“Really? Then how did Yeager end up with Bobby Hilliard’s datebook?”

“He didn’t. He asked me if he could see it, and I said no. He asked me what it looked like, so I told him. Plain black datebook, the kind you can get in any stationery store. He bought one to hold up on TV, but it was just a prop. We got the real thing, and believe me there’s nothing in it but his shift schedule. No clues. He made that up.”

“Sleazy bastard,” Tess said.

“Yeah, but if you start executing journalists because they got no ethics, it’s gonna be hard to put out the local paper.”

What could Tess say? She agreed.

Chapter 23

The silver-haired man who was behind the counter at Gummere Brothers, one of downtown Baltimore ’s few remaining jewelry stores, shook his head at the photos Tess showed him the next morning.

“I couldn’t possibly date an item from a photograph, much less speak to its historic authenticity,” he said. “What kind of stones did you say?”

“Emeralds to my untrained eye, but they could be pieces of a Rolling Rock bottle for all I know. Can’t you tell me anything? Is it plausible, at least, that this could have belonged to a rich woman from the early nineteenth century?”

“Well, I suppose it could be part of a parure,” he said, squinting again at Tess’s photograph. He had large pale-blue eyes, rounder than most, and it was easy to imagine they had gradually been reshaped over the years by the jeweler’s loupe he wore on a velvet cord around his neck. “I mean, it would make sense that Betsy Patterson Bonaparte would have been presented with one. But I’m speaking strictly hypothetically”

“What’s a parure?”

“It’s a set of matching jewels, something only someone of the highest station would have had,” he said. “Probably a tiara, choker, necklace, and usually two bracelets.”

“And such a thing would be valuable?”

“Very, depending on condition, of course, and whether it could be authenticated. I never heard that Betsy Patterson Bonaparte had a parure, but then again, I never heard she didn’t have one. Some descendant may have had financial reverses and sold it to make ends meet. It happens in the best of families.”

“It’s funny, I don’t think of Patterson as being one of the classier names in Baltimore, not like Carroll or Calvert,” Tess said. “After all, Patterson Park is where chicken hawks prowl for young boys, and Patterson Park High School has always been one of the more troubled campuses in the city. Funny how things change. But I guess it’s back to the Pratt and more reading.”

“There are worse ways to spend the last day of January,” the Gummere brother observed.

“Usually I’d agree with you, but I’m restless today. I feel the need to keep moving.” Tess did not permit herself to dwell on how this need for motion might be related to the feeling that lingering anywhere, for any reason, made her vulnerable to an enemy she had yet to meet. “Besides, there’s a snowstorm in the forecast and a lot of the city agencies are shutting down early and letting employees take liberal leave. The library’s probably closed by now.”

“Well, if it’s a shortcut you want, you could probably get a crash course on Patterson-or just about any other woman from Maryland’s history-at the Mu-sheum.”

“Mu-what?”

“It’s a museum set up to honor Maryland women, open by appointment only. The lady who runs it is good on the domestic details of women’s lives. Not just jewelry but how they set their tables and the kinds of wall coverings and window treatments used at various times.”

Tess remained skeptical. She was well schooled in Baltimore oddities; if one had eluded her this long, it couldn’t possibly be of interest. “You’re not sending me on a wild-goose chase, are you?”

He pressed a buzzer beneath the counter, granting admittance to another customer, a prosperous-looking gentleman who seemed impatient, as prosperous-looking gentlemen so often do. Time is money, and this man had broadened the concept: He seemed to think Tess’s time was his money as well. Tess had never actually seen someone in a monocle before.

“I can’t say whether it will be a wild-goose chase, because I don’t know what you hope to find out,” the jeweler said, as he turned his attentions to this more promising customer, who kept clearing and reclearing his throat, like a PA system dispensing static before an important announcement. “But I can promise it won’t be an experience you’ll soon forget.”

The personal obsession masquerading as a museum is something of a Maryland tradition. The University of Maryland had a dental museum that had proved to be one of the Beacon-Light’s perennial slow-day feature stories, as had the private home devoted to the history of the lightbulb. The Dime Museum, a salute to the nineteenth century’s oddities, was the most recent. There was even a museum dedicated to the history of feminine hygiene, down in Prince Georges County.

But it saddened Tess that neither she nor Whitney could compile an even partial list of Maryland heroines as they walked from Whitney’s office at the Talbot Foundation to the Mu-sheum’s headquarters on Calvert Street. No, it was Crow and Daniel Clary, whom she had invited as a lark, who knew much more when it came to Maryland ’s hit parade of double-X chromosome cases than either of its native daughters.

“Elizabeth Seton, of course. She’s a saint,” Crow began.

“I’ve heard of Seton Hill,” Tess said.

“Barbara Mikulski,” Daniel said. “Former social worker who became a U.S. senator. Rosa Ponselle, the opera singer.”

“Billie Holiday.” That was Whitney’s offering. Bareheaded, she seemed not to notice how cold it was, or that snow was expected to start falling at any moment. Her pale face did not redden, which made her green eyes darker and harder. Like emeralds, Tess thought, her mind back with the parure bracelet.

“But she was actually born in Philadelphia,” Daniel pointed out. “Remember when the Blight publicized that, how people just kind of ignored it because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear?”

“Well, if you want to believe what you read in the Beacon-Light,” said Whitney, who had once worked at the paper and consequently had more disdain for it than anyone else Tess knew. “Besides, there’s a statue of her over in West Baltimore. So she must be from here.”

“There’s a bust of Simón Bolívar in a park in Guilford,” Crow said. “Does that mean he’s from here? Now, come on, can’t you think of anyone else who might be in a museum devoted to famous Maryland women?”

“Wallis Warfield Simpson,” Whitney said. “The Cone sisters. Did I tell you I went to a fund-raiser at the museum once, and one of the local restaurants was serving garlic mashed potatoes scooped into little focaccia funnels, in honor of the Cone collection? I don’t know. I can’t imagine that’s what the sisters had in mind when they donated all their Matisses and Picassos to the BMA, seeing their name turned into a potato snack.”

“Linda Hamilton.”

Tess was immediately embarrassed by her lowbrow pop-culture contribution, especially when Crow, Whitney, and Daniel chorused in unison: “Who?”

“The actress from the Terminator movies. You know, the one with the arms. She’s from the Eastern Shore.”

“Oh, well, movies,” Whitney said scornfully. “If that counts as history, we’re all in trouble.”

“If it doesn’t, I’m afraid the Maryland Mu-sheum is in trouble.”

From the outside, the Mu-sheum was just another Calvert Street rowhouse, in the seedier upper reaches of Mount Vernon. The other rowhouses here had been subdivided into apartments or turned into offices for architects and lawyers. This one was better kept than its neighbors, however, with window boxes, empty in winter, and the sparkling-white marble steps that Baltimoreans so fetishize.