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

your theories?” Tess asked suddenly, stalling for time. She felt uneasy, almost frightened of seeing whatever Chris Ransome found so urgent. “Your ones about economics, I mean. Could you make them so simple that a bonehead like myself could get it?”
    “If I can’t, then it’s my failure, not yours. The basic premise is plenitude.”
    “Plenitude?”
    “Simply, there really is enough.”
    Tess’s mind balked at this. “Everything I see says we live in a time of scarcity, that there are too many people and not enough resources.”
    “Well, the theory of plenitude begins with changing one’s definition of what ‘enough’ is. Look, I brought you here to show you Crow’s studio. To convince you that you did know him, and he knew you.”
    He opened a door on the far end of the large room where Felicia worked. Moonlight poured through the windows, and before Chris flicked on the light, Tess had a sense of hundreds of canvases, from large to small, surrounding her. When the light did come on, she saw there were no more than a dozen, and they were all quite small.
    But every face looking back at her was hers.
    There she was, in pastels, in pen and ink, in oil, in crayon. She was clothed, she was nude, her hair was braided, her hair was undone. Even Esskay, who had arrived so close to the end of what would be her time with Crow, had managed to creep into a few of the pictures. There was one of the two of them sleeping, their bodies mirroring each other. It made Tess blush to look at it, to think of Crow standing over her and the dog, studying them, remembering all the details, including the dirty white socks she wore to bed. The only thing she wore to bed.
    “We didn’t know they were here until a week ago. We’ve always respected his privacy, but after he stopped calling and writing…well, we thought he might have left some sort of clue behind.”
    “You know I did try to make amends,” Tess said, feeling a little defensive. The etiquette of the situation overwhelmed her. She was standing in a room with an ex-boyfriend’s father, looking at naked pictures of herself. She had never read Emily Post, but she was pretty sure this situation had not been covered. “He didn’t want to try again. He said it was too late for us, and he was probably right.”
    “These things happen. Felicia and I are the last people to be judgmental about the ways of the human heart. What did Faulkner say in his Nobel speech? ‘The heart wants what the heart wants.’”
    “Actually, I think that was Woody Allen, at the press conference about Soon-Yi. Faulkner said the conflicts of the human heart are the only thing worth writing about.” Every now and then, it helped, being an English major. Not often, but sometimes.
    “I know they’re the only thing worth living for.” Chris Ransome picked up one of the smaller studies, a nude that had been exceptionally kind to Tess’s rounded figure, narrowing the waist just a shade, deepening the almost-dimple in her chin, removing any dimples farther south. But the leg muscles were hers, Tess thought, and that little dent by her tricep. She had worked hard to get her arms cut like that.
    Ransome studied the picture, then looked at Tess thoughtfully. In another man, the look might have been salacious, offensive. But Chris Ransome looked at Tess as if she were merely another in the series of beloved objects his son had toted home over the years. The arrowheads, the rock collection, the Star Wars figures, the Nature Store telescope. A swallow’s nest.
    “Felicia and I know we could hire someone else, Tess. We probably should. But there is something unfinished between you and Crow. I won’t put a name to it, but whatever it is, it’s like a divining rod. You’ll find your way to him. Or he’ll find his way to you. No other private detective can offer us that.”
    He pulled something from his pocket. “This is the last postcard Crow sent to us, before he disappeared.”
    The card