Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  We were at the dinner table. It was not a serious conversation. When our father was intent on serious conversations, he took us into his room and closed the door. Yet there was something about his tone that sounded grave to me, as if he were suggesting that AJ did not always tell the truth.

  “Of course I would be honest,” AJ said.

  “Then it’s your decision.”

  For a week, AJ came home and attacked our father’s manual typewriter with great focus. But he was in the fall play, Zoo Story, and rehearsals began to run later and later. And he was trying to study for the PSATs, while still playing soccer. The memoir was discarded. AJ was a magpie in his youth, saving everything in a file cabinet. But when I went to look for those pages recently, there was no trace of them. I wish he had saved his nascent memoir. I would have loved to read his version of his life, then and now. My brother was achingly sincere. That’s the thing that no one understands. I’m not sure even AJ grasped that part of his nature, and what a burden it was to carry into adulthood. People say it’s hard to be good. It’s harder still to be famous for being good, to find that balance between sincerity and sanctimony. But I believe AJ managed to do it.

  JANUARY 14

  Lu makes her way carefully up the walk of the shabby house on Rain Dream Hill. There is a fine layer of sleet on the sidewalks this morning, and although some of the homeowners have treated their sidewalks with chemical melts, the walkway in front of the Drysdale house is untouched. Besides, she’s always sore the day after a “lunch” with Bash. She may have a gymnast’s build, but she doesn’t have the elasticity. Lu is that rare modern woman who doesn’t exercise, not in any organized way. She doesn’t have to. She walks in the morning, sometimes before the sun comes up, but that’s more for her mind than her body. There’s no compelling reason for her to work out—her weight is steady, all the markers of good health are where they should be. Blood pressure, cholesterol. But the day after an afternoon with Bash, her body reproaches her for not taking better care of herself. A little yoga at the very least, it begs her. But when would she have time?

  Both Drysdales meet her at the door, grim and unhappy wraiths, American Gothic without the pitchfork. They are one of those couples who look like brother and sister—small, with fine bones and surprisingly dark hair, only a dusting of white at the temples. Well into their seventies, they look even older. Their faces are deeply lined and yellow, with a rubbery sheen. Smokers. Lu knows that before she comes across the threshold. The smell is thick on them, hangs in the house like a haze.

  “Mr. Hollister says we don’t have to talk to you,” Mr. Drysdale says, even as he opens the door wider to let her in.

  “You don’t,” she says. “But I’ll remind you, you’re not his clients. Rudy is. You’re just footing the bill. Fred will do what’s best for Rudy. That’s his job. Eventually, you will have to talk to me—and a grand jury. I thought it a kindness to meet in private—without Rudy’s attorney charging you an hourly rate.”

  There is a formal living room to the right of the front door, but they lead her to the family room at the back of the house, nothing more than an alcove off the kitchen. This throwback to the ’70s could never be described as a “great room.” The kitchen appears to have been untouched since the house was built. The appliances are what was once called Harvest Gold, and the adjacent sitting area is tiny by the standards of today’s McMansions. A sliding glass door leads to a small square of deck; Lu knows there will be another glass door below, leading to the walk-out basement, a feature in almost all Columbia homes of the ’70s. But the home’s dominant feature are piles. Piles of books, piles of magazines, piles of newspapers. A pile of shirts on hangers, draped across an easy chair. When Lu perches on the plaid sofa, it emits dust and a smell she can’t identify, although it seems vaguely animal. Not animal waste, but—something musky, furry, as if a dog once slept here.

  “You’ve lived here how long?” she asked.

  “Since 1977. We moved here from the city. Rudy wasn’t happy at Southern High School. We thought Wilde Lake High School, being different, might be good for him.”

  “That wasn’t so unusual then. My brother’s best friend came here for similar reasons. He had been asked to leave Sidwell Friends in D.C.”

  She is trying to be polite and friendly, offering this anecdote in the spirit of commiseration, but they seem mystified by her comment, unsure of what to say. They are socially awkward people. Given their own limitations, perhaps they never recognized their son’s problems. Oddness used to be more acceptable. Some people were just weird. Now anyone who seems the least bit off has to have a label, a diagnosis, be “on the spectrum.”

  “How old was Rudy when he was diagnosed?” She intentionally doesn’t name a diagnosis and is curious to see if they provide one.

  “Nineteen.” Mr. Drysdale is the spokesman. Mrs. Drysdale keeps her eyes on his face. Their connection is wordless, almost telepathic. “He was a really good student, but college was hard for him.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Bennington.” Almost thirty-five years after the fact, this still seems to give the parents a little lift. It was probably the highlight of their lives, seeing their son admitted to Bennington. How had they afforded that? “He wasn’t prepared for the darkness.”

  “Depression?”

  “No, how dark the days were, by the end of that first semester. The sun goes down early in New England. He cared about light. He was a photographer, a good one. He couldn’t deal with the dark. Even when he was a teenager, he needed to be outside a lot. He walked everywhere. There was one doctor—this was recent—who thinks he had a vitamin D deficiency. Or maybe SAD, that seasonal thing. Anyway, the doctor says Rudy is self-medicating when he walks. That’s why we’re worried about him not getting bail.”

  Cause and effect. Everyone wants there to be a reason, any reason, for the inexplicable things that happen in our world, especially the things our children do. He’s tired. She’s hungry. We haven’t adhered to the schedule. And sometimes those reasons apply. But sometimes—how often?—the wheel spins and you get a damaged kid.

  “Was he ever violent?”

  Mrs. Drysdale runs her tongue around her lips, says nothing. “No,” Mr. Drysdale says with as much firmness as he can muster. Then: “We’ve already decided not to have a competency hearing. Mr. Hollister says it’s a waste of our resources. A waste of his time. And money.”

  “I know. He wants to go very swiftly—he’s even invoking Hicks, the rule that says I have to take the case to court within one hundred eighty days. But you know I can challenge that, right? Ask for an exemption if I think it’s warranted?”

  Their eyes are round, innocent, troubled. “He didn’t think you would, though,” Mr. Drysdale says.

  Fred does know her pretty well. Give him that. He knew she would rise to the challenge of fast-tracking this. Has she fallen into a trap?

  “Even if we do have the trial before the hundred-and-eighty-day deadline—you have no idea how much this is going to cost. Your son’s defense. And you’re not obligated to pay it. I’m sure when Fred came to you—”

  “We called him.”

  Their instant chorus at this convinces Lu that they didn’t, but they’ve been coached to say as much.

  “Who suggested Fred?”

  “Rudy’s public defender. We told her we had—come into some money, that we were going to take a mortgage on the house, said we wanted to hire someone. At least, I think that was the sequence of events. Things have happened—so fast. Ten days ago, we didn’t even know Rudy was sleeping rough again.”

  “Isn’t that a British term?”

  “It is.” Mrs. Drysdale is allowed to speak to this at least. “But Rudy liked it. He said it was more like the way he lived. He wasn’t homeless. Our door was always open to him. Always.”

  “As long as he was willing to abide by a few house rules,” Mr. Drysdale mutters.

  “Our door was always open to him. He is
our son.” The second part of Mrs. Drysdale’s comment, made under her breath, seems directed more at her husband than at Lu.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” No answer. “Christmas? Thanksgiving?” Lu, who feels herself in danger of sinking into the rump-sprung sofa, leans forward. “I mean, when was the last time he stayed with you?”

  Mrs. Drysdale’s eyes dart back and forth. Arthur Drysdale has his arms crossed on his chest. Something happened here. Lu’s mind races through the possibilities. Her eyes sweep over Mrs. Drysdale, but it’s Mr. Drysdale who has uncrossed his arms and started to rub his right thigh about midway up on the outside, kneading it with his knuckles.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so scattered—when was the last time Rudy lived with you,” she repeats while standing, so the question will feel tossed off, conversational, something said to fill the silence of departure.

  “It was 2013,” Mrs. Drysdale says swiftly. “For the summer. He was with us all summer back in 2013.”

  “Not a single night since then?”

  “Not a single night.” But it’s Mr. Drysdale who says this.

  Medical records are private, but some ambulance records are public. It takes much of the afternoon, but by 5 P.M., Lu has found what she needs: a private ambulance transported someone from the house on Rain Dream Hill to Howard County Hospital on August 5, 2013. No 911 call, but the emergency room would have informed the police if they had any suspicions it was a criminal matter. Working backward, Lu finds a police report for the address, made three days later, but no mention of Rudy Drysdale—who, as his mother just told her, lived with them the summer of 2013. Arthur Drysdale had come into the emergency room with a stab wound to his right thigh. He blamed the attack on a mysterious intruder, a home invasion in which nothing was taken. He said he came home to find a strange man in the house and the man grabbed a pair of scissors and jammed them into his leg. No arrest was ever made. Lu, bureaucracy lifer that she is, can decode the flat, seemingly nonjudgmental language of a police report. The police knew Arthur Drysdale was lying and probably wrote it off as a man trying to save pride after a “domestic.” If he didn’t want to rat his wife out for attacking him with a pair of scissors, what did they care? The incident was listed as an assault. But an attack in a home invasion should have carried a far more serious charge. And why no call to 911? Because the Drysdales were trying to avoid the authorities altogether. Whatever innocuous story they came up with didn’t pass muster at the hospital and the cops were called. OK, fine, would you believe an attack by a stranger?

  Mr. Drysdale walked in, surprising Rudy, and he was attacked. Or maybe they had a quarrel. Whatever. It all works for Lu. That’s a violent episode, within the past eighteen months.

  Oh, the Drysdales might try to bluster through a grand jury hearing without confirming this, but they won’t. They don’t have the balls to carry this lie, now that the stakes are so high. True, Lu will have a hard time introducing this information during trial unless Rudy testifies, but it’s key. No criminal record for violence? Sure. But Fred can’t get away with claiming that Rudy has no history of violence, and if that day comes, she’ll put Mr. Drysdale on the stand. She should tell Mike and his team to canvass the shelters in the city, just in case Rudy ever had to cave and stay in one when the weather was particularly bitter, as it’s been for the past several winters. If he’s ever behaved violently or erratically there, the staff might remember. She rubs the bruise from yesterday, thinks of Mr. Drysdale, his hand reaching for the spot where his son stabbed him. He’s lucky to be alive.

  Luckier than Mary McNally, that’s for sure.

  Lu had thought that Mr. Drysdale ruled the roost. Now she sees that Mrs. Drysdale does, at least when it comes to Rudy. He was allowed to come home as long as he followed a few rules. Rudy, stop stabbing your father. Lu remembers those piles and piles of things in the alcove off the kitchen, the animal scent on the cushions, which also seemed to smell like the outdoors. That’s where Rudy slept. Continues to sleep, without his father’s knowledge. There was that sliding patio door right there, leading to a deck off the back of the house, another door below. How easy it would be for a mother to leave one of those unlocked, how accustomed a man could become to sliding in late at night and leaving before daybreak. Lu imagines her own Justin as an adult, broken by life or some not-yet-understood brain chemistry. Could she ever turn her back on him? No, no, she couldn’t. She, too, would leave a door unlocked, make sure that her son never had to sleep outside, even if he had hurt someone else in the family.

  So assuming that option was available to Rudy Drysdale, why was he in Mary McNally’s apartment?

  PART TWO

  INTEMPERANCE

  On a snowy evening just before Valentine’s Day 1978—I was sitting at the coffee table, dutifully addressing twenty-seven cards to my classmates, knowing I would return home with only four or five cards from the other kids like me, kids whose parents insisted on an all-or-nothing policy—my father arrived home at five o’clock. That was unusual enough. We were lucky to see him at six thirty most evenings, and dinner was often as late as seven. (Teensy grumbled about this a lot, under her breath. “Lincoln freed the slaves, I thought.”) Far stranger, our father walked straight to the little butler’s bar in our living room and poured himself a half glass of whiskey. He then asked me to leave the living room, as he needed to be on the phone. I didn’t dare remind him he had a phone in his room.

  I asked Teensy if she knew what was going on.

  “Mind your own business,” she said, as she improvised in the kitchen, trying to make a dinner that would lift my father’s spirits, but it was Thursday and she shopped on Friday. AJ was out, as always. He had basketball practice most afternoons, then rehearsals—school plays, choir, madrigals—in the evenings. He had tried to persuade our father that he should be given a car for his sixteenth birthday in April, but our father was firm that he could not afford such an extravagance, even with the Straight-A-Student discount offered by auto insurers at the time. AJ had to count on Bash or Ariel, who had early winter birthdays and more generous parents. Bash had a very sharp, bright red Jeep because his family lived so far out. AJ hitchhiked, too, sometimes, another one of his secrets that I banked. I think he hitchhiked home that very night. His shoes squeaked and there were drops of water clinging to his hair when he finally arrived home.

  AJ didn’t ask our father any questions about his taciturn gloominess. Instead, he did all he could to distract him from his funk, telling stories about practice—Bash had been trying to impress a cheerleader and ran straight into a wall, Davey shot free throws in the way girls are taught, dropping the ball between his legs and arcing it underhand. He had made five baskets in a row that way, AJ said, on a bet. Stories like that, harmless and aimless.

  Our father smiled absently, picked at the pork chops that Teensy had tried to defrost in cool water, not entirely successfully. (I’m not sure if most people had microwaves at the time, but I know we didn’t. Didn’t and still don’t. My father loathes them. It’s a principle with him, not having a microwave. He says time is not meant to be manipulated that way.) At one point, he almost poured ketchup on his salad, but my warning came just in time. It was odd enough that we even had bottled dressing on the table. On a typical night, my father’s salads were an evening ritual, that kind of eccentric family thing that makes a kid proud and embarrassed at the same time. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and dressed the salad at the table in a battered wooden bowl, pouring oil and vinegar, squeezing a lemon wedge. The bowl and the glass cruets were his only family heirlooms, along with the planter’s desk in his bedroom. When his grandfather died in the early 1970s, my father had driven down to Virginia and returned with these items, nothing more. He called his salad bowl and cruets his “lares and penates.” For years, I thought that was Latin for oil and vinegar.

  “What’s up?” I asked AJ in a hoarse whisper as we cleaned up. Teensy always left as soon as dinner was on the table, and it fell to u
s to tidy the kitchen each night. True, this was little more than rinsing things for the dishwasher and putting away leftovers. But given AJ’s busy life, I did this alone more often than not and I bridled at the unfairness of it all. There was so much unfairness in life, especially when one was the youngest, and a girl. I planned to change that one day. I was going to be an astronaut or a president, maybe an astronaut and then the president. And here we are, more than thirty-five years later, and we have plenty of female astronauts and we’re within spitting distance of a female president. But you know what I consider true progress? The fact that we had a female astronaut disturbed enough to make that famous cross-country trip in adult diapers, intent on killing a romantic rival. When your kind is allowed to be mediocre or crazy—that’s true equality.

  “There’s been an appeal,” AJ said. “That man who killed Sheila Compson. He’s filed an appeal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He says the state withheld information about a key witness, someone who can confirm that he dropped her off alive, just as he testified, and that her shoes were in a rucksack. Dad said something—intemperate to a television reporter.”

  “Something cold?”

  “Not temperature. Intemperate.” AJ, still doing PSAT prep, wedged a lot of big words into his sentences for practice. “He lost his temper. And you know he never gets angry, he prides himself on that. But the TV reporters got to him before he heard and he was caught off guard.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, he said”—AJ looked around, lowered his voice anyway—“he said ‘That son of a bitch is lucky he’s not on death row.’”

  I know, it sounds quaint now. Son of a bitch. Small children probably say it for laughs on cable channels. But it mattered at the time. So many things mattered that don’t anymore. Remember, Ed Muskie’s presidential hopes had been torpedoed by tears only a few years earlier. “Son of a bitch” at least had the advantage of being masculine, but it was not something a future attorney general or congressman or senator should say. Intemperate, as AJ characterized it. Our father had been intemperate.