The Last Place Read online

  “It looks like a place that had big plans for itself, you know? Plans based on dreams that didn’t materialize. It has such a pretty location— it backs up to the Monocacy River—but the town houses have fallen on hard times.”

  Studying the complex in the fading light, Tess decided the very touches that had been designed to give the town houses an upscale look—the wall sconces, the ceramic address tiles—were its downfall. Most of the sconces hung crookedly by their wires, and the tiles had faded until the numbers were barely legible. There were other telltale signs of neglect and carelessness. Deck furniture was cracked and dirty from sitting out all winter, the Dumpsters were overflowing, and some windows had newspaper for shades.

  “Maybe the murder changed everything,” Crow suggested. “People sometimes shun a place if they know a homicide has been committed there.”

  “It’s really off the beaten path,” Tess said. “One of those places that sprang up like mushrooms when the economy seemed invincible.”

  “What goes up must go down.”

  She knew Crow was talking about the stock market and the dot-com bust, but the observation applied to Tiffani as well. She had been on her way up—new job, new man, new house, new life—and someone had brought her down. Just one of those things, the Frederick sheriff said. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Yet the wrong place had been her own kitchen, the wrong time had been the middle of the night. “If that’s wrong,” Tess said out loud, “then no one’s ever safe.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just stay on the phone with me until I cross the Potomac, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Sharpsburg was pretty in a bed-and-breakfast kind of way: red-brick houses that glowed in the morning sun, large shade trees, window boxes full of pansies and petunias.

  But the unsolved homicide of Hazel Ligetti had taken place in less gracious precincts, away from the main streets that tourists saw. Her neighborhood was plain, verging on desperate, block after block of boxy wood-frame houses. Rentals, by the looks of the yards, which were shaved closer than a new marine’s skull.

  Except for the lot where Hazel Ligetti’s house had stood. Two years after the fire, nature had taken back this patch of land. Ailanthus trees staked their claim at the edges of the property, while the foundations were wrapped in furry thorns of wild roses, like the brambles that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Tess picked her way through the weeds, gathering burrs with every step.

  She knew, from the newspaper accounts she had found on-line, that no accelerant had been found, just evidence of an ordinary small campfire built inside a storage shed a few yards from the house. The shed was gone too, of course. Tess paced it off, trying to figure out where the blaze had started. It had been March, an unseasonably bitter night. The supposition was that a passing vagrant, or maybe some teenage boys, had built a bonfire. The winds had been high and the flames needed little encouragement to race toward the house. The neighbor who called the fire department seemed almost awed by the fireball next door, according to the 911 transcript. On paper, the caller’s words seemed flat and thoughtful, punctuated by the occasional “Golly!” and “There it goes!”

  The caller could afford to be blasé. He had lived upwind and across the street. No sparks on his roof, Tess thought.

  Hazel Ligetti died from smoke inhalation, probably in her sleep. It was arson because the fire had been set by a trespasser. It was a homicide because someone had died, but that did not make it a murder, an act of intent: Problem Number One.

  Problem Number Two: Tess could not make this case fit any domestic paradigm. Hazel Ligetti, according to her landlord, had lived alone and died alone. She had no spouse, no partner. No boyfriend, no girlfriend, no friends. The lack of survivors in her obituary had not been an oversight.

  “She wasn’t what you would call… an attractive woman,” the landlord, Herb Proctor, said later that morning, settling behind his desk with a sigh and taking a long pull on a Big Gulp. “Walleyed. Fat. Hair so thin it was like she was going bald in spots.”

  Tess wished she could recite back a list of Proctor’s notable features. Paunchy. Pitted skin. Toupee so bad you might as well glue Astroturf to your head and paint it brown.

  Instead, she asked, “Could the fire have been an intentional one, made to look like a stupid accident? I’ve seen the other houses on the street. It doesn’t take a genius to realize how easy they’d burn. They’re little more than kindling.”

  Proctor rolled his eyes and patted his hair cautiously, as if any movement might disrupt the alignment of his fake hair with the fringe of real hair at his neck.

  “No one ever did figure that out. My money’s on some kid playing with matches. He panicked and ran.”

  “A kid would have a hard time keeping a secret like that.”

  “Well, it had to be an accident. Believe me, the insurance investigators were all over it. It was awful, what they put me through. You’d think I’d set the fire. As if I’d kill a woman to collect fifty thousand bucks. You saw the lot; it wasn’t even worth my while to rebuild. And Hazel Ligetti was like a good municipal bond fund, paying off a little every month. A dream tenant. Now, some properties you wish you could burn down because of what the renters do to them. But Hazel was neat as a pin. When you’re a landlord, there’s no downside to a woman who doesn’t entertain, doesn’t smoke, and has good hearing.”

  “Good hearing?”

  “Doesn’t play the television or radio loud, so you don’t have any neighbor complaints. Why, Hazel didn’t even have a cat, the way so many of these single women do.”

  “Where did she work?”

  “For the state. She was a secretary at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene up in Hagerstown. Administrative assistant is what she called herself. Why do you think that is?”

  “Because everyone wants to sound important,” Tess said, fingering the embossed business card that read HERBERT L. PROCTOR, CEO, HALCION PROPERTIES INC. She wondered if he had meant to name his company after the prescription drug, or if he was simply a poor speller. “Did anyone claim her body or make arrangements for the funeral?”

  “I did.” Tess felt a stab of guilt for her harsh thoughts about Proctor. “She had a little life insurance policy, and I do mean little. I had to dip into my own pocket to make up the difference.” Tess no longer felt guilty.

  “Where she’s buried?”

  “Local cemetery.”

  “Is there a marker?”

  “A little one, very plain.” Tess frowned, and Proctor rushed to defend his cheapness. “That’s the way they do it, that’s their custom. Plain boxes, plain stones.”

  “They?”

  “Jews.”

  “Hazel Ligetti was Jewish? Was it her husband’s name?”

  “No. I told you, she was never married. I assumed she was Eye-talian myself, and I asked her one time if she was a good cook. She explained to me that the name was Hungarian, but it was supposed to be spelled slightly different—L-E-G-E-T-E, pronounced Le-get. Immigration changed the e to an i.”

  “And changed a Jew into an Italian.”

  “Well, who could complain about that? It’s not much of an improvement, but it’s definitely a step up.”

  “Umph,” Tess said. It was a noise she had learned to make when she didn’t know what to say. Tess’s mother’s maiden name was Weinstein, and Tess’s own middle name was Esther, from the queen of the Jews— not the one in the Bible, but her grandmother’s sister, the oldest and most imperious female in a family of imperious females. “That Essie,” Gramma Weinstein always said, “thought she was the queen of the Jews.” But with the surname of Monaghan and her summer crop of freckles coming in, Tess looked like the good Irish Catholic girl she never was.

  “Could you tell me where the local cemetery is?”

  “Why?”

  “Someone ought to say kaddish,” she said.

  “Is that like gesundheit?�
��

  “Sort of.”

  It wasn’t much of a trick to find Hazel Ligetti’s grave in the small cemetery at the edge of town. The stone was plain, as Proctor had said, with only Hazel’s name, the forty-eight-year span that was her birth and her death, a Star of David, and a few lines in Hebrew, which Tess had never learned to read.

  But there was one unexpected touch: a few small stones left on the marker’s rim.

  Someone else knew Hazel was Jewish, Tess thought. Someone who knows this custom.

  It took a beat for another thought to occur: Someone knew Hazel. Someone has visited her.

  But how could that be? She had no family, and Proctor said no friend had come forward when she died. But someone had visited this grave, someone who was not fooled by the Italian-sounding name.

  Then again, the stone had a Star of David, some lines of Hebrew. Perhaps a visitor to a nearby marker, a more popular one, had felt sorry for lonely Hazel. Tess found a pebble and added it to the others. She felt a strange tickle at the back of her neck, that feeling sometimes described as someone walking across your grave. Tess had never understood that description. Dead, one felt nothing. She could jump up and down on this spot right now, and Hazel Ligetti would never know.

  On the way back to Baltimore, Tess stopped at Antietam. It was her favorite of the various Civil War battlefields she had visited, and she had visited many. It seemed to have been her fate to take up with men who were obsessed with the Civil War. Crow was so avid he had threatened to get involved with local reenactors, but his hours weren’t compatible with marching around in a gray suit. (Crow, a romantic with a twisted family tree with branches in Virginia, would choose the South, of course. Most reenactors did.) Jonathan Ross had been more bookish, content with the oeuvre of Foote and Catton and the Shaaras. When they played Botticelli, he had used obscure-to-Tess Civil War officers to stump her.

  Then again, perhaps all men were obsessed with the Civil War, or war in general. Why was that? She supposed a certain boyish interest in things with engines led, inevitably, to tanks and aircraft carriers and fighter planes. But why did they know all the generals’ names and all those battles? Tess found war baffling. Even war movies baffled her, with the sole exception of The Great Escape. Getting out, running away—that was an impulse she could understand. Face-to-face combat all day long, until the cornfields ran red, was unfathomable.

  How did men do it? Tess asked herself, not for the first time. How did they talk themselves into thinking it made sense to march toward gunfire for some larger, greater cause? Even if she believed in a cause—and it seemed to her a good idea to keep the United States united and to abolish slavery—she couldn’t imagine sacrificing herself for one. She didn’t want to die.

  Damn. She wished she hadn’t let her thoughts go there. This was the trap she had sidestepped in the graveyard. A door in her brain opened up and took her over the threshold into the abyss of infinity. She was going to die one day, she was going to cease to exist. How could that be? She wanted to believe in higher powers, in reincarnation, in anything that held the promise that she wouldn’t simply cease to be. But she didn’t think it worked that way. You had to be a believer first, and only then did you get the reward of afterlife, or second life, or perpetual life through reincarnation. You couldn’t bargain or barge your way into immortality, like some desperate man fleeing the Titanic, holding a child in his arms. You had to believe in something first. The only thing Tess honestly believed was that she was scared of dying.

  She drove back to Baltimore as fast as she could, racing the sun, telling herself that her only concern was getting back to the city before its early rush hour began.

  CHAPTER 8

  “You’re going to die, Tess.”

  It was Monday and she was back in Dr. Armistead’s office, sulkily pulling on the wing chair’s fringe. It had seemed to her that her Antietam epiphany was just the sort of story one brought to therapy, but Dr. Armistead did not seem impressed or even interested. It was as if she had shown up for a dinner party and the host had frowned at the label on her proffered bottle of wine.

  “Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. I thought it was the most interesting moment of my week.”

  “Really? What about your encounter with that man in the bar?”

  “Troy Plunkett? There was nothing particularly interesting about that. It’s what I do. I talk to people. Sometimes I have to pay them.”

  She had told him about her work only to provide some context for her Antietam moment, although she was confused about the crosscurrents of confidentiality here. Was it breaching confidentiality if she spoke of the matter in a setting where all was presumed confidential?

  “I think it’s quite interesting. You’ll excuse me for playing armchair psychiatrist”—he smiled at his joke, so she did too, out of politeness— “but I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between that encounter and the one that brought you here.”

  “Similarities? I talked to a guy in a bar. He didn’t make a pass at me, and I didn’t attempt to remove his body hair.”

  “You went to that bar on a mission, with an agenda you masked to some extent. After all, if you honestly believed this man had killed his girlfriend all those years ago, I suppose you would go to the police and tell them what you discovered, not attempt to interview him on your own.”

  “Well, yeah, of course. But that’s not how my job works. I don’t solve cases, not on purpose. I look into things, I make reports. Sometimes I come at it sideways, sometimes I don’t. It’s a judgment call. After all, I was straight up with the landlord, the guy in Sharpsburg.”

  “I suppose that’s something we share.”

  He had lost her.

  “The public misperception of what we do, and the role of the mass media in perpetuating stereotypes.”

  “Sure,” Tess said. For one thing, you talk more than I do. But she liked that. She had worried it would be up to her to fill the hour, which was part of the reason she had stored up the Antietam story and told it in such detail. But if it was going to be all back-and-forth like this, more a conversation than an interrogation, she could probably ride out the six months. Tess had been a reporter for a few years, which had taught her how to draw people out. And she had been a woman all her life, so she knew men were always happy to talk about themselves.

  “Come to think of it, the mass media has done much worse by my old job.”

  “Your old job?”

  She kept thinking he was omniscient, that he knew everything about her life to date.

  “I was a reporter before I became a licensed investigator, back at the old Star. But when it folded, the Beacon-Light didn’t hire me, and I had to change careers. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  “Of course it did.” Tess tried to keep her words light, but she was surprised at how much the memory of that rejection still rankled: the token interview with the editor in charge of recruitment, a bulldog-ugly woman who wouldn’t even deign to touch Tess’s résumé. She felt the blood rush to her face, her cheeks burn.

  “Why?”

  “It was the only job I ever wanted. It took me two years to find a new career for myself, and that was mainly luck. Now I see it was for the best. I’m a much better investigator than I was a reporter. I still go out, ask questions, collect facts. But I’m no longer obligated to cram them into the limited templates of newspaper journalism. I’m much happier now.”

  He didn’t speak right away, letting the last sentence sit there, naked and conspicuous, shivering in its exposure.

  “That seems a good thing to have learned,” he said at last.

  “What?”

  “A devastating rejection is often the only path to a better life. Endings can be beginnings.”

  “If you don’t figure out that life lesson by the age of thirty-one, you shouldn’t be free to walk the streets without a keeper.”

  He seemed mildly offended to have his i
nsight dismissed so cavalierly. But he was a pro, he kept going.

  “I’m not so sure. After all, there must be a reason why that Robert Frost poem, ”The Road Not Taken,“ resonates with so many of us. When he stops in the woods on that snowy evening, he’s not a child. He’s a grown man, and it’s not clear if he’s happy with the choice he made, simply that the choice mattered. He takes the less-traveled road. And, according to the poem’s end, it changes his life.”

  “But he doesn’t say if it’s for better or worse, just that it made all the difference.”

  “I’ve always assumed it was positive.”

  Tess shrugged. She wasn’t so sure. Frost should have written a sequel to clarify. “You’ve conflated two poems, by the way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said he stopped in the woods on a snowy evening, but that’s the title of another Frost poem. You know, Whose house is this, blah, blah, blah. Frost is a great poet, of course, but he’s a bit Norman Rockwellian, don’t you think? So good for you, so American, so beloved it sticks a bit in the throat, like oatmeal. I prefer Auden or Yeats.”

  “Do you have a favorite poem?”

  “Yes—but it’s as much of a chestnut as ”The Road Not Taken,“ if I’m going to be truthful.”

  “That’s the one rule here,” the doctor said, his manner grave. “You must be truthful. Lying to me is like going to a doctor and telling him the pain in your knee is really in your neck. It won’t help and it could hurt. So what is this… chestnut?”

  “ ”To His Coy Mistress.“ ” Dr. Armistead betrayed no recognition. “Andrew Marvell. The one about the guy who is trying to persuade a woman that life is too short for a prolonged courtship and they have to go for it right now.” Which was not exactly how she had worded it in her college term papers, but it was succinct.

  “I’m not sure I know it.”

  “You must. It’s one of those things they don’t let you get out of school without learning.

  “Thus though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.”