The Last Place

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.”

CHAPTER 16

“Did anything about that strike you as unusual?”

Carl stopped in his tracks on the sidewalk outside the photography studio. “Wait, I know that line. It’s from a movie. Don’t tell me. I can see the guy who said it, all serious and stone-faced. He’s a really famous actor.”

“No, I mean-”

“I said, don’t tell me. I’ll get it in a second. God, I’m so close. 48 Hours? No, no, that’s not it. One of the Godfathers?”

“Carl-” Tess was not inclined to touch people she did not know well, but she grabbed Carl Dewitt’s left arm and swung him around. “I’m not playing movie trivia. I am not asking a rhetorical question. Let me repeat: Did anything about that strike you as unusual?”

“Yes,” he muttered, yanking his arm from her and rubbing it, as if she had left a stain on his sleeve. “You called me your apprentice, which is one step above flunky. Why’d you do that?”

Tess got into her car, waited for Carl to do the same, then started the engine and began to drive, although she had no destination in mind. They weren’t done with Spartina, she was sure of that much.