Butchers Hill

'I didn't come here to talk about my age or my clothes.' Mary Browne's speech was almost comically precise, her diction clipped and hard. 'I wish to find my sister, who has been estranged from the family since she was a teenager.'

'Estranged? Did she run away? Or was she kidnapped by a noncustodial parent?'

The question seemed to throw Mary Browne. 'She left of her own free will when she was eighteen. It was quite legal, given her age, but not exactly intentional. I mean…'

'I've found it helps,' Tess said, 'if people just tell the truth from the get-go. I'm not here to judge you, and what you tell me is confidential.'

'Fine. My sister became pregnant when she was eighteen and my mother threw her out when she announced she was going to put the baby up for adoption. That's not done among our people. Is that enough ‘truth' for you?'

'Your people?' She was only parroting Mary Browne's words, yet the words sounded a little ugly in her mouth.

'Black families take care of their own, even if they need a welfare check to do it. In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was unheard of for a girl to give her baby away. To give it to her mother or grandmother-that was acceptable. My mother wanted to raise her grandchild, but Susan had different plans. So my mother threw her out and I watched, knowing Susan was doing the right thing, but too intimidated by my mother to object. She was a formidable woman, my mother. Our mother. One didn't cross her, unless one was willing to lose. Susan was. I wasn't.'

'And you've had no contact with Susan-in how many years exactly?' Tess found a steno pad in her desk drawer and took some notes. Mary Browne's officious manner made her want to seem more businesslike.

'Thirteen. Thirteen years ago this month.'

'No contact at all? What about your mother?'

'My mother died last year. I suppose that's why I want to find her. She's all the family I have now.'

'Okay, let's get formal.' Tess turned on her Macintosh, which sat on a computer table next to her desk. 'I explained rates and expenses when you called. You've already been to see Tyner, so all I need to do is put you in my files. I have a form here with your name, address, and phone number, but there are a few other things I need to get started. May I ask what you do for a living?'

'I'm self-employed. I raise money for nonprofits on a contract basis.'

Self-employed. That set off a mental alarm. Tess might want to check Mary Browne's credit rating, make sure she had the money to hire her.

'How did you hear about this office, Ms. Browne?' Aunt Kitty, always the entrepreneur, had recommended she ask this in order to identify her marketing needs.

'I wanted to hire an independent businesswoman like myself, and I remembered seeing the item in the Daily Record, announcing you were joining Mr. Keyes's firm as an associate. Your name rang a bell. You were in the news this winter, weren't you? I can't recall all the details-someone tried to kill you, or you almost killed someone when you were attacked in Leakin Park?'

'Something like that,' Tess said unhappily and her ribs, although fully healed, winced a little at the memory of what a well-placed foot could do. 'Sister's full name?'

'Susan Evelyn King.'

'King?'

'Different fathers,' Mary Browne said shortly, her eyes daring Tess to make something of it.

'Have a Social Security number?'

'Why-no, I'm afraid not. Is that necessary?'

'Nope, just makes it a little easier. How about a birth-date?'

'She was thirty-two on January seventeenth.'

Tess turned back to face Mary Browne. 'I thought you said you were thirty-two. How can your sister be the same age?'

Given the rich, deep color of her skin, it was impossible to say Mary Browne actually blushed, but something in her manner suggested she was embarrassed.

'I meant I'll be thirty-two, in December,' Mary Browne said stiffly. 'We were born in the same year, almost exactly eleven months apart.'

Vanity, thy name is woman. But what was it to Tess if Mary Browne wanted to shave a few years off her age? She was probably thirty-four or thirty-five and already lying about her age. Once Tess was on the other side of thirty, she might feel the same way.

'I've got two sets of first cousins like that on my father's side,' she said, typing in Susan King's date of birth. 'He calls them Irish twins. When my Aunt Vivian had her second boy in the same calendar year, the doctors at Mercy threw in the second circumcision for free.'

Mary Browne allowed herself a small, lips-together smile, then handed Tess the brown envelope she had taken out of her leather briefcase at the beginning of the interview. Inside was a photograph and a check for the retainer.

'Is this her?' Tess asked. The girl in the photo was big-boned and plump. Her oversize glasses had caught the camera's flash, so her face was little more than a dark smudge beneath two exploding stars. She wore an apron and held something by its handle, a broom or a mop. It could be Jimmy Hoffa, for all Tess knew, or Madalyn Murray O'Hair, another missing Baltimorean. Totally useless, this photo, but the check-well, it was bad form to stare too hungrily at the check.

'That's her at seventeen.'

'Not much of a resemblance, is there? But you did say you're only half-sisters.'

'She was actually a pretty girl, just not particularly photogenic.'

'Sure,' Tess said dubiously.

'It's all I have.' Mary Browne managed to sound apologetic and defensive at the same time. 'But I guess it is about as helpful as someone trying to find you with that photo on the wall.'

Great, Mary Browne's miss-nothing eyes had landed on the flying rabbit photo. Tess definitely had to find something else to hang over the safe.

'That was taken outside the old Weinstein's Drugs on Edmondson Avenue. Remember, it was in the same shopping center as the old Hess shoe store with the barber shop and the squirrel monkeys in the window?'

'We didn't buy our shoes at Hess, but, yes, I know the place of which you speak.' The place of which you speak-close your eyes, and it could be the latest BBC production of Jane Austen. 'My mother would take me to see the monkeys.'

'Just you?' Tess assumed Mary Browne hadn't told her everything. People seldom did. Maybe there was more to the story of why Susan King had bolted, the ugly, unfavored duckling growing up in the shadow of this swan.

'Susan, too, of course.'

'Well, that photo marks the day I learned a tough life lesson. My grandfather owned Weinstein's, so I thought I was entitled to endless rides on the flying rabbit. But when my quarter was done, it was done, same as anyone else's. Poppa was a soft touch, he would have let me ride forever, but Gramma had rules about such things. ‘You'll pay like the other kids!' No free rides and no free treats at the soda fountain, although Poppa sometimes slipped me something chocolate.'

'This may sound strange, but you look like that little girl who was on television years ago, the one who jumped on the sofa with the plastic slipcovers.'

'You mean'-Tess slipped into the Baltimore accent her mother had made sure she would never acquire-'‘Hey you kids, stop jumping on that furniture! You'll rune it!''

'Yes, that one. I remember wanting my mother to buy those covers, because I thought it meant you could then jump on the sofa with impunity.'

With impunity, yet. Jane Austen, meet Joe Friday.

'Actually, that was my cousin Deborah on the commercial, Deborah Weinstein. Funny you'd pick up on the resemblance. We don't look anything alike now. She's still fair, while I got dark.'

'You think you're dark?'

It was Tess's turn to blush and stammer. 'Well, I mean my hair got darker.'