By a Spider's Thread Page 30

  "We'll make a Jew out of you yet," Mark had joked.

  "Maybe a half one," Tess said.

  "Can you be a half Jew?" Isaac had asked. "Don't you have to be all or nothing?"

  Mark Rubin had treated the question with the utmost seriousness. Tess was learning this was the way he treated all his children's questions, large and small.

  "When it comes to faith, you believe or you don't believe," he had told his son. "But there is a cultural aspect to Judaism, too, and Miss Monaghan is talking about that part of herself. Her mother's family was Jewish, but she wasn't raised to believe anything."

  "Yes I was," Tess protested. "I was raised to believe that a good handshake, big tips, and a decent Christmas-card list can grease the wheels of doing business. And that Jews can have crab feasts as long as they have them outdoors."

  Mark didn't want to laugh at mat bit of sacrilege, not in front of his children, but he did anyway. "Tess doesn't have a religion. But she does believe many things. And she sticks by them, which is more than some religious people can say. She honors her own principles."

  "And Mama? Was she a half Jew or a whole one?"

  It was as if a cloud had passed over the sun and a bright day had grown chilly and dreary. With just a glance at Mark's face, Tess could tell he was thinking about Natalie, who was being held in a Maryland jail and fighting extradition to Ohio, where she and Zeke had been implicated in the death of a patrolman. Mark could not believe that his wife had killed anyone but Zeke, and Tess saw no reason to argue with him. But a police officer was dead, and Ohio wanted a live suspect to try. Tess, remembering the coded exchange between Zeke and Natalie, had a hunch Ohio was after the right person. But she held her tongue around Mark. People needed to believe what they needed to believe.

  "Your mother," Mark said at last, "is a good woman who loves you very much. That was what she believed in—that you were precious and worth making any sacrifice for."

  The Rubin Sukkoth table groaned with offerings from throughout Pikesville, and Tess knew that Mark Rubin would remain alone only by his own choice. Still, he had yet to pursue a get from Natalie, or even a more mundane Maryland divorce. She hoped he would. Mark Rubin was an awfully attractive man. Not attractive enough to convert for—Tess knew her limitations. But he would make such a good husband for the right woman, once he was through yearning for the woman he couldn't have, the woman no one should really want.

  In the Pratt the jazz trio, a group of Peabody students, began playing a light classical piece that Tess knew she should recognize but didn't. Crow would know, she thought, the memory almost unbidden. Crow always knew things like that.

  "That's your cue," Kitty said, pushing her past the shelf of biographies, and Tess walked the length of carpet that had been put down to create an aisle between the rows of folding chairs. She walked a little more swiftly than she should, although the heels kept her from moving with her usual long stride. At the end of the runner, she greeted Tyner and then turned to watch Kitty walk down the aisle. Because of her dual duties, she did not carry flowers, but she had a tiny velvet bag dangling from a wrist corsage. She would produce the ring from that bag when the time came.

  Kitty swept up the aisle on the arm of Tess's father, Patrick, the oldest of her five brothers. The Unitarian minister raced through the service as if he had a train to catch, and it was a little pro forma to Tess's taste, with the usual Shakespearean admonitions—love is not love that seeks to alter, allow no impediments to the love between two true minds, et cetera, et cetera. Kitty had wanted Tess to give a reading, but she had balked. She had no fear of public speaking, but she was terrified of choking up from emotion, and Tyner would never let her live that down.

  Fifteen minutes proved to be a generous estimate. The wedding was over in twelve, making way for the grand party Kitty had been promising all fall. Tess followed her aunt down the aisle, finishing the last of her attendant duties—removing the veil and folding it into a sealed plastic wrapper, finding a place to keep Kitty's flowers for the duration of the reception, which was to be held a few blocks northward in yet another library, the Peabody.

  "You're in the second car," Kitty said. "You'll find it parked at the curb."

  "Really, Kitty, I could have walked it, even in these shoes. Or grabbed a ride with my folks."

  "No," she said, reverting back into her adamant-bride mode. "It's very important to me that the wedding party arrive with proper pomp and circumstance. Besides, I want you to open this in the car." She handed Tess a small box from Tiffany's. "It's traditional for the bride to give her maid of honor a gift. Don't lose this."

  "I didn't lose the ring, did I?" Actually, she had almost knocked it down the sink in the Pratt washroom before the ceremony, but there didn't seem to be any reason to mention that fact now that the ring was safe on Kitty's left hand.

  The Lincoln Town Car was at the curb, as promised. Tess crawled in, inadvertently flashing the guests milling on the sidewalk—she still hadn't gotten the hang of maneuvering in such a sleek skirt—and settled herself in the deep backseat. The car reminded her of Mark's. She'd hate to admit it to anyone, but she had grown rather fond of that Cadillac and had even priced a few used ones on the Internet. A woman who did surveillance for a living deserved a more comfortable ride. Besides, as Uncle Donald said: "It's a write-off, mamele."

  Kitty came out and was showered with mesh bags of seed, while Tyner rolled behind her, trying to scowl but failing. He heaved himself into the limousine, a Lincoln Navigator, and Kitty folded his chair with a speedy efficiency that spoke volumes of their ease with each other. If you had to be in a wheelchair, you might as well be with someone who knew how to fold it, Tess thought.

  "The Peabody," she told the driver, pulling on the ribbon of the box Kitty had given her. They said good things came in small packages, but Tess couldn't think of anything she wanted that was this tiny. Inside, under layers and layers of tissue, there was only a folded piece of paper. Maybe Kitty and Tyner had bought her the new car she wanted. Or had given her a check to pay for her pain and suffering through this ordeal. Tess was giving them a small wooden chest, courtesy of Mickey Harvey the woodworker. Tess didn't care how old Kitty was. Every bride needed a hope chest.

  The paper, folded with almost origami complexity, was a note, nothing more. I'm not sure what the traditional bride's gift is to the maid of honor, Kitty had written in her distinctive parochial-school hand, but I thought I'd give you a nudge. The inscription was followed by a telephone number that Tess had memorized long ago, a Virginia number she had not been calling all these weeks. It was the home telephone for Crow's parents.

  So Kitty had known. She had probably figured it out long ago, and she had kept her own counsel, offering Tess chance after chance to confide, but never pushing. Even now she wasn't telling Tess to go back to Crow. She was simply urging her to decide what she wanted, once and for all, to give up this limbo of inaction.

  Tess thought of all the things people did in the name of love. She thought of the pain that Natalie and Zeke had caused everyone around them, the literal lives lost because they believed that their love suspended all the usual rules. She thought of Mark, sitting shivah for a marriage that never was rather than expose himself to a world of women who would find him eminently lovable. She thought of Natalie's inextinguishable passion for her children, which had convinced her to do the right thing, albeit in the wrong way.

  Wasn't Tess's refusal to do anything simply the other side of Mark Rubin's misguided belief that he could control everything? The fact was, Tess had resented Mark's passionate quest for Natalie because she wanted Crow to pursue her, to fight for her, to engage in some way, any way. Funny—they were so good in a crisis, when they had to bond together, so fragile when it came to day-to-day life. Instead of trying to work out their problems, they had gone to their respective corners to sulk. Crow had a right to such immaturity, but Tess was thirty-three now. She needed to be a bit more adult.

  The car a
rrived at the Peabody Library. The front doors were thrown open, and a beautiful square of yellow light shimmered in the night. The book-filled rooms at the top of the short flight of stairs seemed to hold all that anyone could ask for of life—family, friends, good music, delicious food. Rubik's Cube solved at last, at least on this face. Who knew what the other five sides looked like?

  As Tess started to get out of the car, this time remembering to keep her knees together, she realized she must experience the evening not only for herself but also for her virtual clan, the SnoopSisters. Susan in Omaha would want to hear about the rare books in the Peabody's stacks. Letha in St. Louis would be curious about the people—what they did and what they wore. Margie Lynn in California would be filled with questions about the menu, while Gretchen would bluntly demand to know the cost of the whole affair. And yes, they also would want to know what happened to Tess in the next moment. For the SnoopSisters had been privy to Tess's secret all these weeks, and they had given her that rarest combination of friendly commiseration—pure empathy and no advice. They deserved to be the first to know what she had decided. Well, maybe the second.

  She stopped on the sidewalk, digging her cell phone out of the ridiculously small evening bag Kitty and her mother had insisted she carry. Tess had wanted to use a knapsack—a small one, to be sure, by a name designer—but Kitty assumed she was just trying to sneak her Beretta into the ceremony. This dinky thing barely accommodated her keys, phone, and lipstick. No room for the second phone, the one she used for outgoing calls, so she had to use the one whose number she always safeguarded. But that was okay. Tess didn't mind if this particular person had her number.

  An answering machine picked up. "Call me on this phone when you have time to talk. Please. No matter how late, no matter how early." Then she climbed the stairs and entered a fragrant room that contained almost—almost—everything she wanted.

  * * *

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  WHEN THE SHOOTING STARTED, ALEXA CUNNINGHAM was looking at Anita Whitehead's arms—her arms, then her underarms, because Anita threw her hands over her head and began to shriek. Later, Alexa Cunningham would try to rewrite that memory in her head, replace it with something more portentous, but the image was stubborn: Anita's tremulous upper arms bursting into hives, then the tiny white mothballs of roll-on deodorant visible in the stubble of her underarm just before she threw the telephone down. Alexa even caught a whiff of something floral, antiperspirant or perfume, and found time to wonder why someone who claimed to suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities would use anything scented.

  That troubled her, too—how one track of her mind detached, finding room for trivial observations in the midst of a crisis. Later, she told herself that it was simply a citizen's duty to be prepared for the role of eyewitness, absorbing every detail of an unfolding tragedy, and one could not pick and choose what one noticed. Still, there was no getting around it—what Alexa saw, at the moment that everything changed, were Anita's arms, swaying like poorly staked hammocks; Anita's lips, puckered around the straw in her omnipresent Vanilla Diet Coke, then rounding into a scream; and Anita's eyebrows, too overplucked to register surprise. And what Alexa heard was a voice in her head, coolly narrating events. Why was that? Where did such a voice come from? But Alexa knew. If you lived to tell the story, then you lived. She had instinctively thought like a survivor, and there could be no shame in that.

  When the shots came, I was picking up my mail in the office, and listening to Anita complain about her imaginary symptoms.

  "TGIF," Anita had said a few minutes earlier by way of greeting. "Tee-Gee-Eye-Eff."

  "Hmmm," Alexa murmured, eyes on her mail so she would not stare at Anita's arms, left bare by a sleeveless knit top. Alexa's older brother, Evan, had once dressed as a woman for Halloween, donning a flesh-colored turtleneck beneath a muumuu, then stuffing the arms with tennis balls so they wobbled back and forth just the way Anita's arms shook whenever she moved them. Alexa, eight at the time, had laughed until she almost wet herself. Evan was imitating their own mother, who was a good sport about such things.

  "You got big plans for the weekend, Lexy?"

  Alexa had never been known by this nickname, which sounded a little soap-operaish to her ear.

  "Uh-uh. You know how the work floods in, the last week for seniors. Have to make sure all my kids are ready to walk next Thursday."

  "Supposed to be beautiful this weekend. I sure wish I could go somewhere. But even if we could get down the ocean"—she gave it the local pronunciation, downy eauchin—"my doctor says I really shouldn't."

  "Hmmmm."

  "Because of the sun."

  Alexa made no reply, pretending absorption in Barbara Paulson's memo on senior pranks. Faculty and staff were to be reminded—that was her wording, were to be reminded—that any student participating in a stunt involving damage to property, no matter how small, would be banned from the graduation ceremony. As a newer school, Glendale did not have many entrenched traditions, but outgoing seniors did have a curious habit of setting off firecrackers in the woods just beyond the athletic fields. We also take a strict view of injury, Barbara had added, making bodily injury seem an afterthought to the more serious problem of vandalism. The memo was pure Barbara—bureaucratic, poorly written, unintentionally funny. But then, Barbara was never funny on purpose.

  "And the air." Aaaaaah-er in Anita's accent. "The very air makes my skin sting. My doctor says it's because of the salt in the breeze."

  "Hmmmmm."

  Anita's doctor was a topic to be avoided at all costs. Six months ago, Anita had decided that her health problems—not only her hives, but the headaches and chronic shortness of breath—were the fault of some toxin in the Glendale High School heating and cooling ducts. Or the carpet. Or the sealant used on the gymnasium floor. Three tests had been ordered so far, and three tests had come back with inconclusive results. Yet Anita was still threatening legal action and when she tired speaking of her doctor, she mulled out loud about which lawyer might represent her. All her options advertised on local television, although she sometimes glimpsed someone promising on Court TV. Otherwise, she was waffling between the "Let's-talk-about-it" guy and the firm endorsed by former Baltimore Colt Bubba Smith. Alexa, one of the few faculty members who accepted multiple chemical sensitivity as a legitimate medical condition, did not scoff at the science behind Anita's claim. She just didn't happen to believe that Anita suffered from anything other than her own bad choices.

  "My girlfriend who used to work for social services?"

  Alexa did not take the bait, but Anita was not someone who considered a lack of response inimical to a conversation.

  In fact, silence only encouraged her. "They shut down the whole building because it was making people sick. Now she works in that old Caldor on York Road, across the street from a Panera Breads and a Giant Foods and a Starbucks. She says it's real convenient, especially since Blockbuster Videos went in."

  So that's your plan, Alexa thought. Keep demanding tests until she was reassigned to a better location, or Glendale High School was rebuilt on a site more convenient to overstuffed sandwiches, grocery shopping, and movie rentals.

  The irony was that there had been growing support to level Glendale and rebuild a new school before Anita began threatening legal action. Such an act, while drastic, would not be unprecedented. Nearby Howard County had recently blown up a windowless octagon built in the heyday of the open space movement, replacing it with a more traditional rectangle of beige and glass bricks. But Anita Whitehead's complaints had forced the school board into a defensive position. The school had no flaws, the Baltimore County school board and
superintendent now maintained, a laughable contention at a school that had been obsolete and reviled from the day its doors opened 10 years earlier.

  To begin with, Glendale was too small, a common enough problem in Maryland, where school construction seldom kept pace with growth. The best elementary schools were surrounded by portable classrooms, and some students spent their first five years in these nominally temporary settings. At the high school level, unhampered by mandated student-teacher ratios, they simply crammed more bodies into existing buildings. Glendale, built for 1,200 students, held almost 1,500.

  Yet while Glendale High School's classrooms were cramped and overflowing, its public areas, all in the north wing, were almost too vast. The auditorium was so large that no student concert or play could fill it, which gave productions a melancholy air of failure. The gymnasium was a high-ceilinged barn that always felt half-empty, even when the boys' basketball team made a run for the state championship.

  But the crowning idiocy of Glendale High School, as Glendale's original developer Thornton Hartigan had complained so publicly and loudly, was that the architect simply had not understood Maryland's climate, much less the quirkier weather peculiar to this valley. Glendale lay in North Baltimore County, physically closer to the Pennsylvania state line than it was to Baltimore, although most parents commuted southward to the city, or beyond. Because storms often cut a northeasterly path across the state, this northern part of the county could be under six inches of snow while the rest of the region was unscathed. And the winds were especially harsh here, whipping around the school's treeless lot as if still angry at those who had cleared so much of the valley's forests a century ago.

  Yet the architect had sold the school board on four freestanding wings centered on a courtyard, a design more suitable to California or Florida. In inclement weather, students had to choose between cutting coatless across the courtyard, or taking the longer circuitous route, which meant being tardy. An in-house telephone system tried to make up for these vast distances, but this only overburdened the school's wiring, which was wholly inadequate to modern expectations. Students increasingly used BlackBerries, Treos, or other cell phones with e-mail capabilities, rather than rely on the school's sluggish Internet connections.