In Big Trouble

Argyle. There was no husband's name twinned with hers, and no coy initials to disguise the fact of a woman alone. Tess liked that in a woman, but only because it made a private investigator's job easier. She wouldn't have her own home number in the phone book for anything. Like most people who made their livings invading the privacy of others, she had become intensely protective of her own.

'Don't people know how easy it is to find them?' she asked Esskay. The dog appeared to think about this for a moment, then nudged Tess with her nose, demanding another cookie. Tess gave her a liver treat instead.

'Most people,' Tess amended. 'Everybody but the one person we want to find.'

As it happened, Marianna Barrett Conyers wasn't quite that easy to find. According to the map, her house sat somewhere among a curving grid of streets in a place known as Alamo Heights, but Tess kept ending up on a long, narrow road below a flood plain, which took her away from the neighborhood and into another, similar- looking one on the wrong side of the highway. Finally, after she had crossed back for the third time, she found the right house.

It looked shy, if a house could be called that. The stucco exterior had been painted a soft olive green, the trim just one shade darker, allowing the house to disappear into the trees and plantings around it. Don't notice me, the house murmured. Drive on by, leave me alone.

A maid in a gray uniform answered the door, a tiny Mexican-American woman brandishing a broom. She looked at Tess as if she were a piece of dirt she wanted to sweep away as quickly as possible.

'You want to see Mrs. Conyers? What for? Who are you? She know you? I didn't think so. What do you want?'

Although the maid barely came up to her collarbone, Tess found herself taking a step back, out of arm's length, if not broom's length. 'It's about what happened up at her country place,' she said when the maid finally ran out of breath. She assumed Sheriff Kolarik had been in touch by now, that she need not go into too much gory detail.

'They've been here. She knows. It's got nothing to do with her. Goodbye. We don't want any.' The maid started to close the door on her, as Tess braced it with her foot. She didn't want to come on too strong, but she wasn't leaving without making her best effort.

'There are still things that have to be…discussed.' Tess was trying to imply an official role without claiming one. 'I was the one who found the body, you know.'

'Really?' The maid was intrigued, but only for a moment. 'So what?'

A voice called out from somewhere within the house. 'Oh, let her in, Dolores. I guess I can stand two callers in one day.'

Reluctantly the maid opened the door so Tess could pass, watching her to make sure she wiped her feet. Tess had thought she looked neat and professional, in her narrow, ankle-length skirt of blue plaid and a simple white T-shirt. She had even borrowed an iron from Mrs. Nguyen and gone to the trouble of putting her hair up. Dolores's sour gaze made her feel grubby and mussed.

Although the pale peach walls of the foyer were unadorned, the small study to which Tess was escorted looked as if a particularly ghoulish souvenir shop had exploded among the plain furnishings. Tess couldn't understand why anyone as wealthy as Marianna Barrett Conyers appeared to be would fill her home with such tacky, morbid things. One item might have suggested a certain camp sensibility, but this was true overkill, a virtual gallery devoted to death and rot.

A life-sized skeleton in 1890s garb walked a skeleton dog, grinning mouth clamped on a cigar, a corseted lady friend at his side. Other skeletons gazed from old woodcuts, while the built-in bookshelves held even more of their bony kin. There was a skeleton Mexican mariachi band, a skeleton bride and groom, a skeleton typing maniacally at a desk, her fluff of cotton ball hair standing on end, her head bouncing on a coiled spring of a neck.

Yet the skeletons proved to be the least ominous offerings here. A bright sun leered from the wall, a gaudy ceramic cathedral rose in the corner. But the most hideous piece by far was a flat-chested mermaid, wings sprouting from her bony shoulder blades, face frozen in a Munch-like scream. Just having this thing was in her house would give her nightmares, Tess thought.

'Do you like her, my little la sirena?' asked the woman sitting in a wing chair near the window.

Tess's high school Spanish was no help, but the context was obvious. La sirena, the siren. 'Well, she's literally neither fish nor fowl, isn't she?' Tess took a seat on carved pine chair. The furniture, at least, was normal. 'Interesting. All your things are…so interesting.'

'Yes, I've been collecting for years.' It was hard to see the woman's face, for the trees around the house kept the room dark. She had a glass of ice water at her side and a book in her lap, but Tess didn't see how she could read a single word in such deep shadows.

'I'm Marianna Barrett Conyers,' the woman added, as if Tess might not know whose doorbell she had rung.

'I'm Tess Monaghan. I found the body, up at your country place yesterday.'

'Yes.'

Yes, what? Yes, you're Tess? Yes, you found a body? Yes, I have a country place?

'I told the deputies that I had gotten lost. That's not exactly what happened.'

'Yes.' A little less emphatic this time, more of a question.

'I was looking for someone. Someone who's been staying at your house.'

She merely nodded at this piece of information and took a long sip from her water glass. Marianna Barrett Conyers was probably in her late forties, not much older than Kitty, but she seemed to cultivate the dress and aspect of an older woman. In Tess's admittedly limited experience, upper-class women knew how to be young and they knew how to be old, but few settled comfortably in their middle years. They either clung to a kittenish, jejeune look, with a little help from a friendly plastic surgeon, or they chose to mummify themselves prematurely. Mrs. Conyers's hair was set in stiff, careful waves, and her makeup was expertly thorough. Not just a little lipstick and mascara, but the whole deal, from foundation to eyebrow pencil. For all that, she was a woman better described as handsome rather than pretty, with blunt features that looked like a hasty first draft for a face.

'You were looking for someone,' she repeated, as if thinking about this. 'But you didn't tell the sheriff that.'

'No.'

'Why not?'

Tess needed only a second to come up with a plausible lie, but she had a feeling Marianna noticed that second. 'My relationships with my clients are privileged.'

'You're a lawyer, then?'

'No, but I work for one.'

'A private investigator.'

'Yes.'

'Not from here.'

'No.'

'This reminds me of a game,' said Marianna, closing her book and resting her chin on her palm. 'Twenty questions. How many do I have left?'

'How about if we take turns and I ask a few? Did you have anyone staying at your house this summer?'

'Obviously I had at least one guest, the gentleman who was staying in the pool house.' She smiled, pleased with herself.

'Did you have any invited guests?'

'Not precisely.'

'Imprecisely.'

Whatever delight Marianna had found in this conversation had disappeared as it quickly as it had arrived. She was bored now, uninterested.

'My goddaughter has a key, she's allowed to come and go as she pleases. Someone might as well get some use out of the place. I haven't been up there for years, and I don't have any children of my own.'

'Is your goddaughter a young blond woman named Emmie, who sometimes goes by the name of Dutch?' Tess