The Last Place

CHAPTER 15

Carl Dewitt was given to unnervingly long and deep silences. Such a capacity for quiet could be construed as a sign of strength and power- when the person squinting at the horizon was Clint Eastwood or Dewitt’s beloved William Holden.

But in Carl’s case, his inability to make conversation on the long drive to Virginia simply made Tess aware of his crippling shyness. Unless the subject was Lucy Fancher, he was incapable of warming to any topic. Sometimes, even he became so unnerved by the silence between them that he punctuated it by reading the highway signs out loud.

“BEST BISCUITS AROUND,” he said, as they turned south, not far from Hagerstown. Then, a few miles later: “FLYING J TRUCK STOP. CLEAN RESTROOMS, SHOWERS. CRACKER BARREL. VISIT OUR GIFT SHOP.”

His readings, however, were not endorsements. Carl was appalled when Tess asked where he wanted to stop for breakfast. “I brought along a box of Chix ‘n’ Stix,” he said, pulling out a brand of chicken-flavored crackers that Tess thought had ceased to exist years ago. She declined, and they compromised on a drive-through just outside Martinsburg, West Virginia. Tess had liked the bacon biscuit, soaked with grease, more than she cared to admit.

Back in the car, Carl also seemed to find the radio barely tolerable, grunting when Tess punched the buttons to keep the NPR newscast coming in as they passed through one public radio station’s universe after another.

“That’s news?” he asked at one point, after a report on the funding crisis of an Italian opera company.

“Sure, it’s news. You have to think of the broadcast as an entire newspaper. A story like that would be in the arts section.”

Another grunt.

“Let me guess. You read sports, the front page, and nothing else.”

“I glance at the front page. I don’t follow sports anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“I don’t know. Seems pretty trivial. I liked the Philadelphia teams when I was younger, but only because that station came in clearer than the Baltimore one. But, as the Bible says, I’ve put away childish things.”

“Are you religious?”

“Not particularly. I just remember that verse from when my parents dragged me to church.”

“Which was-”

“Methodist.”

“No, I mean where did you grow up?”

“Right in North East, in the house where I live now. I’ve lived my whole life in Cecil County except for college.”

“Which was-”

“University of Delaware.” He allowed himself a small smile. “The Fighting Blue Hens. I didn’t finish.”

There was something almost compulsive in that last tacked-on sentence, as if he didn’t want to be caught embroidering his résumé in any way.

“Why not?”

“My mom got sick. So I came home and took the job with the state. When I found out I would be stationed at the bridge, right outside my hometown, I thought it was the luckiest day in my life. And I guess it was…”

He did not finish the thought. But Tess thought she understood. The murder of Lucy Fancher had cut through this man’s life, separating him from the person he once was as surely as her killer had separated Lucy’s head from her body. She wondered if Carl had daydreamed, in the boredom of his old job, about doing something more exciting than helping stranded motorists or chasing down people who didn’t pay their tolls. It would have been natural for a young man to yearn in such a fashion.

More natural still to regret those yearnings in the wake of what had happened.

“And your mom?”

“Died. Going on eight years this summer. Time flies.”

“So it does. We’re almost to Spartina.”

Spartina was on the long stretch of interstate that cut through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, near the Shenandoah River. A college town, home to one of the state colleges, it looked like any other small city on an interstate. Lots of fast-food restaurants and one mall, which had leached the life from downtown, now a place of empty shops and small diners that closed by early afternoon. Only the landscape and the syrupy-thick southern accents reminded Tess that she had traveled quite a way from Baltimore.

Their first stop was the small motel, an old-fashioned motor court, where Eric Shivers had spent his last untroubled night on this earth. Spartina had several chain motels, but Eric had been a regular at this family-owned place off the beaten path, a U-shaped arrangement of whitewashed stucco, with planters of geraniums outside the office entrance. The place lacked the amenities that most business travelers considered crucial-a twenty-four-hour restaurant, voice mail, and rooms wired for laptops-but it was homey and restful, the Shenandoah visible from the trampled side yard, where rusty spikes stood waiting for a game of horseshoes.

“Eric Shivers?” The man behind the counter was jolly-looking, with a round flushed face. Bald, he had allowed his remaining fringe of hair to grow wild and woolly, so he looked a little clownish, but in a good way. “Oh, Lord, I haven’t thought of that poor boy for years.”

“You remember him, then?” Tess took the lead automatically, although she and Carl had not discussed this beforehand.

“Surely. I think I’d remember Eric even if it weren’t for that awful thing that happened. I still remember those police officers calling here, then coming down from Maryland to break the news. He couldn’t drive, one of them had to take his van back up there. Oh, he was broken up.” The old man shook his head, lost in the memory. “He came here regular-like, at least once a month for six months, when he was on business. I suppose he’d still be coming, if it weren’t for what happened.”

“And what did he do exactly?”

“Salesman?” But the manager-owner’s voice scaled up, unsure. “He paid calls on customers, but I was never clear-something about chemicals?”

“Photographic supplies, perhaps?”

“That was it.” He looked relieved. “Something to do with chemicals for photographs.”

“So did he go to camera shops or local photography studios?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

“Did he have a regular client he always visited?”

“Oh, Lord, I don’t know. I just checked him in, didn’t quiz him much. He’d usually get down here in the evening, so he could be up and out early the next day, making his rounds, stay one more night, then head out the next day. So I guess he had a lot of customers in the area, but I never knew who they were. I was grateful for his business. We’re more of a seasonal operation, though we do get the overflow on the big school weekends. Eric was a small-town boy.”

Even as Tess and the manager spoke, Carl had slid the local yellow pages from the desk, opened it to CAMERA SUPPLIES, and jotted down every store listed. He then found a listing for PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIOS and did the same.

“So what happened to Eric?” the manager asked. “He go home?”

“I’m not sure. His in-laws”-it seemed only polite to refer to the Guntses this way-“said he went back home, somewhere in the South.”

“The South? This is the South. Maryland’s north.”

“It’s all below the Mason-Dixon line,” Tess said. “But I meant his original home.”

“Oh. I just assumed he always lived in Maryland. Now where did I get that idea? Boy, I haven’t thought of him in years. We had some real nice chats that winter, we sure did.”

“About what?”

“He told me all about his plans, even asked one time what kind of diamond I thought girls like best. ”Big ones,“ I said, meaning it as a joke. But he took everything so seriously. His eyes got all big and dark and he said, ”Not my girl, Mr. Schell. If I gave her a piece of chicken wire she’d wear it as if it were the Hope diamond. She loves me, not the things I give her.“ Oh, he was a literal boy in his way. You couldn’t tease him for anything.”

“The Hope diamond?” Carl spoke up for the first time since he had grunted his name. “Isn’t that the one that’s cursed?”

Mr. Schell looked perplexed. “I thought it was the big old diamond that Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor. But I could be wrong. Memory’s not what it was.”

By day’s end, Tess and Carl had canvassed almost every camera supply store and photography studio in the greater Spartina area. It seemed to Tess that they had questioned almost every person in Spartina who owned a camera, even those disposable ones.

“Modern society is too damn mobile,” she grumbled.

“What do you mean?”

“In the six years since Eric Shivers last visited this town, the jobs at these stores and studios have turned over four-five times.”

“Not the managers,” Carl pointed out. “Besides, what did you expect? The person we’re looking for moved on, most likely. You heard the man back at the motel. Eric Shivers couldn’t help bragging on his girlfriend. So some twisted minimum-wage slave takes it into his head to go up to Frederick and kill her. Then he moves on.”

“So how does he meet Alan Palmer if he’s working in a camera store?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s shooting studio portraits in Kmart. Lucy had one of those done about two weeks before she died. Maybe he’s selling hot dogs at Orange Julius.”

“Then why are we here?” Tess was getting angry at herself. She hated errors of momentum, mistakes born of rushing forward without taking time to think. It was the one thing she tried never to do. “What can we possibly find if we’re looking for someone who’s no longer in Spartina?”

“Something. Anything. Look, we turned Cecil County upside down looking for answers to Lucy’s death. And, best you could tell, the Frederick sheriff ‘s department did a pretty thorough job up there. So this is all we’ve got.”

“No, this is all we’ve got,” Tess said, pulling up outside an old dust-filmed photography studio in a business center that had fallen on hard times. The smiling graduation photographs in the windows of Ashe’s Studio Portraits amp; Fine Photography were clearly fifteen or twenty years old. Caps and gowns didn’t change that much over time, but hairstyles did, and makeup. It had been a decade or so since such full bushy brows had been considered fashionable for women, since lips had gleamed through so many layers of iridescent gloss.

Yet the man inside the studio was not as old as Tess expected. Mid-forties, perhaps, tall and thin with the posture of an al dente noodle, he would have been a college student himself when the window displays were put up. He looked surprised to see anyone enter his store-and not happily so.

“You lost? Need directions back to the interstate?”

“No,” Tess said, “we’re investigators-”

“From the state? I’ll have to see some identification.”

“I’m a Baltimore-based private investigator,” she said, pulling out her billfold and showing her ID.

“And him?” The man jerked his head toward Carl.

“He works with me. Maryland requires an apprenticeship.” The lie jumped out on its own, catching Tess off guard, as her lies often did, and irking Carl. She saw him frown, unhappy at the word, mouthing it to himself: apprentice. But the man’s assumption that they were “from the state” had jarred some instinct. This was someone who worried about trouble crossing his threshold. A particular kind of trouble, brought by a particular brand of authorities. State investigators.

“Are you Ashe?”

“Son of. What does Maryland want with me?”

“We’re looking for people who used to do business with Eric Shivers, a Maryland man who worked this area as a salesman.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah as in ”Yeah, I knew him,“ or ”Yeah, go on‘?“

Ashe had one of those faces that revealed its flaws gradually. His skin tone was splotchy and uneven, his nose a pointy little beak, his chin nonexistent. And his yellow-brown eyes bulged slightly, with so much milky white showing at the edges they made Tess think of deviled eggs gone bad.

“Both,” he said at last. “Although my dad was still alive then, so he was the one Eric dealt with.”

“I’m sorry to hear your father passed away,” Tess said. “Has it been long?”

“A few years back,” the man said, scratching his nonexistent chin. “Five, I think. And don’t be sorry. He was old.”

“What did Eric sell?” This was Carl, his voice too hard, too rushed. It was a traffic-stop voice, not the more consciously casual tones a skilled investigator used.

But the question, despite its argumentative edge, seemed to catch the man off guard. “What-I mean, you were the ones who came in here saying he was in photographic supplies, not me.”

“No, we didn’t say, actually.” Carl stepped forward, getting as close as he could to Ashe Jr., given the dusty counter between them. “We said he was a salesman. What did he sell?”

“Paper.” But it was a question in spite of itself.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know. I know Eric called on my father, but I never took much interest. I’m just sitting on this place until the market recovers and I can get a fair price for the property, put it into something a little more dynamic, you know? I’m not a photographer, and if I’m going to run a business, it’s going to be something a little exciting, with potential for real growth. This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life.”

“Yeah?” Carl leaned forward, so he was nose to nose with the weedy, feckless man. “Well, join the club, buddy. Join the club.”