Laura Lippman: In Big Trouble

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.

Yet Felicia and Chris still hadn't given up. They probably thought it a master stroke, putting her in this boyhood room, full of Crow artifacts. But it had only strengthened her resolve to get away from them and Charlottesville. Felicia and Chris, who had given their son everything he ever wanted, seemed determined to give her back to him.

What they didn't understand was that he didn't want her, and she didn't want him.

A knock at the door, and Chris Ransome poked his head in.

"May I come in?"

"It's your house."

He took the desk chair, a scarred wooden one that looked as if it had caught the overflow of several experiments with an old-fashioned chemistry set, the dangerous kind.

"You were so quiet at dinner." A slight smile. "Except when it came to a particular monosyllable, you hardly said anything."

"I have your best interests at heart. You're right to be concerned, you just need to hire someone who knows Texas."

"But you know Crow."

"Do I?"

Chris Ransome's hands beat an unconscious tattoo on Crow's desk, which was covered with a boy's various collections-bird nests, rocks, arrowheads. The whole room had a museum quality to it, preserved not so much as if Crow might return, but as if future generations might wish to see it exactly as it was. And here's where the famous composer-artist-future President played with model airplanes and studied the night sky with this Nature Store telescope . Tess's parents had turned her room into a sewing room the moment she graduated from college.

"I'm not sure what you mean, Tess."

"I mean-" It seemed petulant to continue lying on the bed, so she swung her feet to the side of the bed and sat up. "I mean I knew your son for more than a year, worked alongside him in my aunt's bookstore, dated him for almost six months. But I didn't know anything about him. Either I wasn't listening or he wasn't talking. A little of both, I think."

"What didn't you know?"

"I didn't know his mother was Felicia Kendall, for one thing. And that you were some hotshot at Harvard."

"Not particularly vital information, if you ask me. Besides, we moved to Charlottesville so Crow could be someone other than the son of the famous sculptress and the ‘Harvard hotshot,' to use your terminology. A parent's fame can crush a child."

"Felicia said you came here because you couldn't be happy in Boston."

"Did she?" Chris fiddled with the placement of the bird nests, lining them up, although they looked perfectly aligned to Tess, then moving them around as if they were cups in an ornithological version of three-card monte.

"Were you famous?" she asked on a hunch, a vague memory stirring. "Or notorious?"

Chris smiled. His resemblance to Crow was still disorienting for Tess. In many ways, he was what she had thought she wanted when she was unhappy with Crow-a grown-up version of same.

"Now see, that's why Felicia and I want to hire you. You're intuitive."

"Don't flatter me, please. Just answer."

Chris looked like a child forced to recite for company. "It's hard to imagine now, but twenty-five years ago Felicia and I were the scandal du jour, at least in our hometown of Boston. I hasten to add that the threshold for notoriety was much lower back then."

"What did you do?"

"We had an affair." He smiled at Tess's is-that-all-there-is expression. "Shocking, isn't it? Shocking to think it was once shocking. Felicia's husband was my thesis adviser at Harvard. I was his star student, I was going to bring home all the big prizes one day. I had theories that were going to change the world. Instead, I turned my own world upside down. I fell in love."

He rearranged the bird nests yet again, but his voice now had a warm, dreamy quality. He liked this part of the story.

"I fell in love and Felicia became pregnant. Wait-that construction makes it sound as if it were something she did. When it was really something I wanted. I got her pregnant, because I was desperate for her. I didn't think she'd leave her husband just for me, but I knew she would leave for a child. It's not that she didn't love me, but Felicia was a careful, deliberate woman. She didn't have much experience in doing what she wanted, as opposed to doing what was expected."

"But you changed that."

"Eventually. Crow arrived before her divorce was final, and we never did get around to marrying officially. Yet it was the age difference that really scandalized people. Our ages, and the things I supposedly ‘gave up' for her. I was twenty-two she was thirty-three. Silly, isn't it, how age trips people up?"

Tess, who had agonized at times over the six-year difference between her and his son, did not answer Chris's question. "Does Crow know all this?"

"Oh yes." Chris frowned. "Actually, he may not know we never married. Little boys don't care much about such things, do they? They don't ask to see wedding pictures. If he had asked, we would have told him, but I don't remember it coming up. We celebrate our anniversary every year, only it's the anniversary of the night we met. May 30. A Memorial Day weekend party. Felicia was wearing pale green."

Tess ransacked her memory, trying to find some little piece of the story. Crow must have told her at least part of it. Yet nothing was there.

"I didn't know any of this," she said, intending to sound plaintive, but achieving only a low-grade whininess. "Yet Crow knew how my parents met, what they did for a living. He knew which bars fell into my father's territory as a Baltimore city liquor inspector. He even knew what my mother does at the National Security Agency and that's technically classified."

"She's a supervisor, right? A tall woman, like you, given to matching her shoes to her outfits as exactly as possible."

Tess stalked over to Crow's bureau, where his childhood collection of Star Wars figures had been laid out on a rough woven cloth. "See? You even know how my mom dresses . That's more than I knew about Felicia. How can you say I knew Crow at all?"

"Crow is one of the world's listeners."

"He chatters all the time," Tess objected.

"Yes, he does. But he never really gives out any information about himself, does he? He talks about the latest thing he's read, the song he's working on, something strange and wonderful he saw on the street. But he doesn't talk about himself. He's unusual that way. He fools a lot of people into thinking they're close to him, but few really are. All the words, all that chatter, is a way of keeping people at a distance."

"So I'm right-I never really knew him. I'm even less suited to finding him than I thought."

Chris stood up. "I need to show you something. Down in Felicia's studio. Do you mind?"

The night was cold and crisp, one of the first true autumn nights this season. Their breath was visible as they walked through the garden, to the cottage from which Felicia had materialized that afternoon. Chris Ransome unlocked the door and flicked on a light.

"Crow had his own studio here." Chris grinned with a rueful self-awareness. "We've always been a little indulgent, I suppose."