The Last Place

“Yes,” Tess agreed, feeling a little dazed by all these words, all this information.

“A lot has happened to me. I mean-a lot. But I’m alive and never been anything but. In fact, I’ve never had stitches, even though I almost cut my toe off once.” She propped her bare foot on the table and grabbed her second toe, as if begi

“See that?”

“See what?”

“My scar. I was walking in the surf at Ocean City after graduation- you know, we all drove down, got a motel room: six girls, six blow-dryers, blew the fuses every night-and I felt this little tug, like a fish nipped me. I said to my friend, ”I’m going up to my towel, there’s fish in this water.“ Then I saw my toe, hanging by, like, a thread, and I started to scream. There was a boy on the beach, said he was premed at Maryland, he wrapped his T-shirt around my foot. They took me to the clinic on Fifty-third Street, but they didn’t know what to do. But there was no-what did he call it?-no topical skin loss. The doctor in Salisbury just patted it back in place and I was fine. I was on crutches a whole week. You want to talk about a good way to meet boys, walk around on crutches.”

“It looks… good.” The story seemed confusing to Tess, implausible even. The thick skin at the base of the toe didn’t look like any scar she had ever seen. But the story also had made her queasy, and she didn’t want to ask questions lest Julie Carter provide more information.

“So, I’ve never had stitches, never been in a hospital at all. Except when I was born, I guess. I’ve never even had a near-death experience. That’s when your life passes before your eyes, right? I hope when I do, it’s not just me stacking cans at Mars. What a bummer that would be.”

Julie was rocking in her seat now, beating her hands on the kitchen table, ignoring her tea. She sniffed once, twice. The tip of her nose was pink as a rabbit’s. Tess finally put it together then: Julie’s need to get to Baltimore on a regular basis, the rapid-fire speech, the eyes that were all iris. It might be speed, it might be cocaine or even crack. But it was something that juiced you up, not down.

And now Julie was moving in to close the deal, as sure of her mark as any Fuller Brush guy, any tin man.

“Look,” she said. “I know I just met you, but you seem so nice. Not stuck up. There’s been this terrible computer mix-up at work. The checks are, like, frozen inside the computer because the bank’s computer crashed and we’re not going to get paid for another two days, after they make a wire transfer or something like that. Could you lend me a little money so I could get some food for the house? I’m good for it, you know. But I live check to check, and when the check is late I’m hosed.”

The easy thing would have been to hand over a twenty. The futile thing would have been to lecture, or even call attention to the bullshit. Tess chose to play Julie’s game, Julie’s way, piling lie on top of lie.

“Gosh, I wish I could. I don’t have any cash on me, or even my ATM card. I’m overdrawn myself. Got a little out of control, playing the Delaware slots last month. And the people I’m working for, they haven’t paid me a dime yet. I have to wait until the end of the month to see dollar one.”

Julie sniffed once, twice. “I guess that makes sense. Because whoever told you I’m dead doesn’t know their shit, do they? That is some weird-ass job you’ve got, going to people’s doors and telling them they’re dead.”

Tess thought so too.

CHAPTER 10

“Be calm, be polite, play the game.”

Whitney’s advice, hissed in a whisper in the corridor of her family’s foundation offices, was undeniably good. Still, it infuriated Tess, who felt she had earned the right to her snit.

“Play the game? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this was just a game. I thought I was working for a group of people who were sincerely interested in making a difference in the world.”

“Poor choice of words.” Whitney was maddening when she was reasonable. “One doesn’t go charging into a meeting with people who are paying you-paying you quite well, by the way-and accuse them of being incompetents. There were bound to be a few glitches along the way.”

“Glitches? I was told Julie Carter was dead and she pops up alive. Hazel Ligetti died in a fire that appears to have been set accidentally by someone who didn’t even know her. The investigators in Frederick may not have been brilliant, but they were competent. These cases are worthless.”

“Let us worry about how to lobby the General Assembly,” Whitney said. “For now, make nice with the board. You work for the entire group, remember?”

Tess did. She took a deep breath and smoothed back a tendril of hair that had snaked from her widow’s peak, just like the little girl with the curl. She would be good, she would be very, very good.

They were the last to arrive, a Whitney power play: Summon everyone to your office, then make them wait. Tess watched with barely concealed amusement-and impatience-as the other members of Whitney’s consortium unpacked the lunches they had brought to their “brown bag” meeting. Lunch told so much about a person. Even how one carried a lunch indicated a lot. Only one person here, for example, had a literal brown bag, and it happened to be the group’s lone male member, Neal Ames. He pulled a bologna sandwich on white bread, an apple, and a bag of Utz pretzels from the soft crinkled sack, which had obviously been recycled several times. Earnest and idealistic, if not particularly imaginative, Tess decided.

Now the woman in the middle of the table, Miriam Greenhouse, the executive director of the city’s best-known women’s shelter, had brought a fashionable-looking salad, a chocolate cream cheese muffin, and a Diet Mountain Dew: caffeine junkie, much too busy to pack her own lunch. The two other women, still in their twenties, had Diet Cokes, Greek salads, and low-calorie yogurt, which Tess found mildly depressing. Regular yogurt should be abstemious enough. Finally, there was Whitney, who wasn’t eating at all. Probably another power play on her part.

Tess unwrapped her own lunch and tried to decode what message she was sending: turkey sub with lettuce, tomato, and extra hots, a bag of Utz crab chips, and a real Coca-Cola. She didn’t know what those gathered around the table saw, but she knew who she was: a diet-averse, shellfish-allergic hometown girl who had never tasted crab seasoning until Utz had the brilliant idea of putting it on potato chips.

“So bring us up to date,” said Miriam Greenhouse, the woman from the shelter, taking the lead. She was the kind of woman to whom others automatically deferred-confident, calm, with a hint of an edge that allowed her to stay confident and calm, because no one wanted to find out what would happen if she was pushed. “What kind of lapses have you discovered so far? What warning signs were ignored, what clear signs of danger were missed in these women’s cases?”

Tess, who had just bitten into her sandwich, had to work her way to the end of the mouthful, holding a finger aloft as she chewed for what seemed like a lifetime.

“Sort of the opposite,” she said, after swallowing. It had the feel of an anticlimax.

“You’ve made no progress? But Whitney said you’ve already submitted expenses for your trip to Frederick and Washington counties.”

“I submit my expenses weekly. It is possible to rack up quite a bit of mileage without-” She paused, not sure of what she wanted to say, how she wanted to phrase it. She had come in loaded for bear. How had she ended up on the defensive?

The man, Neal Ames, rushed into the pause. “That wasn’t a cheap meal you had in West Virginia. Nor was it a cheap motel. Couldn’t you have stayed in lodgings more reasonable than the Bavarian I