The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “Will you ever catch the person who did it?”

  It was a logical question, one Tess and Tull had expected.

  “We know who killed your daughter,” the detective said. “We arrested him, he confessed. But he couldn’t tell us anything about his victim, not even her name. We sent him to prison this year.”

  Where he died, Tess thought. But she knew why Tull didn’t tell that part, not just yet. He wanted to give Dick Schiller the fleeting comfort of having an enemy.

  “Who is this man?”

  “Just a stupid punk kid. A huffer.”

  “Huffer?” Dick Schiller echoed.

  “A glue sniffer, someone who inhales paint and gasoline fumes.”

  “People do that? On a regular basis?” Schiller looked amazed, but Patsy was nodding, almost unconsciously. Oh yeah, Tess thought, definitely a secretary who married the boss. She could almost pick out the zip code in Prince George’s County, one of the little working-class enclaves where the girls dream big, inspired by local heroine Kathie Lee Gifford. You can take the girl out of Bowie, but you can’t take the Bowie out of the girl.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid they do.”

  “I don’t know Locust Point,” Patsy put in. “Is it near Canton? We have some friends who live in the Anchorage. They have the prettiest view.”

  “Other side of the water, ma’am.”

  Dick Schiller, to his credit, did not wish to discuss Baltimore real estate. “The man who killed my Gwen, how long will he be in prison?”

  Tess liked him for the use of the possessive.

  “He’s dead,” Tull said. “He was stabbed to death.”

  The room was silent, a silence that not even Patsy was foolish enough to fill. In less than five minutes, Dick Schiller had found out his daughter was dead, his daughter had been murdered, his daughter’s killer had been caught, her killer was dead. Most people complain justice is slow, but it had moved much too swiftly for Dick Schiller.

  “Was Gwen using drugs, too?”

  “No.”

  The question had been Patsy’s; the emphatic denial came from Tess. She couldn’t help feeling fiercely protective of Gwen.

  “I was just asking,” the stepmother said. “After all, she had…other issues.”

  Tess studied the second Mrs. Schiller. She was so curvy, so pink and white, the colors of her outfit repeated in her fair, ripe flesh and carefully made-up face. She reminded Tess of the old-fashioned refrigerator cookie still found in some Baltimore bakeries, a round disc with pink swirls running through the vanilla dough.

  It was a kind of cookie that looked better than it tasted.

  “Mr. Schiller, how did Gwen’s mother die?”

  “Ovarian cancer,” he said. “She went very fast. At least, that was her doctor’s frame of reference. It may have been fast in medical terms, but it was agonizingly slow for us.”

  “Was she very thin, toward the end?”

  “Yes.” He looked at Tess curiously, trying to figure out where she was going. “Yes, quite thin.”

  Tess didn’t push it. It was just a hunch, an inexcusable, pseudo-psychiatric leap of faith. But it didn’t surprise her that a teenage girl who had seen her mother waste away, then watched her father bring home this strawberry sundae of a woman, had a complicated relationship with food.

  “Do you have a photo of Gwen? In all the time I was looking for her, I’ve never known what she truly looked like. All I had was an artist’s sketch.” And a photocopy of a Polaroid of a corpse.

  Schiller gave Tull a questioning look, as if he had already forgotten why she was here. “Tess is a private investigator. She’s the one who identified your daughter after the police department had given up. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for her efforts.”

  He left the room and returned with a framed studio portrait, the eight-by-ten from a standard school package, with blue skies in the background. It was an old photo. Gwen had braces, the gawkiness of a middle schooler. The part in her hair was crooked, as was her smile, and her eyes were half-closed.

  She was also one of the most beautiful girls Tess had ever seen. Like a painting, Sukey had said, or someone famous. Tess understood now. Gwen’s hair was glossy, as Devon had noted, her eyes dark and bright, her features perfect and yet not. Tess could stare at this photograph all day, dissect it a thousand ways, and never be able to explain why Gwen Schiller was so arresting. The dark hair, the fair skin, the lush red mouth. She could pass for Snow White.

  And everyone knows what Snow White’s stepmother did when she found out she had competition in the fairest-of-the-land department. Tess would have bet all Schiller’s paper billions that Patsy had been the one who pushed for Gwen to be hospitalized, while she and her husband went on their extended honeymoon.

  “She was lovely,” Tess said, handing the photograph back.

  “She is, isn’t she?” Schiller said, still not ready to speak of his daughter in the past tense. “Her mother and I never knew how we produced such a specimen. Andrea was pretty, but in a more earthbound way. And me—well, you see what I bring to the table, genetically. I used to tease Andrea, ask her if she had been having sex with a swan behind my back.”

  “A swan?” Patsy looked mystified. “That’s sick.”

  “It’s how Helen of Troy of was conceived,” Tess said. “Zeus disguised himself as a swan and impregnated a woman named Leda.”

  “Oh, yeah. Helen of Troy. The one with the face that launched a thousand ships, and the Trojan Horse, and all that.”

  Tess thought it was as concise a summary of Homer as she had ever heard. Maybe Dick Schiller could make his next billion by starting an Internet company that sold Patsy’s interactive Cliff Notes over the Web.

  Schiller was staring off into space. He hadn’t cried, not yet. Days might go by before he did. But Tess suspected that once he allowed himself to grieve for his daughter, he might never stop. A dead wife, a dead daughter. Patsy would be a comfort to him, Tess had to give her her due. Whatever her limitations, Patsy Schiller wasn’t the kind of woman who died young. She was pragmatic, she looked both ways before crossing streets, or marrying billionaires. She would take good care of her husband, if only because it served her own strong instinct for self-preservation.

  “You know, I’m in the information business,” Dick Schiller said at last. “I can’t help thinking how ironic it is that my daughter could go unidentified for nine months, just because a missing persons report was filed in one jurisdiction and she died in another.”

  “We’re not exactly at the cutting edge of technology—” Tull began, but Tess interrupted him.

  “What do you mean, nine months? Gwen was missing for more than a year.”

  “Gwen walked out of the clinic on her birthday, January thirty-first. I think I know my own daughter’s birthday. She had turned eighteen, and they couldn’t hold her legally against her will. The clinic staff tried to notify us before she left, but we were en route to—I’m not sure where we were in January. Chile?”

  “Wherever we were right before Brazil,” Patsy said, adding for Tull and Tess’s edification: “We were in Rio for Carnival.”

  “Gwen didn’t check herself out, that’s the point,” Tess said. “She ran away in October of the previous year, well before her birthday. Devon Whittaker told me she heard about the escape from someone else who was still at the clinic.”

  “Impossible,” Dick Schiller said. “We continued to receive e-mail from her through January. Not much, I grant you—she was very angry at me for putting her in Persephone’s—but she stayed in touch.”

  “Through e-mail,” Tess said.

  “Right.”

  “And you knew she was the one writing the e-mail because…”

  Schiller put his head in his hands. “Because it came from her e-mail address at the clinic. How stupid can I be to think that means anything? Anyone who had her laptop could have used it to send me those notes. No wonder they sounded so stiff and impersonal. But Jesus
Christ, why would the school wait so long to report her missing?”

  “Because they didn’t want to appear negligent,” Tess said, working it out for herself as she spoke. “Gwen ran away, probably to punish you for putting her there. Maybe she thought you’d go crazy, offer a huge reward, or at least come home from your honeymoon. But the clinic decided to risk not notifying you, to stall until her eighteenth birthday. Then, at least, they could say she left legally, instead of having to admit she had run away. I imagine Persephone’s long waiting list might have been somewhat diminished if the news had gotten out about her escape.”

  “All this subterfuge, to disguise the fact that a girl had run away?” Dick Schiller shook his head. “It seems excessive.”

  It did, Tess thought. The clinic was hiding something else, something bigger. But what?

  “Where is this place?” Tull asked her, his mind following the same trail.

  “On the Eastern Shore, near Easton,” Patsy said. “It’s really quite nice. I thought Gwen would be happier in some place that didn’t look so much like a hospital.”

  Maybe, Tess thought. Or maybe you thought you’d be happier if she were tucked away in some place far away from Potomac, even while you were trotting around the globe.

  “We need to get out there,” Tess said. “We need to get there with a warrant before Herman Peters extracts Gwen’s name from someone, which will give the clinic a heads-up that we know she was dead three months before she was reported missing.”

  Tull stood up. “We could drive straight there, radio the state police and county officials to meet us there. If Herman is pushing too hard, the department might make the information public, and it will be all over WBAL and the television stations. They’ve got no reason to hold it back. They knew I was meeting with Gwen’s next of kin this afternoon. But it would still take us two hours to get over there.”

  “Three hours, once you factor in afternoon traffic on the Capital Beltway,” Schiller said. “However, my company has a helicopter on call. My old company, I should say, but I think they’d let me use it under such extraordinary circumstances. Would that help?”

  “Sure.” It was Tess who answered, not Tull. He gave her a look as if to say, Why do you think you’re coming along for the ride? She knew, in the end, he would let her go with him. It was only fair, after she had accompanied him here, and Tull was always fair. She couldn’t wait to step out of a helicopter on the clinic’s grounds, to let them see who had brought the police to their door. One if by land, two if by sea, three if by air.

  It was their fault. They should have let her in the first time she asked.

  chapter 16

  TESS DID A PRETTY GOOD JOB KEEPING HER STOMACH south of her throat until the helicopter was about halfway across the Chesapeake Bay. She clenched her fists, trying to hide them from Tull. There was more swaying than she would have expected, a rocking motion not unlike being at the top of a Ferris wheel, although this was side to side, instead of back and forth. It seemed to take forever to cross the wide expanse of water and head south, toward the protected cove where Persephone’s Place waited.

  Waited unwittingly, Tess hoped, because otherwise this whole exercise was pointless.

  “You’re sure there’s a place for me to land?” This was the pilot, a stone-faced man who gave the impression that he considered this particular assignment no different from ferrying corporate executives around the Mid-Atlantic region.

  “There’s supposed to be,” Tess shouted back.

  “Don’t see it yet. We may have to improvise.”

  “Everyone’s in place on the ground,” Tull put in. “The state police have blocked off the road leading to the school, and the Department of Natural Resources police are at the cove’s edge. All they need is the go-ahead from us. You ready, Tess?”

  He was grinning at her, obviously attuned to the second, third and fourth thoughts that had dogged Tess since she had talked her way into this helicopter. She was grateful now that she had only picked at her lunchtime sub. Eaten, it seemed, about a million years ago, back in a place called Baltimore, when the matter of Gwen Schiller’s death was still tragic, but not particularly sinister or mysterious.

  Tess nodded, and the helicopter began its vertical descent, its propellers whipping the branches of the trees at the property line. Tess wondered if Sarah Whittaker was watching this scene unfold from her casement window on the third floor. They were on the ground blessedly quick. Ducking their heads beneath the blades, Tull and Tess ran toward the white-and-pink house. He had lent her a shoulder holster, so she looked quasi-professional, the bulge of her gun visible beneath her suede jacket. Sirens sounded in the distance, and the state police rolled up the drive, even as the DNR police massed on the shore behind them.

  Once free of the helicopter, Tess began enjoying herself immensely. Girls were pouring from the house—one, three, five, eight, a dozen in all, all quite thin and frail looking. She thought she glimpsed Sarah’s furred face among the girls, but they looked startlingly alike. Behind them came the orderlies who had tended to Tess after her shipwreck, and behind them even more staff, all new to her. Finally, she saw the auburn-haired woman and the doctor.

  “Capsize again?” This was the woman, Miss Hollinger, her mechanical voice as crackly as dry ice today, steam coming out of her mouth in the cool air, a coat thrown around her shoulders. The doctor was not so cool; he moved toward them, then started back toward the house, only to find state police blocking his way.

  “Baltimore City police,” Tull said, showing his badge. “Homicide.”

  “Homicide?” The woman’s puzzlement was sincere. “No one has ever died here.”

  So you’re not surprised to find the police swarming over the lawn, but you are surprised to find out it’s related to a homicide. Interesting, Tess thought.

  “One of your patients, Gwen Schiller, was killed after leaving the school.”

  Miss Hollinger hugged her elbows, but said nothing. She was trying to keep her face empty, but Tess thought she saw an excited glimmer in the pale blue eyes.

  “She was killed November sixteenth.”

  Tess was right. The woman had to fight to keep from smiling. “I’m sorry to hear that. She was a lovely girl. But I don’t see how it concerns the clinic. Gwen checked herself out in January, when she turned eighteen.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t make myself clear,” Tull said, with deadly politeness. “Gwen Schiller died on November sixteenth of last year. Almost three months before you told her father she was missing. Do you bring a lot of people back from the dead here? Because if you do, I’d sure like to get in on the ground floor if you ever have a stock offering.”

  “I don’t think I have anything I want to say to you,” Miss Hollinger said with an admirable, if infuriating, dignity. In her silk print dress and burgundy heels, head held high, she could have passed for one of the patients’ mothers. “Not until my lawyer arrives.”

  Sarah Whittaker came down the porch stairs, her insubstantial frame lost inside a sweatshirt and leggings. She tugged at Tess’s sleeve to get her attention, then jumped back, as if fearful Tess might try to return her touch.

  “How will you arrive next time? On horseback?”

  “I don’t think there will be a next time, Sarah.”

  The girl looked up at Tess. Her eyes were dull, like a dying animal, her skin chalky and dry. She could have been a dandelion gone to seed: One puff and she’d disintegrate, carried away by the wind. “They’ll have to send us home now, won’t they? I’ll get to go home for Christmas after all, go to Guadeloupe with the family.”

  “I suppose so,” said Tess, who had no idea what would happen.

  “Well, I’m not going to wear a bathing suit,” Sarah said. “No way. I’m positively gross.”

  “Oh Sarah—” Tess assumed she was worried about the hair on her face and back, her pallor.

  “I mean my thighs,” Sarah said, holding one forward, smacking the leg to make the non
existent flesh jiggle. “They’re huge.”

  Given the number of people involved, Tull and the other law officers decided to keep everyone at Persephone’s for questioning, rather than try to bring them into the state police barracks, or the Baltimore police department. The girls were of little help—none of them had been here the previous fall, when Gwen had run away—and the auburn-haired Miss Hollinger, who Tess thought of as Big Nurse, was coolly silent.

  But the sour-breathed Dr. Blount was not as composed when Tull got him alone in the clinic dining room. The two sat across from each other, while Tess hugged the wall behind Tull. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but Tull wasn’t up for the scene that would result if he tried to have her removed.

  “I should have a lawyer,” Dr. Blount proposed tentatively. It sounded like a question, and Tull treated it as such. The doctor had been Miranda’d, of course, recited the rights that most schoolchildren knew better than the Pledge of Allegiance thanks to television. But Tull, like most seasoned homicide detectives, believed there was some play in the clause about the right to counsel. Until the doctor emphatically and definitively held out for a lawyer, Tull was going to pick at him.

  “You really want a lawyer? Because if you want one, you can have one.” Tull turned back to address Tess. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how the guilty guys always want a lawyer?”

  “I’m not guilty of anything.”

  “Oh.” Tull looked confused. “But didn’t you say you wanted a lawyer?”

  “Well—I can have one if I want one, right?”

  Tull sighed, hunkered forward, as if dealing with a sweet but very stupid child. The doctor had a little boy’s face, ruddy and fat-cheeked. “Look, you can pick up the phone right now and ask for a lawyer. But then I’m done talking to you, because he’s not going to let you say anything. So we can’t make a deal, can’t sort anything out. I mean, there are levels of illegal activity here, it probably wasn’t even your idea. But—you want a lawyer, call a lawyer. I don’t have a problem with charging everyone with the same thing, figuring it all out later. My only problem is where to lock you up for the night, here or in the city.” Tull pretended to think. “I guess I gotta take you back to city jail.”