Because the low, thin island is so difficult to see, it’s caused a large number of shipwrecks over the centuries, often illustrated on maps of the island, like Molly Metropolis’s screen print where the shipwrecks are represented with tiny drawings of colonial-era ships. With approximately 350 shipwrecks on its shores between 1583 and 1999, Sable earned the nickname “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
The final shipwreck to date, in 1998, was also the only wreck of a private yacht, called the Merrimac. The yacht possibly belonged to an American family. The CCGC investigated the crash but determined that the causes were “non-criminal.” The records of the investigation, like all records of non-criminal investigations that occurred before the police digitized their files, were trashed ten years after the investigation closed, in 2009, before Molly disappeared. The Canadian aquatic force sent two or three copies of the report to the FBI summarizing the investigation, indicating that they believed the victims were American. Although the FBI was more than willing to provide me with the files under the Freedom of Information Act, they couldn’t find them. Probably misfiled, the records won’t be recovered for years, when the FBI finishes digitizing many decades’ worth of physical, low-priority files. As a result, few verifiable details of the wreck survive.
Relying on rumor to guide me towards truth, I discovered that an American family was causing some trouble about Sable a year before the shipwreck. Charles and Margot Pullman, a wealthy couple, both successful architects and cousins to the Daley family on Margot’s side, had a ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth — a spoiled and precocious child. Elizabeth read about Sable in an Encyclopedia Britannica and developed a strong desire to own one of the island’s feral horses. Charles and Margot, to reward Elizabeth’s inquisitive bookishness, began pursuing legal means to acquire a Sable Island horse for their daughter.
When the Canadian government denied their requests, the Pullmans allegedly threw an epic public tantrum and planned to illegally abduct a horse. They reportedly bribed a young member of the CCGC to allow them unfettered access to the island on an appointed night. Later that year, the Merrimac washed up on the Northeastern shore of Sable, the area of the island that has collected the highest number of shipwrecks. The CCGC aquatic force pulled four bodies out of the water, three adults and one child. The remains were DNA tested but the results are unavailable somehow the reports were never sent to any other U.S. authority other than the FBI, or the bodies were never identified even through testing, or the identities of the dead were never otherwise reported by some other bureaucratic folly. The recovered pieces of the Merrimac had been fitted with animal containment devices a few days before the crash. One week later, the Pullman family and their stable manager, Anthony Perkins, were reported missing. When the family didn’t reappear and were presumed dead, their substantial financial holdings, reportedly in the hundreds of millions, were transferred to an urban renewal charity, the Becker-Ho Foundation, in accordance to Charles and Margot’s last will and testament.
The Pullmans didn’t own a yacht but certainly had the means to buy, rent, or borrow one quickly. In 1999, only three of all the yachts registered in Canada, the United States, and Nova Scotia were called Merrimac. Two of them are still in use today. A Chicago resident named Bruce Adler, a wealthy bachelor in his fifties, owned the third Merrimac. Adler registered the Merrimac with the Chicago Yacht Association and reported that he docked the yacht at the Inner Jackson Harbor until 2001, when he broke the ship down to scrap wood. However, the Inner Jackson Harbor’s longtime Harbor manager, Nancy Gould, remembers that that sailboat, not a yacht, was always tied to Adler’s dock.
Did the Pullman family borrow Adler’s yacht, sail it to Sable with the intent of stealing a horse, and accidentally crash on the shore of the island? If so, what would Alder have to gain by concealing this fact? And why would a twenty-three-year-old pop star have a screen-printed version of a map of the island on her wall? Where would a map like that even come from?
I can only answer the final question. Molly Metropolis commissioned the screen print on her wall, but it was copied almost exactly from a map called “Sable Island: Known Wrecks Since 1583,” drawn by John Fauller and now part of the collection at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.
For whatever reason, Molly must’ve considered her screen print version of that map one of her most important wall hangings. Besides the place of prominence she gave it above her bed, she also used it as a hiding place. When Taer moved the print, a notebook, which had been wedged between the wooden box frame and the wall, fell onto the bed. Nix recognized it immediately. It was Molly Metropolis’s personal diary.
* This recording is a harbinger of a fixation Taer developed with her recording device. She zealously recorded most of her conversations about Molly, spurred on early in her investigation by something Molly wrote in her own notebook: “Never work, always document!”—the phrase itself was a cheeky bastardization of a Situationist assertion “Never work!” Molly strove to make the act of living her life its own art. The documentation of her actions was compulsory, so art could be made without work.
† “Brian Slade” refers to Todd Haynes’s 1999 film Velvet Goldmine, about a David Bowie pastiche character who faked his own death onstage.
‡ Molly Metropolis wasn’t the only celebrity who stayed there. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie famously favored the Peninsula whenever they stayed in Chicago with their brood.
§ This is a theory that her family and friends contested to the police as strongly as Nix contested it to Taer. In September 2009, on an unreleased date, Molly Metropolis’s mother, Melissa Young, underwent open heart surgery. Molly stayed with her family at the hospital for a week, and was attentive all through the tour. Molly’s family believed that she never would’ve disappeared purposefully while her mother was still recovering.
ǁ The Transit Subcommittee chose plans designed by Savoy’s rival, Ronald Mansfield, but those plans weren’t implemented either because the Commercial Transport Committee eventually chose to divert the L restoration funds to building another Metra line, the Metra Electric South Shore Line that Taer and Nix used to travel between the city and Flossmoor.
Chapter 3
After packing the rest of Molly Metropolis’s belongings into boxes and ferrying them to the hotel’s mailroom, Nix and Taer left the Peninsula, taking Molly’s notebook with them. When I spoke with Nix, she told me they stole the notebook out of “simple curiosity.” However, in an interview with Berliner, when I asked him if he could provide an outside perspective on Nix’s comment, Berliner said: “Their curiosity wasn’t simple.”
Nix and Taer didn’t examine the notebook’s contents until they got back to Taer’s apartment and Taer’s roommate had gone out for the evening, leaving dirty dishes in the sink. For half an hour, they thumbed through the pages together, reading passages out loud and examining Molly’s sketches of outfits and accessories. After this brief examination, Nix decided not to delve any deeper into Molly; she felt done with the notebook. Reading it felt like a betrayal, or like “grave-robbing your grandmother,” as Nix told me.