"And then one day, someone shows up who doesn't know anything. A young woman with an accent as flat and matter-of-fact as she is. A young woman whose ignorance allows me, for a moment, to not tell the story I thought everyone knew. Yes, I rewrote history for a day. Horace dead in a hunting accident. Well, it happened in a hunting camp. Lollie, Frank, and Pilar, dead in a car accident. "Suddenly, brightly: "Did they tell you they tortured him?"
"Who?"
"My Frank." She held a finger to her lips. "Only we're not allowed to say how. That's something only the killer knows."
Jimmy Ahern's book had hinted at details about Frank's death that had never come to light, but Tess had assumed he was a bad reporter.
"I'm sorry, I didn't-"
"-know. You didn't know. Exactly. That was your charm."
Charm. The Duchess of Euphemism had struck again. What Tess had been was stupid, even arrogant.
"So you knew who Tom Darden was all along."
"No, I was truthful on that count. When you came here on Friday, Tom Darden was nothing more than a corpse on my property. Yesterday was the first I heard that he was thought to know something about how Lollie and Frank…died." She smiled ruefully. "You should understand the Sternes and I have not been kept informed about all the developments over the years. Perhaps we should have been less critical of the police investigation. But they made such a mess of things, at first."
"How so?"
Marianna looked weary and pale beneath her careful makeup. Tess was beginning to understand why she had permitted herself the lies that allowed her to avoid this topic, at least for one afternoon.
"Small things. Probably unimportant things. But when it's you, and it's your husband-or your first cousin, and the servant who all but raised you, in the case of Gus Sterne-there are no small things. All I know is they never came close to making an arrest, and they didn't seem to have many satisfactory explanations as to why. Now the detective tells me Darden and this other man were in prison all these years, so the case ‘lacked urgency.' Well, it never lacked urgency for me.
"What about Emmie?"
"What about her?"
"Could she have known about Darden?"
"I'm sure Emmie would like to see justice done, but Lollie's death has never preoccupied her."
Tess leaned forward. "I thought today was the day you weren't going to tell lies. If people associate you with your husband's death to the exclusion of almost everything else, then the murder of Emmie's mother must be the central fact of her existence as well."
"That sounds logical, but it didn't work that way. Enunie didn't have a before and after. Her life is all aftermath. She never knew Horace, and she accepted the family's explanation that he died in a hunting accident. When Lollie died, she was only two. The truth is, she doesn't even remember her mother. She's like a child who had a bad dream and woke up to find herself safe and warm in a house where everyone loved her. Gus did a very good job of protecting her while she was growing up. It was her mother's absence that scarred Emmie. Gone is gone."
"However you want to "plain it, she's clearly disturbed. Did she ever get professional help?"
Marianna sipped her tea. Tess had worded the question as carefully as she could, but it obviously was too blunt for Marianna's sensibilities.
"When she was a teenager, Emily began…acting out in various ways," Marianna began cautiously. "She saw various counselors and doctors. One decided she could recover Emily's memory of what happened the night of the murder. I'm sure she thought she'd solve the crime and be a big hero. At any rate, she put Emily under hypnosis. When Emily couldn't remember anything, she became hysterical, convinced something was wrong with her. Gus gave up on doctors after that."
"How was she ‘acting out'?" Marianna's habit of casting other's words in invisible quotation marks was catching.
"Pardon?"
"You said Emily was sent to all these doctors because of her behavior. What was she doing?"
"Oh, typical adolescent rebellion. Truthfully, I think Gus over-reacted. His son, Clay, is so well-behaved, he makes normal children look out of control. Emily is a Sterne through and through, very headstrong. Clay's genes were watered down by his mother. She was a Galveston girl, pretty enough, but weak-willed. I think eating all that shellfish thins the blood."
"‘Was'? Is she dead, too?" Jesus, how many "accidents "could one family have?
"Oh no, she and Gus divorced about ten years ago, and she settled in California. Another blow for Emmie. She ended up losing two mothers before she was thirteen."
"I don't imagine it did much for her son, either."
Marianna lifted one shoulder in a tiny, ladylike shrug, as if Clay's problems were of little interest to her.
"Would Emmie go to her uncle if she were in trouble?"
"I told you the first time we met that they haven't spoken for five years."
"You told me lots of things the first time we spoke," Tess reminded her.
Marianna Barrett Conyers's face had a way of clicking off abruptly, like a coin-operated television set in a bus station.
"Waste your time if you like. Sterne Foods is on the Austin Highway, not that far from here. It runs off Broadway, near an old Mobil Station, the one that was a dress shop. You'll find it easily. But don't be surprised if you have trouble getting in. Security is very tight just now."
"Why does a restaurant chain need security? Is someone trying to get the recipe for the secret sauce?"
"I wouldn't know." And Marianna Barrett Conyers tilted her face toward a nonexistent sun, her part of the conversation clearly over.
Tess liked roads that told you where they went. Back home, it was York Road, Frederick Road, Harford Road-not to be confused with Old York Road, Old Frederick Road, and Old Harford Road. They weren't the fastest routes to their namesakes, but they were always more interesting than the interstate. Here, it was Fredericksburg and Blanco and Castroville. And if the Austin Highway was no longer much of a highway, it seemed cheerful about its demotion. Tess stopped for lunch at a place called the Bun and Barrel, on the theory that any restaurant configured to look like its namesake was always worth a visit. Although only the barrel was present here, and it was just a little decoration on the roof, the theory still held. It was almost two when she finished her burger and drove a little farther up the highway, to the fortress that was Sterne Foods.
One of the older buildings along this stretch of road, it had a fierce spick-and-span quality. The squat stucco rectangle was blinding white, with a red trim that was so shiny it looked wet. The cyclone fence-and the razor wire stretched across the top-shimmered in the midday sun. The grass was bright green and sharply edged, the flower beds severely symmetrical. No risk of E. coli here, Tess thought. Sterne Foods put the process in processed foods.
The only scruffy note was a slow-moving line of protesters in front of the fence. With union members on both sides of her family, Tess automatically assumed these were disgruntled workers. But their placards told of a much deeper dissatisfaction with Sterne Foods. SAVE YOUR OWN SOUL-DON'T EAT MEAT, read one sign. COWS DON'T DESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY. HUMANITARIANISM DOESN'T STOP WITH HUMANS. And, a little mysteriously, CHRISTMAS IS CARNAGE. Tess couldn't let that one go.
"Christmas? It's not quite Halloween."
"It's from Babe," said the picketer, a stringy woman with yellow-orange skin, the color of an expensive pepper. "You know, the movie about the pig who wants to herd sheep."
"A classic," Tess agreed. She and Esskay had watched it on video several times. "So what's your beef with Sterne Foods?"