By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  "It's a ridiculous theory."

  "Probably," she said, trying to placate him even as her excitement grew. "But I bet it's strong enough to go to federal authorities and persuade them to issue a warrant for Natalie. That means the next time she's spotted, local police can take her in and hold her long enough for you to get there and get your kids back."

  "No."

  "No?" She had thought her idea sheer genius.

  "It's dangerous. The police could give chase, and the children would be in the middle."

  "Your children are traveling with a bank robber, who's been risking encounters with the police up to twice a week. They'll be safer if authorities intervene."

  "I don't want Natalie to face criminal charges."

  "I'm sure she won't, if she agrees to cooperate. But she's clearly not going to turn herself in."

  "She's doing this under duress. This man has scared her, forced her to do these things."

  "Mark, you yourself pointed out that she didn't get away from him when she had the chance—"

  "No." He was yelling now. "No police. And if you go to them, you're violating my confidentiality as a client. Remember the papers you had me sign, the ones drawn up by your lawyer? Those require you to honor my wishes."

  "Not when I have evidence of a string of felonies."

  "But you don't. This is just some wild idea you cooked up, nothing more."

  "It's not as wild as what you're thinking."

  He gave her a look that he must have perfected over his years in business, a level, direct gaze that was hard to meet for more than a few seconds.

  "Really?" he demanded. "Tell me what I'm thinking, Miss Mind Reader."

  "You believe you can turn this to your advantage, that Natalie will have to come back to you if this man is locked up. That you can get her a great lawyer, cut her a deal, and have leverage over her. But if she doesn't want to be with you, then she's never going to stay, Mark. What are you going to do, put her on an even tighter leash when you get her home?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The money, the house, the life you created for her—it was all about control. In your heart of hearts, you were always preparing for the day she might leave you. You tried to make sure she wouldn't have the wherewithal, financially or emotionally. But the fact is, she's chosen another life, with another man. Yes, he's probably a crook, and it's a crappy life, and it makes no sense, but it's what she wants, Mark. You've got to forget about Natalie and focus on your children."

  Mark did not speak for several long moments. When he did, his voice was frightening in its controlled anger, its absolute disdain for Tess and her opinions. "I did not hire you for personal advice. I hired you to find my family. Given the information you've developed today, you might want to go back to the records at Jessup, see if Boris had any contact with someone serving time for armed robbery. That strikes me as the most useful thing you can do."

  "Mark—"

  "There will be no more talk of warrants or police," he said, holding up a hand. "You work for me. Do as I've told you or you're fired."

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-five

  TWO THINGS KEPT TESS FROM WALKING OUT ON MARK Rubin in a fit of pique—the thought of Isaac waving to Mary Eleanor on the highway, and the thought of her bank account waving a frantic SOS in her direction. She had not yet earned out Mark Rubin's generous retainer, but she had spent a large chunk of it. If she wanted to quit on principle, she would have to refund money she didn't have, a principle she abhorred even more.

  So she sucked it up and chose the best antidote she could think of to Mark Rubin's cold, high-handed treatment. She invited her WASP-iest friend, Whitney, over for dinner. Whitney was always good company, and she would take Tess's side in this quarrel with her client, which made her even better company. Within an hour of Tess's call, Whitney arrived with Indian takeout from the Ambassador and a bottle of zinfandel.

  "The guy at the Wine Source said it was peppery and aggressive, with berry overtones and a strong finish," she said. "Just like me."

  "You don't look very fruity," Tess said of her sharp-chinned friend, whose coloring was more easily found in the dairy case—butter-yellow hair, milk-white skin with a bluish undercast.

  "Oh, I'm sour as a pickle these days. Everything annoys me. I took my mother to a Barbara Cook concert down at the Kennedy Center, and there was a sign-language interpreter. At a vocal concert. Does this mean they're going to start providing audio commentary for the ballet? And I can't speak to the sign language, but the closed-captioning was for shit. Cook was doing Sondheim, and a line from 'Losing My Mind' was transcribed as 'I want to sew.' "

  "If I said that," Tess said, "you would know I was losing my mind."

  Whitney laughed, expelling a little zinfandel through her nose. "It seemed to annoy Cook, too. Here she is, singing brilliantly, and there's someone blocking her from part of the audience's view, hamming it up."

  "How does an interpreter ham it up?"

  "Oh, c'mon." Whitney stood, giving Esskay the opportunity she needed to snatch a half-eaten samosa from her plate and bolt. "Damn dogs—they've gotten really nutty since Crow went to Virginia." Like kids in a divorce, Tess thought ruefully, but said nothing. She hadn't told Whitney about the breakup either, if only because she didn't want to be castigated for letting go of the perfect postmodern boyfriend. Whitney had always mocked the age difference between Tess and Crow, but she was perverse enough to exalt him now that Tess had lost him. "Anyway, she was trying to upstage Cook, I kid you not. Although I guess it would be downstaging in this case."

  Whitney demonstrated, making grandiloquent gestures, opening her arms wide, painting rainbows in an imaginary sky, and finishing up by twirling an index finger next to her ear.

  "I don't know sign language either, but I'm dubious about the last one you threw in there."

  "I don't mean to sound callous. I'm all for an inclusive society. But a lot of this is just frosting the cannoli." This was Whitney's odd variation on gilding the lily, and Tess still didn't know what it meant after fifteen years of friendship. "I went to a bar mitzvah last week—"

  "You went to a bar mitzvah?"

  "Professional obligation, someone from the Krieger board I'm trying to cultivate. Anyway, they were signing during the half-a-Torah."

  "Haftarah."

  "Right, what I said. So there's a kid up there reciting a language that ninety-five percent of the people up in the synagogue don't speak or understand, and someone's signing so the deaf people in the audience—of which there were none, I'm pretty sure, although hearing aids were in great evidence—can follow along. But there's already an English translation in the text, so who are they signing for? The illiterates? The blind?"

  Tess laughed, knowing Whitney's performance was pure show. She was not as intolerant as she pretended to be. She couldn't be. Whitney played up her hard edges to compensate for life as a professional do-gooder—sitting on her family's board and dispensing gobs of money to worthy causes. Polymath that she was, she had probably learned sign language at some point.

  "Were any of those real signs you were making?" Tess asked. "Or were you just faking?"

  "Oh, I can say a few basic things. 'I love you. Run away.'" Whitney demonstrated.

  "I'd go far with just those two sentences." Strange, Tess wanted to confide in someone, but she couldn't get the words out.

  "I also know the alphabet from A"—Whitney cupped her hand—"to Z." She slashed the air.

  It was Tess's turn to spit a little wine. "Do that again."

  "What?"

  "The Z."

  Whitney slashed the air.

  "Like Zorro."

  "Well, duh."

  It was one thing to have the action described on a computer screen, quite another to see it. The one little boy kept doing a sort of Zorro thing. Mary Eleanor had assumed that Isaac was being supportive in a silly, little-kid kind of way. But what if he had been spelling!

/>   Less than an hour later—after consulting the Internet, talking to Mary Eleanor on the phone, then studying the Internet again—Tess was on Mark Rubin's doorstep, an insistent Whitney at her side.

  "Don't be surprised if he doesn't shake your hand," Tess muttered after ringing the bell. "He doesn't touch women sometimes, but it's just a mind-fuck."

  "I don't touch anybody. I'm a Presbyterian." Alcohol had an interesting effect on Whitney, sharpening the edges it softened in others. Her eyes were bright, her diction crisp, her posture perfect.

  "No, I mean—" But Rubin had already answered the bell. He stood, the door only halfway open, as if unsure of whether he wanted to admit Tess to his home.

  "I assume you have news." There was a stiff little pause. "Or an apology."

  "News."

  "And this woman is… ?"

  "A fearsome buttinsky named Whitney Talbot, but enormously helpful in her own way." Whitney gave him a broad wave as if she were on the deck of an ocean liner and Rubin was on a dock far below. "Does Isaac know American Sign Language?"

  "I'm not sure. I think he learned it for a concert at school, but I was working and couldn't go." His voice took on a defensive edge. "It was during the day. If I left work for every concert, my family wouldn't have a roof over its head. But I remember Isaac rehearsing his part around the house."

  Whitney poked Tess in the back. "I told you this sign-language thing is completely out of control."

  "We think he was trying to send us a message. But it doesn't make sense to us, and I wondered if it meant anything to you."

  She handed him the printout, with the American Sign Language alphabet and the variations on which Mary Eleanor had finally decided: Z-E-T-E, Z-E-R-E, and Z-E-K-E.

  "Do any of those things mean anything to you?"

  Rubin's face was a study. For some reason it reminded Tess of the sky in western Maryland, right before the storm began and the horizon turned green. It was a ghostly, unnatural face.

  "The last one. Zeke. It could be… I don't see how, but possibly…"

  "Yes?"

  "It's my stepbrother's name."

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-six

  ZEKE HAD TAKEN NATALIE AND THE KIDS FOR AN EARLY supper outside Charlottesville, hoping that the meal would make up for the long drive ahead. They had spent the weekend in the Shenandoahs, acting like any family on a beautiful fall weekend—driving Skyline Drive, going to the caverns. Zeke had bought the kids souvenirs, given piggyback rides to Penina and Efraim. Who could ever associate this picture-perfect family of five with a cop dying on a roadside back in Ohio? A dead Ohio cop didn't even make the TV news in Virginia, the old Plymouth was back in the mall parking lot in West Virginia, and a Taurus with Maryland tags was nothing extraordinary here. But when Zeke told the family to pile into the car for dinner, Isaac had gone to stand by the trunk. Force of habit, Zeke guessed.

  "I already told you, no more trunk, buckaroo," he said.

  "Oh. I thought you were just giving me time off for the weekend."

  "No, we're done with the trunk. You ride in the car from now on."

  You think a kid would be grateful, but this one had to challenge everything.

  "Why?"

  "Well, for one thing, this car doesn't have a luggage rack."

  "But we'll need money eventually."

  So he had put it together after all. Zeke wasn't sure how much the kid knew, but it was definitely too much. Which only made Zeke more determined to do what he'd decided, to execute the plan he'd plotted in his head while pretending to look at scenery all weekend.

  "No, we've got plenty." Which was a stretch, but Zeke decided to live the lie, picking one of the nicer chain restaurants for dinner, a place with menus big as Bibles and apple-cheeked waitresses in provocative little aprons that twitched around their hips when they walked. Every girl in the restaurant moved as if she were a drill-team member, with prancing, pony steps. But Zeke kept his eyes low. It was never good for Natalie to notice him noticing.

  But she was absorbed in the twins, sitting between them, an arm around each one, her head lowered as they whispered to her and patted her face. At this point their chatter was almost total gibberish, or so it seemed to Zeke. He wondered if their odd sounds were some sort of bastard Russian, their own Yiddish lite. Natalie nodded and whispered to them as if she understood every word. Isaac, placed with great deliberation between Zeke and the wall, cut his vegetarian omelet into smaller and smaller pieces but didn't put any of it in his mouth that Zeke could see.

  "Dunkin' Donuts is kosher," Isaac said. "Some anyway."

  "Now that's a healthy way to end the day," Zeke said, trying to sound good-natured. "With a bellyful of sugar and some high-octane coffee."

  "I wasn't really talking to you," Isaac said. "I was just observing to myself."

  "Observe away, buddy."

  Zeke studied Natalie. God, she was beautiful. Women had come easy to him all his life, always good-looking women, too. But the first time he had seen Natalie, he had understood why rich men stole masterpieces they could never display. Some things you owned to impress others, other things you needed only for yourself. From the moment he glimpsed Natalie waiting in the visiting room for her father, he had to have her. Mark, there to see Zeke, had noticed her, too. Not that he would admit it, the prig. Every man in the room had watched that teenage sylph float across the floor. She gave the impression that she didn't know the clatter she was setting off inside all those men, but that was calculated. Natalie was like a terrorist sitting on a cache of nuclear weapons. She understood exactly how much power she had, and how much damage she could do.

  Lucky, she fell just as hard for him as he did for her. He had played to her sense of romance, giving her the one thing that no man ever had, entering willingly into her soap-opera world of love letters and poetry and anguished phone calls.

  What do you do when you want a woman like that and you can't be alone with her for a decade? It was one thing to hold on to her while he was in Jessup, but Zeke knew that all bets would be off once he was in Terre Haute. It was too far away, his sentence too long. His solution had been nothing short of genius, if he did say so himself. He stored Natalie in Mark's house, just another beautiful thing in that sterile museum full of paintings and sculptures. It had been too perfect. Orthodox life had required her to dress modestly, to live modestly, not even touching other men. She was hidden in plain sight, locked up in Pikesville waiting for him. And while he had been furious when she showed up on his release day with three little bonuses in tow, he had to admit he was moved by her devotion to them. If only his mother had cared as much. But she had chosen her second husband over her son, time and time again.

  Had his mother and Mark's father been having an affair before his father's death? He could believe it of Aaron Rubin—the gonif , the schemer—but not of his mother, never of his mother. It was not so far-fetched to believe that Rubin had coveted his mother all along, even before his own wife had died. Leah Rubenstein had been a prize, a German Jew so proper she was almost a gentile. The two young partners had met her when she came in to buy her first mink, just eighteen. Zeke's father had fallen in love with the shy, proper girl, while the already-betrothed Aaron Rubin had been smitten with her money. And in the end both men got what they wanted. Yakob Rubenstein got love, Aaron Rubin got money.

  Jewish women kept their property—but not in death. Zeke's mother had died of breast cancer his senior year in college, and it was then that the boy who was born Nathaniel Ezekiel Rubenstein became just Zeke. What did it say about Aaron Rubin, that every woman who married him died of cancer? Rubin was the sickness. Rubin was evil. Rubin was the one who had convinced Zeke's mother that he would care for her son, so she hadn't felt the need to provide for Zeke in her will. And while Aaron Rubin was ready to share his second wife's largesse with her only son, it turned out he wanted to apply condition upon condition. If Zeke—or Nat, as the family never stopped calling him, despite his insis
tence that he wanted to be known by his middle name—brought his grades up, if he graduated from Maryland, if he stopped wrapping cars around trees, then he might—might, mind you, might—find a place at Robbins & Sons. The business his father had cofounded, the business that was his by all rights.

  "Fuck you," Zeke told his stepfather, and struck out on his own, starting his own clothing store. Like father, like son. Right down to the money problems and the subsequent felonies. Zeke chose credit-card fraud. His father tried arson.

  People always said that if Zeke's father hadn't died, the gossip would have killed him. Zeke, only five at the time of his suicide, was spared the whispers at first. By the time he was a teenager, however, the neighborhood yentas and yentas-in-training made sure he knew every shameful detail. The division of the business, with the shrewd macher Rubin screwing Rubenstein, persuading him to take the downtown real estate and the dress business, while he moved the furs to the suburbs. Then there was the fire at the store, an arson fire that killed a night watchman who should have been on his dinner break, but they never proved that Zeke's father did it. He didn't live long enough to be charged.

  To Zeke's way of thinking, his father's death proved only that he was in despair, not that he had arranged that little bolt of Jewish lightning. The fire had wiped him out—the insurance company didn't want to pay because of the arson investigation. Yakob Rubenstein had nowhere to turn, except to his wife's bank accounts, and sweet, pliant Leah didn't want to give him her money. Why did everyone harp on the suspicious fire while ignoring the serendipity of the Widower Rubin marrying the Widow Rubenstein less than six months later? Rubin had screwed his onetime partner, now he screwed his wife. All the while expecting Nathaniel Ezekiel to toe the line, to be a scared little yes-sir boy like his own son, Mark.

  If only his own mother had been more like Natalie and put her son first. If only Natalie were more like his mother, willing to abandon her children for the man she loved. One was too weak, the other too strong.