Read Butchers Hill for Free Online Page B

he
gets off."
    "That shrimp ?
What, is he the next big romance? He's too small for you.
Throw him back."
    "Just a friend. I need friends
more than big romances right now."
    Dorie laughed knowingly. "Sure you
do, Tess. Keep telling yourself that."
    "He's a buddy, nothing
more. I like him. Besides, it can't hurt to have a friend who
happens to be a homicide detective."
    "Hey, maybe he can help you with
this Beale thing."
    "No shit, Sherlock." It
wasn't often that Tess got the last word with Dorie, but when
she did, it was sweet. Fleeting, but sweet. Tomorrow, there would be a
sarcastic email on her computer, a subtle reminder of just who needed
whom in this relationship.
     
    At her apartment that evening, Tess opened
up two cans for dinner—ravioli for her, Pedigree for Esskay.
Having read somewhere that single people shouldn't stint on
the niceties, she took the time to put the ravioli on a plate and made
a salad with a mustard vinaigrette from the pages of Nora
Ephron's Heartburn ,
one of the two "cookbooks" she owned. She even
added a drizzle of olive oil to Esskay's food, then carried
both dishes out to the "terrace," a sooty expanse
of roof reached by the French doors off her bedroom. During the
warm-weather months, it was her dining room of choice, as long as
Esskay kept the dive-bombing seagulls at bay.
    A few weeks back, she had gotten overly
optimistic about where the decimal point belonged in her checking
account and ended up purchasing a cafe table and matching chairs from
the Smith and Hawken store. She had intended to buy only one chair, but
the saleswoman had made her feel so odd that she had ended up taking
home four, over-compensating as always. She tried to remember to sit in
a different one each night, just in case the green-painted metal was
susceptible to wear patterns. She felt like Goldilocks, going from
place to place, only these were all the same and never quite right.
    Was she lonely? That wasn't the
word she would put to what she felt—the quick, rapid pulse in
her throat, the dryness in her mouth, the constant sensation that
somewhere, somehow, she had left an important task undone. No,
loneliness was melancholy and still, a feeling experienced when one was
far from family and friends. Sure, Whitney had moved to Japan and she
was—thankfully, really—on a hiatus from romance,
but she had other friends and an embarrassment of relatives rattling
around Baltimore. What she was feeling must be anxiety over the new
business, pure and simple.
    "But things are looking
up," she told Esskay and herself, picking at her food with
uncharacteristic delicacy. "We put money in the bank today.
We've got a cushion now."
    The greyhound gazed soulfully at
Tess's plate, as if to say, Well, then,
let me help you celebrate by finishing your dinner .
Tess used the leftover ravioli to lure Esskay back into the apartment,
then went downstairs to the bookstore on the first floor, hoping a
visit with the proprietor, her Aunt Kitty, might take the edge off her
strange mood.
    Kitty was in the front, shelving a new
shipment of books. Women and Children First had started as a family
deal struck at a crab feast several years back, when a suddenly flush
Kitty Monaghan literally collided with a not-so-suddenly bankrupt Poppa
Weinstein. Of course he had been taken with the petite
redhead—almost all men were—but he had also admired
her idea for a specialty bookstore in what had once been his flagship
drugstore. "I always served women and children," he
told Kitty, as they swung their crab mallets, "so why not
books for women and children? Make me an offer."
    But the Titanic -inspired
name was a misnomer within a year. "Women and Children First,
but not exclusively ,"
Kitty had decreed, gradually adding male authors to the
women's side of the store. Her only requirement was that the
men's books must have strong female characters, a stipulation
that excluded many famous writers.
    "I mean, you can sequester
yourself, but what does