The Last Place

CHAPTER 27

Tess was coming off the water late Saturday morning when she saw Whitney on the dock. A former rower, Whitney knew better than to stand in the middle of the boathouse’s morning rush hour, creating an obstacle for the college teams staggering beneath the weights of their fours and eights. Yet there she was, in everyone’s way, arms folded across her chest. When Tess pulled parallel to the dock, Whitney ran to the side and grabbed one of the Alden’s oars so forcefully she almost flipped the shell with Tess still in it.

“Whitney, I’ve been getting up on this dock for years without your help. I think I can manage.”

“We need to talk,” she said. Whitney always considered all her needs urgent.

“Fine. Just let me get out and rinse the boat off, put everything away. And if I were you, I’d want me to shower first. It was steamy this morning, almost like summer.” Tess indicated the patches of sweat on her chest and back, beneath her arms.

“We need to talk now. You’re the last one in; it’s not as if you’re blocking anyone.”

Tess glanced around and saw this was true. There were no other boats coming in behind her.

“Let me get out. I feel odd sitting here, with you looming above me.”

Whitney looked as if she were going to fly apart from nerves. Her usually smooth hair was almost standing on end, her pale face was white and drawn in a way that Tess had never seen. But she nodded her assent, jaw muscles twitching, and waited for Tess to climb out and carry the boat to a pair of saddle horses in preparation for its daily bath. Hosing down the shell was an essential step for those who rowed the filthy Middle Branch of the Patapsco.

“Did you read the paper before you came down here this morning?” Whitney was sitting on the grass now, digging through the voluminous leather pouch she used as a purse.

“Glanced at the front page, read my horoscope. And the dogs’ horoscopes, which they seem to enjoy. Esskay’s apparently due for a favorable business transaction.” Whitney didn’t smile. “Jesus, what’s up? How bad could it be?”

Whitney continued to dig through her bag, removing all sorts of strange and wonderful objects-a Swiss army knife, a leather journal, an antique ivory bracelet-until she found a piece of newsprint ripped from what appeared to be an inside page of that morning’s Maryland section.

“The name didn’t mean anything to me at first-to tell you the truth, I was reading it over breakfast, laughing at the Beacon-Light’s naïveté, because it’s so clearly a drug deal gone bad. But she’s white and she’s from the county, so they turn it into one of those ”sweet suburbanite mowed down in inner city‘ stories, as if she were a random victim. Granted, they were on deadline, and they were probably trying to find an angle to make it fresh, after it led all the late-night newscasts-“

“Whitney, slow down and start over. You’re not tracking.”

“Julie Carter was killed last night. Shot in an alley in Southwest Baltimore.”

Tess’s legs were often quivery and weak after a good workout, but not in this way. She sank to the ground next to Whitney. If she had anything in her stomach, she might have felt sick. But there was never time to eat in the morning. No time to eat, no time to read the paper properly…

“My Julie?” she asked, but that didn’t sound right. “Our Julie?” That didn’t sound right either. “It’s a common name. Common enough.”

“This Julie Carter lived out near Beckleysville. Near Prettyboy Reservoir. Ring a bell?”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah.”

Tess sat on the ground, hers legs splayed out like a Raggedy Ann. Whitney crouched next to her, looking as if she wanted to sprint away, if she could only figure out where to run. The humidity was burning off as the sun rose. It was going to be a beautiful day, for those privileged enough to wake up alive. The blue skies, the subtle spring smells-Tess and Whitney could have been college roommates again, sitting on the banks of the Chester River after a workout. Tess wished they were. To be twenty-one again, to be free of the knowledge she had gained in the last ten years, or even in the last ten minutes, seemed an excellent idea.

Julie Carter had been twenty-one. Just. But hers had been a hard twenty-one, with hints of more troubles than Tess had ever known.

“It could be a drug deal,” Tess said. “She clearly had some problems in that sphere.”

“Could be,” Whitney said. “Could be just the biggest fucking coincidence to ever come down the pike.”

“We have to call Major Shields, over at Pikesville.”

“I did. Paged him immediately.”

“And?”

“And he said that’s exactly what it was. Just one big co-inky dink.”

“Did he say co-inky dink?”

“He might as well have. He considers me part of the problem, you know? Me and the board. Thanked me very kindly for the tip, as he termed it, and said they would consider it, but they’re still working under the presumption that the man who killed Tiffani and Lucy is dead.”

“Unless he didn’t die. Unless Carl’s right.”

“Or if there’s another someone and has been all along.”

“Who? No one knows who was on that original list, except for your own board members.”

“I don’t know. Someone who knows what the other guy did?”

Tess was no enemy of coincidence. It permeated life, it powered the daily newspaper, and, as even Mary Ann Melcher knew, made for the best television movies. Most of the stories worth telling, even the smallest anecdotes, begin with a coincidence. You don’t tell people about the 364 days you got on the number 11 bus and didn’t run into your best friend from grade school. You tell them about the one day you did.

But Julie Carter’s demise was a chronicle of a death foretold. Whoever made up that list knew she would join the others as a homicide. Even the cause had been right, a gunshot to the head. That made her death just violent enough to warrant mention in the morning paper, arriving like a sinister greeting card sent by a secret admirer. Here’s another body. Thinking of you.

“Whitney. Did we ever learn the name of the volunteer who put the list together?”

“We know it now. After I talked to Major Shields, I called that jerk attorney for Luisa O’Neal’s foundation. Would you believe he tried to claim privilege? I told him I couldn’t decide if I was going to come to his home with my shotgun or go to the state’s attorney’s office and file a complaint against him.”

“What kind of complaint? It’s not illegal to be a sleazy dumb-ass in Maryland.”

“I was bluffing. That’s why I put in the part about the shotgun. He decided the person in question wasn’t exactly a client, at least not in this capacity, and he was within his rights to tell me.”

“Who gave the board the list, Whitney?”

But even as Tess asked, she knew. Somehow she had always known whose elegant fingerprints she would find on this case.

“Your all-time fave Baltimore philanthropist, Luisa Julia O’Neal herself.” Whitney dug her fingers into her forehead, as if she felt a headache coming on or wanted to claw a memory from her overactive mind. “It was her idea all along, Tess. Looking into these cases, hiring you to do it. She was behind the whole thing, and I never knew. I’m as big a dupe as you in this, maybe bigger. Because I never understood why you thought she was so horrible.”

“But not this horrible,” Tess said.

Whitney lifted her face from her hands. “What do you mean?”

“I hate Luisa O’Neal, but this isn’t her style. She’s been used as surely as we have. Besides, she’s in a nursing home, right? Maybe she didn’t do it. Maybe she’s someone’s fall guy. Where did you say she was?”

“Keswick, I think.”

“Let’s hope they have Saturday morning visiting hours.”

The nursing home on the hill, looming above Baltimore’s pricey Roland Park and not-so-pricey Hampden, had acquired a newer, blander name. But old-timers and old families still knew it as the Keswick Home for Incurables.

That seemed right to Tess. She didn’t know the exact nature of Luisa’s physical ailments, but she had never doubted the rot in her soul was beyond repair.

Luisa was in the clinic, the last stop before the mortuary. Her decline must have been a rapid one to put her there less than a year after taking her own apartment in the residential wing. Tess and Whitney signed in on the depressingly blank visitors’ log for the health care center. The attendant then wrote down three numbers on a sheet of paper and passed it to them.

“Her room number?” Tess asked.

“No, it’s the daily code.”

“Code?”

“To get out.” He gestured to the control pad by the double doors, which had locked behind them. “Our residents aren’t allowed to leave on their own.”

“Grim,” Whitney said.

The atmosphere only got grimmer as they took the elevator to the second floor. Their youth was an affront here, an obscenity. The women they passed in the halls-all women, nothing but women- looked up from their walkers and wheelchairs with undisguised envy. Tess heard a voice calling, weak and empty, a voice with no expectation of a reply.

“And this is the top of the line,” Whitney whispered. “Can you imagine what the bad ones are like?”

Luisa had a private room, which was little more than a glorified hospital room, although she had been allowed to add a few pieces of her own furniture-a chest, a small table, a flowery chintz chair that Tess remembered from the O’Neals’ sunroom. Luisa had sat in that chair when she explained to Tess just what she had done to keep her only son from facing criminal charges for the murder he had committed.

But she didn’t sit in her chair anymore. A large white-uniformed nurse overflowed in it, eyes fixed on the television in the corner. Redhaired and freckled, with olive skin, the nurse would have stumped any census taker who tried to guess her race. Luisa was in a hospital bed, propped up. A hand-lettered sign above the bed reminded the night staff that she was to wear cloth diapers, not plastic, because she was allergic to the plastic ones.

Tess had never thought anything could make her feel sorry for Luisa O’Neal, but that sign came close.

“Money not only can’t buy you love,” she said to Whitney, out of the side of her mouth, “it apparently can’t even guarantee you a dignified old age.”

Luisa’s pale blue eyes narrowed. She picked up a large sketch pad and a black marking pen.

I cannot speak, she wrote, but my hearing is fine.

“She’s such a liar,” said the nurse, one of those stoic, placid souls well suited to the profession. “She can talk, but she won’t, because she sounds funny, and she won’t do her therapy.”

Luisa turned to a fresh page. I do not like to do things if I cannot do them well.

“Big surprise,” Tess said. “But you could at least fill up a sheet of paper before starting on a new one. It’s wasteful, what you’re doing with that sketchbook.”

She shook her head, but it might have been a spasm. Then she wrote, Donna, would you leave us alone, please? The request clearly bothered the nurse, but she didn’t talk back. She heaved herself out of the chair, switched off the television, and marched out of the room. The nurse had a wonderful, insolent walk, her large backside swaying slowly back and forth.

“Do you know why we’re here, Luisa?” Whitney asked. They had decided Luisa might be more responsive to one of her own, another moneyed blueblood.

She hesitated. Tess knew she would lie to them if she thought she could get away with it. At last she wrote, I have my suppositions.

“You forwarded a list, through your foundation’s attorney, to a consortium of nonprofits interested in the issue of domestic violence.”

Luisa nodded.

“You decided which other nonprofits should be invited-and you made sure I was included. Your idea, your list, your project. My family’s board doesn’t have much experience with social issues. But you knew I’d jump at it, didn’t you? And you knew that Tess and I were old friends and I’d put her forward as the private investigator.”

Luisa had no response to any of this, no denial and no affirmation.

“In fact, it was your lawyer who suggested we hire a private detective. And it was your lawyer who said, ”Don’t you know someone like that, Whitney?“ ”

She wrote slowly, with more care than she needed. I cannot speak to things that happened when I was not there.

“Where did you get the list, Luisa?”

Research, she wrote. We have an excellent library here.

“Research?” Whitney had reached the limits of her patience- which, admittedly, was never a distant boundary. “With your palsied hands? If there’s a computer on the premises, it’s a cinch you don’t know how to use it.”

It was a great advantage, refusing to speak. Luisa simply stared at Whitney. The partial paralysis of her face made it particularly difficult to read. The stroke had left her with an Elvis-like sneer.

Tess turned to Whitney and mouthed, Leave. Whitney shook her head at first, but something in Tess’s face convinced her to go. She, too, stomped out to the hallway, shutting the door behind her.

Tess crouched by the bed, so she could speak as quietly as possible and still be heard. “Luisa. I kept your secret. It’s been over two years, and I’ve never told anyone how Seamon O’Neal arranged for Jonathan Ross to be killed.”

Her letters were not as careful now. I was never sure, she wrote, that he intended for him to die. The revisionism stunned Tess. Here was Luisa O’Neal on what appeared to be her deathbed, and she could not quite admit that anyone in her family was capable of wrongdoing.

“Why resist the truth, Luisa? Your husband is dead, beyond justice for the things he did, even if those things could be proven. Your son remains in the institution where you had him committed. The man who took credit for your son’s crimes has been executed for his own. No one mourns him, no one feels sorry for him. All your scores are settled, everyone you love is safe. Why can’t you afford me the same privilege?”

Luisa began to turn another page in her sketchbook but wrote instead at the bottom of the sullied page, I never wanted anything to do with you. I had hoped never to see you again. I am only a go-between.

“Whose?”

Still on the same page. I must not say.

“Why? What are you scared of?”

Quickly, fiercely, as if she were carving the words into Tess’s flesh:

Not death. I want to die.

“Great, good for you. You’re much braver than the rest of us. So what does this person have on you?”

Luisa placed her shaking hand on a silver frame at her bedside. A young woman, a woman who resembled the Luisa that Tess had once known, with luminous eyes and soft dark hair. She was with a handsome if beefy man and a chubby baby boy. The daughter, Tess recalled. Luisa had a daughter in Chicago.

Luisa wrote, He will kill her. I am sure of that.

Her own eyes were still beautiful, once you got past their withered casings, the faded brows and lashes. Deep in the damaged face, the eyes were as blue as ever, almost robin’s-egg blue. Tess remembered that Luisa Julia O’Neal had been known as Ellie Jay. She had been one of the city’s best female tennis players, strong and vigorous, albeit in a ladylike way. Now she was dying by inches. What disease had not taken from her, fear would. Fear was exacting a greater toll on her body now than all her medical problems.

“Luisa, I’ll do my best to protect you and your daughter. But I have to know something. If you won’t tell me who this man is, you must at least tell me what he wants.”

Luisa turned a page and wrote in large block letters that took the entire sheet:

You.

She should have been more shocked. But the moment the answer came, she realized she had known it all along. It was the gnat in the ear, the buzzing that had bothered her so many times. What did all these people have in common? Tess Monaghan.

I am the link. Not geography or cause of death. The five were not connected to one another until I came along.

The list had been the lure, leading her toward something, to someone. She needed to know who, she needed to know why. But Luisa O’Neal had already refused to tell her either, and who could blame her? Killing her daughter would be nothing to this man. He had killed Julie Carter just to remind Tess that he was not done.

She unfolded from her crouch, listening to her knees crack. She was happy to have her legs at all, instead of the atrophied appendages beneath the blanket in Luisa’s bed. She was happy to be alive and wondered how much longer she would be. She heard a furious scratching sound and looked up to see Luisa writing hurriedly. Her handwriting was almost indecipherable now.

You must not tell anyone. No one. No police.

“But-”

My daughter, Luisa wrote. MY DAUGHTER. He will kill my daughter if you go to the police. And if you send the police here, I will deny everything.

With that, she ripped the pages from the tablet and shredded them as best she could. Her hands may have been shaky, but they still had some strength.

“But he wants to kill me, Luisa. Right? So are you saying your daughter’s life is more important than mine?”

Not necessarily, she wrote-and promptly tore it up.

“Are you disputing my first premise or the second?”

Both. This note, too, was torn up. Then: Go.

Tess did, feeling as she always had when she faced someone from the O’Neal family-defeated, crushed, decreased. But when she reached the door, a voice called after her. It was a sad voice, slurry and soft, unable to make consonants, but a voice all the same.

“Nushingish ran’um.”

“What?”

“Nushing… nushing.” Tess could hear the fury in Luisa’s voice, could see how she loathed her imperfections. Her face was flushed from emotion and effort as she held up a hand, spreading her fingers the best she could. Her fingers curved, slicing the words into the air.

“Fi-” she said. “Fi-”

“Five? Five what?”

But she gave up, returning to her pad.

Tiffani Gunts Lucy Fancher Julie Carter Hazel Ligetti Michael Shaw

Five names. Five homicides. And nothing was random. Absolutely nothing.