The woman dragged Sukey away, with hardly a glance in Tess’s direction. Red-faced Sukey stared at the pavement, mortified, not even bothering to say goodbye.
Then again, for an adolescent, the mere revelation that one actually had parents, had emerged from another person’s flesh, was enough to cause acute embarrassment.
Tess walked back to her car and wondered where Sukey had been going with her new version of the “I met Jane Doe” story. Then she wondered why she cared. As surely as Fort Avenue dead-ended at Fort McHenry, she had come to her own dead end. Nothing to do but turn the car around and go home.
chapter 11
THREE HOURS LATER, TESS WAS STILL IN A FUNK, A bleak, mean mood, as bad a mood as she could imagine. She went to the boxing gym in her neighborhood, where she used the weights and exercise equipment, but not even a good sweat could boil this defeated feeling out of her. Slumped at her desk, still in her workout clothes, she had an inspiration and began dialing Whitney’s various numbers. The cell phone answered.
“What’s up?” Whitney knew it was her, she had Caller ID, which Tess kept meaning to get her number blocked for. She considered telecommunications the modern-day arms race, and she believed in constant one-upmanship.
“Any chance of shooting tonight?”
“Absolutely.” Whitney’s certainty about everything was always refreshing. “My parents’ place?”
“Well, we could go to my folks’ place, but if you set up a target on a tenth of an acre in Ten Hills, the neighbors tend to get all squirrelly.”
“Okay, meet me in an hour,” Whitney said.
“The sun will be down by then.”
“No problem. We’ll just shoot from the glow of the headlamps. Night training, you know.”
Whitney’s family lived in the valley. Which valley, Tess had never been sure- Worthington or Greenspring, she got them confused. The more pressing question was valley of what. It wasn’t as if there were mountain ranges in this part of Maryland, just rolling hills. But that’s how it was known, this mix of huge old houses and farmland beyond the Baltimore Beltway. The Valley.
It was colder in the Valley, and darker and starrier. What’s the difference between the rich and the rest of us? They have more money, and they have more stars in their night sky. Tess had known Whitney for more than a decade, but she had never gotten over feeling like a trespasser when she turned up the long drive to the Talbots’ stone farmhouse, a place so simple and well preserved that even the most cloddish social climber could see it outranked the nearby mansions. And that was before one factored in the 50 acres of prime Baltimore County real estate, just screaming out to be turned into 100, maybe 150 “executive” homes. When Whitney wanted to torment her mother, she claimed she would do just that with her inheritance.
Whitney was full of shit. She loved her childhood home so much she wouldn’t move out, preferring to live in a small guest house rather than find her own place in the city. She had sworn, upon returning from Japan, that she was looking for a condo or a rowhouse, but she was proving to be more particular than Goldilocks.
“I don’t know why it’s so hard,” Whitney said a little plaintively. “All I want is an old place-but with the kitchen and systems updated, of course. A water view. And a neighborhood where there are things to do, but I don’t want to worry about parking and congestion.”
“How many real estate brokers have you gone through so far?” Tess asked her.
“Three. Four. No, just three,” she said, pulling on a pair of boots in what she called the “great room” of the four-room guest house. Her mother had decorated it as if it were a hunting lodge, which suited Whitney. “The last one didn’t call back when I left a message about a place I saw in Federal Hill. I think my photograph may be circulating through all the offices. Who cares? No one buys a house in December, anyway. It can wait until spring.”
“What about your privacy?”
“Oh, they never come up here. If anything, I’m the one who’s barging in on them all the time, borrowing things, stealing food.”
“But they can see your house from their breakfast table. If you brought someone home-”
“Brought someone home? Tess, you know I’m a sexual camel. I can go years in-between. I had sex in Japan. I’m not due for a while.”
“You had sex in Japan?” This was new. “You didn’t tell me.”
“It’s not like it was the first time, I told you all about that.” So she had, in detail so clinical and detatched that it would have put an eighteen-year-old Tess off men forever, if she hadn’t ventured into the territory first. “And it wasn’t love. Just the usual, ohmigod, I’m ten thousand miles from home, there go the last of my inhibitions kind of thing. The need for distance only seems to increase. First it was college, on the Eastern Shore. Then New Haven, or New York on the weekends. Now Japan. I may have to move to New Zealand to have any sex life at all.”
“Was he Japanese?”
“One was.”
“One?”
“There was an Englishman, too.” She grabbed her fair hair and crammed it under a battered tweed hat, the kind that older, preppy men wore. “It was fun.” She said this as if it was a rather sudden revelation. “I may even try it again sometime.”
They drove in Whitney’s new Suburban to a cleared field at the property’s edge, where Whitney had already set up two cardboard torsos. With the car running, she left the headlamps on, so they were in a small circle of light.
“It’s colder than I thought,” Tess complained. “My hands are blocks of ice.”
“Don’t you dare wear gloves,” Whitney decreed. “Gloves are for sissies.”
Tess loaded the Smith amp; Wesson, then fired off her six rounds. She always lost count, and had to click at least once on the empty chamber to be sure the gun was empty. She hadn’t practiced for a while, and her sighting was off. It was disgraceful, really, how easy it was for someone in Maryland to buy and keep a gun, with no proof of one’s ability to use it.
“You’re pulling to the right,” Whitney observed. “My turn.”
Whitney, whose first gun had been a hunting rifle, preferred a Berretta for target practice, a semiautomatic with a magazine. The first time Tess had seen a magazine, she had said: “Oh, like a Pez dispenser.” Because she always had trouble loading Pez dispensers-the candy tended to snap out of the plastic column and spray all over the room-she had decided she was better off with the Smith amp; Wesson.
Whitney was faster than Tess, much more expert, and her shots were neatly clustered at the center of the torso.
“Want to try mine?” she asked.
Tess shook her head. “I’ve tried it. Between the recoil and the casings flying out the side, it makes me a nervous wreck.”
She took aim again with her.38. Not as good as Whitney, but better.
“Now try it from leather,” Whitney instructed.
“Oh really-”
“Come on. Cops have to do it. Why not you? You think everyone who takes a shot at you is going to send you an engraved invitation first, so you know to have your gun handy? I’ve got a holster in the Suburban, let’s try it.”
Tess was clumsy at this. The local gun ranges didn’t allow members to draw from leather, so she had almost no experience.
“My turn,” Whitney sang out, as if they were playing jacks.
The night was cold and still, sharp with the final, decadent smells of autumn. Tess had thought she couldn’t last long in such cold. But her concentration made her forget everything, except the gun in her hand and the target ahead of her. There was room for nothing else in her head. Not for Ruthie, not for Jane Doe. Not for Sukey, not for bars whose licenses listed dead owners. Not for smarmy Arnie Vasso. There was only the night and her gun.