which Tess and her friends had discovered the mixed pleasures of mixed drinks. 'You're holding everything up.'
'This is kind of important,' Tess said between gritted teeth, but too intimidated by her grandmother to just push past her and make a mad dash for her car. 'People's lives may be at stake. There's a woman-Jacqueline Weir, you might remember her as Susan King. She worked for Poppa in the Fells Point store, and she's about to make the biggest mistake of her life.'
She couldn't help it, she was curious to see what her grandmother's face would reveal, curious to see how she would react to the name. But Gramma looked unimpressed.
'That troublemaker? Wouldn't you know she'd pop up again just now, when there's money to be made. She always did have a nose for money. Well you tell her that she's not getting another penny, you tell her that. Nothing's changed.'
'Oh, she came around ten or twelve years ago, asking Samuel for money for college, but I put my foot down. So he got her pregnant, the stupid man, and had to give her money for an abortion. You think someone who owned a drugstore might have had the means to prevent such a thing, might have taken the time to sell himself a prophylactic kit. But he didn't and he had to pay. I accepted that. Once. Were we to pay for his stupidity for the rest of our lives? When she asked for help again, I told Samuel it was out of the question. Otherwise, she'd never be out of our lives. Now you tell me she's back. I can't say I'm surprised. I wonder how she heard about the land sale?'
'You knew? You knew all this time?'
'Of course I knew. Your grandfather could never hide anything from me. Believe me, he didn't stray again. As I reminded him, Maryland is a community property state. First he was too rich to leave me, and then he was too poor. What's half of nothing?'
'Knew what?' Judith asked. 'Who's Susan King? Will someone please tell me what's going on?'
'I'd tell you, Mom, but I have to go stop a woman from committing her second felony of the day,' Tess said. 'Let Gramma explain it all to you. Besides, she's known about it much longer than I have.'
'There's nothing to explain,' Gramma said, with a wave of her hand that suggested the past was an inconvenience-a fly to be swatted, a smear on a window pane that could be erased with a quick shot of Windex.
'There's a lifetime to explain,' Judith said. 'A lifetime of secrets and lies, and I'm sick of it. You're not going anywhere, Theresa Esther Monaghan, until you tell me everything.'
Tess grabbed her mother's hand. 'I'll tell you what I know in the car, if you insist. But I should warn you I'm going to be driving just a little bit above the speed limit.'
Chapter 26
Tess's driving proved to be the least of Judith's concerns, even as Tess ran every amber and not a few reds on the way to Roland Park.
'So this woman, this client of yours, she's…connected to Poppa?' Judith asked tentatively. 'And Mama knew, she knew all this time, and never told any of us?'
The sign at the intersection said no right on red, but Tess thought it surely couldn't apply to her. After a quick glance to make sure no cops were around, she tore around the corner.
'She didn't know Jackie put the baby up for adoption, because Poppa didn't know the baby was ever born. Jackie told him she was going to get an abortion, and kept the money. She told me when she asked for his help with college, he said the business was too shaky for him to help her. But I guess he couldn't squeeze that much cash out without going to Gramma, and she put her foot down.'
'So I have a half-sibling.'
'Yeah, a sister.'
'I always wanted a sister,' Judith said, then smiled. 'Well, that was inane.'
'We saw her today. I knew it had upset Jackie, but I guess I didn't know just how freaked out she was.'
Tess was on Northern Parkway now. If she had been in her office, or her apartment, she could have made Roland Park in fifteen minutes. But her parents' house couldn't have been much farther away. If you thought of the Baltimore Beltway as a clock, it was akin to driving from seven o'clock to midnight.
'Edgevale is on the west side of Roland Park,' her mother said. 'It runs off Falls Road. But how will we find it without the number?'
'I know Jackie's car.'
It was dark now, and fireflies flickered on and off as they drove down Edgevale. Whatever Jackie was doing, she couldn't make much noise, for sound would carry easily across these lush, hushed lawns. Unlike Keisha Moore's embattled neighbors, Roland Park residents would never let a gunshot go unreported, assuming they realized it was a gunshot, instead of a car backfiring. Then again, the houses were set just far enough apart to suggest a certain reticence on the part of the owners, a surface neighborliness that didn't go too far beyond mimed 'hellos' at the curb. Such places often had an unspoken agreement not to be too nosy. A woman could be beaten here, or a child, and the crime, if discovered, would only prompt the usual banalites. 'He was a quiet man.' Yet just let a young black man try walking in the neighborhood and the police would be summoned at once.
Jackie, however, had the right accessories to slip under that radar. Her white Lexus was parked in the driveway of a stucco mansion at the end of the street. It blocked a late-model Toyota Camry with an ACLU bumpersticker, but another car had pulled in behind the Lexus, a black Mercedes with 'Save the Bay' plates. Tess pulled in behind the Mercedes. An old car like hers might also excite comment in Roland Park if left on the street.
'Stay in the car, Mom.'
'Not on your life.'
'There's a woman in that house with a gun, my gun. A hysterical, unpredictable woman who doesn't know you, and might not hestitate to harm you.'
'My point, exactly. So why don't you call the police, and let them handle it?'
'Because there's a slender hope I can undo what Jackie has done without getting the police involved.
The front door was unlocked. Tess stopped in the front hallway, listened intently. Judith came in right behind her. No time to argue about it now. She motioned her mother to be quiet, her mother gestured back that she knew what she was doing. God, she was exasperating.
Now both the women concentrated on the sounds of the house. It was so big, so quiet. It was hard to imagine any child here, running up the stairs so shiny they looked wet, leaving handprints along the expensive-looking wallpaper. There was a murmuring sound from the rear, perhaps a television left on, or even the leaves of the trees rustling together. Tess and her mother moved toward the sound, through the formal living room, into the dining room and through swinging doors into the kitchen, a bright, cold place, all granite and stainless steel.
'Who are you?' a woman asked, and her voice was too loud, too shaky, even for someone seeing two strangers in her kitchen. Short and fleshy, with the kind of silver-blond curls never found in nature, she was sitting on a severe little metal love seat at one end of the remodeled kitchen, where a family room had been created in what once was an alcove or breakfast nook. A small man in glasses was next to her, frowning.
Jackie was sitting directly across from them in a matching chair, her briefcase open on her lap. Was the gun in there? Would she use it before Tess could cross the room?
'Hey,' Jackie said languidly, as cool and composed as the day Tess had first gone to her apartment. 'I didn't expect to see you here tonight. That your mom? I see the resemblance. You're lucky, girl, if you got that bone structure. You're going to look
