Wilde Lake: A Novel Read online

  Lu fills AJ in, sketching out the details of the woman’s life, the innate sadness of her situation. Dead for a week and no one noticed, not until she missed a day at work. It’s a rehearsal, in a sense, for the opening statement she will make before a jury.

  “And the defendant still may request a competency hearing.” That’s their father. “But Lu doesn’t think he has a chance on those grounds.”

  “No, although he has been institutionalized a time or two. But if he was judged healthy enough to be in a group home, then I don’t think they’ll have any luck. Not that he would stay in the group homes. He used his SSI to stay in motels, slept outside when it was warm enough. He’s probably going to claim he broke into her apartment after she was dead. After or before, coming and going when she wasn’t even there. He’s been canny enough not to commit to a specific date.”

  “A lot of people are on the streets who should be in care,” AJ says. “Schizophrenics. People with severe mental illnesses.”

  “And there are a lot of people on the street who aren’t schizophrenics. You know that, AJ. A diagnosis of mental illness isn’t enough to avoid consequences for one’s actions.”

  “Maybe it should be. He at least could enter a defense of—what’s it called?” AJ went to law school, but never bothered to sit for the bar.

  “Not criminally responsible,” their father answers. He assumes all questions are intended for him.

  “God, I hope I don’t have anyone like you on my jury, AJ. Anyway—the guy did something very strange, after the woman was dead. He left the little balcony door, near where she was lying, open, then turned her thermostat down. I think he hoped the cold would make it harder to determine exactly when she had died. Does that sound like someone who’s mentally ill?”

  “That reminds me,” Lauranne says. “We’ve had the most depressing vandalism in some of our community gardens. Can you imagine someone crawling over the fence into a garden just to break things? I mean, it’s just empty containers this time of year. What goes on in the mind of someone like that?”

  Lauranne’s interruption signals that she wants Lu to move on from the topic of her first murder case as state’s attorney. Lauranne has very strict ideas about sharing conversational time—unless she’s the one who’s talking. Lu speaks more quickly, not quite ready to yield the floor.

  “Anyway, the killer”—she makes it a point to use this word when discussing defendants because it hardens the idea in her mind, crowds out doubt. Rudy Drysdale is not just the defendant, he’s the killer. “Oh, I forgot. You might know him, AJ.”

  “I know him?”

  “Well, you went to Wilde Lake at the same time, although I guess he was two years behind you. Rudy Drysdale.”

  “No, no—doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Yearbook photographer, AV squad, I found him in your yearbook—”

  “There were twelve hundred kids in that school, Lu. I didn’t know all my classmates, much less some AV geek.”

  “Anyway,” Lauranne says, “we’re not sure what we’re going to do. Surveillance cameras? AJ hates the idea and people would just steal them, but it’s infuriating to see our work undone for no reason. I’d understand if they were junkies—”

  “Addicts,” AJ corrects softly.

  “But it’s not like there’s metal to steal and fence. It’s the worst, this kind of mindless vandalism. It’s like they can’t stand to see their neighbors doing something positive, they have to drag everyone back to their level.”

  Lu wants to say Namaste, Lauranne. Namaste. Instead, she lets her sister-in-law take the conversational bit into her mouth and run with it. At least she isn’t lecturing them on the menu, which happens sometimes. Lauranne claims she’s not judgmental about meat eaters, then drones on and on about unappetizing subjects such as GMOs and Big Agriculture. Tonight, the grown-ups (save Lauranne) are having pork tenderloin, while the twins eat macaroni and cheese. Out of a box, but one of the organic brands. Lu doesn’t see the point of buying three pounds of cheese to produce some Barefoot Contessa–caliber casserole when this is what her children prefer.

  Penelope and Justin, bored by the adults, drift off to watch television—and manage to drift out of hearing range for any chores they might be assigned. Lu’s brother and his wife stay late, AJ smoking a cigar with his father on the recently added four-seasons porch, Lauranne offering no help with dishes or bedtime. The only thing she offers is criticism, not for the first time, of the household’s failure to compost. Lu would probably have done it by now if it weren’t for Lauranne’s insufferable nagging.

  But AJ loves her so, she reminds herself. And that’s enough.

  It is 10:30 by the time they leave, 11:30 before Lu is ready to go to bed. Moving through the house, compulsively putting small things in order, she sees light spilling down the stairwell from the third floor. The electric bills are heart-stopping for this inefficient old house, especially in the winter. She fines the children for leaving lights on, and they are generally good about remembering. When she turns the hall light off, she can see more light seeping under the door from AJ’s old room. The light is coming from a “modern” study lamp he had in high school, probably purchased at Scan’s in the Mall at Columbia. Their father says that it might be of value, that these original Danish modern items are sought after by collectors, and AJ should take it to his home before their father redoes this room. The lamp casts a circle on AJ’s desk, but there is nothing in the circle. Lauranne was probably poking around. She has designs on some of Adele’s jewelry, and their father has said it’s only fair that she have a piece or two, but Lu has dragged her feet about making any decisions. Of course, the jewelry isn’t kept in AJ’s room, but there are other treasures—a coin collection, a drawer full of photographs, many featuring AJ’s high school and college girlfriends. Lauranne has a jealous streak, too.

  Lu turns the light off, but she doesn’t leave the room right away. Here, in the house’s last untouched place, she feels more connected to her past, her family, than anywhere else. She remembers AJ and Noel locked up in here for hours. Smoking pot, she knows now, although she didn’t realize it at the time, despite her obsessive eavesdropping. Oh, and almost hanging out the window to get a glimpse of the new neighbor, Miss Maude. “And then there’s Maude,” they would say, quoting a line from the sitcom’s theme song. Then they’d laugh and laugh and laugh, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. Yep, stoned, yet never stoners. She recalls Noel making just that point. “We’re not stoners.” At the time, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, envisioned the characters in the B.C. comic. Stoners, stonemen, cavemen. It’s amazing how much of life comes into focus years later, how long a memory can drift without context, then suddenly make sense. B.C. The comics were her life when she was a child, her frame for understanding everything. She can still see the layout of the morning Beacon’s comics page, not even a full page, while the afternoon Light had two entire pages. Still, she read the Beacon every morning. Mr. Tweedy, Marmaduke—those were one-panel cartoons with the horoscope above them. Oh, and that strange little naked couple that was so madly in love. Penelope and Justin don’t even look at the newspaper, whereas Lu used to sit next to her father and read the funny pages while he studied the editorials.

  Ah, but now she sounds like Andrew Brant, harrumphing about how things have changed. Everything does. Everything but this room. Lu wonders if everyone in the Brant family enjoys this little time capsule. Maybe AJ was the one who was up here tonight.

  OPERATOR, CAN YOU HELP ME PLACE THIS CALL?

  As spring and AJ’s fifteenth birthday approached in 1977, he began to campaign for a new telephone line in our house, a private one, to be installed in his third-floor room. And if not a private one, then an extension. Between sports and his other extracurricular activities, he was almost never home. When he was home, he usually had Noel with him. And if Noel wasn’t at our house, AJ needed to talk to him, for hours and hours. We had only two telephones
, one in my father’s bedroom and one in the kitchen, a fire-engine red one that hung on the wall. The cord was just long enough that AJ could stretch it into the walk-in pantry. I would go into the kitchen after dinner and see this thin scarlet worm taut across the kitchen, hear AJ’s mutterings. But even when I could make out the words—and I always lingered as long as I could—they never seemed to be about anything important or interesting.

  Yet AJ insisted he needed his own phone.

  “I can’t see why,” our father said. “All you use it for is idle gossip.”

  “No, we check our math homework. Algorithms are killing me in Algebra two. I don’t understand them at all.”

  “Then I don’t think more time on the telephone is the remedy. A tutor, perhaps, if you’re really struggling—”

  “Also, we could use a Baltimore line, couldn’t we? Don’t you need to be able to make local calls to both Baltimore and D.C.? That way, I could have a private line. Lots of kids do.”

  Now in Columbia, at that time, your telephone prefix conveyed an important part of your family’s story, its roots. You were given a choice, upon moving in, whether you wanted to be “997,” which allowed you to make local calls to D.C., or if you were “730,” oriented toward Baltimore. Yet my family, who had moved to Columbia from Baltimore, always had a D.C. prefix. “For my work,” our father said, and I guess that made sense. He was in government, government was in D.C. And Annapolis, the state capital. There was nothing left for us in Baltimore. AJ sometimes spoke longingly of the house where he had lived his first eight years—the stained-glass windows, the turret, the fenced backyard. But on our rare trips into the city—usually to eat at Haussner’s, the art-crammed German restaurant that my father loved—there was always a reason not to drive by. We were running late, the house was in the wrong direction.

  “We don’t need a Baltimore line,” our father said. “But we can compromise. If your grades are good on your third-quarter report card, I’ll install an extension, only in the living room.”

  The phone that arrived in April was as ordinary as a phone could be: black, squat, unmoving. If you wanted to use it, you had to sit in one of the two wing chairs flanking the round mahogany table where the phone lived. Still, it was a novelty and like all children, I loved novelty. Home alone (except for Teensy) until 4 or 5 P.M., I would sit in a wing chair, the TV muted, and pretend to place calls. The White House, Buckingham Palace, China. I yearned to make prank phone calls, but knew the circumstances would be dire if I were caught. Besides, the only two jokes I knew were about Prince Albert in the can, which I didn’t really understand, and “Is your refrigerator running?” (Then go out and catch it!) I wasn’t even sure to whom someone was meant to place prank calls. Friends? Strangers? I would pick up the black handset, my index finger on the button so the phone was not actually off the hook, and imagine someone calling me. Lu? Lu? Would you like to come over? Sure, let’s make ice cream sundaes and watch The Big Valley.

  I was playing this sad little game when the phone rang one afternoon, vibrating beneath my finger. Startled, I almost dropped the handset. Instead, I lifted my finger and rattled off as I had been instructed, “Brant household-who-may-I-say-is-calling?,” even as Teensy was saying the same thing into the kitchen phone, although not quite as swiftly.

  “Luisa?” a strange woman’s voice asked. “Luisa?”

  At that, I did drop the phone with a shriek, let it clatter to the floor, believing a ghost was calling me. From the kitchen, Teensy yelled: “You hang that phone up NOW, Lu. You hear me? You hang up that phone and go outside.” I did, but not before I heard Teensy in the kitchen, breathing hard into the receiver. “Please do not call here again. I’m sorry, ma’am, but you know that’s how it has to be.”

  The phone began to ring every day after that, between the hours of three and five. At some point, Teensy decided to stop answering. “Nuisance calls,” she said. “Like pranks?” “Yes. Do not pick up the phone. That only encourages them. Just let it ring.”

  Every afternoon, the phone continued to ring. Five times, eight times, a dozen. We got used to it. As for telling my father—I guess I assumed Teensy had filled him in. Surely this had something to do with his work.

  Now, even though Miss Maude was no longer available to look after me, Teensy had come to expect her early leave-taking on Fridays. My father had decided I could stay home alone as long as AJ promised to get there as soon as possible. “As soon as possible,” to AJ’s way of thinking, was any time that put him through the door ahead of our father, who seldom left the office before 6:30. I kept his secret, enjoying my autonomy and the power it gave me. Then, one Friday, as I was watching a rerun of The Big Valley, the phone rang and I was so caught up by the strange things that were happening on the show—the Barkley brothers were threatening a Chinese man, making him swear on a chicken that he didn’t know where Victoria Barkley was, when she was downstairs in his master’s basement—that I picked up the receiver almost without thinking.

  “Brant-residence-who-may-I-say-is-calling?”

  “Luisa? Luisa, is that you?”

  The strange woman’s voice again. Yet I wasn’t scared this time, despite being alone in the house. It was just a prank, after all. Victoria Barkley wasn’t scared. She was played by Barbara Stanwyck and on those rare times when AJ was home during The Big Valley, Noel would drop into the other wing chair and watch with me, telling me what a great actress she was.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you know who this is?”

  “Miss Maude?”

  “It’s your grandmother, Luisa. Your mother’s mother, Victoria Closter. Your nana.”

  “I don’t have any grandparents,” I said, confused. My father’s parents might be alive, but I knew he had chosen to live his life without them. My mother’s parents were dead. I was quite clear on that. They had died years ago, not long after my mother died. That’s why we never saw them. They were dead.

  “Oh, that wicked, wicked father of yours, trying to keep us apart. You do have grandparents and we want to see you, darling. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”

  “You saw me when I was a baby?” There was no photographic evidence to support this.

  “We did. But then your father said we couldn’t see you anymore—”

  AJ came in then, breathless and red-cheeked; the late April day was unseasonably cold.

  “AJ, it’s our grandparents! They’ve alive. It must have been some terrible mistake, like, like”—my mind groped for such a scenario and found it instantly in the soap operas I had watched with Miss Maude—“maybe they just had amnesia!”

  He took the phone from me—and hung it up.

  “What did she say to you, Lu?”

  “That she was my grandmother. But I thought we didn’t have any grandparents.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She said our father was wicked.”

  The phone began to ring again. AJ motioned for me not to touch it. He let it ring ten, fifteen times—phones would do that, then. When the person on the other end finally gave up, AJ called our father’s office and spoke to his secretary. “Miss Dolores? This is AJ. We’ve been having some nuisance calls and I’m taking the phone off the hook for now. I just thought our father should know.” Pause. “I’m fine, she’s fine. But I know he doesn’t want us to have anything to do with these calls.”

  Our father was home within the hour. He asked AJ to speak to him in his room. For some reason, I accepted this was a private matter. How can this be? Yet my memory is that I sat at the kitchen table, busy at something. What exactly? I had a small loom on which I could make belts, ugly imitations of the Native American styles that were still popular. No, I was getting a head start on Easter, preparing the eggs. Teensy had taught me how to hollow eggs. I couldn’t dye them on my own, but I knew how to hollow them. Or thought I did. The kitchen table told a different story, with two destroyed eggs for every one that remained intact, and the intact one
s had enormous blow holes. Meanwhile, we had enough eggs to make omelets all weekend. It was almost as if I didn’t want my father to summon me to his room, or I hoped he would be so upset with me that he would be distracted. I didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me.

  But eventually, he did ask me to talk to him, without any comment about the mess I had made.

  In the corner of my father’s room that he used as a home office, there was a big leather wing chair, his, and a wooden rocking chair at three-quarters scale, in which I had often read alongside him. I started to climb into the chair, but my father startled me by asking: “Do you want to sit in my lap?”

  We were not that kind of family. I sat next to him when we read the paper together; I did not sit on him.

  “No, sir, that’s okay. We can talk like this.” He seemed relieved.

  “Lu, there were some things that happened, back when you were born, that I never told you about. Your grandparents—your mother’s parents—did not approve of her having a second child.”

  “Why?”

  “They had their reasons—or thought they did. Their reasons didn’t matter. Your mother was an adult. Her parents treated her like a child. They wanted her to, um, end the pregnancy. That was not legal at the time.”

  “They didn’t want me?”

  “You weren’t you yet, Lu They weren’t thinking about the possibility of a person, with all your bright promise. All they could think about was your mother. Their daughter. And then when your mother was, well, gone, they said, ‘See, we told you this would happen.’ They said I had signed her death warrant. They said other things, rude and cruel things. I became very angry. I told them that they were to have nothing to do with us. I didn’t trust them to be . . . careful around you, to keep their feelings to themselves. AJ was almost nine at the time. He had lived with his grandparents most of his life. It was very hard on him, but he understood. The three of us had to stick together. Perhaps if they had apologized or acknowledged how hurtful and wrong their words were, things could have been different. I told AJ it was as if they had died, that we must live as if they had. I believed they would make you feel responsible for your mother’s death, which was not the case at all. I also feared that they would try to do to you, both of you, what they had done to your mother. I couldn’t have let that cycle repeat itself.”