Laura Lippman - In Big Trouble

"Do you keep a lot of your collection in the stacks?" Tess asked the librarian who showed her where to find the local newspapers.

"What you see is what you get," the young man said. He had a long silky ponytail and Bambi eyes. Tess noticed the periodical section seemed unusually crowded, with a large number of high school girls peering at the librarian over the tops of Teen People , but her guide seemed oblivious to his fan club. "I guess they thought if they built the building, the books would take care of themselves."

At least civic thinking was the same everywhere. Float the bonds for the construction projects and hope everything else took care of itself. Tess settled down with a stack of local newspapers, looking for any mention of the body in Marianna Barrett Conyers's pool house.

The Blanco paper was a weekly, so its cycle had yet to catch up with the story. The New Braunfels paper reported the discovery on page one, but its focus was on public safety. A killer, believed to be dangerous, was still at large, the paper warned its citizens. As opposed to non-dangerous killers ?

The San Antonio Eagle 's front page was full of pie-in-the-sky dreams for a new basketball arena which would transform the city's northeast side into a land of milk and money. Close your eyes and you're in Baltimore, Toto. Tess had to search the skimpy local section for a short item, which said only that a body had been found on the property of Marianna Barrett Conyers of Alamo Heights. It was noted the apparent victim, ex-felon Tom Darden, also had made his home in San Antonio, before he was sent away on a kidnapping charge twenty years ago, along with Laylan Weeks. The sheriff had mentioned Weeks, too, Tess recalled. "The infamous Danny Boyd case," the paper called their crime, but the reporter didn't bother to explain the infamy for those who hadn't been around twenty years ago. In fact, the article's emphasis seemed to be on the terrible inconvenience of having a corpse in one's pool house, especially a body as undesirable as Darden's. He had been found, the nonbylined piece added almost as an afterthought, by a drifter.

"A drifter !" Although Tess spoke aloud, in a rather emphatic tone, no one shushed her. Perhaps this was because no one could really hear her in the happy Saturday morning bustle. The teenage girls were whispering and giggling, while small children trotted in circles, shouting for their parents. Adolescent boys hunkered in front of the computers, playing games, probably trying to figure out how to bypass the cyber blocks and download porn. Who needed Chuck E. Cheese when there were libraries around?

Before she left Enchilada Roja, Tess used the computer's Netscape browser to glide home to the Baltimore Beacon-Light's Web page. She had never thought she would miss the Blight . The Eagle was a little gaudy for her tastes, although she recalled Marianna had said something about its tabloid days, suggesting it had once been more sensational still. The Blight's Web site was a mess, done on the cheap, but it was a joy to read about meetings and crimes set in places she could visualize, in a typeface she knew. A robbery on Lombard Street, a homicide on Lanvale, a fire on Waltherson. It all combined to make her homesick.

She stopped at a laundromat, then, against all odds, found her way back to Broadway and La Casita, her home away from home. Someone was sitting on the curb in front of her room, arms hugging her body as if she were cold on this sunny, breeze-less day. Tess couldn't see the face, but the hair was butter yellow in the sun and cut in a Dutch-boy bob.

"Hey," Emmie said.

"Brace yourself," Tess said, stepping around her with her duffel bag of clothes and unlocking the door. "I'm going to release the hound."

Esskay came bounding out of the motel room, greeted Tess as if they had been separated for days, then began inspecting the stranger on the curb. Emmie hunched her shoulders, as if frightened of dogs, but held her ground.

"I thought you might have left by now," she said.

Thought or hoped ?

"I could," Tess said. "I've done what I was hired to do."

"What was that, exactly?"

"Find Crow."

"Oh." She appeared to be thinking about something, but her expression was inscrutable. "We're not together."

"Pardon me?"

"Ed and I. We're not together. We were-at first, up in Austin-but now we're not."

Tess held up her hand, traffic cop style. "None of my business."

Emmie was still sitting on the curb, hugging her knees to her chest, scratching her shins. She had drawn blood, Tess noticed, but she kept scratching, oblivious. There was scabs on her calves and pale, thin scars that would probably never quite fade.

"He keeps up with you, you know," Emmie said, after scratching a while longer. Esskay, usually so friendly, was keeping her distance from this visitor, as if even she could smell the craziness on her.

"What?"

"He has a file, of newspaper clippings. There aren't that many, maybe three or four."

"I haven't done much to write about."

"No, I guess you haven't." Emmie didn't sound rude, merely factual, the way children do before grown-ups school them in the art of the polite lie. "Have you ever killed someone?"

"What?" Tess felt as if she was saying this a lot.

"I mean, you've been in some real strange situations, but I don't recall if you ever killed someone. Have you?"

"No. I've seen someone die. I've seen dead people. But I haven't killed anyone."

"Hmmm." Emmie frowned. "And you can remember it, I suppose, all the gory details. All the blood. Assuming there was blood. Would you like to go to lunch?"

"Excuse me?" Tess had thought she was bad about jumping from topic to topic, but Emmie's synapses were misfiring like the cheap caps that kids play with on the sidewalk.

"Lunch. Aren't you hungry? Ed said you could eat a lot. You know what? I'm going to start calling him Crow. It suits him."

"Does Crow talk about me often?"

Emmie gave this serious consideration. "Not so very often. Sometimes. When it's so late that it's early, and we've played really well, so we're all drained, and he's had a couple drinks maybe, and we go to Earl Abel's for pie, and the sun is just coming up-his memories come up, too. Is it true you ate the same thing for breakfast every day?"

"Well, not every day."

"Do you think that means you're naturally monogamous?"

" What ?"

Emmie held her fingers to her mouth, as if to taste the blood rimmed beneath her fingernails. "I would think someone who could eat the same thing for breakfast every day would be pretty dependable. Then again, maybe that's the kind of person who just loses it, you know. Goes postal, burns down the house, hits the road because she suddenly realizes she can't face another bowl of Frosted Flakes. So, do you want to go to lunch or what?"

"Why not?" At least it was a question she understood.

Tess wasn't sure where she had expected Emmie to take her to eat, but this lunch counter at the old-fashioned drugstore, the Olmos Pharmacy, was a pleasant surprise.

"Get a milkshake," Emmie instructed her. "They're the best in the world."

"My grandfather made the best shakes in the world, at his lunch counter." But Tess added a shake to her order of grilled cheese and bacon. She had never seen a milkshake served this way: The counter woman set small plastic tumblers of whipped cream in front of them, then left behind the sweating metal container from the old-fashioned Hamilton mixer. Emmie poured the thick concoction over the whipped cream, stirred, then dug into hers with a spoon. Although it was possible to coax the thick liquid up a straw, it wasn't very easy. A spoon was definitely the way to go.