The Sugar House

illegally in a loading zone. A ticket was on the windshield, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Why should it? It was probably a point of honor with him that he could get his tickets fixed. Lord knows no one in Tess’s family had ever paid a parking ticket. Fulton took the white sheet from the windshield, crumpled it and threw it in the trash. Tess watched the maroon Mercury pull away from the curb and head down South Street.

Maroon. She remembered a car just that color. Granted, she had only seen the bottom six inches of fender, but it had been maroon. She darted across the street and found Fulton’s ticket, crumpled, but at least on top of the trash heap.

She knew before she checked that the license plate would match the one she had glimpsed yesterday in the alley behind Domenick’s, that she wasn’t going to have to drive to the MVA in Glen Burnie after all.

She started back into her father’s office, brandishing the ticket and her notebook. But before she could call upstairs from the lobby, she stopped and retreated to her own car. Loyalty had long ago replaced Roman Catholicism as her father’s religion. Confronted with this scrap of information, he’d make excuses for Gene. Worse, he’d probably ask Gene about it, which would tell the folks at Domenick’s more than she wanted them to know just yet.

She folded the ticket and put it in her pocket, trying to decide where she should go next. So far, there was one person who had been consistently truthful in talking to her about Gwen Schiller, the only person who had been helpful to her in any way.

Wouldn’t you know, it was the one person everyone said was a pathological liar?

chapter 22

SHE FOUND SUKEY IN LATROBE PARK, READING THE latest issue of Teen People.

“Do you think I could ever look like this?” she asked Tess, pointing to a photo of the latest teen sensation, female variety, a toothpick girl with absurdly large breasts on her bony chest. She reminded Tess of the drawing of the boa constrictor in The Little Prince, the one that showed the snake with a pig halfway through its digestive system. Put this girl on her back, and she was more or less the same shape.

“No,” Tess said. “Because no one actually looks like that, not even her. Jesus, those can’t be real.”

“Oh they are,” Sukey assured her. “She says right here that she’s never had plastic surgery.”

“Sukey, do you always tell the truth?”

The girl looked down at her feet, hurt. “Most of the time.”

“Which is what everyone does. So why would you assume she’s telling the truth?”

This seemed to cheer Sukey up. “Hey, can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I have a boyfriend.”

Uh-oh. “Why does it have to be a secret?”

“Don’t worry, he’s not one of those old guys you warned me about. I mean, he’s older ’n me, he can drive and all. His name is Paul.” Sukey paused. “He’s not a boyfriend-boyfriend. He has a girl. But he likes to talk to me, when she’s being a bitch.”

“Sukey-” Tess didn’t know what to say without sounding as if she were forever contradicting herself. True, she had told Sukey to avoid the boys who wanted girls for their parts. But the talkers could be dangerous, too, in another way. They usually came so much later in one’s life. She had known one in her twenties, a man who dropped by to “talk” late at night, after his fiancee had gone to sleep.

“Go on,” Sukey said.

“What?”

“Tell me he’s using me. Tell me he’s using me to make his girlfriend jealous, that he’ll always go running back to her. That’s what my mother says.”

If Mrs. Brewer had been briefed, then Tess was off the hook, freed of feeling she had to be in loco parentis.

“He does sound a little, well, confused, but I didn’t come here to talk about our love lives.” Sukey beamed at the implication she and Tess were equals, two girlfriends with the same set of problems. “I’m here because we never finished our conversation the other day, the one about the girl I was looking for, Gwen Schiller.”

“I figured you didn’t need me anymore, once you knew who she was.”

There was a sad, lonely note in Sukey’s voice. It wasn’t reproachful, but it was a reminder to Tess that there were infinite ways in which to use people.

“I never would have found her without you. I said your name on television, didn’t you hear?”

“Just my first name,” the girl said sulkily.

“As if everyone in Locust Point didn’t know who Sukey Brewer was. Besides, I thought your mom might not like it, if I used your full name. She certainly wasn’t happy the day she found us talking,” Tess said. “She interrupted us, remember? I thought maybe there was something else you were going to tell me, something more about Gwen.”

“She didn’t look like a Gwen,” Sukey said thoughtfully. “She should have had a more flowery name, like Heather. Or Shania.”

“Sukey, have you told me everything you know about Gwen?”

For a girl known as a liar, Sukey wasn’t much good at hiding her emotions when she was interrogated directly. She made things up, but only for fun, Tess realized. Give her a piece of paper, and she’d just be another novelist.

But for now, she squirmed, refusing to make eye contact.

“Sukey?”

“She needed to make a call. She asked if she could come to my house, but I couldn’t let her. My mom would kill me if I let someone in. But I told her there was another way to make her call-” she stopped.

“What, Sukey?”

“You can’t tell this part. I’d be banned.”

“I won’t tell.”

She rolled her magazine into a tight log, pressed it against her mouth, muttering into it as if it were a bullhorn. But she ended up muffling her words, not amplifying them.

“I can’t hear a thing you’re saying, Sukey.”

“She didn’t have any money, and I sure didn’t have any. But she really needed to make this call. So I swiped a phone card. Off the counter, at the mini-mart. From Brad, which made me feel awful, but she needed it so bad. It was only a five-dollar one, and it was a rip-off, the way it counted the minutes. One call, just to leave a message, and it was almost used up. She used it at a pay phone. She made a call, and she said someone would be here to get her in a few hours. She was sure of it. She said she’d have to wait in the park, because Fort McHenry closes at sunset. She said she was going to be okay.”

Sukey was close to tears. Tess looked away, letting her use whatever tricks she had mastered to keep them from coming. Why was it so important not to cry when you were a child? She couldn’t remember the logic, but she knew the feeling, knew Sukey would feel she had lost face if Tess saw her tears.

“It’s not your fault, Sukey. You tried to help her. In fact, you might be one of the few people who ever tried to help Gwen Schiller. There are a lot of people who should feel guilty about what happened to her. You don’t happen to be one of them.”

“It’s so strange,” the girl said, sniffling. “Knowing someone who died. I mean, a someone who wasn’t a grandmom, or an old person.”

“I know,” Tess said. Boy did she know. “Let’s go to the mini-mart.”

“You’re not going to make me confess, are you? My mom did that once. She made me go into this store and tell I boosted gum. I couldn’t ever go back. I only did it the once.”

“Only once?”

“Only once in that store,” Sukey confessed.

“I’m not worried about your shoplifting. You should stop stealing, though. You’re going to get caught, and