Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  I asked: “Did you tell my father this?”

  “Yeah, the second time. But because I lied the first time, no one believed me. After Ryan had been away two years, I couldn’t take it anymore. I told your father that she had died, but it was an accident. That she sassed me and I pushed her and she grabbed me and we were fighting and then I pushed her off me and she hit her head on a rock.”

  “But that wasn’t true, was it?” My father had told me that Sheila Compson was much taller than Eloise, and at least thirty pounds heavier. He had reason to doubt her.

  Now Eloise was not so talkative. She walked a little farther. “I swear there was an amphitheater. But it was more than forty years ago. I guess it’s amazing the woods are still here. One day, I bet there won’t be any trees left between Baltimore and Washington. When I was growing up here, it was country, real country. We hated Columbia, with its tacky houses and all those circular streets that don’t really go anywhere.”

  “Cul-de-sacs,” I said. It was, admittedly, an inane thing to say. But Eloise Cabot Schumann was born in 1959 and she was acting as if she was the original owner of the colonial tavern that had become my family home. She was all of seven years old when ground was broken for Columbia. These words, these memories, these complaints belonged to someone else. Possibly Ryan Schumann.

  “How did you meet Ryan?” I asked, knowing this would get her talking again. This was the story she wanted to tell. A love story.

  “At the mall,” she said. “I was at McDonald’s. I thought I had enough money for french fries, but I didn’t. I was seven cents short. There were all these people behind me in line and they were so mean when I was looking for that seven cents because I was sure I had it. One man began yelling and the girl at the cash register, she could have just let it go, but she wouldn’t. I was about to cry—I wanted those french fries so bad, I had hitched up to the mall to get them—and Ryan came up and he gave me the change and then some, bought me a Big Mac, and we started talking and that was that.”

  “When was this?”

  “September 17, 1973.”

  “You were fourteen.”

  “And only fifteen when he was arrested. That’s why he didn’t want me to testify. He was trying to protect me.”

  “And himself, I guess? From statutory rape charges?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Yes, that, too. But, really, he did what he did out of love for me.”

  We had been walking for forty-five minutes now. I didn’t really expect she could lead me to Sheila Compson’s grave, and I wasn’t sure what I would do if she did. She hadn’t been able to do it thirty-some years ago, when her memory was fresher, the landscape virtually unchanged. But what else is there to do on a long walk but to talk and talk?

  “He told the truth. He didn’t kill her. And there was a rucksack, and the sandals were in there. One must have rolled out, in the car.”

  “What happened to the rucksack?”

  “We threw it away.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you just leave it with her body?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Eloise Schumann said. “I can’t remember it all.” She stopped at a dying tree. “It might have been here. I don’t know. We probably should have marked it. But, you know, it was an accident and we panicked because no one was going to believe that. Ryan was trying to protect me. So he buried her and we threw the rucksack in a Dumpster behind the Giant in Laurel. If that one shoe hadn’t rolled out in his car, if his wife wasn’t so mean—”

  Eloise is a middle-aged woman and while she looks younger than her age, she still looks like a middle-aged woman. She was wearing what I think of as a Chico’s ensemble—a striped T-shirt dress, a little too long on her tiny frame, bright red Toms, which are not the most practical walking shoes for this terrain. But as she spoke about Ryan, her voice was as light and high as a teenager’s. She had held these memories close for so long.

  “There was blood on the sandal,” I reminded Eloise.

  “Well, like I said, she hit her head. But it was an accident.”

  “But the sandals were in her rucksack. She was wearing a different pair of shoes. That’s what frustrated you and Ryan so much. The things he told the truth about, no one believed. You hit her, didn’t you, Eloise? You hit her from behind, with her own shoe, and you thought it was back in the rucksack you tossed later. You killed her and Ryan covered it up for you and then neither of you knew how to make it stop. He was an accomplice, once he hid that body, so the only thing he would gain if you came forward was a reduced sentence for testifying against you. You tried to do the right thing, I guess. You told my father that you saw her at the concert, then you told the story about the accident, claimed he had withheld it from Ryan’s defense counsel. You kept trying to figure out how to get Ryan a new trial without incriminating yourself. That’s why you want a posthumous pardon. He spent his life in prison because of you, for you. The pardon isn’t for Ryan. It’s for you.”

  Eloise Schumann shrugged, blithe as a teenager discovered in a minor lie.

  “Like you said, if we told the truth, we both would have ended up in prison. He always said, ‘What’s the point in that?’ But those other truck drivers, they said there wasn’t a rucksack and there was. They didn’t tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He deserved a new trial. Because there was a rucksack and the shoe did roll out. All those things were true.”

  Ah, the rucksack. How had two witnesses gotten the rucksack wrong, made the mistake about her shoes? Could be the cops, could be someone in my father’s office. They might have been led during the interviews. But I don’t think my father suborned perjury, not over so trivial a thing. He was a good lawyer. He could have knocked the rucksack down six different ways. No, I think my father repeatedly spoke to a young woman who was giving him every reason to believe she had been involved in a murder—and his mind rejected the notion. My father, the great protector. He married a fragile woman who needed him, tried to save her. In his mind, he also was saving Nita Flood from her own impossible story. A girl could not be raped by a boy with whom she had been having sex for more than a year. He was not that different from Don Quixote—Don Quexana, actually. The translations vary, as does the spelling of Quexana’s name, but they all agree on one thing: after Don Quexana spent all those years of reading courtly tales, about knights and the fair maidens they saved, his mind dried up.

  “I want that posthumous pardon,” Eloise said. “It’s the least you can do.”

  “You can’t get that unless you tell the truth. And there’s no statute of limitations for murder. The new state’s attorney would be happy to take your confession.” Boy, would she, I thought. Andi had been appointed to the top job, at my recommendation, after I stepped down. “But if that’s what you want, I can make it happen.”

  I was lying, of course. Already in my mind, I was imagining my father’s obituary. His triumph in the Compson case, his victory in obtaining a conviction with no body, no evidence but that damn shoe—how could I take that away from him? It was one of the singular triumphs of his legal career and he believed it, always. Whatever mistakes my father made, as AJ said, he never lacked conviction. If his mind balked at the idea of a tiny teenage girl killing another girl, if he did not believe that a young woman could be raped by her boyfriend—well, those were the things he believed. He was a man of a certain generation, a man of his time. We always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later. We want Jefferson to free his slaves and not to father children with any of them. We want Lindbergh to keep his Nazi sympathies to himself. We want Bill Clinton to keep it in his pants. Martin Luther King Jr., too. And that’s just what we expect of the men. The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit—it all will be held accountable for the things it didn’t know, didn’t understand.

  The things
we don’t know, the things we don’t understand.

  I did the only thing I could do. I got out my checkbook and wrote one more check for my father’s refurbishment project. I even wrote “interior design consultation” in the memo line on the check. I told Eloise Schumann that she had to report the income, but that’s between her and the IRS. My only job now is to take care of my family. I’m a SAHM and a SAHD—stay-at-home daughter.

  Oh, there’s nothing to keep me from practicing law again one day, aside from my willingness to indulge in that little bit of implicit extortion. I assume that’s why AJ killed himself, so I wouldn’t have to figure out if my brother needed to be charged for soliciting Nita Flood’s murder. He was trying to save my career. Or maybe he was trying to save his reputation. He died—oh that word—beloved.

  At any rate, I’ve lost my taste for the legal profession. It is too serious to be treated as a competition, too flawed to be a calling. Even with the twins now in fourth grade, days are easier to fill than one might think. From sunup to well past sundown, I go and I go and I go. I could have sent Teensy off into a well-remunerated retirement, but neither she nor my father would have liked that. If the fates are kind, he’ll be giving her a ride somewhere and they’ll overshoot the driveway and plow into Wilde Lake together. Of course, Teensy being Teensy—that is, endlessly perverse—the more I do around the house, the more she does; even the spacious kitchen is not enough to keep us from bumping into each other as we battle for housekeeping supremacy. Homemade rolls? I’ll see that and top you with pasta made from scratch, not even using a machine. The more dishes we dirty, the more time I have to spend cleaning the kitchen at night, my form of meditation.

  When the house is clean, the voice of my father’s television finally silenced, I sit in the living room and drink a glass of wine or three. On windy nights, the fake lake is stirred into action and I can hear its wavelets smacking the shore. AJ, the lake says. Noel. Rudy. Mary McNally. Ben Flood. Adele Closter Brant. Gabe. How many deaths can one family hold in its ledger? It’s as if death begets death. It was practically the family business. My only hope is to free my children from its legacy. That’s why this investigation, donated to the Howard County Historical Society, is to be sealed for one hundred years—not unlike the papers of H. L. Mencken, to cite another man who shocked future generations by being a man of his times. Let strangers pore over them one day, piecing together my family’s history. My children don’t need to know any of this. They, at least, are blameless. How long can I keep them that way? Does anyone get through life blameless?

  They certainly don’t need to know their father was with another woman when he died. A woman who called me several weeks later, apologizing profusely as she sobbed, begging me to understand that they were IN LOVE, but they never wanted to hurt anyone. A woman who says she was with him earlier that night, but swears he was alive when she left. Who knows? Love, she kept sobbing to me. They were in love. She never would have hurt anyone; she and Gabe spoke often of how much they loved their partners, but—love. Love, love, love. I offer this story only because I think it provides context for some choices I have made since then and for the scant information I have offered about Penelope and Justin. This is not their story. This is not their legacy.

  I told that woman never to call me again. On good days, I think she was a liar, a troublemaker, someone who thought she would be offered money to go away. On bad days—well, at any rate, she didn’t get any money from me.

  I tell the story here so I may never tell it again. My childhood was made up of stories and so many of them were false. Is that because the true stories were unendurable?

  Just last week, I ran into my childhood friend, Randy Nairn, at Wegman’s. We were both buying sushi-grade tuna. He owns a wholesale liquor distributor and he has the look of a marathoner: lean, almost too lean, as his face is a little weathered, ten years older than his body, but then—his body looks great. He’s married, happily I assume, because he didn’t flirt at all and I might have given him an opening, mentioning the time he asked to kiss me. I might have touched his elbow. He glided right past that, instead recalling Thanksgiving dinner at my house, that opened bottle of crème de menthe he brought as a gift. He laughed at himself with the ease of someone who knows he has transcended the foibles of his past, a trick I’ll never master. I still get mad when people tell the story about my golf caddy back-to-school outfit. That is, I would get mad, if there were anyone left to tell it. Maybe I will tell Penelope and Justin, and they can tell it back to me. The Brants have a few stories left that can still be told.

  “Your house was like a castle to me,” Randy said. “It was like you were living in some palace, high above everybody else. I thought you were royalty.”

  We did, too, Randy. We did, too.

  AFTERWORD

  Where to begin? I am indebted to Alison Chaplin and Molli Simonsen, who did everything in their power to help me get things right. Alafair Burke, Calvert County State’s Attorney Laura L. Martin, and Jane Tolar provided much-needed expertise on legal matters. New City Upon a Hill: A Brief History of Columbia and the “You Knew You Grew Up In Columbia” Facebook page filled in the gaps in my knowledge about the place where I lived and attended high school, 1974–1977. I appreciate the support of everyone at William Morrow, particularly my editor of twenty (!) years, Carrie Feron. Also with me for twenty years, my agent Vicky Bijur.

  Those who know Howard County politics will know that Lu Brant is not, in fact, the first female state’s attorney, but I gave her that distinction for the purposes of the novel; Marna L. McLendon served back in the 1990s.

  I am lucky to have a spouse, David Simon, who can answer stray questions about homicide investigation. My daughter, Georgia Rae, is eager to contribute illustrations to my books, but says that must wait until she finishes school in twelve years. The FLs keep me sane even as they encourage my worst impulses.

  But in the end, all errors are my own—and some are deliberate.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Since LAURA LIPPMAN’S debut in 1997 she has been heralded for thoughtful, timely crime novels set in her beloved hometown of Baltimore. Now a perennial New York Times bestseller, she lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY LAURA LIPPMAN

  Hush Hush

  After I’m Gone

  And When She Was Good

  The Most Dangerous Thing

  I’d Know You Anywhere

  Life Sentences

  Hardly Knew Her

  Another Thing to Fall

  What the Dead Know

  No Good Deeds

  To the Power of Three

  By a Spider’s Thread

  Every Secret Thing

  The Last Place

  In a Strange City

  The Sugar House

  In Big Trouble

  Butchers Hill

  Charm City

  Baltimore Blues

  The Girl in the Green Raincoat

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WILDE LAKE. Copyright © 2016 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN 9780062083470

  ISBN 978-0-06-208345-6

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