She thought of girls she had not seen since Miss Porter’s, at least two in the area. She called them both. The first number, she got an answering machine and no one ever called back. The second number, she reached Jessica herself. They arranged to meet Sunday noon at a coffee shop in Georgetown. Jessica sounded surprised but agreed at once—probably bored silly to be home with her parents. Melissa mentioned the meeting casually as if she had been seeing Jessica all summer. “Jessica—who’s she?” “You met her at Miss Porter’s.” To a contemporary she would have described Jessica as a plump blond with butch hair and a talent for drinking quarts of beer without getting visibly drunk. To Rosemary, she said, “She’s the daughter of a career bureaucrat in the Department of the Interior. Forestry stuff. Her mother is from Virginia and also claims to be a collateral descendant of Robert E. Lee. We talked about it when she was my friend at Miss Porter’s.” “I remember. Your father checked it out, and the claim is legitimate.
