In Big Trouble

'And you are…'

'I don't know,' he said. 'What am I?'

Tess blushed. 'I mean, how old are you?'

'I'll be eighteen in April.'

Jesus. This one wasn't even legal.

'And you met Kitty…'

He put his hands on his hips and stared her down. 'So, do you like ever ask a direct question, or do you just play this fill-in-the-blanks game? 'Cause I gotta tell you, it's annoying.'

'Look, Keith, I'm just trying to figure out how my aunt ended up in what is probably an illegal relationship even under the statutes of this backwards state.'

'Keith? I'm not Keith, I'm Maury, his son. And who are you calling backward? As I recall, Maryland was all over the news not long ago because a thirteen-year-old married her twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend.' He stopped, then allowed himself a sly smile. 'So you thought I was getting it on with Kitty? Crazy. Not that I would mind scrounging my dad's leftovers. He's got pretty good taste.'

'Keith is your dad?'

'Right. He's at Whole Foods, picking up some stuff for vegetarian lasagne.' Maury suddenly looked the way Esskay did when some off-limits food was simmering on the stove. 'We're death on red meat around here.'

'Texas vegetarians? Isn't that an oxymoron?' Great, she had come all this distance to a place famous for barbecue and fajitas, only to end up in a household where meat was banned.

A sputtering bright yellow Triumph pulled up on the side street.

'There's my dad now. Guess I'll go help him with the groceries.' He was back to smiling, bouncy Maury now. 'He's not threatened a bit, if I lend him a hand.'

The man who got out of the car was short and stocky, pot-bellied in truth, with thinning hair. Maybe he had fallen apart after Kitty had thrown him over. The Kitty that Tess knew took up with young men like Maury, not pudgy guys of her own age, and ran through them as quickly as Esskay devoured rawhide bones. Keith's face was round, pleasant but ordinary. Maury's genes obviously came from some long-legged, long-ago stunner of a leftover, to use his parlance.

'Tesser,' Keith said, balancing his canvas grocery sack in one arm, pulling her to him with the other and kissing her on the cheek. 'Not to be overly familiar, but I was almost your uncle, you know.'

'Oh, sure.' She had never heard of him and he knew her family nickname. That seemed fair.

'A magnificent woman, your aunt. I just couldn't see moving to Baltimore, leaving my life here. And she felt the same way about Texas.'

'Uh-huh.'

'I'm glad we could finally be friends, although it wasn't always easy. When she called today and asked me to put you up, I couldn't have been happier. I look forward to us getting to know each other.'

'Absolutely.'

Tess grabbed Esskay's leash and followed Keith and Maury into Quadling Country, wondering if anyone ever really knew anyone.

Texas was hot in October, with no promise of the autumn weather that had settled over the mid-Atlantic. Tess-traveling with Maury at Keith's insistence-drove to Crow's old neighborhood on the city's north side, a place called Hyde Park, beyond the University of Texas. She tried not to complain, but the Toyota 's air conditioner had given up just last month. Back in Baltimore, this had not seemed particularly urgent.

'I don't see how you stand it,' she said for the fifth or sixth time, shrugging out of her leather jacket, then the denim shirt she had worn over her T-shirt.

'Stand what?' Maury asked. 'Wait, turn here, this is the block you're looking for.'

The address to which Crow's parents had sent checks through the month of August was an old Victorian, cut up into at least six apartments by the count of the mailboxes. Names had been affixed randomly-one with an old- fashioned label-maker, others with scraps of paper held in place by layers and layers of Scotch tape. Groves, Perelman, Lane, Gundell, Linthicum. None of the names meant anything to Tess. She rang the bell for number 5, which had been Crow's apartment.

'No answer,' she told Maury.

'Would you answer if you were an illegal sublettor? Like Dad told you over dinner last night, there's no way an apartment is sitting vacant in this market. The question is whether the landlord kicked Crow out to up the rates, or if he found someone to take his place. Let's try the door.' He started up the steps ahead of Tess, but she passed him on the landing and reached the door marked No. 5 before he did.

'I'm looking for Crow Ransome,' she called through the door, after knocking and getting no reply. She heard footsteps creeping toward the door and away again, as if someone had peered through the fisheye and decided not to answer. 'Look, this door is so thin I can practically hear you breathing through it.'

'You got the wrong place,' a voice called from the inside. 'Never heard of anyone by that name.'

'No, it's the right place. And I know whose name is on the lease here, and it sure isn't yours,' Tess said, her voice louder now. 'I'd hate to track down the landlord and tell him you're not the one on the lease.'

Her bluff brought results. A marijuana-laden breeze drifted into the hall as a skinny man in baggy plaid shorts opened the door. He had red hair pulled back in a scraggly pony tail and pink, blotchy skin. His hairline was as high as it could be and still be considered a hairline at all.

'You with someone official?' he asked.

'I'm a private detective looking for the man who used to live here. Crow Ransome. You know him?'

'Never heard of any Crow.'

'Maybe you knew him as Ed or Edgar.'

'Eddie?' Eddie? 'Okay, sure, a little. I mean, I met him when I took over the place. I gave him cash up front for the next six months, he pays the landlady. He makes an extra 25 dollars a month on the deal. Everybody's happy, you know?'

'Twenty-five dollars isn't that much. Why didn't he just break the lease and have his mail forwarded to wherever he was living?'

The man was beginning to relax, or maybe he was just too stoned to stay anxious. He yawned, leaned against the doorjamb, scratched the gingery hair under one freckled arm. 'I don't know. He had moved in with this chick, and he needed every peso he could get. Maybe he wasn't sure it was going to last. We kind of left it open. I knew if he showed up here before his lease was up, I had to let him have it back. Those are the breaks.'

Moved in with some chick. Tess was having a little problem getting past that one piece of information. When she didn't say anything right away, Maury jumped in.

'So when was the last time you saw him?'

He needed to think about this. 'September? Anyway, a while ago. He came by, picked up his mail, not that there was much, a letter from Virginia, which he told me to mark ‘Return to sender.' Although he always looked real carefully, as if he thought something else might be in there, too. He told me he was going to be out of pocket for a while, but promised he'd keep paying the rent. I hope so. I'd hate to lose this place.'

From what Tess could see through the open door, it wouldn't be much of a loss. The remodeling of the old house had been done as cheaply as possible. The walls looked like painted cardboard, the kitchen wedged into one corner was nothing more than a two-burner stove and a half-sized refrigerator.

'Did you have a number for Crow? For Ed, I mean.'

'A number? Oh, you mean like for the phone.' He wandered back into the apartment, scratching himself at intervals, until he found a scrap of paper on the floor, near his own phone. 'I think this is it.'

Tess glanced at it, then checked it against her date book. 'This is the number he had here, before it was disconnected.'

'Oh, yeah, that makes sense. It was disconnected for a while, but I got it turned back on.' He crumpled it into a ball and tossed it on the floor.

'What about the girl, the one he had moved in with?' This was Maury again. Tess would have to tell him later that they were not partners in this enterprise, that he was to stop asking questions. 'Did you know her? Do you know where they lived?'

Another yawn, another scratch. 'Naw. I saw her once, when Eddie stopped by. She was pretty, like a little