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her
ribcage as if it wanted to escape.
    Her fingers clumsy with nervousness, she
punched in the phone number Mary had left, only to hear the precise,
silky voice that had so recently filled her office: "You have
reached the pager-voice mail for Mary Browne. Please leave a message at
the beep, or punch in your number and I will return your call as
quickly as possible."
    Tess smothered her relieved laugh.
"I just wanted to tell you to plan on seeing your sister by
the fourth of July, Mary Browne," she told the pager.
"I almost guarantee I can find her by then."
    Actually, Tess couldn't find
anyone who wasn't in the phone book. But she knew someone who
could, and she wasn't too proud to delegate.

Chapter 3
    T he
third-floor ladies room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library was empty. It
usually was, which was why Tess had chosen it for a meeting place. She
didn't know why the library's top floor, home to
the humanities department and the Mencken Room, should be so
relentlessly male, but it was, and always had been. There was probably
a class-action suit in this, but it would have to find another
plaintiff. Tess had long cherished this island of privacy in downtown
Baltimore, with its view of the verdigris-domed Basilica of the
Assumption.
    "Hello, Wee Willie
Keeler," she said, waving to the blank windows across
Cathedral Street. That was Kitty's pet name for the cardinal,
Kitty being about as lapsed as anyone named Monaghan could be.
    Tess had her own lapses. Once, as a college
senior home for winter break, she had taken an over-the-counter
pregnancy test in one of the stalls here. She didn't dare try
it at home, and yet she couldn't stand the suspense of
waiting until she returned to school. The test had been negative and
she had celebrated by meeting Whitney Talbot at the bar at the top of
the old Peabody Hotel. Wearing slinky little dresses, they had lied
about their ages, names, and just about everything else to the men who
insisted on buying them drinks. "Auditioning new sperm
donors," Whitney had called it.
    The Peabody was gone, demoted to a chain
hotel with polyester bedspreads and no rooftop bar. And her best friend
Whitney was gone—at least temporarily to Japan. Ah, the local
litany of loss. Now that was the real Baltimore Catechism, the
ecumenical prayer known to every native. Tess curled up in the window
well, deep and low enough to be a proper window seat, and skimmed a
copy of Mary McCarthy's first volume of memoirs while she
waited. Soon enough, she heard the heavy tread of hiking boots on the
tile floors. A plump woman, as soft and disarrayed as an unmade bed,
entered the room.
    "About time—"
Tess began, but Dorie Starnes held a finger to her mouth, in imitation
of the librarian stereotype.
    "Did you check the
stalls?"
    "The doors are all open, Dorie.
See?"
    Unsatisfied, Dorie pushed each of the stall
doors, then glanced up at the ceiling, in case someone might be
clinging to one of the light fixtures.
    "You can't be too
careful, you know," she said, closing and locking the heavy
wooden door to the outside corridor.
    "Actually, you can.
There's a point where precaution has a diminishing return.
For example, let's say you're so afraid to fly that
you drive everywhere. That's not only more risky,
statistically, it also costs you money through lost time."
    "I don't fly."
    "Right, because you're
afraid."
    "Because I've never
wanted to go anywhere that was more than three hours from Baltimore by
car."
    "Oh." Tess tried to
think of a nonflying analogy about the benefits of risk-taking, but
nothing came to mind. "I take it back. Maybe you can't be too careful."
    "You better believe it. If my
titular bosses ever find out I've opened my own shop while
still working for them, that would be the end of little Dorie. This may
seem like cloak-and-dagger bullshit to you, but it keeps my health
insurance and 401-K safe for another day."
    "Nice use of titular. Still doing
those vocabulary builders?"
    "Yeah. It's a
twelve-cassette