The Sugar House

chapter 11

THREE HOURS LATER, TESS WAS STILL IN A FUNK, A bleak, mean mood, as bad a mood as she could imagine. She went to the boxing gym in her neighborhood, where she used the weights and exercise equipment, but not even a good sweat could boil this defeated feeling out of her. Slumped at her desk, still in her workout clothes, she had an inspiration and began dialing Whitney’s various numbers. The cell phone answered.

“What’s up?” Whitney knew it was her, she had Caller ID, which Tess kept meaning to get her number blocked for. She considered telecommunications the modern-day arms race, and she believed in constant one-upmanship.

“Any chance of shooting tonight?”

“Absolutely.” Whitney’s certainty about everything was always refreshing. “My parents’ place?”

“Well, we could go to my folks’ place, but if you set up a target on a tenth of an acre in Ten Hills, the neighbors tend to get all squirrelly.”

“Okay, meet me in an hour,” Whitney said.

“The sun will be down by then.”

“No problem. We’ll just shoot from the glow of the headlamps. Night training, you know.”

Whitney’s family lived in the valley. Which valley, Tess had never been sure- Worthington or Greenspring, she got them confused. The more pressing question was valley of what. It wasn’t as if there were mountain ranges in this part of Maryland, just rolling hills. But that’s how it was known, this mix of huge old houses and farmland beyond the Baltimore Beltway. The Valley.

It was colder in the Valley, and darker and starrier. What’s the difference between the rich and the rest of us? They have more money, and they have more stars in their night sky. Tess had known Whitney for more than a decade, but she had never gotten over feeling like a trespasser when she turned up the long drive to the Talbots’ stone farmhouse, a place so simple and well preserved that even the most cloddish social climber could see it outranked the nearby mansions. And that was before one factored in the 50 acres of prime Baltimore County real estate, just screaming out to be turned into 100, maybe 150 “executive” homes. When Whitney wanted to torment her mother, she claimed she would do just that with her inheritance.

Whitney was full of shit. She loved her childhood home so much she wouldn’t move out, preferring to live in a small guest house rather than find her own place in the city. She had sworn, upon returning from Japan, that she was looking for a condo or a rowhouse, but she was proving to be more particular than Goldilocks.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard,” Whitney said a little plaintively. “All I want is an old place-but with the kitchen and systems updated, of course. A water view. And a neighborhood where there are things to do, but I don’t want to worry about parking and congestion.”

“How many real estate brokers have you gone through so far?” Tess asked her.

“Three. Four. No, just three,” she said, pulling on a pair of boots in what she called the “great room” of the four-room guest house. Her mother had decorated it as if it were a hunting lodge, which suited Whitney. “The last one didn’t call back when I left a message about a place I saw in Federal Hill. I think my photograph may be circulating through all the offices. Who cares? No one buys a house in December, anyway. It can wait until spring.”

“What about your privacy?”

“Oh, they never come up here. If anything, I’m the one who’s barging in on them all the time, borrowing things, stealing food.”

“But they can see your house from their breakfast table. If you brought someone home-”

“Brought someone home? Tess, you know I’m a sexual camel. I can go years in-between. I had sex in Japan. I’m not due for a while.”

“You had sex in Japan?” This was new. “You didn’t tell me.”

“It’s not like it was the first time, I told you all about that.” So she had, in detail so clinical and detatched that it would have put an eighteen-year-old Tess off men forever, if she hadn’t ventured into the territory first. “And it wasn’t love. Just the usual, ohmigod, I’m ten thousand miles from home, there go the last of my inhibitions kind of thing. The need for distance only seems to increase. First it was college, on the Eastern Shore. Then New Haven, or New York on the weekends. Now Japan. I may have to move to New Zealand to have any sex life at all.”

“Was he Japanese?”

“One was.”

“One?”

“There was an Englishman, too.” She grabbed her fair hair and crammed it under a battered tweed hat, the kind that older, preppy men wore. “It was fun.” She said this as if it was a rather sudden revelation. “I may even try it again sometime.”

They drove in Whitney’s new Suburban to a cleared field at the property’s edge, where Whitney had already set up two cardboard torsos. With the car running, she left the headlamps on, so they were in a small circle of light.

“It’s colder than I thought,” Tess complained. “My hands are blocks of ice.”

“Don’t you dare wear gloves,” Whitney decreed. “Gloves are for sissies.”

Tess loaded the Smith amp; Wesson, then fired off her six rounds. She always lost count, and had to click at least once on the empty chamber to be sure the gun was empty. She hadn’t practiced for a while, and her sighting was off. It was disgraceful, really, how easy it was for someone in Maryland to buy and keep a gun, with no proof of one’s ability to use it.

“You’re pulling to the right,” Whitney observed. “My turn.”

Whitney, whose first gun had been a hunting rifle, preferred a Berretta for target practice, a semiautomatic with a magazine. The first time Tess had seen a magazine, she had said: “Oh, like a Pez dispenser.” Because she always had trouble loading Pez dispensers-the candy tended to snap out of the plastic column and spray all over the room-she had decided she was better off with the Smith amp; Wesson.

Whitney was faster than Tess, much more expert, and her shots were neatly clustered at the center of the torso.

“Want to try mine?” she asked.

Tess shook her head. “I’ve tried it. Between the recoil and the casings flying out the side, it makes me a nervous wreck.”

She took aim again with her.38. Not as good as Whitney, but better.

“Now try it from leather,” Whitney instructed.

“Oh really-”

“Come on. Cops have to do it. Why not you? You think everyone who takes a shot at you is going to send you an engraved invitation first, so you know to have your gun handy? I’ve got a holster in the Suburban, let’s try it.”

Tess was clumsy at this. The local gun ranges didn’t allow members to draw from leather, so she had almost no experience.

“My turn,” Whitney sang out, as if they were playing jacks.

The night was cold and still, sharp with the final, decadent smells of autumn. Tess had thought she couldn’t last long in such cold. But her concentration made her forget everything, except the gun in her hand and the target ahead of her. There was room for nothing else in her head. Not for Ruthie, not for Jane Doe. Not for Sukey, not for bars whose licenses listed dead owners. Not for smarmy Arnie Vasso. There was only the night and her gun.

Before she knew it, two hours had passed.

“You know what? I think this is better than yoga. I never feel so relaxed and smoothed out as I do after shooting.”

“I think it’s better than sex,” Whitney said. But she was grinning in the glow of her headlamps, mocking her own cool Wasp couth.

Back at the house, they cleaned their guns, washed their hands, built a fire in the stone fireplace, and fixed mugs of tea with brandy. Food was more problematic. Whitney’s cupboards held only a very old package of Carr’s water biscuits. The refrigerator was slightly better-a jar of olives and a bottle of vermouth. The freezer had a bottle of gin, a bottle of vodka, and a frozen dinner so encrusted with ice that Tess could make out only a few letters on the label.

“Spinach,” Tess guessed. “Or maybe spanakopita. Whitney, what do you live on, anyway? My place isn’t that well-stocked, either, but I’m a few steps from about a dozen restaurants, not to mention Kitty’s kitchen. You can’t even get a pizza delivered out here.”

“I eat up there,” she said, indicating her parents’ house with her chin, not at all embarrassed. “Or I get carryout from Eddie’s. Or Graul’s, or Sutton Place. I’ve been living off Eddie’s Caesar salad. And salmon cakes.”

“Salmon cakes?” Tess had a vision of the prepared food at Eddie’s, arrayed beneath the glass counter, the people lined up two to three deep. There was fried chicken and tenderloin and pasta and London broil and turkey meat loaf and whipped potatoes. There were sesame noodles and barbecue ribs and pork chops and couscous and red pepper hummus. “Why would anyone eat salmon cakes?”

“They’re very good with saltines.”

“How did someone with such bad taste in food ever develop an eating disorder?”

“It’s not really about the food, as you well know. Which reminds me-I’ve been doing some thinking about your problem.”

“My problem.” Because Tess was lying on the floor, her mug of tea balanced on her stomach, she couldn’t lift her head to look at Whitney. “What problem?”

“Your bulimic Jane Doe, remember? Did it occur to you that if she was far enough along to have significant tooth damage, she might have received treatment somewhere?”

“Sure.” Actually, it hadn’t. “But every hospital and psychiatric clinic in the country treats eating disorders now. It doesn’t exactly narrow the search.”

“True. But not every eating disorder clinic is known as the Sugar House.”

Tess removed her mug from her belly and sat up. “What are you talking about?”

“The Sugar House. Didn’t Jane Doe say that’s where she’d been?”

“How do you know that?”

“You mentioned that part to me. Besides, as I told you, I can read upside down. And you were in the bathroom quite a while that evening.”

Whitney preened, pleased with herself. She had removed the ridiculous tweed hat, but she still had on her ancient corduroys and a thick sweater with a border of flowers across the top. Flushed and fair, she could have been hugging a tree in one of those sorority girl composite photos.

“There’s a clinic called the Sugar House?”

“Actually, its alumnae tend to call it the Wedding Cake for some reason. But a Wedding Cake could be a Sugar House as well, right? It’s a small treatment facility on the Eastern Shore, very exclusive. The rates run $2,000 a day, and some girls stay there for up to a year.”

Tess did the math in her head, if adding three zeros to 365 and doubling the figure can be described as doing math. “That’s impossible. No one has $730,000 a year.”

“Oh, some people do,” Whitney assured her. “And I guess there are still some health plans out there that pay for such things, although I don’t know any. It’s for rich girls.”

“Jane Doe wasn’t a rich girl.”

“So you keep insisting. But do you have a better lead?”

She didn’t. But she also didn’t want to encourage Whitney to think of herself as Tess’s partner in this endeavor.

“How did you find this place, anyway?”

“I went through the licensing division of Health and Mental Hygiene and asked for a list of every residential treatment center that handled eating disorders. I noticed the one in Easton because it was near my parents’ place on the shore, and because it had such an odd name. Persephone’s Place. They were very secretive when I called, wouldn’t give out any information and said they took referrals from only a few select doctors. I asked for the doctors’ names, and the woman on the phone said it didn’t matter, they were full for the foreseeable future. According to the licensing information, they can take up to twenty patients. That’s almost $15 million a year, if the beds are staying full.”

Tess would have whistled at that figure, if she could whistle. “They should call it the Green House. But if the woman on the phone is so uncooperative, how did you find out it’s known as the Sugar House?”

“Talked to the competition, of course. You can’t make the kind of money Persephone’s Place is making without making other folks jealous. I found a slightly seedier place in Annapolis-it charges only $1,000 a day-and the director there was happy to tell me that Persephone’s Place was overpriced, overhyped, and poorly named.”

“Poorly named?”

“Would you name an eating disorder clinic after a girl who has to spend half the year in hell, just because she sucked on a few pomegranate seeds? The clinic may know how to treat eating disorders, but it sure doesn’t know its Greek mythology.”

“And you think our Jane Doe-” Tess winced; she didn’t want to get into the habit of using “our” and “we” when discussing her work with Whitney. “You think Jane Doe, wandering through Latrobe Park, is really some little rich girl who bolted from the Sugar House?”

“I think it’s something to check out,” Whitney said. “I’m free tomorrow. Want to drive over to the shore together? We can spend the night at my folks’ place, maybe even drive up to Chestertown, play at being returning alumnae.”

“I promised to spend the day with Crow. He wants to see the Christmas garden at the Wise Avenue firehouse.”

“Oh.” Whitney frowned into her glass. “Well, we can do both can’t we? Go to the stupid Christmas garden, and then head for the shore and find Persephone’s Place. All three of us? I like him, you know. I feel badly I ever twitted you about him. He’s the perfect postmodern boyfriend. Just try to keep the public displays of affection to a minimum.”

Whitney’s tone was light, as if the words she had spoken were of no consequence. But Tess knew her well enough to recognize an important concession. She liked Crow, she approved of him. And once Whitney liked someone, it was forever.

But all Tess said was: “You’re very understanding, for a camel.”

“Humph.” Whitney got up and went to a butler’s bar in a corner of the room, where she kept a collection of silver martini shakers and every kind of glass imaginable. Martini glasses; old-fashioned glasses; champagne flutes; wineglasses, white and red; gold-rimmed shot glasses. Tess had a feeling she was going to be spending the night on Whitney’s sofa. It was either there or Baltimore County ’s northwest precinct, on DWI charges.

Whitney selected the largest shaker and two martini glasses. “I wonder,” she said, heading for the kitchen, “if camels feel vaguely superior to those who need water all the time.”