Laura Lippman (25 page)

“Slow down,” Rick said, as she drained her glass for the third time. “It’s not a contest.”

“Just my luck. This is one thing I do really well.”

The Liberty was not quite as bustling as it had been when they had arrived an hour ago and she could hear the music over the speakers. She knew this melody. “That Lovin’ You Feeling Again,” the voices of Emmylou Harris and Roy Orbison entwined like a bower of wild roses. He gave her his love. She had wanted his heart. And some goddamn 2 percent, most likely. Tess hummed the last few bars as Orbison’s yodel faded away.

“See, you do like country music,” Rick said. His mouth was close to her ear, but it was all very brotherly and proper. A friend comforting a friend, nothing more. But she could change that. She knew, with a swift and terrible sadness, the power women have in such situations. Most women knew. How a look, a tone, the tiniest change in body language, the slight pressure of a knee or a hand, could transform such a platonic moment.

“I like
you
,” she said. She wondered if this were true. She was in that gray space where she was still aware of what she was doing, but drunk enough so the alcohol could be her excuse if she kept going. Did she want to keep going? Rick had put his arm around her to comfort her, and it was still there. Rick was mad at Kris. Tess wasn’t mad at anyone but herself, and she was so sick of her own company. She had not been with someone for such a long time.

“Have something to eat,” Rick said. “A slice of chocolate cake, at least.”

Of course, Rick belonged to Kristina, so it would be wrong, and she didn’t really like him—not that much, not in that way. But if no one knew, if they just went to his car, parked in the shadows at the edge of the lot, and made out like teenagers, would it be so wrong? It would just be between Rick, Tess, and her karma. If no one knew, no one would be hurt.

“You son of a bitch.” It was Kristina’s voice, coming through the window. What a pretty picture they must have made for her, framed in the red neon that bordered the windows. “You goddamn son of a bitch.”

“You’re late,” he said, confused by her anger. For he, after all, was still innocent, a guy doing nothing more than a good deed, who had no idea how close he had come to cheating on his girlfriend. But if he had yet to gauge Tess’s intentions, Kristina had seen through her immediately. “Two hours late. I didn’t think you were coming.”

“So you start all but making out in public with whoever is convenient? Well,
fuck
you.”

“We weren’t making out,” Tess said.
Just contemplating it
.

“You go, girlfriend,” a man in a Mae West outfit hooted in falsetto, as the ghosts and witches surrounding Kristina nodded and yelled their support.

“You know, Kris, you’re worse than any redneck racist,” Rick yelled through the glass. “You see me with my arm around some woman—around Tess, who isn’t my type at all, as you damn well know—and you think I’m on the verge of going to bed with her because I’m this hot-blooded Latino who can’t keep it in my pants. But if I were to get jealous of you in the same situation, I’d be paranoid. The bottom line is you don’t trust me. You don’t want to marry me, and you’re desperate to find an excuse, any excuse, so you can go running back to Wisconsin and marry some thick-headed Swede like yourself, and have lots of milky white children.”

“I’m
Norwegian
, you asshole.”

With that, Kristina ran across the street to her car. Rick bolted from the restaurant, and soon Tess saw his Lexus zipping past the window. She did the only thing she could think of, given the circumstances. She summoned the waiter, asked for the check, then inquired if it was difficult to catch a cab in this part of town.

Five hours later, in the grip of a guilt-induced insomnia, Tess finished Volume 2, Chapter 74, of
Don Quixote
. Or
Don Quijote
, as some of the new translations insisted. She had been working on the book so long that her copy was obsolete. Over the years, Kitty had tried to replace this worn, broken-back edition with newer, fresher versions, as if a new version was all it would take to get Tess to finish it. What she had needed was being spared the knowledge that it was so very good for her. The novel’s virtue had always been the sticking point, as Don Quixote himself might have said.

“Death came at last for Don Quixote, after he had received all the sacraments and once more had disavowed his books of chivalry…Don Quixote was born for me alone and I for him; it was for him to act, for me to write, and we two are one…
Vale
.”

Finishing it was strangely sad, sadder than finishing sex, which could be very sad indeed. The little death, as the French called it. No, what was really sad is what had driven her to finish it, how she had almost allowed herself to do something truly wretched because she was feeling sorry for herself. She was alone, more alone now that the book was finished. She had done something she had long meant to do, which should have filled her up, but instead it emptied her out. What would she put on next year’s list, when she outlined her goals in a black and white composition book, her fall ritual for almost twenty-five years now? Perhaps: “Stop trying to sleep with other people’s boyfriends.”

It was three
A.M.
, four
A.M.
in Baltimore, but she had to talk to someone. Kitty would understand. She would understand the book and all the varying types of sadness weighing Tess down.

She came on the line within two rings, her voice fresh and alive, as if she hadn’t been sleeping at all.

“Tesser! Are you okay?”

“Physically. Spiritually, I think I racked up a few demerits tonight.” The story spilled out, and Kitty listened, as was her great gift, saying nothing until Tess finished.

“You have to apologize,” she said, her tone gentle but firm. “She doesn’t have to forgive you, but you have to apologize.”

Tess had hoped for something a little closer to absolution. “If you think about it, I didn’t really do anything—”

“You would have. I love you, sweetie, but you’ve always had a covetous streak. Sometimes, I think you’d rather borrow someone else’s boyfriend than have one of your own.”

“Well, sure, there was Jonathan, but I’m not like that anymore.”

“Apparently you are, and you’re using the same rationalizations. You were feeling sorry for yourself. Just like when you got mixed up with Jonathan. Remember, you two had broken up, it was only after you lost your job and he got engaged that you started sleeping with him again. Have you ever stopped to think what would have happened if he hadn’t died? He’d be married to someone else by now. He wasn’t yours, honey. He still isn’t.”

Tess came close to making an angry reply. Unfortunately, Kitty had the advantage of being right.

“You’re right, I have to apologize,” she agreed. “I’ll start with you, in fact. I’m sorry I called in the middle of the night. It was self-centered and thoughtless. But I felt so alone, and I needed to talk.”

“Oh, I wasn’t asleep, Tesser. I was having a little snack.”

Tess smiled, happy to know things were back to normal in some quarter of the world. Kitty’s predawn snacks were never eaten alone. “So I guess the UPS man kept wearing his shorts.”

“Well, no—” Kitty sounded uncharacteristically flustered.

“Is it someone else? Is he right there? Or are you in the bedroom, waiting for him to bring you cold cuts on that white wicker tray?”

“No, I’m downstairs. What would you think if I moved my bedroom downstairs, into the big storeroom behind the kitchen, and moved the office upstairs?”

“Why would you do that? You’ll be running up and down all day.”

“Kitty!” It was a loud voice, a familiar voice, a voice that always made Tess feel as if she should drop and give someone twenty. But now there was a softness to the voice, a warmth that Tess had never heard before. “Do you want capers on your bagel, or just the smoked salmon?”

“Just the smoked salmon.”

“That’s Tyner! You’re sleeping with Tyner!”

“We’ve spent a lot of time together in the past two weeks,” Kitty said. “He started coming over at first because you hadn’t called him. Things progressed from there.”

“But—
Tyner
!” Esskay sat up in bed, instantly alert at the sound of any word beginning with a T, which meant “treat” in her limited vocabulary.

“He’s very nice,” Kitty said.

“Tyner!” Tess repeated. One of the hookers banged on the wall and told her to be quiet.

“We’ll talk when you get home, sweetie.” A muffled exchange. “Tyner wants to know when that is, by the way.”

“I’d say sometime before hell freezes over, but it apparently just did. You’re sleeping with Tyner! He’s old! He’s cranky! He’s Tyner, for God’s sake!”

“We’ll talk when you get home,” Kitty repeated. “I love you.”

“Tyner!” Tess screamed to the empty line, and the hooker banged again, and Esskay wagged her tail harder, trying to wait patiently for this treat Tess kept screaming about.

S
even hours later, Tess pushed open the door of Y Algunas Mas and found Kris with her arms full of marigolds.

“From Rick?” she asked, and received a baleful look in return.

“I’m making an
ofrenda
. Tomorrow is Dia de los Muertos. Day of the Dead.” A small silence, and then Kris lifted her chin. “Rick brought me yellow roses. Three dozen.”

“I should be the one sending you flowers. Rick didn’t do anything last night.”

Kris turned her back on Tess, arranging the bright orange blossoms on what appeared to be an altar, although it was unlike any altar Tess had seen in her rare visits to church. In addition to the marigolds and votive candles, it had a round of bread with a cross slashed into it, a bottle of Diet Rite, a six-pack of Schlitz, an Art Deco cigarette lighter, a pack of Merits, candy skulls, and a photograph of a striking woman, circa 1950-something, judging by the hair and the sweater.

“He
said
he was trying to comfort you.”

“He was.” Tess paused. “Where that might have gone remains to be seen. It was up to me, and I’m not sure what I might have done.”

“Up to
you
,” Kris said, her back still to Tess, but the catch in her voice, the way she jerked her shoulder blades, hinted at the angry tears she was trying to hold back. “Who do you think you are, some sort of femme fatale who crooks her little finger and the men all come running? No offense, but Rick says he doesn’t have the slightest interest in you, he wouldn’t have fooled around with you just because he was mad at me.”

“No, he wouldn’t.” Tess suspected this was a lie, but lies were greatly underrated when it came to making people feel better. “Look, I’m not one of those women who thinks women are inherently better than men. Obviously,
I’m
not inherently better. I felt crummy last night, and I would have reached for anything offering a little temporary oblivion. A drink, a joint, someone else’s boyfriend. You have the solace of knowing nothing happened. But I’ll never know what I might have done if you hadn’t shown up.”

She was still looking at Kristina’s back, at the white blond hair, worn today in two plaits, exposing her milk-white neck and a narrow part as pink as a little girl’s.

“Besides, what if I had? What if I had come to my senses, gone home and crawled into bed with
Don Quixote
? The book, I mean. I still thought about it. I lusted in my heart. Not for your boyfriend, not for Rick—although he’s a great guy,” she added hastily, as Kristina turned, green eyes narrowed at the inferred insult. “I just wanted to blot out my thoughts for an hour or two.”

Kristina’s lips twitched. “It didn’t last quite that long.”

“Did you—?”

She nodded. “Then he made me breakfast in bed this morning. And you can be damn sure he went out and got some two percent along with the roses.”

Tess couldn’t help feeling a small pang. So many people having sex and then breakfast, and she wasn’t one of them. She hadn’t even had breakfast this morning, because her stomach was jumping at the thought of this meeting.

“Well, I hope Rick persuaded you he was totally innocent.”

“Oh, he sold you out,” Kris said cheerfully. “Sang like a canary, to use the vernacular of his trade. Still, it’s a relief to have you come in here and say more or less the same thing. I’m assuming he didn’t put you up to it, because I can’t imagine anyone making a more unflattering apology than you just did. I’ll give you points for that. You didn’t try to sugarcoat it, not much. It almost makes me think I could like you again. Almost.”

Kitty was right: Tess had to apologize, but Kristina didn’t have to forgive her. Still, it hurt that this open-faced, generous girl no longer trusted her.

“Tell me about that thing you’re putting together, that old frienda.”

Her deliberately mangled Spanish wrested a small smile from Kristina. “
Ofrenda
. It’s in memory of my grandmother, who died last year.”

“But why the beer, and cigarettes, and all the other stuff?”

“Because Day of the Dead is the day that people come back to visit us. So we have to have their favorite things, along with the traditional marigolds and
pan de muerto
—dead bread.” She held up a pair of silver combs. “These were my grandmother’s favorites. She also loved beer and keno—I used these Mexican loteria cards instead. Most of all, she loved her Merits, even if they did kill her. If she’s coming back, she’ll want a smoke. Day of the Dead isn’t a time for lessons.”

“Can anyone do this?”

“Sure. It’s not like there’s a licensing requirement.” Kristina scanned Tess’s face. “Is there someone you’re missing? You could make a small one right here. I’d help you.”

“Maybe…I’d need some things, though—ordinary things, like you have, but I’m not sure where I’d find them.”

“I don’t know what you need, but there’s a Family Dollar store, and a liquor store on Main for starters. You go scare up whatever you think is appropriate, and I’ll cover a card table with a cloth, put out the candles, flowers, and dead bread.”

“I don’t know—”

“C’mon, Tess. Maybe this is one time when it would be a good idea to act on your impulses.”

She was back in less than an hour, arms laden as if she had been on a scavenger hunt. A bottle of mezcal, a Big Mac, a Hohner Marine Band harmonica. A bag of Domino sugar, to stand in for the neon sign they had watched from her terrace. The
Beacon-Light
had been the hardest item to find, and she had almost settled on a
New York Times
from a box. She had driven all over the city’s north side, it seemed, before she found a bookstore with out-of-town papers.

Her collection of artifacts seemed paltry when compared to Kris’s more elaborate ofrenda, and she looked around the gallery for things she might add. Her eyes fell on a ceramic taxi, driven by a grinning psychopath of a skeleton, a backseat full of terrified skeleton passengers, bony fingers clasped to their cheekbones in Munch-style horror, a devil perched on the trunk, watching the whole scene with great amusement. Kris nodded at the question in her eyes, and she added the taxi to the table of candles and flowers, although there had been no passengers. No witnesses, in fact, except her and the driver, who had not been smiling, not as far as she knew. It had been such a foggy morning, the air thick, like some animal’s coat.

And although she hadn’t seen the devil sitting on the taxi’s fender, she had never doubted he was there.

“Do you have a picture?” Kris asked. “It’s traditional to use one.”

Yes, she had a picture. Two, really. A picture in her head, of a man airborne over a Fells Point alley, and another one that she kept in her datebook, a grinning head shot that could never quite blot out the first one. Perhaps that had been part of the problem. The literal photo, not the mental one. People blame the wiring in their heads for everything. But maybe it’s all the
things
, Tess thought. The mementos, the sealed packages of love letters, the dates we keep in our heads—maybe these are what really weigh us down and keep us from moving forward. The photo in her datebook had been the unseen wedge between her and Crow, an amulet between her and the risk of caring too deeply, in a world where death, life, and other women were always out there. She took the snapshot out of a slender fold meant for business cards and propped it up on the ofrenda, against the taxi that had taken his life.

Jonathan Ross, dead at twenty-eight, killed because he was a better reporter than even he had known. It was for him to write, and her to act. Vale.

“Boyfriend?” Kris asked.

“No,” Tess said.

She sat in a cafe she had noticed while driving around town on Mission Ofrenda. The name, Twin Sisters, had drawn her in. It was apparently literal, although the photos of the owners invited disbelief. One had dark corkscrew curls, the other straight blond hair. The menu showcased the same kind of striking contrast, with pastries and tacos mixed in with more healthful fare. Tess asked for a bowl of fruit, pointed to a sugar-topped muffin in the case. “Oh yeah, the Jewish coffee cake,” the waitress said, and Tess was taken aback. But surely it was meant as a compliment?

She skimmed the
Eagle
’s weekend section, which provided a full schedule of this weekend’s All Soul activities. She hadn’t realized just what a big deal it was—B. B. King and Etta James were playing Saturday night, there was even a symposium on Robert Johnson. Meanwhile, the local listings claimed a band known as the Breakfast Club was still at the Morgue, while Las Almas Perdidas was scheduled to appear at Hector’s. Hard to cancel gigs while one was on the run, she supposed, stealing glances at a family enjoying a late lunch. School was out, apparently, a teachers’ conference according to the scraps of conversation she could overhear.

The younger child, a freckled-faced boy, was playing air guitar with a lot of Pete Townshend gyrations, while his sister rolled her eyes beneath a mop of amazing pre-Raphaelite curls, beautiful hair that would probably be her complete despair for much of her adolescence. Mother and father exchanged fond, if tired, looks over their heads, and the looks carried so much history that it made Tess ache a little. She wanted to know how these people, barely ten years older than she, had arrived at a shore that seemed so impossibly distant. Who had given up what? Who had pursued whom, who had followed? Had they ever fought, or had second thoughts? Tolstoi had it backwards. Unhappiness was the same everywhere; it was the happy families who were unique.

Sighing, she went back to her paper. She noticed the date: Friday, November 1, All Saints’ Day. Tomorrow was not only Day of the Dead, it was the Day of the Deadline, the day Crow’s parents expected to hear from him according to a telegram she had sent about eight million years ago. She would have to call them instead, explain how she had found their son only to lose him again. Good news, though: She now had the San Antonio Police Department helping in the search.

Why had Crow wanted a week? At first he had said it was because some record company executive was coming to town for the All Soul Festival. But even after Emmie had disappeared, and the future of Las Almas Perdidas seemed more likely to be played out in the criminal justice system than on the radio, he had been fixated on that date.
You ruined everything
, he had said to her in the garden of the Alamo, the next-to-last time she ever saw him.
All I asked for was a week, and you couldn’t even give me that
. And it was only when Rick had said he couldn’t expect to make bail, that he might be in jail over the weekend, that he had gone out the window. After Emmie. Not because he knew where she was, Tess realized, but because he knew he had to find her before Saturday. Why?

When Tess was a little girl, she had gone out an open window on the second story of her parents’ home. She had been trying to re-create Goldilocks’s flight, which seemed suspiciously easy to her. Sure enough, she had broken her collarbone, which had somewhat dimmed her pleasure in being right.

Last night, she had gone sailing out the window again, confident in own theories, and been proven wrong. That had knocked the wind out of her in much the same way.

But nothing hurt more than the thought that Crow had not trusted her with whatever secret he was hoarding. She had to find him—again, and before tomorrow. What was the law of missing objects? They can be found in the most obvious places. Crow was not an object, but he was in a city he didn’t know all that well, with no car and very little money, and a mysterious deadline fast approaching.

The only thing to do, she realized, was to retrace her steps, as if she were looking for a set of keys, or a notebook, or her gym shoes. That was how you found things. Retrace your steps. Retrace them again and again and again. Think about the last time you saw or held the missing item. Retrace your steps. What you have lost is always there, you just don’t always see it until the third, fourth, fifth time around.

Chris Ransome had said there was something unfinished between his son and Tess, an energy like a divining rod. It wasn’t the kind of theory for which one won the Nobel Prize, but it was all she had.