Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“Fine. Just let me get out and rinse the boat off, put everything away. And if I were you, I’d want me to shower first. It was steamy this morning, almost like summer.” Tess indicated the patches of sweat on her chest and back, beneath her arms.

“We need to talk now. You’re the last one in; it’s not as if you’re blocking anyone.”

Tess glanced around and saw this was true. There were no other boats coming in behind her.

“Let me get out. I feel odd sitting here, with you looming above me.”

Whitney looked as if she were going to fly apart from nerves. Her usually smooth hair was almost standing on end, her pale face was white and drawn in a way that Tess had never seen. But she nodded her assent, jaw muscles twitching, and waited for Tess to climb out and carry the boat to a pair of saddle horses in preparation for its daily bath. Hosing down the shell was an essential step for those who rowed the filthy Middle Branch of the Patapsco.

“Did you read the paper before you came down here this morning?” Whitney was sitting on the grass now, digging through the voluminous leather pouch she used as a purse.

“Glanced at the front page, read my horoscope. And the dogs’ horoscopes, which they seem to enjoy. Esskay’s apparently due for a favorable business transaction.” Whitney didn’t smile. “Jesus, what’s up? How bad could it be?”

Whitney continued to dig through her bag, removing all sorts of strange and wonderful objects-a Swiss army knife, a leather journal, an antique ivory bracelet-until she found a piece of newsprint ripped from what appeared to be an inside page of that morning’s Maryland section.

“The name didn’t mean anything to me at first-to tell you the truth, I was reading it over breakfast, laughing at the Beacon-Light’s naïveté, because it’s so clearly a drug deal gone bad. But she’s white and she’s from the county, so they turn it into one of those ”sweet suburbanite mowed down in inner city‘ stories, as if she were a random victim. Granted, they were on deadline, and they were probably trying to find an angle to make it fresh, after it led all the late-night newscasts-“

“Whitney, slow down and start over. You’re not tracking.”

“Julie Carter was killed last night. Shot in an alley in Southwest Baltimore.”

Tess’s legs were often quivery and weak after a good workout, but not in this way. She sank to the ground next to Whitney. If she had anything in her stomach, she might have felt sick. But there was never time to eat in the morning. No time to eat, no time to read the paper properly…

“My Julie?” she asked, but that didn’t sound right. “Our Julie?” That didn’t sound right either. “It’s a common name. Common enough.”

“This Julie Carter lived out near Beckleysville. Near Prettyboy Reservoir. Ring a bell?”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah.”

Tess sat on the ground, hers legs splayed out like a Raggedy Ann. Whitney crouched next to her, looking as if she wanted to sprint away, if she could only figure out where to run. The humidity was burning off as the sun rose. It was going to be a beautiful day, for those privileged enough to wake up alive. The blue skies, the subtle spring smells-Tess and Whitney could have been college roommates again, sitting on the banks of the Chester River after a workout. Tess wished they were. To be twenty-one again, to be free of the knowledge she had gained in the last ten years, or even in the last ten minutes, seemed an excellent idea.

Julie Carter had been twenty-one. Just. But hers had been a hard twenty-one, with hints of more troubles than Tess had ever known.

“It could be a drug deal,” Tess said. “She clearly had some problems in that sphere.”

“Could be,” Whitney said. “Could be just the biggest fucking coincidence to ever come down the pike.”

“We have to call Major Shields, over at Pikesville.”

“I did. Paged him immediately.”

“And?”

“And he said that’s exactly what it was. Just one big co-inky dink.”

“Did he say co-inky dink?”

“He might as well have. He considers me part of the problem, you know? Me and the board. Thanked me very kindly for the tip, as he termed it, and said they would consider it, but they’re still working under the presumption that the man who killed Tiffani and Lucy is dead.”

“Unless he didn’t die. Unless Carl’s right.”

“Or if there’s another someone and has been all along.”

“Who? No one knows who was on that original list, except for your own board members.”

“I don’t know. Someone who knows what the other guy did?”

Tess was no enemy of coincidence. It permeated life, it powered the daily newspaper, and, as even Mary Ann Melcher knew, made for the best television movies. Most of the stories worth telling, even the smallest anecdotes, begin with a coincidence. You don’t tell people about the 364 days you got on the number 11 bus and didn’t run into your best friend from grade school. You tell them about the one day you did.

But Julie Carter’s demise was a chronicle of a death foretold. Whoever made up that list knew she would join the others as a homicide. Even the cause had been right, a gunshot to the head. That made her death just violent enough to warrant mention in the morning paper, arriving like a sinister greeting card sent by a secret admirer. Here’s another body. Thinking of you.

“Whitney. Did we ever learn the name of the volunteer who put the list together?”

“We know it now. After I talked to Major Shields, I called that jerk attorney for Luisa O’Neal’s foundation. Would you believe he tried to claim privilege? I told him I couldn’t decide if I was going to come to his home with my shotgun or go to the state’s attorney’s office and file a complaint against him.”

“What kind of complaint? It’s not illegal to be a sleazy dumb-ass in Maryland.”

“I was bluffing. That’s why I put in the part about the shotgun. He decided the person in question wasn’t exactly a client, at least not in this capacity, and he was within his rights to tell me.”

“Who gave the board the list, Whitney?”

But even as Tess asked, she knew. Somehow she had always known whose elegant fingerprints she would find on this case.

“Your all-time fave Baltimore philanthropist, Luisa Julia O’Neal herself.” Whitney dug her fingers into her forehead, as if she felt a headache coming on or wanted to claw a memory from her overactive mind. “It was her idea all along, Tess. Looking into these cases, hiring you to do it. She was behind the whole thing, and I never knew. I’m as big a dupe as you in this, maybe bigger. Because I never understood why you thought she was so horrible.”

“But not this horrible,” Tess said.

Whitney lifted her face from her hands. “What do you mean?”

“I hate Luisa O’Neal, but this isn’t her style. She’s been used as surely as we have. Besides, she’s in a nursing home, right? Maybe she didn’t do it. Maybe she’s someone’s fall guy. Where did you say she was?”

“Keswick, I think.”

“Let’s hope they have Saturday morning visiting hours.”

The nursing home on the hill, looming above Baltimore’s pricey Roland Park and not-so-pricey Hampden, had acquired a newer, blander name. But old-timers and old families still knew it as the Keswick Home for Incurables.

That seemed right to Tess. She didn’t know the exact nature of Luisa’s physical ailments, but she had never doubted the rot in her soul was beyond repair.

Luisa was in the clinic, the last stop before the mortuary. Her decline must have been a rapid one to put her there less than a year after taking her own apartment in the residential wing. Tess and Whitney signed in on the depressingly blank visitors’ log for the health care center. The attendant then wrote down three numbers on a sheet of paper and passed it to them.