By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  "It's good food—you don't know what you're missing. Other kids love it, would eat it every day if they could."

  Isaac just shook his head, his lips pressed together as if someone might try to sneak in an outlaw french fry. Zeke was actually worried about how little the kid ate, holding out as much as possible. Today he had agreed to drink a strawberry milk shake, on the grounds that it wasn't made from real milk, then asked for the money for a salad. He loaded up on salad bars when they went to places like Ruby Tuesday, sometimes asking the waitress for a Styrofoam to-go box and plastic utensils. He was rigid, a little chip off the old-before-his-time block. But there was something defiant in his behavior, too, a thumb-in-the-eye slyness that drove Zeke mad.

  "I know about keeping kosher, but it's bullshit, my man, just old superstitions that don't make any sense. You think God cares what kind of plates you eat from or whether you have a lobster now and men? Why would God make something as delicious as lobster if he didn't mean for man to eat it? Think about it."

  "It didn't look good, when we went to that Red Lobster place. The twins left it on their plates. They said it tasted like butter-flavored rubber."

  Zeke decided to try a different tack. "You miss your dad, don't you, partner?"

  The boy nodded miserably.

  "Look, I know what it's like to miss someone, buddy, but you have to understand. This is for the best. Your dad was good to you, but he wasn't good to your mom. Your mom was very, very unhappy, living like she did. And your dad knew it, but he didn't want to do anything about it. So she had to leave."

  "She could have left me with Dad. I wasn't unhappy."

  "Is that what you wanted, a life without your mother?"

  The question was cruel, almost worse than a smack, asking a child to choose between two parents. Zeke could see that Isaac was floored by the impossibility. Like every kid since time began, he wanted his mother and his father. Yeah, well, four out of five dentists pick Trident, and one out of two marriages folds. Get used to it, kid. One parent is better than nothing. Zeke had two, then he had one, then none. It was all survivable.

  "Was my mom really unhappy?" the boy asked. "I never saw her cry."

  "She didn't want you to know, but yeah, she was really unhappy."

  "But my dad was happy, and I was happy, and the twins were happy."

  "I suppose so. You thought you were, which is as good as. But now that you know how unhappy your mom was, maybe it was all an illusion."

  Isaac shook his head, defiant now. "No, I was definitely happy. So you're saying that for my mom to be happy, it's okay to make us all unhappy—me and my dad and the twins."

  "The twins are like puppies, my man. They're fine as long as they're warm and their bellies are full."

  "Still," Isaac said, "two against one, me and my dad."

  "What?"

  "Majority rule. If we were happy, she should have tried to be happy."

  Oh, man, the apple really don't fall far from the tree. Another little selfish shit, courtesy of Orthodox Judaism, arguing every point as if it were straight from the Talmud. What about my happiness? Zeke wanted to ask this smug brat, but he knew that Isaac didn't consider Zeke a factor. As someone outside the Rubin golden circle, he didn't matter at all.

  "Look, partner, there's some stuff kids just can't understand. If we go back to Baltimore, they're not going to let you live with your dad."

  "Why?"

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "I could if you pick the right words. My father tries to explain everything to me, no matter how complicated."

  "I'm not your father," Zeke said, straightening up. "Thank fuckin' God."

  He assumed that Isaac would have a smart-ass retort, but Natalie appeared in the corridor just then, the twins in tow, her lovely face flushed and on the verge of tears.

  "Penina—I mean, Daisy—made…" She gestured helplessly at the girl, red-faced and damp, either at the end of a crying jag or about to begin one.

  "Made what?" Zeke asked, although Isaac was nodding as if he understood.

  "Made. In her pants, in the ball room, and they're all out there screaming at me, saying the sign says no children who aren't toilet trained. Only she is, she was, for over three years now—never even wet the bed in all this time. I don't know what's gotten into her."

  The girl babbled something, and the boy twin babbled back, comforting her, or so Zeke assumed. He couldn't understand a word these two said, even when it was allegedly in English. Natalie said they used to talk like normal kids, but you couldn't prove it by Zeke.

  "Take her in the ladies' room and clean her up the best you can," Zeke said. "I'll take the boys out to the car and wait for you there. And if we have to, we'll start strapping diapers on the two of them. If I'm all but living in a car, I don't want it to smell like crap."

  He left the receiver dangling on its silver cord, catching Isaac's longing looks toward it. Zeke was going to have to watch this one like a hawk. Watch him or put him in the trunk more often. He had no choice.

  You'll be sorry, he thought, then wondered who the words were for, Isaac or some long-vanquished foe. Was the boy his enemy or simply a reminder of others who had wronged him? Oh, things would be so much simpler if Natalie hadn't shown up with the children, if she'd never had them in the first place. There weren't supposed to be any children. But there were, and Zeke prided himself on his ability to improvise. The key to a truly genius plan was its flexibility, the planner's ability to modify, to roll with the punches.

  Natalie had always been good at keeping secrets. That was a big part of her attraction. It occurred to Zeke for the first time that perhaps she had grown too good at staying mum, that there could be other surprises in store for him as well. He might have to think this all through again, change his plan one more time. He had to figure out just what he was going to do about the kids.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tess sat in Rubin's office chair for the next hour, hitting the redial button with her index finger until she began to feel a twinge from wrist to elbow. Finally the unsympathetic buzz of the busy signal gave way to a ring, which turned into a puzzled "Hello?" on the twelfth ring.

  "Could you please tell me where I'm calling? I know it's a McDonald's in Indiana, in the 812 area code." Caller ID and Isaac had combined to give her that much information. "But I need the town name and the location of this phone."

  "You're calling McDonald's but you don't know why or where it is?" The voice was pleasant if foggy, a young man blissed out on Happy Meals or some other substance that had led to the sudden need for a cheeseburger.

  "Long story," Tess said. "Boring one, too. But I sure would like to know where you are."

  "Well, according to conventional cartography, I am at the forty-second latitude and seventy-fifth longitude, aka French Lick, Indiana, you'll pardon the expression."

  "Is that really the latitude and longitude for French Lick?" Tess asked, curious in spite of herself.

  "No, I just made it up, but it sounds plausible, doesn't it? Where are you calling from?"

  "Baltimore."

  "Oh, I don't think so," the young man said, hanging up. Tess felt like one of the errant knights in a Monty Python film, denied permission to cross a bridge because she'd waffled on her favorite color. She had already struck out with the state police once they heard that Mark's son had confirmed he was with his mother and there was no custody order for the father to enforce. No laws broken there, the police said, compassionate but firm. If only Isaac had spoken of kidnapping or said he feared for his life.

  Tess called directory assistance and asked to be connected to the only McDonald's in French Lick, but the manager refused to answer any of her questions, saying she had just gotten on and couldn't possibly know who had passed through the restaurant even an hour ago.

  "Is there someone else—" Tess began.

  "Have you seen the sign? Over a billion served? Well, about half of 'em were here today alread
y, and I don't have time for this. You should see my restrooms."

  The manager ended the call by slamming down the phone with a bang so hard and an epithet so coarse that it shattered any stereotype Tess harbored about kindly, salt-of-the-earth midwesterners.

  "French Lick, Indiana," Tess said to Mark, who had been pacing his office like a caged animal, literally pulling at his hair. "That mean anything to you? Do you or Natalie know people there, or anywhere nearby?"

  He had the desperate look of a kid in a spelling bee asked to tackle a word he had never heard of, sounding it out as if stalling for time. "French Lick, French Lick, French Lick, French Lick."

  "Just go," said Paul the salesman. Apprised of the afternoon's events, he had been keeping vigil with his boss, scurrying back into the store whenever the chime announced arriving customers. "Get in your car and go, boss. I can take care of things here."

  "Maybe I should. How far could it be. Ten hours? Twelve hours? If I started driving right now…"

  "You wouldn't be doing anyone any good," Tess said. Her bluntness seemed to offend the two men, but she didn't have the patience for the rhetorical curlicues—the "I think"s and "perhaps"es that women were supposed to use when giving orders. "Look, I know you want to do something. But I can get someone there faster, and learn a lot more, without ever leaving this chair."

  "How can that be?" Rubin asked.

  Tess patted the side of the IBM ThinkPad lying open on his desk. "Good old-fashioned networking. Just tell me how to connect to your ISP, and I can guarantee results in less than two hours."

  She had them in one. Gretchen used the instant message function to link all the online SnoopSisters via a spontaneous chat, even as she was assuring Tess that (a) she could take the gig and (b) yes, Chicago was closer to French Lick than anyone else in the network and (c) Tess was a total idiot when it came to geography outside Maryland. Letha in St. Louis jumped in and said French Lick was, in fact, closer to her, but her son had a soccer game Saturday afternoon, so let Gretchen take it. Gretchen said the whole point would be moot in a few days, when the newest SnoopSister, a documents whiz from Columbus, Ohio, signed on. She also said she rather liked McDonald's and felt that the company had taken a bad rap in the infamous coffee lawsuit. Perhaps that was the real reason the manager had been so rude to Tess.

  This prompted Jessie Ray in Texas to point out that the McDonald's lawsuit was not at all frivolous but one involving real injury to an elderly woman, possibly second-degree burns, and that the rumored settlement was not some pie-in-the-sky amount but a sum correlated to McDonald's coffee profits. Plus, the restaurant had been warned about overheating its coffee, so punitive damages were not without warrant. Susan in Omaha countered that people who drank McDonald's coffee had already suffered enough.

  STAY ON TOPIC, PLEASE, Tess typed. And get on the road, Gretchen.

  Rubin watched all this furious typing with skepticism, as if activity that didn't produce a tangible product couldn't possibly accomplish anything.

  "Trust me, this will work better in the long run," Tess assured him after signing off. "Gretchen will be there tonight, with photographs of your children and wife to show people she interviews. She'll go back to the restaurant tomorrow, too, visiting about the same time of day as the calls were made. That way she has a shot of getting the right manager, the right shift workers, who might be more responsive to a visitor than they were to my phone call. If your family is still in town, she'll find them."

  "And if they're not?" Rubin bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, but this couldn't stem the tears coursing down his face. He didn't seem the least bit embarrassed about crying in front of Tess. She, on the other hand, was mortified.

  "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Gretchen is really dogged. Give her a chance. She's swapping the work out against future work from me, so it doesn't cost you any extra."

  "I still think I should go myself."

  "Earlier today you said you hoped I was judicious with my time. I am. That's why I know this is the smart way to go. Meanwhile, at the risk of repeating myself, can you think of any reason your wife would be in French Lick, Indiana, or passing through there? Family, friends, any kind of connection?"

  "No. What little family she has is… here. I mean, I suppose there are relatives back in Russia, but in this country it's always been just Natalie and her parents."

  "I've met her mother. Where's her father?"

  "I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not Indiana."

  "What's his name?" Tess tore a piece of paper from a memo pad on the desk: ROBBINS & SONS—SINCE 1946.

  "Why do you want his name? He moved away long ago. He and Natalie don't even talk."

  "Databases. I'll run it through all sorts of databases, and he could pop out. Maybe in French Lick. You never know."

  "It's such a common name, Peters, I don't think you'd be able to do much with it."

  "Let me worry about that."

  "Come to think of it, I'm not sure the surname was ever adopted legally. I think her father might be using his Russian name."

  "I can narrow the results down with age and any other information you have for him, like past addresses. I assume he lived in the row house on Labyrinth at some point."

  "I think Vera got that place after they separated."

  "Could I just have a full name? And an approximate age?"

  "Boris Pasternak."

  "Author of Doctor Zhivago?"

  "I'm sorry. I meant Petrovich, Boris Petrovich. And I guess he's about fifty."

  "So your father-in-law is closer to you in age than your wife is?"

  "Not by so much. I'm twelve years older than Natalie, he's eight years older than I am."

  Tess willed herself to have no reaction. "How did you meet anyway?"

  "Who?"

  "You and Natalie."

  "Oh. Well, I had seen her around—Baltimore is small that way, northwest Baltimore smaller still." This was true, Tess knew. Baltimore wasn't so much a metro area of 1 million-plus as it was a dozen small towns that overlapped in various places. "The first time we spoke was in the old Carvel's on Reisterstown Road. She worked behind the counter. I stopped in for a cone, and we got to talking."

  "I thought you said she never worked."

  "Did I? I mean that she never had a career. She had summer jobs, like any other teenager. Carvel's, babysitting." He shook his head, as if burdened by his memories. "Isaac loved that story. He'd ask us to tell it again and again. I thought that was odd, because boys don't usually care for that kind of detail. But he was very aware of the fact that he would not exist if it weren't for the chance encounter of his parents. It was almost like a suspense story for him. What if we hadn't met? What if we hadn't spoken?"

  "Why do you think," Tess said, "that she took them with her? The children, I mean?"

  "She's their mother. She loves them."

  It was what he had said before, and while it was perfectly reasonable, Tess was not yet convinced it was a complete answer. "Is that the only reason?" He looked bewildered. "Is she trying to get at you? Did she take the children because she knew it would hurt you?"

  "Why would she want to hurt me?"

  "I don't know." Tess wished she could plug him into the virtual world of the SnoopSisters, whose members would have been happy to enlighten Rubin about the many reasons women want to hurt, or at the very least startle, the men with whom they shared their lives. So many women in relationships had bouts of feeling they had been more colonized than courted, subsumed by a larger, more powerful entity. And when they rebelled, it was nothing short of the Boston Tea Party. Everything—everybody—went overboard.

  "You should go home," she said. "Nothing's going to happen, not here, not tonight. I'm going to go toodle around on my laptop, see if I can find a match for Boris Petrovich in the Indiana phone book."

  "You won't." Even in his frenzied grief, Mark Rubin retained his irritating, know-it-all quality.

  "Well, we'll find ou
t by this time tomorrow if your family is still in French Lick, and maybe that's all we need. I'll call you—" She caught herself. "I'll call you as soon as the Sabbath ends."

  "You could call earlier. I think I would be allowed to answer the phone under such circumstances."

  "Do you have caller ID?"

  "No."

  "Then how will you know it's me who's calling? Wait until sundown. Gretchen probably won't get to me much sooner than that anyway."

  "And what if my family has left French Lick?"

  "Then we're where we were this morning, no different."

  "No, it will be worse, because I've had this moment of hope. If I had been here the first time he called…"

  "We have a lead. If Gretchen finds out anything significant, she'll stay throughout the weekend, keep digging. That will cost you, though. Her extra expenses are on top of my per diem."

  "I told you, money's not an issue."

  "Yeah, people always say that—and yet it always is somehow."

  Her laptop open on the dining-room table, Tess checked the clock in the upper-right-hand corner—7:15. The dogs looked at her with mournful patience. She could take them for a quick one around the block, then return to work, or finish up and then give them the nice long saunter they had earned after being cooped up all day. It was a beautiful night, dry and cool since the sun had gone down. And it was a clear night, so the stars would be visible overhead.

  She started to close her laptop. The search for Petrovich could wait a few hours, although Rubin would probably writhe in anxiety if he knew she was postponing any task, even for a few minutes.

  Except… for all his impatience about everything else, Rubin had been so certain she wouldn't find Boris Petrovich/Peters that he didn't care if she tracked him down at all. He had, in fact, seemed determined to keep her from following that one lead, using that fake name. If she hadn't been an English major, Boris Pasternak might have slid right by her.

  She sat back down, ignoring the dogs' profound disappointment, and began dropping the two variations of the name into every database she had. Rubin was right about one thing: Petrovich was a common surname. There were a surprising number of Boris Peterses on the planet, too. But by working backward from the property records for Labyrinth Road—for Boris had been on the deed before the divorce, according to the city tax rolls—she was able to find an MVA record, which led to his date of birth.