“So he woos these women, loves them, takes care of them. Then one day, without warning, he kills them. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Carl said. “Maybe the answer is up ahead.”
Notting Island had come into view.
“Saying the name William Windsor around here,” Carl said an hour later, “is like farting in front of a duchess.”
Tess knew what he meant, although she might have expressed it differently. The locals’ faces had frozen at the mention of the name, and while a few said yes, Billy Windsor had lived in Harkness once, they offered little more. The family was gone, he had no kin here, no one knew what had become of him. One older man, who appeared to be hard of hearing, pointed out the Windsor house, but it was clearly vacant and had been for some time. Someone was keeping the lawn trimmed at the white clapboard house, but the snowball bushes at the front had not been cut back for years. Bursting with heavy blue flowers, they almost blocked the front windows.
When Tess tried to follow up with questions about Becca Harrison, the older residents of Harkness said pointedly, “She lived down to Tyndall. We didn’t know her at all.”
If Tess had been alone, she might have given up. But Carl wouldn’t let her. They had come too far, literally and figuratively.
“Remember the old lady down at the general store in Tyndall Point?” he asked, as Tess slumped on a splintery old bench on the dock.
“Sure.”
“At least she admitted to knowing Becca Harrison. Maybe she’ll tell us something about Billy Windsor, too.”
“It’s worth a try.”
The distance between the two towns was no more than three miles, and they thought about starting off on foot or trying to convince one of the local teens to drive them. But there was no road that went all the way through, begging the question of why people here bothered to have cars at all. The only way to get from Harkness to Tyndall was by boat. No wonder those who lived in Harkness felt so separate from the residents of Tyndall.
The old crone was alone today, listening to a shortwave radio that crackled with watermen calling back and forth to each other as they worked. She seemed bored at first, indifferent to her visitors. But something flickered in her eyes at the mention of Billy Windsor, something bright and hard.
All she said was, “Ah, half the people in Harkness were named Windsor once upon a time. But they weren’t a hardy lot. Billy’s long gone, his father longer gone, and his mother lives with you.”
The syntax confused Tess. For a second she thought it was meant literally, that she was harboring Billy Windsor’s mother without knowing it. Then she realized the woman meant only that the mother lived on the mainland.
“But there must be people here who remember Billy. No one in Harkness seemed to know anything.”
“Of course they remember him. But why should they speak of him to you? They don’t know who you are or what you’re after.”
Tess realized that gossip was the most powerful currency at this store, that the woman would give as good as she got. Yet how could they risk telling her the truth?
“Nothing bad,” she said. “Quite the opposite. He may have come into a bit of money. At any rate, we’ve been asked to find him.”
“By who, Becca Harrison? I’d like to see her face when you tell her he drowned himself over her all those years ago. But she was cold then, and I suppose she’s cold now.”
Tess hesitated, but Carl picked up the lie, sure and confident. “She didn’t tell us why she wanted to find him. Just to find him.”
“Well, it’s an old story, probably not worth telling.” The woman was being coy. At first Tess thought she was teasing for money, a bribe. But she was just trying to stretch out the encounter, enjoying this variation in her usual daily routine.
“Please,” Carl said. “We’d really like to know. Becca hasn’t told us why she wants to find Billy Windsor, only that it’s important to her.”
“It’s a short story. Becca Harrison and her father moved here when she was thirteen, maybe fourteen. Billy Windsor fell for her so hard he was never the same again. Swagger die, it was like he had a killick around his neck. And that’s probably how he ended up.”
Tess had no idea what a killick was, although she could infer from context that it was inappropriate neckware at best. But Carl seemed to understand, so she let it go. Now that the woman was talking, she didn’t want to get in her way.
“At least, we always’s‘posed that’s how he done it,” the old woman said. “I think he was being considerate of his mother, in his own way. More considerate than she was of him, I’d have to say. He could have used a shotgun, but no, you wouldn’t want your mother to see you like that. Pills would have been hard to get around here. Even over to Crisfield, word would have gotten back. So he must’ve weighted his body down. He knew no matter how much he wanted to drown, his lungs would have fought it. The body tries to live, even when the head wants to die.”
“So you think he tied a killick around his neck,” Carl prompted. “But you don’t know, because his body was never found.”
“They searched near Shank Island, where they found his skiff drifting, but there’s no guarantee that’s where he went over. My guess is Billy picked a deeper spot. He knew the bay, all the boys here do. He’d pick a good place to go in. His mother never admitted he was dead, though, and no one dared speak of it in front of her. She stayed here for a few more years. Then, come five years ago, she upped and moved. Still owns the house but keeps it empty.” The crone narrowed her eyes. “So for all her grief, I guess she had an insurance policy on the boy, and it finally paid off when she had him certified as dead.”
She had skipped over something. A piece of the story was missing.
“What does this have to do with Becca Harrison?” Tess asked.
“Didn’t she tell you? Maybe she doesn’t know. After all, she was gone.” The woman lighted a cigarette, a generic one. “Well, apparently she wanted to get away from here real bad. Went to Audrey Windsor for help. I think Drey-we called her Drey, although I can’t remember how that started.”
“Ma’am?” Carl prodded. She gazed at him over the haze of her cigarette smoke. Tess realized the old woman saw herself as Notting Island’s Lauren Bacall, even if no one else did.
“Drey Windsor helped Becca Harrison run away. She let people think it was because she felt sorry for the girl, but I think it was because she didn’t much care for her son being so over the moon in love. She thought she’d kill two birds with one stone: help the girl get away from her father and get her far away from Billy. So it’s her conscience she has to live with.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was the one took Becca Harrison to Smith Island, to catch the ferry that goes to Point Lookout, over t’other side. But when Billy Windsor realized his girlfriend was gone, he was never seen again. I guess his mother didn’t count on that.”
Point Lookout. Tess glanced at Carl, he had caught it too. Mary Ann Melcher’s boyfriend had disappeared from that spot in just the same way Billy Windsor had. A boat was found but not a body, not a body that could be proved to be Charlie Chisholm, because Charlie Chisholm didn’t exist. And Billy Windsor, if that was the man they sought, was not shy about repeating successful tricks. He had used his parked van to create alibis in the two homicides, driving all night in rental cars to return home and kill the women he said he loved.
“Where does Mrs. Windsor live now?”
“I couldn’t tell you for sure. I don’t have her address, but she left me her number. She likes to keep up with the local gossip. She likes to know”-the woman narrowed her eyes until they almost disappeared into the tortoiselike wrinkles of her face-“she likes to know if strangers come around looking for her.”
Again, Tess felt there was a way to get her to tell them more, but she could not figure out what this woman wanted from them. She had to rely on Carl, whose instincts were sharper here, surer.