The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  Great, another factoid about Tyner’s sex life. This day kept getting better and better.

  Ellen Cade overrated her abilities. Two hours passed before the Philadelphia cops sent Tess off into what was now night. Tess would have liked to crawl into the back of her Toyota and sleep, but that wasn’t an option. Instead, she dialed Whitney’s house. Not the guest cottage, but the main house.

  “Tesser!” Mrs. Talbot’s voice was mellow with tiny cracks in it, like good whisky being poured over ice. “We’re just sitting down to dinner. But Whitney’s at a holiday party held by one of her classmates from Roland Park Country Day.”

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Talbot. I really wanted to talk to you.”

  “To me?” She sounded at once surprised and flattered.

  Tess paused, trying to think of a polite way to ask Mrs. Talbot if she knew the Whittakers of Philadelphia. It would sound as if she assumed all rich, blueblood types knew one another. Which was exactly what she assumed.

  “Mrs. Talbot, is your family in the Social Register?”

  “Tess, you know I’ve never cared about such things.”

  That would be a yes. “Does the Social Register include addresses?”

  “Yes, winter and summer. And the yachts, sometimes, if the family uses one.” If there was any irony in Mrs. Talbot’s voice, Tess missed it. “Why do you ask? Certainly, you know where we live.”

  “I’m trying to find a home address for the Whittakers of Philadelphia. They’re not in the phone book.”

  “Which Philadelphia Whittakers? There are several.”

  “The parents of Devon Whittaker.”

  “I may have the Philadelphia book around. It’s an excellent resource for fund-raising, and you know how many committees I serve on.”

  Mrs. Talbot put the phone down. Not a minute later, she picked up an extension in another room. “I do have it,” she said, a little breathlessly. “Is this part of your work? Am I helping you out? It’s rather fun, isn’t it?”

  Tess had a vision of both Talbot women following her around, in fetching mother-and-daughter outfits. Starsky and Hutch and the Duchess of Windsor on stakeouts together.

  “Rather,” she said, trying not to mimic Mrs. Talbot’s accent. “If you have the stomach for it.” She thought again of Hilde, how her lifeless body had been dragged and bumped across the room, as if she were nothing more than an unwieldy bag of garbage. She remembered the jumbo bag of barbecued Fritos the cops had plucked from the dining room table, hoping to find fingerprints on the plastic. Devon Whittaker would not have a bag of Fritos in her pantry, Tess knew, and Hilde probably wouldn’t bring such a loaded food into the house. Which meant the killer had sat a few feet from Hilde’s body, having a picnic while waiting for Devon to arrive.

  She took down the phone number and address Mrs. Talbot provided, then stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy a map.

  It was dark in the suburbs and house numbers were difficult to see. Tess had to get out of her car several times to check the mailboxes at the street’s edge. Finally, she found the Whittakers, and headed up the long driveway. She wasn’t sure why she felt so cowed—the Whittakers, after all, were just the Philadelphia version of the Talbots, or any number of moneyed, familied Baltimoreans she had known. But this wasn’t her territory, she didn’t know the connections and history here. If the Whittakers called the cops when she showed up on their doorstep, she could end up back downtown, waiting for Ellen Cade to bail her out a second time.

  A man opened a door. Not a butler, judging by his clothes—a tweed jacket over an Oxford cloth shirt, khaki pants—but far from the patrician man of the manor Tess had expected.

  “Yes?” Behind tortoiseshell glasses, his eyes were at once vague and nervous. His other features were soft and mushy, more like lumps in gravy than an actual face.

  “I’m Tess Monaghan.”

  “The girl who saved Devon’s life?”

  “Yes.” Left unasked was the question of whether Tess had put Devon’s life in jeopardy to begin with.

  “Please come in.”

  She was led into a book-lined study that could have been drawn from the plans for her own dream home—antique Persian rugs, a fireplace, a sofa covered in moss green velvet, the walls lined with books, old books, with worn spines that had known many hands and many readings.

  But Devon, sitting in an armchair close to the fire and wrapped in a chenille throw, registered no delight in her surroundings. Despite the throw, and the fire, her body was shaking convulsively. Her face, reflected in the firelight, had a decidedly bluish cast.

  “I just feel so bad,” she said when she saw Tess.

  “About Hilde?”

  She nodded. “And Gwen.”

  Her father stood in the doorway, as if waiting for Devon’s permission to enter. Tess wondered if this young woman had always held so much power in her family, or if she had earned her father’s deference when she began destroying her body. Maybe that was the reason she had stopped eating in the first place, to gain power.

  “You can listen, Daddy. That way I won’t have to tell it twice.”

  The father took a seat at a rolltop desk, out of Devon’s sight line. Tess sat on the sofa, facing her. That is, she would have been facing her, if Devon hadn’t continued to stare into the flames.

  “The first time I came to see you—why didn’t you tell me you had heard from Gwen, that she had called you?”

  “Are you good at keeping secrets?” Devon asked.

  “I like to think I am.”

  “I’m great at it. Most girls with eating disorders are. I was. So was Gwen. The disease turns you into a sneak, you see. You have to be crafty, to keep people from making you eat, in my case, or making you stop throwing up, in Gwen’s case. Even when you told me Gwen was dead, I felt I had to keep her secrets.”

  “About the rape?”

  “And other things.”

  “What other secrets could Gwen possibly have?”

  “The usual. She hated her father”—Devon turned her head toward Mr. Whittaker, but he didn’t seem to notice—“for putting her in that place, then going off on his year-long honeymoon with the secretary-slut. That’s what she called his new wife. She thought if she ran away, he would have to pay attention to her. It was just a castle in the air at first, a fantasy to talk about at night. But when the teacher raped her, she decided to run away for real.”

  “How could you know that? You left Persephone’s more than a month before Gwen escaped, to enroll at Penn.”

  Devon pulled the throw more tightly around her. “We stayed in touch. It wasn’t allowed, but we did it.”

  “Not allowed?” Tess asked.

  “It was the doctor at the clinic who thought it would be better for you, Devon,” Mr. Whittaker said in a soft, shy voice. Tess had almost forgotten he was there. “He said it might retard your progress.”

  “Dr. Blount.” Devon grimaced. “Yes, he was a real prize. You’d pay two thousand dollars a day never to see him again, or smell his rotten breath while he blabbed on and on about all the stupid reasons girls did what they did. As if he knew. As if he knew anything.”

  “But you’re better,” Mr. Whittaker said, his voice a plea.

  “Sure,” Devon said. “I’m better. I’m alive. I’ve been alive for a whole year longer than Gwen. That doesn’t seem fair somehow. I helped her run away, and she ended up dead. Does that mean I killed her?”

  “How did you help her?”

  “I sent her money, through one of the Mexican women they hired to clean there. She didn’t know what she was smuggling in, she just knew she got twenty dollars for every letter she took in. I managed to send Gwen five hundred dollars that way, before she left. You know, she never even thanked me for the money. She was a bit spoiled that way. Gwen was so beautiful that people liked to do things for her, and she grew accustomed to it. When she wanted something from you, she expected to get it right away. She thought you could drop everything and do her bidding.”

>   Tess thought she knew where Devon was heading. “She called you, and asked you to come to Baltimore, didn’t she?”

  “She left a message on my voice mail, telling me she was waiting for me at a park near Fort McHenry. I didn’t find it until evening, when I came home from class. I figured it was too late, by then. The call had come in hours before. Besides, I couldn’t figure out a way to shake Hilde. I thought Gwen would call me again the next day. But she didn’t.”

  She tried, Tess thought, thinking of Henry Dembrow’s confession. She died trying. You have a phone, she asked. Of course we have a phone. It was then that Gwen’s interest had been piqued, that she had agreed to go to Henry’s house with him.

  “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me she called you. It’s not your fault she’s dead, Devon.”

  Devon was crying now, tears streaming down her face. “But it is. If I hadn’t helped her leave Persephone’s Place, she never would have been there, don’t you see? All this time, I told myself she couldn’t be dead, because Dick Schiller’s daughter couldn’t die without it being a big deal, right? I told myself that every day for a year, but I never picked up the phone, never tried to call the Schillers’ house down in Potomac. Because I knew somehow. I knew something terrible had happened to her.”

  Sobbing, Devon was a figure of pity, yet her father did not move from his chair, did not try to comfort her. It was as if he was waiting for an invitation. Finally, Tess went over to her and pulled the throw around her shoulders. Devon stiffened at the contact, but she didn’t push Tess away.

  “You didn’t hurt me, by hiding what you knew,” Tess told her. “But you almost hurt yourself. Someone else knows Gwen called you. I don’t know how, but they do. Someone who wanted to keep you from speaking to me. I’m not sure what Gwen knew, but someone is willing to kill anyone who talked to her in the final days of her life.”

  “I can’t help hiding things,” Devon said. Her nose was running, and her voice was still choked from her tears. “It’s what I do. I used to cut my food into tiny little pieces, and push it down into my sock when no one was looking, then throw the socks away after supper. My mother could never understand why I was always running out of tube socks. I told her the dog was stealing them from the hamper.”

  Mr. Whittaker cleared his throat, but said nothing.

  “Whoever tried to kill you thinks Gwen told you something.”

  “Well, she didn’t. The only thing she kept saying on the answering machine was, ‘I can’t go back, I can’t go back.’”

  “She meant to Persephone’s?”

  “I thought so at the time. Although she also said…” Devon paused, searching her memory. “She said, ‘I can’t go back. I can’t go with him.’”

  “I can’t go with him?”

  “Yes. I thought she meant her father, but it could have been someone else.”

  Tess shook her head. It was too small a scrap of information to be useful. Besides, it might not mean anything.

  “Devon, Mr. Whittaker—” the father hitched his chair slightly forward, but otherwise was silent. “I don’t think you should assume Devon is safe, not in the short run. She should be sent some place far away, and I think you should hire a bodyguard for her. If you can afford it.”

  The last part sounded silly to her ears. There was clearly very little the Whittakers couldn’t afford, or wouldn’t buy, especially when it came to Devon.

  “How long will she have to go away?”

  “I wish I could tell you. If Hilde’s killer thinks it through, he’ll realize Devon has spoken to the Philadelphia police, to me, to her family, and that keeping her silent is no longer a realistic possibility. But I’d go away for Christmas, if it’s not too much of an imposition.”

  “We could,” her father said. “We have a house in Guadeloupe.”

  Of course you do, Tess wanted to say.

  “What about school?” Devon asked. “I have finals.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” her father assured her. Tess wondered how many times he had made that same promise to his daughter. “You can do them by mail, perhaps. We’ll work something out.”

  “Guadeloupe will be warm at least,” Devon said. “I’m cold all the time now. I feel like I’ll never get warm again.”

  “I thought the doctor said your blood pressure would start going up,” her father said.

  “Doctors,” Devon said, cramming more scorn into that one word than Tess would have thought possible.

  She stood, ready to leave. “Guadeloupe sounds like a good plan. Don’t forget the bodyguard, though. Besides, maybe the Philadelphia cops will surprise us. Maybe it will turn out that this has nothing to do with Gwen at all. Maybe it was a botched kidnapping.”

  Devon’s father seemed to find some comfort in this, but Devon was a harder sell.

  “Aren’t you in danger, too? They followed you to my apartment today. They’re one step behind you.”

  “Actually,” Tess said, “I’m afraid they’re one step ahead of me.”

  chapter 24

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN TESS MADE IT HOME. SHE had expected little in the way of a welcoming committee—Kitty and Tyner were at the opera, Crow had a gig, and Esskay went to bed pretty early, to prepare for the next day’s napping regimen.

  But when she tiptoed into Kitty’s kitchen to forage for a snack, her stomach less than satisfied by a Roy Rogers pit stop near the state line, her father was sitting at the kitchen table. He had a can of beer open in front of him, and the radio was on—Stan the Fan, or one of those sports talk shows. He had sat like this in their kitchen at home many an evening. If you asked him what he was listening to, or why, he might not have an answer. As a child, Tess had found this odd. But as an adult, she had developed her own fondness for the jumble of voices on talk radio. There was a soothing rhythm in all that chat, a kind of white noise in the locals’ nasal accents.

  “Mom kick you out?” she asked. Turn your fears into jokes, and life won’t be so inclined to provide the punch-line.

  “I was waiting for you,” her father said. “Kitty left me a key. They’re going to be out late—”

  “The opera, I know. Tosca.” She left out the part about how opera affected Tyner. Her father was almost as protective of his only sister as he was of his daughter. The difference being that he wholly approved of Tyner, an older man with a good income, and had yet to approve of anyone Tess had brought home.

  “So, what’s up?” By turning her back on him and rummaging in the refrigerator, she was able to make the question sound almost casual. How was your day? Same old, same old. Got shot at, saved a woman’s life.

  “You’ve got to stop what you’re doing.”

  She froze, her hand wrapped around the upper portion of a bottle of Pinot Grigio, her face warm despite the cool air of the refrigerator. For a moment, she thought her father knew of her Philadelphia adventure. But how could he? The Inquirer would have a story tomorrow, given the prominence of the Whittaker family, but no one cared about her involvement. She was counting on the cops to misspell her name, counting on the reporter not to track her down, not tonight.

  “Stop what?” she asked casually. “Drinking white wine? Hey, I had a hard day. You want another beer?”

  “Arnie Vasso called me today. He said you’re making a nuisance of yourself. He said you’re annoying some people you’d be better off leaving alone.”

  “I spilled a glass of water in his lap, that’s all.”

  “I’m not talking about Arnie, and you know it. I’m talking about Nicola DeSanti. Whatever you’re doing, Tess, drop it. It’s not worth it. Not worth your time, and not worth Ruthie’s money. Tell your cop friend what you know, and get out of the way.”

  She poured a glass of wine and sat down across from her father. No use putting the bottle back in the refrigerator. She knew she’d drain it before this night was through, maybe start on another one. “Get out of the way of what, Dad?”

  “You did what R
uthie asked. You identified the dead girl. But there’s no connection between her and Henry dying, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone in my office. That’s all there is to it.”

  Usually, it’s the liar who can’t make eye contact. But Tess thought it would break her heart to look into her father’s steady blue eyes as he piled fiction upon fiction.

  “It’s not just Gene, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean if Gene Fulton was in this alone, you wouldn’t be afraid. You could go to the boss, tell him that he’s helping Nicola DeSanti run a prostitution ring out of her bar. Because that’s what he’s doing, Dad, and you know it. So why can’t you turn him in?”

  “I’m protecting you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Tesser!” She almost never used such language in front of her parents. Then again, her father seldom tried to bullshit her. Judith had been the one in charge of parental misinformation, running the gamut from “You’ll put your eye out” to “The boys won’t respect you if you do that.” Patrick had specialized in omission. He sought to protect her from the world by not telling her too much about it.

  “Dad—why are you protecting Gene?”

  It was his turn to look away. “You know, Gene and I go back a ways. We were never friends, but he’s one of the old-timers down there. He got divorced a couple years back, and the judge really soaked him on child support. On top of that, his wife took his kids to Georgia. So he has to pay all this money, and he never gets to see them.”

  “Which is his justification for taking kickbacks from a small-time criminal. Does he get extra for chauffeuring the girls around, or does he provide that service out of the goodness of his heart?”

  “It’s legit. It’s an escort service.”

  “Dad, please.”

  “Look, Tess, it’s not like she’s selling drugs, or killing people. The girls who work there, they’re free to choose what they do, you know? And they’re a helluva lot safer than they’d be on the streets, or hooked up with pimps. The old lady screens the customers, has guys take them to and from their appointments.”