I didn't want to be double-teamed. I'm not ready for two-on-one. "Everyone has secrets, Mrs. O'Neal. If I remember correctly you didn't know about your husband's interest in Ava Hill until my last visit."
"I should say we don't have secrets about important things." She walked over to the window and looked out, sighing and hugging her arms. The leaves behind the house were already thinning out. Baltimore's cruel, brief autumn. It did improve the view, however. One could see all the way to the creek bed, to the meadow beyond. The houses on the far hill were almost visible, instead of just windows winking through the trees.
"You have such a nice view," Tess said.
"We owned all of this once, you know. Up until ten years ago we still owned the houses on either side and all the land to the creek."
"Did something happen ten years ago?" Tess's voice wavered a little, despite her best efforts.
"You tell me, Miss Monaghan."
She walked back to her wing chair, crossing her legs at the ankle and folding her hands in her lap. Tess, feeling like Scheherazade, took a deep breath. After weeks of telling lies and bluffing, with uneven results, it felt odd to speak the truth, to say only what she knew and nothing more. It also felt dangerous. If she was right about Mrs. O'Neal, the woman would do anything to protect her family.
"Ten years ago Tucker Fauquier's killing spree ended. He had been raping and killing little boys off and on since the late 1970s, since he was eighteen. But when he was arrested they could charge him with only one murder, because only one was witnessed. It was a capital crime and he got the death penalty. But because Fauquier buried his victims in carefully concealed places, only confessions could resolve the other murders. Encouraged by his lawyer because he was already condemned to die, he eagerly told police all the details. Bodies were found all over the state-twelve in all. One of them was unearthed at the foot of your property, along Little Wyman Falls. An eleven-year-old named Damon Jackson. He lived near the old stadium, off Greenmount Avenue, and had disappeared early in Fauquier's career, as he prefers to call it."
"Yes, I know all this. I was at home the day the police came. I watched from here as they unearthed the body. Actually we didn't sell the property until after that, so I guess it was less than ten years ago."
"Did you have to wait to sell the property until the body was found?"
Mrs. O'Neal gave Tess an appraising look. Tess glanced down the long hallway to the front door, ready to bolt.
"What is it you think you know, Miss Monaghan? Why don't you just tell me that?"
"You and your husband paid Tucker Fauquier a lot of money-well, not a lot of money to you-to confess to that murder. The details were passed through Abramowitz. What the boy looked like, where he was buried. Fauquier was a little vague about where he found this particular boy, but it was a long time ago and Fauquier didn't know Baltimore that well. Yet he remembered he had buried the body near Cross-Tree Creek, according to his confession. As your husband once said, nobody calls it that. Except your family."
Tess looked up nervously, as if Mrs. O'Neal were a stern professor, giving her an oral examination. But she merely nodded, a sign for Tess to continue.
"So if you paid Fauquier, where's the money?" At this point Tess almost forgot about Mrs. O'Neal. She was figuring this part out as she went. "He said Abramowitz stole it, and Abramowitz did leave a sizable estate. But Abramowitz was a good lawyer; he might have earned much of that while in his own practice. Or maybe he got paid, too. After all, he was obstructing justice, suborning perjury-disbarment was the least of what he was facing if caught. Of course, he was too clever and you were too careful to write out personal checks. You had to pass it through something innocuous. Luckily for you, the William Tree Foundation, which your family controls, gives out more than five million dollars a year. What was another $50,000?"
Tess pulled out the faxes she had collected this morning, clutching the papers so hard that only the sweat on her palms kept them from tearing. "Today I asked a friend at the attorney general's office to send me the William Tree Foundation's allocations list for the past three years. Year after year, only two grants, which happen to total $50,000, are made in perpetuity-to VOMA and the Maryland Coalition for Survivors, both chartered by Michael Abramowitz. They're also the only two crime-related groups on your list. Everything else goes to the arts, the poor, the mentally ill, or religious-based charities."
"Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish," Mrs. O'Neal said. "My father set it up that way."
Tess didn't even hear her. "I'm guessing now. I'll admit that. The foundation made the allocations to the two groups Abramowitz had set up. But instead of passing the money on to Fauquier, he let the charities keep it. In the case of VOMA, which gets $30,000 a year, he was ripped off by a greedy accountant, but that's another story. He thought he was doing a good deed. As for the Maryland Coalition for Survivors, it receives only a $20,000 grant, so it has no tax disclosure forms. It does, however, have a mailing address in Friendsville, Maryland: Care of Delores F. Compson. Tucker's mom. She remarried."
Mrs. O'Neal pulled her white cardigan over her shoulders, as if she had caught a sudden chill. When she spoke, her voice was cool, too.
"Mr. Abramowitz emerges as a somewhat heroic figure in your theoretical account. The money goes to a support group for rape victims and the poor mother of his notorious client. Of course, he does violate several laws and enrich himself in the process. Otherwise an admirable man."
"I think he was trying, in his own confused way, to do what was right. Some people are good and bad."
"Yes. Well, in that case, Mr. Abramowitz and I have much in common." Mrs. O'Neal stood up, and Tess almost flinched. Did she really think Luisa O'Neal would hurt her? No, she'd pay someone to hurt her. Mrs. O'Neal walked back to the window, looking down the hill.
"My parents had two children, a son and a daughter. It was my father's wish we should grow up here, on either side of him. But my brother died in a flu outbreak when we were young. My parents died less than a year after my marriage. Shay and I moved into this house. We had a son and a daughter. Mary Julia and William Tree O'Neal. I thought, as my father had, that my children would live on either side of me. But Mary Julia married a Chicago boy. She lives in Lake Bluff."
"And William?"
"William lives out of state. He has for years."
"Since he killed Damon Jackson? Did you see that, too, from your window? Or did you just watch him bury the body?"
Luisa O'Neal did not answer. Her eyes, deep gray in the shadowy light, stared down the hill. Whatever she had seen, she was seeing again. Tess almost felt sorry for her, but she had come too far to stop asking questions just because the memories might be hurtful to someone.
"Why did you ask Fauquier to confess? Damon Jackson's body probably never would have been found. It had been there almost five years by the time Fauquier was caught. It was on your property. Even if the body had been discovered, you were the only eyewitness."
"One can be too neat," she said, still staring outside. "The people who make fortunes, men like my father, are reckless and bold. The people who inherit them, or marry them, tend to be more timid. Shay doesn't like loose ends. I didn't like the idea of a woman forever wondering where her son was. Besides, we could never develop the property as long as the body was there. As it turned out Ms. Jackson was a prostitute junkie who had seldom known where her son was when he was alive. But I didn't know that when Shay came up with his plan. I thought it was a good idea."
"So you approached Abramowitz."
"Shay did, yes. He said he was representing a friend, but Mr. Abramowitz didn't believe him. It didn't matter. Mr. Abramowitz was burned out. And so very poor. He was paid the same as Fauquier, in the same way as Fauquier. You did a good job, Miss Monaghan, but there were three other ‘dummy' groups on that list: the Park Heights Soup Kitchen, the Hank Greenberg Scholarship Fund for Young Boys, and the Ladies Auxiliary of the Temple Beth-El Gonif. All tax-exempt. Mr. Abramowitz made sure of that. Another law broken, of course."