Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

Tull surprised her by leaning forward and wiping a piece of feta from her cheek. His touch was a father’s touch-well-meaning, but too gentle to get the job done. Mothers knew how hard to rub a stained cheek. “You know, if you plan on any more human contact today, you might consider a breath mint.”

Tess took over, cleaning her own cheek. “I think I’m just going to go back to my office, read these files, and canoodle with Esskay, whose breath is always much worse than mine.”

“And someone pays you for this? Man, I want a gig like that someday. You need a partner?”

“Everyone wants to be my partner these days.” Tess thought about Whitney’s similarly facetious offer just the other night. At least, she hoped it was facetious. “Why is that? Does my life really look so cushy from where you sit?”

“Actually, it looks…happy. You look happy, ever since you got back from Texas. And back with Crow.”

“I guess I am,” Tess said, then looked around nervously. Too late-there wasn’t even a splinter of wood to knock in this room of formica tables and plastic chairs. She rapped her knuckles on her forehead, figuring it was hard enough to count.

TESS SUPPOSED THERE WERE WORSE THINGS THAN FINDING one’s erstwhile boss at the breakfast table almost every day, wearing his robe and eating bran flakes, but she had yet to think of any.

Oh yes, there was one-knowing that said erstwhile boss was sleeping with one’s aunt.

“Hello, Tess,” Tyner Gray greeted her the next morning, his smile so smug that it could make the Chesire Cat disappear from shame. “We didn’t hear you come in last night, but then-we were busy.”

“Roll a little closer to the table,” she said, nudging his wheelchair with her hip. “I need to get into the refrigerator.”

“I thought you ate at Jimmy’s most mornings,” he said, even as he complied. The kitchen was large, or so it had seemed before Tyner came along. “Is it true that you got one of the new waitresses fired for putting cream cheese on both your bagels, or is that just more Fells Point apocrypha?”

Tess leaned into the refrigerator, checking out her options. “In the off season, when we’re not rowing, I like to come downstairs and have breakfast with Kitty and her man of the moment. Some of them even cook. The one before you made Belgian waffles.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d become resigned to toasting my own bagels this winter,” he said. “Kitty’s talking about installing an elevator so we can use her rooms on the second floor.” Since taking up with Tyner, Kitty had limited herself to the cramped rooms behind the store.

“Don’t count on it. Kitty has been in the boyfriend-of-the-month club for as long as I’ve lived here.” Tess sniffed the half-and-half. Kitty drank her coffee black, so the cream she kept for guests and her tenant-niece sometimes went bad. “Why do you think she’d change her ways for you?”

“Because I’m so good,” Tyner said. The waxy container of half-and-half slipped through Tess’s hands, but she caught it before it hit the floor.

“ Gross . If the cream wasn’t sour to begin with, then that remark definitely would have curdled it.”

“Crow said he was going to pick some up while he was out walking Esskay,” Tyner said complacently, turning a page of the newspaper. “Rumor has it that your apartment has a kitchen, but you can’t prove it by me.”

“Are you two sniping at each other again?” Kitty’s voice was sleepy as she padded into the kitchen, tying the sash of her peach robe. Fifteen years older than Tess, she looked much better in the mornings, with her fair skin and tousled red hair. But it was her sweet, open disposition that bound men to her. “They come for the curls,” Crow once said, “but they stay for the temperament. Kitty’s like a hearth where every man wants to warm himself.”

“Then why isn’t Tyner burnt to a crisp by now?” Tess had lamented.

It wasn’t that she disliked the irascible older man. He was a good rowing coach and a decent lawyer, who threw her work and represented all her clients for a small fee, so she could claim privilege if the police ever hassled her. But Tyner in love was unbearable. He beamed. He smiled. He gazed adoringly. Some mornings, it was all Tess could do not to toss her waffles on the Beacon-Light’s local section, which happened to be the only part of the paper that Tyner didn’t commandeer.

“You can’t expect our relationship to change just because you two are boyfriend and girlfriend now,” Tess told her aunt. “This is how Tyner and I always talked to each other. You just used to take my side, remember? You’re a traitor to your gender and your blood.”

But Kitty wasn’t listening. She leaned over Tyner’s shoulder, pretending interest in the newspaper he was reading, letting a hand rest on his shoulder. Tyner picked it up and kissed her palm.

“You know,” Tess said, aware no one was listening, “Jimmy’s is looking better and better. Tell Crow to meet me there.”

It was almost ten before she set out for Locust Point. Funny-she saw the neighborhood every day, from across the water, rowed her Alden along its ragged shore, yet all she really knew of Locust Point was Fort McHenry and the Domino Sugars sign, which she could see from the makeshift terrace outside her bedroom. She tried to remember to look at it every night, just before bed. So much had changed in Baltimore, it was reassuring to go to sleep with that static neon vision blazing red in her mind’s eye. As a child, she thought God might be lurking behind the sign, because if she were God, that was where she would make her heaven. Atop a neon sign overlooking Baltimore, guarding a mountain of sugar.

On a map, Locust Point looked cramped and narrow. Yet once Tess crossed Key Highway, there was a feeling of expansiveness, as if the sky were deeper here, the city miles away. She had heard rumors of yuppies, drawn by inexpensive rowhouses with water views, but there was little evidence of such an invasion. Even with the big employers disappearing-Procter amp; Gamble, the shipping jobs-the neighborhood was strikingly unchanged. One could imagine Locust Point inside a plastic globe, synthetic snow sifting down, no one ever getting in.

And no one ever getting out. It seemed an unlikely place for anyone to die as a stranger, yet Jane Doe had done just that.

Tess parked her car on Hull Street, a few doors down from the Dembrow rowhouse. She was going to walk where Henry walked, or at least where Henry had said he walked the morning of Jane Doe’s death. She was even starting out at the same time, so the light would be more or less the same. Of course, December was not November, but it was close enough. Even the weather was the way it had been thirteen months ago, sunny and unseasonably mild. Henry had gone out the back door, so she walked to the alley and touched the gate, almost as if beginning a game, and started on her way.

She was not Tess Monaghan, she kept telling herself. She was Henry Dembrow, a twenty-one-year-old huffer aching for a high, seeing the world through itching, watering eyes that evaluated everything for its potential utility toward this goal. Such eyes would look for the glint of coins on the sidewalks, or untended purses in cars. Would he notice copper downspouts, too, or iron balustrades? No, Henry wasn’t enterprising enough to gather metal to sell, to make the trip to the salvage places that asked no questions of the men with shopping carts. He wanted things easy.

He had remembered stopping at the corner gas station, so Tess stopped there, stepping into the warmth of the inevitable mini-market. The manager had chased Henry Dembrow from here the day of the killing, according to the police report, but hadn’t noticed any girl. Tess grabbed a handful of mini Goldenberg Peanut Chews from a box next to the cash register. To each his own high.