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.

Chapter 24

"He lives on Bikini."

"Huh?"

"This detective, Marty Diamond," Rick Trejo said, heading up Austin Highway. Tess realized she knew where she was, for once.

"He lives in a bikini? You means he hangs around the house in one?" Tess envisioned a too-brown old man, greased-up and dessicated at the same time, his stomach cascading out of a tiny magenta swimsuit. It wasn't an image that sat well on a late lunch from La Calesa. Rick had given her another taco tutorial-actually, the menu had been Mexican-Mexican according to his lexicon, the same sort of food that Espejo Verde had served. Despite that unhappy association, it had been all she could do not to stand up on the breezy patio and belt out: "How Long Has This Been Going On?" One thing was certain: She was never going back to ground beef, cheddar cheese, and chopped lettuce in an Old El Paso shell.

"Bikini is the street name," Rick said. "All the streets in this subdivision have some kind of Hawaiian theme. Waikiki, Molokai. Lots of retired military around here. I think the Pacific Rim theme makes them feel at home."

The houses in this northeast-side neighborhood were small ranches. Some had fallen on hard times, but most were fastidiously maintained. The lawns, in particular, seemed a kind of fetish here. Tess wondered how much work it took to keep one's yard so green and lush in a climate like San Antonio's. Rain hadn't threatened once in all the time she had been here.