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 i

“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 Susqueha

“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 cha

“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 ma