By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  Her e-mail was the usual mix of spam and people eager to grant her the privilege of doing things for free. Today it was an invitation to teach a course in self-defense, something about which Tess knew nothing—and she had the scar to prove it, a purple-red checkmark on her left knee. She sent a form-letter reply from her "assistant," S. K. Chien, which stated Miss Monaghan's fee structure—five thousand dollars for public speaking, five dollars per word for articles (minimum fee of one thousand dollars), and first-class travel arrangements for out-of-town gigs. That usually ended the queries, although some of the pushier types asked if the fee could be waived. S. K. Chien, however, was never moved by such pleas; she simply sent the same form letter until these supplicants gave up. Greyhounds are stubborn that way.

  Her mailbox culled, Tess settled down to the messages from people who actually knew her. There was a political petition from Whitney, who had awakened one morning and decided she actually cared about the world. And an oddly formal invitation to lunch from Tyner Gray, a lawyer who had helped her get started as a PI and still threw her work. He had, in fact, vetted Rubin and hooked Tess up with Mrs. Public Works, so Tess probably owed him a lunch. She typed back her RSVP.

  She saved for last the daily SnoopSisters Digest, a networking service for female private investigators that was fast becoming the highlight of Tess's working day.

  Dear Sisters, the first entry read. Weather fine and clear in St. Louis this a.m., almost too warm to my way of thinking. I am trying to figure out where a prominent local man may have stashed assets prior to wife's divorce filing. Usual trails all dead-ended. Any thoughts? Letha in St. Louis.

  Dear SS'ers: There's a good seminar on computer-related investigation in Houston in January. I'm enclosing a link to the program sked. I'll put you up if you don't want to spring for a hotel room. By the way, here's a link to one of those quiz sites that helps you figure out whether you're a hobbit, an elf, or a troll. I'm an elf. JR, your Texas Tornado.

  The digest was the brainchild of Tess's onetime partner, Gretchen O'Brien. Baltimore born and bred, Gretchen had slipped on the ice last winter and suddenly decided she wanted to live in… Chicago. "They do winter right there," Gretchen had said with her usual conviction. "If you're going to have winter, you might as well have it in a city that can cope." Tess suspected there was a man involved in this western trek, but closemouthed Gretchen seldom yielded such personal information.

  Soon after she returned to work in late August, Tess had scored a lead on an identity thief she was pursuing. The guy was in Naperville, Illinois, but moving fast. Tess's client, already facing bankruptcy because of her former fiance's credit-card shenanigans, couldn't afford for Tess to buy the pricey last-minute plane fare. (She was one of the clients who ended up stiffing Tess, but ever so apologetically.) The guy was such a small-timer that the Naperville police couldn't be bothered to pick him up in a timely fashion. Enter Gretchen, who had already made contacts with several Chicago-area bounty hunters. She had the guy hog-tied on his own motel-room bed within three hours of Tess's e-mail, and DuPage County was happy to extradite him once he was caught.

  Where Tess saw a fortuitous coincidence, Gretchen had seen the future of the small businesswoman.

  "The thing is, independents like us could save money if we had a network operating in key hub cities," Gretchen had decreed. "Not so much with collars, but with paperwork, the various bureaucracies. Everything's still a long way from being online, and there's always stuff you can only get in person, with a little persuasion. Why not have a cooperative, with women working out of key cities, exchanging work on a barter basis?"

  And so the SnoopSisters Digest was born. Tess loathed the name. "Why not Miss Marple's Tea Party?" she had suggested. "Or the Redheaded League?" The literal but never literary Gretchen had pointed out that their only flame-haired member was Letha in St. Louis.

  Even with the unfortunate name, the network was an unqualified success. There were still some wide-open places to be filled—they had no one to cover the vast swath west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, and an Atlanta connection would have been helpful. But they were otherwise solid along the eastern seaboard and could do most of Texas and the Pacific Coast in a pinch. They shared information, brainstormed tough problems, and, as they got to know one another, divulged more and more details about their private lives—boyfriends, husbands, teething children, rambunctious dogs, garden pests (except for Gretchen, who got very impatient with what she called the "damn chitchat"). A typical digest might contain information about a handy new database followed by a recipe for those overwhelmed by the summer bounty of tomatoes and zucchini.

  And Tess loved it, somewhat to her amazement. The digest was a virtual kaffeeklatsch, with all the chummy camaraderie of an office and none of the backstabbing politics. The group was also genuinely helpful—no one-upmanship, no macho posturing, no disdain for simple questions.

  Dear S-Sisters, she wrote that morning, refusing to use the full name on principle and eschewing "SS" because of its unkind historic associations. I have scanned three photos into the shared files, part of a missing-persons case. To say that the information is sketchy would be generous. Natalie Rubin, nee Peters, disappeared three weeks ago with three children—a boy, Isaac, 9, and boy-girl twins, Efraim and Penina, 5. Police have ruled out foul play, but husband insists he never saw it coming and thinks—hopes—her flight may have actually been done for his benefit. What's the emoticon for skepticism? I'll enter DOBs for all four into the shared files. No known aliases. No known anything, really. Assumption is they're traveling together, but who knows?

  It pained Tess a little, adding this cynical bit of doubt, but, out of Rubin's sight, she had to be tough-minded, entertain the possibilities he could not. There was the notorious Pennsylvania case of almost two decades ago, where a woman and two children had disappeared. The woman's body was found within forty-eight hours, the victim of a bizarre plot by her charismatic lover; the children had never been found. And if everyone was alive… well, it was hard to travel with one child, much less three. Harder still when there was no money and no vehicle. Whatever Natalie was running from or to, she'd run faster alone, to paraphrase Kipling. Would appreciate any ideas about how to proceed.

  Tess then added a few lines about Baltimore's glorious Indian summer, described the muffin she was eating, and asked, almost as an afterthought, Anyone here know much about Orthodox Judaism? I'm curious because my client-Modern Orthodox, not Hasidic—refused to shake my hand. I knew; but forgot, about the prohibition against men touching women 'who are not their wives. Still, shouldn't the religion have evolved beyond this concept by now? What's the point in this day and age?

  Tess disconnected and tilted her face back to the sun, trying to convince herself that she felt like Goldilocks. Everything was almost just right—the weather, her work. Rubin's job alone would make her fourth quarter, and now there was a possibility that Tyner was going to throw something lucrative her way. Why else would he summon her to lunch at Petit Louis? Meanwhile, she would start the Rubin case tomorrow by visiting Vera Peters, Natalie's mother. She imagined a Pikesville matron, a more devout version of Tess's Weinstein aunts. Perfect nails, perfect hair, shining house. Really, how estranged could any Jewish mother be from her daughter?

  Then again, perhaps the reason that Natalie Rubin had exploded, taking her whole family with her, was that she had kept everything from everyone. Tess could see that happening. She had been accused of doing the same thing, but the way she saw it, a girl just couldn't win. You either talked too much or too little. There was denial, that old river in Egypt, but there also was a place called Laconia, the aptly named land that had once contained Sparta. Tess was determined to live in Laconia for a while, a place where there wasn't so much yakking about feelings and emotions.

  And, yes, she knew all about the little Spartan boy who had let the pilfered fox nibble his internal organs rather than cry out in pain, but she wasn't worried. All you had to do
to avoid that fate, Tess figured, was not steal any foxes.

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  NATALIE ENJOYED PICKING OUT NEW NAMES FOR THE children once Zeke explained why the change was necessary. Zeke was good that way, making sure she understood the why of everything they had to do. Moshe had only pretended to make her an equal partner in decisions, but he always got his way in the end. All along, Natalie had wanted to give her children American names, pretty names, names that meant something to her, not God. She knew better than anyone how a name could change a child's life. Hadn't she chosen "Natalie" for herself, keen to fit in, to erase the awkward foreign girl who was teased and belittled? And it had worked, too, worked like a charm. Besides, Moshe used "Mark" in the outside world. Even his store had a fake name, so who was he to lecture her on what was real?

  But when she'd made that point, he said the store's name was a business decision, one made by his father. Robbins & Sons Furriers was too well known, too successful to change its name at this late date. It would be silly to forfeit the brand over this small point, yet pigheaded to perpetrate the self-destructive practice of cultural assimilation generation after generation. Those were his exact words, for this was how Moshe spoke when intent on winning an argument—and he was never not intent on winning. He strung together self-important phrases, as if the words could make him right. Natalie thought he sounded like an old man, and a boring one at that. They were Jews, Mark kept repeating, their children were Jews, and they must work hard to preserve their identity in a world that attempted to substitute the secular for the spiritual. Blah, blah, blah. When Mark started talking like this, Natalie left the room, at least in her own head.

  "I'm not going to repeat my father's mistakes," he often said when making his big points, and Natalie longed to fling back at him the news that he had committed a far larger one. But Moshe didn't know that, of course. So she held her tongue. She ended up holding her tongue for ten years, a third of her life. Really all her life, for her father had been quick with a hand when she dared to question him. "Whore," he might say, for no crime greater than her having an opinion. "Thief," she'd countered once, just once, and he had struck her so hard that he had not allowed Natalie to sleep for two days, in case she had a concussion. He had been kind to her for those forty-eight hours, bringing her soup, hovering by her bed. He never hit her again, and he was never quite as nice to her again either.

  Zeke, however, always treated Natalie as a partner, an equal. So when he suggested that the children should have new names—she, after all, was traveling under a new one, she had arranged that in advance—he had left the decision up to her.

  "We should have done this earlier, before the first time, back in Terre Haute," he said. "They need new names—and new birthdays, too, while you're at it."

  "That's a lot to remember," Natalie had said. She wasn't good with numbers, whether dollars or dates.

  "Give 'em easy ones, then. Fourth of July, New Year's Day. Look, a blind man could see those are your kids. No one's going to ask a lot of questions."

  Except Isaac, of course, who didn't want a new name. Isaac always had questions.

  "Warren?" he said, making a face. They were at a rest stop, an old one that was not particularly inviting, even on a bright, almost fall-like morning. "Warren is a stupid name. Why do I have to be Warren?"

  The twins, younger and more docile, accepted that they were Robert and Daisy, although they could not remember the names from one moment to the next, and stared blankly when Natalie tried to get them to respond, until she ended up using them together, as in, "Penina-Daisy, take your thumb out of your mouth and listen to me." Or, "Efraim-Robert Rubin, are you eating dirt?" Even then their little faces looked blank, as if she were speaking to them in a foreign language.

  "I want to be Sandy," Isaac persisted. "Or Hank."

  "Why? What's so special about those names?"

  "Dad would know." What was wrong with him? Isaac had never been so sassy at home. But then he was growing up. It was just the natural order of things for a boy to get more combative as he grew older.

  "Well, your father's not here," she said, stubborn as any Rubin man, perhaps more so. "So you will do as I say. And as Zeke says."

  Zeke, who had been sitting on the next picnic table over, enjoying a smoke, looked up warily. He threw the cigarette down and ground it beneath his heel.

  "You shouldn't litter," Isaac admonished. Zeke walked over and crouched in front of Isaac, forcing him to meet his gaze.

  "You know what I always say, Warren?"

  Isaac glared at Zeke for using the new name but didn't try to correct him.

  "Call me whatever you like—just don't call me late for supper."

  With that he had ruffled Isaac's hair, enveloped him in a bear hug—and then popped him into the trunk. "Got to make money today," Zeke said to Natalie, "because we sure didn't make any yesterday or the day before. Isaac may have saved us from making a bad mistake back in Mount Carmel, but we're scraping bottom now."

  Natalie's stomach clutched when she saw her son's face in the split second before the trunk closed. It was so stony and unforgiving, pinched with the effort of not crying. He never looked more like his father than at such moments. He was her son, her oldest boy, and she loved him with a ferocity that rivaled any emotion she had ever known. But while Zeke and others saw Natalie in her children, the only face Natalie could see in Isaac's was Moshe's, and she didn't want to see Moshe's face anymore, because it made her feel guilty and sad. She didn't hate him. She just didn't love him, not really, and no woman should have to spend a life with a man she didn't love, when the man she did love was finally in a position to claim her.

  With Isaac stowed away for now, out of sight if not out of mind, Natalie settled into the front seat. The twins began to sob, asking for Isaac—they had already forgotten all about the new names—but she told them it was okay, that he wanted to ride in the trunk because it was like a little bed, so soft, so luxurious. All this accomplished was changing the tenor of the twins' sobs. Now they wanted a turn, riding in the trunk, in Isaac's cozy little bed.

  "Nice job, Nat," Zeke said. "Don't try to explain everything to them. They're children. They're not our equals. We tell them what they need to know, when they need to know it."

  "But I thought that's what you hated about the way you were raised."

  "When I was in high school, yeah. But not when I was fuckin' five." She shot him a look for using profanity in front of the children, and he put his hand over his mouth. "Sorry."

  "Okay," she said, not wanting to fight. She snaked her hand across the seat and let it brush his thigh. She didn't dare touch him when Isaac was around, and even the twins would find it confusing if she showed Zeke too much physical affection. They needed more time to get used to the new ways. She had suggested they call him "Uncle Zeke," but he had quickly vetoed that. "That's not what I am to them," he had said, and he was right, of course. Zeke was going to be their father, more of a father to them than Moshe, who was never home, who worked all the time.

  True, he had spent time with Isaac, talking and reading to him late in the evenings. But Natalie had always felt that was because Mark found Isaac better company than she was. They liked the same dull things, history and baseball, things found in books. During the day Isaac was obedient and loving, interested in the things she cared about. They had a standing date at 4:00 p.m. to watch that decorating show, the one where the neighbors changed houses. But when Moshe came through the door, it was as if Natalie didn't exist anymore. They ganged up on her, made fun of her. She was the butt of all their private jokes.

  "Do you think," she asked Zeke, "that we should aim a little bigger? At least on your end? There's not much I can do to bring more money in. But if you don't change up, we're going to be working almost every other day. We burn through money so fast, what with motels and eating in restaurants."

  "A man has to know his capabilities," he said. "Look at your father if you ev
er doubt the wisdom of that."

  Natalie didn't have much affection for her father, but hearing him criticized caused the usual defensive reflex. "My father lost his temper at a bad moment, that's all. He was good at what he did."

  "Yeah, but he got in over his head, didn't he? That's all I'm saying. He tried to be a big shot and ended up crossways with the wrong guy. Look, I learned how to do this. I paid attention, I listened. Small is the way to go. Small towns, small places, as close to state lines as possible. Just be patient."

  As if she hadn't already waited forever, as if she hadn't proved she was more patient than almost any woman on the planet. She was beginning to think Zeke was a person who loved the planning, the buildup, just a little too much. She always did everything he told her to do, only to find there was still one more thing required of her.

  There was a legend in Natalie's family about a relative, a great-uncle or something like that, who had hidden himself in a cupboard at the end of World War II and stayed there for two weeks without moving. He was the only person in his family to survive the destruction of his village. He was fourteen at the time, small for his age, and he never grew another inch after he came out of that cupboard. Natalie's mother said he was forever known as the "Little Uncle." But there were no photos of him, and Natalie's persistent questions threatened to unravel the story. (Where was the village? What year was this? Weren't the Germans in retreat by then?) Her mother finally made it clear that the Little Uncle was an article of faith in her family and Natalie was a bad sport for trying to undermine the tale. "This is what happens, when you come to America," her mother had complained at last, throwing up her hands. "Your children become Americans."

  "Where are we going?" Natalie asked Zeke.

  "Not Indianapolis," he said. "Too big."