Crime scene tape marked off the pool house at the Barrett place and a new pane of glass had replaced the one she had cut, but it was otherwise as she had first seen it. She shouldered her knapsack and walked around the house a few times before she peered through a kitchen window. There was a dark shape on the floor in the main room. Her stomach clutched-she really wasn't up for finding another body. But this shadow was flat and still, nothing more than the corner of a blanket, or a bedroll.

A bedroll? There had been nothing lying on the floor when she had made her first inventory of the house. She tried the door, found it unlocked, and stepped over the threshold.

"Hello?" she called.

"What do you want?"

The voice came from behind her. Crow stood in the doorway, backlit so she couldn't really see his face. The sky beyond him was unlike any she had ever seen-dark gray, with a stripe of navy blue on the horizon. A blue norther. She hadn't realized the term was so literal.

"You're alone?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I am, too."

"I know. I hid in the grove of pecan trees when I heard a car on the gravel driveway. I wouldn't have come out if anyone had been with you. Even Rick. I'm not turning myself in, Tess. Not yet."

"Not until tomorrow, right?"

He had come all the way into the house, and she could see his face now. He looked surprised and a little irritated. "How do you know about tomorrow? How did you find me?"

There was one answer for both questions. "Because I know you."

"You did once," he said. "Not anymore."

"No, it's the other way around. I know you better now than I ever did when we were together. Looking for you, I began to understand you, to find out things I should have known all along." His face remained guarded, closed to her. "There were times when I didn't understand you. But I always knew you wouldn't be involved in murder, Crow."

"Well, I'm not," he said, sounding at once angry and relieved. "But I can't go to the police, Tess. They'll keep me, thinking I can tell them where Emmie is. I can't. My only chance to find her is tomorrow."

"What is it about tomorrow? You've been fixated on that date since I got here."

"It's All Souls' Day-and the day of the All Soul Festival parade."

The parade, Gus Sterne's brainchild, his ego trip through the streets of San Antonio. "So what's Emmie going to do, Crow? She can't burn down a parade."

Instead of answering, he walked past Tess into the main room, where he crouched in front of one of the built-in bookcases. From the lowest shelf, he pulled out a scrapbook, then sat on the bedroll, inviting Tess to sit by him.

"Do you know where we are?" he asked, opening the book. It was a pretty volume, with a moss green velvet cover and pale gray pages.

"On the old Barrett place, near Twin Sisters, somewhere between Austin and San Antonio, in the state of Texas, in the United States of America," she answered dutifully.

"We're at a trysting spot. Two lovers used to meet here. Two lovers forbidden to be lovers. They met here and they promised to love each other forever and ever, despite the world's disapproval, despite all the obstacles in their path. One of them broke that promise, and the other one can neither forget nor forgive."

He began flipping through the pages, and dust from pressed flowers rose into the air, their fragrance long gone. The first few pages were filled with photographs. A Polaroid, the kind taken in restaurants, of two men and three women, laughing over their margaritas. Tess recognized Marianna Conyers and Gus Sterne, guessed that she was looking at the long-dead Frank Conyers and the long-gone Ida Sterne. The third woman looked like Emmie-more correctly, like the woman Emmie was in the process of becoming. Lollie Sterne. Her obituary was pasted beneath the Polaroid and Emmie had circled her own name among the survivors, then written "Survivor's List?" in the margin in the same red crayon.

"She thought it would make a good name for a band," Crow explained.

"An odd photo to save."

"It's the only one she has. Gus couldn't bear to have photos of Lollie around, after the murder. He put them away, planning to give them to Emmie one day. For obvious reasons, that never happened."

Next page. A tall, handsome man with two blond children on tricycles. Emmie smiled into the camera with a charisma that had not yet soured into craziness. Little Clay stared at the ground, sulky and cross. Gus Sterne looked at Emmie. More family photos, clippings from the society pages, more fragile remains of old corsages. Gus Sterne and family at this gala or that. Ida was in some of these, then she disappeared, with no explanation or acknowledgment.

With or without her, the dynamic was always the same-Emmie looked into the camera, Clay looked away, features twisted into a pout or a frown, Gus looked at Emmie as if startled by a particularly lovely ghost. It was like watching a rosebud unfurl-Emmie looked more like Lollie with each passing year. Here she was as the princess of the Order of the Alamo, escorted by her grim-faced cousin. Emmie at a picnic. Emmie backstage, in costume for a school play. Oklahoma, given the gingham dress and the comical hat. The girl who can't say no. Every picture told a story. Every picture told the same story: A radiant young woman, an unhappy boy, an older man who could not take his eyes off the young woman.

"Jesus," Tess said.

"There's more," Crow said. She was barely listening. Had Clay known his father and Emmie were lovers, or had he merely guessed? Technically, it wasn't incest, not by blood, but Gus had raised Emmie as his daughter, so it might as well be.

Crow turned another page, to a glossy photo razor cut from a book. This was a famous image, one Tess knew: The old Life photo of a woman lying on the hood of a crushed car after jumping from the Empire State Building.

"The twentieth century's version of the Lily Maid of Astolat, who died for the love of Lancelot," Crow said. "That's Emmie's fantasy. She'll jump, and hit the hood of the car, the old Lincoln, and it will carry her down Broadway. I've told her dying isn't as easy as it looks, but she's determined. When she realized I intended to interfere with her plan, she decided to get rid of me. She's the one who put the gun under my bed, then called the cops."

"So you do think she killed Darden and Weeks."

"No. Emmie's not a killer. But she doesn't care about them. She doesn't care about anyone. Nothing is important to her, except making this grand, stupid, insane gesture."

"All for Gus Sterne."

Crow looked perplexed. "Who said anything about him?"

"You showed me the pictures." She took the scrapbook from him, flipped back to the earlier pages. "You told me about the two lovers who met here secretly. I put it together."

"You put it together wrong. Emmie wasn't in love with Gus, for Christ's sake. She's in love with Clay."

"Clay?" That raw, unfinished boy-someone was willing to die for him? But Tess was coming to realize that it was futile to try to understand who might love whom, or why. She thought of Kitty and Tyner, of Kitty and Keith, of Kitty and everyone. Of Rick and Kristina, even the squabbling couple on the bridge above the River Walk, comical to everyone, but not to one another. Lovers made sense only to themselves.

"Since high school," Crow said, answering one of her many unvoiced questions. "Gus found out and forbade them to see each other. Clay, dutiful as ever, agreed. Emmie didn't. That's when she tried to burn the house down. When she left the psychiatric hospital, she followed Clay to Austin and they started again, meeting here. Then, about a year ago, Clay suddenly broke off all contact, with no explanation. In May he moved back to San Antonio-and into his father's house. He chose Gus over Emmie. At least, that's how she sees it."