By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  "I'm not sure," he said.

  "Since we left the store?"

  "I didn't see it at the store," Isaac said, which was true.

  "So how long? Ten minutes? Fifteen?"

  "I don't have a watch," Isaac said. "You took it away from me, remember? You threw it away on the second day because it beeped every hour on the hour and you said it made you crazy."

  Zeke had done just that, yanking it from Isaac's arm and throwing it out the car window while he drove. I spent the last ten years of my life living on a schedule, he had said. I don't need to be reminded of every hour going by. Well, duh, school was like that, too, and Isaac never complained.

  "I'm probably just paranoid," Zeke said to Isaac's mom. "It's not like the Ohio State Police drive Mini Coopers. Probably just some anxious driver who doesn't want to scratch her precious little toy."

  Isaac's mom glanced back. Something bad had happened, but Isaac couldn't figure out what. The twins weren't speaking at all anymore, and his mother had said only a few words to him since Zeke took him out of the trunk, her tone dull and strange. And although the man at the store had given his mother lots of cash—cash, not a check, which was different—they had been given only apples and bananas for lunch. Not that Isaac minded. Fruit was always kosher.

  "We're getting close to Wheeling," Zeke said. "Let's see what happens if we exit there."

  They left the highway at one of the first entrances to the West Virginia town, and the Mini Cooper followed, much to Isaac's joy. Zeke began driving recklessly, gunning the car through red lights, making sudden turns, but the Mini Cooper was always there, a determined gold bug. Isaac couldn't help rooting for it. He didn't know why the car was following them, but it had to have been sent by his father. He tried to give the driver a little wave, one that Zeke couldn't see, to show that he was on her side.

  "Turn around, Isaac," Zeke said.

  "But I'm carsick, and this helps."

  "Don't be silly. Looking backward makes it worse. Looking forward is what helps."

  "No, it really does help him," his mother said, taking his side for once. "I don't know why, but he likes to look out the back when he's sick."

  Unable to shake the determined little car, Zeke pulled into a drive-through lane at a Burger King. It was past three, but the line was a long one, moving slowly. The Mini Cooper didn't join the line but parked on the street opposite the restaurant's exit. Car by car, Zeke edged up the line, placing an order for two cheeseburgers and two milk shakes, then finally rounding the corner, out of the Mini Cooper's sight.

  "Slide over, Nat," Zeke muttered. "Take the wheel. And when you get the food, just pull over as if you're going to eat it here in the parking lot."

  "Why? What—"

  "Trust me," he said, and Isaac wished he could say, No, don't trust him. Please stop trusting him. But his mother scooted across the seat, taking the wheel, and Zeke ambled away from the car as if he didn't have a care in the world. He headed toward the street, but he didn't walk toward the Mini Cooper. Instead he turned right, strolling away from it.

  A few minutes later, as Isaac sat ignoring the cheeseburger his mother had placed in his lap, he saw Zeke walking back, but now he was on the other side of the street. He had left his jacket in the car, so he was in just a T-shirt, but he had taken the baseball cap he always wore, and it was pulled down tight. The woman behind the wheel of the car was talking on her cell phone, glancing at the Plymouth from time to time.

  Look behind you, Isaac wanted to scream. Watch out for that man in the baseball cap. He thought about trying to get out of the car and running toward her, but he had a twin on either side, so he couldn't move without crawling over one of them, and his mother would probably grab him before he got out. He wondered if he should lean over the seat and start pressing the horn, but that still wouldn't get the woman in the Mini Cooper to look at Zeke. He watched, his stomach flip-flopping, as Zeke suddenly ducked down behind the Mini Cooper. Had he dropped something? He straightened back up a minute later and started walking in the other direction. He disappeared from sight again, and Isaac could tell that his mother was worried. She began to shake, muttering to herself.

  "He's going to leave me," she said. "I've ruined everything. He can't stay now."

  Isaac thought it would be wonderful if Zeke left, but he couldn't stand to see his mother so upset.

  "Mama?"

  "What?"

  It was one of the first times they had been alone, out of Zeke's earshot, since the trip began. Isaac and his mother used to talk all the time, about all sorts of things. Not the same things he discussed with his father. In fact, Isaac did most of the talking, and his mother listened. But she had seemed so interested in everything he had to say—about school and books and what he had done that day. She didn't know all the things his father knew. She was not a person you would go to if you wanted to find out how something scientific worked or learn about a World War II battle. But she had always been someone Isaac could count on.

  "Why don't we live with Daddy anymore?"

  "It's hard to explain."

  But she had said that before, over and over again, and he wasn't going to settle for that answer anymore.

  "Do you love him?"

  "Not in the way a woman needs to love her husband."

  "Why not?"

  "Only God can explain that, Isaac. It's not something people can control, who they love, who they don't."

  "But you loved him when you married him, right? You loved him once?"

  No answer.

  "You have to love people to marry them."

  "I suppose."

  "Mama—do you love me?"

  "Of course I do." These words seemed to rush out of her. "More than anything in the world, Isaac."

  "But if you stopped loving Daddy, couldn't you stop loving me, too? Are you going to leave me someday?"

  His mother began to cry, sobbing harder than the twins ever did, which was not at all what Isaac wanted. He patted her shoulder, trying to comfort her, begging her to stop. The twins, seeing their mother cry, began to weep, too, wailing like animals who had been hurt.

  "Pretty soggy in here," Zeke said, sliding into the passenger seat. "Now, dry off and start driving. She won't follow us."

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "Just drive, Natalie. Take the highway east, all the way back into—" Zeke paused, looked at Isaac. "Just head east, and I'll tell you how to get where we need to go. I want to buy new wheels—and dump these. We'll park this wreck in a shopping center somewhere, take the tags."

  "Won't the missing tags just make them notice it sooner?"

  "Maybe. But it also means they have to get inside, check the VIN number, which will lead them back to Amos. And that's a dead end these days, you'll pardon the expression."

  Isaac glanced over his shoulder, silently rooting for the Mini Cooper. The car started to follow them as they headed up the street, but there was a horrible whap-whap-whap noise, and it stopped abruptly, lurching toward the curb.

  "I punctured her tires," Zeke said, laughing. "Let her spend the afternoon in Wheeling. We'll be over the state line before she figures it out."

  Isaac watched as the Mini Cooper faded from view. He waved, not sure what else to do, then made a thumbs-up sign, so the driver wouldn't feel too bad. She had done her best, but it was so hard to win with Zeke. It was like Battleship. He was going to have to wait for Zeke to make a mistake. But in Battleship, Isaac remembered, it was the littlest boat that was the hardest to find, and that made it the most powerful.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Roy Rogers at the rest stop wasn't kosher, not that it mattered. Mark Rubin had no appetite after Mary Eleanor's last call, in which she confessed she had lost the family in Wheeling.

  "She said everyone looked good," Tess said, not for the first time. She was feeling guilty for being able to enjoy food, much less taste it. But she was famished, and the last Roy Rogers in Baltimore ha
d closed its doors months ago, so this meal was a treat for her. "She saw all the kids, especially Isaac, who kept peering over the backseat and waving at her."

  "They looked happy?" Mark traced the lines on the place mat on the tray that held his bottle of water. It was a cartoon showing a family's fun-filled day—capped off with a stop for Roy Rogers fried chicken, of course.

  "She didn't say happy. Just healthy, intact. All present and accounted for."

  "And the man?"

  "I told you." Mark had been asking the same questions again and again. "She described him the same way the McDonald's crew did—tallish, thin but muscular build, dark hair. He was wearing a baseball cap, so she didn't get a good look at his face. Besides, she was staring at the back of his neck most of the time."

  Mark didn't look up, just kept tracing the cartoon's family trip, from home to swimming pool to the movies to Roy Rogers and back again.

  "Did she say if he was… handsome?"

  "Mark—"

  "She's with him by choice. He left her and the children in the car for ten minutes and walked away, with mis midwestern librarian parked across the street from mem. All Natalie had to do was drive off, or walk over to the woman and ask for help."

  Tess bent over her fries. She had thought that Mark had come to accept the idea that Natalie had left of her own volition and remained away for her own reasons, whatever they might be. Perhaps Tess should not have withheld the information about Natalie's past. But Mark so clearly didn't want to know the worst about his wife. Tess could kill a man, but she still couldn't break bad news to one.

  "Mark—we've placed them for the second time in a week. We have a description of the car and the temporary tag numbers. We know they're moving around, probably to escape detection. But they have to light somewhere eventually. Lana's money is only going to tide them over for so long, and she can't have that much socked away, even if she's the best manicurist in the whole Mid-Atlantic region. Plus, they were headed east, closer to us."

  "So we should go talk to Lana, demand to know what she knows."

  "I'm not a cop. I can't hold a private citizen in a room and interrogate her."

  "No, but you can do what you did to the guy at the convenience store."

  "Show her my gun and bluff?"

  That actually won a halfhearted smile from Mark.

  "You could use the same kind of threats. She's a manicurist, right? Threaten to turn her in to the IRS for underreporting her tips if she doesn't talk to you. Or I could run a credit report on her, see if she has any bad debts. A young woman like that tends to get carried away from time to time."

  "I don't know, Mark. Her devotion to Natalie seems unshakable. I don't think she's going to fall apart if we find out she was delinquent on a department-store account."

  "Then let's go pay her a visit at her place of work. People don't like that. I know I wouldn't be pleased with one of my employees if a private detective and a distraught father came to my shop and started making a lot of noise."

  Tess studied Mark Rubin. He was, as always, impeccably dressed, wearing a lightweight gray suit, white shirt, and a silk tie in a conservative pattern of navy and maroon. When they had pulled into the rest stop, he had told Tess he needed to say his evening prayers and walked away from the complex, finding a quiet spot near a copse of trees. He was dignified, a man of what Tess's mother would call good bearing, but his dignity was beginning to fray. She saw the signs of wear in his red-rimmed eyes, in the hair that was at least a week past its normal trim.

  "Tomorrow," she said. "I'll go to Lana's salon first thing."

  "We will go to the salon first thing in the morning."

  "In the morning," Tess agreed. "First thing."

  "And tonight?"

  "Tonight," she said, her voice gentle, "you should do whatever it takes to get some sleep, whether by prayer or pill."

  Tess did not take her own advice. In bed, the greyhound all but wrapped around her in a fit of separation anxiety, she began making lists, free-associating. French Lick, she wrote, adding the date that Natalie had been spotted there.

  Zanesville. Wheeling. There was no pattern to discern, geographical or otherwise. The towns just boiled down to three not-big places in the Midwest. Sighing, she checked her e-mail, which included a reminder that the SnoopSisters had their weekly "chat" tonight—or brainstorming session, as Gretchen insisted on calling it. Tess normally skipped the chats, which were held late to accommodate those in the Pacific time zone, but she wanted the others to know how hard the new recruit had worked.

  The sisters were already engaged in fast and furious talk, their "voices" falling over each other like dialogue in a Howard Hawks film. Mary Eleanor was not on the log of participants, so Tess waded in, described their newest colleague's valiant efforts, then proclaimed herself stumped. She expected only sympathy, not solutions. But Jessie Ray in Texas piped up.

  JR: I have a theory.

  TM: Have at me.

  JR: What if your runaway wife is using social services?

  TM: How can she? She's always moving. She can't settle down somewhere and get AFDC.

  SF (that was Susan Friend in Omaha): They don't even call it AFDC anymore, Tess. That went out with the Clinton administration. It's a whole new world of acronyms out there.

  GOGO (Gretchen liked the look of her initials squared): More acronyms, but fewer dollars.

  JR: True. But some states do have discretionary emergency funds. We're talking tiny amounts—$200 here, $400 there. Enough to check a family in to a cheap motel for a couple of days. Others will cut you a check to buy a used car, if transportation is the thing standing between a woman and a job. The idea is to get a family settled, then start the more onerous paperwork for real services. But you could take the money and split, and they wouldn't do a darn thing about it. No one's going to chase you down and make you take more government aid.

  Tess typed: Interesting. But would it leave a paper trail?

  JR: Possibly. There's a little-known child-support enforcement program that searches federal databases for deadbeat dads, which are my specialty. It has a lot of flexibility—it can do sophisticated Boolean searches with variables, using suspected aliases in combination with data the applicant is less likely to fake. Downside is, it can take months because it searches millions of records. Veterans, federal employees, anything the feds have access to. But if you know you only want to look at social-services programs in a handful of states, it might go a little faster.

  Worth a try, Tess typed, although she doubted Mark Rubin would be placated by something so passive. He didn't want search engines crawling along millions of entries in government databases. He wanted to get in his car and just start driving until he found his family and brought them home.

  A virtual door creaked audibly, and the log at the bottom of the screen showed that M'E—Mary Eleanor—had entered the room.

  M'E: Hey, gang. I'm the new girl.

  TM: All hail Mary Eleanor. She did amazing work today.

  The Sisters responded with a variety of hip-hip-hooray emoticons.

  M'E: I'm not sure I deserve to be saluted. Gosh, those kids are cute, tho. The one little boy kept giving me a thumbs-up, and doing a sort of Zorro thing, like he was cheering me on. Makes me feel worse for losing them.

  TM: Please, no girly self-deprecation here. You tracked them to Wheeling. You told us they were all safe and well. It was—she stopped for a moment, trying to find the right word, one that would be positive but truthful—meaningful to their father, to know his children are well.

  She bade the sisters good-bye, her fingers exhausted. The phone rang at almost the precise moment she disconnected from the Internet. It was silly to think the phone's peal was angry and insistent, as if someone had been trying to get through for a while. Yet that's exactly how her caller sounded.

  "You missed the appointment with the caterer," Kitty said without preamble. "We waited and waited for you at the Brass Elephant, but you never showed u
p. I need to know what you think about quail."

  "Given the way this country is going, I think anyone can be president."

  "Tesser." In thirty-two years Tess's Kitty had never once raised her voice to her niece, or anyone else. Her low, sweet tone was as much a part of her charm as her reddish curls, peachy skin, and perfect figure. Even now she didn't sound exactly loud, but there was an unaccustomed edge to her voice. "This is serious."

  "So I'm guessing what was once described as nothing more than a large party where a couple of people happen to get married has turned into a big-ass nightmare of a wedding."

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone, and Tess wondered if Kitty was so far gone that she might take offense, or even start crying. Tess was really getting sick of making people cry. To her relief, Kitty laughed instead. A rueful laugh, to be sure, but the laugh of a woman who still had some perspective.

  "I'm sorry. PMS."

  "You still…"

  "Tess, please. I'm only forty-five. The thing is, I worry when you don't show up for an appointment, and I can't find you at home or in your office. I should carry your cell phone number, but I never remember it and you don't always answer it. You didn't used to be so hard to find."

  "You didn't used to worry about me so much."

  "No, not really. But last summer was a… bit of a jolt."

  Last summer. Kitty made it sound so far away. Tess glanced at the scar on her knee and remembered sitting in the vacant parking lot waiting for an ambulance. If it had been a horror film, the man she had left for dead might have risen again in the endless minutes it took for her 911 call to be answered. But when Tess Monaghan killed a man, she was nothing if not thorough. The cops who arrived at the scene had been almost perverse in their admiration for her work. At least the shooting part. She could tell that the other wound, the one that had been truly defensive, made even the cops queasy.

  Kitty had come with Crow to the emergency room at Harborview Hospital. The three had agreed to protect Tess's parents from the full knowledge of what had happened to their daughter in the warehouse. For once Tess had been thankful for the dulled-down newspaper prose, which reduced the most horrific night of her life to a simple construct. Miss Monaghan followed the suspect to an abandoned warehouse, where she managed to kill him after he inflicted fatal injuries to her associate. A grand jury declined to indict, deciding she acted in self-defense and discharged the full clip only because she was panicky.