"What prompted all the changes?"
"VOMA. It brought me together with a lot of women I might not have met otherwise. Rich women, from Roland Park and Guilford. Accomplished women. Pru really encouraged me. But she thinks I'm uppity, too."
"Why?"
Cecilia shrugged. "It happens. Someone's your mentor, then suddenly you don't need a mentor anymore. Hey-what was yours like?"
"My mentor?"
"No, your rape."
Tess stared into her glass, mumbling: "Oh, typical date rape. I was helping a guy study, and we went up to his room."
"Mine was a burglar. I asked him to…pull out. I was scared of, I don't know, pregnancy, or AIDS. I think I had this idea it would be more tolerable if he didn't come inside me. Of course he found the whole thing hilarious."
"How did he get off?"
"His lawyer used the thing about pulling out. He said I was so calm, so thoughtful, it must have been consensual. That it was my form of birth control. But that's not the reason he got acquitted. Someone, the lab or the cops or the prosecutors, lost the physical evidence, the swab. The case fell apart without that."
"How does VOMA help?"
"Oh, self-defense classes. Lectures. We even looked into some kind of civil suit."
"Against the lab, for losing your results?"
"Something like that. VOMA worked pretty well."
"Worked, past tense? Are you quitting because you're getting married, or because of law school?"
"Right. Exactly. Because I'm getting married." Cecilia jumped to her feet, gathering up her purse and the sheaf of papers on the table. In her haste she knocked everything to the floor. When Tess tried to help her pick the fluttering papers up, she panicked.
"Don't touch anything! Just let me put it back in order!" she shouted, her voice as shrill as a police whistle. It was a commanding sound, coming from such a tiny body. But Cecilia's voice merely startled Tess into holding the papers even tighter, crumpling the sheets in her fist.
Cecilia dropped into a practiced crouch, fingers curved as if to gouge someone's eyes or stab a larynx, but her self-defense training was of little use unless someone came at her. Tess merely stood there, staring at her, along with everyone else in the coffee bar, except for two chess players who were using a timer for their game. Cecilia knew how to defend, but not how to attack. Tess knew how to attack, but she had no intention of doing so. After a few moments of this standoff, Cecilia improvised, throwing her body against Tess's knees in a blatantly illegal tackle and bringing her crashing to the floor.
As Tess fell she reached out blindly with both hands, dropping the crumpled sheets. Cecilia grabbed them and bolted, leaving Tess in a puddle of steamed milk and crockery.
"Just another coffeehouse brawl," Tess told the manager when he rushed over to examine the damage, not to her but to the heavy cups and saucers. "Caffeine makes some people very aggressive."
It hurt, being dumped on one's butt on a concrete floor. Of course, Tess thought, a coffeehouse couldn't have anything warm or soft underfoot. As she pulled to her feet, she saw a coffee-splattered piece of paper under the table. Greasy and gray, it appeared to be a page from some company's articles of incorporation. Tess remembered seeing such documents when she was a reporter. This was the last page of the charter, bearing two signatures: Prudence Henderson, president and treasurer of VOMA, and the lawyer who had filed the charter for her: Michael Abramowitz.
Chapter 15
The president of the United States came between Tess and her bagels the next morning, and it wasn't in one of her strange dreams.
Nor was it the first time. Like most Baltimoreans, Tess had more experience than she wanted with visiting presidents, First Ladies, cabinet secretaries, and their ilk. Just forty-five miles up the parkway from Washington, Baltimore had become the destination of choice during the last decade, an easy photo op for those who wanted to surround themselves with local misery or color. Real folks. Even the queen of England had felt obliged to put in an appearance at an Orioles game. But whether it was a monarch or a president, a Democrat or a Republican, it all meant the same thing for the local populace-traffic jams and security checks, breathless reports on television for a week before and after, a disruption of life in general.
Cranky at being deprived of her breakfast routine, Tess splurged on a chocolate-filled croissant and a cup of hazelnut coffee from one of the stalls inside the old Broadway market. She had planned to savor the high-calorie treat and gourmet coffee, but she ended up bolting both when she saw the bus crossing Broadway. One reason her Toyota had survived this long was because she used public transportation when possible, as long as she didn't have to transfer. Baltimore 's bus system didn't make it easy. Today she ended up six long blocks from her destination, the complex of state office buildings at Preston and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
The bland gray towers here housed hundreds of state employees from several divisions. Tess took the elevator to room 808, home to all corporate charters filed in the state of Maryland, for businesses and nonprofits alike. Cecilia's smeared copies must have come from here, from the old microfilm files, a technology now almost as quaint as telegraphs and Morse codes.
It was a dusty, overheated room, always crowded and tense. When Tess was a reporter, jazzed up on caffeine and deadlines, just being here had pushed her to the edge of teeth grinding irritation. The too-small room seemed to affect everyone's reflexes, until employees and visitors alike moved as if suspended in honey. There was always a crowd at the banks of filing cabinets, always a line at the front desk, never enough clerks to help out. Strange little gnomes, male and female, hogged the microfilm machines and tables. Tess had never known, or cared, who these people were or what they were doing.
Now she was one of them. A free spirit, liberated from the forty-hour-a-week grind. Tess waited to surrender to the same lethargy the others had, to shuffle to the front desk, where she would get the folio number for the file she wanted, then to the cabinets where the files were kept, and to the machine where she could scan to the page number she needed. But the only feeling she had was her usual urgent desire to get out as quickly as possible. It took a mere five minutes to get the reel of microfilm, but the microfilm readers were already taken by people with piles and piles of film stacked at their sides. A bad sign, Tess decided, a very bad sign. She would have to rely on her more devious instincts, becoming sharper by the day, to jump ahead in line.
"Anybody parked on Howard Street?" she asked brightly. "Because they're ticketing."
Immediately three people rushed for the doors. One left a microfilm reader vacant and Tess usurped it, ignoring the glares of those who had not moved quite so quickly. She scanned on fast, which made her head ache as the pages rushed by in a blur. The machine gave off a noxious smell, a combination of ink and dust, laced with a burning odor from the old motor. VOMA's charter began on page 1,334, fairly deep into the file. She slowed the scan to a crawl, but she had already passed it by and had to reverse direction for several hundred pages before she could zero in.
She was looking for more names to add to her growing list. Tess knew from writing about charities that a nonprofit typically had officers and a board. A lawyer filed the incorporation papers, but the lawyer usually didn't have any further dealings with the group. Still, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that Abramowitz filed the papers for a group that had at least one member who hated his guts. The original filing for VOMA, the Victims of Male Aggression, listed only Prudence Henderson as president-treasurer, and the "agent," lawyer Michael Abramowitz-the same names she had found on Cecilia's fragment in the coffehouse. No board, and nothing unusual in the bylaws, basically a statement of purpose ("a nonprofit that seeks to educate about sexual assault") and a promise not to support or oppose individual political candidates. That was boilerplate, a federal law any tax-exempt group had to follow.