The Last Place

CHAPTER 20

“There is no boat to Notting Island,” said the craggy-faced man sitting on his boat along one of Crisfield’s docks, eating a late lunch and washing it down with something in a paper sack. Tess realized she had been watching people eat all day, but had not eaten anything herself since her 7 A.M. bagel.

“Then how do people get there?” Carl asked.

“I mean there’s no ferry, no regular-like boat. You want to go there, you have to charter something.”

“There’s a boat to Smith Island,” Tess said. “Notting’s just a little beyond that.”

“Yes, ma’am, there is. Because people got reason to visit Smith Island. It has an inn and that whatchamacallit, the visitor center. Notting’s got nothing like that. Notting’s got nothing. In fact, some say-”

“Yes, we know what some say,” Tess said. They had been traversing Crisfield’s docks for almost forty-five minutes, and they had heard the old yarn about Notting’s name at least four times.

But they had yet to find a way over.

“Well,” the semi-ancient mariner said, peeved to have his story rebuffed, “the fact is, no one goes to Notting but those what live there, and they have their own boats. There’s the school boat-”

“Then put us on that,” Carl said.

“It’s not mine to put anyone on. Besides, the school boat would put you there after four, with no way to get back, and you’d be stuck there all night. There’s no place to stay, no motels or the like.” He gave Tess a once-over. “You don’t look like you’d be inclined to sleep on the ground, getting bit by bugs. No, best thing to do is charter something in the morning, like you was going fishing or sightseeing. Then you can come and go as you want.”

“Isn’t there anyone who will charter a boat now?”

“Those who got boats to rent don’t have ‘em this late in the day, not on a day this pretty. Fishing is for early risers.”

“I’ve been around boats all my life,” Carl said. “If you’d let me use your boat, or even rent it-”

“I’m not Hertz,” he said, after a quick sip from his bag. “I’m not even Avis. I don’t try harder.”

The man laughed a beat late, as if caught off guard by his own wit. His face was a topographical wonder, creased with lines, the nose and forehead rising out of the folds like mountain ranges. His thick white hair had a texture closer to fur. He looked as if he lived under the dock, crawled out during the daylight hours for the sun, and then retreated into the shadowy damp at nightfall.

“Did we tell you we were working with the state police?” Carl asked.

The semi-ancient mariner spat in reply.

But Tess was sliding crisp twenties from her billfold, counting them covertly, because people are more apt to notice the actions one tries to hide, just the way ears perk up at a whisper. She had ten in all. Something clicked in the man’s eyes when she peeled the fifth bill off the roll. She handed them over, along with her ID.

“So you know we have to come back.”

“You’ll bring her in by dark? I’d like to go home for supper tonight.”

“Guaranteed.”

Not quite convinced, he gave Carl a measuring look. “You really know boats?”

“Yes, sir. I grew up in Cecil County, have my own sailboat. I’ve sailed the upper waters of the bay, as well as the Susquehanna.”

“Well,” the man said, “I guess that almost counts as growing up on water.”

The bare-bones powerboat wasn’t much for speed, yet Crisfield faded behind them almost too quickly. It seemed to Tess a long time before land came into view, and that was Smith Island, nine miles out.

They kept going, Carl consulting the bay chart he had thought to buy, until a smaller, more compact land form came into view.

“Notting Island,” he said.

“Some say it was meant to be Nothing Island.”

“Yeah,” he said, catching their benefactor’s odd accent just right. “That they do.”

“But others say Knot Island.”

“That they do.”

Tess began laughing, and Carl allowed himself a smile. In their search for transportation to the island, they had not only been forced to hear the story of its curious name over and over, they had heard the legends about its would-be names. One version had that it was once Knot Island, for it was a lumpy fist of a place when first charted, tight as a good knot. Others said it began as Nothing Island and cited as their proof a line from Father Andrew White’s diary, kept on that first voyage to Maryland, when the Ark and the Dove had sailed into the bay. He wrote about seeing “an island so small it might as well be nothing” not long before arriving at Point Lookout on the Western Shore.

For such a tiny island, it had more than its share of lore. The men along the Crisfield docks had told them that Notting Island almost disappeared in the early twentieth century. Literally. The bay began to beat at it from all sides, eroding its shores. Other islands in the bay, such as Shank, had been pummeled in this fashion, becoming uninhabitable. Notting had seemed bound for a similar destiny. Then a huge storm came up, and when it was over the bay had somehow reversed itself and decided to spare Notting. Or so the old men said.

They also said Notting was cursed, haunted by the ghost of a young waterman killed in a drunken brawl, the only homicide recorded on any of the bay islands in the last fifty years. He had been accused of poaching, which was to an island community what horse-stealing was to the Old West. Falsely accused, it turned out, for the poaching continued after he was dead. He was said to haunt the island to this day, stealing other young men like himself.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Tess asked Carl as he guided the boat into the narrow channel that led to the main dock in Tyndall Point, the larger of the two towns on the island. She was learning that such impersonal questions were the best way to draw him out. He had come a little bit out of his shell, over the time they had spent together, but he was still quick to retreat.

“Lord, no. And definitely not this ghost. It’s just a story and it does what stories do.”

“Which is-?”

“Stories make the truth less painful. Young people leave these islands because there’s no more work, no way to making a living. I bet not even two hundred people live on this island now. The bay may have spared Notting, but the twenty-first century won’t. It’s dying. It’s easier to blame that on some nonexistent ghost than to face up to the reality that a way of life is passing.”

Not even two hundred. Tess tried to fix that number in her mind, to find some context for it. Her high school graduating class had almost twelve hundred students. Camden Yards held forty-five thousand fans. Two hundred was tiny.

Then again, how many people did she have in her life proper? Even with her large family and her almost promiscuous attitude toward friendship, there could not be fifty people on the planet who truly mattered to her. And she had carved that fifty out of a metropolitan area of almost two million. If you started with two hundred, would you have more close friends or fewer?

Tyndall Point was forlornly picturesque, with white clapboard houses scattered along crooked streets. The focal point was clearly the weathered general store, a dingier white, with two sets of gas pumps- one on the dock and one on land-although it was hard to see where cars could go on the island. Then again, there must be some use for cars, because a field of rusting auto carcasses and abandoned appliances sat not a hundred yards from the store.

“Let’s hope,” Carl said, “that we walk into that store and find some old busybody who has been keeping track of anyone and everyone since time began. Because this is not a place where a stranger wants to go knocking on doors.”

The girl behind the counter was younger, at least in years, than Tess. But there was a curious wisdom in her young face, a cool indifference that would have been at home on Baltimore’s toughest drug corner. Smooth was the word that came to Tess’s mind-the girl had shiny hair that had been pulled back in a ponytail that deserved to be called silken, creamy skin, blue eyes so dark they were opaque. And her manner was slick as marble. Polite but hard, with nothing to grasp.

“We’re trying to find someone who lives here,” Carl said, leaning on the counter. Tess found herself wishing he were just a little better looking, or a lot more charming. “I suspect if they’re here, you know them.”

“I wouldn’t claim that,” the girl said.

“This girl-she’d be a woman now-I’m not even sure she’s here anymore. But she was a teenager here, maybe fifteen years ago.”

“More likely my mother would have known her,” the girl said. She did not, Tess noticed, offer to find her mother.

“Her name was Becca,” Tess put in. She did not mind Carl’s new deferential manner, but she wondered why he had not identified himself, flashed his badge, and said he worked for the state police. Most people want to cooperate with the police. Not in West Baltimore, perhaps, but certainly the law would be welcome here.

“Becca,” the girl repeated, with no show of recognition. “Not Rebecca?”

“No, just Becca.”

“Hmmm. You don’t recall a last name?”

“Harrison,” Carl said.

“That’s not one of the five families.”

“Five families.”

“The year-round residents. There are only five surnames in Tyndall Point, give or take an odd cousin or a newcomer. She must have been summer people. But they tend to come for one season and not come back. Can’t say as I blame ‘em. I sure wouldn’t choose to live here.”

She was projecting her words, speaking for someone else’s benefit. But for whom? The store was empty as far as Tess could tell.

“So Becca doesn’t ring a bell?”

“Huh?” The girl had drifted off, bored with them.

“Harrison,” a voice pronounced from behind a floor-length pair of oilcloth curtains that hung in a doorway behind the counter. A woman came out, and Tess felt as if she were staring at one of those cruel computer-generated projections of how a face ages. For here was the smooth girl in thirty years’ time, dried and gnarled. The shiny brown hair would turn gray and wiry, the complexion would mottle. But it was the hands that caught Tess’s eyes. They were huge, with ropy tendons and long thick fingers so big they appeared permanently splayed.

“The Harrisons lived here some years back. This one was in diapers then, if she was born at all.” Mother gave daughter a hard look. “For all the sense she has, maybe she should be in diapers now. What has it been, twenty years?”

“Closer to fifteen,” Carl said.

“Twenty, seventeen, fifteen, ten. The fact is, it seems like it was forever ago, and it seems like it was just yesterday. That’s how you know you’re getting old, when it all blends together.”

Old? The woman couldn’t have been more than forty-five.

“So you knew this girl, Becca Harrison?”

“I wouldn’t say I knew her.” Tess understood that “knew” was not a word to be used lightly here. “We were aware of them, of course. And the father, he was said to be someone. Come to think of it, he was the one who said it. I never heard of him before, and no one heard from him after, so I don’t know how famous he could have been.”

“Famous for what?”

“He wrote for magazines. Or so he said. I never saw his name in nary a one.” She gestured at the dusty racks in front of her cash register, where she had copies of TV Guide, People, and Sports Illustrated. “He said he was going to write a book about the island, but that never came along neither.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“He went by Harry Harrison. I suppose there may have been parents foolish enough to call their boy such a thing, but I hope he had a real name too. I just never heard it.”

Tess’s fingers itched to take notes, but she had learned that nothing made people dry up faster than seeing their words scratched onto a pad. She was trying to train herself to listen hard enough so she didn’t need to write things down. But it was tricky. Her memory wasn’t as good as she wanted to believe it was.

“How long has it been since he lived here?”

“Like I said, he wanted to write a book about Notting, a made-up story. So he moved on, found some other place to write about, I guess.”

“And Becca went with him?”

“Well, I swagger a man’s children should go where he goes, don’t you?”

I swagger. The unexpected localism was so charming, so unexpected, that Tess almost missed the woman’s neat evasiveness. She hadn’t said yes, she hadn’t said no, and her expression was cat-sly.

“Is there anyone here who knew Becca well, who counted her as a friend? Or her father, for that matter?”

“The Harrisons kept to themselves. The father claimed to like it that way. Said he had a clearer vision of what he was seeing here. We liked it that way too. He was… a frivolous man.”

“How do you mean? Did he drink, act silly?”

“Ah, you won’t catch me making judgments about those who drink. Drink is legal here, in Tyndall Point.” She nodded toward the refrigerated cases, three in all. Behind two were the greens, golds, and browns of domestic beers, while the third held a few essentials, such as eggs and cheese and milk. “Just beer, no hard stuff. The store over to Hark-ness, now, they don’t carry anything.”

“What made Harry Harrison frivolous?” Carl asked.

“Why, he didn’t do a lick of work that anyone could see. People work hard here. His idea of working was to wander around asking improper questions. Now, we’re used to being studied. College students, reporter people, those folks who care more about the marsh grasses than they do about human beings-”

“Environmentalists?”

“So they call themselves. Anyway, we know something about people who are making a study. But Harry Harrison, he was just interested in himself and how Notting affected him. He couldn’t see the way he affected Notting.”

The old woman looked thoughtful, as if she had said something she had long felt but never found the words for until today.

“But Becca-is there anyone here who would remember Becca or would still be in touch with her?” Tess pressed. As interesting as it was to contemplate the hapless Harrison, wandering around the island in his solipsistic state, it was his daughter they needed.

“Oh, I doubt it. As I said, they kept to themselves. Now”-the woman leaned forward and pressed her hands on the counter, until they looked like a griffin’s talons-“now, I suppose you’ll be wanting to buy something.”

Tess understood they were expected to repay the woman for the time they had taken, although it appeared that time was an abundant commodity on Notting Island. She picked up a bag of Oreos. The woman raised one eyebrow. Tess added a few cans of beans, a Slim Jim. The eyebrow stayed up and didn’t budge until Tess had amassed about $40 worth of groceries she didn’t need. Really, this woman could beat Whitney in an eyebrow Olympics.

“Do you think they were telling the truth?” she asked Carl as they headed back for Crisfield, racing the setting sun. It had been a clear day, but a few clouds had drifted onto the western horizon, creating a spectacular sunset. The world was turning purple and rose, and Tess was drinking a beer, part of the toll back in the general store. She wondered if the woman always charged six dollars for a six-pack of Old Milwaukee.

They had not relied on the old woman’s testimony that no one in Tyndall Point would remember Becca Harrison, much less know her whereabouts. Old woman-funny, how Tess kept thinking of her that way. They probably weren’t much more than fifteen years apart in age, and Tess did not plan to be old at forty-five. But the woman in the store had been like some withered sage in a myth, full of obscure portents and warnings.

And, like the heroes in a typical myth, they had ignored her hints. They had knocked on almost every door in Tyndall Point. Some were answered, but most were not. The few residents they found were female, and some looked to be in their early thirties, but not a single one recognized Becca Harrison’s name. Reminded of her father’s stay on the island, they allowed they might have known her, but no one had kept in touch with her. One said she thought Becca meant to be an actress, another said Becca planned to be a singer.

“Never did hear of her again, though,” this last woman said. “So I guess she wasn’t quite so good as she thought.” Tess wondered if this flash of malice lurked below the surface of every Notting Islander who remembered the Harrison family. Certainly, neither the father nor the daughter was missed.

“Why does Becca matter?” she asked now. Crisfield was coming into view and they could see the semi-ancient mariner waiting for them, his white beard and hair blowing in the breeze.

“You were the one who wanted to go on that wild goose chase, not me.”

“Bear with me. I’m thinking out loud. Eric Shivers died. Someone may have watched him die. Certainly, whoever took his identity knew it was there for the taking. Knew he had a license in the system, knew the real Eric Shivers had no use for it.”

“Are you thinking Becca is our killer? What, she got a sex change over at Johns Hopkins, got herself turned into a man, prosthesis and all, then began killing the women she dated? And you think I watch too many movies.”

“No, I’m going a different way. The man you knew as Alan Palmer-he had a female accomplice. A woman called, remember? Called you and Sergeant Craig, said she was a caseworker with the state. Maybe the man who took Eric Shivers’s identity had help too. Maybe there were two people who saw Eric die, and they protected each other. As vague as everyone on Notting was, they did confirm the fact that Becca left the island more than fifteen years ago, not long after Eric Shivers died. Perhaps her father sent her away to protect her.”

“A middle-class guy like that? If he knew, he’d make his daughter stand up and take responsibility for what she had done.”

“You’d like to think so,” Tess said. In her experience, upstanding citizens could be enormously flexible about the law when it was applied to them. That had been Luisa O’Neal’s fatal flaw.

“Look, when you were a Toll Facilities cop, did you ever have to chase down drivers who didn’t pay the toll, just busted on through?”

Carl stiffened noticeably. “There was much more to my job than that.”

“I’m sure there was. But I’m asking, Weren’t there people who didn’t throw the quarter in the basket?”

“You know, one person who ran that toll ended up killing a cop. A stupid kid driving a stolen bakery truck, all the way from New York City. It wasn’t a joke, what I did. It mattered.”

“I know, I know. But there’s a point to where I’m trying to go here. Weren’t there people-fine upstanding people in nice cars-who blew through the toll?”

“Yeah, sure. On occasion.”

“And didn’t they always, always, have a reason for why they did something wrong? Hadn’t they decided the rules didn’t apply to them?”

Carl got the point, smiled.

“Rationalization,” Tess said. “That’s what really separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s the opposite of Darwinism. Animals do what they have to do to survive, but it’s all instinct. Humans do what they want to do, then work backward, trying to make a case for why it was essential to their survival.”

“So does Eric-Alan have a reason for what he does?”

“I bet he believes he’s justified on some level.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s a monster.” The sun had dropped below the horizon with astonishing speed, and Carl’s features were not as visible in the murky light. “Some people are just born evil.”

“You don’t believe in ghosts, but you do believe in monsters?”

“I believe in evil, yes.”

“I’m not so sure. It’s not like there’s evil in one’s DNA. Something has to form your character.”

“But now you’re doing what you just accused other people of doing- rationalizing. My mommy did this, my daddy did that, and I’m all mixed up. I’ve got no patience with people like that. I don’t have much use for psychiatry in general.”

“Well, me either, but-shit.”

“Am I coming in too fast?”

“No. I just remembered I had an appointment today with my own shrink. It totally slipped my mind. And what do you want to bet that the fact I forgot is only going to be used as proof of my hostility toward the whole process?”

Did she really think he wouldn’t know she had been there? His mother kept in touch with her old friends. It was only a matter of hours before one of them happened to ring up and say-casually, almost as an after-thought-that some strangers had come around, asking about Becca Harrison. Which set her off, and now she was on his phone, almost in a panic.

“Don’t worry, Ma. It wouldn’t matter why they came or what they asked. You know no one there would confide in strangers about anything.”

“But they spoke of her by name-”

“And they think she’s someone they can find.”

This gave his mother pause. Even on the buzzy, unreliable line of his cell phone, he could tell she was turning this thought over, sifting through it the way a gardener might spade a patch of earth. She had such a good mind. He liked to think he had inherited this quality from her, this ability to analyze a problem. Then again, he often wondered if her tendency to examine things so thoroughly had come from years of picking crabs, separating out the meat from the waste in those small bodies. In which case, the trait could not be inherited. But it could be learned, through careful study.

Natural selection-the words came back to him from seventh grade social studies, swimming through the years, as fresh and sacrilegious as they had been the day he first learned them. He had come home from school, eager to tell his mother about how evolution really worked, how the giraffe had not grown a long neck, but that the long neck had come to be favored and the short-necked giraffes died out.

“Don’t talk that trash in front of your father,” she had warned.

But his father, when he came home that evening, had said it made sense. “If these crabs get any smarter,” he said, “they’ll be on the skiffs and I’ll be burrowing in the mud, trying to keep them from catchin‘ me. What’s the point in being married to the best picker on the island if I can’t bring her enough crabs to pick?”

She wasn’t the best. That was a devoted husband’s hyperbole. But she was good. A woman like his mother, who had picked for a living, could do things to a crab that no casual tourist feaster could ever do. Her personal best was fifteen pounds in an hour. But it wasn’t her speed that made her exceptional, it was her thoroughness. There was nothing left on a crab when his mother got through with it.

Technically, what his mother and all the island women did was illegal. The crab meat they picked was not inspected by the state’s health inspectors. They all knew what it was like to have a carton seized, to see a day’s work taken away. How they hated those unhealthy-looking workers from the health department, those prissy, pinch-faced spoilers.

For the men, the enemy was the Natural Resources police, who enforced the always-changing rules on crabbing and fishing. Growing up on the island was not unlike living in a colony or some close-held territory. They had a hard-earned skepticism of all authority except God. So even if anyone there had ever questioned the not-quite-told story of Becca’s flight, all those years ago, they would never speak of it to outsiders.

But they hadn’t questioned it. And they did not speak of it, even among themselves, because they would not want to hurt his mother, presumed to be in denial ever since the day his boat was found, drifting on its own, near Shank Island. Suicide was such a shameful thing. Of course, almost as shameful was the possibility that an island boy like himself had drowned by accident, had made a miscalculation when the storm came up. Confronted with those two possibilities, people chose simply not to speak of what had happened to Audrey’s boy. After all, she had just lost her husband to bad blood and now she had no boy. She had carried this falsehood fifteen years now, constant and unswerving. It was only lately that she seemed to worry so much.

She began again. “June Petty said-”

“June Petty. Never has a woman been so aptly named.”

“June said there was two of them. She thought they might be DNR, but they never showed no badge or said exactly why they wanted to find Becca.”

He knew, but he could not tell his mother. There were only so many secrets she could be expected to keep. She did not know how Eric Shivers had come magically back to life, much less why. She knew he used an array of fake names but assumed those were for his business. His mother had no problem with what he did for a living. A person whose ancestral home was almost swallowed by the bay tends to have more respect for nature, but also less. Everything the earth produces must be allocated and reallocated. Survival of the fittest.

“Did June say what they looked like?” he asked, as if he did not know. His mother would not expect him to know.

“The man was orangey, like a Cheshire cat, and speckled as an egg. The woman was tall, with a braid. June said she just missed being pretty.”

“June Petty,” he said, with more heat than he intended, “thinks everyone just misses being pretty, except herself and her daughters. I wonder if she’s looked in the mirror lately. She was a hag when God was a boy.”

“She was the best-looking woman on the island in her prime.”

“Which is quite an achievement when you consider that the island had maybe-oh, three hundred and fifty people in June’s heyday.”

“What’s got into you, son? It’s not like you to be so sharp.”

“Nothing.” He backs away from the anger. “I’m sorry, Ma. It just bothers me that June ran to the phone, eager to tell you all this. She likes… pitying you, always has. First when Dad got sick, and then after I-” He doesn’t need to finish the thought. “Are you sure you weren’t the prettiest girl on the island and June Petty’s just trying to get you back after all these years?”

His mother laughs, the sweetest sound he has heard all week. Just then, the telltale buzz of a bad cell begins. He is losing her. He says good-bye hurriedly, hating the feel of being cut off. Whatever happens, he never forgets to tell his mother “Good-bye” and “I love you.”

He slips the phone into the well beneath the radio and drives on. It’s raining today, and the temperature is barely in the fifties. The past few days had been sunny and almost hot, close to eighty. A typical spring in these parts. He knows a moment of envy and resentment: She has been to the island, a place denied to him now for fifteen years. He doesn’t even dare to go to Crisfield or Princess Anne. Those who would seek to punish him will never be able to equal the pain of this exile from the place he loves above all others.

The end of April in Harkness. The hackberry trees would be coming into their own just now, and the marsh grass would be that soft shade of green he has never found on the mainland. It is too early for the snowball bushes to bloom, but they would be well on their way. Most of all, there would be the excitement that slowly builds when the rush is imminent as the blue crab mating season gets under way and the jimmy starts to court the sook, holding her to him for hours and hours. Beautiful swimmers indeed.

He wonders if her city-bred eyes and nose could begin to absorb the teeming bounty that was around her in those few hours. He could teach her. He could show her.

He has so much to teach her.