“What about them?”

“They could tell us about Eric. The hospital is one possibility, but it’s not the only possibility. Maybe it will turn out that he and Alan Palmer went to the same… band camp.”

“Band camp? What, this all began over some chance meeting with a tuba? You’re throwing too wide a net. You have to be focused in police work, methodical.”

They were back out on Guilford Avenue. Tess glanced up at the expressway that loomed over the street. How easy it would be to go up there, get out of town, head east instead of west.

“Look, we have two choices. We can drive back to Spartina, retrace our steps, and talk to the same guy we talked to last week. Or we could go back into that mailbox store, pay to fax the photo to Ashe in Virginia, and head to the Eastern Shore to learn something new.”

“They told us not to do that.”

Tess was becoming impatient. She couldn’t help thinking how quickly Crow or Whitney would warm to such a plan. How had she ended up being saddled with this strange stick-in-the-mud, this know-it-all?

“They told us we couldn’t interview people they had earmarked. But clearly they can’t get angry if we develop a few new leads. If we don’t learn anything, they’ll never know we were in Crisfield. If we do, they’ll be thankful.”

“Thankful enough to ignore the fact that you disobeyed the prime directives?”

“The prime directives?”

“From RoboCop,” Carl said. “Serve the Public Trust. Protect the Innocent. Uphold the Law.”

“Look, I can handle the state police,” Tess said, surprised at how confident she felt, how cocky. “The fact is, we still have my trump card. If they cut us loose from this, I can go to the press.”

“You told me you hated the press.”

“But they don’t know that.”

Carl chewed the inside of his cheek, puzzled. His mind didn’t work on a lot of levels, Tess realized. If you threw him a football, he’d run straight toward the goal. If you dealt him a bad hand in poker, he’d fold. He wasn’t dumb, far from it, but he had a directness about him that could be a handicap.

She’d have to remember that-and control for it.

CHAPTER 19

Tess always forgot how far Crisfield was, how deep Maryland dipped down on the other side of the bay. Starting out, she assumed it was closer than Ocean City and the Delaware beach towns, which took a solid three hours to reach on a summer weekend. But Crisfield was just as far.

She also had forgotten the feeling that this was where the world ended. The main drag of Crisfield essentially dead-ended into the bay, which opened up before them, as vast as any ocean here, so it seemed all water and sky. The result was almost unbearably bright on a spring day. Tess felt naked and exposed.

“The current address for the Shiverses is on Princess Anne Court,” Carl said. “Take a left here.”

“You want to stop and get lunch first? It’s almost one o’clock.”

“No. Besides, when we called from the road, we said we’d be there by one-thirty.”

“Well, it’s not one-thirty.”

“I don’t do lunch.”

Carl Dewitt didn’t eat conventional meals at all, as Tess was learning. He went the entire day on Diet Mountain Dew and then ate one huge helping of protein and grease at night-not unlike a boa constrictor. But she conceded, in part because Crisfield had few restaurants for the crab-averse. There was a Dairy Queen back on 50. She’d hold out for that.

Still, she could have the last word. “You know, you’ll end up gaining weight, living that way.”

“How do you figure? It’s not more than two thousand calories, and I don’t take in empty calories like alcohol.” He gave her a pointed, superior look. Carl found the consumption of alcohol decadent and had almost passed out from shock when Tess ordered a beer with a midday meal. “I burn at least two thousand calories every day. Besides, I don’t want to be a little stick, like that boyfriend of yours.”

Crow had come out of the house in his pajama bottoms just that morning to wish her well on her various errands. Tess had thought he looked admirably lean, not unlike the greyhound by his side. The morning, Baltimore, Crow- it suddenly seemed very far away.

“Well, first of all, it’s horrible, what you’re doing to your digestion. I have a theory-my own, I’ll grant you, not a dietitian’s-that your body can absorb only so many calories at a single sitting and any extra is more readily converted to fat. Your body’s not a cash register. It doesn’t reconcile accounts at day’s end, decide whether you finished up in the red or the black, and adjust your weight accordingly.”

“But if you’re in deficit when you sit down to eat, it’s like being an empty gas tank. It’s better than what you do, filling yourself every three hours, every time your dipstick drops a level.”

“You’re mixing your automotive metaphors.”

Carl snorted. “I forget. You seem like a normal person most of the time, but you’re one of those overeducated types. What did you study at college? Let me guess, one of those weird things that no one really knows what it is. Ethnography? Symbiotics?”

She started to correct him, only to catch his wisp of a satiric smile. “The fact that you know enough to make a joke about semiotics tells me you’re not as ignorant as you’d like people to believe.”

“Man, I grew up in Cecil County and joined the Toll Facilities Po-leece when I was twenty, a college dropout. I’m just a dumb hick. Couldn’t you tell that by the way those fellas treated me over at Pikesville?”

“I can tell you like to play that part. But it occurs to me that there were some books in your house, and they weren’t Reader’s Digest Condensed Versions. You read some, don’t you? I mean, when you’re not memorizing movie dialogue.”

He was sheepish now, caught. “I do like history, especially the Civil War.”

Tess sighed and made a mental note not to teach Dewitt how to play Botticelli, no matter how many long drives they had to spend in each other’s company.

The woman who opened the door at the Shivers house could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five. Lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes, while her sad mouth seemed to be encased in double sets of parentheses. The price you pay for all this light, Tess thought.

“Mrs. Shivers?” Carl asked. Tess noticed that his voice had shifted in some indefinable way. He was playing his Upper Shore card for all it was worth. Not that a Crisfielder would have much affection for someone from Cecil County, but it was preferable to Baltimore.

“Hallie Langley. I am-I was-I am Eric’s sister.” She stopped, still puzzling over tenses after all these years.

“I thought your parents were going to be here.”

“Maybe it sounds funny to you, but my parents still don’t like to talk about Eric’s death. It was so sudden, so unexpected, and he-well, he was their favorite. I’m not saying they slighted me. They didn’t. But he was their first child and their only boy, and they never got over it.”

Once Tess might have been surprised by such a candid, easy confession, especially from a hard-shell Eastern Shore native. But she had learned people were often anxious to tell their secrets, if only someone would ask. Strangers made the best confidantes. Hallie Langley led them into the shadowy living room, a place that did not appear to have changed much over the past two decades.

“Eric was born in the hospital over in Salisbury?” This was Carl. Tess had agreed he could take the lead here.

“Born there and died there. But we always lived here.”

“Now I’m not clear how he died. The hospital records say it was an allergy attack, but there was no autopsy.”

“I guess people would call it a freak accident. It was the big bull and oyster roast, you know the one?”

Tess did. It had been an obligatory stop for the state’s politicians as far back as she could remember.