"It's not only your vocabulary. Your voice sounds different, too. Fuller."

"I've been listening to Derek Jacobi read the Iliad on tape. It's like, I don't know, twenty hours altogether, and if I keep my headphones on too long, I start sounding as if I'm from a whole different kind of Essex."

"Indeed," Tess said. Dorie had mispronounced the English actor's name, but she'd never hear about it from Tess. "Well, duchess, let me tell you what I need."

Dorie listened intently, taking it all in. Tess would have gladly given her copies of her files, but Dorie was paper-averse. She maintained that her "organic hard disk" was the safest way to store information. No power surges, no system crashes, and not even the world's best hackers could get to it.

"Jeez, Tess," she said after hearing the details of the two cases, shaking her head. "I mean, normally, no problem, but it happens I've got a few people with rush jobs. People who pay me considerably more money than you do."

"Hey, I qualified for my lifetime discount by suggesting you set up this little sideline, remember?"

"Sure, and I'll take you for a ride in my new Ford Explorer someday to show you how grateful I am. In the meantime, the Beacon-Light, my employer of record, has a few things they expect of me as well. Tyrannical despots. Can the Susan King search wait a couple days?"

"Sure." In fact, it was probably better that way. A too-swift result might prompt the demanding Mary Browne to wonder if she had been charged too much. "What about the Beale case? Can you help me on that at all?"

Dorie ran her fingers through her shortish hair, whose tendency toward cowlicks gave her the look of an exotic bird, the faintly cross-eyed ones with the comical little crests. "You gotta be kidding. First names only, and the geezer isn't even sure of those? Minors, no less, probably in state custody at some level, whether it's foster care or the juvenile justice system."

"The state has computers," Tess wheedled. "Department of Juvenile Services, Department of Human Resources-all their stuff must be on a mainframe somewhere."

"Look, I'm not saying I can't hack my way into the state system, but once you get there, it's a mess. None of the agencies' files are compatible, and there's no cross-referencing. And even within the state bureaucracy, Tess, you gotta have more than a first name. I could get you the clips on Beale's trial pretty fast, though. Maybe the kids are named in there."

"I already thought of that. But as minors in foster care, their identities wouldn't have been publicly disclosed."

"Then try the old-fashioned shoe leather approach in the neighborhood. Maybe someone knows where they all went, or can hook you up with the foster parents. Use those long legs for something besides rowing that stupid little boat of yours."

"Okay." It was the answer Tess had expected, although she had half-heartedly hoped Dorie might know some secret, omnipotent database.

Dorie started to leave. Tess knew the drill, knew she would have to wait five minutes before she departed. She may have chosen the site, but everything else about their meeting had been dictated by Dorie.

"So what are you doing later?" Dorie asked as she unlocked the door and checked the corridor. "Want to grab a beer somewhere?"

"Sure. Oh-no, I can't. I'm having coffee with Martin Tull when 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 it accomplish?" she asked Tess this evening, unpacking books by yet another round of interlopers. Amis, Ellroy, Updike, the two Roths, Henry and Philip, and the latest from the local guys, Madison Smartt Bell and Stephen Dixon. "You can shut yourself off for a while, but eventually you've got to face them."

"That's why I fought against going to Western High School," Tess said, sitting on the old U-shaped soda fountain that still sat in the center of the store. "A public all-girl high school is a nice concept, but I never wanted to be safe in some little namby-pamby girl world."