Wilde Lake: A Novel Read online

  He placed the lone shoe, size seven, on the flat rail of the jury box.

  The jury came back in less than two hours. Guilty of murder in the first degree, life in prison. The death penalty in Maryland had been temporarily suspended because of constitutional challenges or this man certainly would have been sentenced to die.

  We went out for a celebratory dinner at the Magic Pan—Noel somehow got invited to that, too—and toasted, as was our private tradition, Hamilton Burger, the beleaguered D.A. on Perry Mason. Most people rooted for Mason, but my family knew who the real hero was, who stood for justice and the community, not just his client.

  “But what about the shoe?” Noel asked.

  “What?”

  “It was so big, so bulky. He should have noticed, when he buried her—”

  “We don’t know that he buried her, Noel. There’s plenty of undeveloped acreage in Howard County. A body could go years without being discovered.”

  “Okay, dumped or buried—how could he not notice that she was wearing only one shoe? And if he noticed, then I think he would have looked for it. Maybe he kept it, on purpose. Or maybe—maybe the wife was there.”

  My father reared back, as if from a bad smell. “Don’t be silly, Noel.”

  “I’m just saying maybe they cruised together for girls. I saw a movie like that, where a husband and wife went looking for young girls. Only they were vampires. The husband and wife.”

  “Vampires,” my father said. It was a rhetorical trick of his, repeating a word, then letting it sit, so the silence around it somehow made it ludicrous. Vampires. Then: “Who wants dessert?” Everyone did. The Magic Pan had a specialty that was a solid brick of vanilla ice cream in a sweet crepe, covered with chocolate sauce. I thought it was the most sophisticated thing in the world. When I ate it, I felt as if I were sitting high up in the Eiffel Tower with Cary Grant. (Noel had made us watch Charade at the Slayton House film series that summer.)

  School started the next week. AJ was entering high school, which he considered momentous. And while I had a year of kindergarten behind me, it had been at a private Montessori school, so this would be my first year at the neighborhood school, Bryant Woods Elementary. First grade was the real deal, I decided, the time when the serious business of learning would begin.

  Better still, our teacher was brand-new and beautiful, with a cloud of permed hair and peasant-inspired clothing—a loose blouse worn belted, a flowing skirt, high-heeled boots. The moment I saw her, I decided I had to be nothing less than teacher’s pet, even if I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. I wanted to bring her home, introduce her to my father, make her my mother. I decided all those things before we had finished saying the Pledge of Allegiance. With a six-year-old’s logic, I reasoned that the way to ingratiate myself with Miss Gordon was to show her I was beyond first grade, on a par with her, perhaps better suited to be her assistant. As she began to lead us through the alphabet, I sighed loudly and said to no one in particular. “This old thing.”

  “What was that?” Miss Gordon asked. She didn’t look happy to have been interrupted, so I didn’t speak up. The boy across the aisle, Randy Nairn, spoke for me.

  “She said, ‘This old thing.’” He added a sneer to my tone that I swear wasn’t there, spoke in a high voice nothing like mine, screwed up his face in a prissy moue. The class laughed. Miss Gordon didn’t.

  “Louise Brant? Is that your name?”

  “Luisa, but I go by Lu.”

  “Well, Luisa”—oh, the refusal to use my nickname was hurtful, a rejection of my friendship—“if you’re already bored, we can see if you’re ready to do second-grade class work. In fact, maybe I could take you to Mrs. Jackson’s class right now, just throw you in. Sink or swim.”

  I sensed a setup. Although I could read, I understood there was more to school than reading. What I didn’t understand was Miss Gordon’s instinctive dislike, her hostility. Adults always took a shine to me. Adults liked me better than kids did. I was smart. I behaved. I could hold my own in a conversation. And when they found out I was the daughter of Andrew Brant, most adults beamed at me, even Republicans. There was talk, after the trial, that my father could be state’s attorney general if he wanted, maybe even a congressman or a senator. I wondered if Miss Gordon knew who my father was, if there was a way I could drop the information casually.

  “I’m fine here, ma’am.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “What?”

  “That ‘ma’am’ sounded very sarcastic, Luisa. You are to call me Miss Gordon.”

  “Yes, ma—yes, Miss Gordon.” The ma’am was Teensy’s fault. It was as if everyone in my life had set me up to fail—AJ, by teaching me to read, my father for encouraging the habit, Teensy for insisting on manners. Didn’t anyone in my family know how the real world worked?

  Things never got better that year. They didn’t get worse, but they never got better. Even my impeccable classwork did not endear me to Miss Gordon. And when it came to creative work—drawing pictures, using our new words to make simple poems—she was particularly harsh with me. My neat, bland drawings were never placed in the center of the blackboard display. She hated my brown cats and black dogs, my blue skies and yellow suns. She even seemed to dislike my precise rhymes, while she heaped praise on students whose words didn’t really go together, insisting they had imagination. She stretched out her arms as she stretched out the syllables of that word—EH-MAH-GI-NAY-SHUN! Miss Gordon valued creativity above everything.

  Later that fall, when my father went to parent-teacher night, he came home and sat on the edge of my bed to report back, at my insistence. I had told him I wanted to know exactly what Miss Gordon thought of me, word for word. To my father’s credit, he agreed to honor this request, although he warned me it might hurt. I imagined a Band-Aid being ripped from my skin. I never cried when that happened. I could handle words.

  “I’ll be okay,” I assured him.

  He sighed and began his summation.

  He had been told that Miss Gordon was frustrated by my hostility toward creative work. I lacked, yes, EH-MAH-GI-NAY-SHUN. Oh, I could do any task that was based on studying and having facts at hand. In the world of right answers, I was 100 percent. But asked to draw a picture or tell a story, I pestered Miss Gordon with endless questions about the “rules.” Did there have to be a person in the story? A tree? Must it have a happy ending? How many words? What do I need to get an A?

  “Why is it so hard for you to imagine things, Lu? You read lots of stories.”

  “I can imagine things fine,” I said. “But I want to make sure I get the best grades.”

  “Why? I’ve never told you that I cared about your grades. All I ask is that you do your best.”

  “Yes, being the best is important. Winning is important.”

  “No, being a good person is important. Caring about others. Being warm and empathetic. Miss Gordon said you make fun of the kids who aren’t as smart as you.”

  “That’s not true.” I wanted to cry at the unfairness of this accusation. “I try to help them. Some of them can barely print, and I’m the only one who can write cursive. And their rhymes are wrong. Danny put together ‘hard’ and ‘park’ and Miss Gordon said his poem was great, while I wrote ‘Once I saw a possum / Smelling a blossom,’ and she told me that possums don’t come out in the daytime, so why would they be smelling flowers. See—when I do have imagination, it doesn’t count, I’m making a mistake. But when Randy Nairn draws a dog with smoke coming out of its mouth, he’s told he’s wonderful.”

  “Your classmates don’t want your help, Lu. That’s what Miss Gordon says. You finish your work early, then try to insert yourself in the work of others.”

  I became frustrated, saw that I would never be able to explain the situation to my father. I was battling Miss Gordon for control of the classroom. Losing, but battling. She had rejected me, so I wanted the other kids to see I was as smart as she was. I was at war.

  “I
just want to win,” I said.

  “Win what, Lu?”

  I shook my head, out of words.

  “You’re so competitive, Lu. If you make winning everything, you’ll never be happy.”

  “You’re happy when you win. You were really happy when you won that case.”

  “Because justice was done. Because a young woman whose body may never be found wasn’t forgotten. When I go to court, Lu, it’s never about winning.”

  But that’s what competitive people always say. Have you noticed only another competitive person will ever call you competitive? Yes, I liked to win, but so did my father and my brother. And, oh Lord, how Gabe made everything a competition. Who’s playing the saxophone on this song? he would ask me when some jazz standard came on a restaurant’s sound system. Or, apropos of nothing, How many Triple Crown winners can you name? I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t want to win, but I definitely didn’t know a Brant who didn’t love victory. We played chess, checkers, Botticelli, Geography, “Jimmy has a ball of string.” We played Stratego, Life, Operation (and only I could remove that funny bone). Dominoes, gin rummy, a card game called Up the River, Down the River. I was given slight advantages when I was very young, but I was never patronized. When I won, it was real, a true achievement. Winning was everything in my household.

  The thing I had gotten wrong was showing how desperately I wanted to win. That was what I had to learn to conceal, what my father and AJ knew from birth: disguise your desire.

  JANUARY 9

  Lu watches through the one-way glass as Mike and his partner, Terry Childs, interrogate Rudy Drysdale. Lu expected someone more obviously homeless—matted beard and hair, dirty clothes—but this Drysdale character is fairly neat and well groomed, considering his lifestyle. If one didn’t know which was which, he might appear to be the attorney. He has a quiet poise, while the young female public defender is almost aquiver with nerves.

  The detectives are pushing for a confession. Seems unlikely with a guy who invoked his right to an attorney so quickly, but Lu is happy to let them try.

  To her delight, the inexperienced public defender is allowing her client to speak, almost encouraging him to do so. The whole point of lawyering-up is to shut up, but the public defender seems to believe that Drysdale has an alibi or other information that will lead to his release.

  Rudy whispers to his public defender, who then presents his story to the detectives. Lu is reminded of how Penelope and Justin used to confide “secrets” to her in tandem, a hot, damp mouth pressed to each ear, words tumbling out. When had that stopped? They are growing up so quickly and she fears she is missing too much. But then, being twins, they always have each other. Maybe it’s natural that they become self-contained at a much younger age than other children.

  “The apartment appeared to be empty,” says Rose Darling, a lovely name for a woman who is, well, not lovely. Splotchy complexion, overweight, dark frizzy hair. Lu amuses herself by coming up with various tricks to remember the woman’s name, which will be useful when they meet again. Public defenders vote, too, and everyone yearns to be remembered. My public defender is like a red, red rose. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling defender Rose. Lu feels bad about the woman’s cheap suit. Public defenders make even less than state’s attorneys. Lu takes special care to make sure that her expensive clothes do not look expensive. Her inherited wealth is one of those ugly topics always just below the surface. During the campaign, Fred called her a dilettante, tried to suggest that she wanted his job so she wouldn’t be bored. Has anyone ever suggested that a rich man wanted to work simply because he had nothing else to do?

  “When?” Mike asks. “When did you break in?”

  Drysdale shakes his head frantically. He looks a little younger than his age, uncommon in a man who spends so much time outside. And he does not appear mentally incapacitated, aside from his aversion to speaking out loud. Once dressed in a suit, he will look presentable at trial. That could work for him or against him, Lu decides. If she were his attorney, she’d try to have him ruled incompetent to stand trial, given his history of hospitalizations. She wouldn’t win on those grounds, but she’d at least try. Rose—what was the surname, oh my darling, oh my darling—Darling doesn’t even seem to realize it’s an option. She’s the one on the verge of boxing him into a certain set of dates. Drysdale at least seems to realize that the less said about timing, the better.

  He leans in to whisper to her again. Rose Darling says: “My client is not admitting he broke in and he says he cannot be sure of when he was there. He doesn’t keep a calendar.”

  “Did you know Mary McNally, Rudy? Had you seen her at the Silver Diner? Or around the neighborhood?”

  He shakes his head no, but only after a long pause.

  “Why were you in her apartment?”

  He whispers in his lawyer’s ear then, and the lawyer says: “He’s not admitting that he was in her apartment.”

  “He already did,” Mike says.

  More whispers. “He can’t be sure he was in her apartment because he doesn’t know who she is. He doesn’t know Mary McNally, has no knowledge of her whatsoever. He entered an apartment in the Grove. He doesn’t remember when and he doesn’t know who it belongs to. If there was a body in there at the time, he might not have entered that room.”

  “Buddy, we got fingerprints. You’re all over the place. On the door that was open, which was inches from her head, and on the door that was closed. You’re on the thermostat. So, what, you climbed up on her balcony, saw the open door, stepped over her body, went to check the thermostat, then left by the other door, which you carefully closed? Is that the story you want to tell?”

  Rudy stares at the ceiling as if the conversation has begun to bore him. His affect is like a teenager’s, checking out as his parents discuss his failings at the family dinner table. Asked how he got into the apartment, he continues to stare at the ceiling. Asked how Mary McNally died, he makes eye contact only with the light fixture over his head. Asked if he can account for his whereabouts over the past week, he smiles and shakes his head, as if the detectives are being silly. Fine, don’t speak, Lu thinks. The fingerprints put him at the scene, he’s been IDed in a lineup. He’s going straight from here to a judge, who will almost certainly order him held without bail.

  “I almost feel sorry for that public defender,” Lu says to Mike when just that scenario plays out. She has sent Andi to the bail review, an easy bone to toss.

  “Yeah, she’s a mess. Jury might end up feeling sorry for her, too. And him. What a sad sack. Local guy, went to Wilde Lake Middle and High School.”

  “That’s where I went,” Lu says. “Also my brother.”

  “Really?” Mike is too polite to note that the school’s reputation is lackluster these days. The original “villages” of Columbia are now called the “inner villages,” and the pejorative echo of inner city is not accidental. The money has marched west, and the desirable school districts are in what were cornfields and wilderness in Lu’s lifetime. “Still, he has an almost plausible story. All he has to do is claim that the sliding door in the second bedroom was unlocked—we can’t prove he was the one who pried it open—that he came in that way, noticed it was cold, checked the thermostat, then—”

  Lu holds up a hand. She’s not a superstitious person, anything but. Yet she has no patience with worst-case scenarios. Bad news will out soon enough, why put it in the universe? When the twins were six weeks old, there were a couple of bad nights with Justin, the smaller of the two, and Gabe kept trying to bring up the possibility of colic. She wouldn’t let him say the word out loud and she would hold the screeching baby as if his screams didn’t grieve her. Lu believes that you must will yourself not to dwell on all the bad things that can happen, only the good. She imagined herself as state’s attorney and here she is. The bad things still find a way to happen.

  And if she’s honest with herself, there were days when Gabe was forever on planes and corpor
ate jets and traveling to far-flung places that she wondered what life would be like if he just didn’t come back. Now she knows. Now she lives it every day. She had thought she was doing everything, that he contributed almost nothing to their children’s daily care. But gone is not dead. She had to learn that the hard way.

  Gabe’s ghost seems to hover at her elbow that evening, as she tries to help Penelope with her math homework. Lu has a firm rule that homework must be done on Friday nights, not Sundays. She is a big believer in getting unpleasant things out of the way, and homework has become particularly unpleasant. In her heart of hearts, she hadn’t really believed the dire warnings she heard from other parents about how difficult and demanding homework had become. She never believed any of the dire things people told her about raising children, and yet every stage seemed to arrive as foretold by the Oracle of Delphi. Now multiply that by two children, subtract one spouse—there was a math problem even more daunting than the multiplication tables that Penelope was struggling with long after Justin had breezed through them and earned his hour of screen time.

  “It’s so unfair,” Penelope whines, her hazel eyes filmed with tears, a strand of hair in her mouth. The thing is, it is unfair. Lu knows firsthand what it’s like to have a brother who’s better than you in everything. But at least AJ was eight years older than she was, so she had the consolation of thinking she would catch up to him—in height, in talent, in looks, in social skills. Penelope is six minutes older than Justin and they look so much alike that they could be twins in a Shakespearean comedy, destined to switch identities at some point. They look nothing like Lu, although people claim to see a resemblance. As babies, they were little Gabes, dark and beetle-browed. Now they have that magical combination of olive skin and light eyes, with brown hair that turns golden in the summer sun. They are close, as twins tend to be, and that only aggravates Penelope’s frustration.

  “Take a deep breath,” Lu says, stroking Penelope’s hair, even as she yearns to move two hours ahead into the future, when she can sit by herself for a few minutes. She had been a good student and has no idea what to say to a bad one. And how can Gabe’s daughter not have an affinity for math? Lu has a brainstorm, tells Penelope that she can put her homework away for now, come back to it tomorrow. “You’re tired, I think. That’s all. Your brain is fogged.” At bedtime, she reads Penelope a chapter from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the one where Francie conquers arithmetic by turning it into a story. If Penelope did not inherit Gabe’s genius for numbers, maybe she can learn Lu’s talent for creating narratives. While many prosecutors consider their most violent cases to be their most pivotal, Lu is perversely proud of a theft case she had to try, one that involved a complicated accounting scheme at a city hospital. Any jury can follow a story of murder or rape. Leading them through a thicket of numbers required much more skill.