Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Lu says.

  “I’m more surprised how long it took you to figure it out. Everyone’s always saying how smart you are.”

  Lu doesn’t recall any time the newspapers have given her credit for being extraordinarily intelligent, but who knows what Jonnie Forke reads between the lines.

  She follows her into the apartment, noting Jonnie Forke’s skin, which has the orangey glow of a year-round tanner. Self-tanner or tanning salons, Lu thinks, then wonders why her mind is stuck on such a trivial track.

  Possibly because she’d rather contemplate Jonnie’s grooming routines than the questions that have brought her here.

  Still, she gets right to it once she is seated on the green sofa in Jonnie’s living room, no formalities: “When did you realize that you were Rudy Drysdale’s intended victim?”

  “Who says I was?”

  “His own lawyer.” Okay, so it’s a lie. It’s not like this is an official proceeding. Lu can say whatever she wants to shake the truth loose. And Fred all but said it. Maybe he, too, is trying to figure out just how smart Lu is.

  “I didn’t know until the newspaper published his name. I honestly didn’t recognize him when I saw him hanging around here. He’s put on weight since high school. He was just another creepy homeless guy. But I did feel as if he were watching me. Then I saw his name and I remembered I knew him, but—well, I was glad it wasn’t me. Sorry, I was.”

  Definitely a case of hashtag sorrynotsorry.

  “How well did you know him? Back in high school?”

  “We both worked at the mall. Sometimes he gave me a ride. That was about the extent of it.”

  “Then why would he want to kill you?”

  “No idea.” Jonnie’s eyes flick right, toward the patio doors off her living room, the sliding doors that Rudy meant to come through almost four months ago.

  “It’s against the law to lie to an officer of the court,” Lu lies. She’s not on official business. Jonnie can lie her head off.

  “I’m not lying. I never did anything to him. I haven’t spoken to him for thirty-five years. I don’t know. Who says he wanted to kill me, or anyone? Maybe he had a crush on me, all those years ago. He was always doing favors for me. Then again, lots of guys did favors for me.”

  “And you did favors for lots of guys.” It just slips out. Lu wishes she could take the words back. It’s as if she’s channeling bitchy Lynne. But the woman’s confidence is annoying for reasons she can’t pinpoint.

  Jonnie shrugs it off. “What? You don’t think guys would like me unless I had sex with them. Because I had acne? Guys always liked me. Because I was fun. And I’m not talking about sex. I liked to laugh and I drank beer and I wasn’t a drag like the prissy girls. I didn’t sleep with anybody I didn’t want to sleep with. Until the night that Davey Robinson raped me.”

  Lu cannot believe she is still clinging to that story, after all these years.

  “Davey Robinson did not rape you. A grand jury heard your testimony and decided not to indict him. Wasn’t it obvious that your father was the one who beat you? That you lied to protect him?”

  “I told the truth to get my father to stop beating me for being a slut. Sure, I had sex with Davey before that night. We’d been having sex for a year. I liked him. But not that night. He held me down, he raped me, then acted as if everything was normal. So I did, too. I wasn’t going to break down in front of his friends. But I was upset, I drank too much, and those stupid shits just dumped me on my doorstep. They could have walked me around, cleaned me up. Even with the vomit caked on my clothes, I smelled like sex. My father beat me because I wouldn’t tell him, at first, who it was. Me saying I was raped—telling the truth—probably saved Davey’s life because the police got to him before my dad did. If I had told my father we’d been together a bunch of times before that night, he would have just driven to Davey’s house and straight up killed him then.”

  Over a year. Again, Lu hears Lynne’s cruel taunt, realizes that Davey is already sleeping with the girl that his friends are mocking. Maybe he blushed, too, that day, but his dark skin concealed the blood rushing to his face.

  “You were mad at him keeping the relationship a secret. You can’t deny that. The other boys all said they heard you fighting.”

  “We both wanted it to be a secret. My dad wasn’t going to let me have a black boyfriend. Davey’s parents didn’t want him to have any girlfriend at all. So he took different girls to dances and I was okay with that. But he took that Sarah chick to homecoming, then went to homecoming at her school, and that wasn’t part of the deal. That’s why I got mad. We were in love, we really were. I never knew anyone like him. And, yeah, maybe at first, he liked me because I was cool with sex. But that’s not why he stayed. That’s not what he said to me. He said he loved me.”

  Before or after orgasm, Lu wants to ask, but manages to keep this to herself. Why do people put so much stock in that word, love? As if no one ever uses it falsely, as if it’s always true. Love can be the biggest lie of all.

  “Your brothers did their best to finish the job your father didn’t have a chance to do.”

  “And one of my brothers died,” Jonnie says softly. “Everyone seems to forget that. Just because you have seven brothers doesn’t mean you don’t mind losing one. My dad was never the same. My mom, either. It tore my family apart, what happened to Ben. Tom ended up dying in a car accident a few years later, drunk and high. Both my parents were dead before I was thirty-five. That left the six of us. But we’re really tight. We have to be.”

  “Ben died because he tried to kill another person—and ended up maiming him. A person who did not, by law, rape you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what the law said. But who was there, who was in that room? Me and Davey. Who held who down? Who had bruises? He weighed, I don’t know, probably about two hundred pounds? I weighed a hundred and ten and wore size 3 jeans. You see, I knew what sex was like. I didn’t have any confusion about how it was supposed to go. What happened that night was rape. The fact that he was my boyfriend, that he kissed me when he was done—that didn’t change it.”

  “Of course that’s what you’d say now. But the law—”

  “The law? You mean your father? Well, fuck him. Big, handsome, rich Davey Robinson held down a stupid little acne-scarred slut, forced her to have sex, but no one believed her. Turns out there were all these tests, all these rules I didn’t know. ‘Did you scream?’ Sorry, I didn’t know I had to scream for it to be a crime. Next time, I’ll make sure I scream. ‘Did you struggle?’ Yeah, I struggled, for all the good it did me. I said no. But because I had said yes all the other times, no didn’t count.”

  Lu believes her. Almost. Which is to say, she thinks Jonnie is telling what is now the truth in her head, but it’s a story born of thirty-five years of hindsight. Davey, the gentle giant, would never have done such a thing. Lu can see, however, that Jonnie absolutely believes what she’s saying. She has conveniently forgotten that she had a motive to lie back in 1979. She was angry at Davey. She was trying to protect her father, who had beaten her severely enough to require an ER visit. Her refusal to tell the truth about the beating benefited him.

  “Davey Robinson ended up with a life sentence that the law never would have given him—paralyzed from the waist down. Didn’t that satisfy you?”

  “For a while,” she says, then looks startled by her own unvarnished honesty.

  Silence, a dead end. Lu, not sure what to say, asks: “What happened to Mr. Forke?”

  “Oh, him. I don’t know. I was almost twenty-seven when I got married, which seemed late to me, old enough to make good choices. We had three kids, boom, boom, boom. He took off after the third one. But I raised good kids. I’m a grandma now and proud to be one. That’s Joni Rose.”

  She indicates a set of three photographs in a triptych on the table next to the bright orange armchair where she sits. A baby, a toddler, a little girl, maybe four or so. All t
he same kid, Lu assumes. Bald as a doorknob as a baby, with one of those ridiculous headbands that proclaims, I am a girl, dammit. Still pretty wispy haired as a toddler and kid. Too bad she didn’t get Jonnie’s genes. The woman’s hair is impressive, thick and glossy.

  “Did you ever see Davey again?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Nonresponsive. The witness is directed to answer the question.

  “Heck, you might have run into him somewhere. He still lives here.” Davey and AJ lost contact years ago. But Lu knows—anyone who reads a newspaper knows—that Davey is a minister, one of the leading opponents of Maryland’s move toward marriage equality two years ago. “He’s at the big, new superchurch in far west Howard County.”

  “Well, I’m not much for churchgoing,” Nita says with a harsh laugh. “God hasn’t done too well by me and my family.”

  Lu gives up, bids the woman good evening. She leaves believing that Jonnie-Nita Flood-Forke has her suspicions about why Rudy Drysdale targeted her—and has no intention of sharing them. Lu can’t force her to talk. Rudy is dead, his intent no longer important. And it would not be particularly comforting to Mary McNally’s family to learn that she was an even more random target than anyone ever dreamed.

  Back in her car, Lu picks the Sinatra station on Sirius, hoping to quiet her mind, roiling with nervous energy. She catches the end of “You Couldn’t Be Cuter.”

  “Ella Fitzgerald,” she says out loud, as if Gabe were still there, quizzing her. “Written by Jerome Kern.” She could almost always identify the vocalists, even if she couldn’t tell Django Reinhardt from . . . well, whoever else was famous for playing jazz guitar. Gabe would have considered Reinhardt too well-known for his pop quizzes. This song is on the Jerome Kern Songbook album and Lu is old enough to remember albums, the days when one listened to a record in order. When the song dies out, she half expects to hear what would have followed on the album or CD: “She Didn’t Say Yes.” Now, there was a politically incorrect song if ever there was one. And yet a wise one because it realized that people, most people, could not get outside their own heads. So what did she do? . . . She did just what you’d do too. Translated: People behave as you would. And if they don’t? They’re probably wrong.

  Nita Flood didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no. Nita Flood, caught in a lie about being raped, came to believe it. Our minds shape our memories to be something we can bear. Happens all the time. What if Nita decided that her story, more credible now because of the way times had changed, was something she should go public with, despite the potential embarrassment for a very public, very righteous pastor? There was no record; Davey had been no-billed by the grand jury, everyone involved was a minor. Ben Flood’s attack on Davey was always reported as provoked by unfounded rumors. At the insistence of Lu’s father—again, he had always been thinking of Nita, the way her lies could destroy her future. The Wilde Lake students who had once gossiped about the story probably had dim memories now: Nita Flood was a slut who got drunk, had sex with her boyfriend, then accused him of rape because he wouldn’t take her out in public. Yet over the past year, more and more women had come forward with stories about being drugged and molested by a famous comedian. What would happen if Nita Flood tried to do the same thing to Davey Robinson? Would people still be so quick to ignore her?

  Lu can’t imagine the young man she knew hiring a homeless drifter to kill his former girlfriend. But then—she can’t imagine Davey opposing marriage equality and supporting the death penalty. Davey has power; he has been in the media a lot over the past few years. He doesn’t even believe in sex out of wedlock. What would he do if his former girlfriend threatened to speak publicly about what happened between them?

  The only thing to do is to ask.

  APRIL 10

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Lu wakes with a start, confused and disoriented. What is she thinking about? Where is she? The dim room, the neutral “art” on the walls, the heavy, humid presence of another body—she has fallen asleep in Bash’s place, something she has never done before. He catnaps sometimes, but she never does.

  “I—I must have dozed off.”

  “Guess I’m losing a step.”

  “No”—yawn—“no, lover, no. I’m . . . just . . . so . . . tired. Insomnia.”

  Lu is used to being tired. She’s been tired since her kids were born. But as of late, she’s tired in a new way. Twice in the past week, she has fallen asleep on the sofa while watching television and it felt as if she were pinned to the cushions by invisible hands. She would open her eyes at 2 or 3 A.M., surprised and disoriented, the very act of rising and stumbling into her bed seemingly impossible. Yet once in bed, she can’t sleep at all. She has always slept well. What is happening?

  “Ah, it’s your age, I guess.”

  “My age? I’m eight years younger than you.”

  “It’s a female thing. Insomnia at midlife.”

  This may be her least favorite conversation ever with Bash. Not that there have been that many conversations to begin with. She doesn’t waste a lot of time talking to him. Bash was the “dumb” one in AJ’s group, and even when it turned out that he had been stealthily intelligent all along—making National Merit Scholar, getting a full ride to Trinity—his reputation was more or less sealed within the group. Old friends, like family, have a hard time letting personae change. You are what you were. That’s why Lu can’t stand to have anyone refer to her stature. It reminds her, always, of “Little Lu.”

  “Your wife is even younger than I am, Bash. What do you know about women at midlife?” She’s trying to make a joke, but an edge slips into her voice, a little pocketknife showing its blade.

  “I’ve got a pharmaceutical client who’s trying to break ground in menopause, perimenopause. It’s promising stuff, if we can just get the FDA out of our way. I hope it gets online in time to help women your age.”

  Okay, this is officially her least favorite conversation, ever. The last thing she wants to do is tell Bash she went through early menopause because of fibroids. Although Bash’s tone couldn’t be more impersonal, she feels as if—her mind searches for the source of her unease, finds it—as if she is being set up for a disappointing job evaluation, something that has happened to her exactly once. It was her first year in the city’s state’s attorney’s office and she was disheartened not to receive the highest evaluation. They claimed it was a policy not to give first-year employees top marks, but she later found out that the other newbie, a man, was given the best possible rating. Anyway, it feels like that. Is she about to be fired as—what is she? She’s not a mistress or a girlfriend. Her mind rejects the crude pop culture term that would seem to best describe what they do. She’s not Bash’s “buddy.” And although she calls him “lover,” she’s not fond of that word either, given its root. If she thought she were capable of loving Bash, she wouldn’t be with him. She would never claim to love another woman’s man. That’s the true betrayal.

  Yet she remains curious about his other life, his “real” life. She senses that, say, should a truck mow down Mrs. Arnold “Bash” Bastrop on Capitol Hill tomorrow, Lu would not be a candidate for being his public companion, although Bash is clearly one of those men who cannot live without a mate. But he requires a decorous one, a woman who would be delighted to consider her husband and household her “job.” How interesting, Lu thinks, that Bash and her brother have chosen such retro wives. Because Lauranne, for all her blather about her “partnership” with AJ, is very much a junior partner, tolerated at AJ’s side because he insists on it. He’s the brand. And it’s a cinch Davey has a dutiful, passive wife.

  Davey.

  Lu has not been able to summon the—strength, moxie, chutzpah?—to go visit him. How do you show up in the life of someone you haven’t seen for almost thirty years and try to figure out if he ordered a hit on his old girlfriend? There’s no evidence that Davey even knew Rudy Drysdale. After all, her brother didn’t. A little Internet s
leuthing quickly determined that Davey’s church does give out bag lunches every week, in a parking lot near North Laurel. Still, it’s hard to imagine Davey himself handing out lunch bags, looking for a killer to recruit. None of this makes sense.

  Jesus, Rudy, why didn’t you just confess before you killed yourself? Would that have been so hard?

  She sits up, stretches, and Bash pushes her back down, covers her with himself. She is starfished on the bed, arms pinned. Again, she thinks of those waking moments on the sofa, the sense that she is being weighed down by something she cannot see and cannot overcome. But she can see and feel what is holding her in place and she likes it. So Bash has pharmaceutical clients. She had always assumed his ability to go more than one round was simply the result of pent-up lust, but there probably is some sort of pill involved, come to think of it. Come to think of it. She is on the verge of doing just that when Nita Flood’s voice hisses in her ear: He weighed, what, almost two hundred pounds? And I was a hundred and ten, wore a size 3 jeans. How could anyone tell if I struggled?

  Her pleasure is dimmed. Still, she manages to finish. Bash notices that she is distracted, but he probably assumes she is making that inevitable transition into real life, the life that has no place for a healthy, harmless lust. Would Bash’s wife find this so harmless? As much as Lu wonders about her, she has no desire to know anything. This is civilized, she tells herself. I’m a forty-five-year-old woman, I need a sexual outlet, but I don’t need a boyfriend or a partner, and I definitely don’t need a husband. I am taking care of enough people. The term “high maintenance” always seems to be applied to women, but Lu has never known any woman who needs as much care as a man. Heck, her father has had an ersatz wife in Teensy all these years.