Esskay made a beeline for Crow’s voice, Tess right behind her. Alas, Crow was preparing wood, not dinner, stripping paint from the kitchen cabinets while a boom box provided him with his own private Mardi Gras, courtesy of Professor Longhair’s version of “Big Chief.” Or maybe it was Dr. John.

“Why didn’t you call?” Tess asked plaintively, leaning against the doorjamb-or where the doorjamb would be, eventually. “I would have brought takeout.”

“Lost track of the time,” Crow said abstractedly, examining the one cabinet that was almost done. Her father had wanted to yank out everything in the kitchen and start over, replacing the original cabinets with modular units from Ikea. But Crow had a hunch that maple lurked somewhere beneath the layers of paint, past bile green, past egg-yolk yellow, past mud brown, past no-longer-glossy white. The kitchen cabinets were a veritable history of bad American taste, circa 1930-1975. It was taking forever, but now the wood was in sight. He stroked the exposed patch softly. “It’s going to be beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” she said, meaning it as a joke, not quite able to carry it off. His face was streaked with dirt, his hair stood up in strange tufts, he had on elbow-high rubber gloves and protective eyewear. And yet he was beautiful to her. He was growing up so nicely, her six-years-younger man, his face thinning out, his body filling out. He had begun lifting weights with her this past year, just to be companionable, and now all sorts of interesting changes were taking place. Friends who had once teased her about him now wanted one too, as if he were a Fendi baguette or a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes. But Crow was no accessory, and no knock-off version of him would do.

Esskay sniffed the air and stalked off, angry that she couldn’t detect any food smells beneath the paint remover. Crow thumbed through the take-out menus that formed the spine of their diet these days. Tess had intended to start cooking once she had her own house, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

“Thai? Chinese? Pizza?”

Slumping already, she drooped a little more with each suggestion. No menu ever seemed right for the cold bright days of January, when the mind argued for abstemious balance and the body yearned for the rich treats of the recent holidays.

“What then?”

She didn’t know what she wanted. The more she had in life, the more complicated this question seemed. She had always thought it would be the other way around. “Honestly?”

“Always. That’s our one rule.”

“Let me run over to Eddie’s before they close, pick up cheese, crackers, a box of brownie mix, and a bottle of red wine.”

Crow, usually so agreeable to her whims, frowned. “Can we at least bake the brownies this time, or are you going to eat them out of the bowl raw?” he asked, removing his gloves. “I worry about you and salmonella.”

“We’ll bake them, I promise. I just happen to think brownies and wine go well together. But, Crow-”

“Yes?”

“Maybe you could keep those glasses on. I mean- for later. They really do something for you.”

A rubber glove hit her head as she ran toward the door.

Later arrived sooner than usual. Within an hour, they were in bed, bodies spent but glasses not yet empty, the pan of brownies cooling on the top of the old-fashioned gas stove. Giggling and relaxed, Tess began to tell Crow about the Porcine One, thinking it nothing more than a good story. Her work did yield good conversational fodder at day’s end, although not as often as one might think. And the rules of confidentiality made it tricky. She sometimes thought about “hiring” Crow and paying him the princely sum of, say, one dollar a year, so she could tell him everything. Luckily, the Porcine One wasn’t a client, so she could gossip about him freely-and meanly.

But Crow was not as amused as Tess was by the tale of John P. Kennedy.

“Jesus, Tess, it would be awful if he found someone who was willing to do it. The Visitor might never come back.”

“He won’t find anyone. He only has a day left, and he made a point of telling me he couldn’t get an appointment with anyone else-everyone else being so much more in demand, apparently.”

“So he said.”

“Why would he lie?” The greyhound had sneaked into the room and draped herself at their feet like a heavy, furry quilt. Tess nudged her with her toes, only to have the greyhound sigh and expand, taking up that much more of the bed. Esskay subscribed to the Manifest Destiny theory of sleeping space, and the headboard was her horizon.

“Maybe he wants you to feel confident that no one’s going to take him up on his nasty little assignment. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the first detective he visited.”

“You mean, of all the private detective agencies in the world, he just happened to walk into mine?”

“You been in the paper lately?”

“Not for a year, thank God. I’ve been a good little citizen, limiting myself to insurance work as much as possible, a few missing-persons no-brainers. Not even a matrimonial in the past two months.”

Crow rolled from the bed and walked over to the room’s French doors. In her old place, Tess had a terrace that afforded a view of the harbor and the city’s Domino Sugars sign. In the boom times of the late nineties, it had become an expensive view, and a day had come when she could no longer afford it. Here, the little cottage had porches on three sides, and they could gaze out at the woods and Stony Run Creek. It was much darker, away from the haze of downtown. Tess actually found it a little scarier, full of unexpected sounds and shadows, but she hadn’t confessed this to anyone, even Crow.

“The sky is awfully clear tonight,” he observed. “Didn’t the weather forecast call for snow?”

“No, apparently the chance for snow wasn’t pronounced enough for the television weatherheads to justify throwing themselves into a frenzy and panicking the entire city. Just cold and clear.”

“You ever been? I mean, you have lived here all your life.”

“Where?” she asked, a beat behind. “No. I mean- January at midnight, the corner of Greene and Fayette? I love the idea, but I’ve never been able to drag my body out of bed.”

“I’ll get you up. I’m still a night owl at heart.”

“Why?” she asked, deciding to skip the argument, which she had already lost, and proceed straight to the heart of the matter.

“Because life’s so short, and then you die. Molière said that, or something close. It’s pathetic, really, how people have to hand you reasons to do things you should be doing. Easy things, right-in-front-of-you things. It’s like waiting for guests to visit before you go see any of the things that are special in your hometown. Your would-be client has bluffed us into doing something we should have done already. You have to do it once, at least, so why not tomorrow night?”

“It seems to me you made the same argument last Halloween, when that local theater group was performing ”The Masque of the Red Death‘ on Rollerblades.“

“And weren’t you glad you went?”

“Only because I dined out on the story for weeks. I’ll go a long way for an anecdote.”

“Then why not go to the graveyard tomorrow night?”

“I’d already said I’d go. Hey-aren’t you cold?”

He got back into bed, and it wasn’t long before the greyhound fled for the living room sofa, playing the part of the offended grande dame. Tess and Crow knew each other so well, or were beginning to. The gurus of modern relationships say couples are to speak honestly, eschew codes, always state directly and plainly what they want. But there are codes, and there are languages. Tess and Crow had their own language. Tess was never going to be an “I want” kind of person, no matter how much Crow encouraged her. So he did his best to read between the lines of her epigrams, translating at will. “Are you cold?” could have meant many things, from “Please get the brownies as long as you’re up” to “I’m cold, come warm me up.” Actually, it had meant both things, but Tess was happy to settle for the latter. It was a small price to pay for being obscure. She could have a brownie after.