Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

Tess pushed again, and the window moved up by no more than eighteen inches. Enough, she judged, for her to get through. She grabbed the ledge and pulled her torso through the opening. Her legs dangled for a moment, but she pressed against the inside wall with her hand and slid forward, grateful for the coat and gloves that protected her from the splintery, mushy wood beneath her belly.

“Hey!” Gretchen called out, as if worried about being left out.

Tess stuck her head out. “Toss up one of the flashlights and I’ll go down and see if I can unlock the front door. And bring my boots and my bag, okay?”

She was on the landing of a rear staircase. Tess crept down, taking care to watch where each shoeless foot landed. But the old building, while not particularly clean, was neat. There was no debris on the stairs, no waste, animal or human, and the kitchen she entered still had its old fixtures. The metal scavengers had not gotten inside here, not yet. She found a narrow hallway and followed it to the front. The metal door had a dead-bolt, just as Gretchen said, but Pitts had been kind enough to leave a key in it. Tess loved people’s stupidity when it benefited her.

“Did you see anything?” Gretchen asked, thrusting Tess’s boots and duffel bag at her and rushing past, as if worried that Tess had searched the building without her.

“I came straight to the door,” Tess said. “Slow down, take a minute to think about what we’re doing here. For one thing, let’s find out if there’s any electricity in this place.”

They were in the hallway of what appeared to have been a grand home, before someone had bricked in the first-floor windows. A wide stairway rose to the upper floors, and a chandelier hung overhead. The beam of Tess’s flashlight found the switch and they turned it on. The light was dull, the bulbs smoky with age and dirt, but it was better than creeping around by flashlight. Gretchen started down the narrow hall.

“I’ve been that way already,” Tess called after her. “It’s nothing but an old kitchen. Let’s see what’s behind these sliding doors.”

The ornately carved doors were another remnant from the house’s better days. They balked at Tess’s touch and then gave way, rolling back to reveal an old-fashioned parlor.

“What a bunch of junk,” Gretchen said, after flicking the light switch in this room. This was Tess’s first thought too. Boxes were piled almost to the ceiling, while sheeted pieces of furniture stood among them like so many ghosts. The room was so crammed with stuff it was impossible to venture more than a few steps inside. Yet it projected a sense of order, suggesting that its caretaker would know instantly if anything had been disturbed.

“Let’s check the upstairs rooms,” Gretchen said, and Tess could see no reason not to follow her. But as she turned to go, her boot heel caught on one of the sheets, dragging it from its moorings and revealing an object she had never thought to see again. It was a lighthouse made from Bakelite, standing almost as tall as she was, with a green-and-white striped base and what appeared to be a gaslight fixture in the top.

“It’s the Beacon-Light beacon!”

“What?”

“The replica of the image that appears on the Beacon-Light’s masthead. It used to stand on a pedestal above the Beacon-Light offices on Saratoga Street,” Tess explained, walking around the lighthouse. “It disappeared in the mid-eighties, during the renovations. A boy at an antiques store in Fells Point told me they still get calls about it, from time to time, but they’re always false alarms.”

“Who would want it?” Gretchen asked dubiously. “It’s tacky as hell, and it doesn’t look like it would be worth much.”

“It could be,” Tess said. “To the right person, it would be worth a lot. I wonder how it came to be here.”

“People get rid of stuff all the time, don’t they? The city spent years trying to get that damn RCA dog back from the guy in Virginia who bought it, then put it in that crazy museum. I never understood why people care so much about some big plaster dog, just because it once sat on a building they drove by when they were kids.”

“It’s a harmless sentiment, unless-Gretchen, let’s see what else is here.”

While many of the boxes were, indeed, filled with porcelain and china and crockery, a second theme quickly emerged as they worked feverishly in those predawn hours. It was “ Maryland, My Maryland,” as sung by Arnold Pitts. Here were boxes filled with National Bohemian merchandise, from coasters to signs, all declaring Baltimore the Land of Pleasant Living.

Here were the T-shirts made to promote the Maryland Lottery when it began in the 1970s, back when it was considered progressive public policy to trick the state’s poorest citizens into financing construction projects for the middle class.

Here was one of the original Ouija boards, which had been invented in Baltimore, a fact Tess had forgotten. Boxes and boxes of Oriole and Colts memorabilia, including a football-shaped bank that Tess was tempted to slip into her backpack. A letter to the Baltimore Police Department from Bob Dylan, asking for details of the Hattie Carroll case, although he had already committed her story to song. The old-fashioned swimsuit and straw hat the then-mayor had worn to frolic with the seals when the National Aquarium wasn’t completed at the promised time. Finally, there were cartons of old postcards, glowing with the rich hand-tinted hues of a long-ago, maybe never-was Baltimore. Certainly, Tess had never known a Baltimore of such somber beauty.

And here was the very item that the Mu-sheum’s Mary Yerkes had coveted, one of Toots Barger’s bowling trophies. Tess picked it up, remembering it had gone for a price so dear that Mary, even with her million-dollar endowment, could not afford it.

Gretchen was bewildered. “What a lot of crap.”

“To most people,” Tess said, still holding the bowling trophy, which had a wooden veneer and featured a trim skirted female on top, crouched in perfect form as she released the ball. “But to some… to some, it’s more valuable than money or jewels. There are people who collect their own past. Everyone does it to some degree. You want things because you had them once, or because they remind you of the dishes your mother used, or the jar of candy your grandmother kept on her sideboard.”

Tess was thinking of her own objects: the Berger cookie tin on her desk, the Planter’s Peanut jar where she threw her receipts, the “Time for a Haircut” sign from the Woodlawn barbershop that had butchered her through grade school. She wasn’t immune to the impulse to preserve the past she remembered.

“You won’t catch me trying to buy the kind of stuff my parents had,” Gretchen said, her voice disdainful. “I like new things, things that work. In my whole apartment, there’s not one thing that’s more than five years old.”

The Ouija board was in its original box and Tess hesitated before she opened it. Original packaging was as much a part of its value as the board itself. But yellowed pieces of Scotch tape at either end suggested the box had been opened at least once. She took it out, balanced the board on her lap, placed her fingers on the- what was it called?-the planchette, that was it, and waited to see if the other world had anything to say. But it was silent, of course, because it takes two to Ouija and Gretchen wasn’t playing.

“Pitts and Ensor told the police they were burglarized,” Tess said, looking down at the board, with its familiar sun and moon and the ominous good-bye stenciled across the bottom. “They went to Bobby’s apartment and the Hilliards’ farm, looking for their stuff. But what stuff? According to the police reports, the things they lost were electronic items-televisions, camcorders, VCRs. Insurance would have paid the replacement cost on those. Who would go to so much trouble to find stuff that can be replaced?”