The Last Place

So she looked for Lucy Fancher’s last-known address instead, getting lost in a series of meandering roads that dead-ended at the river.

The house sat off by itself, in a grove of trees. It was nothing special, a dull rectangle with rust-red asbestos shingles for siding, and it appeared to have been vacant for some time. A generic For Sale sign, peppered with dirt and water stains, listed to one side at the driveway’s edge. Tess got out and walked around the small house, largely for something to do. The house may have been plain, but the view from the rear was extraordinary, all water and sky. The trees, a mix of sweet gums and evergreens, formed a natural screen from the houses on either side. No water access, but it was probably only a matter of time before Fancher’s landlord sold the place. Expensive new houses were sprouting up all over these narrow lanes. The lot must be worth a fortune.

“You interested?”

The voice, hoarse and rusty, made Tess jump. She turned to find a man in his forties with a weatherbeaten face beneath an old Caterpillar gimme cap. Grimy and unkempt, he looked like a drifter, but she could hear an engine ru

“Excuse me?”

“You interested in buying the place?” The shadows were so deep here, under the trees, that it was hard to see much of his face. “Owner will give you a good deal on it. It’s been empty for a while.”

“Since-” She stopped to think about how to phrase it, how much she should reveal. “Since when?”

The man scratched his chin. “Four years? Three? Around that. I live just up the road.”

“It’s a great location. I’m surprised someone hasn’t snatched it up.”

“Owner got greedy, I think. People had a lot of money when he put it on the market. Then they didn’t, and he wanted to sell, bad. Now, every time he gets a contract it falls through. People talk.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something happened here.”

His country terseness was wearying, and Tess decided to speed things up.

“The girl who lived here”-she figured girl would be the local parlance for a woman of twenty-three-“she was killed, right?”

He nodded.

“Did you know her?”

“Just to say hello.” He raised his hand to demonstrate, throwing his left arm up as if waving from a car.

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“A fellow lived with her. I guess that made him a boyfriend.”

“Did you know his name?”

“No, I knew him just-” The left arm saluted again. “They didn’t live here that long, before… He looked nice, though. He kept his van real clean and tended to the yard when he was here. It wasn’t so overgrown then.”

A clean van and a neat yard. Tess guessed those clues to a man’s character were as reliable as anything else glimpsed from a distance.

“What happened to him?”

“No one knows.” The man leaned forward, lowered his voice. “People said he… kind of lost it. Not right away, fu

He looked at her expectantly, as if he wanted her to fill in the next part.

“Second what? Was someone else killed?”

“Because… because”-he looked offended-“don’t you know? I mean, can’t you imagine?”

“I know his girlfriend was shot and they never solved the case.”

The neighbor scratched his chin. “I’d forgotten that the newspaper didn’t tell it. But everyone knows.”

Tess shook her head. “I don’t.”

“It was October thirty-first, Halloween?”

She nodded, confirming that October thirty-first was Halloween.

“That was the first part.”

“The first part?”

“They found Lucy Fancher’s head in the middle of the Route 40 bridge, about two A.M. Just sitting on the median strip, almost exactly at the county line between Cecil and Harford. Her head and her driver’s license, in case anyone couldn’t make the ID with just the head.”

Suddenly, everything was too sharp: the deep itchy smell of the evergreens, the bay-tinged breeze, the blue eyes of her cheerful informant.

“That wasn’t the worst, of course.”

Of course.

“Two nights later, the body shows up, here on the back steps. It’s waterlogged, like it’s been submerged somewhere. People say the person who done it had found a jack-o‘-lantern, left over from Halloween, and propped it on her neck for a joke. Yes, she was shot, and that was the cause of death. But it always seemed the point was to get at her boyfriend, to taunt him in some way.”

Tess was begi

“Was she-”

“Raped?” It was creepy how quickly he filled in her unvoiced thought. “They never said.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

The man had scratched his chin until he opened up a small cut, but he kept scratching, smearing blood. “I don’t know. He moved away. Some said he went crazy. Who’d blame him?”

“Did she have an ex-boyfriend around, or an ex-husband?”

“Don’t know. Only knew her by sight, as I said, and the only man I ever saw around here was her boyfriend. They looked like a nice young couple, with everything in the world to live for. I sometimes wonder if that was the point.”

“The point?”

“Of what that crazy man did. Because he’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t he? And he’d have to be a man-just to carry her back here, I mean. Couldn’t have been easy, the body waterlogged as it was. Not easy to cut off a person’s head, come to think of it, even after they’re dead. You’d need proper tools. But I always thought the person who done it hated him more than her, you know?”

“Someone killed Lucy Fancher to get at her boyfriend?”

“I’m not saying he knew them. I’m saying he mighta saw ‘em. In town, or at the diner up on Route 40. They looked happy together. There are some men who would begrudge another man the love of a pretty woman. You ever play checkers when you were a kid?”

“What?” The conversation became more surreal at every turn.

“I used to go to a friend’s house, after school, play checkers. His little brother wanted to play, but it’s a one-on-one game, and there’s no way to make it three-person. Besides, he didn’t know how to play for beans. So we told him to go away. Well, he-he-” The gabby neighbor was suddenly at a loss for words. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, as if he feared being overheard. “He whipped it out and sprayed that board like a dog marking his territory. If he wasn’t going to play checkers, no one was going to play checkers.”

“This theory of yours-is it part of the local gossip, too, or just based on your observations about human nature?”

She had tried to sound respectful, but the man drew himself up, affronted.

“It’s good as anything they ever come up with. Better than anything ol‘ Carl Dewitt came up with, and I didn’t go crazy in the process, did I?”

“Who’s Carl Dewitt?” Tess asked. But he was already walking away, leaving her alone in the backyard. Tess glanced at the concrete back steps, trying to imagine how the scene had looked on a grayer, colder day, when the sun set so much earlier. From a distance, in the dark, the body had probably looked like a straw man, some child’s tasteless joke. Close up? Close up, that discovery could be enough to drive a man crazy. She wondered if Carl Dewitt was Lucy Fancher’s boyfriend, the one whose happiness another man might have begrudged. And she knew it would be a long time before Lucy Fancher’s landlord ever sold this property.