The Book
The novel Vanishing Act is fiction, but it grew out of an actual happening, the baffling disappearance of Margaret Kilcoyne from Nantucket Island in the 1970’s. No one ever discovered what happened to her, whether she engineered her own mystery or ran afoul of – what? What could happen to anyone, even a woman alone, in the S’conset of the ‘70’s?
The utter absence of clue in her drama haunted me while I worked on an image-driven novel that won admiration but no bites from editors. Finally, when two other news stories began to knock insistently and suggest a credible plot, I embarked on four absorbing years of recalling places important to me, of reading—Europe between the World Wars, plant medicine, the South Bronx, most notably Tom Reiss’s mesmerizing New Yorker article “The Man from the East”—and of writing a story driven by character and events.
I recommend the life to people who can sit still for long periods.
The story opens with a prologue you can read here:
From the Journal of Rose Moore: September 29, 2001
We don’t lose everything. Now and then, some thing, some one, some treasure swept away by tides of greed or carelessness, has the energy to create its own luck and bob up again: a story spirals out of a buried past into the present, taking me entirely by surprise.
Twenty-eight years ago, a woman named Elsa Galen vanished quietly as a ripple from Nantucket, a Massachusetts island known for its fogs and salt-silvered cottages as “’the little grey lady.” So called, that is, by the summer people. Locals steeped in their hair-raising whaling history, weaned on the Sound’s treacherous winds and winter seas, have less affectionate nicknames. They were probably saddened but not shocked when Elsa disappeared without a trace from a place she called home.
The island was different then. Young money hadn’t sprouted into bald, staring palaces on the moors, ousting the subtler native creatures. Summer visitors mothballed dress clothes and arrived by leisurely car ferries to gather simply on beaches or in casual, whimsically furnished cottages. Sea breezes whistled intimately like family around their corners at all hours, whispering “’island”’—Elsa’s own name for the place as though it were the only one in the world.
She was one of the summer people, but she arrived before the ice was off Sackacha Pond and stayed in S’conset at the island’s quiet eastern end till November’s north wind drove her from her woodstove-heated frame cabin. Wherever events took her, a homing instinct drew her back to her island alone to take bearings. She loved the steamboat’s blast—no turning back!—the prosaic mainland shrinking as the ship’s wake arrowed her away into two hours of watery limbo, and then: the bell, the jetties, the little town’s steeple, the stork-like wharf houses sudden in mist—a salt-lapped Brigadoon. The journey traced a pattern satisfyingly dreamlike, yet real: real the harbor, the swooping terns; utterly real the island cab’s dish-faced driver Henry Fickett with his opaque, sea-bleached blue eyes, the last on the island to see her alive.
A friend since childhood, he drove her from the ferry dock to the A&P and the liquor store, swore cheerfully as he loaded her cartons into the trunk of the same stick-shift car she’d learned to drive fifteen years earlier. She rolled down the window, put her flushed face into the wind, pulled the pins out of her heavy blond hair and let it blow into damp corkscrews while he chattered to her all the way out Milestone Road—the straightaway that always felt longer than its eight miles. He helped her into the cottage, watched her light the stove and pour a glass of wine, said, “You’ll be okay now?”
She said, “You’ll be coming to my party!” and waved goodbye. . .
My previous publication credits include poems—2 prize-winning—in small press magazines, and articles for: The Baltimore Sun, Smithsonian Air and Space, Notre Dame Magazine (many pieces for N. D.’s wonderful editor Kerry Temple, including one feature-length on the Seven Deadly Sins), and, when she was about to read her poem for the Clinton Inauguration, a profile for Wake Forest Magazine of Maya Angelou.
Available from your local bookstore or from Maine Authors Publishing
Buy Vanishing Act:
$15.95