to confront Crow alone. Perceptive Keith had told Maury that he had to cover the store while Keith ran errands that afternoon. She had left him sulking behind the counter, pretending to read a new comic book.
The town of Blanco wasn't much more than a small grouping of buildings and a sign warning that the speed limit had dropped. Tess, still wedded to her Old Western version of Texas, had expected a dusty Main Street flanked by late nineteenth-century buildings with porches, maybe a saloon. It passed by in less than five minutes, and in another five minutes she had found the dance hall and convenience store that seemed to be the sum of Twin Sisters.
The girl behind the counter was bright-eyed and friendly, a little too happy to be working as a cashier in the local convenience store. Just the kind of personality Tess had hoped to find-an outgoing busybody who engaged every passerby in conversation. The photograph of a boy in a football uniform was taped to the cash register.
'How're you doing today?' the girl asked, her voice as loud and enthusiastic as a big puppy on the loose.
'Fine, just fine,' Tess replied.
Experience had taught her it was better to come at things slantwise. People trusted you more if you didn't seem too focused. She grabbed a Coke, then tried to find some regional specialty among the junk food. Alas, another aspect of American life gone totally generic. While some of her favorites were missing-Goldenberg Peanut Chews, Fifth Avenues, Clark Bars-there didn't appear to be any local equivalents to take their place.
'You looking for something in particular?' the clerk asked.
'In a manner of speaking. I want something I've never had before.'
The girl's eyes widened, as if this was a strange, almost subversive thing to say.
'I mean, candy-wise,' Tess explained. 'What's the point of traveling if everything is the same wherever you go?'
'We've got some of these Mexican candies here by the cash register, pralines and such. These ones look like the Mexican flag.' The girl held up what appeared to be a block of solid sugar, striped red, green and white. The red had faded, as if the candy had been sitting out in the sun for a very long time. 'And you could always have a Big Red, I guess, instead of that Coke.'
'What does Big Red taste like?'
'Truthfully?' The girl looked around, making sure there was no one to overhear her. 'Ground-up pencil erasers. But it is local.'
'I guess I'll stick with the Coke. And a moon pie. I can't get that back home.'
'Really? There are places where they don't have moon pies? Imagine that.'
'Yeah. They say movie stars are moving out here, but I've never seen one. Of course, they're all up closer to Fredericksburg way, but you think we might get a little one. Like Pauly Shore.'
Tess laughed. The girl had a spark of wit to her. Maybe she'd escape Twin Sisters after all, if she could avoid getting knocked up by the football hero boyfriend.
'As it happens, I was up in Fredericksburg, looking for someone,' Tess said, pulling out the two photographs. 'Not a movie star, but maybe you recognize him?'
'I know this one,' she said, pointing to what Tess now thought of as the 'Ed' picture. 'He came in and bought groceries last month, just before school began. I remember, ‘cause I work the earlier shift in the summer. He was staying up at the Barretts' place.'
'Is Emmie Barrett a young woman with blond hair?'
'Oh, no'm.' Tess didn't find the shortened version of ma'am any less painful. 'But I know the blond girl you're talking about. I saw her, too, but she stayed in the car.'
'What did she look like?' Tess was counting on a woman to come up with something more precise than a china doll or Yoko Ono.
'Blond, like you said. Big eyes, or maybe they looked big 'cause her face is so skinny and small. She looks as if she hasn't been getting enough to eat, to tell you the truth.'
Could there be more than one blond woman in Crow's life? Tess couldn't decide if she would prefer this to the idea that he was traveling with some chameleon who appeared differently to everyone who met her.
'You remember the car?'
'Yes'm, because it was a real nice Volvo, but he counted his money out careful-like, as if he wasn't sure he would have enough to pay for the groceries and the gas.' Crow had driven a Volvo, a castoff car from his parents, complete with the private school stickers of his privileged youth. 'He was polite, I'll say that for him. A lot of the new folks coming through here aren't very nice.'
The girl's eyes, already so bright, seemed to shine with excitement. 'Is he in trouble?'
'Not at all,' Tess assured her. 'I've been hired to find him because-because he has a huge windfall waiting for him. Only heir to a large-well, I probably shouldn't say anymore.'
'My
Many minutes of chatter later, Tess emerged with the directions and a second moon pie. The Barrett place, as the helpful cashier had told her, was a weekend place owned by an old San Antonio family. Twenty minutes from the convenience store, she turned her Toyota onto a gravel driveway. A small limestone house stood at the end of a long fieldstone path. There was no car in the drive, Volvo or otherwise.
But he had been here. She trusted her information. More importantly, she trusted her feelings, and she could sense his presence here.
She walked up the path and tried the front door. Locked. She walked around to the rear, which had a small patio with a pool, overlooking the hills. Hill Country-she got it now. It really was quite pretty here-endless vistas of soft hills, blue sky, a temperature of eighty-five this late in October. The only ugly note were the gnarled and stunted trees, which bent toward the ground like sour old women. Some were pecans, Tess could see the nuts coming in. The others were a mystery to her. Cottonwoods? Maury had been prattling about something that sounded like Wee-satches as they drove around Austin, but she hadn't paid close attention to his travelogue.
The back door was locked, too. Tess went to the Toyota and returned with a glass cutter from the old- fashioned picnic hamper she kept in her trunk. She had been accumulating the tricks of her trade-the gun, the lock picks (which she couldn't quite master), and this sweet little glass cutter, her favorite by far. She removed one pane, complimenting herself on her neatness, put the piece of glass aside, reached in and unlocked the door.
The house looked unused. No, the house looked as if someone wanted it to look unused. An important distinction. Covers over the furniture, no dishes out, garbage emptied, nothing in the old-fashioned refrigerator except ice-in trays and caked on the sides. Dusty cans of pork and beans and succotash were the only things in the cupboard. But Tess was convinced that the house had been inhabited, and fairly recently.
She opened the cabinet below the sink, found a wrench and took apart the pipe. She had dropped enough earrings down the drain to know how to do this quickly and efficiently. Exactly what she had expected-a few pieces of pulpy bits that had been washed into the sink, rotted and ripe-smelling, but evidence that people had been here, and not that long ago.
She wandered through the small house, hopeful of finding more clues. Weekend houses were such strange places, sterile even when they weren't rented out to others. A line from a favorite short story surfaced in the strange little swamp of her mind: something about the secrets of summer houses, which no real house would deign to keep. Not only could she find no traces of Crow, but she really couldn't discern anything about the owners. Rich, presumably, because they had this place. Yet the house wasn't opulent, far from it. It looked sad and lonely to her, not so much neglected as disowned and forgotten.
She left the house, wiping her fingerprints from the surfaces she remembered touching, putting away her tools. What now? Where now? She found herself drawn back to the view. The sun was sinking below the hills, and the shadows were purple. In the violet light, she noticed a shed in a grove of trees that looked as if it had been converted into a pool house.
