Chapter 36 Janes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6
AFTER THEY ARE FOUND, THERE is light. Bright, harsh, white like Heaven in movies.
There are cameras, a battery of flashes.
A large rectangle of police tape is drawn around the marsh and the Sunset Motel.
There is no breeze that day. For once, the grass is somber, still, without its usually whispery shush-shush-shush.
The marsh is filled with a quiet like the penitent silence inside a church.
Without the wind, the flies are worse. Detectives and coroners are constantly slapping them away, swearing under their breath.
Their boots slosh through the soft muck.
Three of the men who report to the scene must step away to get sick.
It’s the smell. The decomposed flesh. The open eyes, staring, imploring.
The vulnerability of those bare feet. The splayed hands, asking for alms. Asking for more than what they got.
All summer there have been questions in the air and the women seem to have the answers. What kind of place is Atlantic City? What is it meant to be now? A ruined dream? A tumbled-down sand castle buffed away by the tide? A nightmare?
A dozen gloved hands touch the women. The investigation is doomed from the beginning.
They will never find the man, though some of the police sketches circle his likeness—the set of his jaw, the blades of his cheekbones—yet none of them capture the pale glass of his eyes.
The city won’t treat the cases as the work of one person—pressure from the politicians, from the casinos; the words serial killer will scare off whatever tourists are left.
And so they investigate each woman as her own crime, her own case, isolated from the rest. Having lain there, sisterly, so close, for so long, the women bristle at the absurdity.
They thought they had seen everything this city could do to them, but even now they can still be surprised.
The other girls from the streets leave flowers, plush bears, little crosses made of plywood.
But after three days, the offerings are rain-drenched and faded.
The crosses tilt in the muck. In a few weeks, they’ll be washed away by the September storms that drive against the coast, hurricanes thrashing up from warmer seas. Lost.
The investigators never find the seventh woman, the one he left near the rusted-out railroad tracks.
They never even know to look for her, even though for weeks her dyed red hair is bright against the fading grass.
The police bring in a suspect for questioning, a plumber who had been staying at the Sunset Motel when the bodies were found.
They question another man—one whose apartment on the boardwalk is filled with women’s shoes.
But they are all the wrong guesses. The women know he’s gone for good after the seventh woman.
They know, too, that he’ll never be caught.
Who they were, their longings and dreams, their secrets and their darkest thoughts, will be lost. Time will turn them into warnings, symptoms, into stories people tell in dark corners of bars.
Seasons pass. The tides surge and recede.
The moon waxes and wanes. The grass of the marsh turns green and brown and green again.
One spring, the feral cats under the boardwalk are caught and taken to shelters inland.
A new restaurant opens in the middle of an empty, gray block on Pacific.
A section of boardwalk that was ruined in a storm is nailed together again.
The state buys the Sunset Motel and razes it to the ground.
A new governor promises the city more funds.
The lights at the Revel go on again, a glittering column at the end of the skyline.
An art show draws a critic from the New York Times.
In the Press of Atlantic City: “Local Painter Honored for a Lifetime of Work, Commissioned to Paint Murals Downtown.” A young woman waits tables at a diner in San Diego and writes a college application essay about tarot cards and telling stories, about a boardwalk shop overlooking another sea.
The women hover above it all, presiding like ghosts.
Even now, they, like everyone else in town, still believe in luck, in the change of tides, in the upswing, in the chance that they’ll hit on the next deal.
That something else will happen, something beautiful, wonderful, something that will turn it all around.
They choose to believe that this isn’t the end.