Laura Lippman (26 page)

B
efore setting out, she stopped at La Casita to ask Mrs. Nguyen to keep an eye on Esskay for the rest of the day. She found the two fast friends watching yet another telenovela—
Mi Amor, Mi Vida
—and sharing a bag of pork rinds.

“Don’t let her have too many of those,” Tess cautioned. Esskay gave her a smug look, confident that she could charm the birds out of the trees. Or at least pry the pork rinds from Mrs. Nguyen’s fingers.

“Okay. When you coming home?”

“No idea.”

“Better take a jacket.”

“Jacket? It’s eighty-five degrees out there.”

“See the sky?” Tess glanced at the little slice of sky visible from La Casita’s office. It was bright blue, with a few white fluffy clouds. “No,
other
sky,” Mrs. Nguyen said. “Blue norther coming in, from the northwest. Much rain, cool weather behind. Temperature drop twenty, thirty degrees just like that.” She snapped her greasy fingers. “Chris Marrou on Channel Five
said
.”

“I’ll take a jacket, Mom,” she said.

“And your gun!” Mrs. Nguyen called after Tess. “Always good for a girl to have her gun.”

The cool front was only a rumor as Tess drove, windows down, re-covering all the ground she had covered in the past few weeks. She drove down the St. Mary’s strip, where Primo’s was already advertising “Lunch Box Nite!” and a new band called the Urkels. But the creepy manager was at the bank, and the smiling bartender had no news of Crow. She circled the Morgue, a forlorn place in daylight, all its doors locked and bolted, even the back entrance off the loading dock. She found the duplex on Magnolia Drive, where Crow’s Volvo was still parked in the back. Had he left his car because he knew where to rendezvous with Emmie all along? She didn’t think so. She thought Crow had done what she was now doing, moving in ever-widening circles, trying to find Emmie by visiting what he knew of her past. But Emmie had the home-field advantage.

She headed to Hector’s, much scarier at three
P.M.
than it had been at two
A.M.
No Crow, no Emmie, she was told. Not since last Saturday night. Did she know if they would be there tomorrow? Doubtful, very doubtful.

The rhythm of driving was addictive, she couldn’t stop. As long as she was moving, she was doing something. No location, no matter how tangentially related, should be overlooked. She ate an early dinner at Earl Abel’s, glided past the Sterne house on Hermosa, cut over to Austin Highway, and saw the lonely band of picketers keeping vigil outside Sterne Foods. Her knowledge of San Antonio exhausted, she headed north, bypassing the town of Twin Sisters this time and going straight to the old Barrett place. She told herself she’d try Austin next, drive all night if she had to, watch the sun come up over I-35 and head back into San Antonio, repeat the whole crazy loop. Momentum was the only thing she had going for her.

Crime scene tape marked off the pool house at the Barrett place and a new pane of glass had replaced the one she had cut, but it was otherwise as she had first seen it. She shouldered her knapsack and walked around the house a few times before she peered through a kitchen window. There was a dark shape on the floor in the main room. Her stomach clutched—she really wasn’t up for finding another body. But this shadow was flat and still, nothing more than the corner of a blanket, or a bedroll.

A bedroll? There had been nothing lying on the floor when she had made her first inventory of the house. She tried the door, found it unlocked, and stepped over the threshold.

“Hello?” she called.

“What do you want?”

The voice came from behind her. Crow stood in the doorway, backlit so she couldn’t really see his face. The sky beyond him was unlike any she had ever seen—dark gray, with a stripe of navy blue on the horizon. A blue norther. She hadn’t realized the term was so literal.

“You’re alone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I am, too.”

“I know. I hid in the grove of pecan trees when I heard a car on the gravel driveway. I wouldn’t have come out if anyone had been with you. Even Rick. I’m not turning myself in, Tess. Not yet.”

“Not until tomorrow, right?”

He had come all the way into the house, and she could see his face now. He looked surprised and a little irritated. “How do you know about tomorrow? How did you find me?”

There was one answer for both questions. “Because I know you.”

“You did once,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“No, it’s the other way around. I know you better now than I ever did when we were together. Looking for you, I began to understand you, to find out things I should have known all along.” His face remained guarded, closed to her. “There were times when I didn’t understand you. But I always knew you wouldn’t be involved in murder, Crow.”

“Well, I’m
not
,” he said, sounding at once angry and relieved. “But I can’t go to the police, Tess. They’ll keep me, thinking I can tell them where Emmie is. I can’t. My only chance to find her is tomorrow.”

“What is it about tomorrow? You’ve been fixated on that date since I got here.”

“It’s All Souls’ Day—and the day of the All Soul Festival parade.”

The parade, Gus Sterne’s brainchild, his ego trip through the streets of San Antonio. “So what’s Emmie going to do, Crow? She can’t burn down a parade.”

Instead of answering, he walked past Tess into the main room, where he crouched in front of one of the built-in bookcases. From the lowest shelf, he pulled out a scrapbook, then sat on the bedroll, inviting Tess to sit by him.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked, opening the book. It was a pretty volume, with a moss green velvet cover and pale gray pages.

“On the old Barrett place, near Twin Sisters, somewhere between Austin and San Antonio, in the state of Texas, in the United States of America,” she answered dutifully.

“We’re at a trysting spot. Two lovers used to meet here. Two lovers forbidden to be lovers. They met here and they promised to love each other forever and ever, despite the world’s disapproval, despite all the obstacles in their path. One of them broke that promise, and the other one can neither forget nor forgive.”

He began flipping through the pages, and dust from pressed flowers rose into the air, their fragrance long gone. The first few pages were filled with photographs. A Polaroid, the kind taken in restaurants, of two men and three women, laughing over their margaritas. Tess recognized Marianna Conyers and Gus Sterne, guessed that she was looking at the long-dead Frank Conyers and the long-gone Ida Sterne. The third woman looked like Emmie—more correctly, like the woman Emmie was in the process of becoming. Lollie Sterne. Her obituary was pasted beneath the Polaroid and Emmie had circled her own name among the survivors, then written “Survivor’s List?” in the margin in the same red crayon.

“She thought it would make a good name for a band,” Crow explained.

“An odd photo to save.”

“It’s the only one she has. Gus couldn’t bear to have photos of Lollie around, after the murder. He put them away, planning to give them to Emmie one day. For obvious reasons, that never happened.”

Next page. A tall, handsome man with two blond children on tricycles. Emmie smiled into the camera with a charisma that had not yet soured into craziness. Little Clay stared at the ground, sulky and cross. Gus Sterne looked at Emmie. More family photos, clippings from the society pages, more fragile remains of old corsages. Gus Sterne and family at this gala or that. Ida was in some of these, then she disappeared, with no explanation or acknowledgment.

With or without her, the dynamic was always the same—Emmie looked into the camera, Clay looked away, features twisted into a pout or a frown, Gus looked at Emmie as if startled by a particularly lovely ghost. It was like watching a rosebud unfurl—Emmie looked more like Lollie with each passing year. Here she was as the princess of the Order of the Alamo, escorted by her grim-faced cousin. Emmie at a picnic. Emmie backstage, in costume for a school play.
Oklahoma
, given the gingham dress and the comical hat. The girl who can’t say no. Every picture told a story. Every picture told the same story: A radiant young woman, an unhappy boy, an older man who could not take his eyes off the young woman.

“Jesus,” Tess said.

“There’s more,” Crow said. She was barely listening.
Had Clay known his father and Emmie were lovers, or had he merely guessed? Technically, it wasn’t incest, not by blood, but Gus had raised Emmie as his daughter, so it might as well be
.

Crow turned another page, to a glossy photo razor cut from a book. This was a famous image, one Tess knew: The old
Life
photo of a woman lying on the hood of a crushed car after jumping from the Empire State Building.

“The twentieth century’s version of the Lily Maid of Astolat, who died for the love of Lancelot,” Crow said. “That’s Emmie’s fantasy. She’ll jump, and hit the hood of the car, the old Lincoln, and it will carry her down Broadway. I’ve told her dying isn’t as easy as it looks, but she’s determined. When she realized I intended to interfere with her plan, she decided to get rid of me. She’s the one who put the gun under my bed, then called the cops.”

“So you do think she killed Darden and Weeks.”

“No. Emmie’s not a killer. But she doesn’t care about them. She doesn’t care about anyone. Nothing is important to her, except making this grand, stupid,
insane
gesture.”

“All for Gus Sterne.”

Crow looked perplexed. “Who said anything about him?”

“You showed me the pictures.” She took the scrapbook from him, flipped back to the earlier pages. “You told me about the two lovers who met here secretly. I put it together.”

“You put it together wrong. Emmie wasn’t in love with Gus, for Christ’s sake. She’s in love with
Clay
.”

“Clay?” That raw, unfinished boy—someone was willing to die for him? But Tess was coming to realize that it was futile to try to understand who might love whom, or why. She thought of Kitty and Tyner, of Kitty and Keith, of Kitty and everyone. Of Rick and Kristina, even the squabbling couple on the bridge above the River Walk, comical to everyone, but not to one another. Lovers made sense only to themselves.

“Since high school,” Crow said, answering one of her many unvoiced questions. “Gus found out and forbade them to see each other. Clay, dutiful as ever, agreed. Emmie didn’t. That’s when she tried to burn the house down. When she left the psychiatric hospital, she followed Clay to Austin and they started again, meeting here. Then, about a year ago, Clay suddenly broke off all contact, with no explanation. In May he moved back to San Antonio—and into his father’s house. He chose Gus over Emmie. At least, that’s how she sees it.”

“May—that’s about the same time a band called Poe White Trash arrived in Austin.”

Crow nodded ruefully. “Yep. I was looking for a girl singer. She was in the market for an accomplice to her self-destruction. We both got more than we bargained for.”

“Did she tell you her whole saga, or did you just figure it out?”

“A little of both. I knew about her mother’s murder before I met her—she wasn’t shy about milking her past, whether for publicity or sympathy. One night up here the two of us ended up on a real maudlin drunk, literally crying in our beer. I showed her my broken heart, she showed me hers. She told me she had a fantasy about killing herself in front of Clay. Later she denied everything, said it was the liquor talking. But I had already seen the scrapbook. Besides, liquor’s a pretty good truth serum. I’ve never known anyone to lie when they were drunk.” He looked at her. “Once, when you had a lot to drink, you said…someone else’s name in bed.”

She didn’t remember this, but nor did she doubt it. “You know, liquor isn’t so much a truth serum as it is a paint thinner. It strips a lot of stuff away, takes you down to the old finishes. I am so over my past, Crow.”

“As of when?”

“As of this morning.”

He had nothing to say to that. Some things were so stupid they had to be true.

“You know, she may have been exaggerating,” Tess said. “Emmie’s definitely a drama queen.”

“No, she’s going to kill herself, and she’s going to make sure Clay sees the whole thing. When I couldn’t talk her out of it, I thought I might at least be able to stop her.”

“How do you know it’s going to be at the parade?”

“I don’t, for a fact. But Sterne Foods is a fortress, she can’t get to him there. Ditto the house on Hermosa. Besides, she has to
jump
, that’s part of the fantasy. Falling to her death, falling in love. The parade route has a nice tall building in a key spot.” He frowned. “Although not necessarily tall enough. I’ve tried to impress that upon her. There’s a real chance she’ll only cripple herself. Or kill someone else, a spectator along the route. A child, even.”

The wind was kicking up, but the chill Tess felt had nothing to do with the weather.

“Why did Gus care if Clay and Emmie were together, anyway? They were the children of first cousins. They could have married in most states.”

“Gus said she would hurt him, and he couldn’t bear to see his son hurt.” Crow’s face was sad and drawn in the strange gray-blue light. “As if you can ever spare anyone the hurt of loving anyone.”

She reached for his hand, unsure whether to hold it or pat it. She ended up tugging on his index finger. “I’m sorry, Crow.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Everything?” It still didn’t seem like enough.

The rain Mrs. Nguyen had predicted started then, as heavy and sudden as any storm Tess had ever experienced. It clattered on the tin roof, cascaded from the pecan-clogged gutters. It was as if watery drapes had been thrown over the world, blotting out everything.

“My car windows!” She ran through the rain to roll them up. When she returned, soaked to the skin, Crow was still sitting on the bedroll. For some reason, he seemed more surprised to see her now than he had been when she first arrived.