You must be outside your mind, girlie, if you think you could do that again.
I crouch down, pressing on my temples, willing the voice to stop so I can focus. Helping Alec will require more than deciding between a soft wrap and a ring sling. It requires the Anderson-indictment me. A version I carefully constructed to have a challenging but manageable job with plenty of time to build the home I always wanted.
Recalling that version of myself, I picture her process, how well she operated. I swipe the eraser across the letters, my pulse pounding as I clean the board. I line up my markers and write each area of inquiry in a different color:
BODY
SUSPECT(S)
ALEC (alibi)
TIME LINE
I do a quick LexisNexis search, thankful my account is still active from the previous job. I search Belina’s name and run Swan Point as a cross-reference if some coverage didn’t include her. My first question: Why is Alec the only suspect?
I’m surprised to see the most coverage is from TheHaleReport.com, which has only one owner, operator, and reporter: Phillip Hale. His blog had been inactive as far as I knew. And my knowledge came from being the one who shut him down.
I half grin at the image of him looking all “serious reporter” on the blog’s header. Something kicks in my gut, but I scroll instead of letting in the guilt. Not yet.
Phillip has a photo from Belina’s freshman year of college at Salve Regina in Newport. She’s pictured in tight jeans and a flowy top, talking to a professor. She’s smiling wide, obviously aware of the photo. One commenter (Oysterdigger77) wrote that she was “probably fucking the whole class.” Some sickos say worse than that, but I skim the rest.
The next article was posted the following morning in the Providence Daily, the main local paper, playing catch-up. It doesn’t report anything new other than the standard “looking into it” from the police communications officer. It runs the same freshman-year photo of Belina, with credit to TheHaleReport.com. There are many more comments on its coverage, mostly racist trolls blaming her murder on “them immigrants, blacks, or Mexicans.” I grew up around plenty of racists in Kansas. I thought in liberal New England, I’d see less of it, but the worst of people grow everywhere.
My disgust with the human race continues with comments about how hot she is and how that probably got her killed. I can’t ignore it now, noting the chatter.
Maybe she did ask for it.
Maybe you’re too stupid to see what your friend really was.
There are slams against the East Side because the police got here so quickly. In other neighborhoods, it would have taken them at least twice as long to get to the scene. A few people theorize that gay prostitutes who supposedly use those woods should be suspects. A dozen insist any woman alone at night is asking for it.
I return to the in-depth coverage from TheHaleReport.com about Belina. Ms. Cabrala was from Newport, Rhode Island, a graduate of Saint George’s Academy, an elite prep school. She attended Salve Regina University in Newport until her sophomore year. Cabrala held hostessing and office jobs.
Alec Mathers, her employer, is described as an entrepreneur in the fishing industry. His business employs recently incarcerated men to give them skills and a paycheck. Misha Mathers is a stay-at-home mom and had employed Cabrala as the full-time nanny for their son, Emmett, three, for the past eighteen months.
I shake my head at the last line because it’s structured for judgment toward Misha. I didn’t take Phillip Hale for someone looking for the cheap shot. I’d know because I took a few at him. And he never gave them back.
Not yet.
In his next major article, Phillip publishes Belina’s private Instagram photos. She didn’t have many: five selfies and three of Emmett from a distance. Someone leaked them or hacked them, and I make a note.
The story explains how Alec had clicked the little red heart on all of them. There are no photos on his Instagram page. Most of the other accounts Alec follows are for local restaurants or boating.
But Phillip’s lead picture that day and for days to come was a selfie Belina had taken with Alec and Emmett on Alec’s boat. There’s sunlight and a corner of a sail behind the three of them, all smiling, especially Emmett. Her caption: With my boys #newport #goodlife #boafortuna #saudade.
I side-eye her use of “my boys,” since they’re not. But my gaze returns to her effervescent smile, and my heart wrenches. I don’t want to think about her smile now—embalmer’s choice—rotting in a dark casket beneath the earth.
I focus on my task and google her saudade hashtag. The word doesn’t have an English equivalent, but it’s about longing for a point in time. Not necessarily a time that’s happened or will ever occur. A quote from a Portuguese writer, Manuel de Melo, pops up. He says saudade is “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”
Neither Alec nor Belina appear to be suffering in that moment, but perhaps she knew pain waited for them back on land.
The alt-weekly newspaper, the Cthulu, named after H. P. Lovecraft, takes all Phillip has written and adds nonattributed quotes from around the neighborhood.
The dead nanny basically raised that kid. I never saw the mom around.
The killer is inside that fancy East Side house.
The kid seemed to love her more than his own parents.
I’m not a Misha apologist, but as a mother, I cringe at the remarks. The coldness of people when a family is in crisis. But I do wonder if Misha was jealous of the closeness between Belina and Emmett. Or the relationship between Alec and Belina. Had she seen the Instagram pictures?
The unattributed quotes were picked up in other articles as “neighborhood perceptions,” whatever that means. For a couple news cycles in the first week, national tabloids ran Phillip’s articles, adding the “hot nanny” quotes and photos. Going viral meant Phillip had little control over the coverage. That was when he changed gears.
Phillip is featured in a special edition of Good Day RI. This half-hour news talk show normally includes local interests: a chef sharing her shrimp scampi recipe or an anchor stomping grapes at the South County wine festival. But two weeks after the unsolved murder, Phillip appears to have pitched a whole show focused on the murder, with him in the driver’s seat.
I click on the video and turn up the volume. After the lead-in, Phillip is sitting in the guest chair, looking sharp in his dark suit and hipster glasses. I watch Good Day RI regularly, the cohosts smiley and upbeat, the man bald and woman blonde, both white. It’s not every day they have a black male guest join them and even rarer that it’s someone breaking news about a local murder.
Ester begins to whine, and I hurry over to rock her bouncer. She’ll need to be fed soon, but I get her calm enough to continue.
Phillip runs through the evidence, teasing the breaking news of a tape. But first there’s footage of the Mathers home, three stories and imposing, before the video shows the other large houses along Cole Avenue. Then there’s a long shot of Belina’s house, which I’ve never seen. Her apartment is located on the west side of Hope, close to busy North Main Street. Phillip explains to non–Rhode Islanders, national producers in particular, the subtext East Siders already know.
The shot pans to more weathered and less pristine places. “The closer you get to North Main, there are fewer single-family homes. Instead houses are split, floor by floor, into apartments.”