The Last Place

“Could you tell me where the local cemetery is?”

“Why?”

“Someone ought to say kaddish,” she said.

“Is that like gesundheit?”

“Sort of.”

It wasn’t much of a trick to find Hazel Ligetti’s grave in the small cemetery at the edge of town. The stone was plain, as Proctor had said, with only Hazel’s name, the forty-eight-year span that was her birth and her death, a Star of David, and a few lines in Hebrew, which Tess had never learned to read.

But there was one unexpected touch: a few small stones left on the marker’s rim.

Someone else knew Hazel was Jewish, Tess thought. Someone who knows this custom.

It took a beat for another thought to occur: Someone knew Hazel. Someone has visited her.

But how could that be? She had no family, and Proctor said no friend had come forward when she died. But someone had visited this grave, someone who was not fooled by the Italian-sounding name.

Then again, the stone had a Star of David, some lines of Hebrew. Perhaps a visitor to a nearby marker, a more popular one, had felt sorry for lonely Hazel. Tess found a pebble and added it to the others. She felt a strange tickle at the back of her neck, that feeling sometimes described as someone walking across your grave. Tess had never understood that description. Dead, one felt nothing. She could jump up and down on this spot right now, and Hazel Ligetti would never know.

On the way back to Baltimore, Tess stopped at Antietam. It was her favorite of the various Civil War battlefields she had visited, and she had visited many. It seemed to have been her fate to take up with men who were obsessed with the Civil War. Crow was so avid he had threatened to get involved with local reenactors, but his hours weren’t compatible with marching around in a gray suit. (Crow, a romantic with a twisted family tree with branches in Virginia, would choose the South, of course. Most reenactors did.) Jonathan Ross had been more bookish, content with the oeuvre of Foote and Catton and the Shaaras. When they played Botticelli, he had used obscure-to-Tess Civil War officers to stump her.

Then again, perhaps all men were obsessed with the Civil War, or war in general. Why was that? She supposed a certain boyish interest in things with engines led, inevitably, to tanks and aircraft carriers and fighter planes. But why did they know all the generals’ names and all those battles? Tess found war baffling. Even war movies baffled her, with the sole exception of The Great Escape. Getting out, ru

How did men do it? Tess asked herself, not for the first time. How did they talk themselves into thinking it made sense to march toward gunfire for some larger, greater cause? Even if she believed in a cause-and it seemed to her a good idea to keep the United States united and to abolish slavery-she couldn’t imagine sacrificing herself for one. She didn’t want to die.

Damn. She wished she hadn’t let her thoughts go there. This was the trap she had sidestepped in the graveyard. A door in her brain opened up and took her over the threshold into the abyss of infinity. She was going to die one day, she was going to cease to exist. How could that be? She wanted to believe in higher powers, in reincarnation, in anything that held the promise that she wouldn’t simply cease to be. But she didn’t think it worked that way. You had to be a believer first, and only then did you get the reward of afterlife, or second life, or perpetual life through reincarnation. You couldn’t bargain or barge your way into immortality, like some desperate man fleeing the Titanic, holding a child in his arms. You had to believe in something first. The only thing Tess honestly believed was that she was scared of dying.

She drove back to Baltimore as fast as she could, racing the sun, telling herself that her only concern was getting back to the city before its early rush hour began.

CHAPTER 8

“You’re going to die, Tess.”

It was Monday and she was back in Dr. Armistead’s office, sulkily pulling on the wing chair’s fringe. It had seemed to her that her Antietam epiphany was just the sort of story one brought to therapy, but Dr. Armistead did not seem impressed or even interested. It was as if she had shown up for a di

“Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. I thought it was the most interesting moment of my week.”

“Really? What about your encounter with that man in the bar?”

“Troy Plunkett? There was nothing particularly interesting about that. It’s what I do. I talk to people. Sometimes I have to pay them.”

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.”