Now You See Me...

by Rochelle Krich

  “Anyway,” Rabbi Bailor said, “Dassie saw his photo before she met him. She would have recognized Mr. Shankman.”

  “He probably e-mailed her someone else’s photo. That’s what they do.”

  “But Dassie met him twice before Sunday,” the rabbi said. “If it was Mr. Shankman, she would have told Sara.”

  “Not if he convinced Dassie that she couldn’t trust anyone with their secret. Actually, that would make the whole courtship more exciting. Forbidden love?”

  “You have this all worked out,” the rabbi said, impatient. “But I didn’t hire Mr. Shankman. And he knew that it wasn’t my decision to fire him.”

  “Why was he fired?”

  “You haven’t changed, Malka. Sorry—Molly. Always tenacious. Anything else?”

  “You should call the police, Rabbi. The more I think about the note—”

  “You’re going to show it to your detective friend. Let’s see what he finds out. I think this man is playing with me, Molly.”

  I frowned. “What makes you think so?”

  “Just a feeling.” Again, he glanced over his shoulder. “Is that it?”

  He was either eager to get rid of me and my questions, or anxious to join his wife and brother-in-law. Maybe both.

  “I’d like to ask Aliza another question. Is she home?”

  “She’s probably in her room. By the way, I talked to her about the IM thing. Thanks again for telling me.”

  “No problem.”

  At least I’d accomplished something.

  Chapter 11

  Aliza was at her desk, applying pink-beige polish to her nails.

  The mounds of clothes on the beds had disappeared.

  “Nervous energy,” she said, following my eyes. “We’re all waiting for Dassie to show up, or at least phone.” Aliza capped the nail polish bottle and opened a bottle of topcoat. “I thought that was her phoning half an hour ago, because my parents were so stressed right after. But my dad said it was a parent. They’re always calling him at home.”

  “It must be tough to be a principal. My mom teaches high school English, and she often gets calls from parents at home, too.” “Emergencies” that are rarely that.

  “My dad loves his job. Well, he’d love it more if he wasn’t worried about losing it.” She looked up at me, her teeth catching her upper lip. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I won’t tell,” I promised. “Why would your father’s job be at risk, Aliza? He was a wonderful teacher. I’m sure he’s a terrific principal.”

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure why I cared. Despite my sympathy for the rabbi during this crisis, I was still nursing a fourteen-year-old resentment. And though in my adolescent fantasies he’d never been the object of my revenge (I’d reserved that role for Rabbi Ingel, had pictured him being fired after confessing publicly that he’d maligned me), over the years I had often imagined Rabbi Bailor begging my forgiveness. But now I felt an inexplicable need to defend him against his detractors.

  Aliza nodded. “My dad loves connecting with students, bringing them closer to Judaism. Most of them love him. And he’s being honored in January at a Jewish educators’ conference in New York.”

  “So what’s the problem? If you can’t tell me, that’s cool.”

  “It’s not a secret, really.”

  She busied herself applying topcoat. I sensed that she was deliberating, and didn’t push.

  “My dad and the secular principal don’t get along,” she finally said. “Dr. Mendes wants to get as many kids as possible into the Ivy Leagues. My dad encourages them to go to Israel, at least for a year. She thinks he tells them to focus on Jewish studies at the expense of secular subjects. Which isn’t true.” Aliza examined her nails and frowned. “My dad says you have to try to excel in all your studies. According to the Torah, wasting time is a sin.”

  That was the Rabbi Bailor I remembered. “You said most of the students love him?”

  “A couple of months ago my dad wanted to expel a senior. Dr. Mendes didn’t agree, because the student is planning to go to Harvard, and they didn’t have proof. His dad and brother went to Harvard, too, so it’s a big deal for him to go there.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, my dad put this student on probation. So he missed the early decision deadline. Now his whole family’s mad at my dad. Plus his father is on the school board. He gave a lot of money to build the school.”

  “Who’s the student?”

  “I have no idea.” Aliza closed the topcoat bottle. “My dad never talks about students by name. The only reason I know all this is because I overheard him talking to my mom.”

  “So your parents are worried, huh?” I said.

  “My dad says whatever happens is supposed to happen. My mom’s worried, but she wouldn’t mind if my dad got a job at a different school. One shadchan told my parents she might have a harder time setting me and my brother up because Torat Tzion is too modern. Can you believe it?” Aliza rolled her eyes. “My dad told the shadchan he’s not interested in narrow-minded people.”

  “The shadchan or the families?” I smiled.

  Aliza smiled, too. “Both.”

  “Actually, I have a dating question, Aliza.” This was why I had come back. “Where would you go for the ultimate romantic setting?”

  “Yamashiro Room,” she answered without hesitation. “It’s not kosher, so you can’t eat anything, but you can have drinks if they don’t card you. Plus you’re going for the atmosphere and the view, which I heard is amazing. But it’s not for a first date, or second.”

  I smiled. “The third date’s okay?” In my sister Liora’s circle, three dates means you’re ready to pick out a ring, and china at the Mikasa outlet.

  “Maybe the fourth.” Aliza giggled. It was a lovely sound. “Yamashiro Room says you’re serious. I’ve never been there, but one of my friends got engaged there a few weeks ago. Dassie said that’s where—Oh.” She gazed at me. “You think this guy took her there, right?”

  I could hear the wistfulness in her voice. From the color that rushed to her face, I think she heard it, too.

  “I know you’ve probably heard this before,” I said, “but the right guy is out there for you. By the way, how was your date Saturday night?”

  “Okay, but no magic. He’ll call back,” Aliza said. “The ones you don’t want to, always do.”

  At least she was smiling.

  Walking down the stairs, I said a silent thank-you to God for bringing Zack and me together, and a prayer for Aliza and for my sister Liora, who at twenty is starting to feel anxious about meeting her bashert, and for young women all over the country who were hoping to get to Yamashiro Room or its equivalent.

  I was heading to the kitchen to say goodnight to the Bailors when I heard loud voices.

  “. . . don’t have to tell her everything. She’s not family.”

  Reuben Jastrow’s voice. He sounded impatient, annoyed.

  “. . . ask her to help and leave her in the dark?”

  Rabbi Bailor.

  I should go, I thought. But curiosity is one of my vices, and since I assumed I was the “her” of this conversation, I had no trouble justifying my tiptoeing across the carpeted rooms and pressing my ear against the swinging door to the kitchen.

  “She’ll either find him or she won’t,” Jastrow said.

  “I’d like to find him,” Gavriel said.

  “Gavriel,” his father warned.

  “She’s my sister! She’s your daughter! Don’t you want to find this menuval and . . .”

  “And what? Teach him a lesson? Beat him to a pulp so he won’t prey on other young girls? Sure, I’d love to do that. And then this man will go to the police and file charges for assault, because it’s not as though he kidnapped Dassie. She went with him of her own accord. And maybe he’ll get your sister’s name in the papers. That would really help her reputation, and the family’s.”

  The rabbi’s sigh
was so loud I could hear it through the door.

  “More important,” he said in a gentler tone, “that’s not the Torah way, Gavriel.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. I’m just so frustrated.”

  “Go learn, and hope that in the z’chus of your learning that Hashem will protect your sister. Go daven and ask Hashem to help us find her.”

  “And in the meantime?” Nechama said.

  “We tell Molly.”

  “It won’t help her find him,” Jastrow said.

  I pushed the door open and stepped into the kitchen.

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  Chapter 12

  They were sitting at an oak table at the end of the large room, underneath bright fluorescent light that caught the frozen expressions on their faces.

  “He phoned,” Rabbi Bailor said. “The guy Dassie’s with.”

  “Chaim, you don’t—” Jastrow began.

  A look from his brother-in-law silenced him. “Gavriel, please excuse us.”

  “I’m not a kid, Abba.”

  “Gavriel.”

  There was a flicker of defiance in the young man’s eyes. He stood. A few angry strides took him to the door. He shoved it hard and exited the room. The door swung back and forth several times.

  “Tell her, Nechama,” Rabbi Bailor said.

  I didn’t envy Nechama, caught between her brother and her husband.

  “He phoned me on my cell not long after you left,” she said. “I saw Dassie’s number on the display, and I thought, thank God.” Nechama shut her eyes briefly. “But it was him. He was using her phone.”

  Clever, I thought. And so cruel.

  “I asked to talk to her. He said Dassie didn’t want to talk. She’d asked him to talk for her. So I said, how do I know she’s all right, that she’s not. . . . ?” Nechama gripped the table edge so hard her knuckles turned white.

  My heart pounded.

  “So he called her. ‘Dassie, come here, honey.’ I hated that he called her ‘honey.’ I know he did it to upset me. But then I didn’t care, because she was on the phone. ‘Ima, I’m okay.’ ” Nechama shut her eyes again for a second. “I was so happy to hear her voice, I started crying. ‘Come home,’ I said. She said she was fine. She felt terrible about causing us worry and pain. That was the only thing keeping her from being completely happy. ‘Come home,’ I told her. ‘Please, come home.’ ”

  Dassie hadn’t been raped. Relief coursed through me. A second later I shot a reproachful look at Rabbi Bailor. He’d had knowledge—not “just a feeling”—and had let me worry.

  “He took the phone again,” Nechama said. “I heard him tell her he’d be right back, and I heard a door closing. ‘Mrs. Bailor,’ he said, ‘I think you and the rabbi should know Dassie is in love with me. She’s committed to me and wants to spend the rest of her life with me.’ ”

  Not, “We’re in love with each other, committed to each other. We want to spend our lives together.” My relief was short-lived. I felt a chill snaking up my spine and avoided looking at the rabbi, who had stood and was pacing the length of the kitchen.

  “I wanted to scream.” Nechama moved her hands from the table and tightened them into fists. “I said wonderful, tell Dassie to come home, tell her we love her, we want her to be happy, and if you make her happy, that’s what counts.’ I almost choked on the words. He said Dassie needed to know that we were ready to accept him. I said, ‘We’re ready. Bring her home, you’ll see.’

  “He laughed. He said how could we be okay with our little girl running off with some man she met in a chat room? He said he didn’t care what we thought, and soon Dassie wouldn’t, either, because every day she was coming closer to needing only him. Not her parents, not her sisters or brothers, or her friends. ‘We’re like Romeo and Juliet,’ he said. ‘If I wanted to, I could tell her not to talk to you ever again, and she wouldn’t, because she trusts me that much. And didn’t the Torah say that when you marry, you should leave your parents and cleave to your spouse? Well, tell the rabbi that in God’s eyes, his daughter and I are married.’ ” Nechama wiped the tears that had pooled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

  “In God’s eyes?” I said.

  “They had a ceremony. He gave her a ring.” She looked down at her own gold wedding band.

  “Is that binding?” I asked Rabbi Bailor.

  He stood still. “It can be. If she wasn’t coerced, if the ring belonged to him, if there were two valid witnesses.”

  I didn’t know how to phrase the next question. “Did they . . .”

  “They’re waiting until she goes to the mikvah,” Nechama said. “ ‘Your husband should be proud of his daughter,’ he told me. ‘She wants everything to be kosher, although we’re both eager. Monday seems so far away.’ Monster.” Hate twisted her face.

  The ritual bath and the laws of family purity are central to Orthodox Judaism, and many non-Orthodox women have also embraced this monthly rite that marks the end of a cycle in which life wasn’t created, and prepares for the possibility of life in the coming month. You count seven days after the completion of your menses. Then, before you resume intimacy with your husband, you cleanse yourself and submerge yourself in the rainwaters of the ritual bath, just as Sarah did and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah.

  Today was Thursday. Monday was in four days. “Did you recognize his voice?” I asked Nechama.

  She shook her head.

  “Could you tell how old he is?”

  “No. He was whispering, I guess because he didn’t want Dassie to hear him. He sounded intense, almost angry one minute, pleasant the next. I asked him what he wanted. Whatever it takes to bring Dassie home, I said, we’ll do it. Just tell us what you want.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wanted a hundred thousand dollars. Then he laughed again and said he was kidding, he didn’t want money. He said Dassie was free to leave, that she didn’t want to come home, which should tell us something. And even if she did come home, she was a married woman, forbidden to others. ‘Ask your husband; he’ll know.’ Then he said, ‘Isn’t love grand?’ And something like, ‘It’s a consummation Dassie and I both devoutly wish, so tell your husband I won’t be paying the fifty shekels after all.’ He said Chaim would know what that meant.”

  Nechama turned to her husband. “I asked you before, Chaim. What fifty shekels is he talking about?”

  Jastrow was looking at his brother-in-law. If I could have backed out of the room, I would have, but Rabbi Bailor was standing in front of the kitchen door.

  “He sent me a note.” Rabbi Bailor told his wife about the coin and its reference, but said nothing about the song. “I didn’t want to upset you, Nechama. And I’m glad I didn’t tell you, because it was all talk.”

  She had been staring at her husband. When he finished speaking, she was still staring. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the dead silence.

  “How could you keep that from me?” Her voice was quiet, hard as stone. “Who gave you the right?”

  “I was protecting you, Nechama.”

  “Like you protected Dassie by letting her go to that school? Like you protected her by letting her have her own computer and keeping it in her room?”

  Rabbi Bailor flinched. “You’re right.”

  “What good does that do, Chaim? Will being right bring Dassie back? What else are you keeping from me?”

  “Nothing. We’ll find her, Nechama.”

  “And then what?”

  Nechama buried her face in her hands. Rabbi Bailor moved toward her, but Jastrow had drawn his sister’s head onto his shoulder.

  Rabbi Bailor walked me to my car. I think he was anxious to get out of the house, away from a wife he couldn’t console and a brother-in-law who could. His head was lowered, his shoulders hunched. I tried to think of something to say, but came up blank. Sometimes silence is best.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the ph
one call right away,” he said. “My brother-in-law was pressuring me, and Gavriel. . . .”

  I didn’t answer. We continued walking.

  “The other day Dassie told me she’d heard about a boy and girl at a coed camp who had a mock wedding ceremony,” he said when we reached the car. “She wanted to know if they were married if there was no rabbi. I told her the ceremony could be binding, and they might need a divorce. I thought she was just curious,” he said. “What goes around, comes around.”

  I assumed he hadn’t told his wife about that conversation. “You mentioned that for the marriage to be binding, you need a ring and valid witnesses. Where would he get witnesses?”

  “I have no idea. To be honest, I’d be surprised if he did have two witnesses.”

  “So they’re not married. Isn’t that good news?”

  “Not if Dassie doesn’t know that. If she thinks she is married . . .”

  “If,” I have learned, is a huge word, filled with promise or foreboding. “Why didn’t your brother-in-law want me to know about the call?”

  “Reuben worried that you’d decide to bow out, that you’d insist on bringing in the police. Because the man joked about wanting money, and he sounds so . . .”

  “Controlling, manipulative? Reuben was right, Rabbi Bailor. I think you should tell the police everything.”

  “You’re going to give your detective friend the note and the coins, right? Maybe he’ll find out something. Did anything strike you about the call, Molly?”

  “The fact that this man mentioned Monday,” I said. “It’s as though he’s giving you a deadline. Maybe he wants you to find him.”

  He nodded. “I noticed that, too. But I don’t understand his game. Do you?”

  I hesitated, then shook my head.

  Several other things had struck me. Some that I wanted to think about, others that I didn’t want to share with Rabbi Bailor because they were so worrisome.

  Chapter 13

  “Don’t be disappointed if you don’t learn anything,” Zack said after he handed his car keys to the young valet.