Read Laura Lippman for Free Online Page A

Toyota headed out of Baltimore on Route 40 on Sunday morning, bound for Charlottesville, with Esskay the only passenger on board. Although it was slightly out of their way, she went west, then south along the Shenandoah Parkway. That kept them out of Washington traffic and gave Esskay a chance to see the fall leaves.
    Tess knew the first part of the route well enough, from the dozens of school trips to Skyline Drive and Luray Caverns, where she always had to relearn the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. “C for ceiling, stalactites hang down.” Another brain cell wasted.
    But once south of the Natural Bridge, it was all new to her. She wasn’t much of a traveler. There had been the road trips for crew in college, a few trips to New York, a wedding in Chicago, one spring break on the Outer Banks. When there had been time, there had been no money, and now that there was money, at least a little of it, there was no time. Or maybe she just wasn’t inclined to make the time.
    The truth was, she had never really understood the lure of travel. Strange faces, strange sheets, upset routines. And for what? To look at some scenery, as she was doing now. Pretty enough, but nothing to leave home for. Tess remembered Kitty making a present of her childhood Viewfinder. Tess would have been around six or seven at the time, so Kitty was the glamorous young-old aunt, not even out of college yet. Tess had dutifully held the Viewfinder to her face and depressed the switch, taking in the Golden Gate and Hoover Dam, Mesa Verde and the Four Corners, the Astrodome and the Alamo. (Of course she knew the Alamo.)
    The only places that touched her were close to home. Poe’s grave, for example—she swore she had felt an icy breeze on her cheek, as if he had just passed by. GreenMount Cemetery, home to John Wilkes Booth.
    Maybe it wasn’t local places after all, but a perverse fondness for graveyards.

     

    Once in Charlottesville, Mrs. Ransome’s careful directions led her past the university and into the heart of an old residential neighborhood with mature trees and substantial houses. Tess had expected something a little more ramshackle, a run-down bungalow with a “Property Is Theft” sign on the unlocked front door. But the Ransomes’ house sat far back on a well-kept lawn, an Arts and Crafts bungalow at odds with its more traditional neighbors, but undeniably pretty and charming.
    A small woman in baggy print pants and bright purple sweatshirt, her dark hair an uncontrollable mass of curls, opened the front door. She looked just as Tess had imagined her—a casual refugee from the sixties, indifferent to fashion and appearance.
    “I’ll show you how to come through the back way,” she said, using a hillbilly accent, perhaps for comic effect. “A little easier to get in through the kitchen. Besides, I just mopped the front hall.”
    “It’s good to meet you, Mrs. Ransome.” Tess held out her hand, to forestall the hug she feared was coming. Bostonians were supposed to be reserved, but you never knew.
    “Miz Ransome?” The woman squinted at her, confused. “Oh, you mean Miz Kendall. She’s in her studio, finishing up. But she’ll be in directly to see you. I told her on the walkie-talkie box that you was here.”
    The garden behind the house, screened from the front by a privet hedge, came as something of a surprise, a hidden art gallery, much bigger than one would guess from the street. Here, large bronze sculptures in a variety of styles sat among weaving paths.
    “I don’t think the sculpture garden at the Baltimore Museum of Art has as much stuff,” Tess said to Esskay, who was inspecting one of the more abstract works.
    “No, but it’s of better quality,” said a tall woman who was coming along the path, from a cottage at the rear of the garden. She wore a dusty green smock over her clothes and there was a streak of something on her right cheek, but she was otherwise impeccably groomed. Her dark hair was