Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “Still, he’s not an unusual-looking man, right? Brown hair, brown eyes. It would be easy to confuse him with someone else.”

  “Not for me. People in my job, you pay attention to faces, make eye contact. It’s the difference between a decent tip and a good one.”

  “And where do you work, Ms. Forke?”

  “Luk Fu.” She grimaces. “It’s not like I named it. It’s a noodle bar. It’s pretty good, for the price. Those critics on Yelp can—” Lu’s eyes beseech the witness to get back on message. “They can go somewhere else if they don’t like it.”

  Lu toys with her a little longer, but she’s rock-solid. Then she lets the jurors ask her questions. They, too, are curious about how she can be so certain of the ID. She’s almost too adamant, a person who never admits to being wrong. She’s certain that she never forgets a face. An unflattering thought flits through Lu’s mind: probably better with men’s faces than women’s. She just gives off that vibe to Lu. But then, Lu always feels as if she has to overtip extravagantly to make up for people’s biases about women.

  Drysdale takes the Fifth, of course. Fred has instructed him not to lock in his testimony. Anything he says here can’t be contradicted in court and who knows what discovery still might bring?

  They’re done by midmorning, and the grand jury hands up its indictment before lunch. Murder one.

  The courthouse is theoretically within walking distance from the office—but not in January and never in four-inch heels. It’s a two-lane road with no shoulder, risky enough in daytime, dangerous at dusk. Lu drives the scant mile back to the office, parking in the permit spaces. She has no designated space here or at the courthouse, a security measure for the judges and other officers of the court. Back inside the Carroll Building, she shuts herself up in her office. This isn’t the kind of situation in which one does a victory lap. She has to act as if she never doubted she would win. Grand juries are supposed to be slam dunks for prosecutors.

  She spends the afternoon attacking the usual raft of phone messages, then tries to put a dent in the e-mail. She tells Della she’s available for media calls, but there are no media calls. Mary McNally’s murder received maybe four paragraphs in the big newspapers, while Rudy Drysdale’s arrest and initial charge were considered only slightly more newsworthy. The Howard County Times, now owned by the Beacon-Light, is content to use the press release put out on the HoCoGov’s Twitter feed and Facebook page.

  It is almost seven before Lu leaves, which means Teensy has fed the twins and her father, technically Teensy’s job, but something that Teensy seems to resent terribly. It has become Brant family legend that Teensy is their boss, that she’s the one who gets to pick what she does and doesn’t do, and all because she chose them over the Closters forty-five years ago. The myth is self-serving. Teensy is probably underpaid and overworked by almost any legal standard. Still, it’s a little frustrating having a housekeeper who resents any housekeeping duties that do not serve the man-of-the-house. Does Teensy consider herself Mrs. Brant, in a sense? It’s not the first time that Lu has allowed herself to consider this. It’s a tantalizing and impossible idea, one she has tried to discuss with AJ, who finds it merely impossible. It’s not that Lu thinks they have sex, her father and Teensy. Even when she came to accept that her father was a sexual being, having discreet dalliances with Miss Maude and others, she could not imagine him with Teensy. Tidewater Virginian that he once was, he resisted, for a time, the new information about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But when he came to accept the scholarship, he turned on his former idol. During a family outing to Monticello last summer, the docents begged Andrew Brant to withhold his side lectures about Jefferson and Hemings—whom her father, rightly, calls by her real name, Sarah—until the tour was over. And yet—there is a sense that Teensy, still married to the seldom-seen Ron, considers herself the Brant matriarch. On nights such as this, she won’t even leave a plate for Lu.

  It has been a bitter winter so far. The cold, when Lu pushes through the employees-only door at the rear of the building, invades her sinuses like some spiky parasite. She gasps at the shock of it, then gasps a second time, startled by a woman emerging from the shadows, moving too quickly, her speed almost menacing, yet her stature so petite that it’s hard to see her as a threat. Unnerving, but not threatening. Lu readies herself for a citizen encounter.

  “Lu Brant? Eloise Schumann. I really need to talk to you.”

  “I’m headed home,” Lu says automatically. “Monday, perhaps. If you call my secretary—”

  “I have been calling your secretary. You never call me back.”

  “Well, yes.” Might as well tell the truth. “You never say why you’re calling and I’m afraid I have no idea why you’re calling because I don’t know who you are, despite what you think.”

  For a moment, the woman looks angry, insulted. She balls her hands, bare despite the subfreezing temperatures.

  “How can you forget Ryan Schumann? It was one of your father’s most famous cases.”

  “Schumann?” And finally Lu remembers. Schumann. Shoe. Man. That was his surname, not a nickname bestowed on him by Noel, but an inevitable pun: Shoe Man, Sheila Compson’s killer. The victim’s name is burned into her faulty memory, as is the image of that sandal, balanced on the jury box railing. That was her father’s genius, his intent. To make people remember the girl, even if this was all she had left behind. Humanize the victim, demonize the perp. Ryan Schumann.

  “But you’re not his wife,” Lu says, her voice rising with uncertainty. She has a mental image of that woman on the stand, grim and angry. This woman seems too young, no more than ten years older than Lu, which would have made her barely twenty at the time. “How old are you?”

  “I’m fifty-five. And I’m his second wife. I married him while he was serving his sentence.”

  “While—has he been released?”

  “No. He died in prison late last year. Just like your father wanted. Even though he was so sick at the end. He should have been given compassionate leave.”

  Lu has no compassion to spare for Ryan Schumann, who not only killed and probably raped a young girl, but refused to tell her parents where they might find her body. Life in prison seems right to her.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I want a posthumous pardon for him.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “What if I can convince you he was innocent?”

  “Even less likely.”

  “Maybe you should talk to your father before you make up your mind.”

  “My fa—”

  “He knew me as Ellie Cabot. Ask him. Ask your father what he knows that he never told anyone. Ask him why he railroaded an innocent man, a good man who never did anything wrong.”

  She turns, walking swiftly, but not toward the public side of the parking lot. She heads for the dark, two-lane road that leads to the courthouse, the road that Lu won’t walk even in the daytime. Had she gone there first, in search of Lu, thinking to catch her after the hearing, then walked here, not realizing what a dark, dangerous trudge it was in the winter dusk? Although the woman has done her no harm—seems scarcely capable of doing harm—Lu clutches her coat at the throat. She didn’t think it was possible to feel colder than she did a minute ago, and yet she does.

  THE AGE OF REASON

  The first time I saw Nita Flood—really saw her, noticed her, who knows how many times I had walked past her before—was on my back-to-school shopping trip to the Columbia Mall in 1978. That is, I was supposed to be shopping for new clothes, which my father would come back and pay for, an arrangement reached after a summer devoted to wheedling and arguing. It was a ridiculous thing to grant an eight-year-old girl, but I think even my head-in-the-clouds father had come to understand it was unfair to entrust Teensy with the oversight of my wardrobe, and he certainly wasn’t up to the job. Witness my hair, worn quite short, cut by a barber, so it had no elfin, gamine quality. If my nickname hadn’t already be
en Lu, it would have been Lou.

  Yet when my triumphant shopping day finally arrived, I was in no hurry to get started. Instead, I trailed AJ and his friends through the mall. They roamed in a pack, their agenda clear only to them. They seldom stopped moving and they never went into stores. There was a conceit at the time, a suburban legend if you will, that Wilde Lake students, whose high school was a two-story, windowless octagon built around the hub of a “media center,” had been trained to walk in a circle. When AJ and his friends stopped moving, they leaned on the metal railings along the mall’s second floor, just as they leaned on the railings at school between classes. There was a photograph in AJ’s yearbook, the Glass Hour, showing them doing just that in the fall of 1978. Let the freshmen and sophomores hurry to class. They were juniors now, sure of their power.

  On this particular August day, AJ and his group lingered long enough at the Hickory Farms kiosk to grab samples of summer sausage from a girl with stringy hair, a face sodden with acne, and a Barbie-doll figure. If the term “butterface” had been in vogue then, someone might have made that cruel assessment, but I don’t think that crass term existed.

  Cruelty did, however. We had plenty of cruelty in 1978. AJ’s friends didn’t even bother to walk out of earshot before they began making fun of the girl.

  “If anyone knows sausage,” Lynne said, “it’s Nita Flood.”

  Everyone laughed at this, except Ariel, who blushed and looked at the floor. Nita Flood stared stonily in the other direction, as if fascinated by the small camera store tucked into the corner of the mall just opposite her. I didn’t get the joke, but I knew better than to ask. That would only draw attention to my not quite legitimate presence. My arrangement with AJ was that I could follow him when he was with his friends, but I couldn’t interact with them. I was like Casper the Friendly Ghost, condemned to scare off the very people I wanted to befriend. AJ posed this as a win-win—we both got out of the house and away from Teensy, who always found chores to fill our idle summer days. But it was more of a win for AJ. My brother was generally a good big brother. And like our father, he disdained overt unkindness. I was astonished that he didn’t reprimand Lynne for mocking someone, just as he and Davey had come to the defense of that kid at the cast party. But the girl selling sausage apparently wasn’t worthy of his protection.

  We were almost to Friendly’s when Lynne whispered something in Bash’s ear and he, with a backward glance at me, whispered in turn to AJ.

  My brother stopped and walked back toward me, hands in pockets, eyes fixed at some point behind me. “Lu, don’t you have any friends your own age to hang out with?”

  That was cruel. AJ knew I didn’t. Although I did have a plan to take care of that, a strategy for transformation that would make me the most popular girl in the third grade. All summer, I had been reading magazines like Young Miss and Seventeen, trying to figure out the formula for popularity. Clothes were the secret. Clothes and hair and clear skin, but skin was not my problem, unless one counted freckles. Over the summer, I had started growing my hair out, having persuaded our father that I could take care of it. And after studying the magazines, I had decided on a particular back-to-school outfit, which I found later that day in the girls section at Woodward & Lothrop. My father, as promised, came back to the mall with me that evening and paid for the outfit on hold there, along with some other basics—jeans, T-shirts. I wasn’t a tomboy, but I had grown up in a household of men. (Apologies to Teensy, but she never fussed over me. It was easier for her if I wore clothes like my brother’s, even his hand-me-downs in some cases.) I could score a baseball game, but I couldn’t find the business end of a lipstick. I suppose that made my upbringing progressive in a sense, but it was mainly careless and it left me vulnerable to missteps. The outfit I chose that day was disastrous, but no one in my household seemed to recognize that, not even AJ, who always wore the right thing, said the right thing, did the right thing.

  Why did he allow me to make such a horrible mistake when it came to my third-grade back-to-school outfit?

  Maybe he simply realized it was too late to intervene when I showed up for breakfast a week later in plaid gauchos, a long-sleeved white blouse, a newsboy cap, and a ring-tab-festooned vest I had crocheted that summer under Teensy’s supervision. Had the Annie Hall fad finally trickled down to the junior set? My father immortalized the first day of school with photos, so I don’t have to rely on my memory: I looked like a caddy, circa 1920.

  “I’ve heard of high-waters,” one of my classmates said as I took my seat in the second row. (The front row was for brownnosers. I had made that mistake last year.) “But I hope the water never gets knee-high.”

  “These are gauchos,” I said. Then, always quick to go on the offensive—if the other kids didn’t appreciate my superiority, I would simply rub their noses in my grandness—“And they cost seventeen dollars.”

  To be fair, I don’t think Young Miss or Seventeen had encouraged me to brag about the price of things to gain popularity.

  “Isn’t that a kind of a cookie? Gauchos?”

  “Or that old guy with a mustache who died last year?”

  Randy Nairn bent over at the waist, walked up and down the aisle, pretending to puff a cigar. For the rest of the day, whenever the teacher’s back was turned, kids would point to me and waggle their eyebrows, smoke pretend cigars. Randy, ever bold, even jumped into the aisle a time or two when the teacher’s back was turned and did the loping Groucho walk.

  I was dangerously near tears. And I never cried, never. That was one of the things I was famous for as a baby, according to my father. I never cried. Thinking back on this from the vantage point of having had two children, I now have to wonder: Did I really never cry or did my father just not hear me? I’m not saying fathers don’t hear their children cry, only that they may not remember it as a mother would. And he would have been pretty shell-shocked at the time, trying to care for a new baby, alone except for Teensy and AJ.

  At any rate, I didn’t cry, not that day. I seethed, intent on revenge. I made sure to leave school the split second the bell rang and went storming down the bike path in the opposite direction of my house. Columbia was full of such trails, and I knew the one Randy had to take home, which led to the town houses near the high school. The ones where poor kids lived, but you weren’t supposed to say that. The town houses were on the other side of a busy street, Twin Rivers Road, so here the path became a tunnel, a culvert under the street. To this day, I marvel that my eight-year-old self had figured out what all those new town planners could not, how predator-friendly those bike paths were. I cut through the culvert then climbed the hill on the other side, scrambling to the top where I would be able to see Randy approaching. I dragged a dead branch up the hill with me—it was heavy enough to strike a blow, sharp enough to scratch or take out an eye.

  Was that what I had intended to do? I have thought so often about that day, my intentions, the lengths to which I was willing to go. When do children understand right and wrong? Some people think that Catholics have established seven as the age of reason, but that is a simplification of the church’s rules. Jews established the age of majority at thirteen for boys. (It used to be twelve for girls, which I find interesting, a stray fact discovered when I was still keeping my promise to raise the twins as Jews.) And in the law, my law as I used to think of it—ah, the law. When I first started studying criminal law, there were ironclad rules about juveniles who committed crimes, almost uniform standards throughout the United States. Young offenders were granted anonymity. They were deemed worthy of a second chance. Those days are over. Now younger and younger people are being tried as adults, sent to regular prisons in some cases.

  But in 1978, an eight-year-old girl who beat a nine-year-old boy with a stick—Randy had been held back a year in first grade—what would be the consequences? Factor in the not irrelevant information that I was the daughter of the county’s state’s attorney. This would not have been in my favor, by the way
. If I had accomplished what I now believe I wanted to do that day, no one would have come down harder on me than my own father. He would have made sure that I faced the full censure of the law.

  I watched Randy approach. He was alone. I was going to let him cross under the tunnel, then attack him from behind. I was not only murderous, but cowardly. He disappeared into the tunnel. I estimated it would take him about thirty seconds to pass through. One one thousand, two one thousand . . .

  I crawled down the embankment, stick in hand—

  And there was my brother with Noel, approaching from the other direction. The high school students were released earlier than the elementary-school students. They should have been long gone by now, or in practice for something, although AJ did not play a fall sport that year and there would be no rehearsals on the first day of school. AJ and Noel were speaking to each other in arch British voices and doing odd staggering, skipping walks. Noel, whose house had better television reception than ours, watched Monty Python on the D.C. channel on Sunday nights, then acted out the entire show for his friends, who eagerly picked up the most memorable lines and sang the song about the lumberjack, which I didn’t get at all.

  But they were not so lost in their silliness that they didn’t see me on the hillside, holding my branch with two hands.

  “Lu, what do you think you’re doing?” AJ asked. He didn’t sound particularly urgent or concerned. Randy emerged from the tunnel and looked up, following AJ’s gaze. As soon as he saw me, he laughed and pointed, began walking his Groucho walk. He probably thought I wouldn’t try to do anything with two high schoolers present.

  He didn’t know me very well.

  I threw my stick down and jumped him. He was a runty kid, probably one reason he picked on me. And he wore the same clothes almost every day, come to think of it, which was worse than wearing new clothes that people thought silly. I kneed him between the legs, pretending I was Angie Dickinson on Police Woman, which had been my favorite show before it went off the air, although I had to watch it on the sly if Teensy was around. (Our father didn’t believe in censoring anything we watched or read.) Randy collapsed, whimpering, and I jumped on top of him, landing blows and kicks wherever I could, pulling his hair.