Butchers Hill

"Why did you wait so long before telling anyone what was happening?" one of the committee members asked.

Willa Mott stuttered from nervousness. "I myself do not believe in abortion, because of my religious pr-pr-pr-principles. I thought it was right to counsel young women against it. But I began to see that they were hurting the women who came in, and some of them just went someplace else, anyway. It didn't seem Christian to me, what they were doing. I and one of the clients called a television reporter. I didn't go on camera-they shot me in the dark, with one of those machines that makes your voice sound fu

Another senator, a woman, asked a question: "The adoptions they arranged-were those legal and aboveboard?"

"Oh my goodness, yes. If they could have just kept doing that, without trying to coerce the women who came to see them, I would have been proud to work there. But they had a cause, you know? They honestly believed in what they were doing."

The testimony ended there and before Tess knew it, she was listening to a debate over a different bill, something about the state's private adoption laws. She turned her headset in and walked outside, blinking in the bright sun on Lawyers Mall, the square at the center of the State House complex. Tourists were gathered around the statue of Thurgood Marshall, snapping pictures, posing alongside the bronze version of the Supreme Court justice as if he were one of those life-size cutouts of the president or a popular sports figure.

Marshall was a relatively new addition to the State House grounds, added as a way of soothing the hard feelings engendered by a statue of the other Marylander to sit on the Supreme Court, Roger Taney. Taney's claim to fame, alas, was that he had written the Dred Scott slave decision, helping the nation set course for the Civil War. Inevitably, people in the bury-the-past nineties had wanted to tear Taney's statue down, as if that would make everything better. The state, in a rare burst of Solomon-like wisdom, had countered by adding Marshall's likeness. The compromise had worked in ways few imagined. For while Marshall stood in this open square, literally embraced by tourists, Roger Taney sat high on a hill on the other side of the State House lonely and ignored.

Back in her car, Tess turned on the radio and punched the buttons until she found a man talking about the media conspiracy to conceal some Washington scandal. It was a liberal media conspiracy, of course, an allegation that always made Tess smile. The media was one of the most conservative forces she knew.

A traffic a

Maybe she should call in to one of the talk shows before she hit the tu

Only Jackie wasn't a friend, she reminded herself, merely a client. Once Tess found her daughter, she'd be gone.

Chapter 14

"Doesn't Carroll County still have an active chapter of the KKK?" Jackie asked, looking nervously around the bagel shop where she and Tess had stopped, killing time before their 10 a.m. appointment with Willa Mott.

"Uh-huh. In fact, they've got a recruiting flier up on the wall over there," Tess said, pointing with her chin toward the bulletin board. "I've heard it's a great way to meet men. Want me to write down the number?"

"You know, some things are not fu

"I'll concede that if you'll concede some things are."

Jackie broke off a piece of her bagel, then looked at it as if she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do with it. She wasn't quite as tense and nervous as she had been at the Adoption Rights meeting, but she was definitely rattled. Was it possible to want something so much that it scared you?

"Remind me to check my teeth in the rearview mirror before we head out," Tess said. "I don't want to interview someone with poppy seeds in my teeth."

"You should have ordered something without seeds, then." Oh so prim.

"What, like that banana nut thing with blueberry cream cheese you're toying with? I have news for you, Jackie. That is not a bagel. If the local KKK came in here right now, they'd take one look at what you're eating and say, ‘At least she's a Gentile.' Then they'd drag me out of here by the braid like the cossacks who used to come calling in my great-grandmother's village."

"Really? Did things like that truly happen to your ancestors?"

Tess shrugged. "We only have Gramma Weinstein's word for it and she's never been above a little embroidery. Especially if it's in the cause of trying to get one of her grandchildren to eat liver."

"But you're not really Jewish, right? Your last name is Monaghan."

"Judaism comes down through your mother."

"Is that how it works?" Jackie seemed genuinely curious. "I mean, if your father was Weinstein and your mother was Monaghan, you wouldn't be Jewish?"

"I'd be exactly what I am, a nonbelieving mongrel, but I wouldn't qualify for citizenship in Israel." Tess pulled her lips back in a gum-baring grin. "Any seeds?"

"One, up near the pointy tooth. No, other side. You got it."

"Let's go meet Willa Mott."

H. L. Mencken, never a loose man with a compliment, had described Carroll County as one of the most beautiful places in Maryland. In some undeveloped pockets, you could still see the soft hills and long, tapering views that had inspired him. The older towns-Westminster, New Windsor, Union Mills-had the nineteenth-century red brick houses, more like the old German and Me

Willa Mott lived in one of the oldest, ugliest subdivisions south of Westminster. A faded sign in the front yard advertised "Apple Orchard Daycare," but the only tree Tess could see was an ailanthus that no one had tried to chop down until it was too late. The bastard tree had struggled through a crack near the driveway and was now a spindly twelve feet.

"The kids are watching a video," Willa Mott said, opening the door before they were up the walk. "So we have exactly eighty-eight minutes. Although they sometimes like me to sing along with the hunchback."

It was hard to imagine Willa Mott singing, or doing anything vaguely joyful. She looked just as Tess had imagined her while listening to the taped testimony: a plain woman of little distinction. She wore a denim skirt, polyester white blouse, and navy cardigan. Her hair was a dull brown, her eyes a duller brown. The only color in her face was her nose, red with a summer cold. She found a tissue and blew the way children do, one side, then the other.