knew how, and was rather smug about it), one had recess and homework, and one was especially kind to the boy who was different. I was a shy child, at once excited and tentative about taking these steps.

As soon as I stepped into the classroom that morning and saw him, I knew I could not do what my mother had asked. Cody Lundgren terrified me. His limbs jerked. His mouth hung open. Saliva pooled on his lower lip and dripped in glistening cobwebs, darkening his shirt. Worst of all were the sounds he made, viscous gurgles punctuated by high-pitched keening. Every day, while the rest of us learned our numbers or studied butterflies—larva, pupa, fly away—Cody sat with his personal aide, making his sounds and collapsing on occasion into horrible tantrums.

Then, one Monday in February, Cody Lundgren was not in school. Our teacher, Ms. D’Elia, gathered us in a circle and told us that Cody had died over the weekend. We were each made to say one thing we would remember about Cody. This struck me even then as a poorly conceived exercise, dependent as it was upon five-year-olds possessing the subtlety to craft a pleasant fiction about who Cody had been. (Ms. D’Elia was new that year, and more than once I’d overheard my mother on the phone with other mothers describing her as “out of her depth,” which led me to imagine Ms. D’Elia in a yellow bathing cap, performing a synchronized swimming routine, her legs treading furiously beneath the water’s surface.) All of the other children shared the same memory, of the cupcakes Cody’s mother had brought on his birthday. They were not the homemade ones the rest of our mothers packed in Tupperware for our birthdays, but fancy ones from a bakery, with sugar flowers and perfect whorls of buttercream. It was a memory that had nothing to do with Cody, really, and everything to do with his mother’s love for him. When my turn came, I said I would remember how much Cody liked to sing. Every morning during music time, Cody would squawk and moan along to “Funga Alafia” or the Erie Canal song, terrifying sounds of unmistakable pleasure. I would not actually remember this fondly, but I understood that it was the sort of thing Ms. D’Elia had in mind. Next, she read us a picture book, a parable in which a family of mice grieve and heal after one of them is eaten by a cat, and that was that.

The truth is I was relieved Cody Lundgren was dead. Death meant never seeing someone again, and I was glad I would never again see Cody or hear the yelps and gurgles that so disturbed me.

A few months later, my mother and I ran into Cody’s mother at the supermarket. Mrs. Lundgren was tall, with silky black hair, far prettier than any other mother I knew, prettier than I’d previously understood a mother could be.

“Look how big you’ve gotten!” she exclaimed to me. Her smile was so hard and desperate that I reached for my mother’s hand like a younger child than I was. I left the grocery store with a pit in my stomach, rocked by an emotion so new to me I could not identify it, though looking back I know it was shame.

THIS WAS the extent of my experience with death when my sister’s body was found on an uninhabited cay in the Caribbean, many years ago now. Looking back, the things I remember most clearly from the days after Alison went missing and before she was found are strangely inconsequential. For example, I remember the hunger I experienced on that first day when my parents forgot about breakfast and lunch, and how I felt sorry for myself about it in the banal way any child feels sorry for herself when she finds herself overlooked in a flurry of attention devoted to her sibling. I remember hiding out in the bathroom to devour a Toblerone bar and a tin of mixed nuts I’d scavenged from the minibar. I was hiding because I wanted to see how long it would take my parents to realize they’d forgotten to feed me, so that I could take the full measure of their neglect. Once they did realize, I have vivid memories of the room service food with which I was plied, or soothed, or distracted (I’m not sure what to call it) in the days that followed—cheeseburgers and fries and sundaes and a personal pan pizza with delightful miniature pepperonis. I cleaned my plate at every meal; if my parents noticed this, I’m sure they thought my appetite was unaffected by what was happening because I was too young to grasp the seriousness of the situation, but that wasn’t exactly right. I was terrified during those days, but not because of what might have happened to Alison. Even as the people around me grew increasingly frantic, I was not worried for her. I literally did not understand that what had happened to Cody Lundgren could happen to my big sister. I thought—I knew—that she was playing an elaborate game with us. She was watching it all, the dapper policemen with their braided gold epaulets, the resort staff in a tizzy, the entire spectacle she’d created, from some hidden perch with a smile. No, it was not Alison’s disappearance but my parents’ terror that terrified me. Their distraction and anguish shook the foundations of a world that had, until then, seemed to me absolutely stable.