Laura Lippman - The Last Place

For a moment, Tess thought he was talking about Crow. Even when she understood the question, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with this your guy/my guy rhetoric. It made it sound as if they were in a rotisserie baseball league, swapping stats about starting pitchers.

“I don’t know what Eric Shivers looked like. But Tiffani was pretty enough, almost like a changeling. It was hard to imagine how such a tiny, elfin girl emerged from that sour, doughy family.”

“And what did your guy do?”

“Salesman-in camera supplies, I think. Or maybe it was film. Something to do with photography.”

“Hmmmm.” Carl stroked his chin. “Hard to see how someone hooks up professionally with these two, one being in camera supplies, the other an antique scout. Where was he the night she died?”

“Spartina, Virginia. It’s a college town in the Shenandoah Valley.”

“Out of town. Just like Alan.”

“Yeah.”

Carl stood, with some difficulty. It wasn’t just that his chair held him tight. One of his knees, the left one, seemed to give him some trouble. He wobbled a little, but he didn’t lose his balance.

“Let’s go.” He was remarkably pleased with himself.

“Go where? It’s nine o’clock. The only place I’m going tonight is back to Baltimore. This has been the creepiest day I’ve spent in a long time, and I just want to sleep in my own bed, with my dogs. And my boyfriend.”

Carl looked disappointed. “I didn’t really mean-didn’t you get it? ”Let’s go.“ ”

“To Spartina? Right now? It’s almost nine o’clock.”

“No, you don’t get it. ”Let’s go.“ It’s the key line of The Wild Bunch. William Holden says, ”Let’s go,“ and there’s, like…” His voice trailed off at the incomprehension in her face. “You’ll have to see it sometime. It’s only the greatest movie ever made. I’ve got it on DVD and wide-screen VHS. The scorpion in the opening shot looks six feet long!”

He gestured to the bookcases that flanked his large television. There were some books there, but there were far more DVDs and videocassettes.

“So you don’t want to go anywhere? You’re just doing movie dialogue?”

“No, I think we should go to Spartina. Your guy went there a lot, isn’t that what you said?”

“At least once a month, according to his almost in-laws.”

“And Alan had to go down the shore on a regular basis, to hit the auctions. Okay, picture this. There’s a bartender, works in some nowhere place. Guy pulls his girl’s picture out when he’s had a few beers. She’s pretty. She’s wonderful. He’s going to marry her. Can’t stand being away from her so much. Or maybe he shows her photograph to another traveling salesman type, a guy who can’t get a girl, doesn’t have anyone back home.”

“Sounds a little crazy.”

She caught a flash of ire in Carl Dewitt’s face, a stereotypical redhead’s temper.

“It’s not crazy. Maybe far-fetched, but I’m just talking out loud, trying to think this through. You came to my door, remember? Well, now you’re here, so listen to me.

“I know everything about how Lucy Fancher died. I know everything about Lucy Fancher. I know her birth date and her perfume-lily of the valley. I know she wore a color she called periwinkle, although it looked like just plain lavender to everybody else. I know she had put a hundred dollars down on a wedding dress and veil on Labor Day weekend. It was going to be a Christmas wedding. I know what the weather was like the night she died-cold, for October, and damp. I know the tides for that day and that the moon was new. Her nearest neighbor watched the ten o’clock news before he went to bed, the next-nearest neighbor gave out Butterfingers and Baby Ruths to the trick-or-treaters.”

“I-”

But Carl was too wound up to hear her, to hear anything. “You think the hot-shit state trooper who was in charge of the case knows even half of what I know? One-fourth? One-tenth? I don’t know if there’s any link between her and this girl who died out in Frederick. But if there is, I’ll be the one to see. No one else can help you, assuming you want any help. Assuming you really understand what you’ve found here.”

The photographs of Lucy Fancher were still in view. They were poorly lit, the kind of black-and-white crime-scene photos that Tess rushed past whenever she steeled herself to read textbooks on investigative techniques. Death was so undignified. That was its real power. People looked stupid when they were dead.

“If you come down to Baltimore tomorrow, we can drive to Spartina together. It will be a long day, but with two of us driving it shouldn’t be so bad.”

Carl nodded at the photos. “She got to you, didn’t she?”

Tess started to shake her head no but ended up agreeing.

“She gets to everyone, eventually.”

He awakens by the side of the road and for one panicky moment cannot remember where he is. Can barely remember who he is. But slowly he gets his bearings. There is his old patchwork pillow beneath his cheek, which he imagines still carries the scent of his boyhood home, although the cover has been washed many, many times. Not a week goes by that he doesn’t stop at a Laundromat and watch the faded gingham pieces turn somersaults through the porthole of a coin-operated dryer.

He is in the back of the van, parked somewhere off Route 5 in southern Maryland. The rear of the van is windowless, but light is playing at the edges of the windshield, sneaking in. It had been late when he finished last night, and he was bone-tired. It’s hard work, what he does, physically demanding. The people who hire him don’t always get that. They understand the mess, the need for care and discretion, but they don’t realize how strong you have to be, how much manual labor is involved. Exhausted, incapable of driving the rest of the way home, he had pulled into a parking lot near the Amish flea market and slept his usual dreamless sleep. He is here, the time is now, he is whole, all is well.

He had a real scare in Saint Mary’s City last night. He thought he saw a woman he once knew, peering hard into his face. Luckily, he doesn’t have the beard and his hair is back to its normal shade, but someone who had been close to him might see the resemblance. Then again, people don’t see what they don’t expect to see, and no one ever expects to see him. Still, the incident served to remind him of all the places that are lost to him.

That’s why he’s trying to get everything under control. He was not meant to live like this. He wants to put down roots, stay put. He wants what everyone wants, and there’s no crime in that.

He rolls up his sleeping bag, places the pillow in its usual spot, on the passenger seat of the van, and sets off north, the rising sun almost painful in the perfection of its shape, the flatness of its color. This is not the sun he grew up with. This is an angry sun, querulous and irritable, appearing on the horizon with great reluctance, then shooting up into the sky as if it wants to get the day done. He asked his mother once if she noticed how many colors she lost upon moving here, how the more subtle shades and variations had been drained from the sky and the water, even the trees and the land. She just looked at him as she often did- fond but uncomprehending, utterly baffled. Love does not guarantee understanding.

Today, as he glances at the sun off to the right, watches it ascend in the sky and change from plain red to dull yellow, he realizes they are in the same boat, him and the sun. They are in exile, unhappy and hollow. The earth still revolves around the sun, but the world tends to forget that fact, even as the sun’s rays reach through the thinning atmosphere, quietly claiming more victims.