By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  "I didn't ask where we weren't going."

  He gave her a look, but he liked that she had spirit, that she talked back to him.

  "An-ti-ci-pation," he sang. "You'll know where we are when we get there."

  "But how long?" She couldn't help thinking of Isaac, back in the trunk.

  "Not long. Not long at all. Get your game face on."

  The Plymouth hit a bump just then, and Natalie wondered if Zeke had done it on purpose, hoping she might cry at the thought of Isaac in his little nest. It helped if she cried, they had found that out the first time, when he had hit her. Well, not hit her, because Zeke would never hit her, just pushed her a little, shook her, when she had balked. At first she hadn't wanted to do her part, didn't see why they couldn't get by on his efforts alone. Moshe had never expected her to work. But this was a partnership, a one-two system, and Zeke couldn't do his part unless she did hers. The near miss back in Mount Carmel had convinced her of the brilliance of his plan.

  But what if the story of the Little Uncle were true? What if Isaac, already small for his age, never grew into his height because Natalie let Zeke put him in the trunk? No, it was for his own safety, for his own good. Isaac was as stubborn as his father and his mother combined. He would keep trying to call attention to them, and the one thing they could not risk was being noticed. Zeke had been pounding on that point from the moment he met the children.

  "Act like normal and you'll pass for normal," he kept saying. "If anyone's looking for you, they're looking just for you and the kids. They don't expect to see you with a man."

  They jolted over another bump. But Isaac had those blankets and a pillow, and it was such a big trunk, and it wouldn't be for more than an hour, maybe less. An hour couldn't possibly stunt his growth. But the fear must have registered in her face, for Zeke glanced over and frowned at her, and the twins began to cry as if on cue.

  "Jesus, pull it together, Nat." Zeke then called over his shoulder to the twins, "I'm going to teach you a song, a song my dad taught me when I was your age and we took trips. I'll sing a line and you sing it back to me, okay? Okay?"

  The twins stammered between their tears, but the noises they made sounded like agreement.

  " 'We're hitting the road'—come on, sing it back. 'We're hitting the road.' "

  Natalie sang, providing cover for the twins' small, garbled voices.

  " 'Without a single care!' " Zeke's voice was booming, almost too loud, and Natalie knew that his song was scaring the twins more than it was cheering them up. But she didn't want to criticize him when he was trying so hard.

  " 'Without a single care,' " Natalie and the twins echoed.

  " 'Cuz we're going, and we'll know where we are when we're there.' Wait—don't sing that one. But then you come in again: 'We haven't got a dime.' "

  " 'Haven't got a dime,' " the twins lisped dutifully after a confused pause.

  " 'But we're going, and we're going to have a wonderful time, yes, sir, we're going to have a wonderful time!' " Zeke slapped the dashboard as if they were having a wonderful time, but it all fell a bit flat in Natalie's opinion. The twins went back to crying, although not quite as loudly, and Zeke looked hopeless, his scariest look of all.

  "You know," he said to Natalie, "there weren't supposed to be any kids. I told you—no kids."

  "But mere are." She tried a light, careless laugh, as if Zeke were complaining about something at once trivial and beyond anyone's control, like the weather.

  "There weren't supposed to be."

  She let it drop, knowing him well enough by now to pick her battles. He was just being obstinate. The children couldn't have stayed with Mark. Children needed their mother. Besides, Zeke would soon love them as much as she did. Natalie had no doubt of that. Zeke would come to love them as he loved her, and they would be a real family at last.

  * * *

  THURSDAY

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  TESS HAD NEVER DOUBTED SHE WAS A HIGHLY suggestible person. So it was only natural that Vera Peters, living on Labyrinth Road, would remind her of a Minotaur. Or perhaps thoughts of Minotaurs were unavoidable no matter where Vera Peters lived, given her enormous head, snoutlike nose, and the two tufts of white-blond hair sticking up like little horns. The short, stocky woman also was about as welcoming as a Minotaur in its lair, yanking open the door of her modest row house and bellowing "WHAT?" only after Tess had depressed the doorbell for twenty long seconds.

  Or, more accurately, "VAT?" The woman's accent was thick, another surprise in a morning of surprises, the first of which was this modest, lower-middle-class neighborhood deep inside the city, as opposed to the upscale suburban home Tess had imagined for Natalie's family: Given Mark Rubin's appearance and business, not to mention Natalie's well-groomed beauty, she had assumed that the runaway wife was… well, a JAP. Tess didn't think of the Jewish-American Princess as a negative stereotype, more of an exotic species that happened to occur in Northwest Baltimore, like some butterfly found in a particular rain forest. JAPs were seldom glimpsed this far inside the Baltimore Beltway.

  "Vy do you keep ringing my bell?" demanded the woman, presumably Vera Peters, although maybe she was a deranged housekeeper. If so, she was falling down on the job, judging from the dark, cluttered interior Tess glimpsed through the narrow space between door and frame. "I don't vant to buy anything—or talk about God, if that's vat you do. I have my own God, not that he does me any good. Go away, go bother someone else."

  "I'm a private detective, and I'm looking for Vera Peters."

  "Vy?" Tess loved this reply because, nine times out of ten, it meant she had found the right person. "Why" was the ultimate hedge, asked just in case she might be from Publishers Clearing House and the van was looking for a parking spot.

  "I work for your son-in-law."

  "Mark Rubin?"

  "You have another one?"

  "I don't have him, you ask me. I am not in his life, and he is not in mine."

  "And your daughter? Do you have much contact with her?" Rubin had said she didn't, but Tess had to work from the assumption that Rubin didn't know everything about his wife, not even close.

  "She made her choices long ago. She is not my concern."

  "Three weeks ago she made a choice to walk out on her husband, taking their three children with them. Is that a decision you support?"

  The woman eyed Tess thoughtfully, fishing a pack of cigarettes from her sweatpants and tapping one out. "Show me your ID."

  Tess produced her private investigator's license and her driver's license, on which she looked insanely cheerful. It was an old photo.

  "Vat does this prove?" the woman asked after squinting at the two cards. "I know men who can make these in their basements."

  "You're the one who asked to see it. At the very least, it establishes who I am and that I live on East Lane, and I was thirty-three as of August."

  "My daughter's thirty." Said as if an important point had been made, although Tess wasn't sure what it was. That the Minotaur's daughter was younger? Or that people born in different years couldn't possibly know one another?

  "I know. Born March seventh."

  "How do you know this?"

  "I told you, I'm working for your son-in-law. I know quite a bit about your daughter already."

  "Quite a bit" was an exaggeration, if not an outright lie. The only thing Tess knew about Natalie Rubin was that she was thirty, a wife and a mother, and she was gone. Oh, and somehow her dark, almost exotic beauty had been formed by this stooped-over woman, whose thin hair showed an inch of dark gray roots before changing over into the startling white-blond shade. Mrs. Peters wore a pink sweatshirt, dark blue sweatpants, and yellow slippers, open at the front and back. Her feet were painful to behold—raw, red, and chapped at the heels, with knobby anklebones. The gnarled toes, with yellowish nails several shades darker than the slippers, looked more like talons. A Minotaur crossed with a phoenix.

  "Vy you want to talk
to me?" Mrs. Peters said at last, coming out on the porch and closing the storm door behind her. That was fine with Tess. She avoided going into strangers' houses when possible. It was a selective claustrophobia, and a new one.

  "I thought you might have some idea where your daughter is."

  Mrs. Peters puffed hard on her cigarette but had no comment.

  "I've been hired by her husband to find her and the children."

  The bent-over woman bent over a little farther, clutching her midsection, although her thin, scratchy giggle did not seem particularly gut-busting. Eventually her laughter turned into a sharp wheeze, then a phlegmy coughing fit.

  "So he sent you to find her? He never learns, does he?"

  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "I mean if you have a dog who bites, you should be glad when it runs avay, not spend money trying to bring it back. He's a very stupid man, Mark Rubin. Which has its advantages. But he needs to get over it."

  "Get over being stupid, or get over Natalie?"

  "Natalie left my house years ago, and I didn't send anyone to get her back. Mark should do the same."

  "She took their three children."

  "Luckier still. Vat vould a man who vorks as much as Mark Rubin do with three little children? He'd just have to find another voman to marry. Or hire someone to do it. But he's cheap about those things, things that he thinks a voman can do. He's a cheap Jew."

  "Excuse me?" It was not unheard of for Jews to be anti-Semitic. Tess's Weinstein relatives sometimes made cutting remarks about the Orthodox families coming into Baltimore from New York, drawn by the real-estate prices. But that was all in the family. No one she knew would ever speak to a stranger that way.

  "Oh, he never minded paying for things. Have you seen the house?"

  "Have you?"

  "No, but I've heard. It's huge, with every kind of"—she fumbled for a word—"machine that anyone could vant. It's an automatic house; it can run itself and it does, every veekend, when the Sabbath comes. Lights come on and off, heat and air-conditioning, stoves and televisions and stereos. He's religious, right, but a religious man who likes to have things his vay. I'm not religious, but if I were, I don't think I vould spend so much time trying to get around things, you know? To me this is not devotion. It's a game, like children play."

  "Still, it sounds as if he gave Natalie a nice life."

  Vera Peters balanced herself on the arm of an old plastic chair, grimy from seasons of dirt, and picked at the cracked skin on her heel with an amazingly pristine fingernail, well shaped, with a fresh coat of a delicate pink shade.

  "As I said, I don't talk to Natalie, but I hear about her from others. Mark Rubin liked buying things. But he didn't like paying for things he thought his vife should do—cleaning, cooking, vashing. Natalie was like a slave. A veil-dressed slave, who ate and drank good things, but still a slave."

  Something finally clicked for Tess—the accent, the neighborhood.

  "You're Russian," Tess said.

  Vera Peters rolled her eyes. "No, I'm from Ukraine."

  "How long have you lived here?"

  "Twenty-some years."

  "Natalie was born in Russia?" Perhaps it wasn't relevant, but it seemed an odd detail for Rubin to omit. Everything Tess had projected on Natalie was wrong, inferred from the image Rubin had put forth. Had he intended that? Or did he, like most people, simply not realize what others might find odd or unusual about his life? Perhaps he thought it was normal for a thirty-something Orthodox Jew to marry a nineteen-year-old Russian beauty with virtually no religious training.

  "In Ukraine. But she's an American girl, through and through. I don't know vy she married a Jew. That face could have had anyone."

  "But you're Jewish. If you came over in the 1980s, that would have been during glasnost—"

  "Um-hum," the woman murmured, making the sort of polite agreement that a person uses when it's too complicated to contradict. "Yeah, sure, ve're Jewish. But ve're not Jewish. You couldn't be, vhere ve lived. So ve came here and now, bam, ve're Jewish, and people are saying ve should give Natalie a bat mitzvah and go to services. But it's the land of the free, right? So ve don't have to do nothing."

  She ended defiantly, as if daring Tess to contradict her.

  "Mrs. Peters, I work for your son-in-law, but it's in your daughter's best interest to be found. If this drags on, if she doesn't come home or make contact, he's eventually going to get frustrated and divorce her in absentia, getting custody of his children."

  The last was a lie, but a harmless one, and it would test Vera Peters's ignorance of her son-in-law. When the woman didn't protest, Tess prompted, "Is that what you want? A daughter who's wanted by the law?"

  "None of this," she said, shrugging, "is vat I vant."

  The shrug seemed to encompass her home, her life, Baltimore, the United States. She had lived here for two decades, close to half her life assuming she was a haggard fifty-something. By almost any standard, it was probably better than the place she had left behind. But it wasn't home and never would be.

  "I need any lead, no matter how slender. Has she called you or written to you? Does she have friends in the area she might have contacted? Do you have a hunch where she might have gone or how she's supporting herself?"

  The woman craned her neck in order to stare into Tess's face.

  "Monaghan," she said, giving the name a hard g. "What kind of name is that?"

  "Irish. But my mother's family was Weinstein. They came to Baltimore from a small town somewhere in Eastern Europe, before World War I. It was a Russian town when they came, I think, but I'm not sure where it ended up."

  Actually, she believed that it was a German town, but the borders of that time were so porous that Tess didn't see any harm in trying to establish a small kinship with the Peterses.

  The woman looked puzzled at this attempt to find common ground. "So you're a Jew?"

  "I'm a mutt. Like everyone, right? We're all mutts in this country."

  The woman frowned, pulling her head back into her round shoulders as if she had been insulted. "You vant information? I don't have much. But vat I have, I'll give you—for a price."

  Tess paid for information all the time, so she was hardly surprised to be asked for money. She just hadn't expected a man's mother-in-law to pad his per diem costs.

  "How much?"

  "One hundred dollars."

  Tess counted five twenties out of her wallet.

  "Per piece."

  "Excuse me?"

  "It's one hundred dollars for every name or fact I give you. Cash."

  "I only have two hundred dollars on me."

  "Then you only get two things."

  "How much do you have to sell?"

  "Ve'll see. Vat vould you like first?"

  "I'd like to know if Natalie has contacted you in any way since she left."

  "No." The woman took a hundred dollars from Tess's hand.

  "Wait a minute. You didn't tell me anything."

  "You asked a question, I answered. That's one hundred. There's an ATM on Reisterstown Road if you need more."

  A serious case of caveat emptor, Tess decided. She wasn't going to pay for any more of these so-called leads until she had road-tested at least one of them.

  "No, that's okay. I'll ask you just one more question. If it's a bum tip, I won't be back, and you'll never get another hundred dollars from me, all right? And by the way, that doesn't count as my question."

  The woman nodded. "You may ask one more thing."

  "Did Natalie have a friend, someone in whom she confided? If so, I'd like a name and number—a simple yes doesn't count as the full answer." She held her money above her head, well out of Mrs. Peters's stubby reach.

  "Natalie didn't care for friends, especially girlfriends."

  Tess continued to hold the money above her head, and Vera Peters studied it the way Esskay the greyhound stared down an out-of-reach dog treat.

  "But she had one, a girl from this n
eighborhood. They went to school together, vorked together before Natalie got married."

  "Worked together? Mark told me his wife never had a job."

  The woman smiled. She had gorgeous teeth for a smoker, big and white and probably fake. "Him. Between vat he doesn't know and vat he won't tell, you have your vork cut out for you."

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  THE NUMBERS VERA PETERS HAD FOR LANA WlSHNIA proved to be a cell phone and a work phone. Unfortunately, there was no landline listed with directory assistance. Tess was running into this new world order more and more, and it was frustrating, because crisscross directories were rendered virtually useless. Of course, Tess used two cell phones, one for outgoing, the other for incoming. This meant that others' caller ID functions wouldn't get her real number, just the outgoing phone. And she never answered that phone when it rang, simply took note of the number that showed up on her caller ID. It was all part of the communications arms race, an ongoing battle to safeguard her privacy while raiding others'.

  She tried Lana's cell but got voice mail, an electronic voice curtly instructing the caller to leave a message. Tess disconnected, then punched in the work number.

  "Adrian's," trilled a woman's velvety voice, with just a hint of supercilious challenge.

  "Is Lana Wishnia there today?"

  "She's with a client. Are you a client?" The voice indicated Tess should be. "Do you have an appointment?"

  "No—yes—I mean—does she have anything open today?"

  "I'll see if she has had a cancellation, although I doubt it." The voice was cool with disapproval. The Velvet Frost, Tess thought. "Perhaps if you could come in at four."

  The voice made it clear that coming in at four was terribly gauche.

  "Sure, I'll take that."

  "And this would be for…"

  "For, you know, that thing Lana does." Tess assumed that a place called Adrian's had to be a beauty salon or spa, although there was an outside risk that she was signing up for an MRI or a high colonic.