In Big Trouble

Chapter 23

Thursday morning. Tess had been in Texas nine days. She sat in the garden at the Alamo with a Peanut Buster Parfait and thought about everything she had accomplished.

She had found Crow, only to lose him again.

She had found two dead men, both so ripe they might have forever changed her relationship with soft cheeses.

She had learned to say "Good morning," "Good dog," and "You are the father of my baby" in Vietnamese. (People were always saying that last bit in Mrs. Nguyen's private telenovela, and she was kind enough to translate.)

She had experienced coitus interruptus by SWAT team.

She had stumbled on a Dairy Queen in a downtown San Antonio mall and convinced the vacant-eyed adolescent at the counter that she had a medical condition requiring her to consume soft ice cream, hot fudge, and peanuts at eleven in the morning.

Yes, travel was broadening. She'd have to do it again sometime, perhaps at the end of the next millennium.

She saw a flash of blond hair and dared to hope-but no, Emmie wouldn't come here. Emmie was on the run, a trail of dead men in her wake, their ill-gotten gains now her iller-gotten gains. Crow was on the run, looking for Emmie. Or on the run from Emmie, because he had the fifty thousand dollars and she wanted it. That was another one of Guzman's theories. If Emmie and Crow weren't in this together, then they were at each other's throats. Emmie and Crow had conspired to kill her mother's suspected murderers, then fallen out over the unexpected cash bonus. Tess wasn't satisfied. Why would a girl with a trust fund bother to fight over a sum less than the yearly payout on a million-dollar lottery ticket? What did Emmie know about the night her mother died, if anything? What did someone think she knew?

And how could Crow kill anyone, under any circumstance? No one changed that much in five months.

But he would keep quiet to protect someone. Especially if he thought the act was morally defensible.

Especially if he was in love.

Oh, sure, he had been convincing enough in his thwarted seduction of her the other night. But you could sleep with someone while you were still in love with someone else. You could do it quite enthusiastically, even. Tess knew this from firsthand experience. What had Crow said? He had accused her of using him as a bookmark, a way of keeping her place while she tried to figure out how she felt about watching the death of a man who didn't quite belong to her, and never would. A man she didn't quite love, and never would. Just because Emmie was through with Crow didn't mean Crow was through with Emmie. Lovers seldom finished at the same time.

"You're thinking too much," Rick had said when she tried to break down Guzman's theories on the way home from the police station. Happy to be a lawyer still, all he wanted to do was find Crow and turn him over to the authorities, then start preparing his case. But Rick's method of finding Crow was to sit back in his office, doing his other work, waiting for the phone to ring. Sure, they were still going to see that detective this afternoon, the one who had been involved in the original bust of Darden and Weeks. But what did it matter, now that Weeks was a corpse, too? Tess wanted to do something, go somewhere, ask some questions. Unfortunately, her inherent bias toward action was proving less than constructive, except as a way of drumming up business for local mortuaries. She felt as if she were flooring a car in snow and ice. The tires spun, the snow melted, taking you down to the ice, where there was no traction, so you went nowhere. So you floored it again, and the tires spun, and the snow melted, and you went nowhere.

Again she thought she saw a blond head, the same white blond as Emmie. It couldn't be.

It wasn't. It was Clay Sterne, disappointment naked in his face.

"She's not here," Tess said.

"I didn't come to see her," he shot back.

"You don't have to worry, Clay. I won't tell your father you were here."

"I do what I want to do, not what my father tells me."

Tess nodded. "Is that why you're living at home, preparing to take over a business you can't stand, instead of going for the advanced degree you want?"

He sat on her bench, keeping as much distance between them as possible. "I'd think you were an extraordinarily good detective if I didn't know Javier had such a big mouth. Okay, sure, it's no big secret. I'd rather be getting a Ph.D. in history, but someone has to run the business, and I'm it. The last of the Sternes."

"You and Emmie."

"She's not a Sterne. And she's not here."

"Not a Sterne?"

"My father never adopted her. He took her in, she used the family name, but she's still Emily Morgan on her birth certificate and driver's license. Bad joke on her mother's part, naming her that."

Tess must have looked blank, for he added, "Emily Morgan was the so-called Yellow Rose of Texas, the beautiful ‘mulatto' slave with whom Santa Anna was supposed to have dallied before the battle of San Jacinto. Serious scholarship doesn't really support the story-Emily Morgan was more likely a free black woman who didn't ‘dally' with anyone-but never mind. You couldn't have a song called ‘The Free Black Woman of Texas.'"

"Still, she is a Sterne. She's Lollie's daughter."

"My dad made the business what it is, anyway," Clay said, his tone argumentative, almost aggressive.

"Yes. Although it was faltering, right, twenty years ago?"

The question surprised him, but only for a moment. "If you're going to read Texas history, you might want to try something with a little more depth than The Green Glass. May I suggest T. R. Fehrenbach? Not politically correct, of course, but still a good place to start. By the way, the Mexicans were on the outside here, the Texans on the inside."

"Fine, mock me, if that makes you feel better. Besides, not all the Mexicans were on the outside."

"What?"

"I went through the exhibit here. You think I was going to come all this way, sit in the garden at the Alamo, and not walk through the place? Some of the defenders were Mexican. There were women and children here, too. I never knew that. Some scholars have questioned whether the battle really was important, while others say it provided Sam Houston the opportunity he needed at San Jacinto. The legend has William Barrett Travis drawing the line that separated the men from the boys, and Davy Crockett going down swinging Old Betsy. But it's been suggested by one historian that Crockett begged for his life, tried to pretend he was just passing by, and was executed on the spot."

Clay gave her a suspicious look. "You didn't learn all that here. The Daughters aren't big on some of the, um, newer theories."

"I went to the library. I didn't read Fehrenbach, but I did manage to skim a few books on the subject. Not because I care if Jim Bowie had a broken leg or venereal disease-"

"Typhus, more likely."

"Not because I care," Tess repeated, "about anything that happened in 1836. But because I want to know where your cousin is, and I thought the answer might be in where she used to come, and history was all I had. Breakfast at the Alamo, Clay. What was that all about?"

He looked around the garden, as if the answer might be posted, like one of the sign boards in the Long Barracks. "It was just some ritual she had. She was very susceptible to rituals. One of her many, many psychiatrists diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder."

"Was that the same one who tried to recover her memories of the murder through hypnosis?"

Again she had surprised him. "I don't think so. They were all hacks, if you ask me. The thing is, she wasn't crazy then. I'm not sure she's crazy now…just disappointed."

"Disappointed?"

"In life. Isn't everyone?" He looked around, frowning. "Personally, I don't care much for the Alamo. It's too accessible."

"Do you think history should be hard to get to? That it doesn't count if you can just walk over on your lunch hour, or on your way to the post office or the mall?" Or after a trip to the Dairy Queen.

"I think historic sites shouldn't be places that you zip through on your way to the gift shop to buy a ceramic ashtray."

He looked so serious when he said this that Tess couldn't help laughing. Clay flushed. He was literally thin-skinned, so pale and transparent that his skin was almost blue when he wasn't blushing. He was just twenty-two, she reminded herself, a young twenty-two at that, although he didn't look quite so gangly and spindly away from his broad-shouldered, bigger-than-life, Texas-sized father.

"I'm sorry, you're right," she said contritely. "History is serious. All history, not just wars and elections, but family history."

Clay's eyes darted, anxious to be anywhere that wasn't in her direct gaze.

"I know about how Emmie tried to burn the house down, Clay. A reporter from the Eagle told me." The same reporter who has the page one exclusive today on the discovery of a body at Espejo Verde, but she didn't want to go into that.

"It was an accident," he said automatically. "The fire, I mean."

Tess made a neutral noise, not bothering to let him know she had already been told otherwise. "Were you two close, growing up?"

"Sometimes. We're only a year apart. That's okay when you're younger. When we got to high school, it was…different. She was part of this very fast crowd, and she did the whole Goth thing. Dyed her hair jet black, if you can imagine. Smoked pot, screwed around. My father had a fit."

"Was she jealous of you?"

"Jealous? Why would she be jealous of me?"

"Because you're the ‘real' son, and she was merely a cousin. Because you're the well-behaved, dutiful straight-A student type, and she's always been so troubled. I imagine your father and mother treated her a little differently than they treated you."

Clay shook his head. "My parents divorced when I was in junior high school. I don't see her much. Truth is, she treated me and Emmie exactly the same-with complete indifference."

Tess had forgotten about the divorce, the "Galveston girl" who had retreated to California. It was one of the rare bits of truth Marianna had let slip. "I'm sorry."

"Why? It's just more history. The social history of the latter part of the twentieth century. Half of all marriages, etc., etc." He paused, stuck on his own statistic. "I've never quite believed that, actually. What does it mean? Does someone like Elizabeth Taylor skew the results? Do you count Richard Burton twice? Even if you don't, in her case, one hundred percent of marriages end in divorce. See, that's the problem with anecdotal evidence."

"Not one hundred percent. Seven-eighths, not quite 90 percent."

"Huh?"

"Mike Todd died in a plane crash. So, divorced seven times, widowed once. Nick Hilton, Michael Wilding, Michael Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton, Richard Burton, John Warner, Larry Fortensky. So far."

Clay looked genuinely aghast. "You shouldn't have that in your brain. It's taking up space where something useful might go."

"I don't seem to have much say about what gets lodged in there," Tess said, hitting her head lightly with her palm, as if to shake out the offending factoid. "Nope, it's stuck, right next to the lyrics from the theme song from The Flintstones. Then again, you'd be surprised at the kind of information that proves useful. Why, I bet there are things Emmie told me the one time we talked, or even you and your father, which seemed meaningless, but may yet help me find her."

She had thought her bluff hit just the right note of implicit menace, but Clay wasn't impressed. "Sounds like urban archaeology to me. But at least they have a reason for doing things the way they do."

"What do you mean?"

"There's a hotel down Alamo Street, the Fairmount. It used to be an old flophouse, on the other side of town, and they moved it from one site to the other over two days. I think it made Guinness-not the largest building ever moved, but the largest one ever moved on rubber tires across city streets."

"Now that's the kind of stat Baltimore specializes in. Distinction through compound modifier." The longer she stayed in San Antonio, the more she saw how much the two cities had in common. "But what does it have to do with archaeology?"

"They were clearing the site when they realized the land was essentially a trash pit from the battle of the Alamo. Broken china, weaponry, even an unfired cannon ball. But the hotel move couldn't be delayed. So, toward the end, they just began shoveling it all up and carting away truckfuls of dirt, to be sifted through later at the University of Texas-San Antonio. Not an ideal way to work, but sometimes it's all you've got."

"Is there a point to the story, Clay? Is there a big pile of dirt I should be sifting through somewhere?"

He was suddenly, inexplicably, quite angry. "I'm saying that you can dig forever, but all you're going to find is garbage. Even if you did find something of significance, you wouldn't really know where it fit without years of study. You can't just come someplace and get to know it right away. You can't come into a family, any family, and think you know them because you heard some gossip, or read some sleazy book. You don't know my dad, or me, or Emmie. You don't understand anything you've seen. You're just a dumb, gawking tourist. Too bad there's not a gift shop for you to visit. At least you might leave with a nice keychain for your troubles."

And with this, he pushed himself off the bench and ran for the exit, toward the very wall a handful of men had scaled when William Barrett Travis had drawn the line that separated the men from the boys. Assuming, Tess thought, that had ever really happened.