“I don’t really understand you,” she said. “What you’ve done. Why you do it. You get so close you’re ready to start a family. And then you leave.”
“I’m used to women not getting it. The important thing is, I understand you.”
“The way you understood Becca? And Tiffani? Lucy?”
His touch roughened. He pulled hard enough on the next section to bring tears to her eyes.
“I loved them,” he said, his voice even. “I loved them more than anything. I invented them. Especially Becca. My love gave her the confidence she needed to discover her gifts.”
“Her gifts? You mean her voice?”
“Exactly.”
“But she couldn’t be an opera singer on Notting Island.” She groped for a name, but couldn’t begin to think what she should call him. Billy? Charlie? Alan? Eric? The names were all so boyish, so innocent. “She had to leave if she was going to do anything with her talent.”
“I know that. I was prepared to go with her. But she wanted to study at Juilliard, the one place I couldn’t go. I might have survived a few years in a city like Baltimore, if I had to. Or even Boston. But not New York, never New York.”
Smart Becca. She had probably chosen Juilliard for just that reason.
“So you killed her.”
“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.” He sounded exasperated, in a mild way. “I tried to get her to stay, yes. But she was the killer, she was the one who wanted to destroy a human life.”
“What do you mean?” But even as she spoke, Tess thought of the calendars, the careful records he had kept for Tiffani and Lucy. “You got her pregnant.”
“We conceived a child.” He was leaning in close, his breath warm on her neck. “She asked me to take her to the mainland for an abortion. When I said I wouldn’t, she said she’d go without me. When I said I’d stop her, she said it might be another boy’s, so I had no say in it.”
“Eric Shivers.”
“She threw that name out. I was never convinced, though. She may have flirted with him but she loved me. She wouldn’t have betrayed me.”
“Still, you killed him.”
He had moved around to the front of her face and was working on creating a fringe of wispy bangs, high on her forehead. “You have a widow’s peak,” he said. “I never noticed that.”
“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.”