“About the rape?”
“And other things.”
“What other secrets could Gwen possibly have?”
“The usual. She hated her father”-Devon turned her head toward Mr. Whittaker, but he didn’t seem to notice-“for putting her in that place, then going off on his year-long honeymoon with the secretary-slut. That’s what she called his new wife. She thought if she ran away, he would have to pay attention to her. It was just a castle in the air at first, a fantasy to talk about at night. But when the teacher raped her, she decided to run away for real.”
“How could you know that? You left Persephone’s more than a month before Gwen escaped, to enroll at Penn.”
Devon pulled the throw more tightly around her. “We stayed in touch. It wasn’t allowed, but we did it.”
“Not allowed?” Tess asked.
“It was the doctor at the clinic who thought it would be better for you, Devon,” Mr. Whittaker said in a soft, shy voice. Tess had almost forgotten he was there. “He said it might retard your progress.”
“Dr. Blount.” Devon grimaced. “Yes, he was a real prize. You’d pay two thousand dollars a day never to see him again, or smell his rotten breath while he blabbed on and on about all the stupid reasons girls did what they did. As if he knew. As if he knew anything.”
“But you’re better,” Mr. Whittaker said, his voice a plea.
“Sure,” Devon said. “I’m better. I’m alive. I’ve been alive for a whole year longer than Gwen. That doesn’t seem fair somehow. I helped her run away, and she ended up dead. Does that mean I killed her?”
“How did you help her?”
“I sent her money, through one of the Mexican women they hired to clean there. She didn’t know what she was smuggling in, she just knew she got twenty dollars for every letter she took in. I managed to send Gwen five hundred dollars that way, before she left. You know, she never even thanked me for the money. She was a bit spoiled that way. Gwen was so beautiful that people liked to do things for her, and she grew accustomed to it. When she wanted something from you, she expected to get it right away. She thought you could drop everything and do her bidding.”
Tess thought she knew where Devon was heading. “She called you, and asked you to come to Baltimore, didn’t she?”
“She left a message on my voice mail, telling me she was waiting for me at a park near Fort McHenry. I didn’t find it until evening, when I came home from class. I figured it was too late, by then. The call had come in hours before. Besides, I couldn’t figure out a way to shake Hilde. I thought Gwen would call me again the next day. But she didn’t.”
She tried, Tess thought, thinking of Henry Dembrow’s confession. She died trying. You have a phone, she asked. Of course we have a phone. It was then that Gwen’s interest had been piqued, that she had agreed to go to Henry’s house with him.
“I still don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me she called you. It’s not your fault she’s dead, Devon.”
Devon was crying now, tears streaming down her face. “But it is. If I hadn’t helped her leave Persephone’s Place, she never would have been there, don’t you see? All this time, I told myself she couldn’t be dead, because Dick Schiller’s daughter couldn’t die without it being a big deal, right? I told myself that every day for a year, but I never picked up the phone, never tried to call the Schillers’ house down in Potomac. Because I knew somehow. I knew something terrible had happened to her.”
Sobbing, Devon was a figure of pity, yet her father did not move from his chair, did not try to comfort her. It was as if he was waiting for an invitation. Finally, Tess went over to her and pulled the throw around her shoulders. Devon stiffened at the contact, but she didn’t push Tess away.
“You didn’t hurt me, by hiding what you knew,” Tess told her. “But you almost hurt yourself. Someone else knows Gwen called you. I don’t know how, but they do. Someone who wanted to keep you from speaking to me. I’m not sure what Gwen knew, but someone is willing to kill anyone who talked to her in the final days of her life.”
“I can’t help hiding things,” Devon said. Her nose was running, and her voice was still choked from her tears. “It’s what I do. I used to cut my food into tiny little pieces, and push it down into my sock when no one was looking, then throw the socks away after supper. My mother could never understand why I was always running out of tube socks. I told her the dog was stealing them from the hamper.”
Mr. Whittaker cleared his throat, but said nothing.
“Whoever tried to kill you thinks Gwen told you something.”
“Well, she didn’t. The only thing she kept saying on the answering machine was, ‘I can’t go back, I can’t go back.’”
“She meant to Persephone’s?”
“I thought so at the time. Although she also said…” Devon paused, searching her memory. “She said, ‘I can’t go back. I can’t go with him.’”
“I can’t go with him?”
“Yes. I thought she meant her father, but it could have been someone else.”
Tess shook her head. It was too small a scrap of information to be useful. Besides, it might not mean anything.
“Devon, Mr. Whittaker-” the father hitched his chair slightly forward, but otherwise was silent. “I don’t think you should assume Devon is safe, not in the short run. She should be sent some place far away, and I think you should hire a bodyguard for her. If you can afford it.”
The last part sounded silly to her ears. There was clearly very little the Whittakers couldn’t afford, or wouldn’t buy, especially when it came to Devon.
“How long will she have to go away?”
“I wish I could tell you. If Hilde’s killer thinks it through, he’ll realize Devon has spoken to the Philadelphia police, to me, to her family, and that keeping her silent is no longer a realistic possibility. But I’d go away for Christmas, if it’s not too much of an imposition.”
“We could,” her father said. “We have a house in Guadeloupe.”
Of course you do, Tess wanted to say.
“What about school?” Devon asked. “I have finals.”
“I’ll take care of it,” her father assured her. Tess wondered how many times he had made that same promise to his daughter. “You can do them by mail, perhaps. We’ll work something out.”
“Guadeloupe will be warm at least,” Devon said. “I’m cold all the time now. I feel like I’ll never get warm again.”
“I thought the doctor said your blood pressure would start going up,” her father said.
“Doctors,” Devon said, cramming more scorn into that one word than Tess would have thought possible.
She stood, ready to leave. “Guadeloupe sounds like a good plan. Don’t forget the bodyguard, though. Besides, maybe the Philadelphia cops will surprise us. Maybe it will turn out that this has nothing to do with Gwen at all. Maybe it was a botched kidnapping.”
Devon’s father seemed to find some comfort in this, but Devon was a harder sell.
“Aren’t you in danger, too? They followed you to my apartment today. They’re one step behind you.”
“Actually,” Tess said, “I’m afraid they’re one step ahead of me.”
chapter 24
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN TESS MADE IT HOME. SHE had expected little in the way of a welcoming committee-Kitty and Tyner were at the opera, Crow had a gig, and Esskay went to bed pretty early, to prepare for the next day’s napping regimen.
But when she tiptoed into Kitty’s kitchen to forage for a snack, her stomach less than satisfied by a Roy Rogers pit stop near the state line, her father was sitting at the kitchen table. He had a can of beer open in front of him, and the radio was on-Stan the Fan, or one of those sports talk shows. He had sat like this in their kitchen at home many an evening. If you asked him what he was listening to, or why, he might not have an answer. As a child, Tess had found this odd. But as an adult, she had developed her own fondness for the jumble of voices on talk radio. There was a soothing rhythm in all that chat, a kind of white noise in the locals’ nasal accents.