Butchers Hill

happy?'

'Not as happy as the check you owe me for this.'

Tess hung up the phone and, not without some effort, wedged her way back into traffic. Idling along, she couldn't help thinking about what Dorie might find on Theresa Esther Monaghan in her electronic data bases. A twelve-year-old Toyota. No mortgage, although she had a loan for the business, co-signed by Kitty and Tyner. No other record of the business-after all, it was in the name of Edgar Keyes, although Tess's name showed up on the incorporation papers as vice president. It made her feel safe and smug, knowing how few electronic tracks she had left. It also made her feel like something of a failure. Surely important people couldn't move so anonymously through life.

She was so busy thinking about her electronic profile that she almost missed the turn-off for Columbia. She caught Highway 175 at the last possible moment and headed west, into the heart of Maryland's last fling with Utopia.

The planned community of Columbia, brought forth during the giddy optimism of the sixties, was to have revolutionized the suburbs with its 'villages' and mandated proportions of green space. A new town, as it had been called, a different way to live. But Columbia's only real legacy was its strangely named cul de sacs-Proud Foot Place, Open Window Way, Sea Change. Utopia was just another suburb, a bedroom community for Baltimore and D.C. The late developer James Rouse was better known for his much imitated 'festival marketplaces,' from Boston's Faneuil Hall to Baltimore's Harborplace, than he was for his new city. He had wanted to change the way people lived and ended up changing the way tourists shopped. So much for life as a visionary, Tess thought. At least he had walked the walk, living in his own creation, and using his retirement years to build housing for the inner-city poor.

Jacqueline Weir's condo was in a development known as the Cove, which at thirty-years-plus was Columbia's equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. Tess wandered through the cluster of stucco and brick buildings for almost fifteen minutes before she found the address. It was a two-story apartment that backed up to a small canal along the man-made Wilde Lake, stagnant and bright green with algae at this time of year.

Dorie's misgivings had gotten to her. What if Jacqueline Weir didn't want to be found? What if she had a legitimate reason not to see her sister again? What if Mary Browne wasn't her sister? Tess couldn't show up on the woman's doorstep and say 'Heigh-ho, I was hired to find you, any reason I shouldn't?' However, armed with nothing more than a clipboard and one of her plain, tell-nothing business cards, she could transform herself into a pollster and ask all sorts of personal questions that might give her the information she needed. Or she could pretend to be from one of those new computer services that offered to reunite people with lost loved ones, then gauge Jacqueline Weir's reaction to this one-time free offer. She rapped briskly at the door, full of purpose.

No answer, no sound of movement came from within the apartment. Dorie had said Jacqueline/Susan worked from home, but who knew where a consultant might be at midday? She rapped again, and this time heard high heels moving across hardwood floors. Perfect. She stood a little straighter, thinking again of the Banneker monitor and the ramrod spine of Mrs. Nelson. She smoothed her hair with her free hand. Lies crowded her tongue, ready to be told.

They all vanished, every word vanished, when the door opened.

'I'd thought you'd get here a little faster than this,' said the woman Tess knew as Mary Browne. 'But I guess you did okay, all things considered.'

Chapter 8

'Who are you?'

'I'm Jackie Weir,' said the woman Tess knew as Mary Browne. Certainly, she dressed like Mary Browne. Today, it was a coral suit with white trim at the cuffs and collars. The white was picked up by her high-heeled shoes, pearl earrings, and a double strand of pearls against her dark throat. All this, just to sit in her home-office, waiting for Tess to come to the punchline of her sick little joke.

'But Jackie Weir is Susan King.'

'Right.'

'And ‘Mary Browne' hired me to find Susan King. You hired me to find you.' For a moment, Tess wished she were in the habit of carrying her gun. This was crazy, and crazy people made her nervous.

'Yes, which you've done. Congratulations. As I said, I thought you might have been here even faster-it's really not that hard, once you find the name change, and any competent private investigator should have been able to do that. But I'm impressed, nevertheless.'

They were still standing in the foyer of Mary's-of Susan's, no, of Jackie's-apartment. Tess studied the parquet floors, the other woman's lethal-looking white pumps, her own nubuck flats. They were from the Tweeds catalog and she would have called them off-yellow, but the catalog had labeled them cornmeal. Why am I thinking about shoes? Because she was embarrassed and humiliated, and concentrating on her shoes kept her from admitting how angry she was.

'I don't like this,' Tess began. 'You came to my place of business, you lied to me-'

'I suppose you never lie.'

Better to skip past that one. 'You wasted my time.'

'I paid for your time. A new private investigator, starting out-all your cases should be so easy. I know what it's like to start a business. You can't have too many easy jobs. But my next job is harder. You won't have such an easy time finding the person I'm really looking for.'

Tess looked up. 'What makes you think I'd do any more work for you at all, after the way you dicked me around?'

Jackie's smile was the smile of a businesswoman used to coddling difficult types, smoothing ruffled feathers, working her to way to yes. 'Look, it's past noon. Can we talk about this over lunch? There's always Clyde's, just across the way.'

'No Clyde's,' Tess said petulantly, a child saying no just to say no. 'I've never forgiven their menu for inspiring that insipid song ‘Afternoon Delight.''

'Let's go into Clarksville, then.'

'Clarksville? What's out there, the local Dairy Queen?' Actually a hot dog and a Peanut Buster Parfait would hit the spot. One drawback to city living was the serious lack of Dairy Queens.

'You obviously haven't been keeping up with Howard County real estate. Clarksville is home to some of the ritziest subdivisions around-and one amazing French restaurant. Expensive, but worth it. Come on, it's on me.'

'You bet it's on you,' Tess said. 'After all, you have a stock portfolio worth almost two hundred thousand dollars as of market close yesterday.'

There was a small victory in seeing Jackie Weir's eyes widen at that factoid. Good-let her wonder what else Tess might have uncovered along the way.

Clarksville had changed. Tess remembered farmland, a few simple houses scattered among the trees. Now huge, elaborate homes sat on landscaped lots. These weren't the kind of developments that looked naked and raw in their early years; too much money had been spent for the owners to tolerate anything less than instant perfection. But the very lack of flaws, the absence of anything as spontaneous as a fallen bicycle or an overgrown lilac tree, made the houses forbidding to Tess.

'Mini-mansions, they call them in the trade,' Jackie said as they drove west. 'The covenant actually specifies a minimum square footage of ten thousand feet and all natural materials.'

'But that was a lavender stone house. How can that be natural?'

'Closer to periwinkle, if you want to be precise. The owner's Mercedes has been custom-painted to match. Or was it the other way around?'

After seeing the overdone, overlarge houses, Tess assumed the restaurant would be built along the same nightmarish proportions. To her relief, Trouve was a small, fieldstone farmhouse that looked as if it had been