“How could I have forgotten about this place?” Tess asked, berating her own Swiss-cheese memory. And not just hers but Paige Rose’s and Kitty’s. The name had been so tantalizingly close to them all along. It was probably in the index of the biography she had bought, but Tess had been too busy reading about Poe’s death to focus on his life.
Daniel was completely lost. “The youth hostel where the European students stay?”
“No, this town house, which I’ve only walked by about eight million times, and whose historic marker I’ve read at least five million times. Your mention of the Saturday Visiter must have jogged my memory. This is why the name John Pendleton Kennedy seems so familiar to everyone. It’s been sitting on this building for all the world to see.”
She pointed to the small faded rectangle, affixed to the building decades ago, in one of the city’s periodic fits of civic pride during the brief reign of Mayor Clarence “Du” Burns. In this town house, in 1833, three men had judged submissions to a local literary contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. The winner, by acclaim, was a young writer named Edgar Allan Poe, for a story called “MS in a Bottle.”
And one of the three judges was John Pendleton Kennedy. If her would-be client had used one of the other judges’ names-Latrobe, with its deeper, better-known Baltimore resonance-Tess would have been suspicious at the jump. If he had taken the name of Dr. James H. Miller, she probably never would have made any connection at all. But John P. Kennedy raised different, more modern associations, and the Poe allusion had slid right past her.
Slid past her like a greased pig.
“I guess this was the Pig Man’s idea of a joke.”
“The pig man? Who’s he? What does he have to do with John Pendleton Kennedy or Poe?”
“I think that’s what I’m supposed to be trying to find out.”
Chapter 12
Tess went back to her office before going home. It was out of the way, but she told herself it was admirably efficient to file the receipt from her dinner at Sotto Sopra and to write down her discoveries about Bobby Hilliard while they were still fresh in her mind. She hadn’t taken notes at dinner, because Daniel Clary had struck her as the nervous type, someone who would speak less freely if he saw his words being converted to her not-quite-shorthand, that self-taught mix of abbreviations that most journalists use. The wonder wasn’t that people were misquoted, Tess knew, but that they were ever quoted correctly.
But as she pulled up to her office, she couldn’t quite admit, not even to herself, that she was curious to see if another note, or at least a trio of roses, waited for her. She had done his bidding-assuming he was a he- and found the secret of John Pendleton Kennedy’s significance only steps away from the library. Certainly, that must have been her correspondent’s intent. Did he know? Did he approve? Did he have another clue for her?
Then again-did she want him to know of her progress, did she want someone watching her that closely? She was still unsettled by his having found her home. She wondered if there was a way to tell her anonymous tipster to direct all future correspondence to her office.
But her office’s front door turned a blank silent face on the street. That was the problem with anonymous tipsters. They were so unavailable, so undependable, coming and going as they pleased. It was rather like dating.
Inside, the only thing waiting for her were several pages of police reports, faxed by Herman Peters. It took her a minute to remember what she had requested. Oh, yes, the police report on Shawn Hayes. In the wake of what she had discovered about Bobby Hilliard and the Pig Man’s sly joke on her, it seemed much less urgent.
She switched on her computer but didn’t bother with the lights. The monitor was bright enough for her purposes. Besides, the gloom felt good. She wanted to cultivate her inner Poe.
She got out a sketchbook and began using an old outlining technique she remembered from her newspaper days-not a straightforward list but a series of connected circles, shooting across the page like meteors, all jumping out from the center of-well, from the center of what? The center could hold, Yeats be damned, if she only knew where or what the center was. Was it Bobby Hilliard? The deadly meeting at Poe’s grave site? The Visitor? The fake John Pendleton Kennedy? What if her fat little friend was the one who was shadowing her now? Why?
Tess was so caught up in her diagram that she jumped at the sound of a soft knock on her door, banging her knee on the keyboard tray. She glanced at the door to make sure she had thrown the lock when she came in. The deadbolt was off, but the regular lock was secure. She waited to see if anyone would knock again. It was not uncommon, in this neighborhood, for lost winos and hard-up junkies to pay after-hours visits. Seconds passed and, hearing nothing, she went back to her diagram. Then came a new sound, a sneakier sound, metal on metal. Someone was picking her lock. Slowly and clumsily, but undeniably picking her lock. This was no wino.
She took her gun out of her knapsack and eased off the safety. But the intruder would have the better view, with Tess backlit by her computer screen. She crouched behind the desk and waited.
It seemed to take forever, but at last the door swung open and feet crossed the threshold. Tess heard the door close-softly, carefully, much too deliberately for a random visitor looking for a quick buck. Tess shifted her weight, her gun in both hands, her knees tight to her chest, almost as if she were holding a yoga pose, and waited for the intruder to move toward the computer’s bright screen. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, but the newcomer was moving slowly, unsure of where things were in the room. Footsteps stopped and started, stopped and started until, at last, she saw a pair of khaki’ed legs come around the desk.
“What the-”
Tess, coiled like the snake in a gag can of peanuts, let loose with both her feet and caught the intruder squarely in the stomach, hard enough to knock him off his feet. She had been aiming for the groin, but she wasn’t going to argue with the results. She scrambled on top of her would-be burglar, her gun aimed at the collarbone.
“Who are you? What do you want?” she roared, with as much volume as she could muster. Tull had told her one time that yelling could not be overrated as a tool in such situations. Plus, it helped release some of the adrenaline Tess had stored while curled in a ball.
Her visitor wore a belted trench coat and a soft, shapeless hat that fell off, revealing a mass of long brown hair. The light-colored eyes showed fear, but the mouth was mean and defiant.
“If you had answered my knock, I wouldn’t have broken in,” the woman said, her tone self-righteous.
Tess pointed the gun toward the ceiling, but kept her thighs pressed on either side of her intruder’s hip bones. The thing was, she didn’t know what to do next. Search for a weapon? There appeared to be something bulky under the coat, but it might have been all flesh. Should she keep her weapon trained on the woman and then call 911? How would she do that exactly?
Discretion is not always the better part of valor. As Tess considered her options, the woman head-butted her in the chest. Even in her pain, Tess thought, Jesus, only a woman would dare do that to another woman. She fell back, still holding on to her gun, not quite clear of the woman’s body but perched on the ankles. Her mind detached, trying to discern the woman’s intent. Was this an assault or an attempt at flight?
Flight. The woman bent her knees and shook herself free of Tess, climbed awkwardly to her feet, and began running toward the door. But this was almost too easy.