Butchers Hill (11 page)

Tess looked at her watch. "Look,
I'm not far from the turn-off to Columbia. Tell you
what—I'll buzz by her place and if Jacqueline Weir
is home, I'll try to figure out her story without letting on
who hired me. Will that make you happy?"

"Not as happy as the check you owe
me for this."

Tess hung up the phone and, not without some
effort, wedged her way back into traffic. Idling along, she
couldn't help thinking about what Dorie might find on Theresa
Esther Monaghan in her electronic data bases. A twelve-year-old Toyota.
No mortgage, although she had a loan for the business, co-signed by
Kitty and Tyner. No other record of the business—after all,
it was in the name of Edgar Keyes, although Tess's name
showed up on the incorporation papers as vice president. It made her
feel safe and smug, knowing how few electronic tracks she had left. It
also made her feel like something of a failure. Surely important people
couldn't move so anonymously through life.

She was so busy thinking about her
electronic profile that she almost missed the turn-off for Columbia.
She caught Highway 175 at the last possible moment and headed west,
into the heart of Maryland's last fling with Utopia.

The planned community of Columbia, brought
forth during the giddy optimism of the sixties, was to have
revolutionized the suburbs with its "villages" and
mandated proportions of green space. A new town, as it had been called,
a different way to live. But Columbia's only real legacy was
its strangely named cul de sacs—Proud Foot Place, Open Window
Way, Sea Change. Utopia was just another suburb, a bedroom community
for Baltimore and D.C. The late developer James Rouse was better known
for his much imitated "festival marketplaces," from
Boston's Faneuil Hall to Baltimore's Harborplace,
than he was for his new city. He had wanted to change the way people
lived and ended up changing the way tourists shopped.
So
much for life as a visionary
, Tess thought. At
least he had walked the walk, living in his own creation, and using his
retirement years to build housing for the inner-city poor.

Jacqueline Weir's condo was in a
development known as the Cove, which at thirty-years-plus was
Columbia's equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. Tess wandered
through the cluster of stucco and brick buildings for almost fifteen
minutes before she found the address. It was a two-story apartment that
backed up to a small canal along the man-made Wilde Lake, stagnant and
bright green with algae at this time of year.

Dorie's misgivings had gotten to
her. What if Jacqueline Weir didn't want to be found? What if
she had a legitimate reason not to see her sister again? What if Mary
Browne wasn't her sister? Tess couldn't show up on
the woman's doorstep and say "Heigh-ho, I was hired
to find you, any reason I shouldn't?" However,
armed with nothing more than a clipboard and one of her plain,
tell-nothing business cards, she could transform herself into a
pollster and ask all sorts of personal questions that might give her
the information she needed. Or she could pretend to be from one of
those new computer services that offered to reunite people with lost
loved ones, then gauge Jacqueline Weir's reaction to this
one-time free offer. She rapped briskly at the door, full of purpose.

No answer, no sound of movement came from
within the apartment. Dorie had said Jacqueline/Susan worked from home,
but who knew where a consultant might be at midday? She rapped again,
and this time heard high heels moving across hardwood floors. Perfect.
She stood a little straighter, thinking again of the Banneker monitor
and the ramrod spine of Mrs. Nelson. She smoothed her hair with her
free hand. Lies crowded her tongue, ready to be told.

They all vanished, every word vanished, when
the door opened.

"I'd thought
you'd get here a little faster than this," said the
woman Tess knew as Mary Browne. "But I guess you did okay,
all things considered."

"W
ho
are
you?"

"I'm Jackie
Weir," said the woman Tess knew as Mary Browne. Certainly,
she dressed like Mary Browne. Today, it was a coral suit with white
trim at the cuffs and collars. The white was picked up by her
high-heeled shoes, pearl earrings, and a double strand of pearls
against her dark throat. All this, just to sit in her home-office,
waiting for Tess to come to the punchline of her sick little joke.

"But Jackie Weir is Susan
King."

"Right."

"And ‘Mary
Browne' hired me to find Susan King. You hired me to find
you
."
For a moment, Tess wished she were in the habit of carrying her gun.
This was crazy, and crazy people made her nervous.

"Yes, which you've done.
Congratulations. As I said, I thought you might have been here even
faster—it's really not that hard, once you find the
name change, and any competent private investigator should have been
able to do that. But I'm impressed, nevertheless."

They were still standing in the foyer of
Mary's—of Susan's, no, of
Jackie's
—apartment.
Tess studied the parquet floors, the other woman's
lethal-looking white pumps, her own nubuck flats. They were from the
Tweeds catalog and she would have called them off-yellow, but the
catalog had labeled them cornmeal.
Why am I
thinking about shoes
? Because she was
embarrassed and humiliated, and concentrating on her shoes kept her
from admitting how angry she was.

"I don't like
this," Tess began. "You came to my place of
business, you lied to me—"

"I suppose you never
lie."

Better to skip past that one. "You
wasted my time."

"I
paid
for your time. A new private investigator, starting out—all
your cases should be so easy. I know what it's like to start
a business. You can't have too many easy jobs. But my next
job is harder. You won't have such an easy time finding the
person I'm really looking for."

Tess looked up. "What makes you
think I'd do any more work for you at all, after the way you
dicked me around?"

Jackie's smile was the smile of a
businesswoman used to coddling difficult types, smoothing ruffled
feathers, working her to way to
yes
.
"Look, it's past noon. Can we talk about this over
lunch? There's always Clyde's, just across the
way."

"No Clyde's,"
Tess said petulantly, a child saying no just to say no.
"I've never forgiven their menu for inspiring that
insipid song ‘Afternoon Delight.'"

"Let's go into
Clarksville, then."

"Clarksville? What's out
there, the local Dairy Queen?" Actually a hot dog and a
Peanut Buster Parfait would hit the spot. One drawback to city living
was the serious lack of Dairy Queens.

"You obviously haven't
been keeping up with Howard County real estate. Clarksville is home to
some of the ritziest subdivisions around—and one amazing
French restaurant. Expensive, but worth it. Come on, it's on
me."

"You bet it's on
you," Tess said. "After all, you have a stock
portfolio worth almost two hundred thousand dollars as of market close
yesterday."

There was a small victory in seeing Jackie
Weir's eyes widen at that factoid. Good—let her
wonder what else Tess might have uncovered along the way.

Clarksville had changed. Tess remembered
farmland, a few simple houses scattered among the trees. Now huge,
elaborate homes sat on landscaped lots. These weren't the
kind of developments that looked naked and raw in their early years;
too much money had been spent for the owners to tolerate anything less
than instant perfection. But the very lack of flaws, the absence of
anything as spontaneous as a fallen bicycle or an overgrown lilac tree,
made the houses forbidding to Tess.

"Mini-mansions, they call them in
the trade," Jackie said as they drove west. "The
covenant actually specifies a minimum square footage of ten thousand
feet and all natural materials."

"But that was a
lavender
stone house. How can that be natural?"

"Closer to periwinkle, if you want
to be precise. The owner's Mercedes has been custom-painted
to match. Or was it the other way around?"

After seeing the overdone, overlarge houses,
Tess assumed the restaurant would be built along the same nightmarish
proportions. To her relief, Trouve was a small, fieldstone farmhouse
that looked as if it had been moved, stone by stone, from the French
countryside. If it weren't for the parking lot full of
expensive cars, it might have passed for the working farm it once was.

"Miss Jacqueline, do you have a
reservation today?" the maitre d' asked. Tess,
glancing at the clientele in the almost-full dining room, suddenly felt
underdressed and frumpy. Her warm-weather clothes tended toward things
that made as little contact with the skin as possible—a
loose, white T-shirt today, and an ankle-length cotton skirt that
allowed her to skip pantyhose, but was now badly wrinkled from all her
driving.

"I didn't plan ahead,
but I was hoping you just might find a place for us, Michel."

"Of course." Tess
assumed two women would be hidden away by the kitchen or bathroom,
especially when one was so sloppily dressed. But Michel led them to a
table next to a large bay window, overlooking a small orchard of fruit
trees and, beyond that, a meadow of wild flowers.

Jackie allowed herself to preen just a
little. "As I said, I bring a lot of clients here."

"What is it you
do
,
exactly?"

"Professional fund-raiser. I
started out in development at a hospital in the Washington suburbs, but
I found I could make better money on my own, raising money on a
contract basis. I do a few good causes to salve my
conscience—Advocates for Children and Youth, Health Care for
the Homeless, Manna House—but I barely break even on those.
The big money is in capital projects."

"And politicians?"

"When I first started. Not so
often now. I prefer diseases to politicians."

"Who doesn't?"

Jackie looked at Tess over the top of her
menu, clearly puzzled.

"A joke," Tess explained.

"Oh, I get it." But she
didn't smile.

At least Jackie—it was still an
effort to remember which name to use—had an appetite. She
ordered an appetizer, salad, and entree, which meant Tess could follow
her lead without feeling the need to explain she had rowed that morning
and then run three miles. It was refreshing to be with a woman who ate
as much as she did, without apology. So many of the women she knew
seemed intent on deprivation, playing some unfathomable game in which
the winner was the person who ordered the most pleasureless meal. Her
mother specialized in exactly that kind of denial. In
Jackie's company, Tess felt she could hang a banner over the
table:
Bring on the cream sauces
!

"I really do have legitimate
business for a private investigator," Jackie told her after
they had ordered. "But I had a bad experience. I hired a guy
several months back, and he didn't do anything, just sat on
his ass and cashed my checks. Another one gave up when it got hard. So
I decided the next time I hired someone, I was going to make sure they
could do some rudimentary investigative work. Finding me
isn't hard, but you do have to have enough gumption to run my
name through a Chicago Title search, then run my name through the MVA
to get my address."

"Which name would that be
exactly?" Tess asked innocently, slathering butter on a
fresh, warm roll.

"The story I told you was
essentially true. Susan King got pregnant when she was a teenager, and
had a falling-out with her mother as a result. She ended up leaving
home and, I'm sorry to say, never quite reconciled with her
mother."

"Do you have to speak of yourself
in the third person? It's a little on the creepy
side."

"Susan King is a third person to
me and as dead as my mother."

"Why did you change your name?
Were you hiding from your mother after she kicked you out?"

Questions seemed to make Jackie impatient.
It occurred to Tess that she had rehearsed this little scene in her
head, and now Tess wasn't playing her part as scripted. How
she must have enjoyed sitting in her apartment, waiting for Tess to
knock on her door.

"My mother didn't kick
me out because I was going to have a baby. She was cool with that.
After all, I wasn't the first girl in Southwest Baltimore to
turn up pregnant."

"Southwest Baltimore? Which
part?" asked Tess, a true Baltimorean, forever focused on the
precise boundaries of where people lived.

"Pigtown," Jackie
muttered. "Pigtown, okay? Anyway, Mama wanted me to keep the
baby, so she could raise it, get a little extra AFDC money and food
stamps every month. I almost went for it, too. But you know, I had
finished high school and I had this nothing job, and I suddenly saw my
future. I told myself, ‘This is it, girl. You've
still got a chance to make something of yourself, but not if you keep
this baby.'"

The appetizers arrived—a tart with
woodland mushrooms for Tess, some goat cheese thingie for Jackie.

"What about the baby's
father?"

"He wasn't interested in
being a father. But you know, I give him credit for admitting it up
front, for not pretending to be into it and then dumping me as soon as
the baby came. I saw that happen often enough to my girlfriends.
Anyway, I signed my daughter over to a private agency and never looked
back. And when I got a scholarship to Penn, I decided to change my name
legally, sort of a symbol of my new life. In the back of my mind, I
think I didn't want my baby to come looking for me one day.
You see, I figured I was going to be somebody real famous, real
successful, and I didn't want any tabloid trash reunion in my
future."