And here was the very item that the Mu-sheum’s Mary Yerkes had coveted, one of Toots Barger’s bowling trophies. Tess picked it up, remembering it had gone for a price so dear that Mary, even with her million-dollar endowment, could not afford it.
Gretchen was bewildered. “What a lot of crap.”
“To most people,” Tess said, still holding the bowling trophy, which had a wooden veneer and featured a trim skirted female on top, crouched in perfect form as she released the ball. “But to some… to some, it’s more valuable than money or jewels. There are people who collect their own past. Everyone does it to some degree. You want things because you had them once, or because they remind you of the dishes your mother used, or the jar of candy your grandmother kept on her sideboard.”
Tess was thinking of her own objects: the Berger cookie tin on her desk, the Planter’s Peanut jar where she threw her receipts, the “Time for a Haircut” sign from the Woodlawn barbershop that had butchered her through grade school. She wasn’t immune to the impulse to preserve the past she remembered.
“You won’t catch me trying to buy the kind of stuff my parents had,” Gretchen said, her voice disdainful. “I like new things, things that work. In my whole apartment, there’s not one thing that’s more than five years old.”
The Ouija board was in its original box and Tess hesitated before she opened it. Original packaging was as much a part of its value as the board itself. But yellowed pieces of Scotch tape at either end suggested the box had been opened at least once. She took it out, balanced the board on her lap, placed her fingers on the- what was it called?-the planchette, that was it, and waited to see if the other world had anything to say. But it was silent, of course, because it takes two to Ouija and Gretchen wasn’t playing.
“Pitts and Ensor told the police they were burglarized,” Tess said, looking down at the board, with its familiar sun and moon and the ominous good-bye stenciled across the bottom. “They went to Bobby’s apartment and the Hilliards’ farm, looking for their stuff. But what stuff? According to the police reports, the things they lost were electronic items-televisions, camcorders, VCRs. Insurance would have paid the replacement cost on those. Who would go to so much trouble to find stuff that can be replaced?”
“Well, there was the bracelet, remember? If it’s really made of gold and emeralds-and never mind who it belonged to or who wore it-then it has to be worth something.”
“Yes, it’s probably worth a lot to someone,” Tess agreed. “But I’m beginning to think the bracelet is only a piece.”
“Right, it’s part of a set.” Gretchen’s voice was impatient. “You told me that.”
“No, I mean it’s a piece of something larger, something that connects all this.”
Outside, the city was beginning to come awake. The traffic noise from nearby Martin Luther King Boulevard was steady now. The windows had kept them from realizing the sun was up.
“Take the key from the door and go get copies made, so we can leave the original here and Pitts won’t know someone has been here if he comes back. I’m going to repack, make sure the room looks just as it did when we discovered it.”
“Then what?” It was a good question.
“And then… and then we’re going to find out if there are some more potential members for our little club.”
“What club is that?”
She held up one of the shirts from the cache of Maryland Lottery merchandise, bright green with a wishbone insignia. “You know: Arnold Pitts screwed me and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
Chapter 27
Gretchen had three keys made at a Southwest Baltimore convenience store where the owner was surprisingly blasé about such a request, so early in the day. One for Tess, one for Gretchen, and one that Tess put in an envelope and left in a mailbox at a certain Bolton Hill town house, with nothing more than a typewritten note providing the address for the door the key would open and suggesting the right time to use it.
She left a similar note-with no key, of course, for he would not need a key-at the Stone Hill home of Arnold Pitts.
Tess was not unaware, as she crept up to their doors in the winter twilight, looking around to make sure she was unobserved, that her behavior was no different from her own stalker’s. There was a dirty little thrill in skulking, in leaving anonymous notes. She didn’t want to feel it, but she did.
They had decided to leave the notes about 6 p.m., just before the two men returned home from work. This gave them a window of an hour, an hour in which no end of things could go wrong. Gretchen had suggested trying to put a contingency plan in place, involving Crow and Whitney, but Tess felt strangely confident.
“I don’t want to work with a net,” she told Gretchen, when they stopped for dinner at Baltimore ’s last surviving Roy Rogers to form their plan.
“It’s not a net, it’s common sense. If Pitts decides to go somewhere else-if he decides to flee-we’ve lost him.”
“He won’t.” Tess dredged a fry through her own mix of barbecue sauce and ketchup, feeling in control of events for the first time in days. “The note promised him something he really wants. He won’t be able to stay away.”
“I just hope you’re right.”
“I was right about following him, wasn’t I? Now it’s time to make this little piggy go wee-wee-wee all the way to Central Booking.”
Dinner finished, they returned to the house in Southwest Baltimore -and waited. There was nothing left to do now but to wait. It was strangely peaceful. They didn’t listen to the radio or make conversation, just sat in the front seat of Gretchen’s rental car and watched the night deepen around them. The street had the sodium vapor lamps used in high-crime areas, but most of them were burned out. Vagrants began making their way to the abandoned buildings, toting small paper bags and greasy sacks of take-out food, not that much different from other workingmen heading home at the end of the hard day. Shoulders slumped, heads down, they looked exhausted. Perhaps being a drug addict really was the hardest job in America.
Ensor arrived first, but then he had been told a time fifteen minutes earlier than Pitts. He drove a Mercedes-Benz, an older model the color of a robin’s egg.
“What an ugly old pile,” Gretchen said.
“But not old enough to have that charming retro thing going for it,” Tess agreed, then realized they could have been describing the car’s driver as well.
Five minutes later, Pitts’s van took the corner on two wheels and squealed to a stop.
“The whole time we were following him, I couldn’t help thinking that thing looked like a bladder,” Gretchen said.
“Really? I thought of it as a stomach,” Tess said, surprised that literal-minded Gretchen was capable of such whimsy.
Pitts jumped out and, with a quick furtive look around him, went up to the door. When he found it was already unlocked, he hesitated, his hand on the knob as if he were frozen. He must have inhaled deeply, for Tess saw the cloudy smoke of his exhale. Finally, he squared his shoulders, marching inside with a convincing air of determination.
“No guns, right?” she asked Gretchen. “You checked the permits with the state police.”
“No legal guns. There’s no way to know if one of those fuckers is carrying an illegal weapon.”
“Did you recognize Ensor? Have you seen him before?”
“No, the only one I ever dealt with was Pitts, and he never said anything about a partner. It was all between him and the Visitor, to hear him tell it.”
“Ensor and the Visitor are about the same height,” Tess said thoughtfully. “And the man who killed Yeager was tall, too.”