Prologue
Podcast Title:Life and Death on an Island
Episode Title: “The Town Council”
Host:Welcome toLife and Death on an Island, produced by All Ears Media. I’m your host, Milton Anderson, and on this podcast we’re taking a deep dive, so to speak, into life on a small island whose population increases nearly twentyfold from winter to summer. Last week you heard from several restaurant owners about the challenges they face hiring and housing their workers, many of whom come to the island on J-1 visas. Next week, law enforcement discusses how the increasing number of underage drinkers is threatening island summers. Today we’re talking to four members of the Block Island Town Council. Some of these members believe a mysterious death last summer was related to issues of overdevelopment, landownership, and excessive lifestyles on the island.
If you could each begin by stating your name, your age, your profession, and what, if any, your relationship was to the deceased.
Betsy:I’ll start. I’m Betsy Meyers. I’m sixty-four years old. I’ve taught English at the high school for thirty years. I’m one year away from retirement. My grandson, Henry, was the general contractor for the four houses Buchanan built last summer off Beacon Hill Road. Never met the deceased personally, not one-on-one to have a conversation with. But I saw her. We all did. She was quite memorable, with the hair and all. And I sure heard a lot about her.
Evan:Evan Miller, thirty-five. I own a store in town. The Hangry Angler? We sell fishing gear, and we have a sandwich shop in the back. I might be biased but it’s the best meatball sub on the island. No relationship to the deceased, except observational.
Kelsey:Kelsey Amaral, twenty-seven. Nurse at the medical center here on the island and also at South County Hospital. The meatball subs at the Angler arefire, by the way. I grew up on the island, left, swore I’d never come back, and here I am. I went to one of those big parties last summer. It was insane. When I was a teenager, a party was a six-pack of beer and a bonfire on the beach. We’d barely even heard of hard seltzer. I leave, I go to college, I get a nursing degree, and suddenly people are having like raw bars and champagne at their parties?
(Pause.)
The deceased? I didn’t see her. But, yeah, looking back. She must have been there. Right? She must have been.
Lou:Lou Carpenter, seventy-one. I run a fishing charter out of Old Harbor Charter Dock. Right near where the ferries come in. Every year I say it’s my last year. My daughter’s telling me to retire. And every year, there I am, same as always. I love the water. Did I know the deceased? I didn’t. But if you ask me, it should be prerequisite to coming to an island that you know how to swim.
Evan:Like, a swimming test at the ferry dock? Uh, I don’t think we can do that. We can barely get a noise ordinance passed.
Lou:Why not? The city of Venice started charging an entry fee. I don’t know why we can’t institute a swimming test.
Kelsey:Lots of people who know how to swim drown. I was on duty when they brought her in. The body had been in the water for hours before it was found by that dog walker.
Betsy:It’s always a dog walker. I watch a lot of true crime, and let me tell you. It’salwaysa dog walker that finds the body.
The previous summer...
June
Nicola
For the first three nights in her rental cottage, Nicola tries to ignore the sounds of the parties that reach her from the grand house next door. The thump of music, the highs and lows of traveling laughter, the general rumble that signifies a crowd.
Rentalisn’t accurate. She isn’t paying a penny.Borrowingis the word that fits. The cottage belongs to the father of her cousin’s wife—her cousin’s in-laws, the Buchanans, are the Boston Buchanans. If you move in certain circles you will have heard of them. Buchanan Enterprises is the biggest property development firm in Boston.
Nicola doesn’t move in these circles, but she now occasionally lingers on the outside of them. It was a Very Big Deal when her cousin David married into Taylor’s family. A boy from Minnesota, a prankster, an extrovert, the son of a discount furniture shop co-owner (Nicola’s dad being the other owner), who sometimes got into trouble but who also got into Yale. Taylor and David met during freshman year, and except for a brief hiatus in their early twenties, they’ve been together ever since. They are the kind of couple whose perfection people are constantly remarking on: Taylor so blond and porcelain-skinned, David tall with a Kennedyesque head of dark hair. In fact, more than once the similarities between Taylor/David and Carolyn/JFK Jr. have come up.
A little over two years ago Brice Buchanan, Taylor’s father, happened to visit Block Island from a friend’s yacht that docked at New Harbor for the night. And what did he see but a small, relatively unspoiled place—New England’s best-kept secret, some called it—crying out for development. Brice Buchanan, is, according to some, 80 percent to blame for what the island’s old-timers, its year-round residents, and its longtime summer renters and owners see as a burgeoning recklessness.
Residents have lots to think about, on an island like this: coastal resiliency, shoreline erosion, rising sea levels. Moped rules. But those things are not top of mind for Brice Buchanan.
Buchanan bought David and Taylor’s house as well as the cottage Nicola is currently living in with plans to tear down and rebuild the latter; in the meantime, David pulled a string or bent an ear or called in a favor, and so here she is. The cottage has basic furnishings—these too will go when the cottage does—and a simple set of kitchenware, all of which suits Nicola perfectly, because aside from the patio furniture and a bed, what more does she need?
Happenstance, a breakup, and a dramatic career change have brought Nicola to this place. She recently started a job as an intern for the Block Island Maritime Institute, making her, she’s pretty sure, at twenty-nine, the Oldest Intern in the History of the World. She tries not to think about this most days; some days, she can think of nothing else. She also tries not to think about the law degree she’s no longer using, the live-in boyfriend with whom she’s no longer living, and the school loan payments she’s no longer making, except for the very barest minimum to keep her out of default.
She tries not to think about the day she told Zachary she was moving out.
She tries to think instead about how close she is living to the ocean, and how, if she plays her cards right, she’ll never have to put on business clothes ever again. She thinks about the seals that gatherat the north end of the island, and she thinks about how, if you really look at them, they seem to be looking back at you, as if they’re about to ask a philosophical question, or relate to you the secret of the universe. As if they can see into the very center of your soul.
Nicola comes from a loud, boisterous family in Minnesota, where she never got to visit the ocean or watch seals. She grew up with three older sisters, the four of them born over a span of six years. They were the kind who barged in on each other in the bathroom without compunction and shared jeans and nail polish and gossip. They fought and made up on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis. When Nicola’s family and David’s family combined, as they did every holiday, most weekends, and summers at the family cottage on Pokegama Lake, the kids numbered seven. Which means Nicola has been very good at sleeping through distractions, until now.
To combat the noise from next door she tries every trick in the book: AirPods, a noise machine, a fan, an app that plays soothing ocean sounds designed to put one to sleep. (Ironic, this last one, because if only she turned off these electronics she might, in fact, hear the actual ocean.) But all to no avail. Not even a speck of avail.
After the first party, she’s irritable. After the second, she’s bleary throughout her workday. During the third party, just after midnight, the last straw bends, then breaks the back of the proverbial camel.
