That hurt, if only because it came so close to the truth of the person she had once been. I'm not that cheap anymore, she wanted to tell Crow. I make good money now.
But all she said was: "It was the only place I could find last night"
"It's easy enough to get to from here. Just go up Broadway."
"I know that"
"Tess-"
She waited. It occurred to her it was only the second time he had used her name.
"I love my parents, I never meant to hurt them. Please make them understand that. I hope-I hope they're going to be proud of me, that they'll understand why I needed this time to be on my own."
On your own, with Emmie. But she merely nodded.
Her stomach reminded her that she had not eaten anything since late afternoon, when she had polished off the rest of the Fig Newtons. She stopped at an all-night taco stand on Broadway, a bright pink one, only to be overwhelmed by the unfamiliar choices. Baltimore had not prepared her for the range of possibilities in tacos. What was carne guisada? Carne asada? Barbacoa would be barbecue, of course, but the sign said this was served on Sundays only. She settled for a fajita, feeling wimpy and defeated for settling for something she could have gotten back home.
Even so, it was so much better than anything she had ever eaten in Baltimore that she ordered two more. Charm City's inability to serve a decent taco remained one of its eternal mysteries. However, the Mexican beer, a Bohemia, was an old friend. Dark and flavorful, it smoothed the jagged feelings that seeing Crow had aroused.
What had she expected? What had she wanted? For him to fall into her arms and declare his undying love for her? For her to ride to his rescue, extricate him from whatever mess he gotten himself into, and thus settle the old debts between them? She wasn't sure. Something between the two. But Crow was fine, caught up in nothing more than the inevitable rebellion against one's parents, even if he had come to it much later than most. The pictures in his parents' home may have suggested unfinished business between the two of them, but that was five months ago. Some fruit flies lived longer than Crow's passions.
She looked down at the beef that had fallen from her tacos, and the image of the man in the pool house boo-meranged into her consciousness. How quickly Tom Darden had been dismissed by Emmie and Crow, how incurious they had been. She believed Crow's mystification, believed him when he said he knew nothing about the man, or how he had come to be there.
Emmie-Emmie was another matter. In Emmie's case, it wasn't clear if it was the body that had caught her off guard, or the body's location "at Marianna's place?" she had asked, her voice scaling up.
And neither one had bothered to ask whose body it was.
Chapter 10
A telegram-now there was a concept. In a world of cell phones, e-mail, faxes, and beepers, Tess knew Western Union existed only because it advertised its money-wiring service on television. But did it still do telegrams? She couldn't even find a Western Union in the telephone book, just a list of "offices" at the local grocery chain, HEB.
The closest one was only a mile up Broadway, but it seemed more like a food amusement park than a grocery store. In fact, groceries seemed an afterthought here, what with chefs whipping up pasta dishes on demand, a full menu of cooking classes, a walk-in-humidor, and a wine section that needed two aisles just for South America. Tess scuffed her feet on the rough floors-painted, a helpful clerk told her, to create the feeling of an old European market-filled with an intense and sudden hunger for things she had never heard of. She was enraptured, she was repulsed, she wanted to get a little cot and set up housekeeping, preferably near the flowers. Baltimore's upscale grocery stores-Eddie's and Graul's and Sutton Place Gourmet-were pathetic compared to this temple of food. She couldn't decide if the grandeur was driven by the Texas phenomenon of big-bigger-biggest, or whether it was the inevitable overcompensatory impulse of a founder who had been born with the moniker of Henry E. Butt.
Eventually, she shook off the store's decadent spell and asked someone where she could send a telegram.
"It's cheaper to call," the girl at the front counter said, examining her nails. She had on a new kind of polish that could be peeled off, and she was slowly liberating her synthetic talons from a coat of celery green. "I mean, you can buy a long distance card at the ice house. I got one there last week. It had a picture of David Robinson on it."
"No, it has to be a telegram," Tess said. No one could talk back to a telegram, ask it questions, or track its number through Caller ID.
"It's like my first week," the clerk said. "I don't know how to do everything."
"I'm patient," Tess lied.
The clerk sighed dramatically and rustled around until she found the form she needed.
Tess began to dictate: "Crow found-stop. Will call soon-stop."
"Why do you keep telling me to stop?" the girl asked fretfully. Then, as an afterthought: "You're sending a telegram because you found a crow? Don't they have those where you came from?"
"You say stop to indicate the end of a thought," Tess said, although everything she knew about telegrams she had learned from old movies. "It's like a period."
"Are you sure?"
Eventually, they collaborated on a mutually acceptable document to Charlottesville, Virginia. It read, in its entirety: Crow fine. In Big Trouble name of new band. Will call in one week. Staying here till then. The last line had been a last-minute inspiration, and Tess wasn't sure where it came from, or even if it was true. But seven days seemed little to spare to make sure that Crow wasn't going to use the time he had requested to run again. Besides, she wanted to see where the local authorities were going with the investigation into the death of her Hill Country pal.
"Where's the library?" she asked the girl.
"Enchilada Roja, you mean?"
Now that was Tess's kind of Spanish. "You call your library the red enchilada?"
"Yeah, and it didn't get its name for nothing. It sticks out on the skyline north of downtown, like a sore thumb. Or a big red enchilada, I guess. You can't miss it." She smiled for the first time. "They got computers there. You could zap your friends an e-mail, if you have an AOL account."
"Just send the telegram, okay?"
Enchilada Roja was easy to spot on the horizon, but it seemed to keep shifting as Tess drove toward it. She took several turns through a warren of one-way streets before she found her way into the pay parking lot outside the gleaming new library. Outside and in, it was the antithesis of her beloved Enoch Pratt-gorgeous appointments, state of the art computers, even a room dedicated to genealogical research. The only thing in short supply was books. The shelves yawned with empty spaces.
"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?