Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  Now when I was a child, I was famous for being able to sleep through anything, so it wasn’t the orange glow outside my windows or even the sirens in the distance that woke me. But then, there were no sirens, not yet. There was just my father, still in his work clothes at 1 A.M., shaking me and calling my name. “I need to get you outside, Lu. To be safe. We have to go outside. It could jump.”

  “What jumps?” I asked, rolling away from him and curling up like a potato bug, determined not to leave my wonderfully warm bed, where I had piled three quilts on top of me.

  “The fire. Miss Maude’s house has caught fire and ours might catch, too. We have to go.”

  He eased me into my coat and boots. My mind had finally registered the urgency of the situation, but not my limbs, and it was as if I were a toddler, requiring assistance. AJ had dressed himself and was waiting for us by the front door. Once outside, the overwhelming sensation was one of extreme cold and extreme heat. It was so cold that I began to move instinctively toward the flames, only to have my father pull me back. He then crouched low to the ground, holding me between his knees so we could keep each other warm.

  The fire trucks seemed to take so long. We heard the sirens first, then saw the lights flashing through the bare trees, visible as the trucks raced down Green Mountain Circle and then turned onto our cul-de-sac. The hoses didn’t go on right away.

  “Are they frozen?” AJ asked.

  “I don’t know, son. I just don’t know.”

  The high-powered hoses came on and we almost cheered. But then they shattered the windows on the upper levels of Miss Maude’s house, and the water poured in. I thought of her pretty rooms, the pale green sofa where we watched our programs, the freezer full of Good Humor bars.

  Yet she seemed almost nonchalant about the damage being done. “I bought this place for the yard,” she muttered. “The house can go to hell.”

  Fine for her, but now our house was under threat. We had always thought of our house as far from its only neighbor, sitting as it did on a double lot, but Miss Maude’s house seemed terrifyingly close that night. I understood, then, why people speak of flames licking. That fire had a thousand little tongues that kept darting at our house, eager to taste it, devour it. Sure, it was stone, but there was wood trim and the windows could burst from the heat. My window had been warm to the touch when my father awakened me.

  A tree near the rear of Miss Maude’s property, right next to the unmarked boundary between our houses, began to go up. It was like watching snakes race up that tree, crimson-orange lines going up, up, up the trunk.

  “They might have to train their hoses on our house, just to be safe,” our father said. “If that happens—well, water will get in. It can’t be helped.”

  I thought of my room, my beloved stuffed animals, the new toys from my birthday. I had been given a wooden contraption with two long metal arms; the game was to coax a large ball-bearing up those arms until it dropped into one of the circles below. I was better than AJ or my father at this game; I had a delicacy of touch they couldn’t match. I could not bear to lose that game, the game at which I always won. Pinned between my father’s legs, I started to cry and he tightened his hold on me, as if fearful I would try to run inside. Miss Maude stroked my hair almost absentmindedly.

  “It’s a sign,” she said. “How can it be anything but a sign?”

  “Don’t be silly,” my father said. “And don’t blame yourself. Accidents happen.”

  “Oh, I don’t. I don’t.”

  And just like that, the fire seemed to give up, not unlike the witch vanquished by water in The Wizard of Oz. It shrank back into Miss Maude’s house, or what was left of it. There was a hole in the roof, broken windows, scorch marks. Her house was destroyed. Ours was spared.

  “At least I had the presence of mind to grab my purse,” Miss Maude said. “I can go stay at the Columbia Inn, I guess.”

  “You could have the guest room at our house,” my father said. “It’s always made up for Teensy.”

  I swear AJ blushed in the firelight, thinking of Miss Maude on the other side of the wall from him, separated by only a tiny powder room. She’ll be able to hear AJ go to the bathroom, I thought.

  “No, no, I wouldn’t dare put you out.”

  She walked over to her car, a VW bug. Although she had on boots, she was bare-legged and the hem of her nightgown showed beneath her coat.

  “What happened?” I asked my father. “How did it catch fire?”

  “She told the firemen she lit a candle downstairs, then forgot to snuff it out before she went to bed.”

  It was only when we went back inside that I noticed my father’s feet. “You forgot to put on your shoes?”

  “I know,” he said. “I was in such a hurry to get you out, I didn’t think. You know how I fall asleep in my chair at night.”

  He was walking from fireplace to fireplace, banking the fires we had allowed to burn. I went to his room to get his shoes, assuming he had kicked them off by his reading chair. I couldn’t find them, so I brought him his slippers.

  “What did Miss Maude mean, saying it was a sign?”

  “She’s been thinking about moving. I guess this will settle it for her. Although that’s a very silly way to be, Lu. To place emphasis on portents. Or horoscopes, or any of that stuff. She left a candle burning and her draperies caught fire.”

  “I read my horoscope every day,” I reminded him.

  “I know,” he said. “You read it out loud to me.”

  “That’s because it’s yours, too.”

  “Yes, and do you really think that you and I have the same day every day, that what’s recommended for you applies to me?”

  I did.

  Miss Maude never spent another night in that house. It was razed a few months later, and the lot stood empty for years, which delighted AJ and me as it became our unofficial territory. That spring, glorious flowers came to life, peeping through the overgrown grass, the result of Miss Maude’s meticulous preparation in her first few weeks, her only weeks, in the house. They never bloomed again.

  I was fifteen or sixteen before I realized that my father’s shoes were in Miss Maude’s house when it started to burn. As was my father. My father was shoeless in Miss Maude’s house, and they weren’t in the living room when that candle in the old Chianti bottle caught the drapes, or they might have had a chance to put it out. They had gone upstairs. Together.

  I called my brother, in law school at the time. I assumed he had figured it out before I did, but I held on to the hope that I might, just once, tell AJ something he didn’t already know.

  Of course he had pieced together far more than I had.

  “It didn’t start that night, Lu. He’d been going over there since mid-December, after you were asleep and I was in my room. He’d tell me he was going outside to smoke his pipe—he knew you didn’t approve of him smoking and would give him hell if you picked up the scent of his tobacco in the house—but he didn’t come back for hours. Then one night I saw him leaving her house, and I knew.”

  “Eeeeew,” I said.

  “That’s how I felt then.” That’s how I felt when I was your age. I thought, So infuriating. “Now I’m happy for him. Although—you know, she wasn’t a widow.”

  “What do you mean? She lied about being married?”

  “She lied about her husband being dead. He was at Walter Reed, a double amputee.”

  “But Daddy didn’t know that. He couldn’t have.”

  AJ sighed over the line. It was the mid-1980s. A long-distance call was still something of import, minutes gobbling up money the way the still-novel Pac-Man ate his power pills, although my father never objected to me calling AJ. He wanted us to be close. He had encouraged the ritual of our weekly Sunday call and even allowed me to call before rates dropped if I had important news. However, he probably would have been appalled if he had known what we were discussing on this particular Sunday.

  “How do you think I know, Lu? He to
ld me so himself.”

  “Uh-huh. No way. Daddy never would have been with a married woman. Besides, why would he tell you?”

  AJ’s laugh was raw and sad. “I guess he wanted to warn me that everyone screws up sometime. Even our saintly father. He said she was a de facto widow—wouldn’t divorce her husband out of principle, but he was never going to come home, be her husband again.”

  “So he argued against his adultery on the basis of a technicality?”

  “Other way around. He insisted that he was guilty of adultery despite her situation. But he cared about her, in his way, although he was never going to get serious with any woman. At any rate, she saw the fire as a judgment and left.” A pause. “Miss Maude wasn’t the only one, over the years. There were others. Lu, did you really think our father, who was not quite forty when our mother died, went the rest of his life without female companionship?”

  I did. And I still believe that he did not have a single lady friend during the eight-year stretch when it was just the two of us, after AJ left for college. By the time I was in my teens, I was on the alert for love and sex, imagining it everywhere, so how could I not have noticed if it were there?

  Then again, how did I not pick up the scent of my father’s pipe tobacco?

  Perhaps my adolescent self simply balked at that threshold of my father’s bedroom, as most teenagers do. I hope so. Now I want to believe that my father found a way to meet his needs, that he had a rich and thrilling secret life.

  After all, I did, at least for a time.

  JANUARY 10

  “Your first murder,” Lu’s father says, opening a bottle of wine, one of the better ones in his “cellar”—a corner of the kitchen that now includes two wine refrigerators, one for whites, and one that keeps reds at a steady sixty-four degrees. “Sort of like living in San Francisco,” AJ observed on his last visit, which provoked a pedantic observation from his wife, Lauranne, that San Francisco is not, in fact, sixty-four degrees year-round. Lauranne still doesn’t have a handle on the Brant sense of humor.

  Lu glances at the price tag, which her father has forgotten to scrape off. $39.99, some Australian red with a silly name. And it’s just a Saturday night dinner at home, nothing innately special, although they are expecting AJ and that is always a cause to celebrate. AJ lives less than twenty miles away, but his work—his ministry, as Lu likes to tease him, knowing that the term provokes him on several levels—means he’s on the road, on the go, all the time.

  “Not my first murder by a long shot,” Lu reminds her father. “My first as state’s attorney. I did several as a deputy. You know, not everyone gets appointed to the state’s attorney’s office. Some of us actually have to run.”

  He decants the wine, putting out stemless wineglasses for the adults, heavy tumblers for the twins. Andrew Brant, almost forty when Lu was born, had been considered an “old” father and he remains undeniably old-fashioned. He believes that children should learn to negotiate the adult world, that plastic cups with lids only retard their progress. To his credit, he never gets angry over spills or breakage. Teensy is the one who mourns the destruction of the Brants’ material possessions. But then—she’s the one who has been cleaning them for two generations. When Lu moved back in with her father, she was amazed to realize how little he knows about domestic arrangements. He cannot scramble eggs or make a bed. Or maybe he just doesn’t. He will buy groceries for special occasions—steaks, homemade ice cream, sushi-grade tuna from Wegman’s—but it would never occur to him to go to Giant or Target for everyday things like paper towels and detergent. Teensy does his laundry and ironing. Only his, she made clear to Lu with Teensy-ian logic. “You and the children have so many bright-colored things,” she said. “I can’t mix them with Mr. Brant’s.” How many Andrew Brants does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Lu has never been able to nail the precise punch line, but it would probably have to do with him not needing to change the lightbulb. He could just sit in the glow of his own saintly perfection.

  The twins helped her finish setting the table, and with only a minimum of nagging. They look forward to their uncle’s visits as well. He plays with Justin and is fatherly with Penelope. Lu gazes with satisfaction at the inviting room. Winter is the house’s best season. With the trees bare, the lake is in full view from three sides. Hard to remember now the raw, immature landscaping that legendarily offended Adele Brant more than forty years ago. Lu always thought trees took centuries to reach maturity, yet now they are huge and she is still not old. Forty-five isn’t old, right? Especially when one is beginning a new, big job. Lu likes to joke that her midlife crisis was postponed because widowhood was more pressing. What would a midlife crisis even look like for a single mother of two? Some people might point to the one part of her life that she keeps rigidly compartmentalized, but no one knows about it, so no one can cite it.

  Which just proves, Lu thinks, how very good she is at compartmentalizing.

  AJ—of course—managed to have an original midlife crisis: at age forty-four, he shucked his gorgeous, funny, brilliant wife of ten years, headed out for a wanderjahr, returned and fell in love with a mousy yoga teacher. Lu still finds it hard to reconcile herself to this. Lauranne is a drag. A drag on conversation, a drag on meals—a vegan alternative always has to be provided and is never quite right. Yet AJ remains smitten. Lauranne represents the new life he created for himself after walking away from Lehman Brothers. Granted, he walked away in 2006, excellent timing on his part. Two years later and his fortune would have walked away from him. He divested himself of most of his material goods—although only half of his considerable cash—telling his first wife, Helena, that she could have the house in Greenwich, the apartment in New York City, the beach house on Cape Cod. He then made his own Eat, Pray, Love pilgrimage around the world, although ascetic AJ skipped the eating part. He found Lauranne in some yoga class along the way and eventually brought her to Baltimore, where they became pioneers in urban gardening, something that Lu and her father privately find hilarious. “AJ didn’t even like cutting grass as a boy,” her father says. “Now he’s practically a farmer.”

  AJ’s embrace of simple living has only made him richer. He wrote a book about his travels that became an unexpected hit in paperback, the sort of thing that book clubs love. The book made him an in-demand speaker, someone hired for $10,000, $20,000 a night. A local radio show on AJ and Lauranne’s locavore life ended up being nationally syndicated. Three years ago, he even was named a MacArthur fellow, receiving one of the so-called genius grants. The couple still lives in Southwest Baltimore and AJ is often photographed outside their home, a simple redbrick rowhouse. Photographers and reporters are never allowed inside, however. Luisa suspects this is because AJ and Lauranne actually own three rowhouses, reconfigured inside so that there is an open courtyard with a pool bracketed on three sides by the two end rowhouses, a walled garden at the back of the property. Lu has to give AJ his due; it is still a pretty scruffy neighborhood and he is cheerful about the price he pays to live there—graffiti, vandalism, petty larcenies. And he is doing something incontestably good, helping families in Southwest Baltimore grow their own vegetables and learn to cook and eat seasonally. He, in turn, credits Lauranne for much of his success, but Lu cannot bear to ascribe anything positive to her brother’s second wife. To her, Lauranne is just a lucky hanger-on.

  She misses Helena. Funny, bright, a lawyer. AJ says they broke up over the issue of children, yet AJ and Lauranne don’t seem to be interested in having children, either, although she’s still just young enough, in her thirties. But Lu can tell, by the way she interacts with Penelope and Justin—which is to say, the way she doesn’t interact—that Lauranne has no desire to be a mom. Fair enough. Let her eat vegetables and tie her body up in knots and live forever. AJ seems happy, which is all that matters.

  Just before 7 P.M., as her father begins to fret on the timing of his meal, AJ and Lauranne arrive in their Subaru Forester. His anti-midlife crisis seems self-c
onscious to Lu at times, as if AJ thinks everyone is forever paying attention to every choice he makes. At least he hasn’t started wearing all hemp. Fit and lean at the age of fifty-three, he favors T-shirts and jeans, which favor him. Balding, he has gone whole hog and shaved his head. Go figure, he looks great. Lu still can’t help wondering why he was blessed with their mother’s cheekbones and large eyes, while she had to favor the Brant family tree, which runs to freckles. He hugs everyone with great enthusiasm, while Lauranne offers glancing embraces so weak and watery that it amazes Lu those same arms allow her to do headstands.

  “Lu has her first murder,” their father says as they all sit down. The twins don’t even look up.

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious about your mother’s new job?” AJ teases.

  Justin shrugs. Penelope takes a long drink of milk that allows her not to answer. She plays it for laughs, holding up one finger to show that she’s busy.

  “They’re so young,” Lu says quickly. She cannot bear for anyone to tease her children. And she doesn’t want them to dwell too much on what she does. They are prone to nightmares, apocalyptic scenarios in which they lose everyone they love.

  “You were, what, five when I tried Sheila Compson’s killer?” their father says. “And you begged me for details. Of course, back then, there was a sense of propriety. Newspapers and television stations didn’t feel they had to report every lurid detail, thank God.”

  AJ and Lu share a look over their father’s use of “back then,” a trigger phrase for him, a sign that he might hold forth on the way the world has changed. AJ steps in, trying to keep the conversation from heading down that track.

  “I suppose it’s an interesting one if you’re taking it, not foisting it off on one of your deputies.”

  “Are you calling me a showboat?”

  “More a little prancing pony.” Only AJ can get away with that reference to Lu’s size. As a child, she sought out books about girls who were short, sturdy, freckled. Laura in the Little House books. (She hated the TV show, but loved the books.) Pippi Longstocking. Later, although not as late as one might suppose, Helen in The Group. And although her hair was more sandy than carroty, Lu always had a soft spot for Anne of Green Gables. But she never wanted anyone else to note her resemblance to these fictional alter egos.