Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  Columbia at the age of two was still raw-looking, with immature trees and unplanted landscapes. According to family legend, my mother hated it on sight.

  “It’s too cold. Too modern. I hate modern.”

  “It’s the future,” my father said. “Breaking down barriers. Here, people of different classes and races will live side by side.”

  “Soulless,” my mother said. “Just because you call something a town doesn’t make it one.”

  “I like it,” my father said. “They’re trying new things here. Open space education, for example, where kids go at their own pace.”

  “I hate it,” my mother said. “I could never live in one of these cracker boxes.”

  It was their variation on Green Acres, if you know that TV show. Fresh air! No there there. But my father was too fair-minded to use “You are my wife” to clinch an argument.

  Instead, he proposed a deal: “If I can find a house that you love, will you live here? I know what you like—something older, preferably made of stone, a house with character.” She said yes, probably assuming it couldn’t be done. He let the subject drop, and she thought she had triumphed. It was August now. The pregnancy was known, but only to them. They were keeping the news from her parents, whose house, large as it was, could not accommodate another grandchild.

  Two weeks before Labor Day, my father took my mother to see a Revolutionary War–era tavern, eight miles north of Columbia on the road once known as the Columbia Pike. My mother had to admit she liked it, especially its tiny windows. She didn’t like light, my mother. That’s one of the things I know about her. She didn’t like light. She had grown up in a dark house, one where sunshine struggled through the amber and violet panes of stained glass. She considered shadows normal.

  “The kitchen and bathrooms are hopeless,” she pointed out. “Too small, too out-of-date.”

  “They can be redone,” my father promised. “I’ve found a contractor who has agreed to a rush job. Best of everything, in whatever colors you want. You can keep the wooden floors, which will be nice, I think. You never see wooden floors in a kitchen anymore. Why is that? If they’re sealed properly, they’re fine.”

  “But it’s not in Columbia. It’s practically in Ellicott City.” Ellicott City was everything Columbia was not. The county seat, set in a valley alongside a cold, bright stream, filled with stone buildings dating back to the eighteenth century. “If you’re open to Ellicott City, why not Oella or Lawyers Hill?” my mother asked, then repeated, hopefully: “This isn’t in Columbia.”

  “It will be,” my father said.

  “Not on one of those rinky-dink lots. I couldn’t bear it.” She was grasping now. My mother had the intellect for law school, but no temperament for debate. She took things too personally.

  “I found an irregular lot on the lakeside,” my father said. “It’s essentially a double. Once the plantings are mature, you’ll barely be able to see your neighbors.”

  She was his wife. Good-bye, city life.

  Two weeks later, that stone tavern was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and transferred, at a pace of one mile per hour—the journey took much of a Sunday evening into early Monday morning and required multiple permits—to one of the most desirable lots in Columbia, a double on the west shore of Wilde Lake. The move was covered by both the Baltimore and Washington papers. It marked the first time our family had been in the newspaper, literally announcing my father’s arrival on the local political scene. “The house will be home to Andrew J. Brant and family. Brant, a Baltimore attorney, hopes to be active in Howard County’s Democratic Party . . .”

  My mother’s parents were angry. It had taken almost a decade, but the prince had gotten around the princess’s imperious parents, as the prince always does. They argued. They cajoled. They threatened to cut my parents off without a cent. They offered to pay the tuition to Gilman. But their lobbying campaign to keep them under their roof—my mother and AJ, really; they merely tolerated my father—only signaled to my father the urgency of leaving.

  My parents used me as their trump card. As large as my grandparents’ house was, there was no bedroom available for another child. I broke the spell. I freed the princess from the castle, brought her to a new palace. I even freed Teensy, who had come to work for the Closter family when AJ was born and insisted on following us to Columbia, despite the fact that it meant an onerous commute for her every day.

  Four months later, I was born, Seven days after, my mother died. It was a bitter winter. Everything froze. Wilde Lake froze. The improvements on the house, intended for her, stopped, suspended in time. Again, as in a fairy tale. Or, perhaps, a television show. I was your wife. Good-bye to my life.

  JANUARY 7

  “Happy birthday.” Andi, sailing into Lu’s office again. Not knocking. Again. Lu isn’t sure what to do about this. “You’ve got your first murder. If you want it.”

  “My birthday was Friday. What kind of murder?”

  Lu can tell that Andi is struggling with herself. If she makes the murder sound uninteresting, maybe she’ll catch it. But if it turns out to be the kind of case that Lu wants to try, all Andi will have achieved is a reputation for disloyalty and dishonesty.

  “Middle-aged woman, killed in what appears to be a B and E. Could have been there for up to a week.”

  “How was she killed?”

  “I told you all I know. North Laurel, an apartment complex off Route 1. The Grove. Funny name for a place on Route 1 in North Laurel. I doubt there have been any groves there for a long time.”

  “When was she found?”

  “Call came into 911 a little before three this afternoon. She didn’t show up for her shift at the Silver Diner after a week off. Didn’t answer her phone or her cell. That was odd enough, her boss says, that he went to check on her.”

  “Ya me voy,” Lu says. I’m going. She and Gabe had been in high school Spanish together, although they had barely spoken to each other in any language back then. He hated the fact that his accelerated math skills weren’t enough to free him from all of high school; he split his days between grade-appropriate classes in English, history, and Spanish, then was driven to College Park for math and physics. He should have been admired for his double life, but he was a pariah, disliked by almost everyone, especially Lu. He was small, like her, and Lu hated being paired up with small boys by the time she was fifteen. Her own precocity had been burdensome enough, and she had just finally hit her stride socially. She didn’t need to be tarred with the brush of another geek.

  Ten years later she married him. Twenty-five years later, she had lost him. She regretted, almost every day, ignoring him in high school. If only I had known, she would think, even as she mocked her use of the melodramatic phrase. We could have had ten more years if we really had been high school sweethearts. If only anyone ever knew anything ever.

  When they were first built in the mid-twentieth century, the Grove apartments had probably been a place for people—families, even—on the way up. All the little telltales of aspiration are still here, if worse for wear. The curving fieldstone entrance, the swimming pool, the name spelled out in a pretentious, once-fashionable font, although the sign had been reduced to THE G OVE. And there had been an attempt to avoid a cookie-cutter appearance, with two styles of residences—town houses and three-story apartment buildings, done in three different sidings. There is nothing obviously wrong with the Grove, yet Lu senses that the people who live here now are, at best, treading water. Like the Grove, they’ve seen better days.

  Another tell: the cop cars, crime-scene tape don’t seem to excite much attention—people pulling out of the parking lot slow a little, but no one gets out, no one is gathered at the tape’s edge. It’s a bitter-cold Wednesday. Everyone else’s life goes on, while Mary McNally’s is over, has been for as much as a week.

  “Someone left the balcony door ajar and the thermostat was turned way down,” says Detective Mike Hunt without preamble, knowing this detail will intere
st Lu. He is lean, prematurely silver, and absolute trouble when it comes to women, although Lu knows, via Andi, that he tries not to shit where he eats. At least, that’s the excuse he gave Andi. Married, kids, trying to maintain a ruthless compartmentalization. Lu approves. Plus, he’s a good detective. Smart, confident. He had to be, to survive that name, beloved by prank phone callers everywhere.

  “Do you think it was a deliberate attempt to obscure the time of death?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she turned her thermostat down to sixty-two degrees every night to save money and the killer left the door open in his haste to get away. We’re taking fingerprints from there and the sliding door where we think he entered.”

  “The one he left open?”

  “No, there are two bedrooms off the balcony, each with its own entrance. Let me show you.”

  The apartment is nicer, inside, than Lu expected. The Grove’s bones are substantial. Superior, in fact, to the apartments and town houses built in Columbia two decades later. The floors are a well-maintained herringbone, and the layout indicates an expectation of gracious living not seen in newer apartments. A large kitchen, separated from a full dining room by a swinging door. Pocket doors between the dining and living rooms. The two bedrooms share a terrace overlooking what was once a garden—and maybe it still will be, come spring. Everything looks desolate this time of year.

  “We think he entered here,” Mike says, showing Lu the sliding door in the smaller bedroom. “It was locked from the inside, but there are marks. It wouldn’t be hard to force it. He comes in, then goes to the master bedroom.”

  They follow in the intruder’s footsteps, down the little hall. The woman who lived here didn’t have particularly good taste, but nor was it bad. There’s an arid quality to the decor, it’s as if she studied catalogs and tried to replicate the rooms exactly, down to the placement of tchotchkes. The hallway, for example, has framed copies of those French liquor ads, obviously reproductions. The decorative items seem impersonal, too, chosen to fill space. Yet it is the home of a house-proud woman, meticulously kept. Any dust that has settled here is subsequent to her death. Lu stops, puts a pin in her feelings, files them away. Faces, names, she forgets. But once she begins to translate a victim’s life into a story, it is with her forever. Mary McNally, a waitress, reliable and well liked, if not well known at her place of work. If it hadn’t been for her conscientious reputation, imagine how long she might have remained in her bedroom, staining a carpet she probably never so much as spilled a glass of water on.

  “Is that blood or melted snow in her hair?”

  “It’s all blood. Although not that much from the blow that actually killed her. She was struck from behind, then choked. That’s the cause of death, strangulation. But the body was moved—we’re pretty sure of that because she’s facedown—and all the damage to the face was done postmortem. I mean, the perp almost took it off. Do you want to see?”

  Want? No, she doesn’t want to see it. She needs to see. Assuming there is an arrest—and there better be, the good citizens of Howard County will expect justice for one of their own, a nice lady minding her own business—a jury will inspect photographs. She has to feel the revulsion they will feel.

  She does. It’s one of the more shocking things she’s been asked to see in her professional life and—well, what’s the line from that stupid song that was on the radio in her teens? “Never Been to Me”? She’s seen some things a woman ain’t supposed to see.

  But Mike Hunt’s eyes are on her, so she keeps her voice steady. “Weapon?”

  “We haven’t found it. We’re canvassing the area, hoping he tossed it on his way out.”

  “Are you using ‘he’ generically, or because it seems probable that a man did this?”

  Hunt shrugs, indifferent to pronouns. Men can afford to be.

  “We found a ticket stub in her purse, for the 10 P.M. showing of The Theory of Everything at that movie theater at Snowden Square. That was December thirty-first. She had a week off, December thirty-first through yesterday. So we know she was alive December thirty-first. It’s possible she was killed that night when she came in. Hung up her coat, headed back to the bedroom, surprised the guy.”

  “This seems like an unlikely target for a burglary.”

  “A junkie might have figured the place to be empty because of the holidays, thought it a good opportunity to grab a few things to fence. No tree, no decorations. But nothing was taken except whatever cash she had in her billfold. Assuming she had cash in her billfold. She has a jar of coins in her room—at least $50 to $100 in there, I’m guessing. Heavy to carry, but junkies can be superhuman when it suits them. And you see the iPad next to her bed, on the stand. So if it started as a burglary, the guy got distracted. Let’s hope for a hit on the fingerprints.”

  Lu continues to move through the apartment, trying to absorb every detail she can about the dead woman. The boss at the Silver Diner told Mike Hunt that she was originally from upstate New York, had moved to Maryland for a man, but he had been out of the picture for years. No boyfriend. No real friends, but she seemed content. There was family, back in New York. A mom, sisters. But she didn’t visit them at Christmastime because it was so cold. The cold had begun to bother her a lot. She talked about moving to Florida, near Panama City. There’s always a job for a good waitress in resort towns, she told her boss, but you got to pick one where there’s work year-round. Or where the seasonal work is so good you can survive the slack months.

  Lu will interview the boss herself at some point, nail down more details. Her father once said a murder trial is a biography. The more jurors know about the victim, the more they care about avenging the death. Make the dead live, her father said. He famously did it with no body once, only a shoe. He concocted an entire person from a plaid sandal with one drop of blood on it.

  Lu looks at the bedspread, a comforter of khaki and red squares. She can almost imagine the catalog copy, promising that it would bring a hint of Parisian flea markets into a room. It’s askew, with one corner flipped up at the foot.

  “I think I’ve seen what I need to see. Call me if you get a hit on the print. And you know what? Grab the bedspread, have that tested.”

  Mike is too professional to sigh, but she can tell he wants to. “Why, Lu? This shows no signs of being a sex crime. And if she were, um, an active lady, we might end up looking at a lot of DNA that doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “The spread is mussed,” Lu says. “As if someone was lying on top of it. And that corner is flipped.”

  “So?”

  “Look at this place. She was a major neat freak. Either she was lying on the bed when the guy came in—or someone else was lying on the bed when she came in. Just do it, okay?” She’s testing him, making sure he knows who’s in charge. She softens her command with a joke. “Respect my authoritah.”

  “Wouldn’t have pegged you as a South Park fan. I’ll walk you out.” That’s Mike Hunt, always with the little gentlemanly touches. That’s what women love about him. The ones who fall, they think it’s just for them, the courtly good manners, but Lu has observed that Mike’s gallantry is automatic. He is always, always, thinking about getting laid, and the good manners are an end to that. Sex—conquest—is like breathing for him.

  Sure enough, a woman with a bag of groceries is walking up the fieldstone path to the complex and Mike lights up. “Can I get that for you?” The woman is a bit of a butterface, in Lu’s estimation, and probably older than Mike realizes because her figure is amazing, set off by a tightly cinched trench coat that’s short enough to showcase long legs in spike heels. Lu can’t help resenting women with long legs.

  “No, I’m fine. I live across the hall from, um, Mary. They said it was okay. That I could leave and come back. It’s my day off, I got to do my errands.”

  “I’ll be over to talk to you later,” Mike says. Most women would be beside themselves at the prospect, but this one seems leery.

  “About what?”

&n
bsp; “Anything you might have seen or heard this past week. Even if it didn’t seem important at the time.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she says quickly. Lu knows the type. Just as there are people who never want to serve jury duty, there are citizens who dread being witnesses. “These apartments are well built; they’re pretty soundproof. And they’re set up so the shared walls are between the kitchen and the dining room. Not much to hear, you know?”

  “Look, no right answers,” Mike assures her. “I’d still like to talk to you.”

  “Should I—the people who live here—be nervous? I mean, was it random or a burglary or—what?”

  “We’ll know more soon,” Lu says, hoping it’s true. The woman looks at her sharply, in what Lu interprets as a who-asked-you kind of way. Lu reminds herself that she’s a public official now, already running for her second term in a sense. She can’t afford to be caustic in the face of insults and slights. “I should have introduced myself. I’m Lu Brant, the state’s attorney.”