Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “You all talked that morning and agreed on a story. You worked out all the details about what you were going to say.” Right down to the board game you played.

  “Everything we said was true, so what was the harm in making sure we said the same thing? I was a lawyer’s son. The key was to protect Davey. I knew what could happen if we opened the door to any doubt. Davey’s future was hanging in the balance. She showed up, uninvited. She and Davey had a big loud argument in his room, but then they were quiet as anything. We did play a drinking game. She passed out, we put her in the Robinsons’ bed to sleep it off, then Bash and Noel took her home. True, it was kind of chickenshit to leave her on the doorstep, but no one wanted to come into contact with her old man under the best of circumstances.”

  Lu’s memory for faces and names isn’t good. She’s long been aware of that weakness and done what she can to correct it. She read somewhere that it’s bullshit to say, Oh, I don’t remember names or faces. But she tries. She knows she tries. What she does remember are stories, especially family ones. She could have recited every detail about the short life of Adele Closter Brant, as it was told to her. She can taste the Eskimo pie she ate the day they met Noel, remember the feel of the air on that June night she saw AJ sing in the Tree of Life chorus, count almost every freckle on Bash’s back as he rose and fell on top of Lynne in Lu’s childhood bed. She remembers that Thanksgiving weekend, her father pulling details out of AJ, telling him to stop toying with language about who was invited, who wasn’t invited. And not two hours ago, Bash said of Rudy: He wasn’t invited.

  She says: “Rudy Drysdale was there. That night. How—”

  AJ stands, walks to the edge of his pool. A lap pool, he defended to Lu when she mocked this expense by ascetic AJ. He and Lauranne needed to swim to counterbalance their vigorous yoga practices. If the kids of his Southwest Baltimore neighborhood ever learned about this hidden oasis, no one could stop them from scaling the fence behind the property. But as much as AJ had given to the community, he had walled off this part of himself. Walled off the pool, the sustainable lawn furniture. AJ didn’t want the world to know what he had, what he desired.

  “Not exactly,” AJ says to his lap pool. “He offered Nita a ride home from work. Turns out that when he realized she was going to Davey’s house, he parked his car up the street and sneaked around to the back. Isn’t it ironic—I’m pretty sure it’s irony, at any rate. Davey and I defended him, at that very house, from being a little Peeping Tom pervert, skulking around with his camera. And there he was, in the woods, watching us.”

  Lu feels as if she’s approaching a woodland creature, something timid and prone to bolt. She lets him keep his back to her, doesn’t move. “And what did he see, AJ?”

  “What we said,” he replies, irritably. “Davey and Nita, having sex. Willingly on her part, best he could tell. When Rudy got wind of the investigation, a week or two later, he was dying to be the hero, begged me to let him talk to the grand jury. He wanted to repay the favor. He said he owed Davey and me everything. I told him to cool it, that it was better to let things lie. Nita barely knew his name, did you know that? When asked who drove her to Davey’s house, she always said: ‘Some guy from the mall.’ That’s all Rudy was to her. Some guy from the mall.”

  Lu reaches for a piece of salami from AJ’s platter, although she’s not really hungry. The city sounds are so different from what she’s used to. Traffic, a police siren in the distance, a helicopter whirring overhead. AJ glances up. “That’s a police chopper,” he says. “They’re looking for someone. You learn to tell the difference, living here, between the police copters and the traffic ones. God, this year.”

  She is not going to be distracted by idle talk. “What else did Rudy see? That night. You could see everything from the back of that house, if the lights were on.”

  “I don’t know, Lu. Four teenage boys, living the life he wished he could live, pitiable as that sounds. Funny, isn’t it? Rudy got teased for being a ‘faggot.’ Yet Noel never did.”

  “Why not let him speak to the grand jury, then? What part of your rehearsed story was he going to contradict?”

  “I told you, everything we said was the truth.”

  There it is again, the carefully parsed argument. Everything we said—what had gone unsaid? What had Rudy seen that AJ didn’t want entered into the record?

  “What parts are you leaving out? What did you leave out then? This is your sister, AJ, not the state’s attorney. I need to know.”

  AJ’s shoulders sag, weighed down by a secret that four boys, now three men, have carried for thirty-five years. “She passed out. During the game. We carried her upstairs to let her sleep it off. And we started giving Davey shit that she was his girlfriend. Because she was, you know, and that was embarrassing. Nita Flood wasn’t supposed to be anyone’s girlfriend. Davey got angry. He said he didn’t care for her at all. He said he cared for her so little that we could all take turns, if we wanted. So—” He shrugs, his back still to her.

  “You raped her,” Lu says.

  “I didn’t. I went into the room and just—looked at her. I was still a virgin. I didn’t want my first time to be like that. Noel made the same decision, although he pretended he made mad passionate love to her. That was his phrase, of course. What’s that from? Some movie, I guess. ‘Mad passionate love. Oh, yes, I made mad passionate love to her.’ Later, he took it back and I told him I hadn’t done anything either. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe him. That was what ended our friendship. Realizing that each of us thought the other was a liar. I thought Noel would have sex with her, just to see if he was gay. He thought I’d have sex with a dead-drunk girl because she would never know.”

  “What about Bash?” Lu asks, wishing that her interest was dispassionate, only a matter of fact-finding.

  AJ turns back, able to face her now. “Oh, I’m sure Bash had no compunction. He’s a Neanderthal, Lu. He’d do it with a knothole.”

  She feels the urge to defend him, but maybe it’s herself she wants to defend.

  “Then she was raped that night. No matter what happened between her and Davey, even if you and Noel declined. She was raped. Bash raped her. Probably Davey, too, but I get why you didn’t make that distinction.”

  “Yes, if the facts of that night were to be examined today, it was rape. But—that’s not how people thought then, Lu. I’m sorry, but it’s true. And remember, she wasn’t saying anyone else had sex with her. She also was lying her head off, claiming Davey beat her up. Don’t forget that part. She lied. We just left out the stuff that would have detracted from the lies she was telling to protect her rotten bastard of a father.”

  Only the lies didn’t end with Nita. Where did the lies end?

  “So last fall, Nita asked everyone for money. But only Davey paid up.”

  AJ kneels in front of Lu and clasps his hands around hers, as earnest and sincere a man as anyone Lu has ever known. “It was your election, you know. That and her granddaughter being sick. If it weren’t for you running for office, Nita wouldn’t have had any traction. She contacted Davey last fall, said she was going to ‘make some noise’ if we didn’t pay her. Davey gave her a week’s worth of collections from his church, but all that did was make her greedy. She started calling me. Over the years, I had kept tabs on Rudy. Well, truth be told, he kept tabs on me. As soon as I landed back in Baltimore, he started finding ways to make contact with me. It was like high school all over again, Rudy showing up on the fringes of events, watching me. I had to tell Rudy. He was involved, too.”

  “Why would Rudy care? Nita never knew what he saw. She didn’t even know he was there. He wasn’t going to be drawn into this.”

  The question clearly flummoxes AJ. Her brother, who makes a point of living without air-conditioning as much as possible, pops a sweat so sudden and noticeable that she wants to offer him one of Bash’s magical pills for menopause. His eyes shift right and left—toward the perfect little lap pool, then back t
oward this trompe l’oeil of a house, designed to look like three discrete rowhouses from the front, revealing its true nature only from the back, behind this high fence, which protects him from not only the neighborhood kids’ petty larcenies, but their prying eyes. What do people find when they spy on people who think no one can see them? What did Rudy see at Davey’s house that night? Why would Rudy care what Nita decided to say? What did Rudy, of all people, have to lose? Rudy hid in the woods, watching other boys have fun, but he didn’t participate. Rudy followed AJ’s crowd around, keeping his distance. Watching, forever watching.

  Like high school all over again, showing up on the fringes of events.

  Lu sees her brother, studying a copse of trees on their Memorial Day walk, becoming overwhelmed. He becomes so overwhelmed that he tells her the secret of their mother, a story he was comfortable keeping for almost thirty-five years. She sees now that he was desperate to change the subject, end the conversations about Nita and Davey, shut down his inquisitive sister, who was at once so close and so far away from the truth.

  “Graduation night,” she says. “Rudy was there.”

  AJ nods, his expression a combination of misery and respect. His smart little sister has figured it all out.

  “He was fast, Rudy was. I was chasing Ben and, all of a sudden, there was Rudy, passing me, catching up to Ben. I was trying to tackle Rudy when I fell and broke my arm. He killed Ben, Lu. In cold blood. That thing about Ben falling on his knife—that’s not how it happened.”

  “But you were down, you didn’t see, and the investigation cleared you—”

  “The fix was in, Lu. As long as everyone thought it was Andrew Jackson Brant’s boy who was the hero, no questions would be asked, no difficult questions about how the story didn’t exactly match the evidence. I always told Rudy that it was better that way. Ben Flood had reason to attack Davey and me. I’d be forgiven for chasing him, for fighting him. Rudy wouldn’t. It wasn’t his fight. Again, he was always there, watching, wanting to ‘repay’ us. You know what? If I could live my whole life over again, I would just let those sad fucks from Glenelg High School have their fun with him and be done. I’ve paid a thousand times over for doing the right thing. I wasn’t going to let Nita Flood punish me for something I didn’t even do.”

  “You asked Rudy—”

  “No. No. I told him what was happening. That’s all.”

  “But, AJ, you had to know what he would do—I mean, the fact that you paid for his defense—”

  “I knew he needed a good attorney who would plead him out to not criminally responsible. I chose Howard & Howard because it’s one of the best law firms in the state. I couldn’t know that Fred had landed there or that this stupid case would become some fucking battle between the two of you. Your stupid, stupid pride, Lu. Why couldn’t you just settle?”

  “My pride, AJ? You’re going to blame this on my pride?”

  He drops his head into his hands, still in a crouch before her. Some part of Lu’s mind detaches, wonders at her brother’s knees, his ability to hold this pose so long. “What are we going to do, sis? What are we going to do?”

  She wraps her arms around his neck, an atypical display of filial affection. “It’s a long weekend. Let’s just get through it, and then we’ll sift through all the implications of what you’ve told me come Monday, OK? Rudy is dead and if you tell me he acted on his own, without anyone encouraging him to go after Nita Flood, I have to believe you. Come to the house tomorrow, watch the fireworks, eat some barbecue. We don’t have to solve it now.”

  “It’s going to kill Dad. If any part of this comes out. He’s always tried so hard to do the right thing. Even when he was wrong, he never knew it. Whatever he’s had to live with, he’s never been in doubt. Whereas I’ve lived my whole life, knowing I’m a fake and nothing I’ve done—nothing—can make up for that. When I told Rudy about Nita, I never dreamed—I guess I am Ajax the lesser.”

  “Shhh,” she says “Shhh.” She can’t bear to know anymore.

  That night, about an hour after paramedics are called to AJ’s home—there is a hideous comedy involving the address, with the EMTs trying to gain access through the wrong doors as Lauranne wails inside, not that it matters in the end—Lu and her father receive the courtesy of a personal visit from Mike Hunt, who has been informed by a detective he knows in the Southwestern District that AJ is dead. He waited until Lauranne went to bed, then apparently drank two more bottles of his nice Italian wine, chased it with a handful of pills, and walked into his own swimming pool, tying a metal drum of tomato plants to his ankle to ensure he could not change his mind.

  Lu sees her father’s knees buckle—the phrase makes sense to Lu for the first time, and the next image that comes to her mind, crazily, is one of the towers on 9/11, that seeming moment of hesitation as it swayed, then collapsed—and she realizes that her own pain and anger and sorrow will have to wait, possibly forever, certainly for the rest of her father’s life.

  She grabs him by his elbow, pilots him to a chair with Mike Hunt’s help.

  “Why?” Andrew Jackson Brant keeps asking. “Why?”

  But that is the one thing she must never tell him.

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES IS CALLED TO THE INQUISITION, OR THE FINAL SHOE DROPS

  My father became old overnight. Maybe he was old all along and I willed myself not to notice it. Other friends have told me that they watched their parents sail through their eighties, only to age suddenly at ninety, and my father was getting close to that milestone. At any rate, he is increasingly frail. He doesn’t eat enough, subsists on cold cereal and bananas. He no longer walks around the lake. His hearing seems to be going, or maybe he just doesn’t want to answer the questions put to him, simple as they are. His practice had been a charade for years, albeit a charade that seemed to keep him alert, active, happy. Now I barely trust him to drive a car to the grocery store. He has stopped reading books and it takes him much of a day to make his way through the Beacon-Light, slender as it is. The television is on almost all day. MSNBC and, much to my amusement, endless repeats of Law & Order. It is the one thing that seems to get a rise out of him, those Law & Order episodes. He finds all the lawyers wanting, in acumen and strategy. But, come the end of the hour, at least you know everything. That’s one luxury I will never have.

  Suicides take their secrets with them. Was Rudy wily enough to kill Mary McNally as a warning to Nita Flood, or did he make a mistake that night? Fred said he saw the faded “R” and “L” on his wrists a week after he was arrested. A mistake might explain that trace of DNA. Was he excited about what he was about to do? Or was he sitting on the bed he presumed to be Nita Flood’s, thinking about another cold night, in which he hid in the trees and watched boys come and go in a room where a girl appeared to be sleeping. What did you see, Rudy? What do you know? But his loyalty, to the very end, was to AJ; and if my brother were my client, I would have no problem presenting a plausible case in which he had no knowledge of what Rudy intended to do. And paying for someone’s attorney does not prove conspiracy. Nor does telling your sister a life-changing secret at the very moment she is closing in on this fact. Give AJ this: he was very good at derailing me. That lovely Saturday lunch we had to discuss surrogacy—he was milking me about the case, trying to figure out what I knew, realizing that Rudy would need a better attorney.

  As for his break with Noel—only Noel and AJ know what happened between them. I remain convinced that AJ left out some essential details, as was his wont. Never lying, but frequently omitting. Maybe Bash knows, but I don’t see Bash anymore, and I never really talked to him. He assumes our breakup has something to do with my grief over AJ, but I don’t want to be with a man who would screw a knothole. Or a blacked-out girl. I have no reason to doubt AJ on this part of the story, as he didn’t know I would care. Now when I think about Bash showing up at my open house last Christmas, I wonder where he and AJ were that night. Was Nita Flood still making noise, threatening them? Had they met wi
th Davey, discussed strategy? Almost every detail in my life is up for grabs now, full of new meanings.

  I resigned from my office on August 1. I said I needed to spend time with my family. No one questioned this excuse or put it in ironic quotation marks. After all, I was considered a success as state’s attorney. And there was my father, suddenly in need of so much care. I am trying to keep him home as long as possible, but—irony of ironies—the dream house that my father oversaw is not suitable for a man in his increasingly frail condition. For now, we are making it work. For now. But I’m not sure how much longer I can keep him at home. And once he leaves, why would the twins and I stay here? We can live anywhere we want, only—what do we want? I realize it’s a luxury to be able to ask that question. But it’s a luxury for which I have paid dearly. I think I want to go somewhere far away, or at least far enough away that our name, Brant, means nothing except to birdwatchers.

  Anyway, once I had resigned and was an ordinary citizen again, there was nothing to prevent me from calling Eloise Schumann and asking her to take me for a walk in the woods.

  “There was this big piece of concrete, the remains of an old amphitheater, or something,” she said. Her stride was purposeful and strong. I found myself thinking: She’s a tiny thing. Then: Wow, I never get to think that about anyone; do people think that about me? Until recently, I never really felt tiny. Now I feel as if the wind could pick me up and carry me away.

  She spoke incessantly as we walked, always about Ryan Schumann. She was girlish on the topic, as silly and giggly as the teenage girl she was when she met him at age fourteen. “I was short, but I had a good figure, I didn’t look like a kid. And he wasn’t all that tall, so he liked my height. He said I was like a little doll. He was in love with me, but, of course, we had to wait. For him to get divorced, for me to finish high school. I would have done anything for him, anything. So when he said, ‘Let’s pick up that girl hitchhiker,’ I said sure. And when he asked her if she wanted to go party with us in the woods, I was okay with that, too. But she got flirty when she got high. Real flirty.”