The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “Salmon cakes?” Tess had a vision of the prepared food at Eddie’s, arrayed beneath the glass counter, the people lined up two to three deep. There was fried chicken and tenderloin and pasta and London broil and turkey meat loaf and whipped potatoes. There were sesame noodles and barbecue ribs and pork chops and couscous and red pepper hummus. “Why would anyone eat salmon cakes?”

  “They’re very good with saltines.”

  “How did someone with such bad taste in food ever develop an eating disorder?”

  “It’s not really about the food, as you well know. Which reminds me—I’ve been doing some thinking about your problem.”

  “My problem.” Because Tess was lying on the floor, her mug of tea balanced on her stomach, she couldn’t lift her head to look at Whitney. “What problem?”

  “Your bulimic Jane Doe, remember? Did it occur to you that if she was far enough along to have significant tooth damage, she might have received treatment somewhere?”

  “Sure.” Actually, it hadn’t. “But every hospital and psychiatric clinic in the country treats eating disorders now. It doesn’t exactly narrow the search.”

  “True. But not every eating disorder clinic is known as the Sugar House.”

  Tess removed her mug from her belly and sat up. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Sugar House. Didn’t Jane Doe say that’s where she’d been?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You mentioned that part to me. Besides, as I told you, I can read upside down. And you were in the bathroom quite a while that evening.”

  Whitney preened, pleased with herself. She had removed the ridiculous tweed hat, but she still had on her ancient corduroys and a thick sweater with a border of flowers across the top. Flushed and fair, she could have been hugging a tree in one of those sorority girl composite photos.

  “There’s a clinic called the Sugar House?”

  “Actually, its alumnae tend to call it the Wedding Cake for some reason. But a Wedding Cake could be a Sugar House as well, right? It’s a small treatment facility on the Eastern Shore, very exclusive. The rates run $2,000 a day, and some girls stay there for up to a year.”

  Tess did the math in her head, if adding three zeros to 365 and doubling the figure can be described as doing math. “That’s impossible. No one has $730,000 a year.”

  “Oh, some people do,” Whitney assured her. “And I guess there are still some health plans out there that pay for such things, although I don’t know any. It’s for rich girls.”

  “Jane Doe wasn’t a rich girl.”

  “So you keep insisting. But do you have a better lead?”

  She didn’t. But she also didn’t want to encourage Whitney to think of herself as Tess’s partner in this endeavor.

  “How did you find this place, anyway?”

  “I went through the licensing division of Health and Mental Hygiene and asked for a list of every residential treatment center that handled eating disorders. I noticed the one in Easton because it was near my parents’ place on the shore, and because it had such an odd name. Persephone’s Place. They were very secretive when I called, wouldn’t give out any information and said they took referrals from only a few select doctors. I asked for the doctors’ names, and the woman on the phone said it didn’t matter, they were full for the foreseeable future. According to the licensing information, they can take up to twenty patients. That’s almost $15 million a year, if the beds are staying full.”

  Tess would have whistled at that figure, if she could whistle. “They should call it the Green House. But if the woman on the phone is so uncooperative, how did you find out it’s known as the Sugar House?”

  “Talked to the competition, of course. You can’t make the kind of money Persephone’s Place is making without making other folks jealous. I found a slightly seedier place in Annapolis—it charges only $1,000 a day—and the director there was happy to tell me that Persephone’s Place was overpriced, overhyped, and poorly named.”

  “Poorly named?”

  “Would you name an eating disorder clinic after a girl who has to spend half the year in hell, just because she sucked on a few pomegranate seeds? The clinic may know how to treat eating disorders, but it sure doesn’t know its Greek mythology.”

  “And you think our Jane Doe—” Tess winced; she didn’t want to get into the habit of using “our” and “we” when discussing her work with Whitney. “You think Jane Doe, wandering through Latrobe Park, is really some little rich girl who bolted from the Sugar House?”

  “I think it’s something to check out,” Whitney said. “I’m free tomorrow. Want to drive over to the shore together? We can spend the night at my folks’ place, maybe even drive up to Chestertown, play at being returning alumnae.”

  “I promised to spend the day with Crow. He wants to see the Christmas garden at the Wise Avenue firehouse.”

  “Oh.” Whitney frowned into her glass. “Well, we can do both can’t we? Go to the stupid Christmas garden, and then head for the shore and find Persephone’s Place. All three of us? I like him, you know. I feel badly I ever twitted you about him. He’s the perfect postmodern boyfriend. Just try to keep the public displays of affection to a minimum.”

  Whitney’s tone was light, as if the words she had spoken were of no consequence. But Tess knew her well enough to recognize an important concession. She liked Crow, she approved of him. And once Whitney liked someone, it was forever.

  But all Tess said was: “You’re very understanding, for a camel.”

  “Humph.” Whitney got up and went to a butler’s bar in a corner of the room, where she kept a collection of silver martini shakers and every kind of glass imaginable. Martini glasses; old-fashioned glasses; champagne flutes; wineglasses, white and red; gold-rimmed shot glasses. Tess had a feeling she was going to be spending the night on Whitney’s sofa. It was either there or Baltimore County’s northwest precinct, on DWI charges.

  Whitney selected the largest shaker and two martini glasses. “I wonder,” she said, heading for the kitchen, “if camels feel vaguely superior to those who need water all the time.”

  chapter 12

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, TESS AND WHITNEY SAT at the end of a winding, two-lane road that dead-ended at a locked gate. There was no sign identifying the property and a thick grove of pines hid whatever lay between them and the bay. But there was no doubt in Tess’s mind that this must be Persephone’s Place.

  “The chain-link fence seems to run the length of the property,” Whitney said. She was riding shotgun, as she had all day, while Crow and Esskay waited for them back at the Talbots’ summerhouse. “And there’s razor wire along the top, so it’s not just for show.”

  “Is the fence for keeping people out, or keeping people in?”

  “Both, I’d imagine.”

  They sat in the idling car, studying the fence. It had been a long day, longer than they had anticipated when they had crossed the Bay Bridge a little after lunchtime. Time had seemed elastic—they had browsed through the local stores, stopped at a bar in Easton for a Wild Goose ale, along with some french fries and onion rings. Tess loved the Eastern Shore in the off season—the bleached marsh grasses, the pale sky that yellowed at the edges, like an old photograph. She had liked showing everything to Crow, who was, as usual, enchanted. It had been easy to lose sight of why they were here at all.

  But she had forgotten how short December days were, and they were suddenly two hours away from darkness when they began making inquiries about Persephone’s Place, whose mailing address didn’t show up on any of the maps of the shore counties. Tess had assumed it was the kind of open secret that locals would know, just the way they knew how to point one toward the various millionaires’ mansions along the bay and its inlets.

  But they were too clearly outsiders, and the Eastern Shore was not a place that embraced outsiders. It saw itself as separate from the rest of the state and still smarted from the time a sitting governor had referred
to it as a shithouse. Four years at Washington College, on Tess’s part, and a summerhouse that had been in her family for three generations, on Whitney’s side of the ledger, didn’t make them locals or earn anyone’s trust.

  The bartender, the hunters who lined the bar—they all looked through Tess when she tried to broach the topic. The hospital staff in Easton told Crow it would be a breach of confidentiality to discuss the clinic, which at least confirmed it was out there, somewhere. Finally, Whitney had thought of going to drugstores—not the quaint, old-fashioned family operations that could still be found in places like Easton and Chestertown, but the new twenty-four-hour CVS and Rite Aids that had opened in strip malls along Route 50.

  “You can’t run a medical facility for rich bulimics without crossing paths with an all-night drugstore,” Whitney had reasoned. “I’ll go in first and scope it out. If there’s a young woman behind the counter, we’ll send Crow in. A man—you take it, Tess.”

  “Who died and made you führer?” Tess asked.

  “I can’t help it if I have natural leadership abilities,” Whitney replied. She sauntered into the drugstore, returning a few minutes later with a copy of Harper’s magazine and a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew. “The pharmacist on duty is a girl. Take it away, Crow.”

  “What do I say?” he asked. Asked Whitney, Tess noticed, not her.

  “Tell her you need medical advice. You found an empty Ipecac bottle in your girlfriend’s car, and you want to know if you should be worried. No—your sister’s car, so she thinks you’re in play. Let that lead to a general discussion of eating disorders and treatment. Tell her you’ve heard about this Persephone Place—”

  “No—” Tess kneeled in the driver’s seat so she could turn and face Crow. “Specific names make people a little more suspicious. Grope for the name, or get it wrong. She should feel she’s leading the conversation.”

  Crow leaned forward and kissed her. “I find this enormously exciting. It’s like our first date, when we broke into that lawyer’s office together.”

  “That wasn’t exactly a date,” Tess felt compelled to say, but Crow was already out of the car. Esskay, usually so unflappable, made a strange, high-pitched sound at the back of her throat. She was probably asking Crow to bring her back a candy bar, or a beef jerky strip. It had started to drizzle, and they watched him run across the parking lot, his step so light and carefree that he appeared to be skipping.

  “Is it just me, or does he find everything enormously exciting?” Whitney asked at last.

  “Pretty much everything,” Tess conceded, trying not to sound smug. The way she brushed her teeth, the way she stretched in the morning. The way she read the newspaper, the way she scrubbed the sink. This, too, would pass, so why not enjoy it?

  Crow being Crow, he stayed in the store for almost forty-five minutes and returned not only with the clinic’s location, but a detailed biography of the young pharmacist, which he delivered in her patois and accent. “She has three kids, not a one of ’em over six years old, and her husband got laid off twice in the past two years, and he sure does hate to be stuck at home with them. But she sure as hell doesn’t make as much money as you might think, and the hours are all erratic—”

  “Fascinating,” Whitney snapped. “Did she know about the clinic?”

  “Oh sure, she told me that right away.” He unfolded a piece of paper. “She even drew us a map. You were right, they’ve had some middle-of-the-night calls. Although she said it’s primarily Sundays, when most of the other places are closed. The pharmacy doesn’t deliver, but she’ll drop stuff off at the end of her shift, for extra money.”

  The clinic proved to be considerably south of where they were, on the other side of the Talbot house in Oxford. They left Crow there to baby-sit Esskay—Tess didn’t want to think what the dog might do, alone with Mrs. Talbot’s family heirlooms—and found the unnamed, unmarked road just after sunset.

  Now it was dark, Eastern Shore dark, the kind of complete night that never came to Baltimore. They could smell the bay, but couldn’t see it. The only sound was Tess’s Toyota, rough and asthmatic sounding, sending puffs of white-gray smoke into the night air. She wondered how far the sound traveled, how far it had to travel before it alerted someone to their location at the gate.

  “What are you waiting for?” Whitney asked. “Don’t you think you can talk your way in? You have a perfectly reasonable request—you’re a private eye, you want to know if Jane Doe might have spent any time here. “

  “They made this place awfully hard to find,” Tess said. “Besides, they probably treat famous people. Their antennae will go up if I say I’m a private investigator.”

  “You’ve got to try something,” Whitney said, “Nothing ventured—”

  No one killed. But no, she wasn’t being fair to herself. No one had ever gotten killed because she asked a few questions. Well, almost no one.

  They pulled the car up so they were even with a call box. Tess pushed the button marked Talk.

  “Hello.”

  “Yes?” a voice replied quickly, almost too quickly, suggesting the possibility the car was already on a video monitor somewhere. Tess couldn’t see a camera, but she kept her head inside the car just in case.

  “Yes?” The voice repeated, now impatient. It was a woman’s voice, and Tess had a feeling the clipped, mechanical tone was not the intercom’s distortion.

  “I’m a private investigator from Baltimore, working on a missing persons case.” Better not to mention the dead part, at least not yet. “It’s possible she once stayed here.”

  “Our client list is confidential,” the voice told her. “We can’t confirm or deny who stays here. It’s a medical facility.”

  Time for the dead part. “This particular client is beyond caring about such things. She was murdered in Baltimore a year ago.”

  There was a series of clicks, as if a button was being depressed over and over again, while the voice mulled its response. “Murdered in Baltimore? One of our girls? I think not.”

  The voice made it sound as if Baltimore was simply too declassé a site in which to be murdered. Palm Beach, perhaps. San Francisco, certainly. Acapulco—claro que si. Baltimore, never.

  “Still, I’d like to show you an artist’s sketch, see if anyone can identify her.”

  “A sketch? Don’t you have a name?”

  “The name is what I’m trying to find. The girl was never identified. I thought I told you that.”

  Again, a series of clicks. “But the name is the very thing we could never give. I hope you understand.”

  “I don’t understand. This girl is dead, she has no privacy or confidentiality left to protect. But I have a client who is very keen to identify her.”

  “Really? Who’s your client?”

  “Confidential,” Tess said. She almost wished a video camera were trained on her, so it could see the gleam of her teeth as she smiled.

  The voice was not amused. “One of our security guards is coming to the front gate. It’s your choice to leave now, or make his acquaintance. Although you are on the other side of the fence, you’re still trespassing. In fact, the final quarter mile of this road belongs to us. There’s a sign advising you that you’re entering private property—a large sign, with bright red letters on a white background, visible even at night. You were trespassing once you drove past it.”

  Tess saw a pair of headlamps approaching through the trees. She hesitated for a moment, then backed the Toyota onto the road and turned around. She went as slowly as she could, as if to say: I’m going because I want to, not because you’re making me.

  They were on the public portion of the road when Whitney finally spoke. It was only then that Tess realized how uncharacteristically quiet she had been.

  “A private road. So that’s why we couldn’t find it on a map.”

  “One mystery solved at least.”

  They rode in silence until they found the highway back to Oxford. Then Whitney said: “Turn the
radio on and see if we can find a forecast for tomorrow. We’ll need to check the weather.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Because a good sailor always checks the weather.”

  “I hardly think I want to spend a December afternoon sailing on the bay, all things considered. Let’s just go back to Baltimore, or spend the day in Chestertown, like you said. I’ll figure another way to make a run at Persephone’s Place. I can always claim I’m an investigator for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of taking the sailboat out. We’ll use the motor boat, the old Boston Whaler my father keeps. One if by land and two if by sea, old buddy, and it’s two lanterns aloft in the belfry arch tonight.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “D-Day at P’s Place. You’re going to storm the beach tomorrow, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”

  chapter 13

  THE SUN WAS BARELY UP WHEN TESS AND WHITNEY left the Talbots’ dock the next morning. They were in the Boston Whaler, a motorboat that Whitney’s father had inexplicably christened the Hornswoggle II. Or maybe there was an explanation, but Tess had decided a long time ago it wasn’t worth pursuing. The Talbots specialized in detailed and obscure stories.

  “I’m reasonably sure how to get there,” Whitney said, frowning at the nautical chart in her lap, as they moved slowly away from the dock.

  “Only reasonably sure?” Tess repeated, waving in what she hoped was a reassuring way to Crow and Esskay as they disappeared from view. “I’m not happy about staying behind,” he had told her this morning, burrowed beneath the quilt on Mr. and Mrs. Talbot’s bed. “Someone has to watch Esskay,” Tess had countered. “Besides, you have your own part to play here, if everything goes as planned.”

  This now seemed like a very large “if.”

  Whitney was frowning at the great expanse of water before them. Above, seen from the twin spans of the Bay Bridge, the Chesapeake wasn’t quite so formidable. “I’ve figured out where we were last night and if I’m right, it backs to this inlet.”