Laura Lippman - In Big Trouble

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 decided to leave out the other details, the contradictory descriptions of china dolls, psycho bitches, and anorexic waifs.

"Dutch." Marianna smiled. "She hasn't used that name for years."

"She was using it up in Austin."

"Oh, yes, her music thing. Her real name is Emily Sterne. Emmie to the family. Why are you looking for her? Did…did something happen in Austin?"

"I'm not looking for her. I've never met her." Tess pulled out the photograph of Crow, the more recent one, the cutout with the words "In Big Trouble" above his head. "This is the man I want to find. He was in Twin Sisters with her, last I heard."

Marianna barely glanced at the photo. "And you're looking for him because of this-because it says he's ‘in big trouble.'"

"Partly, yes. His parents haven't heard from him for more than a month, and they're worried."

"Parents always worry."

"I thought you said you didn't have children."

"No, but I had parents, didn't I? Did you think I came out of an egg?" Tess had touched some nerve. "Even Athena had parents, despite coming out of her father's head fully formed. It was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who appeared out of the ocean with no explanation. She was the one to be feared, if you ask me. No, I had parents, and I caused them plenty of worry in their time. Yet here I am, a middle-aged woman, my life so safe and boring that it must be beyond their wildest dreams. They live in one of those senior residences. ‘Assisted living.' Wonderful term. As if the rest of us can muddle through without assistance."

Tess tried to pull the conversation back on track. "This young man-his parents aren't overly protective. But he's never gone so long before without being in touch."

"I wish I had listened to my parents," Marianna muttered, reaching into a thick pile of newspapers in a leather-and-wood rack by her chair. She sorted through them, stopping to search what appeared to be a tabloid entertainment section, the kind that almost every newspaper publishes for the weekend. Tess noticed that the cover on one mentioned the All Soul celebration, the thing that the Marriott clerk had blamed for filling all the hotels. But Marianna rejected that one and kept going, almost to the bottom of the pile before she found what she wanted.

"Context is everything, don't you think? Miss-what was your name again, dear?"

"Tess Monaghan."

"Where are you from, anyway? I can't place your accent."

Tess hadn't known she had an accent. She definitely didn't have the drawn-out O's and misplaced R's of a typical Baltimorean. Then again, Marianna didn't have the Texas drawl she had expected. So far, no one here had sounded like what Tess thought a real Texan might.

"I'm from Baltimore."

"I could tell you weren't from the Southwest before you said a thing, by the way you reacted to my friends." She gestured to all the grinning skeletons. "You don't really like them, that's apparent. Not even my little mermaid."