Wilde Lake: A Novel Read online

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” the woman says.

  “And you are—?”

  “Jonnie Forke.” Lu, aware that her trouble with names and faces is a liability for a politician, plays her private game of trying to construct a mnemonic trick. Stick a fork in her, she’s Jonnie. Heeeeeeeeeeere’s Jonnie—with a Forke for her butterface. “I mean, no disrespect to Mary and I’m sorry it happened, but I’ve got to think about myself.”

  Lu has a reluctant admiration for the woman’s bluntness. She’s saying what everyone thinks, in almost every situation. I’ve got to think about myself. Most jurors, even the ones who take the job very seriously, think about themselves first. If, when—and it will be when, it has to be when, all she needs is a fingerprint to come back, and this perp is no debutante, she’s sure of that, no one commits a crime like this his first time out—Lu comes to a jury with the story of how Mary McNally died, they will be judging the victim as much as the defendant. Did she know him? Did she grant him access to her home? Had they met online or in line, at that 10 P.M. showing of The Theory of Everything? A truly random case, one in which the victim appears to have been singled out for no reason, would be the best one to try in Lu’s experience. An intruder, surprised. He lashes out. The victim turns to run, he hits her from behind, strangles her, then keeps beating her after she’s dead, literally defacing her. Any juror can empathize in that case.

  But if Mary invited the man into her home—that will complicate things. It will be better in some ways if the bedspread is pristine, as Mike’s preliminary scan indicated. With the break-in and presumed burglary, Lu already has a first-degree murder. Sex will just complicate everything. As sex does. Then again, if he didn’t break in, Lu might have the advantage of witnesses who saw them together somewhere. She catches herself: she, like Mike, is assuming it’s a man. The violence at the scene—not a lot of women have that in them. The anger, yes. Just not the strength to act on it. And there is something personal about it. The postmortem beating, the damage to the face. It doesn’t get more personal than that. Then again, men can be surprisingly swift when it comes to having expectations from women they barely know. Strange men tell women to smile, they interrupt conversations, they demand female attention in all sorts of ways.

  And when they don’t get it, they can get very angry.

  THE BOY IN THE BUSH

  My family moved to Columbia, our future house rolled down the highway on a flatbed trailer, I was born, my mother died—and I remember none of it. These are the stories I was told. The first vivid memory that I trust as my own, in part because AJ agreed on every detail, is the August day in 1976 when we found Noel Baumgarten in our bushes, peering into our kitchen.

  Teensy, rinsing the lunch dishes at the sink, shrieked when she realized there was a person in the bushes. His eyes, green as sea glass, might have passed for light-dappled leaves if they had not been moving rapidly back and forth, scanning everything he saw.

  “Got-dammit.” Teensy belonged to a storefront church in West Baltimore and she never cursed, so this was serious business. She grabbed a broom and headed outside, AJ and I trailing her. We weren’t the least bit scared or disturbed by our Peeping Tom. We were excited because something was finally happening and so little happened on those slow summer days, when most of the kids we knew went to camp or the ocean or the mountains. We never went anywhere.

  “What are you doing?” Teensy demanded of the boy in the bush.

  “Taking photographs,” he said cheerfully, showing us the heavy, old-fashioned camera he wore on a cord around his neck.

  “Whaaaaaaa—?” Teensy yelled, making futile passes with the broom, the boy ducking and swerving as if it were a dance.

  “Of your house. It’s wild. What was it, before Columbia was built? Did George Washington sleep here? It’s a thousand times nicer than any other house around here, that’s for sure.”

  “Why did you come up to the kitchen window if all you wanted to do was photograph our house?” That was AJ, not Teensy. She was now completely nonplussed, a first in my experience. Maybe it was those eyes. They were so big and green, like something you’d see on a tiny jungle animal in National Geographic. Or maybe it was his juicy confidence. Noel, as we would soon learn, was completely without guilt, even when he was doing things for which he should feel guilty. He could stare down any authority figure and proclaim his innocence.

  “I bet people take photographs of your house all the time,” he said, ignoring the question put to him. “Don’t they?”

  They did. And, like this boy, they assumed that the house had been there first, that the wood-sided split-levels were the interlopers who had forced themselves on this dignified matron. In that way, the house, although chosen to lure my mother to Columbia, was not unlike my father. A newcomer just six years ago, our father had been appointed to the state’s attorney’s office in 1975 and already seemed a fixture in the county. People often asked if the Brants went back as far as the Warfields, one of Howard County’s oldest, most storied families. That’s how my father’s brand of confidence worked. He found the place he wanted to be, kept still and poised, and eventually people assumed he had been there all along.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Noel said as he emerged from the bushes, brushing a stray leaf from his hair, blue-black and shiny, like Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. His hair was all the more striking with those otherworldly green eyes and fair skin. “I just wanted to see if the inside of the house was as old-fashioned as what’s outside. I’m Noel Baumgarten.”

  He offered his hand to AJ. At the time, he was considerably shorter than AJ, although that would change. But he was short enough so that it wasn’t crazy of me to hope he might be closer to my age than my brother’s, or at least right between the two of us, and therefore a suitable friend to both.

  “Where do you live?” AJ asked. “Where are you going to school in the fall?”

  “Up on Green Mountain Circle.” He hitched a thumb toward the long semicircle of a street that formed the closest thing our neighborhood had to a main drag. “I’ll be a freshman at the high school in the fall. It’s just me and my mom.”

  “Did your parents get divorced?” I asked. “Or is your dad dead?”

  “Lu!” AJ’s tone was reproving. “You don’t ask things like that.”

  Noel laughed. “I do,” he said. “I ask questions like that all the time. I ask people how old they are and how much money they have and what kind of cars they drive and my mother says”—here, he put on a high, pained falsetto, cocked a fist on his hip—“my mother says, ‘You will be the death of me, Noel Baumgarten.’ And, no my parents aren’t divorced, but my dad works, like, twenty hours a day. He’s at the State Department. And he doesn’t want to add to his day by commuting, but my mom thought Wilde Lake would be better for me. I was at Sidwell Friends.” Dramatic pause. “I got kicked out.”

  “For what?” That was AJ, for the record. It seemed far ruder to me than asking if someone’s dad was dead.

  An enormous shrug, his eyes shining. “Marching to the beat of my own drummer.”

  Years later, at Noel’s funeral service, we would meet the classmate whom Noel was discovered kissing in the boys’ bathroom at that exclusive private school. It turned out that neither boy had been expelled, not exactly. School officials conferred with both sets of parents and agreed the boys should be separated. For their own good. Yes, that was something well-intentioned, liberal parents did forty years ago; they tried to nip homosexuality in the bud, hoping it was a bad habit, like smoking. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still do it today. Your son is kissing a boy? Chalk it up to confusion, assume that one of them is a bad influence, and separate them, “saving” the one who was led astray. I think it was Noel’s mother, already deeply ambivalent about her marriage, who chose to put him in Wilde Lake High School, thinking its progressive open education style was an environment in which her unusual boy might flourish. She was a hard little number, Noel’s mothe
r, but she loved her son. In my mind, I see her always in a high, tight ponytail and tennis whites, although that clearly is apocryphal. She would have worn real clothes on at least some occasions. I had a brief period of time hoping that our two single parents would marry, but Noel’s mother surprised everyone, even herself I think, by returning to Noel’s father when Noel graduated from high school. She had spent four years claiming she moved to Columbia just for Noel. Maybe she came to believe it.

  We invited Noel inside, hoping he would pick up on the fact that he must ingratiate himself with Teensy if he wished to have any traction in our household. He started off very smartly by not asking, as so many did, why a six-foot-tall woman was called Teensy. Her nickname was derived, in fact, from her first name, Hortensia. Noel, who had the most finely attuned social antenna I was ever to know, sidestepped that minefield, first apologizing for scaring her, then offering to finish the sink of dishes she had been washing.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Teensy said. “Would you like an ice cream sandwich?”

  An ice cream sandwich! Teensy had told us only minutes earlier that we were not entitled to dessert, given our refusal to eat much of the lunch she had “cooked.” (Another rule of life with Teensy is that we were not to challenge the lackluster lunches she made, so different from the meals she served in the evening, when our father was present. He came home to pot roasts, lamb chops, whipped potatoes. We got canned soup, bologna sandwiches, carrot sticks. Every day. The only variations were turkey instead of bologna, celery instead of carrots.) Now she opened a box of Eskimo Pies and passed them out to all of us.

  And just like that, Noel had the run of our house. When we had finished eating our ice cream on the back porch, he asked for a tour, during which he made approving and knowing comments about the furniture, chosen by our mother and never changed. He liked old things and was appalled that his mother had brought him someplace where everything was new. He told us that his father was old friends with someone in the Rouse Company, Columbia’s developer, and that there had been concern, early on, when black home buyers had clustered in certain neighborhoods. The suspicion was that real estate agents were circumventing the explicit plan to make Columbia a heterogeneous utopia, where race and class mingled. But the truth was prosaic and without agenda. Black home buyers, many of them first-time home buyers, wanted brick homes, not wooden-frame ones.

  “Like the Three Little Pigs!” I said, pleased to have anything to offer to this fast-talking, fast-moving beautiful boy.

  Noel laughed and kept going, not even bothering to ask permission as he opened doors to closets and bathrooms. He sailed into the enormous second-floor bedroom that belonged to my father, picked up the silver frame on his bureau.

  “Who’s this?”

  “My mother,” AJ said.

  “Our mother,” I clarified. It was an odd linguistic habit of AJ’s, to use “I” and “my” in situations where “we” and “ours” were more accurate.

  “She looks like Norma Talmadge.”

  Ah, there was Noel’s inner drummer again, beating wildly, eager to tell everyone who he was.

  Anyway, he was right: our mother did bear a striking resemblance to the actress, with her shortish, curly hair, Cupid’s bow lips, and enormous brown eyes. AJ, lucky rat, was a masculine version of her, while I was a petite knockoff of our father, rawboned and sandy-haired. Worse, I was covered with freckles, something my father had been spared. People said I looked like Laura from Little House on the Prairie. I disliked the show and did not consider the comparison a compliment.

  “She died when Lu was born,” AJ said.

  “The week after,” I said.

  “Do you visit her grave?”

  Her grave. Her grave. Where was my mother’s grave? The question captured my imagination. Why had I never thought about her resting place? I had been death obsessed, as children tend to be, and certainly I had specific reasons to think about mortality. My mother’s parents had been killed in a car accident within a year of her death. Yet it had never occurred to me that my dead mother was contained somewhere, that I could visit her if I wanted.

  “She was cremated,” AJ said, dashing my hopes as quickly as they had been raised. “Her ashes are—I don’t know where they are, come to think of it. I just know that my dad says she wouldn’t have wanted to be kept cooped up anywhere. She was a restless soul. That’s what he says.”

  Noel looked around the room, his eyes catching on a Chinese vase high up on the bookshelves. The vase was out of his reach. He opened my father’s desk, an antique planter’s desk, one of the few things he had from his own family. I could sense AJ wanted to tell him no, but they were courting each other in the way that new friends do, trying to impress. Girls are more likely to do this, but boys do it, too.

  Noel climbed up on the desk and tilted the vase toward him. “No, nothing in here.” He was hoisting it back to its place when the desk lid, which had supports that Noel had failed to pull out, gave way under his weight and cracked at its hinges.

  Although she was a flight of stairs away, Teensy was in my father’s bedroom within seconds.

  “What are you doing in Mr. Brant’s room?” she asked, huffing and puffing, angry at being forced to rush.

  “We’re allowed,” AJ said. “He’s never said we couldn’t be.”

  “But you’re not supposed to be around his desk,” Teensy said. “You know that. He keeps confidential things in there, work things. And it was closed this morning. You opened it up and climbed on it.”

  “To be fair,” Noel said, scrambling to his feet, still holding the vase. “I did that.”

  But he was already beloved in Teensy’s eyes. He could do no wrong.

  “You’re a guest,” Teensy said. “It was up to them to explain the rules of our house.” She surveyed the damage. “It’s a clean break. My husband can fix it.” Teensy’s husband was a mysterious, seldom-seen person, responsible for many edicts that could not be challenged. My husband likes me home early on Fridays. My husband says you’ve got to have a little bread at every meal.

  “So Dad won’t have to know?” AJ asked hopefully.

  She snorted. “You’ll tell him first thing when he comes home. No secrets in this house. But I’ll pick up the papers that scattered. Because he’s particular about those. And while I’m picking up the papers, you can do some of my chores.”

  I noticed another photograph of my mother, presumably her wedding day photo, saw Teensy sweep that back into a manila envelope marked “Adele.” I made a note to myself to come back and inspect the contents of that envelope. When I did, it was only the photograph and a few legal documents of no interest to me. A birth certificate, the marriage certificate, even some of her report cards.

  I was assigned the laundry, while AJ and Noel had to mop the kitchen floor. Teensy had a genius for getting us to do things she didn’t want to do. At least once a week, we were forced to carry out her work as some kind of punishment. It took her perhaps five minutes to pick up the few papers that had fallen, while our tasks required much of the afternoon. There was no talking back to Teensy, and no appealing her laws.

  AJ was her favorite. If it were not for AJ, I doubt she would have decided to work for us, given the twenty-mile drive. You might think—certainly, I thought about it—that she would be even more committed to me, motherless baby girl that I was. But Teensy preferred AJ, always. “Boys need mothers,” she would say, rationalizing her bias. “Girls don’t need anyone.” I think she was speaking for herself. Teensy didn’t need anything or anyone. I’m not even sure why she had a husband.

  I thought of her as old, always, but she was twenty-three when she came to work for the Closters, which means she was thirty-seven on this August day. When my husband died, Teensy was thrilled to have three new lives to domineer after years of tending to my father. So my children and I moved back into that rambling stone house at the edge of the lake, after my father agreed to add a few rooms and renovate the kitchen an
d baths, still stuck in the 1970s. My father has supervised this never-ending project and I have since learned that this frugal, careful man can be a libertine with someone else’s money. I never knew drawer pulls could cost so much, or that there are bathtubs that will put you back more than a car. But it made him happy and I could never deny him anything that made him happy.

  Another full circle in my life, yet my children’s lives in my childhood home could not be more different from mine. I can’t imagine giving Penelope and Justin the freedom to walk to the 7-Eleven on Green Mountain Circle. Wouldn’t matter if I did; it’s long gone. The lapping wavelets of Wilde Lake, my onetime lullabye, now whisper to me of their intent to take my children’s lives if I ever allow my vigilance to flag. And in my imagination, Columbia’s famous walking paths and bike trails are like a Candy Land board game snaking through a forest of potential pedophiles. I don’t even send my children to the neighborhood elementary school I attended, a ten-minute walk. They go to private school at the opposite end of the county, which means I still have to have a babysitter, Melissa, just to drive them to and from school every day. Fred tried to make that an issue during the election, even tried to suggest I was a racist because the neighborhood school has a large minority population. That backfired on him when I explained that my children had been enrolled in their current school’s pre-K not long after their father died; the school was one of the few constants in their young lives. I was reluctant to remove them from the comfort of a familiar place for what would be shallow, political concerns.

  I almost feel sorry for Fred. Almost. It had to be a special kind of hell, running against the unimpeachable Widow Brant. Such a tragic figure, having lost her childhood sweetheart. (Gabe and I didn’t start dating until college, but, you know, print the legend.) A respected figure, daughter and sister to two saintly men. And, by the way, a really good trial attorney. He couldn’t win, and he didn’t. The night of the general election, we were neck and neck the whole evening, but the final precincts delivered the victory to me. A squeaker, 50.5 percent of the vote, but all you need is 50 percent plus one. The gender divide did him in. Women didn’t like him going after my kids. The African American women that Fred thought would vote for him in a bloc much preferred me. Even his appearance at Davey Robinson’s church didn’t help him win those women over.