Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

Sobbing, Devon was a figure of pity, yet her father did not move from his chair, did not try to comfort her. It was as if he was waiting for an invitation. Finally, Tess went over to her and pulled the throw around her shoulders. Devon stiffened at the contact, but she didn’t push Tess away.

“You didn’t hurt me, by hiding what you knew,” Tess told her. “But you almost hurt yourself. Someone else knows Gwen called you. I don’t know how, but they do. Someone who wanted to keep you from speaking to me. I’m not sure what Gwen knew, but someone is willing to kill anyone who talked to her in the final days of her life.”

“I can’t help hiding things,” Devon said. Her nose was running, and her voice was still choked from her tears. “It’s what I do. I used to cut my food into tiny little pieces, and push it down into my sock when no one was looking, then throw the socks away after supper. My mother could never understand why I was always running out of tube socks. I told her the dog was stealing them from the hamper.”

Mr. Whittaker cleared his throat, but said nothing.

“Whoever tried to kill you thinks Gwen told you something.”

“Well, she didn’t. The only thing she kept saying on the answering machine was, ‘I can’t go back, I can’t go back.’”

“She meant to Persephone’s?”

“I thought so at the time. Although she also said…” Devon paused, searching her memory. “She said, ‘I can’t go back. I can’t go with him.’”

“I can’t go with him ?”

“Yes. I thought she meant her father, but it could have been someone else.”

Tess shook her head. It was too small a scrap of information to be useful. Besides, it might not mean anything.

“Devon, Mr. Whittaker-” the father hitched his chair slightly forward, but otherwise was silent. “I don’t think you should assume Devon is safe, not in the short run. She should be sent some place far away, and I think you should hire a bodyguard for her. If you can afford it.”

The last part sounded silly to her ears. There was clearly very little the Whittakers couldn’t afford, or wouldn’t buy, especially when it came to Devon.

“How long will she have to go away?”

“I wish I could tell you. If Hilde’s killer thinks it through, he’ll realize Devon has spoken to the Philadelphia police, to me, to her family, and that keeping her silent is no longer a realistic possibility. But I’d go away for Christmas, if it’s not too much of an imposition.”

“We could,” her father said. “We have a house in Guadeloupe.”

Of course you do, Tess wanted to say.

“What about school?” Devon asked. “I have finals.”

“I’ll take care of it,” her father assured her. Tess wondered how many times he had made that same promise to his daughter. “You can do them by mail, perhaps. We’ll work something out.”

“Guadeloupe will be warm at least,” Devon said. “I’m cold all the time now. I feel like I’ll never get warm again.”

“I thought the doctor said your blood pressure would start going up,” her father said.

“Doctors,” Devon said, cramming more scorn into that one word than Tess would have thought possible.

She stood, ready to leave. “Guadeloupe sounds like a good plan. Don’t forget the bodyguard, though. Besides, maybe the Philadelphia cops will surprise us. Maybe it will turn out that this has nothing to do with Gwen at all. Maybe it was a botched kidnapping.”

Devon’s father seemed to find some comfort in this, but Devon was a harder sell.

“Aren’t you in danger, too? They followed you to my apartment today. They’re one step behind you.”

“Actually,” Tess said, “I’m afraid they’re one step ahead of me.”

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN TESS MADE IT HOME. SHE had expected little in the way of a welcoming committee-Kitty and Tyner were at the opera, Crow had a gig, and Esskay went to bed pretty early, to prepare for the next day’s napping regimen.

But when she tiptoed into Kitty’s kitchen to forage for a snack, her stomach less than satisfied by a Roy Rogers pit stop near the state line, her father was sitting at the kitchen table. He had a can of beer open in front of him, and the radio was on-Stan the Fan, or one of those sports talk shows. He had sat like this in their kitchen at home many an evening. If you asked him what he was listening to, or why, he might not have an answer. As a child, Tess had found this odd. But as an adult, she had developed her own fondness for the jumble of voices on talk radio. There was a soothing rhythm in all that chat, a kind of white noise in the locals’ nasal accents.

“Mom kick you out?” she asked. Turn your fears into jokes, and life won’t be so inclined to provide the punch-line.

“I was waiting for you,” her father said. “Kitty left me a key. They’re going to be out late-”

“The opera, I know. Tosca .” She left out the part about how opera affected Tyner. Her father was almost as protective of his only sister as he was of his daughter. The difference being that he wholly approved of Tyner, an older man with a good income, and had yet to approve of anyone Tess had brought home.

“So, what’s up?” By turning her back on him and rummaging in the refrigerator, she was able to make the question sound almost casual. How was your day? Same old, same old. Got shot at, saved a woman’s life .

“You’ve got to stop what you’re doing.”

She froze, her hand wrapped around the upper portion of a bottle of Pinot Grigio, her face warm despite the cool air of the refrigerator. For a moment, she thought her father knew of her Philadelphia adventure. But how could he? The Inquirer would have a story tomorrow, given the prominence of the Whittaker family, but no one cared about her involvement. She was counting on the cops to misspell her name, counting on the reporter not to track her down, not tonight.

“Stop what?” she asked casually. “Drinking white wine? Hey, I had a hard day. You want another beer?”

“Arnie Vasso called me today. He said you’re making a nuisance of yourself. He said you’re annoying some people you’d be better off leaving alone.”

“I spilled a glass of water in his lap, that’s all.”

“I’m not talking about Arnie, and you know it. I’m talking about Nicola DeSanti. Whatever you’re doing, Tess, drop it. It’s not worth it. Not worth your time, and not worth Ruthie’s money. Tell your cop friend what you know, and get out of the way.”

She poured a glass of wine and sat down across from her father. No use putting the bottle back in the refrigerator. She knew she’d drain it before this night was through, maybe start on another one. “Get out of the way of what, Dad?”

“You did what Ruthie asked. You identified the dead girl. But there’s no connection between her and Henry dying, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone in my office. That’s all there is to it.”

Usually, it’s the liar who can’t make eye contact. But Tess thought it would break her heart to look into her father’s steady blue eyes as he piled fiction upon fiction.

“It’s not just Gene, is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean if Gene Fulton was in this alone, you wouldn’t be afraid. You could go to the boss, tell him that he’s helping Nicola DeSanti run a prostitution ring out of her bar. Because that’s what he’s doing, Dad, and you know it. So why can’t you turn him in?”

“I’m protecting you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Tesser!” She almost never used such language in front of her parents. Then again, her father seldom tried to bullshit her. Judith had been the one in charge of parental misinformation, running the gamut from “You’ll put your eye out” to “The boys won’t respect you if you do that.” Patrick had specialized in omission. He sought to protect her from the world by not telling her too much about it.