Missing Woman Leaves 10 Suicide Notes.

I found it in an email digest from Bernews. The Royal Gazette led with the same story.

In connection with Aetna Simmons of Suffering Lane, St. George's, who was reported missing by her landlady last week Monday, a BPS spokesperson said, "Police can confirm that a stack of ten documents was found in Ms. Simmons' home. The content of these documents brings us to the unfortunate conclusion that Ms. Simmons chose to end her life."

One suicide note is an unfortunate conclusion. Ten is no conclusion but the opposite. 10 Suicide Notes? That's a provocation. As far as I know, you can only die once.

What kind of gross excess is this: ten different suicide notes or ten replicas of the same? Vulgar excess or feverish excess? Is there a difference between vulgar and feverish? Say it's ten of the same. Like birth announcements. Invitations to a soiree. A newsletter for friends and family. Some people do that in lieu of Christmas cards.

"The Bermuda Police Service extends our gratitude to those who may have considered assisting in the island-wide search, which will be postponed until further notice."

Say the documents are all different. Ten unique suicide notes. Why not nine, like the Muses? What's so great about ten? An even number, five plus five. Stroke and circle. Ten fingers, ten commandments, ten Egyptian plagues.

Why bother with one, let alone ten? So you take leave of the living under a cloud of misunderstanding. What do you care, now that you're dead? And the article said stack. Meaning paper documents, not on a computer. Why go to that kind of trouble? Before killing yourself, you'd have to go to the post office, stand in line, Good afternoon, I need some thirty-five-cent stamps. Oh, but this one's going overseas ... I thought about this a lot. Driving to work. Parking in my exclusive spot. Being gentle with the door on my MG, green and seductive as jealousy and springtime. My job was to feed unwanted documents to an industrial shredder, so it's not like I had a lot to think about.

Ten suicide notes.

What does that even look like? Glass panes in a skyscraper? Pieces of ruined church lying down on each other as they crumble? Dear Friends ... But you may not have friends if you're writing this kind of note. Dear Unfeeling World, Up yours. Signed sincerely ...

Aetna Simmons left ten unique suicide notes at Suffering Lane. Altogether they form a corpus. But in the most telling hypothesis, they're also a sequence in which each successive document replaces the one before. A series of drafts.

You know. A document wherein an author is doomed to discover that an unintelligible, even ugly reality has gobbled his or her intentions. This condition, symptomized by wailing and gnashing of teeth, is what writers call a draft. Remedies include the delete key, wastepaper basket, and starting over.

How do I know all this? I know the ten final dispatches of Aetna Simmons are all different from each other because I arranged to read them. I ordered photocopies with descriptions of the original inks and papers. How'd I get this stuff? Easy. I can get anything I want.

Inspector Javon Bean is a faithful client of mine. Built like a quarterback, whines like a toddler. Even e-whines: he's not on the Simmons case, can't get the file, people might ask questions. I said, "You're writing a book. Unsolved Mysteries in the Bermuda Triangle." That took care of the questions. I said, "Next round's on the house." That took care of the whining.

Since it would be foolhardy to give my email address to clients, Javon locked us inside his spacious office. We sat at his pristine desk. I enjoyed, instead of windows, a large photograph of the inspector in dress uniform looking like he was one-up on things. Pictures of his children acquiring Sports Day ribbons lined up beside their father's image like ellipses.

He gave me an envelope. I gave him an envelope. He peeked into his envelope.

"On the house," he said, just to see if I'd developed amnesia overnight. I sat there and let that jackass look at me.

He actually squirmed. "Well, like the paper says, we sort of shelved the case."

"Not because you found her. Because you didn't find her."

"It's been ten days. And we haven't announced this, but you know the landlady? Jeesums, bye, she calls it in like, 'I think my tenant might've disappeared.' Might. Like it's just a few cents' difference between being there and not there. She up and died this morning. A stroke. Myrtle Trimm, eighty-one. Cleaning woman found her in her recliner." Javon's got a bad case of the umums. Sheumum, she up and died. It's an endemic condition.

I asked, "What's she got to say? The cleaning lady."

"Two dead clients back to back? Ya girl must've started thinking they don't call this place The Devil's Isles for nothing. Next flight out, she was down the front of the line. With three of her mates." Javon got a knee-whacking chortle out of this.

"Any other leads?"

Aceboy looked at me like I'd asked a stupid question. I reminded him of the expense involved in producing certain pharmaceuticals. On the house.

"Mrs. Trimm didn't get her rent," he said. "Normally the tenant did everything like clockwork. Only time the landlady even saw her was rent days. But this month? Nothing. She wasn't there when Mrs. Trimm went to her apartment. Went down a couple times a day, three days in a row. Then she called us. Guess she needed money."

Skimming the case file, he added, "Tenant lived alone, no noise, no pets, no visitors. No car, no bike. TCD says she didn't have no license. Checked Immigration. No record of a work permit or Bermuda passport. US Immigration: nobody named Aetna Simmons been through their system. Canada the same. No UK passport was issued to Aetna Simmons, and no Bermuda passport with that name has been through London. No record in the schools. Nothing at the hospital. On her lease she wrote consultant as her profession, but no employer came forward. Saltus thought he had some evidence she'd had dealings with Clocktower, some insurance company. They never heard of her either, she didn't have no life insurance. No will, no debts."

"No body," I noted.

"Nothing for the coroner, nothing for the sketch artist."

"Nothing. Like she was already a ghost."

"First responding constable, that's what he thought too. Old lady, home by herself all the time, no husband. And no wonder, man. Cha. Saltus said she talked more to herself than to him. Only time she talked to him was to snap his head off. A police inspector's trying to ask her questions and she's snapping his head off. Minus a couple marbles, know what I'm saying? Maybe Aetna Simmons was her imaginary friend.

"But according to the file," Javon continued, "her apartment had a tenant at some point. It was clean, didn't look like nobody gone off in a hurry. Toothbrush in the bathroom. Clothes and stuff in the closet. Personal articles suggest a woman, not too fat, medium height. No fancy dresses, no business suits. Says here...