Picking through the skeletons

I reached tentatively into the blankness of cyberspace with a quick, to-the-point email - polite but beseeching. You better believe I didn’t mention his …situation.  “I can’t think of anyone else who could help me with this but you,” I wrote, trying to get across a sense of my desperation. ”I’m just looking for a name.“  I didn’t wait long -  only a week passed before he wrote back.  My heart gave a flutter when I saw his name in my inbox, not just because of the person who wrote the note (I mean, I have known a few people who have killed people.  Well, one that I’ve known for sure.  Two, if you count Dominic.  Which I don’t.), but because of the potential breakthrough I was facing.  It was rather thrilling, just sitting there at the computer, staring at that unopened email with the subject line “RE: Hope you can help.”  A nervous twinge.  Click. 

At this point, I’d read extensively of Dominic’s alleged crime.  With all his skeletons dredged up for public display and more still being added to the pile, I felt strangely guilty asking him to engage.  And like any 30-something American raised on pop-culture schadenfreude and the curiosity of human train-wrecks, I spent a good amount of time picking through those bones with morbid fascination.

They were sailing the waters off Virgin Gorda with another couple from Rhode Island.  It was Christmas vacation (Sharon, Dominic’s wife, was a school teacher).  All four were all experienced sailors and divers.  But something went wrong. Sharon’s body was recovered from the bottom of the ocean two days before their flight home.  Her face mask was torn and she was missing a flipper.  Authorities in Virgin Gorda called it an accident.  Although Sharon and Dominic had begun the dive together, they had drifted apart to explore independently, as they often did.  No one, it was determined, was with her at the time of death.   Dominic flew home from his Christmas vacation a widower. 

Six years later a wrongful death suit was brought against him by his in-laws.  Millions of dollars in “compensatory and punitive damages” were awarded to them.  He was forced into bankruptcy.  He owned a for-profit sailing school in Rhode Island, and that would soon be taken as well, liquidated.  He didn’t have to go to jail, but he had to pay.  Big.   

All of this, hovering like so many bats above his head, and yet his email reply to me seemed upbeat, almost sunny.  He expressed surprise hearing from me, of course, and said he’d often thought fondly of my mother when he drove through Mass. He couldn’t believe I was 30, he saw me last as an 11 year old girl (an angry one, I thought, but he didn’t mention any of that).  He’d love to help me on what he saw as an “interesting quest.”  But with all this excitement of reaching Dominic and having him reach back, I never even considered that he might not remember his friend’s name, the name I needed to get closer to the boat.  “I’m sorry,” he wrote.  “I’ve wracked my brain for the last few days, but the only name that comes to this feeble brain is Ed.”