couldn’t get back the time she had already dribbled away, but she could stop throwing good effort after bad. Why did she even care who owned Domenick’s? The bar’s screwed-up license didn’t have anything to do with Jane Doe. Once again, she had mistaken momentum for progress.
So, find Sukey, put it down. The only problem was, Tess couldn’t remember the girl’s last name, or where she lived, and she didn’t want to wander the streets of Locust Point, asking if anyone knew a round-cheeked girl named Sukey, given to fantastic tales.
The mini-mart at the gas station seemed a logical place to start.
“ Try Latrobe Park,” advised Brad the convenience store manager. “She got a new book out of the rack today, said she was going to read.”
“A little raw to read outside, isn’t it?”
“She always says to me she doesn’t like to be inside unless she has to.” Brad tapped his forehead. “She’s odd, that girl. She’ll tell you blue is orange, and not know the difference herself. She can’t help it. When she’s saying it, she believes it.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.”
Tess left her car and walked to the park. Locust Point was a strange mix of residential and industrial. It seemed amazing that people would have chosen to live cheek by jowl with marine terminals and manufacturing plants, but this had been the norm for Baltimore ’s lower-middle-class families after World War II. If there were still good jobs here, it might still be the norm. Today’s kids, faced with so few opportunities, left these neighborhoods readily enough, but the older folks stayed on and on. Down at Wagner’s Point, where the neighborhood was little more than a toxic dump, people had fought leaving even when the city announced a buyout.
It was home, they said. How can you put a price on my home?
Tess found the swings, but Sukey was nowhere in sight. She sat in one, imagining she could channel Jane Doe, that the young woman had left some trace of her identity on this rectangular piece of wood. The autopsy said she could be anywhere from her late teens to her early twenties, but Tess knew, just knew, she was on the younger edge of that range. Maybe seventeen, eighteen tops.
She dragged her toes in the groove beneath the seat, much too long-legged to make it go. And much too old, not that such a consideration would have stopped her. She remembered the wondrous discovery that a swing would move, would soar ever higher, through the simple pumping action of one’s own legs. Her earliest physics lesson. Actually, her only physics lesson. At seventeen, informed that she was not required to take any more science classes under state law, Tess had decided she knew enough about light and particles and inertia.
At seventeen, she thought she knew enough about everything.
Seventeen. Junior year. She had a boyfriend, she was on the honor roll and the track team, and she could make calories disappear by sticking her finger down her throat. She ate whatever she wanted and never gained weight, thanks to her magic finger. Poor Billy Baker. She couldn’t have been fun to kiss, given her hobby, but he never complained. They had met in his parents’ basement rec room after school, stealing shots from the wet bar, messing around, solving a few algebra problems in their downtime. Latchkey kids. Funny to think about all the dire predictions people had made about such arrangements.
Funny to think how many of them had come true. And yet here she was, relatively unwarped, and Billy was a lawyer last she heard. Corporate, on a partner track with a staid firm, but with a little do-gooder vein, which he indulged through the board of some nonprofit. The thing was, every generation had done such things, but parents once had the good taste not to confront their children so directly. The more the behavior was dragged out into the open, the worse things seem to be. If Tess’s parents, God forbid, had sat down with her and tried to have a Meaningful Chat about contraception and alcohol and marijuana-and how using the second two tended to compromise one’s ability to focus on the first-she would have felt obligated to find other ways to rebel.
A string of popping sounds and a girl’s high, thin wail jolted Tess out of Billy Baker’s basement. Once, she might have mistaken the strangely hollow sound for gunfire, but Tess knew the kind of noises guns made. Yet the girl’s cry was clearly a distressed one, almost involuntary. The sequence repeated itself-pop-pop-pop, the thin, keening wail.
Tess jumped to her feet, but the source of the noise was hard to track in the open park, where sound bounced erratically, competing with the chatter of seagulls and the traffic along Fort Avenue. Tess began to walk swiftly in what she hoped was the right direction. She climbed a small rise, so she was now looking toward the Patapsco River ’s Middle Branch. The day was cold, but bright, and the water appeared darker and bluer than it normally did, with diamond-bright froth on the breakers. Three boys ran into her line of vision, tossing something. She heard the pops again, saw long thin lines of smoke rising above their heads. Firecrackers.
Another scream, and there was Sukey, well ahead of the three boys, but steadily losing ground, perhaps because she was running with her hands clutched to her head, a paperback book pressed against one ear.
“Jesus, drop the book, Sukey,” Tess muttered to herself, even as she found her own legs sprinting across the park. “You can always get another goddamn book.”
She was running on an angle, trying to intersect the boys before they reached Sukey. She wished she had her gun, then damned the wish as irresponsible and callow. Waving one’s gun in public was not effective problem solving. Besides, any one of these boys might have a gun, or another weapon.
The bottom line was, she had nothing.
Except her mouth. A stray piece of poetry flickered through her brain-
“What the fuck?” one asked, while the others merely gaped, open-mouthed, providing an excellent view of South Baltimore dentistry, or the lack thereof.
Now just a few feet from the boys, Tess slipped her backpack from her shoulder and began swinging it by the strap, screaming all the while and continuing to run straight toward them. She thought, to the extent that she was thinking at all:
Instead, they began screaming and laughing, pointing their fingers at her and chanting, presumably the same chant they had been using to torment Sukey.
“Fat pig, fat pig, fat pig, fat pig.”
The words hurt, nonsensical as they were, or would have hurt if she hadn’t been almost blind in her rage and fear. How could anyone tell children that only sticks and stones caused pain? Tess felt as if she were thirteen again, running from the neighbor boy, Hector Sperandeo. He had done far more harm with his taunts than with the lacrosse ball he slammed repeatedly into the small of her back. But she wasn’t running away this time. These boys were thin and gawky, South Baltimore rednecks so malnourished from their junk food diets that they probably had rickets or scurvy. She could take them.
She saw the tallest boy pull another firecracker from the pocket of his denim jacket and light it with a Bic, holding it aloft with a snarky grin. Twirling her knapsack like a bolo, she swung it forward and landed it in his midsection, knocking him to the ground, the burning firecracker still clutched in his hand.
“Let it go, Noonie, let it go,” one of the others screamed as the stunned boy tried to get his breath. “You’ll lose a finger, the way Joey Piazza did.”
The boy uncurled his fingers and the firecracker rolled away, but only a few inches. One of the other boys then kicked it with his foot, just before the fuse burned out. Set off in the grass, it seemed so innocuous. Pop- pop-pop, a small puff of smoke. Tess watched to make sure it didn’t ignite the dry grass.
Noonie clambered to his feet, still breathing heavily. All three looked at Tess uncertainly. Logic must have told them she was no threat-she was alone, and a female at that, armed with nothing more than a knapsack.
Then again, what kind of adult acted this way? They smelled something crazy on her. They backed away, sneers in place, but just barely.
“Fat pig has a dyke friend,” said the one she had knocked down. Noonie, the group’s alpha male.
“Dyke,” the others echoed. “Ugly dyke.”
They turned and ran, Noonie calling back over his shoulder. “Too bad for you. You have to be a boy to get the fat pig to drop her pants. Not that any boy wants her.”
Tess didn’t bother to reply. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb from her body; she needed to concentrate so
