Laura Lippman by Tess Monaghan 04 - In Big Trouble (v5) Read Free Book Online

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