"What's this about, anyway? Eddie in trouble? He seemed like a good guy, but you never know."

Tess avoided his questions by asking one of her own. "What do you do, anyway?"

"Me? I'm a student."

"You look like you're almost thirty."

"Try thirty-five. But I'll have my master's by the time I'm forty if I don't get distracted again, wander off to Mexico for a while. I worked a couple years down in San Miguel de Allende, but that's almost too American now. I'm thinking Merida, maybe farther down the coast in the Yucatan. Tulum. Or I could just keep going, all the way to Belize. I don't know. Whatever comes next."

"Whatever comes next," she repeated to Maury, once they were back in the car.

"What does come next?" he asked. "Where do you want to go now?"

"I was just quoting Crow's tenant. Seems like an enviable way to live. Except that when I lived that way, I didn't realize how free I was. I just thought I was unemployed."

Maury held his forefinger and thumb out toward her. "You are about this close to singing a Joni Mitchell song and you don't even know it."

"No, what I'm saying is that things are different here. In warm climates, people are more relaxed about being down on their luck, because spending a night outside isn't a matter of life and death."

"So, you don't have any homeless guys up in Baltimore?" he asked.

"Okay, my theory needs a little refining." Still, there was something in the weather here, or the water, that changed one's perceptions of time and possibilities. If Crow had caught this local fever, he could be anywhere.

With anyone.

Chapter 5

They took a break, heading back to Quadling Country to wile away the hours until the clubs started opening. A late-afternoon run along the paths near Town Lake gave Tess a glimpse into Austin 's charms. Here was a city, that worshipped fitness, that accommodated those who exercised. Quite unlike Baltimore, where chain-smoking drivers liked to force runners off the roads for the sheer sport of it. It should have been a perfect fit for her. If only Tess believed in perfect fits. Thanks to Kitty, she had been raised on the real Brothers Grimm, where Cinderella's sisters sliced off their toes and heels to cram their feet into that stupid glass slipper.

A few scullers and sweep rowers were working out, and she found she missed her own unpretentious little Alden. The rowing season was almost over in Baltimore, she would lose some of the best days if she stayed here too long. But she would be home soon, she reminded herself. Things were simpler than she or Crow's parents had realized. He had moved out to be with a woman. She'd probably find him-and her-on Sixth Street tonight. All she had to do was walk him to a pay phone, and she was out of here.

So why had he stopped calling his parents? she asked herself, as she ran along Town Lake. How to explain the postcard? Crow might still be angry enough to play such a prank on her, but why would he want to worry his parents?

Her best guess was that carelessness was the prerogative of sons and daughters everywhere, at every age. After all, she hadn't called her parents since she arrived in Texas, and she waited to phone Tyner's office until last night, when she was sure of getting the machine. There were times when one was in too much of a hurry-or too much in love-to stop and talk to anyone.

It was after ten and they were walking north along the street that bordered the west side of the UT campus when Maury said: "You want to stop and get something to eat? I'm dragging. There's a good place not too far."

"Vegetarian?" Tess asked skeptically. She was dragging, too, although not from hunger. It had been depressing, going from music club to music club, showing photos of Crow-one as Tess had known him, with his dyed dreadlocks, and the one in the newspaper clipping. Have you seen him? Have you seen him? No one had.

"Barbecue."

"Barbecue? I thought you had given up red meat."

"Sure, at home. But I can eat what I want when I'm out-as long as I brush my teeth before I come home. I can come home smelling of marijuana, but if Dad catches a whiff of burger on me, I'm grounded."

The thing was, no one here knew Crow or Edgar or Ed or Eddie. They had started with the better places, along Sixth Street, where the local headliners played. And, as Maury kept telling her, a local headliner in Austin was a pretty big deal in the city that was home to Willie Nelson, Shawn Colvin and a lot of other people that Tess had never heard of. Then they had worked their way out and out and out, in ever-widening circles, until they were checking depressed little bars where some kid might be allowed to play in the silences between televised sporting events. Still, no one remembered a guy named Ransome, with or without a doll-like girl.

Now she and Maury were walking through the university section, just in case Crow and his band had been reduced to playing for handouts.

"Or we could go to Sonic," Maury offered. "Get a chili dog."

Tess could accept that no one had hired Crow, although she had always thought Poe White Trash as good as any punk band she had heard. It was harder to believe that no one remembered him. Crow had been so vivid, so alive. He had always made an impression on people.

"Can't you even remember if he ever came in here looking for work?" Tess had asked one club manager.

The manager was the kind of person who never made eye contact, keeping his gaze riveted over one's shoulder, in case someone more interesting might appear on the horizon.

"You know how many kids I see in a typical week? Everyone who gets off the Greyhound thinks he's going to be Austin's next whatever. The place is like Hollywood in the forties. Everyone wants to live here."

"Really?" Tess had said. "I don't."

He met her eyes then, in order to scoff properly. "As if you could."

"So what do you say?" Maury demanded.

"To what?"

"Barbecue or chili dogs. Ruby's is right up here at the top of the Drag, if you don't mind walking a little ways."

"The Drag?"

"Guadalupe Street, the very concrete beneath your feet. Hey, is there anything you want to see on campus? We could cut through there, if you like. Maybe you could post WANTED signs or something on the community bulletin boards."

Tess looked at the utility poles of Guadalupe Street, so covered with fliers that they might be made of papier-mâché. "I don't think so."

"Don't you want to see the campus, anyway? See the Tower?"

"The Tower?"

"Charles Whitman, baby." Maury's eyes lighted up. "Did you know that there was, like, this whole family that was shot inside the Tower that day and they lay there-lie there? lay there-throughout the whole thing and one of them was alive."

"How interesting," Tess said. Still, she understood why Maury would find such a tale fascinating, as long as it was in the abstract. Paradoxical as it might sound, it was often the very lack of experience that made people calloused. She considered telling him some of the things she had seen in the past year. A couple gunned down in their bed. A body in a ditch. A cab coming out of the fog to dispatch a young man in the prime of his life. All the "reality" shows on television couldn't make you understand what it was like to be there at the exact moment when life ended, when someone's soul, for want of a better word, ebbed from the body. But Maury was a boy, a handsome, happy boy who sold comic books for a living. He wasn't remotely interested in reality, which made him a strangely agreeable companion.

As she and Maury walked, she continued to scan the faces of the buskers and hustlers along the Drag. A young woman played her violin, a lovely classical air soaring over the street, but she didn't even look up when coins dropped into her open case. They passed a little open-air market with glass and beaded jewelry, a textbook store crammed with burnt orange and white accessories. A young man sat on top of a trash can, whaling away on a set of bongos.