In Big Trouble

by Laura Lippman

  "I was?" As Tess recalled, Crow had committed at least one felony under her tutelage. Then again, that was before they started dating, and it had not been her idea.

  "He finished school at last. Even the breakup had its positive aspects. He went to Texas, decided to get serious about his music."

  The conversation seemed increasingly surreal, and Tess found herself conscious of the wine she had been drinking all evening. But perhaps Mrs. Ransome had been sitting by her phone, dialing the same number that no longer rang in Texas, sipping her own drink?

  "Well, it was nice to talk to you at last," she offered lamely. Mrs. Ransome seemed to know so much about her, while Tess couldn't remember anything more about Crow's parents other than a few scraps of details. Had she not been paying attention? Sometimes she had tuned out Crow's happy prattling. It hadn't seemed to require close attention.

  "I'm sure you'll hear from him soon," she said. "Crow's always been responsible."

  "That's my point," Mrs. Ransome said. "He's too responsible to do this to us, unless something is horribly wrong. We were thinking of hiring someone—"

  "I'd be glad to help you," Tess interrupted. "Make some inquiries, hook you up with someone in Texas."

  "—but your call seems providential, I realize now. Not to sound too Celestine Prophecy-ish, because I'm not that kind of person. Usually. But things do happen for a reason, don't you think? I need a private investigator and here's one calling me, one I know to be a fine, trustworthy person."

  "I'm really not—" Tess stopped. It wasn't that she didn't consider herself fine and trustworthy, it was just that Mrs. Ransome's exalted opinion sounded suspiciously like one shoe dropping.

  Mrs. Ransome wasn't listening. It was possible that she had never really listened. From the moment she heard Tess's voice on the line, she had been working toward just this, focusing on a single goal in her own gracious way, intent on throwing down this second shoe.

  "Tess Monaghan, would you find my son?"

  Chapter 3

  Thirty-six hours later, Tess was en route to Charlottesville. She owed Crow's parents the courtesy of a face-to-face rejection, or so she had rationalized, only then could she make them see the sense of finding an investigator who knew the territory. There were worse ways to spend a crisp Sunday in October than driving along the edge of the Shenandoahs.

  Strangely, Tyner had wanted to come along, claiming she was too nice, that she was just a girl who couldn't say no. But it seemed to Tess that he was desperate for a distraction. He was restless lately, bored with his job and his routines, which surprised her. She had thought such feelings belonged exclusively to the young.

  "Don't worry, I'm not going to take the work," she had assured him. "I just want to make sure they hire someone reputable, someone who won't run up a huge bill and never do anything more than place a classified ad."

  "Your Toyota can't make Charlottesville," Tyner had said. "We'll have to take my van."

  "As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, what's this ‘we' shit, Kemo Sabe? Besides, a car with 130,000 miles on it can easily go 400 miles more."

  "But maybe not all in one day. And if you should decide to take the case—"

  "It would be a disservice to them to take their money. The only thing I know about Texas is ‘Remember the Maine.'"

  "‘Remember the Alamo.' ‘Remember the Maine' was the Spanish-American War."

  "See? That's how little I know."

  Tyner gave her a sour look. "I remember when the public school education in Baltimore was something to brag about."

  "It still is. I only got beaten up once in four years. It was a school record."

  So it was that Tess's Toyota headed out of Baltimore on Route 40 on Sunday morning, bound for Charlottesville, with Esskay the only passenger on board. Although it was slightly out of their way, she went west, then south along the Shenandoah Parkway. That kept them out of Washington traffic and gave Esskay a chance to see the fall leaves.

  Tess knew the first part of the route well enough, from the dozens of school trips to Skyline Drive and Luray Caverns, where she always had to relearn the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. "C for ceiling, stalactites hang down." Another brain cell wasted.

  But once south of the Natural Bridge, it was all new to her. She wasn't much of a traveler. There had been the road trips for crew in college, a few trips to New York, a wedding in Chicago, one spring break on the Outer Banks. When there had been time, there had been no money, and now that there was money, at least a little of it, there was no time. Or maybe she just wasn't inclined to make the time.

  The truth was, she had never really understood the lure of travel. Strange faces, strange sheets, upset routines. And for what? To look at some scenery, as she was doing now. Pretty enough, but nothing to leave home for. Tess remembered Kitty making a present of her childhood Viewfinder. Tess would have been around six or seven at the time, so Kitty was the glamorous young-old aunt, not even out of college yet. Tess had dutifully held the Viewfinder to her face and depressed the switch, taking in the Golden Gate and Hoover Dam, Mesa Verde and the Four Corners, the Astrodome and the Alamo. (Of course she knew the Alamo.)

  The only places that touched her were close to home. Poe's grave, for example—she swore she had felt an icy breeze on her cheek, as if he had just passed by. GreenMount Cemetery, home to John Wilkes Booth.

  Maybe it wasn't local places after all, but a perverse fondness for graveyards.

  Once in Charlottesville, Mrs. Ransome's careful directions led her past the university and into the heart of an old residential neighborhood with mature trees and substantial houses. Tess had expected something a little more ramshackle, a run-down bungalow with a "Property Is Theft" sign on the unlocked front door. But the Ransomes' house sat far back on a well-kept lawn, an Arts and Crafts bungalow at odds with its more traditional neighbors, but undeniably pretty and charming.

  A small woman in baggy print pants and bright purple sweatshirt, her dark hair an uncontrollable mass of curls, opened the front door. She looked just as Tess had imagined her—a casual refugee from the sixties, indifferent to fashion and appearance.

  "I'll show you how to come through the back way," she said, using a hillbilly accent, perhaps for comic effect. "A little easier to get in through the kitchen. Besides, I just mopped the front hall."

  "It's good to meet you, Mrs. Ransome." Tess held out her hand, to forestall the hug she feared was coming. Bostonians were supposed to be reserved, but you never knew.

  "Miz Ransome?" The woman squinted at her, confused. "Oh, you mean Miz Kendall. She's in her studio, finishing up. But she'll be in directly to see you. I told her on the walkie-talkie box that you was here."

  The garden behind the house, screened from the front by a privet hedge, came as something of a surprise, a hidden art gallery, much bigger than one would guess from the street. Here, large bronze sculptures in a variety of styles sat among weaving paths.

  "I don't think the sculpture garden at the Baltimore Museum of Art has as much stuff," Tess said to Esskay, who was inspecting one of the more abstract works.

  "No, but it's of better quality," said a tall woman who was coming along the path, from a cottage at the rear of the garden. She wore a dusty green smock over her clothes and there was a streak of something on her right cheek, but she was otherwise impeccably groomed. Her dark hair was worn up and held in place by tortoise-shell combs. Tess had tried the same style herself, but her hair always slipped from whatever moorings she used, and she had gone back to her serviceable, dependable braid.

  "Tess," the woman said, studying her. "You look just as I imagined you. Well—not imagined, really. Crow had so many pictures of you."

  He did? That was news to Tess. She had bought her first camera when she started working as a private detective.

  "Mrs.—Ms. Kendall?" She held out her hand.

  The woman ignored her hand and embraced her. "Call me Felicia."

  "Felicia Kendall? Bu
t I've heard of you."

  Felicia Kendall blushed, as if embarrassed by her fame. "I hope Crow wasn't boasting."

  "Quite the opposite. He made it sound as if his mother dabbled in ceramics as a hobby. But you're Felicia Kendall. Your work is famous enough so that even a philistine like myself knows who you are. I remember when you received the commission for the new H. L. Mencken sculpture. Crow never said a word."

  Felicia smiled warily. "Children see their parents differently than others do. I was always Mommy first. Which is as it should be."

  "Does that mean that you put Crow's needs ahead of yours?" That would explain much, Tess thought. His happiness, his trust in the world.

  "No, not at all. In fact, we always believed Crow would be happier if we were happy. We left Boston and came to Charlottesville for that reason, even though Chris's career probably would have…traveled at a sharper trajectory if he had remained at Harvard."

  Again, Felicia blushed for no reason Tess could detect. Happy parents make happy children. Tess wondered if her own parents had ever considered anything so radical. Not that her parents had been unhappy, but they had been more focused on their relationship with each other than their relationship with her. She had often felt like an outsider in their house, the sole disruption to what otherwise would have been an uninterrupted idyll of passionate fights and more passionate rapprochements.

  "Are you tired after your drive?" Felicia asked. "I've made up Crow's room for you. Or perhaps you'd like a drink, a cup of tea or coffee? It's still warm enough to sit out here, at least before the sun goes down."

  Before Tess could answer, there were footsteps on the path, the scrape of the latch on the garden gate. Tess saw something catch light in Felicia's face, and she wondered what it would be like to be that happy about another person's comings and goings, even after twenty-five years.

  Then she saw Chris Ransome, breathing heavily, his face glowing after what must have been a long, glorious run. He was tall, like his son, with short black hair, the same pale, sharp face, and the same long legs.

  And he was at least ten years younger than Felicia Kendall. Possibly fifteen.

  "Tess Monaghan," he said, holding out his hand. "It's a pleasure."

  She did not take his hand, but stood looking at the couple standing together—the man so much like his son, the tall, handsome woman with her upswept dark hair and broad shoulders. She had seen this couple before. She had seen them reflected in the glass of her own terrace doors, in the windows of the shops in Fells Point. A younger version of this man, and a younger version of this woman, but still so much the same that she felt a convulsive shiver. Déjà vu was, she knew, simply a matter of the brain getting things in the wrong order. But she really had seen this couple, many, many times. "Imagine us just like this, on our Christmas card," Crow had said the first time they had slept together, catching her by the hip as she rose naked from the bed, making her face the mirror over her bureau. It had been the most appalling thing anyone had ever said to her after sex. It had also been the most appealing.

  So now she knew: Crow had wanted a girl just like the girl who married dear young dad.

  That night, Tess was lying on top of the bedspread, staring at Crow's Dave Matthews Band poster. She felt as if she had said nothing but no all evening. No, she didn't want the job. No, she didn't want another helping of potatoes, although they were delicious, thank you. No, she didn't know if she could work in Texas, didn't even know if she was licensed to carry there, wasn't even sure she was allowed to have her gun here with her in Virginia. No, please don't give Esskay any more ham, it had too much sodium. No, she didn't know anything, hadn't heard from Crow until the letter had arrived. No, no, no.

  Yet Felicia and Chris still hadn't given up. They probably thought it a master stroke, putting her in this boyhood room, full of Crow artifacts. But it had only strengthened her resolve to get away from them and Charlottesville. Felicia and Chris, who had given their son everything he ever wanted, seemed determined to give her back to him.

  What they didn't understand was that he didn't want her, and she didn't want him.

  A knock at the door, and Chris Ransome poked his head in.

  "May I come in?"

  "It's your house."

  He took the desk chair, a scarred wooden one that looked as if it had caught the overflow of several experiments with an old-fashioned chemistry set, the dangerous kind.

  "You were so quiet at dinner." A slight smile. "Except when it came to a particular monosyllable, you hardly said anything."

  "I have your best interests at heart. You're right to be concerned, you just need to hire someone who knows Texas."

  "But you know Crow."

  "Do I?"

  Chris Ransome's hands beat an unconscious tattoo on Crow's desk, which was covered with a boy's various collections—bird nests, rocks, arrowheads. The whole room had a museum quality to it, preserved not so much as if Crow might return, but as if future generations might wish to see it exactly as it was. And here's where the famous composer-artist-future President played with model airplanes and studied the night sky with this Nature Store telescope. Tess's parents had turned her room into a sewing room the moment she graduated from college.

  "I'm not sure what you mean, Tess."

  "I mean—" It seemed petulant to continue lying on the bed, so she swung her feet to the side of the bed and sat up. "I mean I knew your son for more than a year, worked alongside him in my aunt's bookstore, dated him for almost six months. But I didn't know anything about him. Either I wasn't listening or he wasn't talking. A little of both, I think."

  "What didn't you know?"

  "I didn't know his mother was Felicia Kendall, for one thing. And that you were some hotshot at Harvard."

  "Not particularly vital information, if you ask me. Besides, we moved to Charlottesville so Crow could be someone other than the son of the famous sculptress and the ‘Harvard hotshot,' to use your terminology. A parent's fame can crush a child."

  "Felicia said you came here because you couldn't be happy in Boston."

  "Did she?" Chris fiddled with the placement of the bird nests, lining them up, although they looked perfectly aligned to Tess, then moving them around as if they were cups in an ornithological version of three-card monte.

  "Were you famous?" she asked on a hunch, a vague memory stirring. "Or notorious?"

  Chris smiled. His resemblance to Crow was still disorienting for Tess. In many ways, he was what she had thought she wanted when she was unhappy with Crow—a grown-up version of same.

  "Now see, that's why Felicia and I want to hire you. You're intuitive."

  "Don't flatter me, please. Just answer."

  Chris looked like a child forced to recite for company. "It's hard to imagine now, but twenty-five years ago Felicia and I were the scandal du jour, at least in our hometown of Boston. I hasten to add that the threshold for notoriety was much lower back then."

  "What did you do?"

  "We had an affair." He smiled at Tess's is-that-all-there-is expression. "Shocking, isn't it? Shocking to think it was once shocking. Felicia's husband was my thesis adviser at Harvard. I was his star student, I was going to bring home all the big prizes one day. I had theories that were going to change the world. Instead, I turned my own world upside down. I fell in love."

  He rearranged the bird nests yet again, but his voice now had a warm, dreamy quality. He liked this part of the story.

  "I fell in love and Felicia became pregnant. Wait—that construction makes it sound as if it were something she did. When it was really something I wanted. I got her pregnant, because I was desperate for her. I didn't think she'd leave her husband just for me, but I knew she would leave for a child. It's not that she didn't love me, but Felicia was a careful, deliberate woman. She didn't have much experience in doing what she wanted, as opposed to doing what was expected."

  "But you changed that."

  "Eventually. Crow arrived before her divorce w
as final, and we never did get around to marrying officially. Yet it was the age difference that really scandalized people. Our ages, and the things I supposedly ‘gave up' for her. I was twenty-two she was thirty-three. Silly, isn't it, how age trips people up?"

  Tess, who had agonized at times over the six-year difference between her and his son, did not answer Chris's question. "Does Crow know all this?"

  "Oh yes." Chris frowned. "Actually, he may not know we never married. Little boys don't care much about such things, do they? They don't ask to see wedding pictures. If he had asked, we would have told him, but I don't remember it coming up. We celebrate our anniversary every year, only it's the anniversary of the night we met. May 30. A Memorial Day weekend party. Felicia was wearing pale green."

  Tess ransacked her memory, trying to find some little piece of the story. Crow must have told her at least part of it. Yet nothing was there.

  "I didn't know any of this," she said, intending to sound plaintive, but achieving only a low-grade whininess. "Yet Crow knew how my parents met, what they did for a living. He knew which bars fell into my father's territory as a Baltimore city liquor inspector. He even knew what my mother does at the National Security Agency and that's technically classified."

  "She's a supervisor, right? A tall woman, like you, given to matching her shoes to her outfits as exactly as possible."

  Tess stalked over to Crow's bureau, where his childhood collection of Star Wars figures had been laid out on a rough woven cloth. "See? You even know how my mom dresses. That's more than I knew about Felicia. How can you say I knew Crow at all?"

  "Crow is one of the world's listeners."

  "He chatters all the time," Tess objected.

  "Yes, he does. But he never really gives out any information about himself, does he? He talks about the latest thing he's read, the song he's working on, something strange and wonderful he saw on the street. But he doesn't talk about himself. He's unusual that way. He fools a lot of people into thinking they're close to him, but few really are. All the words, all that chatter, is a way of keeping people at a distance."