Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

Part One
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The headphones were a mistake. She realized this only in

Are you sure you want to wait for your clothes

What time was it?

He stopped at the mock-retro diner on Eastern Avenue, the

Tesss day was thrown off course much as her scull

Greer put the phone back in its cradle and looked

The lamb, Tess decided. Andno, yes, noyes, a glass of

Man, isnt this something?

He stopped at an ATM, making sure it was affiliated

Places in Baltimore often have many lives. Tess recognized the

Tess had a secret recipe for cooling the flush brought

Sorry about earlier today, Tess said.

Tess awoke to a perfect sunrise, a piercing red-orange light

Ben had taken to writing in a local Starbucks, much

You cant possibly believe that Selene has anything to do

That got out of hand fast.

Part Two
Baltimore Babylon

Although twenty-four hours had passed since the Internet had provided

Lottie MacKenzie held up one fingerone tiny, rigid index

No one said outright that it was Johnny Tampas fault

It was Tesss nature to be suspicious of anything that

Martin Tull was, as Tess had assured Flip, good police.

He waited until Marie was asleep to put in one

The Starbucks barista seemed to know Ben Marcus, at least

As she left Starbucks, Tess once again had the sensation

Ben should be happy. Well, not happyGreer was dead, and

Part Three
Desperate Living

And Greer said, in that terribly earnest way she had,

Marie was snoringfull-out, raucous snores, nothing delicate or ladylike. She

Tesss reporting career may have been short-lived, but she still

The not-the-Meyerhoffs Meyerhoffs lived in Baltimore Highlands, a county neighborhood

Ben stared at his screen, pretending to write. So youve

A soft rain had started, a gloomy harbinger of the

While Tess often lamented the colliding spheres that had made

Alicias body was on the floor of her den, facedown.

The Mann of Steel premierereally, more a onetime showing for

T here she was.

Smaller than he expected. Younger, too. But the primary shock was that she was human, a person just like him. Well, not just like himthere was the thirty-plus age difference to startbut flesh and blood, standing on a street in Baltimore, occupying the same latitude and longitude, breathing the same air. Look at her, sipping one of those enormous coffee drinks that all the young people seemed to carry now, as if the entire generation had been weaned too early and never recovered from the shock of it. He imagined a world of twenty-somethings, their mouths puckering around nothingness, lost without something to suck. Figuratively, not literally. Unlike most people, even allegedly educated ones, he used those words with absolute precision and prided himself on the fact, as he prided himself on all his usage, even in the sentences he formed in his head, the endless sentences, the commentary that never stopped, the running voice-over of his life. Which was funny, as he disdained voice-over in film, where it almost never worked.

Yet even as the vision of a suckling nation took shape in his head, he knew it wasnt his exclusively, that it had been influenced by something he had seen. Who? What? A small part of his brain wouldnt rest until he pinned down this fleeting memory. He was as punctilious about the origins of his ideas as he was about the correctness of his speech.

He liked young people, usually, thrived in their company, and they seemed to like him, too. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together whoever wrote that line couldnt have been more wrong. The young people he invited into his home, his life, had given him sustenance, enough so that he didnt mind tolerating the inevitable rumors. Baltimore bachelorlives by himself in that old house near the parkup to strange things with all that camera equipment. People swear hes on the up-and-up, but who can tell? But those things were said by the neighbors who didnt know him. When he selected the children, he got to know their parents first, went around to the houses, showed them what he did, explained his methods, provided personal references. It got so where parents were calling him, begging for a slot for little Johnny or Jill. Gently, tactfully, he would explain that his wasnt just another after-school program, open to any child. It was up to him, and him alone, who would be admitted.

Now that he had this one in his viewfinderwould he have chosen her, glimpsed her potential when she was eight or nine? Possibly, maybe. It was hard to know. Faces coarsened so much after adolescence. Personalities, more so. This oneshe was probably sweet, once upon a time. Affection starved, the kind who crawled into your lap and cupped your cheeks with her baby-fat palms. Patted your face and stroked your hair and stared straight into your eyes with no sense of boundaries, much less the concept of personal space. He loved children when they were unself-conscious, but that phase was so swift, so fleeting, and he was left with the paradox of trying to teach them to be as they once were, to return to a time when they didnt understand the concept of embarrassment, much less worry about what others thought. But it was the eternal struggleonce you realize youre in Eden, you have to leave. He watched the teenage years approach with more anguish than any parent, knowing it marked the end.

The lens was a powerful one, purchased years ago. He was no Ludditethere was much new technology on which he doted, and even more for which he yearnedbut he could not sacrifice his old Pentax for a digital camera. Besides, the kind of SLR system he would need was out of reach. The Canon he had priced online was $2,500 at discount, and that was for the body alone. No, he would stick with his battered Pentax for now. Come to think of ithow old was this camera? It must be twenty-five, thirty years ago that he had taken the plunge at Coopers Camera Mart. A memory tickled his nosewhat was that wonderful aroma that camera stores once had? Film, it must have been film, or the developing products, all outmoded now. Consider itin his lifetime, just a little over a half century, he had gone from shooting photos with a Kodak automatic, the kind with a detachable wand of flashbulbs, to shooting movies that he could watch instantly at home, and if anyone thought that was inferior to trying to load an eel-slippery roll of film onto a reel, then they had his sympathy. No, he had no complaints about what technology had wrought. Technology was wonderful. If he had had more technology at his disposal, even fifteen years ago, then things might be very different now.

Look up, look up, look up, he urged the image he had captured, and just like that, as if his wish were her command, she lifted her eyes from the paper in front of her, stopped sipping her drink, and stared into the distance. Such an open, innocent face, so guileless and genuine. So everything she wasnt.

Her mouth, free from the straw, puckered in lonely dismay, and he knew in that instant the image that had been tantalizing him The Simpsons, the episode that had managed to parody The Great Escape and The Birds with just a few deft strokes. He had watched it with his young friends, pointing out the Hitchcock cameo, then screening the real movies for them so they could understand the larger context. (It was the only reason he agreed to watch the cartoon with them, in order to explain all its cinematic allusions.) They had loved both movies, although the explicit horror of killer birds had seemed to affect them far more than the true story behind the men who had escaped from Stalag Luft III, only to be executed upon their capture. He was ten years old when the movie came outhe saw it at the Hippodromeand World War II, an experience shared by his father and uncles, loomed large in his imagination. Now he found himself surrounded by young people who thought Vietnam was ancient history. They had reeled when they learned he was old enough to have been in the draft. This oneshe, too, considered him old, and therefore a person she was free to ignore. She probably didnt even remember the Persian Gulf War. She might not know there was a war going on even now, given how insular she was. Insular and insolent.