In Big Trouble

'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? But 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. Deja 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.'