The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  Devon stood up abruptly, paced toward the kitchen and back, almost as if she were lost. “The thing is, you just have to make it to your eighteenth birthday. I kept telling Gwen that. Four months. Four months, and she’d have been able to check herself out, no matter what her dad and stepmother said.”

  “How’s that?”

  “When you’re eighteen, and you’ve been involuntarily committed—and almost everyone at Persephone’s is there involuntarily—you can petition the court, argue you’re healthy enough to leave, no longer a threat to yourself. The people at the clinic let you go if you even threaten to do it, as long as you can get up and walk around. They don’t like to go into court, and they have a waiting list, so the beds never go empty. Gwen was going to be eighteen on January thirty-first. But she couldn’t wait, so she bolted.”

  “Ran away.”

  “Yes, a few weeks after I left. Persephone’s kept it quiet, I guess. It wouldn’t do much for their reputation if it were known that the daughter of one of their richest, best-known clients had run away. Where is Gwen now, faking amnesia in some hospital, hoping her father will interrupt his round-the-world honeymoon and pay some attention to her?”

  Tess walked over to the window, which overlooked the park where she had sat staring at the cheesesteak vendor and his stand. She had a name; Jane Doe would become Gwen Schiller within hours of her return to Baltimore. Her remains could be exhumed from the pauper’s grave in Crownsville, her case could be truly closed. But knowing who she was only made it more unfathomable that she could have gone unidentified for so long.

  “Devon, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Gwen Schiller is dead. She was murdered in Baltimore last November sixteenth, probably not long after she ran away from Persephone’s. The man who killed her confessed to the crime, but she didn’t have any identification on her.”

  “Gwen’s dead?” Devon’s reactions seemed a beat off. As thin as her face was, emotions took a long time reaching it. “You said last month, though?”

  “No, November sixteenth a year ago.”

  “It couldn’t be…it can’t.” Devon began pacing again, as if lost in her own apartment. “Gwen was so strong, so defiant. She was going to get well out of spite. She could take care of herself. She’s the last person I’d imagine dying.”

  The implication was that there were so many other girls Devon could imagine dying.

  “What else can you tell me about her?”

  “Gwen?” Devon hesitated. “The first word you think of is beautiful. That sketch doesn’t capture it. Even sick, she was beautiful. Strong-willed, too. We all were, but she was the toughest by far. She didn’t like what money had done to her family. And it didn’t help that her mother was dead, and her dad had this trophy wife who hated her guts.”

  “An evil stepmother.” Tess was remembering that it was a stepmother who left Hansel and Gretel in the woods, where they stumbled on their own version of the Sugar House. Some girls call it the cake, but to me, it’s the gingerbread house, and I just can’t get that witch in the oven, Gwen had told Sukey.

  “Are there other girls who might remember her, who she might have tried to contact once she ran away?”

  “Not really. Faye Maffley was there that year, and nowhere close to going home when I left. She was still telling doctors she had rearranged her DNA by spending two hours a day on the NordicTrack. Patrice Lewison was at the other end of the range, she’s probably been out almost as long as I have. But it’s not boarding school. You don’t go there to make friends. You go there to get out.”

  “By getting better.”

  “Or worse. If you get sick enough, if you get so thin your health is compromised, they’ll take you out by helicopter to one of the Baltimore hospitals. Didn’t you see the helicopter landing pad when you were there?”

  No, Tess had missed that.

  A key scraped the lock, and the door opened. A tall, broad-shouldered woman who looked vaguely Scandinavian crossed the threshold. She carried a bag of groceries in her sturdy arms.

  “Devon—you have a friend?” It was a cautious question, deferential, asked in slightly stilted English.

  “A friend of a friend.” Devon replied swiftly. Tess didn’t mind letting this woman know who she was, but she realized secrecy was a natural impulse for Devon. There was a furtiveness about the girl, an inevitable by-product of eating disorders.

  “Is she staying for lunch?”

  “No,” Devon said firmly.

  “I just came to ask Devon if she knew where I could find an old friend. She helped me out quite a bit.”

  “I see.” The woman went into the kitchen and began putting away the groceries. “What do you wish for lunch today, Devon?”

  Devon put her fingers to her mouth, began chewing on her nails. “I ate on campus,” she began.

  “Devon.” The woman’s voice was sharp, but friendly, as if this were all a great joke, a daily ritual.

  “Soup?” Devon spoke as if this were a quiz and she might provide the right answer. “With crackers.”

  “A soup with things in it, I think,” her roommate said. “Not tomato or broth, but chicken with noodles or beef with vegetables.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “Okay. Let me walk Miss Monaghan to the door, and I’ll come back and eat my soup.”

  She accompanied Tess not just to the front door, but to the apartment’s entrance, and out to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry about Gwen. I really am. I probably should have cried or something, but nothing in my body works right anymore, not even my emotions. I’m too shocked to cry.”

  “You didn’t know her that well,” Tess offered.

  “No, but—I can’t believe she’s been dead so long, and I didn’t know it. That the world didn’t know it. You’d think it would be national news, Dick Schiller’s daughter being killed. You sure it was November sixteenth last year?”

  “Positive,” Tess said.

  “It seems like such a long time ago. Hilde upstairs, that woman you just met, she moved in with me a year ago. She’s another one of my conditions, you see. My parents didn’t want me to live on campus because college girls get so weird about food. But they didn’t trust me to be on my own. So they pay that Valkyrie to live with me, watch my food intake. Nineteen, with a governess. It’s quite a way to live, isn’t it?”

  She sniffed the breeze, which carried the smell of frying onions and greasy meat and cheese. A wonderful smell in Tess’s opinion, but Devon recoiled a little bit, as if the aroma alone might enter her body somehow, sneak a calorie or two into her system.

  “Devon, are you…better?”

  “That’s a relative term, isn’t it? But yes, I’m better.”

  “Are you well?”

  She smiled, shook her head. “No, I’ve pretty much destroyed myself. I’ll never have children, I’ve shortened my lifespan, my organs are all fucked up. When I wake up in the morning, I can barely find my pulse. Sometimes, I think I’m dead. Then again, I all but died several times before I went to Persephone’s.”

  “Did Persephone’s help you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I was in a lot of places, five in all. My cousin Sarah will beat that record before long. I liked some more than others, but they were pretty much all the same. A little therapy, a little medication, all kinds of behavior modification. None of it worked for me. At some point, I decided to get well. I happened to be at Persephone’s when that happened. Sometimes, I think the intersection of desire and treatment can’t be faked, or orchestrated. It’s a decision. You decide to live. Then you spend the rest of your life second-guessing that decision.”

  There was a rapping on the window above. They looked up to see Devon’s “governess” waving happily, motioning for Devon to come in.

  “Lunchtime,” Devon said. “Soup with things in it. Oh boy.”

  Tess stopped at the cheesesteak cart before trying to find a taxi back to the train station. It was as good a version of the famed local dish as any other, she
supposed. Famed local dishes were usually overrated, more about nostalgia and stereotype than real taste. The thing was, after spending even a short time with Devon Whittaker, eating was too fraught with significance. She couldn’t stop thinking about food, about the process. How odd it was to sink her teeth into something and tear away, ripping flesh, chewing it into ever-smaller pieces. One reason Tess had never smoked cigarettes was because the action seemed essentially ludicrous. Suddenly, eating seemed no less ridiculous. Halfway through the sandwich, she tossed it in the trash.

  In the cab on the way to the train station, she looked at the sketch she had shown Devon. Gwen Schiller. It was a good name for her, old-fashioned in a way, capturing some timeless quality in that face. Gwen Schller. When she had been Jane Doe, it had made sense for her to die in someone’s cemented-over backyard in Locust Point. She had been a street kid, a huffer, someone who would never be missed. But Gwen Schiller, no matter how much she professed to loathe her father and stepmother, shouldn’t have been able to go missing for so long. Someone should have noticed she was gone.

  Someone should have cared.

  chapter 15

  WITHIN A DAY, DENTAL RECORDS OBTAINED FROM A Silver Spring orthodontist made it official. The Dead Girl Formerly Known as Jane Doe was Gwen Schiller. Martin Tull was impressed, and generous enough not to hide it.

  “I can’t believe how much you did with so little,” he kept saying to Tess. They were sitting in a sub shop near police headquarters. Tess was never really comfortable inside the stale air and unrepentantly macho culture of the city police department. Cops made her nervous. She couldn’t help thinking they knew her every misdeed—every red light run, every mile over the speed limit.

  “I started with a lucky break and Whitney turned it into something concrete. She was the one who picked up on the significance of the decayed back teeth.”

  “Beginner’s luck. You were the one who parlayed it into establishing the girl’s identity. How did you track down the friend?”

  “I think this is one of those things that falls under our don’t ask-don’t tell policy.”

  “Misdemeanor or felony?”

  Tess was toying with a turkey sub, her usual—lettuce, tomato, extra hots, no mayo. So virtuous it practically qualified as health food. She didn’t have much of an appetite as of late.

  “I’m not sure I broke any laws per se. But you’d still feel obligated to lecture me, so let’s leave it alone. How are her parents doing?”

  “About how you’d expect. We had to call her father to ask for the name of their daughter’s dentist. He can’t help knowing what that means. The thing that gets me is the father insists there’s a missing person report, but I sure never saw one. I think I’d remember a billionaire’s daughter from Potomac. Talk about a red ball.”

  “A paper billionaire,” Tess said, remembering Devon Whittaker’s dismissive tone. “You’ll tell them face to face, right? Not over the phone?”

  “Yeah.” Tull pinched the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, which meant he had a headache. “I’d like you to be there.”

  “No way. My ghoul days are over, I don’t have to confront grieving next of kin anymore.”

  “Yeah, it sucks. But it’s a cinch they’ll ask me something I don’t know, Tess, and I’ll look stupid. We already look stupid. And when the father finds out his daughter’s killer is dead, his rage isn’t going to have any place to go. He’s going to blame the police.”

  “Not Baltimore PD,” Tess said. “Montgomery County, or some Eastern Shore county, maybe even the State Police, wherever he filed the report. All she did was die in Baltimore.”

  This failed to cheer Tull. He switched hands, pinching the flesh on the right one as he trained his brown, sorrowful eyes on Tess. They had met over a corpse, and it had occurred to Tess more than once that if someone had to show up on your doorstep with news that was going to destroy your world, Martin Tull was the man for the job.

  But just because someone was good at something didn’t mean he liked it. Besides, he wasn’t asking her to do it in his stead, merely to watch, back him up. It wasn’t much of a favor, given all the favors he had done her.

  She reached for his hand to shake it.

  “Thanks, Tess,” he said, then pulled his hand back and resumed his headache cure.

  “You know,” she said, “if you didn’t drink so much coffee, aspirin wouldn’t hit your stomach so hard, and you wouldn’t have to rely on pinching your pressure points to get rid of these headaches.”

  “If I stopped drinking coffee, the withdrawal headaches would be so bad that no amount of aspirin could touch it. My one vice, Tess. Isn’t everyone entitled to at least one?”

  “I couldn’t be friends with someone who didn’t have at least one vice.”

  Tull’s pager went off. She offered her cell phone, but he waved it off as if it were a bribe and went to the pay phone on the wall. His voice rose so quickly, in anger and surprise, that she could hear it across the room.

  “What? What? Where did you hear that? No, no comment. No comment means no comment. Later. You’ll be glad you waited, I promise. No. No.” He hung up. “Shit.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Herman Peters, the police reporter at the Blight, is already sniffing around. Someone told him we have an ID on Jane Doe, and he wants to go with it. No name, just the fact we ID’d her. I tried to tell him it will be a better story if he’ll wait until I notify next of kin, but he’s not buying it. I sure wish I knew who leaked it.”

  “Could be your own communications department, trying to grab a little good press.” And shaft me in the process. If there was going to be a story, Tess should be part of it. She had earned a little free publicity.

  Then she thought of Gwen Schiller, dead forever, and felt a twinge of guilt.

  “Naw, those guys don’t know anything unless they’re told. Could be the medical examiner, could be the orthodontist for all we know. Anyway, you ready to take a little ride in my deluxe city vehicle? The sooner we get this done, the less I have to worry about her parents reading it in the paper, or seeing it on television.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told you, I set up a meeting with the Schillers, all the way down in Potomac.”

  “I thought they were coming up here.”

  “These are rich folks. We go to them.”

  Tess thought of Potomac as an old money enclave, full of Kennedys and horsey types. There was even a saddlery shop at the main business intersection, which locals, predictably, referred to as the village.

  But new money had taken up residence here, fortunes so vast that they couldn’t be housed in the older mansions, with their laughably small bathrooms and lack of central air conditioning. Some of these were large and garish, the epitome of nouveau riche. But the most expensive of the new homes had been designed to look old. The Schillers lived in one of these.

  The father was younger than Tess had expected, barely in his forties, with a boyish face and an asymmetrical white patch in his dark hair that made him look as if he had been slapped with a paintbrush. The stepmother was older than Tess expected, in her late thirties. Given what Devon had said, Tess had expected a trophy wife, but Patsy Schiller was more like a prize given out at a boardwalk shooting gallery. Blond and blue-eyed, she wore a pink suit and white blouse that were too ugly not to be expensive. Unfortunately Patsy’s figure, all breast from collarbone to waist, wasn’t quite right for the lines of couture clothing.

  “Nice house,” Tull said, as the couple welcomed them inside. The foyer was the size of the average Baltimore billiard hall.

  “We haven’t finished decorating,” Patsy said. She had the supercilious air sometimes mistaken for a grand manner. Tess knew instinctively how she had come to be Mrs. Schiller, saw the transformation as clearly as a trailer in a movie theater. She must have been Dick Schiller’s secretary or administrative assistant, indispensable and sweetly officious. She had brought him homemade c
ookies on occasion, brushed up against him while handing him his phone messages.

  And widower Dick Schiller, who made Bill Gates look as if he had a really good haircut, probably couldn’t figure out what to do with those breasts except marry them.

  “We finished decorating, once,” he was saying now, his voice glum and weary. He understood this polite chatter could last only so long, that Tull didn’t want to break the bad news while they were standing in the foyer. “Then we started over, when we returned from our trip.”

  “I thought it would cheer you up, getting rid of all that furniture Gwen’s mother had picked out,” Patsy said, patting his arm. “Besides, our decorator said those old things would never have worked in this house.”

  Gwen’s mother, Tess noted. Not a name, not “your first wife,” which would have emphasized her connection to Dick. Just Gwen’s mother. Tull caught her eye, noting the same verbal tic.

  They sat in the living room. For all the Schillers’ money, it looked like one of the high-end display rooms at Ethan Allen to Tess. The furniture was oversized, and so shiny it appeared to be coated with oil. But maybe there were subtleties in the surroundings that were lost on a little prole like her.

  Now that they were seated, Tull spoke swiftly, giving the news the way a skillful doctor would administer a shot to a frightened child.

  “We asked you for Gwen’s dental records because new information indicated your daughter might be the victim of a homicide, a victim we could never identify. I’m sorry to tell you the dental records establish she was, in fact, our unidentified victim.”

  “Homicide?” her father said. Patsy furrowed her brow. Her surprise was genuine, but she didn’t have any other emotion to put behind it. “Murdered, my daughter was murdered?”

  “Yes, sir,” Tull agreed, not bothering to make the kind of distinctions that judges did. Murder was a legal term. Henry Dembrow had been found guilty of manslaughter. “She was killed by a man who found her living on the street in Locust Point, and promised to help her out. This would have been about six weeks after she left the clinic.”