Laura Lippman (12 page)

Whitney selected the largest shaker and two martini glasses. “I wonder,” she said, heading for the kitchen, “if camels feel vaguely superior to those who need water all the time.”

T
WENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER
, T
ESS AND
W
HITNEY SAT
at the end of a winding, two-lane road that dead-ended at a locked gate. There was no sign identifying the property and a thick grove of pines hid whatever lay between them and the bay. But there was no doubt in Tess’s mind that this must be Persephone’s Place.

“The chain-link fence seems to run the length of the property,” Whitney said. She was riding shotgun, as she had all day, while Crow and Esskay waited for them back at the Talbots’ summerhouse. “And there’s razor wire along the top, so it’s not just for show.”

“Is the fence for keeping people out, or keeping people in?”

“Both, I’d imagine.”

They sat in the idling car, studying the fence. It had been a long day, longer than they had anticipated when they had crossed the Bay Bridge a little after lunchtime. Time had seemed elastic—they had browsed through the
local stores, stopped at a bar in Easton for a Wild Goose ale, along with some french fries and onion rings. Tess loved the Eastern Shore in the off season—the bleached marsh grasses, the pale sky that yellowed at the edges, like an old photograph. She had liked showing everything to Crow, who was, as usual, enchanted. It had been easy to lose sight of why they were here at all.

But she had forgotten how short December days were, and they were suddenly two hours away from darkness when they began making inquiries about Persephone’s Place, whose mailing address didn’t show up on any of the maps of the shore counties. Tess had assumed it was the kind of open secret that locals would know, just the way they knew how to point one toward the various millionaires’ mansions along the bay and its inlets.

But they were too clearly outsiders, and the Eastern Shore was not a place that embraced outsiders. It saw itself as separate from the rest of the state and still smarted from the time a sitting governor had referred to it as a shithouse. Four years at Washington College, on Tess’s part, and a summerhouse that had been in her family for three generations, on Whitney’s side of the ledger, didn’t make them locals or earn anyone’s trust.

The bartender, the hunters who lined the bar—they all looked through Tess when she tried to broach the topic. The hospital staff in Easton told Crow it would be a breach of confidentiality to discuss the clinic, which at least confirmed it was out there, somewhere. Finally, Whitney had thought of going to drugstores—not the quaint, old-fashioned family operations that could still be found in places like Easton and Chestertown, but the new twenty-four-hour CVS and Rite Aids that had opened in strip malls along Route 50.

“You can’t run a medical facility for rich bulimics
without crossing paths with an all-night drugstore,” Whitney had reasoned. “I’ll go in first and scope it out. If there’s a young woman behind the counter, we’ll send Crow in. A man—you take it, Tess.”

“Who died and made you führer?” Tess asked.

“I can’t help it if I have natural leadership abilities,” Whitney replied. She sauntered into the drugstore, returning a few minutes later with a copy of
Harper’s
magazine and a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew. “The pharmacist on duty is a girl. Take it away, Crow.”

“What do I say?” he asked. Asked Whitney, Tess noticed, not her.

“Tell her you need medical advice. You found an empty Ipecac bottle in your girlfriend’s car, and you want to know if you should be worried. No—your sister’s car, so she thinks you’re in play. Let that lead to a general discussion of eating disorders and treatment. Tell her you’ve heard about this Persephone Place—”

“No—” Tess kneeled in the driver’s seat so she could turn and face Crow. “Specific names make people a little more suspicious. Grope for the name, or get it wrong. She should feel she’s leading the conversation.”

Crow leaned forward and kissed her. “I find this enormously exciting. It’s like our first date, when we broke into that lawyer’s office together.”

“That wasn’t exactly a date,” Tess felt compelled to say, but Crow was already out of the car. Esskay, usually so unflappable, made a strange, high-pitched sound at the back of her throat. She was probably asking Crow to bring her back a candy bar, or a beef jerky strip. It had started to drizzle, and they watched him run across the parking lot, his step so light and carefree that he appeared to be skipping.

“Is it just me, or does he find everything enormously exciting?” Whitney asked at last.

“Pretty much everything,” Tess conceded, trying not to sound smug. The way she brushed her teeth, the way she stretched in the morning. The way she read the newspaper, the way she scrubbed the sink. This, too, would pass, so why not enjoy it?

Crow being Crow, he stayed in the store for almost forty-five minutes and returned not only with the clinic’s location, but a detailed biography of the young pharmacist, which he delivered in her patois and accent. “She has three kids, not a one of ’em over six years old, and her husband got laid off twice in the past two years, and he sure does hate to be stuck at home with them. But she sure as hell doesn’t make as much money as you might think, and the hours are all erratic—”

“Fascinating,” Whitney snapped. “Did she know about the clinic?”

“Oh sure, she told me that right away.” He unfolded a piece of paper. “She even drew us a map. You were right, they’ve had some middle-of-the-night calls. Although she said it’s primarily Sundays, when most of the other places are closed. The pharmacy doesn’t deliver, but she’ll drop stuff off at the end of her shift, for extra money.”

The clinic proved to be considerably south of where they were, on the other side of the Talbot house in Oxford. They left Crow there to baby-sit Esskay—Tess didn’t want to think what the dog might do, alone with Mrs. Talbot’s family heirlooms—and found the unnamed, unmarked road just after sunset.

Now it was dark, Eastern Shore dark, the kind of complete night that never came to Baltimore. They could smell the bay, but couldn’t see it. The only sound was Tess’s Toyota, rough and asthmatic sounding, sending puffs of white-gray smoke into the night air. She won
dered how far the sound traveled, how far it had to travel before it alerted someone to their location at the gate.

“What are you waiting for?” Whitney asked. “Don’t you think you can talk your way in? You have a perfectly reasonable request—you’re a private eye, you want to know if Jane Doe might have spent any time here. “

“They made this place awfully hard to find,” Tess said. “Besides, they probably treat famous people. Their antennae will go up if I say I’m a private investigator.”

“You’ve got to try something,” Whitney said, “Nothing ventured—”

No one killed
. But no, she wasn’t being fair to herself. No one had ever gotten killed because she asked a few questions. Well, almost no one.

They pulled the car up so they were even with a call box. Tess pushed the button marked Talk.

“Hello.”

“Yes?” a voice replied quickly, almost too quickly, suggesting the possibility the car was already on a video monitor somewhere. Tess couldn’t see a camera, but she kept her head inside the car just in case.

“Yes?” The voice repeated, now impatient. It was a woman’s voice, and Tess had a feeling the clipped, mechanical tone was not the intercom’s distortion.

“I’m a private investigator from Baltimore, working on a missing persons case.” Better not to mention the dead part, at least not yet. “It’s possible she once stayed here.”

“Our client list is confidential,” the voice told her. “We can’t confirm or deny who stays here. It’s a medical facility.”

Time for the dead part. “This particular client is beyond caring about such things. She was murdered in Baltimore a year ago.”

There was a series of clicks, as if a button was being depressed over and over again, while the voice mulled its response. “Murdered in Baltimore? One of our girls? I think not.”

The voice made it sound as if Baltimore was simply too declassé a site in which to be murdered. Palm Beach, perhaps. San Francisco, certainly. Acapulco—
claro que si
. Baltimore, never.

“Still, I’d like to show you an artist’s sketch, see if anyone can identify her.”

“A sketch? Don’t you have a name?”

“The name is what I’m trying to find. The girl was never identified. I thought I told you that.”

Again, a series of clicks. “But the name is the very thing we could never give. I hope you understand.”

“I
don’t
understand. This girl is dead, she has no privacy or confidentiality left to protect. But I have a client who is very keen to identify her.”

“Really? Who’s your client?”

“Confidential,” Tess said. She almost wished a video camera were trained on her, so it could see the gleam of her teeth as she smiled.

The voice was not amused. “One of our security guards is coming to the front gate. It’s your choice to leave now, or make his acquaintance. Although you are on the other side of the fence, you’re still trespassing. In fact, the final quarter mile of this road belongs to us. There’s a sign advising you that you’re entering private property—a large sign, with bright red letters on a white background, visible even at night. You were trespassing once you drove past it.”

Tess saw a pair of headlamps approaching through the trees. She hesitated for a moment, then backed the Toyota onto the road and turned around. She went as slowly as
she could, as if to say: I’m going because I want to, not because you’re making me.

They were on the public portion of the road when Whitney finally spoke. It was only then that Tess realized how uncharacteristically quiet she had been.

“A private road. So that’s why we couldn’t find it on a map.”

“One mystery solved at least.”

They rode in silence until they found the highway back to Oxford. Then Whitney said: “Turn the radio on and see if we can find a forecast for tomorrow. We’ll need to check the weather.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because a good sailor always checks the weather.”

“I hardly think I want to spend a December afternoon sailing on the bay, all things considered. Let’s just go back to Baltimore, or spend the day in Chestertown, like you said. I’ll figure another way to make a run at Persephone’s Place. I can always claim I’m an investigator for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.”

“I wasn’t thinking of taking the sailboat out. We’ll use the motor boat, the old Boston Whaler my father keeps. One if by land and two if by sea, old buddy, and it’s two lanterns aloft in the belfry arch tonight.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“D-Day at P’s Place. You’re going to storm the beach tomorrow, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”

T
HE SUN WAS BARELY UP WHEN
T
ESS AND
W
HITNEY
left the Talbots’ dock the next morning. They were in the Boston Whaler, a motorboat that Whitney’s father had inexplicably christened the
Hornswoggle II
. Or maybe there was an explanation, but Tess had decided a long time ago it wasn’t worth pursuing. The Talbots specialized in detailed and obscure stories.

“I’m reasonably sure how to get there,” Whitney said, frowning at the nautical chart in her lap, as they moved slowly away from the dock.

“Only reasonably sure?” Tess repeated, waving in what she hoped was a reassuring way to Crow and Esskay as they disappeared from view. “I’m not happy about staying behind,” he had told her this morning, burrowed beneath the quilt on Mr. and Mrs. Talbot’s bed. “Someone has to watch Esskay,” Tess had countered. “Besides, you have your own part to play here, if everything goes as planned.”

This now seemed like a very large “if.”

Whitney was frowning at the great expanse of water before them. Above, seen from the twin spans of the Bay Bridge, the Chesapeake wasn’t quite so formidable. “I’ve figured out where we were last night and if I’m right, it backs to this inlet.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then we abort. Besides, we won’t do anything until we’re close enough to see the place. You know the cover story.”

“About that cover story—” Tess looked down at the gray water churning beneath them. She and Whitney had been out in this boat many times before, making fun of the mansions that the nouveau riche built along the bay’s shores. But that had been on sultry July and August days. She could almost smell those days—the sun, the water, the breeze, the suntan lotion—on the life jacket she had donned.

There was no sun today, and the wind felt like tiny knives pricking at her face and neck.

“The life jacket. It’s really just for show, right?”

“More or less. I’m going to try to get you close enough to wade in, but you never know. You’re a strong swimmer, right?”

“Pretty strong. But they have to have a doctor on the premises, right? And he’ll be bound by medical ethics to check me out for hypothermia.”

“I hope so,” Whitney said. “Then again, it would give us some leverage, wouldn’t it? A licensed treatment center without a doctor on call. I’m sure that’s not legal.”

Tess didn’t say anything, but she thought leverage was pretty inconsequential, once you were dead. She glanced at the sky. Overcast, yet Whitney swore there was no chance of rain. She wondered what would happen if she
proposed switching places. But she could never find her way back to the Talbots’, and she wasn’t confident she could handle the boat alone, even under the best conditions.

Almost forty-five minutes had passed before Whitney steered the boat into a narrow channel, cut the motor, and let it drift. “Does this look like the place we saw last night?”

“We didn’t see anything but chain link and razor wire last night,” Tess said, squinting at the large white house sitting back from the shoreline. “But, yes, it could be the place.”

It was a rambling white Victorian, with pink trim. Someone’s old summerhouse, enlarged over the years in a random fashion. It clearly was no longer a vacation home. Persephone’s Place, if this was it, had an antiseptic look, a marked indifference to its surroundings that bordered on hostility. There was no dock, for example, and the glassed-in porch at the rear of the house was small, curtains drawn against the winter light, as if no one there ever dared to watch a sunset. The grounds were bare and open, with the bald, raw look more common to a spanking-new development. Yet the tall, spindly pine trees at the property’s edge had to be decades old. Even as it shut the rest of the world out, Tess realized, Persephone’s Place denied privacy to its residents. There was no place to hide here, no spot where one would be out of view.

“It does look like a wedding cake,” Whitney said. “Even the trim, all gingerbread and curlicues and rosettes. You feel you should be able to break off a piece and eat it. Just looking at it makes me vaguely nauseous, as if I’d been on a little binge.”

“Hansel and Gretel,” Tess said, remembering a scrap
of Sukey’s conversation with Jane Doe. “The Sugar House.”

They were very close now, the boat passing under a tree whose branches bent so close to the water that they had to bow their heads. At the last minute, Whitney reached up and grabbed the branch, keeping the boat from drifting any closer to the fringe of sand and gravel that passed for a beach.

“Here,” she said. “This is as close as I go. Remember I have to putt-putt out very slowly, so make sure I’m out of the inlet before you draw attention to yourself.”

“Do I have to get all the way wet?” Tess asked. “Maybe if I just could climb out here, and walk along the shore—”

“All the way wet,” Whitney said firmly. “You have to give the impression that you could keel over at any moment. It’s the only thing that’s going to keep them from sending you straight to the sheriff’s office for trespassing. I hope.”

Tess sighed and kneeled on the starboard side of the boat. She tried to remember the jump she had learned as a lifeguard at Hunting Hills Swim Club years ago, with legs spread open, so the head didn’t submerge. At least, that had been the theory. She couldn’t recall if anyone had ever done it successfully.

“Go,” Whitney hissed. Did she actually lean over and push her? Tess had no memory of jumping, just a sensation of cold unlike anything she had ever known. Gasping for breath, dog-paddling because of the cumbersome life jacket, she made her way for shore. Behind her, she heard the
Hornswoggle II
pulling away, but she didn’t look back. There was no going back. She’d rather crawl to shore than climb back into the boat and skim across the bay in her sodden clothes. She had dressed in thin layers,
unwilling to sacrifice her suede jacket to this enterprise. In fact, she had raided Mr. Talbot’s closet, availing herself of the soft, old fishing clothes he had amassed over years of coming to the shore. But they were shockingly heavy when wet, and her feet and hands already felt as if they were encased in concrete.

By the time Tess stumbled to the shore, she did not need particularly advanced acting skills to convey the fact that she was wet, chilled, and very glad to be alive.

Too bad there was no one there to appreciate her arrival. For it was not yet 7:30, according to her watch, and the Sugar House was quiet. She crawled slowly up the hill, finally pulling herself to her feet, and staggered toward the house.

It was only then that she noticed a girl looking at her from a small casement window on the third floor.

“Sister Anne, Sister Anne,” Tess breathed, thinking of the Bluebeard legend. “What do you see? What
did
you see?”

She studied the girl’s face, oddly dark and mottled, but that was probably a shadow from the lace curtain she had pushed aside. Her expression was curiously impassive, as if there were nothing unusual about a soaking wet woman weaving up the sloped lawn. Had she seen the boat enter the inlet, watched Whitney push her from the boat? When she caught Tess looking up at her, she quickly ducked out of sight.

Or perhaps she had left the window because of the two men in white uniforms rushing across the lawn toward Tess.

“What are you doing here?” one man asked her. “This is private property.”

“I—capsized,” Tess gasped, her teeth chattering helpfully.

“Where’s your boat?” the other asked.

“Sank. G-g-g-gone,” she said, waving a hand toward the bay, trusting Whitney was long gone now, not even a speck on the horizon. “All gone. Lucky to be alive.”

Now a woman came running across the lawn. Tall, with a dancer’s posture, she managed to look elegant even in a chenille bathrobe and duck boots, her auburn hair flat from sleep.

“Is it—” she looked at Tess. “How did she come to be here?”

Tess remembered that clipped, mechanical voice from the night before. Funny, it sounded even less human in person.

“Boating accident,” one of Tess’s attendants said helpfully. Although they had grabbed her roughly at first, they were being gentle now, holding her firmly as if they believed her legs might go out from under her at any moment. Her limbs shook convulsively, Method acting at its finest.

Yet the woman evinced no sympathy for her.

“I suppose I’ll have to find her some dry clothes,” she said.

“Don’t you think you should have Dr. Blount look at her as well?”

The woman sighed, overwhelmed by the imposition of this uninvited guest, with all her needs. “That, too,” she said.

The two men helped Tess across the lawn, speaking over her head as if she were unconscious, or deaf.

“Funny, isn’t it?” said the one on her left. “I mean, she’s so heavy.”

That hurt a little, and Tess wanted to explain her clothes had taken on quite a lot of water. But she decided someone who had just been rescued from the sea would not have the energy to object to such a personal comment.

“You mean because she’s wet?” the other asked, puzzled.

“No, because she’s
normal
. I’m so used to those little bits of bone and flesh we have around here.”

“They’re not all skinny.” The two apparently were inveterate arguers, determined to disagree whenever possible. “Besides, she’s a lot older.”

“Some of the girls here look old.”

“But they’re not.”

“Yeah, but—”

There was a short flight of steps at the side of the house, which led to a small porch. The two men, bickering all the while, expertly flipped Tess into a horizontal position, grabbed her at the armpits and knees, and carried her into the house. The woman waited impatiently inside.

“Take her into one of the examining rooms,” she said. “I don’t want the girls to see her. You know how any deviation from the routine upsets everything around here. Besides, I don’t want them to think…” her voice trailed off as she led Tess’s carriers through a narrow hallway. They turned and bumped her head, hard, on the molding along the wall.

“Oops, sorry,” one said.

“Watch what you’re doing.”

“You know,” she said, feeling very stupid. “I
can
walk.”

No one seemed to hear her.

The examining room was not the kind of cold, clinical doctor’s office to which Tess was accustomed. In fact, it seemed to strive for a kind of accidental air, as if the paper-covered table and cart of gleaming instruments had been introduced on a whim into what was otherwise a small sitting room. The walls were painted a warm cream
color and heavy linen curtains hung in the one window. The doctor’s chair was a wingback, the desk an old secretary. The patient’s chair was a Victorian lady’s chair, with a needlepoint back.

“I’ll bring you dry clothes,” the woman said. “I’d offer to wash yours, but I don’t want to keep you here too long.”

Don’t want you to be here too long
, Tess amended in her head.

No more than five minutes passed, but Tess found she couldn’t stop shivering, and she wondered if she might have put herself at serious risk. Finally, the woman returned with a Henley shirt, sweat pants, and clean white socks. She made no move to leave and Tess, feeling uncharacteristically modest, found herself stripping beneath the woman’s gaze. Her flesh was gray-blue at the extremities, and everything continued to wobble.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to watch you,” the woman said. “Force of habit.”

This only served to make Tess feel considerably more nervous and exposed.

“I mean—” the woman had the grace to look mildly embarrassed. “I mean, I’m so used to checking the girls here.”

“Of course.” If Persephone’s Place treated girls with eating disorders, the staff probably would watch them as closely as possible, looking for signs of weight loss.

“Of course?”

Tess remembered just in time that she was a stranded boater who had no idea where she was.

“I’m sorry, I’m so cold, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Once she was dressed, the woman gave her a blanket to wrap around her legs. She then pulled out a blood pres
sure cuff and a thermometer, one of the horrible new ones that barely fit beneath the tongue. Tess hated having her blood pressure taken—she always felt as if her arm were going to explode—but she couldn’t object with the thermometer in her mouth. The woman wrote down her findings, then leaned against the closed door.

“Now,” she said, “where are you staying? I can have someone on staff take you there.”

Tess, Crow, and Whitney had planned for this contingency. Good thing, as Tess’s brain wasn’t working well enough to improvise. “I’m visiting friends down near Oxford. I can call them and get directions—” she leaped to her feet, as if planning to find a phone. Then she quickly glanced around the room, checking the position of all sharp objects and hard corners, and faked what she thought was quite a realistic little faint. She had experienced the real thing just once, and had only a vague memory of what it had been like. Still, she thought she did it rather well.

Pulling the cart down with her was not part of the original plan, but it helped to sell it.

“Christ,” the woman said impatiently, and fled from the room. Tess kept her eyes shut and counted to one hundred, then two hundred. Someone had come into the room and was watching her. She waited to feel hands at the pulse points on her wrists or neck, but nothing happened. She counted to three hundred. She could feel the heat of another body coming close to her, peering at her. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the Dr. Blount the woman had mentioned.

Instead, the face looming above hers was an odd little monkey-girl, a gaunt mask of flesh with fine hair covering the jawline.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, crawling backward, crablike,
from the apparition.
I’m supposed to be at a clinic
, she thought,
not on the fucking island of Dr. Moreau
.