Laura Lippman - The Last Place

She had told him about her work only to provide some context for her Antietam moment, although she was confused about the crosscurrents of confidentiality here. Was it breaching confidentiality if she spoke of the matter in a setting where all was presumed confidential?

“I think it’s quite interesting. You’ll excuse me for playing armchair psychiatrist”-he smiled at his joke, so she did too, out of politeness- “but I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between that encounter and the one that brought you here.”

“Similarities? I talked to a guy in a bar. He didn’t make a pass at me, and I didn’t attempt to remove his body hair.”

“You went to that bar on a mission, with an agenda you masked to some extent. After all, if you honestly believed this man had killed his girlfriend all those years ago, I suppose you would go to the police and tell them what you discovered, not attempt to interview him on your own.”

“Well, yeah, of course. But that’s not how my job works. I don’t solve cases, not on purpose. I look into things, I make reports. Sometimes I come at it sideways, sometimes I don’t. It’s a judgment call. After all, I was straight up with the landlord, the guy in Sharpsburg.”

“I suppose that’s something we share.”

He had lost her.

“The public misperception of what we do, and the role of the mass media in perpetuating stereotypes.”

“Sure,” Tess said. For one thing, you talk more than I do. But she liked that. She had worried it would be up to her to fill the hour, which was part of the reason she had stored up the Antietam story and told it in such detail. But if it was going to be all back-and-forth like this, more a conversation than an interrogation, she could probably ride out the six months. Tess had been a reporter for a few years, which had taught her how to draw people out. And she had been a woman all her life, so she knew men were always happy to talk about themselves.

“Come to think of it, the mass media has done much worse by my old job.”

“Your old job?”

She kept thinking he was omniscient, that he knew everything about her life to date.

“I was a reporter before I became a licensed investigator, back at the old Star. But when it folded, the Beacon-Light didn’t hire me, and I had to change careers. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven.”

“Did that bother you?”

“Of course it did.” Tess tried to keep her words light, but she was surprised at how much the memory of that rejection still rankled: the token interview with the editor in charge of recruitment, a bulldog-ugly woman who wouldn’t even deign to touch Tess’s résumé. She felt the blood rush to her face, her cheeks burn.

“Why?”

“It was the only job I ever wanted. It took me two years to find a new career for myself, and that was mainly luck. Now I see it was for the best. I’m a much better investigator than I was a reporter. I still go out, ask questions, collect facts. But I’m no longer obligated to cram them into the limited templates of newspaper journalism. I’m much happier now.”

He didn’t speak right away, letting the last sentence sit there, naked and conspicuous, shivering in its exposure.

“That seems a good thing to have learned,” he said at last.

“What?”

“A devastating rejection is often the only path to a better life. Endings can be beginnings.”

“If you don’t figure out that life lesson by the age of thirty-one, you shouldn’t be free to walk the streets without a keeper.”

He seemed mildly offended to have his insight dismissed so cavalierly. But he was a pro, he kept going.

“I’m not so sure. After all, there must be a reason why that Robert Frost poem, ”The Road Not Taken,“ resonates with so many of us. When he stops in the woods on that snowy evening, he’s not a child. He’s a grown man, and it’s not clear if he’s happy with the choice he made, simply that the choice mattered. He takes the less-traveled road. And, according to the poem’s end, it changes his life.”

“But he doesn’t say if it’s for better or worse, just that it made all the difference.”

“I’ve always assumed it was positive.”

Tess shrugged. She wasn’t so sure. Frost should have written a sequel to clarify. “You’ve conflated two poems, by the way.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said he stopped in the woods on a snowy evening, but that’s the title of another Frost poem. You know, Whose house is this, blah, blah, blah. Frost is a great poet, of course, but he’s a bit Norman Rockwellian, don’t you think? So good for you, so American, so beloved it sticks a bit in the throat, like oatmeal. I prefer Auden or Yeats.”

“Do you have a favorite poem?”

“Yes-but it’s as much of a chestnut as ”The Road Not Taken,“ if I’m going to be truthful.”

“That’s the one rule here,” the doctor said, his manner grave. “You must be truthful. Lying to me is like going to a doctor and telling him the pain in your knee is really in your neck. It won’t help and it could hurt. So what is this… chestnut?”

“ ”To His Coy Mistress.“ ” Dr. Armistead betrayed no recognition. “Andrew Marvell. The one about the guy who is trying to persuade a woman that life is too short for a prolonged courtship and they have to go for it right now.” Which was not exactly how she had worded it in her college term papers, but it was succinct.

“I’m not sure I know it.”

“You must. It’s one of those things they don’t let you get out of school without learning.

“Thus though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.”

“A morbid image.”

“That line always makes me think about a song we sang as kids. ”Did you ever think when a hearse goes by, that one of these days you’re going to die?“ There’s some line about the worms playing pinochle in your snout. Now there’s an image.”

Dr. Armistead laughed, which pleased her in some way she didn’t fully understand. “I must say you have a broad frame of references. From the Civil War to Andrew Marvell to pinochle-playing worms. But we’re back where we started.”

“Which is?”

“In the grave, which is a fine and private place. Like it or not, Tess, you are going to die. Everyone does.”

“So far. But I hear they’re working on some solutions to that problem over at Johns Hopkins.”

Was it a coincidence that the old nightmare returned that night? Tess thought not. She opened the French doors off her bedroom and crept out onto the deck. In her perpetually-under-renovation bungalow, this deck was one of the few finished spaces. Damn Dr. Armistead and all his talk of death. Damn her, for hanging out in graveyards and battlefields, thinking about death. Jonathan Ross had been buried more than two years ago, and it had been a year since she had this nightmare, the one in which she watched him die again and again.

The April night was cool, and she wore nothing but a thin cotton robe, but it felt good, clearing her head. She leaned on the railing, looked out into the darkness that was Stony Run Park. There was light at the edges of the view-streetlamps from the major streets to the north and the south. But here, with the neighbors’ houses dark, it was inky black and quiet.

Jonathan had not been her boyfriend, not by the time he was killed. They were something much less and something much more. They had been each other’s first post-college relationship, which had allowed them to mistake one another for adults. They became each other’s benchmarks, former lovers who gauged their progress through life by the other’s achievements. Jonathan had been far ahead of her when he died, a rising star at the newspaper. He was killed for a secret he had not yet uncovered, a secret that fell to Tess to divine and keep. Tess, without a newspaper in which to publish her suspicions, had not been important enough to kill.