The Last Place

“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.