The Last Place

“Did you kill Eric Shivers?”

He sighed. She wanted to wrinkle her nose at the feel of his warm breath so close to her face, but she willed her features to stay still.

“It was more of a prank, really. I was working the grill for the Kiwanis Club. It was easy enough to put a chunk of crab in the burger I made for Eric. I meant to scare Becca, to show her how weak Eric was. I didn’t know she would run away and he would die. At any rate, it didn’t work. For some reason, it just made her more determined to leave the island, to get rid of our baby.”

Of course it did, Tess thought. Her baby’s father was either dead or a killer. What kind of choice was that for an eighteen-year-old girl?

“So what happened?”

He was on her left side now, his breath tickling her ear. “We were out on my skiff. We quarreled. She said she would do what she had to do without my help. She jumped out of the boat, as if it were some big dramatic scene, as if it were one of her damn operas. There was a big piece of driftwood and I grabbed it, held it out to her, meaning only to pull her in. But the water was rough and she was flailing. She bobbed up suddenly, where I didn’t expect her, and it caught her on the head. I got her out, took her to Shanks Island, tried to work the water out of her lungs, but it was too late.”

Good story. Tess didn’t believe a word of it. But he seemed to.

“You weighed her body down so it wouldn’t be found. Then you faked her disappearance, with your mother’s help, and your own death. It all sounds pretty calculated for a teenage boy who’s supposedly beside himself with grief.”

“Mother helped me… arrange a few things. She knew no one would understand that it had been an accident.”

Because it wasn’t. But Tess didn’t bother to say this out loud. Billy Windsor had spent his life arranging and rearranging these facts into a myth he could live with. Deprived of his true love by a cruel fate, he wandered the earth, alone and rootless. But how did he rationalize the deaths that had followed?

“I got the impression your mother never knew about the others you killed.”

Several pieces of hair fell before he spoke again.

“I wouldn’t want to burden her. But if I told Ma everything, I think she would understand.”

“She would have to, wouldn’t she?” Tess took a deep breath. “You pay for her place.”

“Yes.”

“How? That’s a pretty expensive development.”

“There’s a lot of money in what I do.”

“Which is-?” She still didn’t understand how he made a living.

“Hauling and transporting. I take what I like to call unfriendly substances and find them homes. This is a temporary holding place, sort of my distribution center if you will. These canisters are filled with various things, things you wouldn’t want to touch or inhale. I will relocate them later to more permanent resting places. It can be expensive, doing this kind of work by regulation, getting the proper permits. It’s very burdensome for small businessmen. So I help them out.”

“By illegally dumping toxic substances.”

He allowed himself a one-syllable laugh, not much more than a snort. “It’s not as if a lot of the earth isn’t already spoiled, Tess. Take Baltimore, for example. The people here live like pigs. They breathe dirty air. They live in houses with lead paint. Or, like you, they row on that filthy water. They don’t care how they live. Why should I?”

“I saw your home, Notting Island. It’s not a pristine sanctuary. There were rusting appliances and cars in a huge pile.”

“Trash is different on an island. It’s much harder to haul away. What’s the excuse here, where they come to your door and pick up your trash twice a week? Just think. If people were neater, if they didn’t litter and throw their garbage on the ground, you wouldn’t be in the predicament you are in now.”

He gestured toward her leg, pointing at her wound with the scissors.

“Besides, I had to find work in a cash business. Once I was dead, I couldn’t make money the way most people do. I was just trying to get by.”

“But you kept dying. After you killed Tiffani, you took another identity. Then a third identity, and now, presumably, a fourth or a fifth. Hazel gave you those. Why?”

“Hazel and I became friends,” he said. “I don’t expect you to understand that, but I genuinely liked her. And she liked me. I told her I had made a mistake as a young man, but I had paid for it, and all I wanted was a chance to outrun my past. She believed me. She wanted to believe me. She often said I was the most interesting thing that ever happened to her.”

Hazel didn’t know the half of it.

“Hazel led us to you. She put your name-your real name-as her beneficiary.”

“Really? Well, that only proves how much she loved me. I didn’t want to kill her, but I was turning over a new leaf. I needed to break with my past. Out with the old, in with the new.”

Tess’s hair kept falling in shining clumps-on the floor, over her shoulders, in her lap.

“You killed her because she knew too much.”

“No. I needed a fresh start, and Hazel was part of my old life. I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing. That’s why I went to Dr. Shaw. But he never understood. He thought I was just another guy who couldn’t find a relationship. Which wasn’t my problem at all. It was easy to find women. But it was horrible, discovering how inadequate they were. They weren’t ready for my love. They refused it.”

“But they didn’t refuse-except for Julie, and she was an addict. They loved you. They told everyone you were perfect. You changed their lives, you were their Prince Charming.”

“But it was never quite right. I picked poorly, I admit. They were too young, or too dumb, to appreciate what I was offering them. They would come so far, so quickly, but then their development would stop. They wanted such ordinary things, they dreamed such tiny dreams. I had been looking for a physical type, but it’s the spirit that matters. You’re more like Becca than any of them, even if you don’t look like her.”

Tess felt something on the back of her neck that she had not felt for almost twenty years-a breeze. Then the battery-powered razor whirred on and began nipping at her skin. She had grown her hair long in protest of just this kind of barbershop cut, which she had been forced to wear throughout grade school because her mother hated trying to work a comb through Tess’s snarls and tangles. She had worn her hair in a braid since high school, getting two inches cut from the tip every six months or so. Which meant that the hair on the floor wasn’t that old, in all likelihood. But it felt that way. It felt as if Billy Windsor had just cut much of her life from her head.

Finished now, he stooped to gather armfuls of her hair. Then, to Tess’s amazement, he carried these tendrils to his cot. He took the patchwork pillow, removed the cover, and unzipped the inside casing. The pillow was stuffed with hair, masses and masses of dark hair. From Becca, perhaps. Almost certainly from Tiffani and Lucy. And now from her. So Carl had been right about something else. Billy Windsor had kept trophies after all. He had just collected them while his victims were still alive.

“Now let me even up the front,” he said, coming at her with scissors in hand, peering so closely at the fringe of bangs he had given her that he seemed almost cross-eyed in his concentration.

“Why?” Tess asked. “Why me?”

He drew back, so he could make eye contact. “Why? Because I made you. Even more than the others. You’re my creation. I’ve read the papers these past two years, I’ve seen how successful you’ve become. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t killed that man.”

His logic infuriated her as much as it sickened her. How dare he? She was not his creation. She owed him nothing. It was just the kind of condescension she and Carl had discussed earlier that day, which now seemed a lifetime away. Blood rushed to her face and she yearned to protest.