Tess had looked at the lines she had penned on a legal pad at her kitchen table. It read:
From the same source I have not taken My sorrow I could not awaken, My heart to joy at the same tone, And all I loved, I loved alone.
These were the four lines dropped from the poem “Alone,” the last written missive from her Visitor, whoever he was.
After much pencil-chewing, literal and figurative, Tess had added her own quatrain:
Just because a man’s a stranger Doesn’t mean he can avoid all danger Meet me tomorrow at 6, the usual place, I know your secret-you know my face.
“I’ll stick to my version,” she told the clerk firmly.
“It’s way too vague, I’m telling you. You need to be specific to get results.”
“Well, there’s always next week, isn’t there, and another chance to get it right.”
She hung up, but Tess wasn’t done. She had index cards printed with the same doggerel and she set out with Esskay and Miata, posting them in her usual haunts. If someone had been following her all those weeks, he had been to these places, too. She walked down to the Daily Grind, where Travis agreed to tape the card to the cash register, sharing a conspiratorial wink with her. She crossed the street to Video Americain, where another card joined the jumble of ads for music lessons and apartment shares and yard sales. By the end of the day, her exercise in verse had gone up in the two supermarkets she frequented, Kitty’s bookstore, the boxing gym where she lifted weights, and the “Andy Hardy” liquor store, a neighborhood joint that had earned that nickname because the owners were peppy enthusiastic kids who didn’t look old enough to be drinking wine, much less selling it.
The index cards specified the date they were to meet. The City Paper came out on Wednesday, so “tomorrow” should be clearly understood. Not that Tess was optimistic about getting a response. It seemed just as probable that he would use the time to go to her office or her home. So Crow would be in the house on East Lane, listening for approaching footsteps while he worked in the kitchen. And Daniel had volunteered to park across the street from her office in Butchers Hill, watching for the man to show up there.
Finally, Whitney was to shadow her to Westminster, her only backup now that Gretchen had blown her off. Not that Tess feared this man, whoever he was. Clearly, he was the frightened one.
It was out of consideration for him that she had chosen 6 p.m., when the early nightfall provided cover yet the downtown streets were not yet deserted. The traffic, street and foot, would still be heavy-civil servants rushing home to the suburbs, university types heading to their apartments. She hoped he understood this. She cared only for his safety. His safety and his anonymity. But if he held the secret to a murder, he had to come forward.
Now it was Thursday night, and she was alone in the graveyard. The sign said the grounds closed at dusk, but the unlocked gates invited one to ignore this rule. Tess watched the minute hand of the Bromo-Seltzer clock slowly reaching toward 12. She had debated whether she should wait by the memorial, which had so vexed Gretchen with its wrong date, or the original burial place, which is where the Visitor had laid his gifts. She chose the latter, but there was no bench in its immediate vicinity. Feeling it would be sacrilegious to perch on one of the old family crypts nearby, she began to pace. Then she decided she would look threatening if she kept moving back and forth in this way, so she willed herself to stand still, which made it harder to keep warm. The night was unexpectedly bitter, February strutting its stuff, reminding Baltimoreans that it was short but strong.
Six o’clock came and went, then six-fifteen and six-thirty. Thirty minutes made a profound difference in the neighborhood, and Tess was beginning to lose that comforting end-of-workday bustle she had so counted on. At six-forty-five, she was ready to get out her cell phone and tell Whitney to abort when she saw a tall figure coming toward her, up the steps that led from the law school construction site. The man’s head was down, but he held his hands to his mouth in a gesture she remembered. He glanced at her, slowed his stride for a few steps, and then his gait quickened again. He was rushing, trying to get by her without breaking into an out-and-out run.
“Wait,” Tess called out. “Please wait. I must speak to you.”
The man glanced over his shoulder and then began running in earnest, heading for the Greene Street gate. Tess punched the speed dial button for Whitney’s cell phone and yelled “ Greene Street,” even as she took off after the running man.
It was unclear if Whitney, who had been roaming the perimeter, heard the hoarse shout over the phone or cutting through the night air. She appeared at the side gate within seconds. In her long black trench coat, her blond hair blowing in the wind, she could have risen from the pages of a Poe short story. The running man veered off course, heading for the old catacombs. He had to duck so low that he was practically on his hands and knees. Whitney started to follow him, but Tess called out, “Go around, go around! Cut him off on the other side; I’ll go under.”
She had to bend almost double to work her way through the catacombs, and she stumbled a few times, then bumped her head when she tried to right herself. The man had reached the church’s front yard ahead of Whitney, but she beat him to the front gate. His way to Fayette Street blocked, he turned sharply to the right and ran straight toward the spiked iron fence. With one look back at Tess, he jumped on top of an old crypt so he could gain a handhold on the fence’s spires. He was almost over when Tess caught him by the belt and pulled him back to earth. It had not been her plan to let him land on her, knocking the wind out of both of them, but it worked.
After several stunned seconds, he rolled off, covering his head as if he expected blows to rain down on him.
“Don’t hurt me,” he yelled. “Please, please, don’t hurt me.”
“Why’d you come, just to run away from us?” Tess said, her lungs burning from the frigid air.
The man was young, with pitted skin, matted hair, and the pallor of an overworked graduate student. “Jesus,” he said, almost weeping in fear. “I won’t do it anymore, okay? I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but if you’re going to be like this-”
“You’re going to stop coming to the grave? But that’s the last thing I wanted.”
“I only did it because it’s a good shortcut to the parking garage over on Eutaw. I know the cemetery closes at dusk, but I never saw the harm, cutting through here when I was trying to get to my car. Jesus, couldn’t you give a guy a written warning or something? Did you have to go straight to deadly force? The city cops are nicer than you rent-a-goons!”
Tess was still sprawled on the ground, pressing her midsection in various spots to see if the groveling graduate student had done any serious damage when he had fallen on her. Whitney looked appalled, although it was hard to tell if it was because they had assaulted a shortcutting graduate student or because the student had mistaken her for a campus cop.
“I’m sorry,” Tess said. “It was a case of mistaken identity. But you are tall, and you did have your hands up to your face.”
“What does that have to do with anything? I lost my gloves last week,” he said, holding up hands that were almost blue. “I was blowing on them to keep them warm. That’s part of the reason I cut through, so I won’t have to walk so far in the cold.”
Whitney took off her black suede gloves and threw them to the student. “Fleece-lined,” she said. “Probably big enough, too, given how large my hands are, and styled in such a way no one will ever know they’re women’s gloves. But you ought to get a hat. It’s true what they say about the body’s heat escaping through the head.”