"It still is. I only got beaten up once in four years. It was a school record."
So it was that Tess's Toyota headed out of Baltimore on Route 40 on Sunday morning, bound for Charlottesville, with Esskay the only passenger on board. Although it was slightly out of their way, she went west, then south along the Shenandoah Parkway. That kept them out of Washington traffic and gave Esskay a chance to see the fall leaves.
Tess knew the first part of the route well enough, from the dozens of school trips to Skyline Drive and Luray Caverns, where she always had to relearn the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. "C for ceiling, stalactites hang down." Another brain cell wasted.
But once south of the Natural Bridge, it was all new to her. She wasn't much of a traveler. There had been the road trips for crew in college, a few trips to New York, a wedding in Chicago, one spring break on the Outer Banks. When there had been time, there had been no money, and now that there was money, at least a little of it, there was no time. Or maybe she just wasn't inclined to make the time.
The truth was, she had never really understood the lure of travel. Strange faces, strange sheets, upset routines. And for what? To look at some scenery, as she was doing now. Pretty enough, but nothing to leave home for. Tess remembered Kitty making a present of her childhood Viewfinder. Tess would have been around six or seven at the time, so Kitty was the glamorous young-old aunt, not even out of college yet. Tess had dutifully held the Viewfinder to her face and depressed the switch, taking in the Golden Gate and Hoover Dam, Mesa Verde and the Four Corners, the Astrodome and the Alamo. (Of course she knew the Alamo.)
The only places that touched her were close to home. Poe's grave, for example-she swore she had felt an icy breeze on her cheek, as if he had just passed by. GreenMount Cemetery, home to John Wilkes Booth.
Maybe it wasn't local places after all, but a perverse fondness for graveyards.
Once in Charlottesville, Mrs. Ransome's careful directions led her past the university and into the heart of an old residential neighborhood with mature trees and substantial houses. Tess had expected something a little more ramshackle, a run-down bungalow with a "Property Is Theft" sign on the unlocked front door. But the Ransomes' house sat far back on a well-kept lawn, an Arts and Crafts bungalow at odds with its more traditional neighbors, but undeniably pretty and charming.
A small woman in baggy print pants and bright purple sweatshirt, her dark hair an uncontrollable mass of curls, opened the front door. She looked just as Tess had imagined her-a casual refugee from the sixties, indifferent to fashion and appearance.
"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. Déjà 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.