Free Butchers Hill by Laura Lippman

further
explanation, but decided to make one up, in case Keisha was distracted
by her own grievances. "Because of your lawsuit, I guess.
Double jeopardy and all that."
    "Oh," Keisha said. The
baby's diaper was the kind with tape, and Laylah
wasn't a squirmer, but it still took Keisha quite a bit of
time to fasten the sides. "Well, I don't know where
they are. I never even met 'em."
    "What about the trial?
Weren't you at the trial?"
    "Uh-huh."
    "They were there, too,
weren't they? I know they were called as witnesses."
    "Oh I s'pose we might
have spoke, once or twice. But we didn't meet in any real
way."
    Keisha reminded Tess of the weight you had
to pick up from the bottom of the pool to pass Junior Lifesaving.
Sometimes, if you didn't come at it just right, you had to
surface, take a breath, and make another pass. "Why was
Donnie in foster care?"
    "I don't
s'pose that's anyone's business now, is
it? It wasn't right, I'll tell you that much. It
was all a stupid mix-up. They took my boy from me for no reason and
they got him killed, and they didn't have to pay."
    "They put him in foster care just
like that, with no hearing?"
    Keisha hugged Laylah to her, dropping her
head so she could sniff the back of her daughter's neck. She
smiled, as if the baby's scent was a kind of aromatherapy.
Tess wondered if you had to be a mother to smell it, or if
babies' necks smelled good to everyone.
    "Look, that was all a long time
ago, and I don't remember much about it. I don't
want to remember much. I got Laylah and I'm a good mother
now, a real good mother, and my baby's father is good to me.
What's it to me, you do something for those other
chil'ren?"
    In the front room, one of the sleeping
nephews whimpered like a puppy. Keisha Moore didn't move,
just stood in the shadowy dining room, rocking Laylah in her arms.
    Tess put her card on the freezer/changing
table. "Just in case," she said. "For
what it's worth, Laylah really is a cutie."
    When she passed through the front room, the
two little boys slept on, their cheeks patterned by the rough weave of
the old sofas, their clothes twisted and wrinkled on their skinny,
compact bodies. She hadn't noticed before that they were
wearing their shoes, high-top athletic shoes with Velcro fasteners at
the ankles, shoes that had cost someone dearly. They had probably been
too tired to take their sneakers off when they went to sleep. But why
hadn't Keisha or her sister-in-law followed behind, undoing
the straps and sliding the shoes gently down their ankles so as not to
wake them?
    Tess remembered running barefoot through her
summer days, careless and free, a stubbed toe or a dropped jar of
fireflies her biggest fears. On Washington Street, the children
couldn't even afford the luxury of running barefoot through
their own dreams.

Chapter 6
    A lmost
a decade had passed since Gramma Weinstein had given up her big old
house in Windsor Hills and moved into a cramped apartment in the
suburbs northwest of Baltimore. "So urban," she had
said, and the family had been pleased at this uncharacteristic
rhetorical restraint on Gramma's part. But in the end, the
changing neighborhood was less important to her than the cost of
maintaining the house, a rambling wreck of a place with rotting wooden
shingles and a weed-choked yard. "I am a woman of reduced
circumstances," she liked to tell her children and
grandchildren. "You know, Poppa didn't leave me
that well fixed." They knew, they knew.
    Yet Gramma still wanted to entertain on the
scale to which she had become accustomed when Poppa was alive. For
Judith's birthday dinner, she had invited all five of her
children, their spouses, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren.
It added up to twenty people, which would have made her apartment feel
like an overcrowded elevator, an elevator filled with tsotchkes and
china springer spaniels, each one with its own name and history.
    Her children had handled the situation as
they always did, by going behind her back.