Laura Lippman: The Last Place

“But doesn’t this whole thing prove how angry I am, if not downright psychotic? Aren’t you and Judge Halsey going to use this as an excuse to extend my term here? I fired nine shots at a man I could have allowed to live. Isn’t that wrong?”

“You were fighting for your life. In hindsight, you see that you had choices. But you were weak, you couldn’t outrun him. You had to use the gun.”

“So why nine shots. Why not just one or two?”

“You tell me, Tess. You say you left one bullet in the gun to show you were in control. But what’s the significance of nine?”

Eric, Becca, Tiffani, Lucy, Hazel, Michael, Julie, Carl-and Jonathan. But only the first eight names had been reported in the media. Tess had never spoken of Billy Windsor’s twisted motive, never explained how they had met. She had found, much to her amazement, a tiny flicker of sympathy for Luisa O’Neal, faint but true. Let her die with her family’s reputation intact, if it meant so much to her. Luisa didn’t have much left, lying in a hospital bed beneath a sign advising that she wore cloth diapers. The only thing she had to look forward to was her own glowing obituary. So be it.

Besides, if Tess could forgive Luisa, she might also begin to forgive herself.

She chewed her lower lip. “One day I might tell you. Not yet. But one day.”

“If it’s any comfort, I think you’re doing extraordinarily well. You’ve begun to sleep through the night without medication. You tell me your appetite is back, and it does look as if you’ve gained some of the weight you lost. I don’t expect we’ll go beyond the court-mandated term- which ends in October.”

“October twenty-eighth, to be exact. Not that I’m keep track or anything.” But she smiled, and he smiled back.

Finally, all the instruments agreed that the hour was over, and Tess was free, at least for another week. She walked out into an already-searing morning, the seventh in an oppressive heat wave. Now that it was August, every day was a Code Red day. Crow and Whitney waited in the Adirondack chairs, flanked by a panting Esskay and Miata. They followed her almost everywhere she went these days, in some combination. Whitney and Crow, Esskay and Miata. Sometimes Tess wanted to remind them of what could happen to those who got too close to her. But they would not be deterred, and in the end she did not want them to be.

She realized Crow was sitting where Carl had sat just seven weeks earlier, on another Code Red day, a day when sheer momentum had carried them too far and fast. They should have stopped in those increasingly manic twelve hours, should have paused for breath, taken a moment to think things through-but they hadn’t. They simply hadn’t. In hindsight, she could pick apart what she did, what they did, the mistakes they made.

But at the time, everything had made sense. Sort of.

“We thought,” Crow said, “you might like to get out of town for a long weekend, since we didn’t do anything for the Fourth this year. Get out of town, get out of this horrible air.”

“Where?”

“Ocean City?” Whitney put in. “Or my parents’ place at the shore. Or maybe even down to Saint Mary’s, to a bed-and-breakfast-”

“No, no, let’s head west for a change, toward the mountains. Out of Maryland, even. We could go to Berkeley Springs or somewhere else in West Virginia.”

Whitney wasn’t fooled. “Don’t let Billy Windsor keep you from the places you love, Tess. Don’t give him that power.”

“I’m not. I just want… a change of scenery.”

She could not tell them about the new nightmare, the waking one, where Billy Windsor waited for her everywhere: in every small town, along every hidden inlet of the Patapsco, in every industrial park glimpsed from the highway, behind the wheel of every van that tail-gated her on the Jones Falls Expressway, beneath the bill of every baseball cap on a brown-haired man of six feet or so. Billy Windsor had finally forged the lasting bond he wanted with a woman. Just her luck, it was her. They would be together for quite some time. Not forever, but longer than it took a knee to heal, and she needed to confront that unhappy fact.

But not today. Not now.

“Let’s go,” she said. “West. Away from the water.”

Thanks to the stalwarts (Joan Jacobson, Vicky Bijur, Carrie Feron) and some new technical advisers-particularly Dr. Mark S. Komrad, Heather Dewar, and Tom Horton. I could not have written this book without the guidance of Tom’s An Island Out of Time , which helped me create the mythical island that appears here. It should be noted that Father Andrew White is a real person and he did keep journals on his trip to the New World, but he never described Notting Island, for it exists only in my imagination. This is a work of fiction.

This book was written during what proved to be my final year at the Baltimore Sun , and I want to include here the dedication that Rafael Alvarez was not allowed to use in Storyteller , a collection of his newspaper pieces published by the Sun in 2001: Thank you to the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild for allowing Rafael, me, and thousands of other workers-past, present, and future-to earn a living wage.

Laura Lippman was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twelve years. Her Tess Monaghan novels are Baltimore Blues ; CharmCity ; Butchers Hill ; In Big Trouble ; The Sugar House ; In a Strange City ; The Last Place ; and Every Secret Thing . She has won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, and Anthony Awards. Ms. Lippman lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Please visit www.lauralippman.com.