Butchers Hill

Chapter 14

"Doesn't Carroll County still have an active chapter of the KKK?" Jackie asked, looking nervously around the bagel shop where she and Tess had stopped, killing time before their 10 a.m. appointment with Willa Mott.

"Uh-huh. In fact, they've got a recruiting flier up on the wall over there," Tess said, pointing with her chin toward the bulletin board. "I've heard it's a great way to meet men. Want me to write down the number?"

"You know, some things are not funny."

"I'll concede that if you'll concede some things are."

Jackie broke off a piece of her bagel, then looked at it as if she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do with it. She wasn't quite as tense and nervous as she had been at the Adoption Rights meeting, but she was definitely rattled. Was it possible to want something so much that it scared you?

"Remind me to check my teeth in the rearview mirror before we head out," Tess said. "I don't want to interview someone with poppy seeds in my teeth."

"You should have ordered something without seeds, then." Oh so prim.

"What, like that banana nut thing with blueberry cream cheese you're toying with? I have news for you, Jackie. That is not a bagel. If the local KKK came in here right now, they'd take one look at what you're eating and say, ‘At least she's a Gentile.' Then they'd drag me out of here by the braid like the cossacks who used to come calling in my great-grandmother's village."

"Really? Did things like that truly happen to your ancestors?"

Tess shrugged. "We only have Gramma Weinstein's word for it and she's never been above a little embroidery. Especially if it's in the cause of trying to get one of her grandchildren to eat liver."

"But you're not really Jewish, right? Your last name is Monaghan."

"Judaism comes down through your mother."

"Is that how it works?" Jackie seemed genuinely curious. "I mean, if your father was Weinstein and your mother was Monaghan, you wouldn't be Jewish?"

"I'd be exactly what I am, a nonbelieving mongrel, but I wouldn't qualify for citizenship in Israel." Tess pulled her lips back in a gum-baring grin. "Any seeds?"

"One, up near the pointy tooth. No, other side. You got it."

"Let's go meet Willa Mott."

H. L. Mencken, never a loose man with a compliment, had described Carroll County as one of the most beautiful places in Maryland. In some undeveloped pockets, you could still see the soft hills and long, tapering views that had inspired him. The older towns-Westminster, New Windsor, Union Mills-had the nineteenth-century red brick houses, more like the old German and Mennonite homesteads on the Pennsylvania side of the Mason-Dixon line. It was a place out of a time. Then you rounded a curve in the highway and found a seventies-ugly development hugging the land like a family of jealous trolls, determined to keep anything beautiful at bay.

Willa Mott lived in one of the oldest, ugliest subdivisions south of Westminster. A faded sign in the front yard advertised "Apple Orchard Daycare," but the only tree Tess could see was an ailanthus that no one had tried to chop down until it was too late. The bastard tree had struggled through a crack near the driveway and was now a spindly twelve feet.

"The kids are watching a video," Willa Mott said, opening the door before they were up the walk. "So we have exactly eighty-eight minutes. Although they sometimes like me to sing along with the hunchback."

It was hard to imagine Willa Mott singing, or doing anything vaguely joyful. She looked just as Tess had imagined her while listening to the taped testimony: a plain woman of little distinction. She wore a denim skirt, polyester white blouse, and navy cardigan. Her hair was a dull brown, her eyes a duller brown. The only color in her face was her nose, red with a summer cold. She found a tissue and blew the way children do, one side, then the other.

"Allergies," she said. "The pollen count is 150 today."

"Is that high?" Tess asked.

"Terribly. But I guess you didn't come here to talk about my sinuses." She squinted at Jackie. "I can't say as I remember you. But I guess you've changed some, since back then. Do you recognize me?"

"I think so. Maybe." But Tess could tell Jackie was lying, especially to herself. In her yearning, she was prone to say what she hoped was the right answer, even if it wasn't true.

"Jackie came to the agency thirteen years ago, under the name of Susan King. She would have been just a teenager then, not much more than eighteen. Does that help?"

"Not really. We saw a lot of young girls. Gosh, is that real gold?"

Willa was looking at Jackie's hands, clenched almost as if she was praying, and the watch on her left wrist. Ornate, with diamond chips encircling the face, it was an unusual piece, but not, in Tess's opinion, so unusual as to distract from the topic at hand.

"This? Yes, I suppose it is."

"I like old things like that," Willa said. "There's an antique pin in a consignment shop, down in Sykesville. I've had my eye on it and as soon as I get a little bit ahead, I think I'm going to get it. I thought maybe with my tax refund check, but that always seems to be spent before it comes, doesn't it?"

Tess looked around the small split-level house. Life as a daycare center was hard on any home-juice stains along the baseboard, sticky handprints on the wall, grimy traffic patterns worn into the carpet were to be expected. But even without the toddlers' decorating touches, Willa Mott's house would have looked tired and run-down. Judging by the noise, there were five, maybe six kids in the next room. Willa Mott pulled down six hundred, maybe nine hundred dollars a week. Tess didn't know exactly what daycare cost, come to think of it. Not subsistence wages, but not a lot of money left over for antique pins.

"When I called yesterday, Ms. Mott, did I mention that it's customary to pay people for their time? I mean, I understand we're keeping you from your work and I wouldn't want you to think we didn't value that."

"Miss Mott," Willa corrected with a nervous laugh. "And goodness, I don't think I could take money, not when I can't be much help. Although-" she studied Jackie's face. "You're thinner than you were, aren't you? That's why I didn't recognize you at first. You're so much thinner."

"Of course I'm thinner," Jackie said. "I was pregnant when I came to the agency."

"No, it's not just that. Your face was fuller then, and you had big glasses, which you kind of hid behind. You looked a lot older than you were, didn't you? Yes, it's coming back to me now."

Tess remembered the photo that Jackie had brought her when she thought Jackie was Mary Browne and the photo was her missing sister, Susan King. Willa was right, or making an uncanny guess. Jackie had been heavier as a teenager, and the weight had made her look older than she was.

There was a loud thud in the next room, then a childish wail. "Miss Mott! Miss Mott-Brady says I look like Quasimodo."

"Chrissie looks like Quasimodo. Chrissie looks like Quasimodo." All the children were chanting it now.

"Excuse me," Willa said. "I think I'll go give them some juice packs I have in the big freezer, out in the garage. That might help to keep them quiet."

As soon as she was gone, Jackie poked Tess in the calf with the toe of her high heel.

"Give her some money."

"She said she didn't want anything."

"She's full of shit. Everyone needs money. You stopped at a cash machine on the way out here. It's all part of my tab, right? Give her some money."

Willa came back from the garage and passed through the room with her arms full of juice packs. Distributing them caused much whining and shouting, then another brief ruckus about who had the best flavor. She ran back to the garage for another grape one. Almost ten minutes had passed by the time she returned to the living room.

"Yes, now I'm remembering," Willa said, as if there had been no break in their conversation at all. "There was something about the father of your baby, too, something unusual there, but I can't remember quite what it was."

"The father of my baby's not important," Jackie said. "I know who the father was. I want to know who adopted my girl."

Willa furrowed her brow and pressed her lips together, making a great show of thinking hard. Tess half-expected her to hunch forward, chin in hand, as if sculpted by Rodin. Eventually, she did just that. Sighing, Tess pulled her billfold from her knapsack and dropped a twenty-dollar bill in Willa Mott's lap.

"Oh goodness. I don't want you to think I'm doing this for money." Tess dropped another twenty, then a ten in Willa's lap. She dropped her business card, while she was at it. Willa waited a beat, in case any more bills were going to fall, then folded the ones that were there and put them in the pocket of her cardigan, along with Tess's business card. Preferably not the pocket with the wadded-up tissues, Tess hoped, although she really didn't care if Willa Mott ended up blowing her nose on a twenty.

"Really, I don't know so very much. You had a baby girl, right? I think the adoptive father may have been an executive at one of those plants out in Hunt Valley. Could have been McCormick, Noxell, the quarry. One of those places. I remember he made real good money. You had to make good money to adopt a baby from us, it cost more'n ten thousand dollars. His wife was a schoolteacher, but she was going to stay home when they got a baby. The name was kinda common. Johnson or Johnston. They wanted a girl, and they were going to name her Caitlin."

Jackie looked skeptical. "How did you remember all that, all of a sudden?"

"Oh, I remember all the girls who came through, to tell you the truth. It just takes a little time to jog my memory is all, to hook up the face with the circumstances."

"If I took off this watch and handed it to you, would you remember anything more?"

Willa Mott looked truly affronted. "I'm grateful you compensated me for my time today, but the money didn't have anything to do with my remembering. It took me a minute there to connect you with the way you used to be, that's all. You know, when you were fat."

"I was not fat." Jackie's teeth were gritted.

A child's shriek. "Miss Mott! Miss Mott! Cal keeps poking me with his shoe."

"Am not," a boy's voice retorted.

"You are! You are!"

"I guess I better go check on my little ones," Willa Mott said. "Nice to meet you both. If I remember anything else, I promise I'll call you first thing. I've got your card right here."

With that, Willa Mott waded into the melee in the next room, picking up the offending Cal by the collar of his T-shirt the way a mother cat might grab her kitten by the scruff of the neck, then turning off the video with the toe of her navy blue Ked.

"No more Hunchback, until everyone in this room starts behaving," she proclaimed. "This means all of you-Cal, Brady, Bobby, Chrissie, and, yes you, Raffi."

Tess suppressed a laugh.

"What's so funny?" Jackie asked. She seemed angry that Tess could find anything to laugh at.

"Maybe it's a coincidence, but every kid in the Apple Orchard Daycare Center is named for someone in the Orioles' starting lineup from the year Cal broke Lou Gehrig's record. Cal Ripken, Chris Hoiles, Rafael Palmiero, Brady Anderson. It's got to be-that would have been just about the time they would have been conceived."

"White folks are crazy," Jackie said with a snort.

They were almost back in Butchers Hill before Jackie spoke again.

"You paid her too much."

"Excuse me?"

"That wasn't worth fifty dollars, what she told us. You paid her too much and she thinks we're suckers now. I bet she knows more than she's telling."

"First you tell me to pay her, then you say I paid her too much. But she did remember what you looked like. That seemed genuine enough. I saw the photo, remember. You were a…big girl. What was that stuff about the baby's father, anyway?"

"Nothing." Jackie was gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles looked like they might pop out of her hands.

"No secrets, Jackie, and no lies. That was our deal, remember?"

"Okay." Small sigh. "My baby's father was white." Then, before Tess could react in any way, "Don't look so surprised."

"I'm not looking anything. But you told me he was a boy from the neighborhood."

"There were white boys in my neighborhood."

"I know. I know Pigtown." Tess liked seeing Jackie squirm at the mention of her inelegantly named old neighborhood. "I wonder why Willa thought that particular detail was so memorable, though. The agency she worked for definitely did biracial adoptions. I know that much from listening to the taped testimony."

"What do you expect from some Carroll County cracker? Forget about her. Where do we go from here?"

"Got me. Looking for someone named Caitlin Johnson-Johnston in metropolitan Baltimore is definitely needle-in-the-haystack time."

"Well, I have an idea. Can you work tonight?"

"Sure."

"Meet me at your office at seven tonight, and I'll show you how to do what I do for a living. I'll even bring dinner."

"What are we going to do?"

"I'll tell you when we get to your office. You have one phone line, right? We can use my cell phone, I guess. Not the cheapest way to go, but it will take too long without it."

When they pulled up in front of Tess's office, Martin Tull was waiting in his unmarked car.

"Gotta talk to you," he said without preamble, then looked at Jackie behind the wheel of her white Lexus. "Privately."

"Now?"

"Right now."

"That's okay," Jackie said, looking from Tull to Tess. "I'll see you here at seven. It won't take more than fifteen minutes to explain my idea to you."

Esskay jumped down from the sofa, stretching as if bowing toward Mecca, then began her ritualistic treat dance. Tull usually asked if he could give Esskay her bone, but today he barely seemed to notice her. Tess found a biscuit in the cookie jar, one of the homemade ones from a South Baltimore bakery, threw it to the dog, and put her gun back in the wall safe.

"I thought you didn't like to carry your weapon."

"Tyner felt I should, because of the break-in."

"That's right, you had a break-in over the weekend. Police report said nothing was taken, though."

Tess decided not to ask why a homicide detective knew about her little burglary. She hadn't filed a police report, but the landlord might have. She hoped Tull wasn't getting protective on her. That was all she needed, yet another person fretting over her safety and well-being. "You want a Coke? It's got caffeine at least."

"Lots of bad things happening on Butchers Hill these days. There was a fire in the neighborhood yesterday afternoon," he said, ignoring her offer. "Right around the corner from here."

"Uh-huh. The radio said it was a vacant rowhouse on Fayette." She got herself a Coke, wandered back to her desk, checked the counter on her answering machine. No calls. Keyes Investigations, always in demand.

"The radio was wrong on two counts. The fire backed up traffic on Fayette, but the house was on Chester. And it was vacant, but it wasn't unoccupied." Tull tossed an envelope on her desk. "They found a body in the basement. Guy looked like he was smoking a crack pipe and he dropped it."

Tull seemed to expect her to reach for the envelope. When she didn't, he took it back and opened it, extracting a pair of Polaroids.

"That happens, of course. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. These pipeheads take over abandoned buildings, use them to smoke or shoot up. Accidents will happen. But according to the medical examiner, this guy was dead before the fire started. Someone bashed his head in and set the place on fire. We might not have been able to identify the guy, except he had dental records from when he was in foster care. State makes all the kids in its custody get at least one medical checkup."

"Awfully decent of the state." Tess's stomach clenched. She capped the bottle of Coke, put it down next to her computer.

"Kid's name was Treasure Teeter." Tull flicked a Polaroid at her, like a playing card. Tess let it skim past her shoulder and fall to the floor, but she couldn't help seeing the charred human shape at the center as the image flew by.

"You heard of him, right? You were looking for him, as I hear it. Looking for his sister, too. Destiny? I'm guessing you never found her, though. Big break for you-I did."

He flipped the second photo on the desk. Tess saw the yellow crime scene tape at the edges, the body lying on the bright green grass, the gash in the throat, a ghoulish echo of the mouth above. Except it was impossible to see the mouth, impossible to make out any features in a face that had been battered to the bone.

"Meet Destiny Teeter," Tull said. "You may know her better as the prostitute at the pagoda."