The Sugar House

chapter 16

TESS DID A PRETTY GOOD JOB KEEPING HER STOMACH south of her throat until the helicopter was about halfway across the Chesapeake Bay. She clenched her fists, trying to hide them from Tull. There was more swaying than she would have expected, a rocking motion not unlike being at the top of a Ferris wheel, although this was side to side, instead of back and forth. It seemed to take forever to cross the wide expanse of water and head south, toward the protected cove where Persephone’s Place waited.

Waited unwittingly, Tess hoped, because otherwise this whole exercise was pointless.

“You’re sure there’s a place for me to land?” This was the pilot, a stone-faced man who gave the impression that he considered this particular assignment no different from ferrying corporate executives around the Mid-Atlantic region.

“There’s supposed to be,” Tess shouted back.

“Don’t see it yet. We may have to improvise.”

“Everyone’s in place on the ground,” Tull put in. “The state police have blocked off the road leading to the school, and the Department of Natural Resources police are at the cove’s edge. All they need is the go-ahead from us. You ready, Tess?”

He was grinning at her, obviously attuned to the second, third and fourth thoughts that had dogged Tess since she had talked her way into this helicopter. She was grateful now that she had only picked at her lunchtime sub. Eaten, it seemed, about a million years ago, back in a place called Baltimore, when the matter of Gwen Schiller’s death was still tragic, but not particularly sinister or mysterious.

Tess nodded, and the helicopter began its vertical descent, its propellers whipping the branches of the trees at the property line. Tess wondered if Sarah Whittaker was watching this scene unfold from her casement window on the third floor. They were on the ground blessedly quick. Ducking their heads beneath the blades, Tull and Tess ran toward the white-and-pink house. He had lent her a shoulder holster, so she looked quasi-professional, the bulge of her gun visible beneath her suede jacket. Sirens sounded in the distance, and the state police rolled up the drive, even as the DNR police massed on the shore behind them.

Once free of the helicopter, Tess began enjoying herself immensely. Girls were pouring from the house-one, three, five, eight, a dozen in all, all quite thin and frail looking. She thought she glimpsed Sarah’s furred face among the girls, but they looked startlingly alike. Behind them came the orderlies who had tended to Tess after her shipwreck, and behind them even more staff, all new to her. Finally, she saw the auburn-haired woman and the doctor.

“Capsize again?” This was the woman, Miss Hollinger, her mechanical voice as crackly as dry ice today, steam coming out of her mouth in the cool air, a coat thrown around her shoulders. The doctor was not so cool; he moved toward them, then started back toward the house, only to find state police blocking his way.

“Baltimore City police,” Tull said, showing his badge. “Homicide.”

“Homicide?” The woman’s puzzlement was sincere. “No one has ever died here.”

So you’re not surprised to find the police swarming over the lawn, but you are surprised to find out it’s related to a homicide. Interesting, Tess thought.

“One of your patients, Gwen Schiller, was killed after leaving the school.”

Miss Hollinger hugged her elbows, but said nothing. She was trying to keep her face empty, but Tess thought she saw an excited glimmer in the pale blue eyes.

“She was killed November sixteenth.”

Tess was right. The woman had to fight to keep from smiling. “I’m sorry to hear that. She was a lovely girl. But I don’t see how it concerns the clinic. Gwen checked herself out in January, when she turned eighteen.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t make myself clear,” Tull said, with deadly politeness. “Gwen Schiller died on November sixteenth of last year. Almost three months before you told her father she was missing. Do you bring a lot of people back from the dead here? Because if you do, I’d sure like to get in on the ground floor if you ever have a stock offering.”

“I don’t think I have anything I want to say to you,” Miss Hollinger said with an admirable, if infuriating, dignity. In her silk print dress and burgundy heels, head held high, she could have passed for one of the patients’ mothers. “Not until my lawyer arrives.”

Sarah Whittaker came down the porch stairs, her insubstantial frame lost inside a sweatshirt and leggings. She tugged at Tess’s sleeve to get her attention, then jumped back, as if fearful Tess might try to return her touch.

“How will you arrive next time? On horseback?”

“I don’t think there will be a next time, Sarah.”

The girl looked up at Tess. Her eyes were dull, like a dying animal, her skin chalky and dry. She could have been a dandelion gone to seed: One puff and she’d disintegrate, carried away by the wind. “They’ll have to send us home now, won’t they? I’ll get to go home for Christmas after all, go to Guadeloupe with the family.”

“I suppose so,” said Tess, who had no idea what would happen.

“Well, I’m not going to wear a bathing suit,” Sarah said. “No way. I’m positively gross.”

“Oh Sarah-” Tess assumed she was worried about the hair on her face and back, her pallor.

“I mean my thighs,” Sarah said, holding one forward, smacking the leg to make the nonexistent flesh jiggle. “They’re huge.”

Given the number of people involved, Tull and the other law officers decided to keep everyone at Persephone’s for questioning, rather than try to bring them into the state police barracks, or the Baltimore police department. The girls were of little help-none of them had been here the previous fall, when Gwen had run away-and the auburn-haired Miss Hollinger, who Tess thought of as Big Nurse, was coolly silent.

But the sour-breathed Dr. Blount was not as composed when Tull got him alone in the clinic dining room. The two sat across from each other, while Tess hugged the wall behind Tull. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but Tull wasn’t up for the scene that would result if he tried to have her removed.

“I should have a lawyer,” Dr. Blount proposed tentatively. It sounded like a question, and Tull treated it as such. The doctor had been Miranda’d, of course, recited the rights that most schoolchildren knew better than the Pledge of Allegiance thanks to television. But Tull, like most seasoned homicide detectives, believed there was some play in the clause about the right to counsel. Until the doctor emphatically and definitively held out for a lawyer, Tull was going to pick at him.

“You really want a lawyer? Because if you want one, you can have one.” Tull turned back to address Tess. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how the guilty guys always want a lawyer?”

“I’m not guilty of anything.”

“Oh.” Tull looked confused. “But didn’t you say you wanted a lawyer?”

“Well-I can have one if I want one, right?”

Tull sighed, hunkered forward, as if dealing with a sweet but very stupid child. The doctor had a little boy’s face, ruddy and fat-cheeked. “Look, you can pick up the phone right now and ask for a lawyer. But then I’m done talking to you, because he’s not going to let you say anything. So we can’t make a deal, can’t sort anything out. I mean, there are levels of illegal activity here, it probably wasn’t even your idea. But-you want a lawyer, call a lawyer. I don’t have a problem with charging everyone with the same thing, figuring it all out later. My only problem is where to lock you up for the night, here or in the city.” Tull pretended to think. “I guess I gotta take you back to city jail.”

“What kind of charges are we talking about, exactly?”

“Filing a false report-”

“We didn’t do that.” Dr. Blount’s voice held a note of shrewdness, but it only served to make him more pathetic. “The family did.”

“Based on information you gave them,” Tess said, unable to contain herself. “By the way, did you continue to bill them? I think that constitutes fraud. If an insurance company is involved, I feel sorry for you. I’d rather owe the meanest loan shark in East Baltimore than have an insurance company after me.”

Tull gave Tess a warning glance over his shoulder. But she wasn’t sure he had worked out the fraud angle. It had only occurred to her when she had seen the clinic’s patients arrayed on the front porch, and begun calculating how much money each one brought in at $2,000 a day.

“Who is she, anyway?” the doctor asked.

“Trainee,” Tull said. “An overeager trainee, but with a good point. I’m sure the files the state police are going through will show if Gwen Schiller’s family was billed after the date she walked away.”

“It was never our intent to defraud anyone,” Dr. Blount said. “We do good work here, important work. It didn’t seem fair to let a couple of people jeopardize it.”

“A couple?” Tull asked.

He hesitated. “Are you sure I don’t need a lawyer?”

“There’s a difference, you know, between keeping quiet while someone does something you know is wrong, and doing it yourself.”

Yeah, a difference of five-to-ten years. Tess was finding a perverse enjoyment in the scene. So far, the only interrogations she had been privileged to watch had put her on the doctor’s side of the table. Tull had a rep as an interrogator, and now Tess knew why. He was like a cat persuading a bird to take a nap between his front paws. Tull’s face even had a certain catlike cast, with his high cheekbones and glittering brown eyes.

“It was Sheila’s idea,” the doctor said.

“Sheila?”

“Sheila Hollinger. The redheaded woman. She’s the director here. I’m in charge of the medical division, but she’s the administrator. She keeps the beds full, and the waiting list long, so we don’t have to worry about meeting our monthly bills. I know it sounds like a lot, what we charge, but this is an expensive operation. When Gwen started kicking up a fuss, she could have really hurt us.”

“Kicking up a fuss,” Tull’s voice was at once knowing and inviting, creating a silence for the doctor to fill.

“She said one of the staff members raped her,” Dr. Blount said, as if remembering a minor annoyance. “A teacher, who oversaw the girls’ lesson plans. We confronted him immediately and he admitted the incident, only he said it was consensual. We fired him. What else could we do? It’s not as if we were negligent. We do a background check on everyone who works here. It was an isolated incident.”

“An isolated incident.” Tess didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until Tull glanced at her.

“He said, she said,” the doctor said helpfully.

Tess pressed her palms against the cream-colored wall. It was cool to the touch, smooth as ice cream. Everything was so pretty here, so perfect. Everything except the patients themselves, who had destroyed their bodies, their complexions, their teeth, even their organs. Yet Gwen Schiller’s beauty could not be snuffed out; she had still been beautiful when Sukey saw her. She had a bloom that nothing could strip from her-not her own habits, not the streets, not this clinic.

“But Gwen said she was raped. She didn’t describe it as ‘consensual.’” Tess loved Tull for pressing this point home.

“Yes, that was her story. But she would have said anything to leave here, to force her father to come get her. She was very fixated on getting his attention, on disrupting his new marriage any way she could. I am a psychiatrist, I understood the dynamics of the situation very clearly.”

Tull let this pass. “What was the time frame? When did Gwen arrive, and when did she make the complaint?”

“She arrived in late August and hadn’t been here two weeks when she went to Sheila with her story.” The doctor pulled himself up, a little self-righteously, puffing out his chest and his shoulders. “The staff member was dismissed by the end of the day, I can tell you that much.”

Tull nodded, as if admiring the doctor’s decisiveness. “So Gwen tells you she was raped, and you fire the guy. Did you have her examined, or ask if she wanted to file a criminal complaint?”

“She didn’t say anything until several days after the incident.” That word again. Tess wanted to tell the doctor a fender bender was an incident, rape was a crime. “And, as I said, there was no way of knowing what really happened.”

“Didn’t you find it coincidental that she ran away a few weeks later?”

The doctor’s narrow shoulders sagged, but his pity was only for himself. “We thought she would contact her father immediately, and that would be that. Then, a few weeks after she disappeared, her father wrote to her via the school’s e-mail account and we realized he didn’t know she was gone. It was our computer system. It was easy enough to change Gwen’s password and send her father e-mail. We had kept her disappearance from the other girls, so we didn’t have to worry he might hear from anyone else. We didn’t see the harm in letting her father think she was still here, as long as we continued to look for her. Her eighteenth birthday came and went, and we never found her, so we told her father she had checked herself out, which really wasn’t that far from the truth. As for the billing-we didn’t know what else to do. But of course, we’ll give the money back, every penny of it. We never meant to deceive anyone.”

Dr. Blount looked at them beseechingly. Criminals were always so sure of their right to empathy. Tull turned to Tess, disgust sharp in his face, even as his expression warned her to control herself. He need not have worried. She was still standing by the wall, her palms pressing against it hard enough to leave grimy marks, or so she hoped.

Her only fear was that if she lost contact with the wall, her hands would wrap themselves around the doctor’s throat and never let go.