Invisible Eden A True Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod

PARADISE ICE Cape and Islands First Assistant District Attorney Michael O'Keefe told me to meet him Saturday night. He had agreed to discuss the recent murder of forty-six-year-old fashion writer Christa Worthington, who was found dead on the kitchen floor of her seaside cottage, her toddler daughter nestled by her side. O'Keefe said, "We'll meet. We'll talk. We'll talk about how we keep our mouths shut." He agreed to sit down, but first he was taking me to the Mashpee Wampanoag Winter Ball at the Sons of Italy Lodge in Cotuit. O'Keefe was running for office and had to show up at these community spectacles. It helped to have a woman along. O'Keefe had known Chief Vernon "Silent Drum" Lopez and medicine man Earl Cash, Jr., for a long time, but I'd never met the Wampanoag tribe officials. I knew that in 1620, the Pilgrims had their first encounter with Native Americans in Truro, the small town where I live. A group of half-starved English separatists, led by Miles Standish, pilfered the savages' stash of corn that was buried in a sand dune. It was a rustic caper, but I guess you can say it was the first B&E, or "breaking and entering" violation, perpetrated on Cape Cod by white men. Today, the little crime scene is called Corn Hill. O'Keefe apologized for making me drive all the way up Route 6 on Suicide Alley, a tight two-lane highway that bisects the peninsula, famous for its long chronicle of head-ons. A lot of travelers avoid the bottleneck and turn around. O'Keefe said he didn't know why anyone with free will would choose to live way out on the tip. The Cape Cod peninsula is like a flexed arm thrust into the sea. Truro is at its "wrist," and is only a mile wide at its most narrow site. The slender hook is the afterthought of the Wisconsin Stage glacier, a monstrous wall of ice ten thousand feet thick that shaped all of New England twenty-five thousand years ago. Today, the Outer Cape is still carved and remastered by tides, storm surges, waves, and wind. The Cape is a river of sand; the shoreline continually shifts and rebuilds its ridges. Backshore lagoons arise and disappear from one year to the next. The finial arm is always roaring and tingling, eroding three to six feet a year. All aspects of life this far out are evoked and controlled, atoned for or punished, by the sea. That's what I like about it. But the Outer Cape has a chaotic, fiddlehead topography of dunes and swales that curl around in a spiral. Standing on the breakwater at Land's End, you can lose your sense of direction entirely. What is supposed to be due west is actually looking south, and northward could be east. A person living at the inverted tip has to let go of common sense, drop the reins and rely on intuition, especially in sea mists. "Why do you live way out there, on that clam strip?" O'Keefe said. "You mean Truro?" "That wilderness. Why do you people go for that?" You people could be Truro's movers and shakers, but more likely O'Keefe is referring to the Land's End losers, lost souls and drifters who wash ashore and pile up down here. "I guess it's not for everybody," I said. O'Keefe's sentiments mirrored those of the Reverend James Freeman, who in 1790 wrote about Truro, "What could induce any person to remain in such a place?" Even today, many people think that the Outer Cape is a "no man's land," "a god-forsaken wasteland," or "a situation so completely removed from the stir of society," as Emily Bront' writes in Wuthering Heights. Even Thoreau was appalled by the Outer Cape, and wrote of Truro, "We shuddered at the thought of living there" and "The walker there must soon eat his heart." But for us it's Eden. It's heaven on earth. In fact, at the end of the selectmen's annual report filed in 1982, it was written, "The BoFlook, Maria is the author of 'Invisible Eden A True Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod', published 2010 under ISBN 9780767913744 and ISBN 0767913744.