Butchers Hill (10 page)

Tess tried the oversize door of the Benjamin
Banneker Academy. Locked—unusual for a school, but plain
common sense here. The Nelsons were probably hypersensitive about
safety, given the circumstances in the death of Donnie Moore. She
pressed the buzzer and waited on the stone steps. A round-faced young
man poked his head out and said, "No visitors during lessons,
ma'am."

"Mr. and Mrs. Nelson are expecting
me."

He looked her over, closed the door without
comment, then returned several seconds later, opening the door to her.
Tess saw now that he wore a dark blue uniform in a military style. His
black shoes were mirror shiny, his trousers had a knife-sharp crease.
Although his full cheeks gave his face a babyish cast, the rest of him
was hard and slender, with the big, defined muscles of a weight-lifter
pressing at the seams of his uniform. "I'm sorry,
ma'am. But as the monitor, I have strict instructions not to
admit anyone, especially reporters."

"I'm not a
reporter."

The young man looked puzzled, as if he knew
of no other occupation for white women who came to the door of the
Banneker Academy. A slight woman in a floral shirtdress came out into
the hall, pulling a white cardigan over her narrow shoulders. The
woman's posture was even more formidable than the
monitor's, so straight and proper that it made
Tess's spine ache just to look at her.

"Miss Monaghan?"

"Yes, I'm the one who
called to talk about Donnie—"

"Of course." The woman
touched the young monitor's elbow. "Drew, you may
go back to your post. Mr. Nelson and I will be in the study if you need
us."

She led Tess into a small, shadowy room
lined with bookshelves, but no books. Apparently the Banneker
Academy's endowment was not a lavish one—everything
looked used and threadbare. She glanced at the globe standing in the
corner. It was enormous, a beautiful world of dark, lush colors, and
bright blue oceans. That kind of globe usually cost a fortune new, but
this one was at least ten years old, with Europe, Russia, and Africa
all hopelessly out of date.

Mr. Nelson, a compact man with a moustache
and close-cropped hair, rose from a faded wing chair by a casement
window and offered his hand.

"Welcome to Benjamin Banneker
Academy," he said, but his voice didn't sound
particularly welcoming, and his hand slid quickly through hers, as if
he found the contact distasteful.

"Thank you. I'll admit
I'm a little confused. Is this a school or an
orphanage?"

"Both," Mrs. Nelson
said, "although we don't like the term
‘orphanage.' The Banneker Academy is a charter
school, a private school that receives monies from the district under a
program designed to make the public schools more competitive. At the
same time, it's a group home. The boys admitted here as
students are placed through the city's foster care
program."

"So you're double
dipping."

Mr. Nelson frowned.
"We're not doing anything illegal if
that's what you're suggesting. These are two
separate programs under the same roof."

"I didn't mean to
imply—"

"I'm sure you
didn't," he said stiffly. Great, she had managed to
offend him in what was supposed to be the innocuous, buttering-up
portion of the conversation. Step aside, Dale Carnegie, let Tess
Monaghan show you how it's done.

Mrs. Nelson interceded, trying to smooth
things over. "We convinced the district to allow us to open a
private school for the boys who have become our wards. We are the
faculty, we are the parents. If George and I have learned anything from
our…missteps over the years, it's that
it's no use rearing children right, only to send them into
schools where our teaching is undone."

So now it was the
Baltimore school system's fault that the Nelsons'
wards had been running wild in the streets. Was anyone to blame for
what happened on Fairmount Avenue five years ago
?

"Our boys have consistency now,
and they flourish," Mrs. Nelson continued, her voice quiet
but impassioned. "I grant you, we can't teach them
advanced calculus, or physics, but if we have a boy who wishes to study
those subjects, we can obtain the services of a tutor from the
district. One day, we'll have our own gifted-and-talented
program, and teachers will be fighting to work here."

"One day," said Mr.
Nelson, who seemed less starry-eyed than his wife. "We have a
ways to go."

"You said you learned from your
missteps. I assume you mean Donnie Moore."

The Nelsons looked at each other. Tess saw
him nod, ever so slightly, as if giving her permission to speak of what
had been so long forbidden.

"Donald," Mrs. Nelson
said. "Yes, I was referring to Donald."

"I'm trying to find the
other children who lived with you when
Donald
was killed." Tess had never heard anyone employ this more
formal version of his name—not his mother, not Detective
Tull, not even the newspaper accounts of the time—but she was
willing to appropriate the usage if it helped her gain some small
rapport with the Nelsons.

"Why?"

Tess was ready for this question, more ready
than she had been with Keisha Moore.

"A local victims' rights
group is interested in helping the children."

"Now? Doesn't it seem a
bit late? They've probably just begun to heal, and
you—your victims' group—wants to remind
them of the horror they saw." Mrs. Nelson pulled her sweater
over her shoulders, as if just thinking about Butchers Hill gave her a
chill. "I don't see much love in that kind of
philanthropy, Miss Monaghan."

"No one's asking that
they relive what they've been through. I thought if you ever
heard from them, if you knew where they are—"

"No," Mr. Nelson said
sharply. "We never hear from them. They don't even
know where we are, and we don't know where they are.
That's how foster care works, you know. We took them, we
cared for them, we loved them, but we had no rights. They were our
children, as surely as if they had been born to us. But when Donald
died, they took them from us that very night. That evil old man might
as well have killed all of them, so thoroughly did he destroy our home
and the work we were doing."

Mrs. Nelson was crying now, silent tears
running down her face. Mr. Nelson took Tess by the shoulders and turned
her to the casement window behind the wing chair. "Look
there," he said, gripping Tess's shoulders, as if
she might try to wrest away from him. She saw ten young men in
formation, running drills in the courtyard, marching and turning to a
leader's shouted commands. It was a hot morning and sweat ran
from their faces, but they worked in grim determination, their
movements crisp and sharp.

"These young men love
discipline," he said. "They yearn for it.
They've waited their entire lives for someone to say, you are
good enough to meet the highest standards. Donald and the others lived
in a world where people said,
You're
nothing, you'll never do anything, just show up, go through
the motions, that's all you can do
.
And then, just in case those poor children didn't get the
point, didn't know how little their lives were worth, a judge
gave a man less time for killing Donald than some people get for
killing a dog."

The young men marched in place now, shouting
in cadence. Although Tess couldn't hear the words they were
chanting, she could sense the joy in their movements as their answered
their drill instructor's calls.

"Leave our children alone, Miss
Monaghan," Mr. Nelson urged her. "Let them forget.
Forgetting is their only salvation now."

"Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it."

"Do you really believe
that?"

Tess shrugged. The Santayana chestnut had
been worth a try. "Sometimes."

Her candor seemed to thaw Mrs. Nelson by a
few degrees at least. "If it's any consolation, I
couldn't help you even if I wanted to. Those children are
lost to us, too. I suppose that's our punishment, for not
taking better care of them."

"But you'll save these
bo—young men." It was more of a question, a hope,
than a statement of fact.

Mr. Nelson shook his head. "I wish
I could promise them that. I can only promise them safety here, on this
little patch of land, for as long as they're with us.
Eventually, they'll go forth in the world, and then
there's only so much we can do. But no, there will never be
another Donald Moore, not on our watch."

What was left to say after such a speech?
Luther Beale's compensation plan, his desire for retribution,
seemed trite and puny in the face of the Nelsons' commitment
to their wards.

"Go in peace, Miss
Monaghan," Mrs. Nelson called after her, her voice still a
little shaky from her quiet tears.

The same monitor showed Tess out. Impressed
by his perfect posture, Tess found herself standing a little
straighter, throwing her shoulders back and sucking her stomach in.

"Do you like it here?"
she asked him as he unlocked the front door.

"Oh yes,
ma'am."

"What do they—in the
curriculum—I mean, what do they teach you here?"

"Survival."

"What do you mean?"

The young man gave her a smile at once sweet
and superior. "They're teaching us how to live in
our world—and how to live in
yours
.
Now be careful going to your car, ma'am. We've got
some real bad people in these parts."

Tess was heading north on the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway when her knapsack started ringing.
Startled, she almost swerved out of her lane, then remembered the cell
phone she kept in the litter of pens and crumpled ATM slips at the
bottom of her old leather book bag. Past experiences had convinced her
that she couldn't afford to be without a portable phone, but
the balances on all those ATM slips indicated she couldn't
afford to use it, either.

"It's Dorie. God, I hate
cell phones."

"Not as much as I hate this
always-under-construction road. I'm crawling along down
here."

"You going slowly enough to take
some notes? Or you want to pull off at the next exit and call me back?
I've got the Susan King info you wanted."

"I'm pulling into a rest
stop even as we speak. I'll call you on the
Blight
's
800 number."

Tess pulled her Toyota into a lane banked by
a row of public telephones. It must have seemed so cutting edge once, a
highway rest stop built so you could make a call without leaving your
car. How quaint, how adorably low-tech. But it was a cheaper, better
connection than the cell phone provided.

"Okay, I've got my
notebook out. Shoot me what you have on Susan King."

"First of all, she's not
Susan King anymore—she's Jacqueline Weir. Changed
her name legally when she was eighteen. Probably thought that was good
enough to keep her relatives from finding her."

"It would have been, if her
relatives didn't now have access to Dorie's magic
fingers." A little stroking was all part of the package with
Dorie. "Why do you assume she changed her name in order to
hide? The way her sister explained it, they just lost touch after she
had a falling-out with their mother."

"Jacqueline Weir has the best
reason of all to hide from her relatives—money. For someone
who's only thirty-two, she's done pretty well for
herself. She has her own business. A consulting firm, according to the
file, but that could be anything. She must be doing well, because she
has a huge line of credit. She also has a mortgage of sixty-five
thousand dollars on a Columbia condo."

"That's not such a big
deal," Tess objected, even as she wrote down the address
Dorie rattled off.

"No, but the loan is secured by
her own stocks, and not many thirty-two-year-olds have a portfolio like
that. Approximately two hundred thousand dollars at market close
yesterday. How much do
you
have in savings?"

"Don't tell me you
pulled her credit report, Dorie. I thought we agreed you
weren't going to do that unless it was absolutely
necessary."

"Okay, I didn't pull her
credit report. Let's just say my sixth sense tells me
it's excellent. What else? Oh yeah, she leases a brand-new
Lexus, only through her company, so it's a tax thing. Very
crafty, this Susan King-Jacqueline Weir. I did find some sort of legal
action filed on a Susan King when I ran the Chicago Title search, but
it's after she changed her name, so I'm thinking
it's not the same Susan King, or else it's no big
deal. If someone had been really serious about collecting, they would
have gone to the trouble of finding her. Probably parking tickets, some
penny-ante shit like that."

"If she's so wealthy,
wouldn't she pay her parking tickets?"

"Look, I'm not saying
she's rich, but she's obviously got enough money on
hand so relatives who aren't so well off would feel
comfortable yelling for hand-outs."

Tess thought of Mary Browne in her expensive
yellow suit, which matched the shoes, which matched the ribbon on her
straw hat. Tess's mother dressed that way and it
didn't come cheap, that matchy-matchy look. The shoe bills
alone were staggering. "Her sister didn't look as
if she was hurting."

"Yeah, well that's part
of the trick of getting money, isn't it? Not looking like you
need it. By the way, I ran Mary Browne with the birth date you gave
me."

"And?"

"Even limiting the search to
Maryland, I found about a hundred. With e's, without
e's, but at least a hundred who could be her. Yet not a
single one with that particular DOB."

"I
knew
she was lying about her age."

"Maybe." Dorie
didn't sound convinced. "Or maybe she's
not using her right name, either. Or maybe she's not from
where she says she's from. Maybe she's not this
woman's sister, and maybe you don't really know why
she's looking for Susan King, who's trying to make
a new life for herself as Jacqueline Weir."