"I don't like this," Tess began. "You came to my place of business, you lied to me-"

"I suppose you never lie."

Better to skip past that one. "You wasted my time."

"I paid for your time. A new private investigator, starting out-all your cases should be so easy. I know what it's like to start a business. You can't have too many easy jobs. But my next job is harder. You won't have such an easy time finding the person I'm really looking for."

Tess looked up. "What makes you think I'd do any more work for you at all, after the way you dicked me around?"

Jackie's smile was the smile of a businesswoman used to coddling difficult types, smoothing ruffled feathers, working her to way to yes. "Look, it's past noon. Can we talk about this over lunch? There's always Clyde's, just across the way."

"No Clyde's," Tess said petulantly, a child saying no just to say no. "I've never forgiven their menu for inspiring that insipid song ‘Afternoon Delight.'"

"Let's go into Clarksville, then."

"Clarksville? What's out there, the local Dairy Queen?" Actually a hot dog and a Peanut Buster Parfait would hit the spot. One drawback to city living was the serious lack of Dairy Queens.

"You obviously haven't been keeping up with Howard County real estate. Clarksville is home to some of the ritziest subdivisions around-and one amazing French restaurant. Expensive, but worth it. Come on, it's on me."

"You bet it's on you," Tess said. "After all, you have a stock portfolio worth almost two hundred thousand dollars as of market close yesterday."

There was a small victory in seeing Jackie Weir's eyes widen at that factoid. Good-let her wonder what else Tess might have uncovered along the way.

Clarksville had changed. Tess remembered farmland, a few simple houses scattered among the trees. Now huge, elaborate homes sat on landscaped lots. These weren't the kind of developments that looked naked and raw in their early years; too much money had been spent for the owners to tolerate anything less than instant perfection. But the very lack of flaws, the absence of anything as spontaneous as a fallen bicycle or an overgrown lilac tree, made the houses forbidding to Tess.

"Mini-mansions, they call them in the trade," Jackie said as they drove west. "The covenant actually specifies a minimum square footage of ten thousand feet and all natural materials."

"But that was a lavender stone house. How can that be natural?"

"Closer to periwinkle, if you want to be precise. The owner's Mercedes has been custom-painted to match. Or was it the other way around?"

After seeing the overdone, overlarge houses, Tess assumed the restaurant would be built along the same nightmarish proportions. To her relief, Trouve was a small, fieldstone farmhouse that looked as if it had been moved, stone by stone, from the French countryside. If it weren't for the parking lot full of expensive cars, it might have passed for the working farm it once was.

"Miss Jacqueline, do you have a reservation today?" the maitre d' asked. Tess, glancing at the clientele in the almost-full dining room, suddenly felt underdressed and frumpy. Her warm-weather clothes tended toward things that made as little contact with the skin as possible-a loose, white T-shirt today, and an ankle-length cotton skirt that allowed her to skip pantyhose, but was now badly wrinkled from all her driving.

"I didn't plan ahead, but I was hoping you just might find a place for us, Michel."

"Of course." Tess assumed two women would be hidden away by the kitchen or bathroom, especially when one was so sloppily dressed. But Michel led them to a table next to a large bay window, overlooking a small orchard of fruit trees and, beyond that, a meadow of wild flowers.

Jackie allowed herself to preen just a little. "As I said, I bring a lot of clients here."

"What is it you do, exactly?"

"Professional fund-raiser. I started out in development at a hospital in the Washington suburbs, but I found I could make better money on my own, raising money on a contract basis. I do a few good causes to salve my conscience-Advocates for Children and Youth, Health Care for the Homeless, Manna House-but I barely break even on those. The big money is in capital projects."

"And politicians?"

"When I first started. Not so often now. I prefer diseases to politicians."

"Who doesn't?"

Jackie looked at Tess over the top of her menu, clearly puzzled.

"A joke," Tess explained.

"Oh, I get it." But she didn't smile.

At least Jackie-it was still an effort to remember which name to use-had an appetite. She ordered an appetizer, salad, and entree, which meant Tess could follow her lead without feeling the need to explain she had rowed that morning and then run three miles. It was refreshing to be with a woman who ate as much as she did, without apology. So many of the women she knew seemed intent on deprivation, playing some unfathomable game in which the winner was the person who ordered the most pleasureless meal. Her mother specialized in exactly that kind of denial. In Jackie's company, Tess felt she could hang a banner over the table: Bring on the cream sauces!

"I really do have legitimate business for a private investigator," Jackie told her after they had ordered. "But I had a bad experience. I hired a guy several months back, and he didn't do anything, just sat on his ass and cashed my checks. Another one gave up when it got hard. So I decided the next time I hired someone, I was going to make sure they could do some rudimentary investigative work. Finding me isn't hard, but you do have to have enough gumption to run my name through a Chicago Title search, then run my name through the MVA to get my address."

"Which name would that be exactly?" Tess asked innocently, slathering butter on a fresh, warm roll.

"The story I told you was essentially true. Susan King got pregnant when she was a teenager, and had a falling-out with her mother as a result. She ended up leaving home and, I'm sorry to say, never quite reconciled with her mother."

"Do you have to speak of yourself in the third person? It's a little on the creepy side."

"Susan King is a third person to me and as dead as my mother."

"Why did you change your name? Were you hiding from your mother after she kicked you out?"

Questions seemed to make Jackie impatient. It occurred to Tess that she had rehearsed this little scene in her head, and now Tess wasn't playing her part as scripted. How she must have enjoyed sitting in her apartment, waiting for Tess to knock on her door.

"My mother didn't kick me out because I was going to have a baby. She was cool with that. After all, I wasn't the first girl in Southwest Baltimore to turn up pregnant."

"Southwest Baltimore? Which part?" asked Tess, a true Baltimorean, forever focused on the precise boundaries of where people lived.

"Pigtown," Jackie muttered. "Pigtown, okay? Anyway, Mama wanted me to keep the baby, so she could raise it, get a little extra AFDC money and food stamps every month. I almost went for it, too. But you know, I had finished high school and I had this nothing job, and I suddenly saw my future. I told myself, ‘This is it, girl. You've still got a chance to make something of yourself, but not if you keep this baby.'"

The appetizers arrived-a tart with woodland mushrooms for Tess, some goat cheese thingie for Jackie.

"What about the baby's father?"

"He wasn't interested in being a father. But you know, I give him credit for admitting it up front, for not pretending to be into it and then dumping me as soon as the baby came. I saw that happen often enough to my girlfriends. Anyway, I signed my daughter over to a private agency and never looked back. And when I got a scholarship to Penn, I decided to change my name legally, sort of a symbol of my new life. In the back of my mind, I think I didn't want my baby to come looking for me one day. You see, I figured I was going to be somebody real famous, real successful, and I didn't want any tabloid trash reunion in my future."