After I'm Gone

November 2, 1980

We never got the bounce,” Greg said, staring at the television, numb. “We should have gotten such a bounce.”

Norman agreed. “We deserved a bounce. We deserved a motherfucking bounce.”

Linda nodded, the third member in this mourning party of three. Greg and Norman had seemed old to her a month ago, even two hours ago, but she realized now that they were young, too. Young and preppy and rumpled, men whose clothes were no longer tended by mothers and not yet under the auspices of wives or girlfriends.

“How did we not get a bounce?” Greg asked.

“We never got a bounce,” Norman said.

They were a little drunk and this couplet, which they had been reciting in variation since the polls closed almost five hours ago, was coming more quickly now, abetted by drink and shock.

And although this was not a party per se-John B. Anderson’s small cadre of Baltimore believers was not that deluded-the volunteers had expected a slightly cheerier ending to this chapter in their lives when they planned the gathering at the Brass Elephant. But it was one thing to tilt at a windmill, another to feel as if you were pinned beneath it, arms and legs squirming comically.

The bartender, Victor, who had come to know them quite well over the last two months, had allowed them to bring a small black-and-white television and prop it up on the bar. It had been fun in the first hour or so, just because they were done; they had seen a hard thing through, unlike several other volunteers who had fled the sinking ship. No, they were jovial at first, not thinking about the big picture. About reality.

They muted the television when the networks began calling the election for Reagan. And now it was 1:00 A.M. and the enormity of the result had left them all a little numb. They hadn’t expected Carter to win, they hadn’t wanted Carter to win, and yet-and yet. The Reagan landslide felt literal to Linda, as if she were caked in mud, as petrified as a citizen of Pompeii.

“At least they can’t blame us,” she said, a variation on what she had been saying all night.

“Not in Maryland,” said Norman. “Still reliably Democratic, thank God, and the average Republican pol here is more Mathias than Agnew.”

“They can’t blame us anywhere,” Greg said. “When everything is said and done, there won’t be a single state where Anderson siphoned off enough votes to hurt Carter. Anderson wasn’t the problem.”

“I thought he was supposed to be the solution,” Linda said.

But this was too naïve, even for her fellow travelers in idealism, who usually gave Linda extra leeway because of her youth. They had celebrated her twentieth birthday in this same bar, just two months ago.

They had returned three weeks later, the night of the debate, right here in Baltimore, when Carter had refused to appear and Anderson had debated Reagan one-on-one. He had done so well. That night, the young volunteers had come here in a haze of giddy possibility. It was happening. They were going to make history. Maryland’s best-known connection to third-party presidential politics would no longer be the assassination attempt on George Wallace, but the glorious ascension of this practical, reasonable man, a man who embodied the word “avuncular” in Linda’s mind.

“Are you going to make book on whether he lives or dies?” Uncle Bert, in their kitchen, joking to her father about the Wallace shooting only hours after it had happened.

Her father didn’t think it was funny. “If he dies, he becomes a martyr. That’s no good.”

Bert, quietly: “He’s not wrong about some things.”

Her father, fiercely: “He’s wrong about everything.”

Why was she thinking about this now? Anderson, third-party candidate, Wallace. Avuncular-uncle, Uncle Bert. Her father. Her father. How she wished she could talk to him tonight. Would he have been surprised by the result? His business had relied on him not being surprised about anything that involved numbers, always knowing the odds. Oh, he was apolitical because no candidate would ever support him, not publicly, although they all took his money, one way or another. But he claimed politics was just another game, its outcome shaped by probabilities.

Victor knew her father, it turned out. He spoke to Linda of him that very first night, after checking her ID.

“Class of 1960,” he said, handing her license back. “Just in under the buzzer.” The drinking age was going up to twenty-one, a year at a time, but she was grandfathered in. She would be the only Brewer girl who could drink before the age of twenty-one. Linda didn’t care about drinking so much. She just wanted to hang out with the other volunteers, who had claimed this place as their own.

The bar at the Brass Elephant was a little pricey for a group of unpaid volunteers, even those subsidized by their parents, but it was near Norman’s apartment on Read Street, and the converted town house’s muted elegance gave them a lift at day’s end. Plus, Linda enjoyed the cachet of Victor remembering not only her father, but her as well. He used to wait on them at the Emerson Hotel. Shirley Temples, with extra cherries. Linda was not yet eight, Rachel only six, and the hotel was far from its glory days, but the sisters had no yardstick for decline back then, had not yet observed firsthand how quickly elegance can erode. They certainly did not know of the Hattie Carroll incident, or even Bob Dylan, not in 1968. Linda had known only how much she and Rachel loved being with their father, dueling with plastic swords loaded with cherries, while men came and went, crouching next to Felix, whispering in his ear, then disappearing.

“Do you still drink Shirley Temples?” Victor had asked her after establishing she was one of those Brewers.

Linda had blushed, then blurted out an order for the most sophisticated drink she could imagine, which happened to be her mother’s drink, a vodka and tonic. The joke was on her. She hated vodka tonics. But she stuck to her original order that night and every night after. She’d rather sip slowly and grimly than admit she had been bluffing.

At least she never got drunk, which was a good thing, as she had to drive all the way out to Pikesville, where she was living with her mother and her baby sister, Michelle. Rachel had left for college just a few weeks ago, and it surprised Linda how keenly she felt her absence in the house. Had Linda been missed the same way during her year and a half at Duke? She thought not, somehow. Rachel was the family confidante, the keeper of all secrets, even their mother’s. Linda could be trusted to keep secrets, too, but she was bossy, determined to solve problems that no one else wanted solved. Put Daddy’s photos away if they make you feel sad. Don’t spend money you don’t have. If you must have the latest clothes, get a job at a shop where you can buy them at a discount. At least her mother had heeded the last bit of advice.

Tonight, as Greg and Norman drank themselves into deeper and deeper glooms, Linda found the nerve to turn her vodka tonic back to Victor and say: “Maybe a glass of wine?”

He didn’t tease or shame her. He didn’t even charge her for the half-drunk vodka tonic she pushed back to him. And she was pretty sure that the white wine he poured was not the house brand. It was far better than any glass of white wine she had tasted before. He poured her a glass of ice water, too, then made a quick call. Within fifteen minutes, he was putting appetizers and sides in front of the famished volunteers.

“My contribution to the cause,” he said, when Greg stammered that they couldn’t afford any food. Greg and Norman fell on the mozzarella en carrozza like dogs.

“Do you really remember my father?” Linda asked.

“Of course,” Victor said. “We talked about him the first time you came in here.”

“I mean-not just as a customer, or-what he became.” She never said “fugitive,” not out loud. It wasn’t really the right word. “Exile,” her mother said, when she was feeling magnanimous. “Coward,” when she was not. But never fugitive. “Did you have a sense of him?”

“He was a good guy,” Victor said. “And you know what? He would have preferred Anderson, too.”

“Really?” Linda was doubtful. Her father was so pragmatic. He was not one to pretend that lost causes were anything but lost causes. Wasn’t that why he had run? He couldn’t win, so he didn’t stay around to lose.

“I moved to the Lord Baltimore during the 70s, but your dad still came in, talked politics. He disliked Carter. Not so much the positions, but the man. He was talking up Udall right up-” He stopped, clearly not wanting to say: Right up until he left. “He thought Carter was small-time.”

“Really?” If small-time meant not cheating on your wife, then Linda wouldn’t have minded a small-time father.

“That’s how I remember it.”

“What else do you remember?”

“I remember how pretty you girls all were, the three of you.”

“The three of us?” Michelle hadn’t been born.

“You, the little one, your older sister.”

Linda, blunt within her family, was polite in the world at large, so she did not embarrass him by saying: I don’t have an older sister. And her mother, beautiful as she was, would never pass for Felix’s daughter.

But Julie Saxony might.

“He was a good man,” Victor said.

“Thank you,” she said. It often happened this way. With strangers, friends, even her mother and Rachel. She started down the road toward a memory, toward a vision of her father that she thought would bring her pleasure. Then she would stumble over something unexpected and ugly.

Now her memory was playing with her again, throwing something else in her path. Five-one-five. Five-one-five.

“We’re going to say it was a mix-up,” her father told Bert. “Five shots on the fifteenth. Five-one-five. Someone got confused, put out the wrong number. And we’ll substitute out five-oh-five, say it was a typo.”

“People will get pissed. You could have a fucking riot on your hands.”

“They can play the state lottery if they don’t like how I run my game. Five-one-five will ruin us.”

I was sitting at the dining-room table, doing my homework. I would have been eleven, at the end of fifth grade. No, sixth, because Mama sneaked me into school early, the fall I turned four. She wanted Rachel and me to be three grades apart, not two, and with Rachel’s spring birthday, she needed to either hold her back or push me forward, and everyone saw even then that there would be no holding Rachel back. Mama had this weird theory that we would be better friends if we had more distance at school. And we are very close, which is wonderful. But we might have been close anyway. I didn’t understand for years what happened, that Daddy changed the number because too many people had played it and they couldn’t cover the payout.

So her father’s game was rigged, too.

Rachel may have been the family intellect, but Linda was no slouch. She had gotten into Duke on scholarship, only to find herself profoundly homesick. She had thought she wanted a new start, but found it wearying, trying to create a history that didn’t invite questions. She transferred to Goucher in the middle of her sophomore year. Bambi had been upset about that, far more upset than Linda could understand, given how much money was saved. Linda was happier at Goucher, too, where people knew just enough not to ask too many questions. Her only problem was that life as a commuter student at an all-girl school didn’t make for the best dating life. She volunteered for the Anderson campaign because some girl said it would be a good way to meet men.

She had met a lot of men, many of them keen to date the pretty new volunteer, some of them even suitable, if not Greg and Norman. But Linda, who had come looking for dates, ended up caring only about the candidate. Not that she ever got to speak to him or spend time with him. She met him only once, the night of the debate, when he was introduced to all the local volunteers. She was not invited to the dinner afterward, nor did she expect to be. But she was thrilled to wake up the next morning and discover that the received wisdom was that JBA had won the debate. A giddy day or two had followed before she realized how meaningless that victory was.

She had been so naïve about politics. Lord, she hadn’t even understood how the Electoral College worked, and it still made her angry to see the election called with less than 100 percent of the vote in. She had thought a presidential race was one in which two men-three in this case-came before a nation and explained their positions and then the best man would win. The game was rigged. How could a man like John Anderson not get more votes? Her mother had said Linda was throwing both her vote and her time away, but Linda didn’t feel that way. In fact, she had believed so profoundly in the importance of her vote that she had committed a felony this morning in order to cast it.

It happened like this. Linda, usually the most organized of the Brewer girls, had registered to vote in North Carolina when she enrolled there in 1977. She had gone to a school meeting in the fall of her freshman year, in which it was explained that the town-and-gown tension in Durham could be improved if more students registered to vote, demonstrated a commitment to the community. So she meant to register there. When she moved back home a year and a half later, it hadn’t been an election year so there was no urgency to register at all. Caught up in the Anderson campaign this summer, she had quite forgotten that she had never registered in her home state. Yes, she saw the irony in forgetting to register when she had been sitting at a card table at the mall, signing up other people.

Embarrassed, she didn’t dare confide in anyone on the campaign. Instead she had asked her uncle Bert, who told her that all she had to do was swear on a form that she was a registered voter at her mother’s address, that she had sent in the application earlier this fall.

“It is a felony,” he said. “But it’s not like there’s going to be a recount that forces them to go over all the ballots.”

“It might be closer than you think,” she told Bert. He laughed and ruffled her hair, as if she were still eleven or twelve.

But this morning, only eighteen hours ago, Linda still believed that anything was possible, that improbable victories could be pulled out in the final moment of any contest. During the Nixon years, people had spoken of a Silent Majority. Reagan had invoked the term during this election. But the true silent majority, in Linda’s mind, were young people like herself. Oh, they made a lot of noise, but they forgot to follow through with the actions that really counted. It almost didn’t seem right for people over the age of sixty-five to vote. They had so little time left. Shouldn’t the policies affecting the future be set by candidates chosen by those who had to live in the world longer? If you were going to weight the importance of certain states, why not weight individual votes? When Linda was eleven, a film called Wild in the Streets had shown up on a second-run bill at the Pikes Theater and it centered on the nation’s first twenty-two-year-old president, made possible when the voting age was lowered to fourteen. Linda had gone to see it three times. (The lead actor was very handsome.) Crazy, yes-but it made more sense to her than the Electoral College. She wanted to pound her fists on the bar, say It’s so unfair.

Instead, she asked Victor for another white wine.

A man came into the bar. He glanced around in confusion, taking in the barely audible television, Greg and Norman wolfing down appetizers, Linda staring into her wineglass.

“Are you still open?” he asked. “Is this a private party?”

Although the question was addressed to Victor, Linda answered. “It’s clearly not a party,” she said. “As for private, anyone is welcome, but do you really want to be a part of this group?”

“Did someone die?”

The man was in his twenties, Linda guessed, with the most amazing eyelashes. He has eyes like a giraffe, she thought. Linda liked giraffes.

“Just my hopes and dreams.” She meant to sound blithe, devil may care, but her mouth crumpled, ruining the effect. “We all worked on the Anderson campaign.”

“Well-” He cast around for something to say. “Well,” he repeated. “Good for you. You did something you believe in.”

“But we didn’t change anything,” she said. “We didn’t even matter.” While it would have been awful to be the spoiler, to be blamed for Carter’s loss, it was worse, she decided now, to have had no effect at all.

“You don’t topple giants the first time out, despite what Jack and the Beanstalk, or even David and his Goliath, would have you think. It takes years of work.”

His kindness felt patronizing, as kindness often can. Linda drew herself up haughtily. “Really? Have you climbed any beanstalks lately?”

“I’m a public defender,” he said. “Which is as close to being Sisyphus as any mortal might ever know.” A sweet smile. “Don’t be mad at me.”

“Who says I was?”

“I can’t seem to get on the right foot with you. Should I go out and come back in again?”

And with that, he walked out of the bar, then returned, hopping on one foot.

“I’m a unipod,” he said. “I’m here to audition for the role of Tarzan.”

“You stole that,” Greg said. “Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.”

But Linda had to laugh. Her father had tried such stunts when Bambi was stewing. No, not stewing, quite the opposite. Bambi had gotten cold when angry with Felix. Very cold and quiet and grim. They called her the Frigidaire when she was angry.

Linda did a swift, familiar calculation-should she sleep with this man tonight? She had slept with exactly four men since she lost her virginity at seventeen, and she liked to think of herself as progressive, the kind of woman who took what she wanted when she wanted it, although it was a lot trickier since she had moved home.

No, not tonight. It might not be love at first sight, but she was in for the long haul if he was, she knew that much. Her next campaign, only with a lot more potential. She wondered how he would feel when he found out she was a college senior, living at home. She wondered what he looked like naked.

“I’m Linda,” she said.

“Henry,” he said. “Henry Sutton.”

By three that morning, they were making out in her car. It was hard to say who pulled back that first night. Both would claim later that they were waiting for a more genteel first time. That opportunity presented itself two weeks later, when Bambi went to New York with Michelle, Lorraine, and Lorraine’s daughter, Sydney. It was designed to be a whole Eloise-at-the-Plaza experience for the two girls, although Michelle, at seven, considered herself too sophisticated for both Eloise and five-year-old Sydney. If Linda hadn’t been so anxious to have the house to herself, she might have used Michelle’s antipathy to dissuade Bambi from such an extravagance. Her mother was good, most of the time. But in New York, with Lorraine, she would buy clothes she couldn’t afford, try to keep pace with her old friend, who was privy to Bambi’s difficulties. Maybe that was why it was so important to Bambi to try to hold her own with Lorraine.

But, for once, Linda forgot about everyone else-her mother, Michelle, Rachel, John Anderson, all the sad men she had to prop up. She even forgot about the phantom sister who had passed through the Lord Baltimore Hotel and may or may not have been Julie Saxony. For one blissful Saturday evening, she thought only of herself and what she wanted, opening the door to long-lashed Henry Sutton, who actually brought her a bouquet of supermarket daisies. She was mindful, as the door swung open, of the story of her parents’ courtship, how they had married less than eleven months after her father had found his way to her mother’s door the day after meeting her. And Linda had long ago deduced that she had attended her parents’ marriage in utero, not the cause of the nuptials, but a happy by-product of a progressive courtship.

There are worse ways to begin, she thought, lying beneath Henry in her mother’s bed, the only double bed in the house, taking care to cheat her face to the left so she would not be staring into her father’s eyes in the framed photograph on the nightstand.

Yes, they were very large and brown. She knew that. She knew that. But the man with her-he was gentle, a dreamer and idealist, someone who would never agree that the game was rigged. He probably thought she was a dreamer, too, given the circumstances of their meeting, but even as Linda was abandoning herself in this moment, she was also giving in to the pragmatic person she was meant to be. She would have to take care of both of them, she thought, circling her legs around his waist. She had to take care of everyone. That was okay; she was used to it. She remembered walking up the front walk, after the fireworks at the club. Her mother knew before they crossed the threshold. How had she known? Bert had taken Bambi to the side at the club, but Bert was forever taking her mother to the side over the last few months, since the indictment, then the trial. Bambi had run up the walk, thrown open the door, run from room to room, calling his name. “Felix? Felix?” There was no note, no reason to believe he was gone, yet Linda slowly began to see the details that made the case-the small gap in the closet so packed with suits, a drawer in his valet, opened and emptied of his best cuff links. Michelle was upset by their mother’s tears and shouts, so Linda put her to bed, singing to her as the little one cried, “Tummy hurts, tummy hurts.” She had gorged herself on ice cream and cake at the club. Then Linda and Rachel came into this very room and sat on this very bed with their mother’s arms around them. “He better be alone,” their mother had said, mystifying them. “Will we ever see him again?” Rachel had asked. Linda knew they would not.

“What are you thinking about?” Henry asked, tracing her jawline with his finger.

“The last time I saw fireworks,” she said.

And he kissed her, believing himself complimented.

March 13, 2012

Whenever life took him outside the Beltway, Sandy felt as if he were escaping Earth’s orbit, breaking free of a particularly harsh gravity. As built up as the suburbs got, as bad as the rush-hour traffic was, a drive west on a bright March day lifted his spirits. Maybe he should go for more drives in the country. Did people still do that? Probably not. Most people spent too much time in their cars to consider driving fun, or recreational.

Sykesville, Andrea Norr had said when she called out of the blue this morning. Go see this guy in Sykesville. Despite five decades in Baltimore, Sandy needed a moment to remember where Sykesville was. Those towns between Baltimore and Frederick kind of blended together for him-Sykesville, Westminster, Clarksville. Sykesville was the closest of the three, it turned out, not even twenty minutes from the Beltway, and Sandy took the exit with something akin to regret. He’d like to keep going, driving on this straight, uneventful highway, past Frederick, into the mountains. And he could. No one would notice, no one would care.

But there’s no point in running away when no one wants you back, so he might as well go interview Chef Boyardee.

“Bayard,” Andrea Norr had said. “Chet Bayard. I was reading Chowhound, and it turns out he has a new place after all these years.”

“Reading what?” She had called Sandy at 8:00 A.M., which probably seemed late on a horse farm, but Sandy enjoyed taking his time in the morning, inching into the day. He had worked midnights much of his life and was still barely on speaking terms with the hours between six and ten.

“It’s a website for people who are interested in food.”

“I know that.” He did. He thought about the woman he had met. Short, stocky, but it had seemed like her natural build, not a body nourished on particularly good or bad food. She had made that god-awful tea, too, and gone back for seconds. Someone who ate for fuel, someone who didn’t pay attention to restaurants.

“He was on the Eastern Shore ten years ago,” he said, the file alive in his mind. “When the body was found. Cops took a statement then.”

“Well, he’s in Sykesville now, got a new place.”

Hadn’t Tubman suggested that Andrea Norr had reasons to divert attention away from her? “So you just happened to be reading this website and you just happened to see this guy’s name and you just happened to remember he was the last person to talk to your sister that day and, bam, there he was?”

“No, I did a Google search on him and he came up. I’m surprised you haven’t done that.”

“He was on my list. There are a lot of people in that file. And I thought he was all the way down to Cambridge or something.” And I have better sources than Google, for Christ’s sake. Everyone with a computer thinks they’re so slick.

“That place in Cambridge closed a few years ago, but he’s trying his luck again.”

“Poor sap.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” He would humor her, go out there. He didn’t like relatives telling him what to do. Usually, he had already done it. But he wanted to keep Andrea Norr as his ally in this. She knew something. He just wasn’t sure what it was, or if she even realized she had something of significance to share. He’d prefer that she be a liar, actually. You could break a liar down.

Poor sap. Sandy couldn’t help evaluating Sykesville as a location for what was supposed to be an upscale French restaurant. The heart of the old town was charming, but it wasn’t a destination. The way Sandy understood it-and he had learned much of what he knew about the restaurant business in hindsight-you really needed an inn to make a go of a place like this, either one that was connected to the restaurant or a place within walking distance. The Inn at Little Washington, or even Volt out in Frederick. That had been Julie Saxony’s business plan when she disappeared-add a big-time restaurant to a B and B, then people would have a reason to come to the B and B. But she had been in Havre de Grace, which had the river, things to do. Sykesville struck Sandy as too close in for a weekend getaway, too far for a big night out.

But the place looked nice enough, and the posted menu was promising. Very traditional French, so old-fashioned as to feel new again. Coq au vin, daily fish specials, lentils, cassoulet.

He tried the heavy wooden door, found it unlocked.

“We’re closed,” a young woman said without looking up. “No lunch during the week.”

“I’m not here for a meal. I’m here to talk to”-he squinted at a piece of paper in his hand, although he knew the name-“Chester Bayard.”

“Chester-oh, Chet.” She called back to the kitchen. “Chet, some guy for you.”

The man who came out of the kitchen wore a chef’s coat with his full name embroidered on the breast pocket: Chester Bayard. Cocksman, Sandy thought. Sandy could always tell. It was in the tilt of the head, the predatory nature of the man’s eyes. He was probably sleeping with this girl, who was much too young for him. He probably screwed every attractive woman with whom he worked. He had probably screwed Julie Saxony, or tried. He was one of those guys. It was what he did, automatic as breathing.

“I’m an investigator with the Baltimore City Police Department.” When he came in cold like this, he never said homicide, not first thing.

“A detective?”

“Once, but I retired. I’m a consultant now. I do cold cases.”

“Murders.”

Everyone was so goddamn savvy these days. Or thought they were. Yet this guy, this chef, would probably be appalled if Sandy presumed to know his trade based on watching a couple of shows on the Food Network.

“Yes, Julie Saxony in this case. I’m going to assume you remember her.”

Bayard nodded. “I’m glad you’re taking an interest. She was a nice lady, gave me my start as a chef. You want to sit?”

He indicated a table, then picked up a bottle from a pine buffet-Ricard. He poured the yellowish liquid into a small glass, added water from a ceramic pitcher. He was way too into the ritual, which meant he was either a show-off or a boozer. He offered Sandy a glass, but he passed. He drank with friends. Well, he used to. He hadn’t really kept up with any of the other detectives after he retired. Bayard then waggled his fingers at the girl, her signal to leave. She flounced out, clearly miffed, although Sandy couldn’t tell if it was the fact of being dismissed or the way it had been done.

“Why now?” Bayard asked. “It’s been-”

“Twenty-six years since she disappeared, eleven since a homicide was established.” Sandy was aware that he was finishing the sentence, but not answering the question.

“Has something happened?”

“Not really. Sometimes cold cases are nudged back into being by new information, but sometimes we just look at the file and decide there are things that were never properly explored.”

“Is there new information?”

“I wouldn’t tell you if there was.”

“The detectives, the first time around. Small-town cops, didn’t know what they were doing. They did a shit job, no?”

“No. They did okay. It’s hard without a body. Not impossible, but hard. Havre de Grace police don’t work a lot of murders, but their file was complete. Woman drove away, was never seen again. They talked to a lot of people, followed every lead they had. They talked to you.”

“Well, I was the one who reported her missing. They kept asking me about the boyfriend.”

“You mean Felix Brewer?”

“Yeah. That guy. Stupid waste of time.”

Sandy couldn’t help himself. “Everyone thinks everything’s a waste of time when it’s not the thing that leads to an answer.” He paused, taken by his own turn of phrase, considered its larger implications. It could be a philosophy, almost. Then he realized it was a variation on that hippy-dippy shit about life’s journeys. Still, it was a good rule in police work. Ruling stuff out was a kind of an answer. “It would have been irresponsible not to consider it, given the world in which he moved.”

“She never spoke of him.”

“Really?”

“Not to me. Never mentioned him or her past. She was hurt when the business became successful and he was always part of the things that were written.”

“Never” was a big word, in Sandy’s experience. If love and hate were intertwined, so were never and forever.

The girl came back with a wooden board of cheese and fruit, a long loaf of French bread already sliced.

“Dig in,” the chef said. “It’s almost noon, no?” It was the second time he had allowed himself that Gallic inflection, but Sandy thought this guy was about as French as French’s mustard.

“No, thanks.” He noticed that the girl lingered, pretending to be busy in the immaculate dining room. Ears big as pitchers. Nabby’s expression, a mangling of what other people said about little pitchers and big ears.

“What kind of relationship did you have with Julie?”

“Very good. She was a great boss. And she gave me my start, got me out of the catering business.”

“Was the relationship strictly business?” Bayard’s girl was so fair that Sandy could see the tips of her ears flame red. Honey, this guy is in his fifties. Do you think he’s never been laid before?

“We were friends.”

“More than that?”

Bayard glanced at the young woman. Her back was still to them, but her posture was so rigid that it seemed as if she were literally holding her breath, waiting for the answer.

“I would have liked that. But she was past having lovers. A young woman, still in her thirties, and she claimed she was ‘done with all that.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers. “She needed me as a friend and I was that. I was-”

He stopped.

“Go on.”

“No place to go. I was her friend.”

“A friend with-hope?”

He laughed. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Although-not to be cruel-she wasn’t aging well. She dieted herself until her figure was very severe-anything to get rid of her curves, to hide her old self. She didn’t want people to see the dancer in her.”

“Dancer’s a nice way to say it.”

“Ah. Now see, that was the problem, no? People are so judgmental about strippers. She wasn’t a whore. I’m not saying that girls on the Block didn’t do tricks back then, but she didn’t. She was Felix Brewer’s girl within days of starting there.”

The details were awfully specific, Sandy thought, given she had never spoken of her old life to Bayard.

“She danced in a G-string and pasties. Girls today, they go to the beach in less clothing.” The chef’s eyes rested on his girl, now trying to create busywork over at the bus station, unfolding and folding napkins. He was bored with her, Sandy decided. He was a man who got bored quickly.

“Did she carry a torch for Felix?”

Something caught light in Bayard’s eyes, and he aimed his forefinger at Sandy’s nose. “Do you know you are the first person to ask me the question in that way?”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“No insult intended to your brothers in blue, but no one ever asked me what was in Julie’s heart. It was always-‘Was she in touch with him? Were there mysterious calls?’ They checked her phone bills, her bank accounts. I think they even pulled the records on the pay phone a few blocks away. They were very interested to know if there had been contact, if she had any knowledge of him. As far as I know, there wasn’t, she didn’t. But she was still in love with him.”

“How could you know that if she never talked about it?”

“I know women.”

A smug thing to say, something only an asshole would say. Didn’t make it untrue.

“That bug you? Her carrying a torch for this long-gone guy, while there you were, right under her nose?”

The name is always in the file. Always.

Bayard laughed. “I suppose you have to ask that. But I also have to assume that you have reviewed all the information and know that I spent July 3, 1986, prepping for what we expected to be a very big weekend. We were doing-not exactly a soft open, more of a test for friends. The restaurant was months from its official opening, we hadn’t even finished the renovation of the dining room. I was pretty much in full view of my staff from the moment she drove away. I asked her to go to a kitchen-supply place for me.”

Sandy did know that.

“You reported her missing that very day, right? She tells you she’s going to Baltimore to go shop at Saks Fifth Avenue and you make the first call at ten thirty that night. What made you so sure that something had gone wrong? There are all sorts of reasons for people to stay out late. Traffic jams, a breakdown, running into an old friend, having dinner.”

“The car had just been serviced two days before. And stores close, you know, around nine, and she had already been gone so long.”

“Some women can easily shop that long.”

“Not Julie. She was very decisive. And she had a woman who pulled things for her, to make it easier.”

“Pulled things?”

“Oh, you know-what do they call it? A personal shopper.”

“Did you mention that to the police at the time?”

“I think so. I don’t know. They did take it seriously. Her failure to come home that night, the following day. And the kitchen-supply store was pretty definitive that she had never made it there. But there was the boyfriend, the car-where did they find it?”

“At the Giant Foods on Reisterstown Road, more than a month later.”

“Right. So I assumed they were thinking-well, that fits. She met someone, left the car, didn’t plan on coming back. The thing is, she made no provision for the business. Once she was gone, it went to shit. I didn’t have power of attorney. Neither did her sister. It was a mess, straightening all that out. She had consulted her lawyer a week earlier, but she hadn’t done anything. This was not a woman planning to leave.”

“How did you meet her in the first place?”

“Catering business.”

“Yours or someone else’s?”

“Someone else’s. Julie was looking for a great chef, but she needed someone she could afford. She was very cagey, putting the word out for someone who was good, but not in a position to open his own restaurant. I was practically an indentured servant. I did all the work, the owner reaped the benefits. But I had no name, no backers willing to take a chance on me.”

“But how did she find you?”

The chef played with his Ricard, adding water, swirling it, making quite a production. More show-off than drunk, Sandy decided. “That’s another question no one thought to ask. It’s quite harmless, really, but I didn’t want to talk about it at the time. Out of respect to her, because it just loops around again to the same old topic, and I really did think that was a distraction.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m aware of that.” He tapped a cigarette out of a pack, glanced at it. “I guess I can break the smoking laws in my own damn restaurant when it’s closed. It might be closed forever soon enough. I can’t seem to catch a break in this business. My food is good, too. But that’s never enough.”

“I know,” Sandy said. The chef shrugged as if he thought Sandy was making polite conversation. How could some cop know anything about how hard it was to run a restaurant? “Anyway, how did you meet her?”

“My boss was the caterer of choice for big events among the rich Jews on the Northwest Side. Weddings, anniversary parties, bar mitzvahs. A woman named Lorraine Gelman hired me to do a big party, then referred me to her friend, Bambi Brewer, and I did her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Julie called me a few days before the event, told me she was looking for a chef for a new restaurant, something very ambitious, but she wanted to sample the food, get a sense of what I could do. So she dropped by, hung out in the kitchen during the party.”

“Julie Saxony was in the kitchen during this party for Felix’s daughter?”

Bayard smiled, as if at a memory. “Yeah. I didn’t have all the pieces then. Didn’t understand why she was skittish, why she all but ran into the pantry when one of the family members came into the kitchen. I had tried to talk her out of visiting this particular party, asked that she wait for an occasion where I would be doing something more impressive than crepes and frites. I realized later that it wasn’t entirely accidental, her choosing that event to sample my food. Sometimes, I think she hired me just to save face, you know? Plus, I am a great fucking chef. But that’s not enough to make it in this business.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Julie disappearing-I never caught a break after that. That restaurant was my big shot. I left Maryland, came back. Tried a superlocal thing on the Eastern Shore, but that was ahead of its time and too far from the Washington money. Now I’m trying to make traditional work. Want my advice? Look at what I’m doing now and do it in five years, and you’ll be a rich man.”

“What’s the old saying? How do you make a million dollars in the restaurant business?”

Bayard smiled, finished his Ricard, then finished the joke. “Start with two million.”

April 12, 1986

Rachel washed her hands, taking far more time than necessary, but she was enjoying listening to Michelle’s young friends as they ran in and out of the bathroom, puffed up with their intrigues. Joey says he likes you more than a friend, but not quite as a girlfriend. Michael kissed Sarah even though he’s going with Jessica. Baz-Baz?-says you’ll be cute after your nose job. Rachel loved kids, of every age, but you couldn’t pay her to be thirteen again, not even a thirteen-year-old beauty such as her sister, who had been pulling a pout all evening over this party, for which their mother had spent thousands, maybe tens of thousands.

“When did bat mitzvahs start having themes?” Linda had asked Rachel rather crankily when they entered the Peabody Hotel’s party room, transformed into the Rue Brewer in the Thirteenth Arrondissement. The thirteen was for Michelle’s age, of course. The Brewers had no intimate knowledge of Paris.

“They all do now,” said Rachel, who had been her mother’s confidante throughout the planning, in part because the mere mention of the party triggered Linda’s temper. “One boy in her class did baseball-the family created an entire deck of baseball cards, with all the kids and their ‘stats’-and another girl did Madonna, if you can believe it. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, and I can’t imagine what she wore. Then that one girl, Chelsea, whom Michelle dislikes, also decided to do a Paris theme and hers was first, in March. When Michelle got the invitation, she tried to wheedle Mom into changing the whole thing-I think she wanted to do some variation on Hollywood-but Mother was firm with her.”

“For once,” Linda had said, apparently determined to be in a bad mood all evening. She was seven months pregnant, and the hormones were taking their toll.

Ah, but Michelle deserved her party, Rachel thought, drying her hands and continuing to eavesdrop. (The girl who liked Joey had sent her emissaries back into the party to further parse his feelings. She remained behind with two others. She was pretty and appeared confident, but Rachel, as the older sister to a truly confident girl, recognized fake bravado when she saw it.) And the ballroom was really very charming, with the catering stations set up as pushcarts and sidewalk cafés. Artists sat at easels, drawing caricatures of the guests, and a strolling band of musicians played the kind of music heard on the sound track for Charade. Excessive, yes, but the crepes and pommes frites and madeleines were outstanding, not always a given at such a large-scale party. Lorraine Gelman had been right to crow about her caterer.

But-ninety-five dollars a head, and that didn’t include the open bar-Rachel didn’t want to do the math. The per-plate fee also didn’t include the cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Figure another five hundred dollars or so. It would probably be tasteless, too; in Rachel’s experience, the more elaborate the cake, the less enjoyable it was. She had requested German chocolate cake for her bat mitzvah, which gave her grandmother Ida palpitations. Nana Ida could not stand anything German, although she made an exception for the Singers, the German Jewish family into which Rachel had married two years ago. And an exception for the BMW that Marc’s parents had given them as a wedding gift, in which Ida loved to ride. “It’s the least we could do,” Marc’s father said, “given that you kids took us off the hook for a wedding.”

Yes, Rachel had wanted to say. It really is the least you could do. You’re very good at figuring out the least expected of you and doing just that, nothing more. Besides, my mother would have paid for the wedding, insisted on it, which is why we had to elope. But for all your alleged class, you have no antennae for the feelings of others.

While Rachel had eloped, terrified by the unmatchable elegance of the engagement party thrown by Marc’s family, Linda had the smallest wedding possible, only family and the Gelmans. A brunch at the Gelmans’ house, coconut cake with whipped icing. Now that had been a good cake. My life in cakes, Rachel thought wryly. An interesting structure for a book of poetry. Except she wasn’t a poet. She had tried to be, but it just wasn’t in her. Instead, she had settled on a degree in semiotics, a very fashionable thing to study at Brown and an excuse to lose herself in the words that she could not corral on the page, no matter how she tried. There had been two Baltimore boys in the program, one named Ira, whom she never got to know, and Marc, whom she spent three years avoiding because they had been at Park together and she was all too familiar with his rep as a snob and a player.

Then she fell in love with him. Crazy-insane-head-over-heels in love with him. Marc was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And now the worst.

Respect your first instincts about people, her father had told her the day of her bat mitzvah. People make fun of love at first sight, but it’s just good instincts.

You fell in love with Mama at first sight.

I did. And she with me, although she always pretends she didn’t.

Had Rachel fallen in love at first or second sight? Had she loved Marc back in high school, but pretended indifference because he was out of her reach? She could no longer sort it out. She loved him, he loved her-and he had hurt her more than anyone she had ever known.

Sometimes, Rachel wondered if her parents’ big romantic story would be less of a burden if Felix had actually stayed. Certainly, that charade of perfect love at first sight couldn’t have been sustained as his daughters had grown, become more adept at picking up subtle signs that things were far from perfect. And yet-the myth survived, even after the terrible confidences that Bambi had shared with the two older girls not long after their father left. It was Michelle who was growing up with the full fairy tale, with no knowledge of the other woman. Women, although Bambi seemed to be bothered only by the last one, Julie Saxony, whom she described in strangely poetic terms. Flaxen hair. Cornflower-blue eyes. Those pretty words were worse, somehow, than the gag-worthy information that their father’s girlfriend was a stripper.

The girl who pined for Joey suddenly squealed and ran out of the ladies’ room, her handmaidens in tow, and Rachel was left alone. She sighed and tried to do something with her hair, finally admitting to herself that her dawdling had as much to do with avoiding Marc as it did with playing Margaret Mead in the ladies’ room. She poked at her usually limp brown locks, which had been amplified by Bambi’s hairdresser into seriously big hair, with bangs and tendrils that looked sexily spontaneous until one tried to touch a strand. It all but repelled her comb. She then stuck an experimental finger into her outsize skirt, but the dent repaired itself immediately. Bambi had insisted that all three daughters buy their dresses at Barneys New York, and the result was that the Brewer women were so fashion-forward that they looked hilariously out of place at a Baltimore bat mitzvah. Rachel wished she could have had the cash her mother spent on the dress, but then-she would never take money from her mother. Like Linda, she was terribly worried about the cost of this event. She just wasn’t in a dull fury about it. Besides, Bambi swore that it was okay, that she had found a way to get the money without putting too much of a strain on the household. Which probably meant she had gone to Bert.

Rachel needed money, too. What a joke, being married to a rich man and being so poor. It would be one thing if Marc’s family were cheap across the board. But Marc’s parents were exceedingly generous with themselves and their children. They were stingy only with those who had the bad judgment to marry into the family. Sometimes, Rachel would find herself staring mutely, pleadingly, at her brother-in-law, wishing he were the kind of person who would go outside and smoke a cigarette with her so they could share their mutual pain. But that tall drink of water, that stupid shaygetz, was so naïve he didn’t even know they called him the stupid shaygetz behind his back. Which was odd, because the Singers pretended they didn’t know Yiddish most of the time. They were too grand, too many generations removed. Oh, how Rachel wished her father had been there the night of the engagement dinner, if only for his commentary on the finger bowls. At least Bambi had been able to humble them a little, through her sheer beauty and poise. But the money in that house-that evening, Rachel had watched her mother’s hand go to her necklace, her favorite diamond earrings. A stranger couldn’t tell, but Rachel knew that Bambi was unnerved by her new in-laws.

She wouldn’t have been if Felix were still around.

Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it. She assumed Linda and her mother felt the same way, but they seldom spoke of him. They allowed themselves a handful of nice stories-“Remember the time at Gino’s?” “Remember the bumper cars?” “Remember the time at the Prime Rib?”-and that was all.

Rachel had avoided Marc at Brown because he knew her story. Rachel had fallen so hard for him because she didn’t have to tell him her story. Upon arriving at college, she was determined not to lie about her father, yet also intent on avoiding the emotional promiscuity that dorm life seemed to bring out in people. Sex was one thing, but why were girls so slutty with their life stories? But Marc knew. Knew her and didn’t pity her.

“So here you are,” Linda said, coming through the swinging door. “Marc looks unhappy.”

“It’s a pose he affects,” Rachel said. “He’s more handsome when he’s brooding.”

“What’s going on with you two?”

“We had a fight.” Not quite true, but they were going to have one, tomorrow.

“Oh, you two are always fighting.”

“Not always. But it’s normal to fight sometimes,” Rachel said, hoping this was true. “You just think everyone should be like you and Henry in the Peaceable Kingdom.”

“We fight,” Linda said with a self-satisfaction that belied her words. She sat down carefully on one of the tufted stools. Although hugely pregnant, Linda moved with her usual grace.

“You yell at Henry as though he were a bad dog and he hangs his head and asks for your forgiveness. Or laughs at you. Either way, it’s not real fighting.”

“We happen to agree on most things. What do you and Marc have to fight about, anyway? Everything is going great for you.”

Did it really look like that? Even to her sister? Rachel tried to stand outside her own life and see what others saw. The nice town house, a gift from Marc’s parents, although in a rather sterile development. She would have liked to live in one of the old neighborhoods near downtown, but when someone else is paying, choice is curtailed. Marc worked for his family’s real estate company, on the commercial side. Big deals, big money, he liked to say. Marc would rather sell one warehouse than five homes, whereas Rachel thought the only lure in real estate was the opportunity to make people happy. Rachel was a copywriter at a Baltimore ad agency, but the job was a favor called in by her father-in-law, and she wrote about things so boring that she literally fell asleep at her desk, which did not impress her boss or coworkers.

“Marc’s parents couldn’t even be bothered to attend the service this morning. Didn’t you notice? His father claimed he had an important golf game. There has never, in the history of time, been a truly important golf game.”

“The only thing I noticed was how everyone turned around when the door slammed at the exact moment Michelle got up to give her haftorah. But I’m looking at the bright side-now everyone will think she was rattled, and that’s why she did such a shitty job.”

“Linda!” But she was right about Michelle’s abominable Hebrew.

“Is it too much to ask that she make even a halfhearted attempt to do a good job after all the expense and time Mother put in? She had her own tutor, Rachel, spent countless hours with him. And it wasn’t just the Hebrew. Her speech was ridiculous.”

“I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“Rachel-she incorporated the lyrics of a Wham! song into the story of the Exodus. It was borderline sacrilegious. Make the bread before you go-go?”

“ ‘Lose the yeast or it will be too slow-slow.’ I thought it was funny.”

“Rachel, our semiotician. How’s that working out for you as a career?” But Linda, while frequently furious, was not cruel. She put her hand on her sister’s arm by way of apology. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for three years. And I’m just so pissed that Mother spent all this money she doesn’t have.”

“She told me it would be okay. She swore. She said she had a little windfall.”

“From what? Aunt Harriet is still alive and kicking, with no signs of letting go. She’s out there right now, stuffing rolls in her purse.”

“She wouldn’t say. But she said there’s even enough left over to give her a little cushion.”

But not enough cushion, Rachel thought, to bail Rachel out. If she left Marc, she would have nothing. She had no savings and quite a bit of college debt. The job, provided as a favor to his father, would disappear. The car, too, would be taken back; the title was in his parents’ name. And there was the prenup. Technically a postnup, presented to the happy couple when they had returned from their Las Vegas elopement. How Rachel and Marc had laughed at his silly parents. Why not sign a document that had no meaning, they agreed. They would be together forever.

Rachel believed Marc had been sincere in that moment. He loved her and they were kindred spirits. He even wrote poetry and-knife to her heart-his was good. Second knife to her heart, he abandoned it. “I don’t want to get an MFA and teach and be poor,” he told her. “I grew up with money. I like it.” How could Rachel argue? She had known life with and without it, and there was no contest: money was better.

But if she had Marc’s gift for writing and if her father were still around-she didn’t doubt that he would encourage her, support her. Your family should be your Medicis. Maybe if she found a real job, on her own-

“Do you believe it?” Linda asked.

“What?” she said, pretending she had been listening all the while, not lost inside herself.

“You know. The story. The door.”

“Oh, no. You know how people go in and out throughout the service.”

“But the doors usually just creak, not make that hollow booming sound. Everyone turned around-except Mother.”

Rachel smiled. The two sisters had an almost twinlike closeness. Nice for them, hard on Michelle.

“You’re saying Mom is like the defendant in that old story about the trial where the attorney announces the real killer is about to walk through the door. He doesn’t turn around because he knows he’s the real killer. So Mom knows that nothing can bring Daddy back, not even Michelle’s bat mitzvah.”

“If he were to come back, it would be for that, though.”

“Really? Not college graduations, not our marriages? Only Michelle’s bat mitzvah would bring him back?”

“You didn’t go to yours. Graduation, I mean. And I had no interest in mine because I was already planning my marriage to Henry. Did it ever occur to you,” Linda said, dropping her crankiness for earnestness, “that we both chose the kind of weddings where an absent father was less noticeable? You in Vegas, me at a brunch in the house.”

“We were only trying to save Mother money.”

“And save ourselves from disappointment. Think about it, Rachel.” Linda rose to her feet, swaying a little, like a balloon on a string, but still very graceful. “There’s always been this stupid fiction that he comes back, like some benevolent spirit, standing at the rear of the synagogue, like Elijah on Passover. He’s never come back. And he’s never coming back.”

Linda looked very pale.

“Are you okay?”

“I think I’m going to throw up. Other women have morning sickness during the first trimester. I have evening sickness in the final one.”

Linda walked with admirable dignity to the nearest stall. Rachel waited for her, noting that her sister managed to vomit rather quietly. Ah, the powers of the trained PR person, so skilled in papering things over that she knows how to mask the sound of retching. Or maybe she simply hadn’t started yet.

A girl entered, rubbing her eyes.

“Sydney.” Rachel had known Sydney Gelman, now eleven, all her life. She had been adopted when Bert and Lorraine despaired of having their own children. Less than two years later, Lorraine gave birth to twin boys.

“Oh-hello, Rachel.”

“Are you crying?”

“No. I just had an allergic reaction to the shellfish in the crepes, so Mother asked the waiter to take it away and bring me a fruit plate.”

Sydney was plump, always had been. It was a sweet, healthy plumpness, the kind that came with lustrous hair and shining eyes. Rachel thought Sydney would be much less pretty if forced to lose weight. But Aunt Lorraine lived off broiled grapefruit and Tab and didn’t see why Sydney couldn’t as well.

“Did you get to have the crepes suzette at least?”

“I don’t think I saw those.”

“Why don’t you come with me and we’ll see if there are some left in the kitchen?”

She started to take Sydney by the hand, something she would have done naturally a few years ago, before she left for college. But Sydney was only five then. To treat her that way now would be disastrous. Rachel sneaked her into the kitchen and procured a plate of sweets for her, despite the murderous glances from the man in charge of the catering crew. What was the big deal? Perhaps he didn’t want anyone eating there, but she and Sydney knew that if they took the plate back into the dining room, Lorraine would find a way to whisk that one away as well. It was a party. No one should have to diet at a party.

“Are you having a good time?”

“It’s okay,” Sydney said. “I don’t know many of these kids because I’m two classes behind them. One girl asked why I was even here and I said Michelle and I were like cousins. And she said I was lying.”

“She’s probably jealous,” Rachel said. “We are like cousins.”

“Michelle doesn’t speak to me.”

“What?”

“Don’t say anything.” Sydney’s voice, while pitched low, was panicky. “I don’t care. Really.”

Sydney was wise in her own way. It would be counterproductive to remonstrate with Michelle, but, oh, Rachel wished her sister weren’t cruel. Rachel and Linda had been kind to everyone, at their father’s insistence. The practice had served them well after he left because there were no grudges, no girls waiting for them to fall.

The party was wrapping up when Rachel returned Sydney to the ballroom. The fact that Sydney was at Rachel’s side softened Bambi’s murderous look, but not Marc’s hurt one. Rachel followed him to the BMW, resolved not to fight. This would be Michelle’s bat mitzvah day, not the day she confronted Marc.

In the car, she realized she had left her wrap behind. He didn’t want to go back and they drove another five minutes, which, as she pointed out to him, only added ten minutes to the trip. Said it nicely, still determined not to fight. The shawl was cashmere, a gift from her mother. There was no way she was going to trust it to the hotel’s lost-and-found overnight.

When she entered the ballroom, it was almost empty of people, although the fake cafés and shops were still standing. A woman was walking the ersatz French boulevard, taking it all in.

“Oh, I-I’m… I’m here to meet the caterer,” she said when she noticed Rachel. “About another job.”

The woman was dressed like the catering crew, in black slacks and a white shirt. She had blond hair and blue eyes, Rachel noted. One might even say flaxen and cornflower blue. She was thin, much too thin. She bolted for the kitchen and Rachel was tempted to follow her, but she let it go, let her go. The encounter was so odd that she had an instantaneous desire to speak to Linda about it, followed by an immediate resolve to never speak of this to anyone. She couldn’t be, she just couldn’t be. Even if she was, it was just one of those Baltimore coincidences. She very well could be hiring the same caterer. Maybe she was getting married. Hooray for her. Rachel found her wrap draped over a chair and headed out into the night.

Back in the car, she sat in silence as Marc wondered aloud again why she had abandoned him all night. He was nudging, trying to pick a fight, then backing away as if nervous about what a quarrel might bring.

“I mean, it’s okay, I can handle talking to Lorraine Gelman, although she bores me silly. She and my mom go all the way back to Park. But why would you do that to me, Rachel? You looked so pretty tonight. I just wanted to be with you. Why did you disappear?”

I don’t know. Because I was having more fun in the bathroom. Because I missed my father so much tonight. Because you have a girlfriend. Some stupid piece on the side who actually sends you notes at our house.

“There were just so many people to talk to,” she said.

Was it really only yesterday that she had opened the hand-lettered note to Marc? She wasn’t a snoop by nature. She had picked it up only because it was from Saks and she assumed it was some stupid flyer for a sale and Marc could be needlessly extravagant. She expected to find a notice of a fur sale, given the time of year, or maybe jewelry tied to Mother’s Day.

Instead she found the most explicit love letter she had ever read. A sex letter would be a better description. Your cock here, your cock there, my mouth on your cock. It seemed as if the letter went on for pages, that it was longer than Ulysses, longer than all twelve volumes in A Dance to the Music of Time, a work that Rachel and Marc both loved, but it was really only a page and a half, and it wouldn’t have been that long if the handwriting had been more controlled. Part of Rachel’s mind detached, imagining Marc’s horror at such pedestrian language, the sloppy handwriting.

Another part of her mind, even more cool and cruel, chimed in: Well, look at you. You are truly your mother’s daughter now, a woman whose husband loves her so much that he sleeps with other women. Love at first sight, love at second sight-what about love at last sight? Is that too much for a Brewer woman to ask? Or does one have to settle as Linda has, for a man who’s sweet but weak and pliable?

How had Rachel ended up living her mother’s life? How could she get out of it with her dignity intact? It was one thing to marry the better poet, but he was supposed to be a better man, too.

“Where are we, Rachel?”

She thought the question existential, but Marc, a suburban boy, had gotten twisted in the city’s one-way streets and ended up making a series of squares.

“You’re going north on Calvert. You should circle back to the JFX here.”

“But I can pick it up in a few blocks, right?” He always asked for her help, always got defensive when she provided it. He couldn’t possibly know-or could he?-that his chosen route took them past Horizon House, one of the high-rises thrown up in the 1960s during yet another abortive Baltimore renaissance. It was not quite the spiffy place it had seemed to Rachel ten years ago when her mother had pointed it out to her two oldest daughters, saying in a strangely matter-of-fact voice: “Your father’s girlfriend lives here, but I bet she’ll be moving now that she has all his money.”

March 14, 2012

The day after his meeting with Bayard, Sandy found himself walking down Thirty-sixth Street. The area appeared to be thriving after a few soft years. He stopped tallying up all the restaurants when he got to five. There was home-style stuff, a noodle place, Mexican and the Golden West, with its eclectic mix of Tex-Mex, Thai, and what Sandy thought of as Elvis-Southern. Deep fried, fatty, disgusting, great. A Cuban restaurant would have been a good addition to the current mix. Had he just been ahead of his time? He had used that excuse, but it felt hollow after hearing Bayard invoke it, a loser’s defense. “You’re an orphan,” Nabby would hiss when he disappointed her. “No one wants you and now I’m stuck with you and you’re good for nothing.”

The cost of picking at other people’s brains for a living was that Sandy was all too aware of the machinations of his own mind, where ideas pinged around like errant pinballs. He had known all along where he was headed when he went out for this walk today. Now he had reached his old building, currently an antiques store full of things he could never afford. Sandy turned his collar up and put his head down, although the wind wasn’t particularly cutting. He felt like a teenager, riding his bike past the home of a crush. Just passing by. See me. Love me.

Then he saw the kid, as he always thought of him, one of his few regulars, coming out of some weird bakery that was all muffins and cupcakes, not an honest roll or loaf of rye to be found. The kid was juggling packages while trying to keep a toddler in tow. Sandy had thought the kid had a baby, not a child who was already walking. Then he realized-this was the same baby. Must be two years since he had last seen this guy. Of course the baby had grown. That’s what babies do. Normal ones.

“Can I give you a hand?” Sandy offered, catching the bakery bag before it tumbled to the ground, even as the big satchel on the kid’s shoulder started to slide.

“Hey, Sandy!” He was impressed at the kid’s ability to pull up his name on the spot. For his part, Sandy couldn’t have said for the life of him what the kid’s name was. And the guy’s seeming joy at seeing Sandy, a marginal acquaintance at best, appeared genuine. Sandy couldn’t remember the last time someone had been that happy to see him. Only Mary. Never Bobby. That should have been a sign, right? A boy should be excited when his dad comes home.

“What’s going on, Sandy? What are you up to since the restaurant closed?”

The kid managed to make it sound positive, as if the restaurant was something Sandy had chosen to leave behind. “I’m a consultant. Doing cold case work for the police department.”

“Hey, that’s great-” He took a few steps, grabbed his daughter by the back of her coat. “This is Scout. Carla Scout, but we somehow ended up calling her Scout.”

“Scout?”

He made a face. “I know. It’s so hipster. But it’s from To Kill a Mockingbird and not the least ironic. Besides, I’ve gone through life being called Crow by most people, despite having the perfectly respectable name of Edgar, and I’m relatively unscathed.”

Now, see, the kid was classy that way. He had managed to remind Sandy of his name without putting it on Sandy. Sandy now remembered that he had never called him Crow but had made a joke out of his real name, dubbing him Fast Eddie. If Sandy were running a proper restaurant, a white tablecloth place, he would want this guy for the front of the house.

“Pupcake,” the girl said, looking up at Sandy with enormous blue eyes, but all kids had big eyes. Scout. That was just a crazy thing to do to any kid, but especially a girl. “More pupcake.”

“She’s pretty,” Sandy said, unsure if she really was, but how could you go wrong, telling a man his daughter was pretty. The girl did have amazing coloring-light eyes with dark hair, the black Irish thing. Like Mary. But her clothing was bizarre-shorts layered over heavy tights, beneath a sensible duffel coat. Sandy wasn’t exactly up-to-date on what the fashionable two-year-olds were wearing. Maybe this was-what did the kid call it?-hipster, too.

“She dresses herself,” offered his old customer. “So are you working on something good?”

Sandy realized he wanted to talk about his case. He suddenly wanted to talk, to have this human moment that so many people took for granted. How was work today, dear?

“It’s actually kinda interesting. Julie Saxony, the girlfriend of Felix Brewer.” No look of recognition. “He’s a guy who skipped town back in the ’70s rather than do the time on a federal gambling rap. Way before your time, I’m guessing.” Details were coming back to him. The kid had grown up somewhere else, but his wife was hard-core Baltimore, the kind of local who was said to be Baltimore born, bred and buttered. “Ten years later, almost to the day he ran, she disappeared. The cops were always pretty sure it was a murder, but the body didn’t surface until 2001.”

“Any particular reason you’re working it?”

“No.” You couldn’t tell a guy like this about a sexy photo, the way a dead woman’s eyes had pulled you in.

“You know, my wife is a private detective.”

“I don’t think I did know that.” Was Sandy so incurious off the job that he had failed to ask one of his few regular customers what his wife did? Or was he just the kind of man who didn’t think about women working in a meaningful way? He had to cop to being both. But the thing about being a murder police is that you spend so much time absorbing other people’s lives that you don’t solicit people’s life stories in your off-hours.

“Anyway, she says money is the thing that drives people. Money and pride.”

Sandy wanted to be polite, but he was getting awfully tired of other people telling him his business. A PI wouldn’t know that much about homicide. Divorce work, maybe. Where, come to think of it, everything was driven by money and pride.

“Most murders,” Sandy said, “come down to stupidity, impulse, and opportunity.”

“Sure, most. But those are-what do you call it? The dunkers?”

Lord, how Sandy wished people would just stop watching cop shows. Only cops should watch cop shows.

The kid continued: “I’m thinking about the cases that go unsolved, which is what cold cases are. The ones where people have done something deliberately, then taken care to cover their tracks.”

“Motives,” Sandy said, not bothering to suppress his sigh. “Well, no one benefited financially from this lady’s death.”

Lady. Would he have called her that a week ago? Maybe not. But the more he knew about her, the more he liked Julie Saxony. She was a go-getter.

“I’ve always been curious-do the police have a lot of access to financial information in a murder? Can you get people’s accounts, do a kind of credit report? I mean, my wife-” He suddenly busied himself, wiping “pupcake” from his daughter’s face, which hadn’t bothered him at all a minute ago. Sandy suspected the kid was about to incriminate his wife, reveal that she had sources that got her information through not exactly legal methods. Must be nice, but she didn’t have to stand behind her work in court, delineate every piece of evidence and how it was obtained. Divorce work was like going to war, and all was fair in love and war.

All was fair in love and war. His brain replayed his own thought, telling him to pay attention, not to let go of what might seem like just another cliché passing through.

“Sure, with the proper paperwork I can get what I need. I mean, it’s not like the movies where I go click, click, click, and some amazing document opens on the computer. But there’s no money to follow here. She had a nice business. Her disappearance didn’t benefit anyone, and it screwed up a lot of people-her employees, her sister. In her absence, they couldn’t work it out. Business went bust.”

“Ah, so what do you think happened? I mean, where do you start?”

“With the original witnesses, every single name in the file-and this file runs to almost eight hundred pages. Of course, I can only get to those who are still around. Twenty-five years, things happen.” He considered the youth of the man in front of him, the sunny disposition. “People die.”

The kid nodded. “Or disappear, or don’t remember. Or they think they remember, which is even worse. Did you know the more we tell a story, the more degraded it becomes? Factually, I mean. It’s like taking a beloved but fragile object out of a box and turning it over in your hands. You damage it every time.”

“That’s interesting.” Sandy wasn’t being polite in this instance. He had begun to pay careful attention to the subject of memory, key in cold cases. He worried that there would be a day when defense attorneys could jettison all testimony based on memory. He really thought the United States ought to go the way of the UK, put cameras up everywhere. Oh, all the ACLU types would howl, but if you’re not a criminal, why would you care? All was fair in love and war.

Love, he thought. Love. It didn’t rule out stupidity or impulse. In fact, love tended to run with that crowd.

“Gotta go,” he said abruptly, aware he was being rude, unable to stop himself. “She’s a cutie.”

He went into a diner, an honest one that dated back to the Avenue’s pre-chic days, and ordered a cup of coffee. He got out a notepad and began doodling. Sometimes, it was better not to have the file in front of you, just your head and some paper.

He re-created the shapes in his head-the major triangle of Julie, Felix, and his wife, who didn’t even show up until the murder file was opened in 2001, and she had been eliminated pretty definitively. Everyone had fixated on Felix when Julie disappeared, but what good does it do to kill your husband’s girlfriend ten years after he’s gone, having left both of you? But there were other triangles. Felix-Julie-the sister. Julie had kind of dumped Andrea for her boyfriend, hadn’t she? Moved out, moved up. He drew another triangle: Felix-Julie-Tubby. The former fat man had met her first, brought her to Felix. Tribute? Or had he wanted her for himself and been surprised when she chose Felix?

Sandy paid for his coffee. A buck twenty-five and this place was cheap by today’s standards. Had he really once lived in a world where a cup of coffee cost a quarter, candy bars were a nickel, hamburgers could be had for less than fifty cents? He never flinched at the gas station, no matter how high the prices got, because it made sense to him that something like gas kept going up, up, up, controlled by all those sheiks. It was the small items of his youth that he remembered. And they had seemed expensive then, coming from Cuba. Expensive and bountiful. The first time he had walked into the pharmacy on Twenty-ninth Street, the one with the soda fountain, he had been overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of his new life. It had taken him forty minutes to choose a candy bar. He told that story to Mary, told her it was a Marathon bar. Mary pointed out that Marathons weren’t around when he was fourteen.

So the kid, Crow, was right. The things Sandy thought he remembered best were the things he was getting wrong. In which case-what did that say about his memories of Mary? Were they wrong? As long as they were loving, did it matter if they were wrong? He wished, as he wished every day, for her company. True, she could drive him mad with her endless analysis of every single personal interaction, but that was what women did.

He doodled a name on his pad: Lorraine Gelman. Indirectly brought the chef and Julie together. Knew Bambi and Felix, probably knew Tubman through her husband, the criminal attorney. She would be protective of her old friends. Wives side with wives. But she might know stuff, might have spotted the dynamic he suspected. The only worry in Sandy’s mind was that a woman married to one of the best criminal attorneys in the city wouldn’t talk to him without lawyering up.

Lawyering up. She might even say that. I’ll have to lawyer up. Jesus. Sometimes, Sandy felt like a magician in a room where even the youngest kid yelled out: “It’s a trick box! She’s pulled her knees up to her chest!”

June 18, 1991

Michelle was aware of the impression she made as she walked out to the pool in high-heeled sandals and a pink bikini. She strolled the full length slowly, toward the deep end where the adults-her mother, Bert, Lorraine-were seated. She then had to go back and procure one of the chaises at the other end. Again, she made a show of it, letting the wheels clatter, refusing the help of the all-but-panting teenage boys who offered to do it for her. How could her mother possibly think that Michelle-eighteen, a high school graduate-should attend a party of sixteen-year-olds. It had been bad enough, having Sydney’s company pushed on her all these years, but to attend a Sweet Sixteen on the first beautiful Saturday in June-torture. Especially when her boyfriend had wanted to take her to Philadelphia for dinner, to Le Bec Fin. But her mother couldn’t possibly know that, right? She didn’t even know about the boyfriend.

Michelle had come up with such a good plan to get away, too. She told her mother that she was going to Philadelphia for the day to visit an art museum with a girl she had met on the College Park visit, a girl who might be her roommate if she proved, on this outing, as collegial as she seemed. This should have been a no-brainer for Bambi-art, a girl, Michelle trying to be sensible and optimistic about the whole College Park thing, which had been a bitter pill to swallow. Not because she was a brainiac like Rachel, or a grind like Linda, but because she had wanted to go someplace fun. ASU, Tulane, University of Miami. Only she hadn’t got into any of them. Bambi said Maryland was a bargain and if Michelle wanted to go out of state, she should have put more effort into high school, as Linda and Rachel had.

“You might also want to consider if the number of tanning days belongs on a list of things you need in a college,” she had added.

Tanning days. Michelle flipped on her stomach, reached behind her and unsnapped her halter top, then slid the top beneath her and onto the table where her Diet Coke was sweating. Her mother and the Gelmans were enjoying Bellinis, although the kids-the kids!-had been promised sips of champagne when the cake came out. Michelle’s own sisters-well, Linda at least-had been able to drink at eighteen, but the law had changed. Just another entry on Michelle’s List of Everything Unfair.

But now that her top was off, no one would dare approach her. It actually hurt a little, pressing her bare breasts into the Japanese-inspired lounge chair-Lorraine always had the most beautiful things, but she didn’t always have the most comfortable things-and it would probably leave marks, but who cared? She wasn’t going to see her boyfriend tonight. Her perfect plan had been torpedoed by Bambi, who had blandly told Michelle that she wouldn’t cover the cost of the train ticket because Michelle was overdrawn on her allowance by six weeks. And Michelle couldn’t have the car because Bambi needed it to go to this party, which Michelle was going to attend, too.

“If it kills you,” Bambi had added.

“It just might.”

Michelle glanced over her shoulder at the kids in the pool. A few years ago, she might have amused herself by making all the boys focus on her, but it was too easy, not enough of a challenge. The Philadelphia man, as she thought of him, was another story. The Philadelphia Story. That’s the kind of joke that Rachel would have made, if Michelle had confided in her, but she wasn’t like everyone else, telling Rachel her secrets. The Philadelphia Story was twenty-four, in his second year at Wharton, and Michelle was cock-teasing him within an inch of his life. She loved that men tried to use that term as an insult. She was proud of her technique, as formal and balletic as a matador’s. So far, she had slept with him only literally, stripping down to a T-shirt and her underwear, then ordering him out of the bed when she awoke in the middle of the night to find him trying to undress her.

Her mother had thought Michelle was on a school trip to New York City that time. There was a Park trip to New York in May. Bambi had given Michelle the money to attend and she had signed up, then gone sorrowfully to the head of school seventy-two hours before departure and explained that there were the “usual issues” at home and she needed a full refund. The head had counted the money out of petty cash and asked Michelle how her senior project was coming along. (Park students did not attend classes in their final semester, but worked on projects that they presented at year’s end.) “As well as can be expected,” she said, using her brave voice, the voice of The Girl Who Had Seen Too Much, the girl who had been asked to be an adult before her time. The Philadelphia Story, whom she had met in a bar Preakness weekend, was waiting for her outside the school. He drove her straight to a beautiful inn on the Eastern Shore, one that had been in some movie a few years back, and she had tortured him all weekend. She was a virgin, she told him. True. She wasn’t ready yet. Also true, although Michelle’s not-readiness had nothing to do with fear. Oh, she helped him out, she wasn’t heartless. Well, maybe a little heartless, when she crawled into that beautiful bed with him in her panties and T-shirt and told him he could take care of himself while he watched her touch herself. “But use a towel,” she added.

They had hit Saks in D.C. before he took her back home. She then hid her purchases at her friend Devorah’s, who briefed her on the New York trip so Michelle could provide Bambi with plausible details. The only possible pitfall was that someone would mention to Bambi what a shame it was that Michelle had been forced to cancel, but Michelle was pretty sure that the head would remind everyone to be sensitive about the Poor Brewers. Everyone was so goddamn careful around Michelle. People at school, her mother, her sisters. Just because she used it to her advantage didn’t mean it didn’t bother her.

Jesus, this chaise was like some kinky bondage chair. She couldn’t find a comfortable position on it and she sure as shit couldn’t flip over. Lorraine might not know what it was like to try and lie facedown when one had breasts, but Sydney certainly did. Lorraine probably didn’t spend much time by the pool, being the kind of woman who never tanned. A shame. The pool was gorgeous. Michelle loved everything about the Gelmans’ house, couldn’t understand her mother’s private disdain for it. When she was younger, she had assumed her mother was pretending to dislike it because she was embarrassed by their own house, but, no, Bambi really seemed to think their old wreck of a place was preferable to this shiny house where everything was so very up to the minute. If this was tacky, then Michelle could only hope to live in such tackiness.

She felt a shadow fall across her back, assumed it was a cloud passing over the sun. When the shadow didn’t move, she said: “I’m fine, I don’t need anything.”

“You need,” a man’s voice growled, “to put your top on.”

Oh, Bert, sent to do Mother’s dirty work. Again.

“You have your top off,” she said. Bert was very proud of his physique, and Michelle had to admit it was quite good. Slender yet muscled, the right amount of hair. And, like her, he tanned beautifully, quite the opposite of Lorraine with her big hats and moles everywhere.

“You’re embarrassing your mother.”

And upstaging your daughter, she thought. Michelle actually liked Sydney, who was extremely good-natured about being the overweight redhead in a family of dark-haired, good-looking people. Her twin brothers, Adam and Alec, born less than two years after Sydney was adopted, had the kind of eyes and lips that people said were wasted on boys. They were certainly wasted on those two. Nasty jocks, very competitive. They would have been asked to leave Park School if Lorraine wasn’t such a big deal there.

“Okay, I’ll just sit up and put my top on,” she bluffed.

“You will cover yourself with a towel and go into the house to make sure you’re decent.”

She started to argue, but something in Bert’s tone would not be denied. She did as instructed, thinking about the alternate reality of Philadelphia, the place she should be right now. They might have gone to an art museum for real. Then Le Bec Fin-not that Michelle could eat that much and still wear bikinis, but she liked the idea of expensive restaurants and wine and champagne. She still wasn’t ready to have sex with him, though. She might never be. She wanted to be in love the first time and she hadn’t been, not even close. She barely liked most of the boys and men she knew. She assumed the Philadelphia Story would get mad with her eventually, really mad. That was part of the thrill, testing how far she could push men. No, she did not want to be raped, and she felt she had excellent instincts for picking men who would not go that far. Look at Philadelphia Story, making his stealth move in the middle of the night, then skulking off to sleep in a chair when she called him out. No, she was very clear that she wasn’t caught up in some moral dilemma, as Rachel would probably have it, in which she wanted a man to take her virginity because she was too guilt-ridden to give it away freely.

It was just so exciting, knowing that she had something men wanted, that anyone wanted. Not only did her boyfriends not take advantage of her, they allowed her to boss them around, demand favors. She supposed she would still be able to do that after she lost her virginity, but she wasn’t in a rush to find out. Her mother, as far as Michelle knew, hadn’t had sex for fifteen years and men were crazy for her. Look at Bert, doing whatever she wanted, without Bambi even having to ask. Yet her sisters had fallen crazy in love and where had that gotten them? Linda was always yelling at Henry, and Marc had divorced Rachel before their second anniversary, leaving her without a penny. Rachel had signed a postnup, the sap. You’d never catch Michelle making that kind of mistake.

Michelle had first discovered her power while working with her Hebrew tutor, a young man who had bought her clothes. Shoplifted them, actually, although she didn’t know that at the time. She could imagine Rachel saying, “Do the math, stupe. He was helping you with Hebrew for ten bucks an hour. Do you think he could afford those things he gave you?” But it never occurred to Michelle to worry about how he afforded the items until he was arrested, a month after her bat mitzvah. He was picked up at the Woodies in Columbia with a pair of Guess jeans. Michelle’s first thought was: Wait-he steals for other girls, too? She had assumed she was special and was irritated to learn that he had made similar arrangements with other female students.

He had been a little pervy. It was funny, how the ones who touched you the least were often pervier than the ones who really did stuff. But weak, so weak. Once, when he tried to get her to model one of the outfits, she had looked at him and said: “It’s not really my style. But thank you.” Bambi had been out of the house that day. Who wouldn’t trust her twelve-year-old daughter with her Hebrew tutor? He had tried to kiss her once, only once. Michelle had drawn a hand across her mouth and said: “No, thank you.” The next week, he brought her three dresses, better ones.

Towel wrapped to ensure modesty, she walked back the length of the pool, still aware of the boys’ glances. She did not use the bathroom in the cabana/changing room at poolside, nor did she use the powder room off the kitchen. Michelle, who knew the Gelmans’ home as well as her own, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, where the enormous en suite marble bath had lighted mirrors, heated towel racks, a bidet, even a heated floor, not that it was turned on in June.

The bathroom opened into a dressing room the size of Michelle’s oh-so-stingy bedroom. Even as Linda and Rachel decamped, Bambi would not allow Michelle to move into their rooms. Michelle suspected this was because she would then want to redecorate, make the new room hers. Why shouldn’t she? Her room was childish. Sophisticated for a thirteen-year-old-she had been allowed to use her bat mitzvah money to redo it. But now the color palette, peach and pale green, bored her. So fussy, so Laura Ashley, which it happened to be.

Her top back on, she sat on the long, upholstered stool in the center of Lorraine’s closet and considered its perfection. The problem, as Michelle saw it, was that money came too late. You had to be old, in your forties, before you had the money to have the best clothes, furnishings, jewels. Even if Lorraine had been as beautiful as Bambi, these things would still be wasted on her. Michelle wished she had known her mother in her twenties, when the money flowed and no expense was spared. The photos of this time, in black and white, looked fake to her, props from a film. And by the time Michelle was born in 1973, the clothing was horribly tacky. Thank God Bambi had made them dress like the preppies they weren’t.

She barely remembered her father and worried sometimes that the memories she did have weren’t even hers, just stories planted by her mother and sisters. But there was a smell, a couple of them. Cigar stores, anything leathery. And a certain aftershave that she sometimes picked up in department stores. No one could have made her remember smells that weren’t hers to remember.

If her father had served his sentence, he would be free by now. Would it really have been that hard? She once overheard Linda telling Rachel that he might have been out in ten years, according to Henry. Ten years. He would be here and this would be their house and she would be allowed to borrow her mother’s clothes and jewels. Because, yes, Bambi was the same size as Michelle. When Michelle was younger, the boys who came to the house had gotten crushes on her.

Maybe that was part of the reason that Michelle now preferred men, men she never allowed to come to her house.

But even if her father had returned, would they have been rich again? Michelle could never work out that part of the fantasy, and Michelle was very pragmatic about her fantasies. What would he do? Could he earn as much in a legal enterprise as he had in his old business? These were not questions she could put to Bambi, or even her sisters. So much of what she knew about her father had been learned from eavesdropping. Michelle was less resentful than the others thought about being cut off from the family’s days of ease and money. But she hated not being privy to the secrets that her sisters shared. The stories about the mistress. Did they really think that Michelle, incurious as she was at thirteen, hadn’t seen the article in the Star when Julie Saxony disappeared almost ten years to the day after her father did? It had been only a matter of time before someone at school had told her that everyone believed that her father had finally sent for Julie Saxony-and all the money he had put away, money that was supposed to go to Bambi.

Much to her surprise, Michelle started to cry. And everything around her was so beautiful, silken and pristine, that she wasn’t sure where to dry her tears, which were clotted with mascara. She padded back to the bathroom, picked up the towel she had left on the floor.

“What are you doing here?”

It was Sydney, the birthday girl, the girl to whom all this belonged, not that she would ever fit into skinny Lorraine’s dresses, no matter how her mother tried to starve her. Sydney was wearing a two-piece, which Michelle found absolutely shocking. She would live in a caftan if she had a body like Sydney’s.

“Your father told me to go put my top back on. I was lying on my stomach, just trying to avoid tan lines. But, you know.”

“His ideas about femininity basically align with Sir Walter Scott. He’s a prude, my dad.” A shrug.

Michelle envied Sydney those casual words even more than she envied her these beautiful things. To be able to say that one’s father was this or that.

To be able to say: “My dad.” My dad, my dad, my dad.

“Anyway, we’re about to have cake. Don’t you want cake?”

Sydney’s tone implied that everyone must want cake all the time. Michelle wished she did, that the pleasures of chocolate and frosting could still be meaningful to her. Then again, what did she find pleasurable? She enjoyed things mainly in the planning. If she had gone to Philadelphia today, the thrill would have been in the subterfuge and the escape. And then the night, the hours of denying someone else pleasure. That was what made her happiest, or at least close to something that others might recognize as happiness.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“I guess that’s why you have the body you have,” said Sydney. Cheerful, not begrudging. “Mom tries to make me live on lettuce and carrots, hoping I’ll look like you-or at least like her. But it’s just never going to happen.”

Michelle couldn’t help being impressed by Sydney’s matter-of-fact acceptance of herself. “How do you manage that?”

“Manage what?”

This was tricky to word. “Not minding. I mean, you know, being cool with how things are.”

Sydney smiled. Half smiled, really, using only the left corner of her mouth. “I’ve got my stuff. Believe me, I’ve got stuff that bugs me. Stuff that’s bigger than my weight.”

“Like what?” Michelle really could not imagine what could bother someone if she had money and didn’t care about her appearance.

“I was asked to leave camp last summer.”

“That’s it? You got kicked out of sleep-away camp?”

Sydney studied her, as if judging Michelle’s worthiness as a confidante. “Yes, that’s it. But it bugs me. I loved that camp. I loved-well, I wish I could go back. I would have been a junior counselor this year. But I can’t go back. They made that clear.”

Some boring kid spat, Michelle decided. She wouldn’t press further. She tried to ignore the fact that Sydney clearly wasn’t allowing her to press further.

“Look, even if you don’t want cake, won’t you please come back to the party? I know you don’t want to be here, with my friends, but I’m so happy you came.”

“You are?”

“I am. I don’t have any real cousins. You and Linda and Rachel are the closest thing I have. And my brothers are such assholes.”

“Sydney!” Michelle didn’t disagree. She was just shocked that Sydney was so candid.

“Everyone knows. Except Mom, which I guess is how it’s supposed to be. Look, I don’t mind that I was adopted, I really don’t, and that my brothers were born eighteen months later and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what happens when people adopt, they relax and have their own children.’ My parents have never made me feel second-rate. We’re all three spoiled, but the twins are extra spoiled. Did you notice they’re not here today? They’re out with Uncle Tubby playing miniature golf because I knew they would ruin everything. I asked Dad to get rid of them. They’re psychopaths.”

“Do you ever think about your natural parents?”

“Mom and Dad are my natural parents,” Sydney said. Then, after a pause: “I do wonder about my biological parents, though. I mean, I’m curious. How could I not be? And my folks won’t tell me much about my adoption. They say it was done through the Associated.”

“That makes sense.”

“Yes, but there should be a story, right? And the only thing I know is that it happened really fast, that they got a call and they picked me up and they didn’t have anything ready. Twenty-four hours after I was born. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”

Michelle thought it made as much sense as anything did. She also realized she better start thinking about birth control. Eventually. The women in her family were fertile. Linda had four kids and was talking about getting her tubes tied. Michelle had been not quite an accident, a by-product of too much revelry, her father trying one more time for a boy, although her mother insisted he had preferred being the only man in a household of women. “He liked women,” she said, oh so dryly.

“Anyway,” Sydney said, “I want cake. And it’s my birthday. For one day I get to call the shots around here. Then it will be Heckle and Jeckle’s world all over again. Sometimes, I feel like Ferris Bueller’s sister. You know, there’s probably a reason she was such a freaking bitch.”

“Well, if you’re Jennifer Grey, you get to end up dancing with Patrick Swayze, so it’s not all bad.”

Sydney’s face was a study. “Yeah, no one puts Baby in the corner, right? Only I spend a lot of time in corners. Well, maybe not so many corners, but watching stupid TV, like Blossom. Everyone else in this family is so jocky. Even Mom plays golf.” She shuddered.

“So why did you want a pool party for your Sweet Sixteen?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t even want a party. I wanted to go to a nice restaurant, just Mom and Dad and me. They didn’t think that was special enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Michelle said. She wasn’t. It angered her that Sydney had parents who worried about what was special enough for her. Her family was always trying to knock down Michelle’s ideas about what she deserved, said she was grandiose.

“That’s okay. In two years, I’ll go away to college. My mom thinks I should go to one of the Seven Sisters, but I want to live in New York. Columbia, Barnard, NYU-whatever it takes, I’ll get into at least one of them, I think.”

“I wish I were going away to school. I’m just going to College Park.”

“College Park is away.”

“Not really.”

“Well, then kick ass your freshman year and transfer somewhere you’d rather be.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“Not easy,” said Sydney. “But possible. You’re smart, Michelle. You’re just lazy.”

The words were specific-thrillingly, awfully specific. Michelle knew they had been snatched from some adult conversation. Lorraine and Bert, most likely, but maybe her own mother. “Smart”-a flicker of warmth because no one ever said Michelle was smart. But “lazy” and this brought a more familiar slap of shame because she knew she was exactly that. Michelle, who didn’t panic when she awoke in a strange bed as a man tried to undress her, felt nervous and ashamed that Sydney should have heard grown-ups say these things about her.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”

“No one,” Sydney said, “knows what it’s like to be anyone. Let’s go have cake. Happy birthday to me.”

Michelle followed her, wondering how this plump sixteen-year-old had gotten so wise. No one knows what it’s like to be anyone. Oh, she wasn’t so smart. She had probably overheard that, too. A line from a movie or a sitcom, maybe even Blossom.

March 16, 2012

If Sandy had been pressed to put a description to the Gelmans’ house in Garrison Forest, he might have said “fancy” or “interesting.” He readied those precise words because the lady of the house, who was leading him to the living room, struck him as someone who might solicit compliments, even from a stranger. The house wasn’t really to his taste, but he thought it was probably in good taste, although maybe not. Mainly, it had a decorated quality to it, a ruthless perfection that felt cold and off-putting. Even the one overtly personal touch, an enormous oil painting of a family that hung over the fireplace, seemed a little generic to him.

“Nice portrait,” he guessed.

“Thank you,” Lorraine Gelman said. “It makes me smile, every day. A lovely time in our lives. The boys were turning thirteen, Sydney was fifteen. I hate to say it because it sounds so proud-motherish, but I don’t think my sons ever had an awkward age.”

Awkward age. Sandy noticed that Lorraine did not say the same of her daughter, who was plump and not quite pretty, even as rendered by brush-for-hire.

“How long ago was that?” Making conversation, trying to put her at ease. And maybe himself. Although Lorraine had agreed to talk to him alone, he was unclear if she had asked her husband’s advice about this meeting. And she kept stressing that she had never met Julie Saxony. Not even one time, she said, and she said it more than once, often the sign of a big whopping lie.

“Almost twenty-five years ago. My daughter is a lawyer in New York now, and the boys are in Chicago. All settled with children-well, Sydney has a partner, but we adore her. Adriana is the best daughter-in-law in the bunch.”

Sandy couldn’t help thinking, as he often did, about the things this woman took for granted-her home, her healthy children, now grandchildren. If Bobby had been normal, could Sandy have accepted a partner with this woman’s easy grace? He yearned to think so.

“Well,” he said, taking out his pad, signaling the beginning of the interview. “Julie Saxony.”

“As I told you, I never met her.”

“No, but you knew Felix.”

“Of course. He was my husband’s closest friend; I am Bambi’s best friend to this day. We were sort of forced on each other, through our husbands, but we’ve ended up being as close as the men, maybe closer. You know how that goes.”

Sandy didn’t, but he nodded. He and Mary hadn’t done that couple-dating-couple thing. They had socialized with people from his work and hers, but they hadn’t created that dynamic where the men talk about sports and the women talk about kids. That was Mary’s decision as much as his, another legacy from Bobby. Mary could deal with a lot, but she learned quickly that people didn’t want her to contribute to their happy chatter about their sons and daughters. When she talked about Bobby, it was almost as if she was one of those people who offered pet stories as a counterpoint to kid stories. Other people thought Bobby was a tragedy, that it was in bad taste to mention him in a discussion about normal kids. Mary, so naturally sociable, had pulled away from the world when she realized no one wanted her to talk about Bobby. Not even Sandy.

“Felix’s relationship with Julie was a pretty open secret, though?”

“I think it appears that way in hindsight.” Okay, that answer was as prepared as precut lumber. But then, she had known why he was coming to talk to her. “Felix was circumspect, all things considered. He always had girlfriends, from the first. I asked Bert never to speak of it to me because I didn’t want to feel as if I were keeping secrets from Bambi. And Felix managed to keep his worlds very separate-until he disappeared. Only then was he so uncharacteristically inconsiderate.”

“How so?”

“He put his coffee shop in Julie’s name. That made it public, created a record, something for the newspapers to chew on. And there was Bambi, left with nothing.”

“I know that’s the official story.”

“It’s the true story. Bambi has been living by hook or crook ever since Felix left. We all thought he would provide for her. But no arrangements were made. Or, if they were, the person he trusted was unscrupulous.”

“Who was that? The person he trusted, I mean.”

A flicker of the lawyer’s wife in her eyes, a pause to consider the words that followed. “I didn’t mean to imply that there was anyone. I can only tell you that if Felix did make plans for Bambi, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Bert and I have done what we can. Bambi and her girls are like family to us. There was a time when I hoped Michelle might even marry one of my boys, but she’s almost four years older than they are and that is an insurmountable gap when one is young.”

“You say Felix didn’t make any arrangements for his wife, but he made sure his bail bondsman wasn’t hurting.”

“Do you know that for a fact?” she countered. “Or is it more gossip, like the gossip that Felix found a way to provide for Bambi?”

He gave her his best grin. “You got me there. But, come on, Tubman’s awfully good-natured for someone who ate a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bond.”

“Good-natured now. Time heals even financial wounds. Did you enjoy your visit with him?”

“Ah, so you guys still talk?”

“He and Bert do. Tubman was not someone to whom I was close.” She appeared to suppress a shudder, which seemed a little melodramatic to Sandy. The guy had seemed nice enough to him. He sensed some snobbery at work. Funny to him because he wouldn’t wipe his ass with a defense attorney, but bail bondsmen were doing honest work, by and large, just cogs in the system.

“So he told your husband that I came by?”

“Yes, and Bert tells me everything.” There was an odd emphasis in that sentence, a stress on “me.” “They were so close, once. The three men. Felix’s disappearance-that was the beginning of the end. Then Tubman got married, and his wife made him drop all his old friends. She was never comfortable with our crowd. Churchy. Maybe a little anti-Semitic, to tell the truth, although I suppose I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Anyway, I know when Julie Saxony disappeared, Bert and Tubman couldn’t help thinking she had gone to Felix. Then, when her body was found-I don’t know how to explain this, but it made them terribly sad.”

“Sad?”

“They had this fantasy, see, Felix was with his lady friend, enjoying life. They thought that would be a happy ending.”

“For Felix.”

She favored him with a smile. “Whereas-I won’t say I was glad that Julie was dead, but I felt better for Bambi when the body was found. Because it was really hurtful to her, having people think that Felix had chosen Julie over her. Hard enough to have no money, but if Felix had sent for Julie-that would have been a betrayal.”

“Not the affair, during the marriage?”

She nodded as if to concede a point. “A different kind of betrayal, then. Look, lots of men do what Felix did.”

“Including your husband?”

“Oh, no. Not Bert. Do you know Bert doesn’t even really understand how good-looking he is? Women are forever throwing themselves at him and he doesn’t even realize it.”

I bet, Sandy thought. Although, come to think of it, there had never been a lot of gossip about Bert Gelman, and that courthouse crowd gossiped like old biddies.

“What about Tubby?”

“What about him?”

“Was he, well, envious of Felix? For the relationship with Julie? I can’t help thinking he might have had a little thing for her.”

“Tubman. Tubman.” Lorraine Gelman had clearly never considered this idea before. But she was willing to consider it now, which was part of the reason that Sandy had wanted to talk to a woman. Women were natural-born murder police in some ways, at least if a case turned on love shit.

“I mean, he found her, right? Spotted her in a drugstore, took her to his friend’s place.”

“I guess so. But Tubman had a girl at the time.”

“I thought you said that was later?”

“No, he married later. After Felix disappeared.” Disappeared. She kept using that word. As if it weren’t quite Felix’s fault that he ran away while appealing his conviction. “Before, he dated a girl. A friend of Julie Saxony’s. Susie something.”

“A friend. You mean another stripper?”

“Yes. We did not socialize-I’m sorry if that sounds snobbish.” Why was she apologizing to him? Did she equate strippers with cops? “But even if I had been comfortable, Felix would never have stood for Bert and me to spend time with one of Julie’s friends. No overlap between the two worlds. Someone who knew Julie could never be around Bambi.”

“But Tubby knew her. And probably your husband, Bert. Right?”

“Men are different. It was the women who had to be kept separate. The worlds. Felix’s daughters, to this day-they don’t really understand that he actually owned the Variety. They think he had an office there, nothing more. It’s a selective bit of revisionism, and I think Bambi’s entitled to it.”

“So how did you know about the girlfriend? If you never socialized, I mean.”

Lorraine’s smile was polite and practiced, social but not exactly fake. Not exactly. “Tubman threw a party, sort of a holiday open house, and she presided over it, playing the part of hostess. Felix refused to go, even alone-Felix was smart that way. Whereas Bert is naïve in some things. He didn’t realize the girlfriend would be there. She was so tiny-I don’t think she was five feet tall. The two of them together-I’m sorry, but everyone wondered how he didn’t crush her. Anyway, I was trapped talking to her for what seemed like hours. She wore a green velvet floor-length gown. I’ll never forget that. She looked like a teeny-tiny Christmas tree. She even wore red ornament earrings.”

Lorraine shook her head at the memory, clearly still appalled by Tubman’s girlfriend.

“But just because he had a girl-does that mean he didn’t have a thing for Julie? He discovered her, right?”

“Discovered. You make her sound like a starlet. He saw a pretty girl in a drugstore and told her that she could make more money. You know, most women wouldn’t have done that. That tells you a lot about Julie Saxony’s character right there. She wasn’t going to work at a drugstore if she could make more money dancing naked. And she wasn’t going to settle for dancing naked if she could get the boss.”

Sandy couldn’t help thinking about the chef, who had defended Julie for dancing in an outfit not much different from a modern bathing suit. Men and women saw some stuff differently.

“Are you saying she expected Felix to marry her?”

“Expected? I don’t know if she was that stupid, but it was what she wanted.”

“How can you say that with such certitude if you didn’t know her?”

“Because Tubman’s little girl, the one in the hostess gown, told me so. She told me that Julie was so determined to marry Felix that she had converted. Can you imagine? I almost felt sorry for her when I heard that. She was really very naïve.”

“Naïve.” Lorraine had used that word before. Yes, about her husband. Sandy always paid attention to the words people repeated. Lorraine Gelman thought being naïve was one of the worst things a person could be.

“When was this?”

“Let’s see-Felix hadn’t left yet, so… ’74? ’75? I remember I wore a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress.”

Big help that.

“Do you remember her name?”

“Oh, dear-well, Tubman would, you should really ask him. I mean, we spoke for only a little bit.”

“You said it was hours.”

“I said it seemed like hours. In terms of the toll it took, the boredom. But it was just the one time. Susie-Susie-I can’t summon a last name. I’m sorry, I don’t feel I’ve been any help at all.”

“Oh, no, you have.” At least she hadn’t shot his idea down. Tubman had dated another stripper, a friend of Julie’s. Tubby had married a woman who took him away from the old gang-but not until after Felix disappeared. Had he made a play for Julie? Had he been entrusted to take care of Bambi, then given the money to Julie in hopes that she would reward him by loving him back? Going from the manager of the Coffee Pot Shoppe to an upscale B and B seemed like an unlikely journey, even over a decade.

He thanked Lorraine for her time, searched for a compliment for her house, feeling himself somewhat lacking in this department. “Your home is really impressive,” he said at last. Not a lie, it definitely made an impression.

If you knew Susie-the line stuck in his head on the drive home, like a hamster going around and around in a wheel. Sandy was pretty sure he did know Susie. He walked through the door of his house, not even bothering to hang up his coat and hat, niceties that he observed as a tribute to Mary, who cared so about niceties, who argued every day that the little things mattered. Hanging up coats, making beds, cleaning the kitchen at night. Everything had to be perfect, because of their son who could never be perfect, not even close.

He looked back through the original file. Yes, there it was: Susan Borden had been the housekeeper at Julie’s B and B, but she had been on vacation the week that Julie disappeared. The Havre de Grace police had interviewed her, but it was a pretty say-nothing witness sheet, and the Baltimore detectives hadn’t even bothered with her fifteen years later.

Could be a coincidence, this Susan Borden and Lorraine Gelman’s Susie. Common as a name could be and it wasn’t even the same name, not precisely. But Sandy knew they were one and the same. Not a hunch. Not a feeling. Knowledge, honed by practice. Sandy had failed as a restaurateur. He had failed as a father. He had failed his wife when he failed as a father, although she had never called him on it, to her dying day. Literally, to her dying day. Not a word of reproach, not a hint of resentment, but he was less in her eyes for his weakness. The man who had swept her off her feet on their first date, carried her home, promised in word and deed to take care of her always, had failed. He wanted to be larger than life to her, wanted her to look at him as she had that day, eyes shining with excitement. That man died when Bobby was diagnosed. He just didn’t know how to be a father to a kid like that. Truth is, maybe he wouldn’t have known how to be a father to any kid.

But this, this job? This he could do, better than almost anyone.

January 5, 1996

Shabbat dinner, although a relatively new ritual in the Brewer-Sutton household, was already a smooth-running routine, a testament to Linda’s organizational skills and her determination to see a thing through once her mind was made up. Linda had decided last fall, when Noah entered fourth grade, that Judaism was due for a comeback in her household. True, the winter sunset was long past by the time she got home from work, but her timing was otherwise impeccable. The tenderloin was resting on a cutting board, the rösti potatoes were minutes away from crisp hot perfection. Two loaves of challah waited in the center of the table, wrapped in a green linen napkin. The candlesticks and kiddush cup had been polished to a high shine, thanks to the cleaning woman who now came twice a week. She also baked the challah, but Linda made and braided the loaves in the morning, before leaving for work.

The only thing missing were Linda’s sisters and her mother, who had promised to make it tonight for the first time in weeks. Not that Linda cared-she had started observing the Sabbath for her kids, determined to ground them in something, anything-but Rachel had been unusually adamant that the entire family should gather. Strange, because they had seen one another only three weeks ago, for a perfunctory Hanukkah at Bambi’s house. It had been a lackluster affair, not so much Hanukkah as Christmas Eve with potato pancakes to Linda’s now critical eye. Too much emphasis on the gifts, almost no ritual. Bambi hadn’t even bothered to dig out the dreidel, much less buy gelt for the children, and they couldn’t light the menorah properly because it turned out the shamas had broken off and never been resoldered.

But Rachel said she was feeling stir-crazy in advance. A blizzard was predicted for Sunday, a big one, and Linda would be on-call once the storm hit, giving interviews about outages and power lines. Linda thought this part of her job a bizarre custom. The people without power couldn’t hear or see her confident predictions about the crews working to restore electricity, and those with power didn’t really care about those without. They just wanted to know when their streets would be plowed.

Her boss had already told her to pack a bag and check into a centrally located hotel tomorrow and to be prepared to work around the clock through Monday morning. Linda never minded long days or hard work; she was the family breadwinner. And her being on-call didn’t upset the family’s various child-care arrangements because Henry had left his public defender’s job a few years ago and was now teaching science at City College, one of Baltimore’s best high schools. His newfound professional contentment was like the little woodstove in the corner of their great room-it didn’t really contribute much to the bottom line, but it made everyone feel a little cozier.

And, oh, how Linda envied him at times. I never get snow days, she thought self-pityingly, removing the string from the tenderloin and starting to slice. The warm meat almost sighed at the knife’s touch. Linda was the only decent cook among the Brewer women, and she recognized her own smugness on this topic. Linda knew all her faults. The more honest you were with yourself, the less you had to worry about the world’s opinion. She was always trying to persuade her bosses of this approach. Tell the truth, whenever possible, and start with yourself.

“Hey, sis.” Rachel came in the side door, hung her coat and scarf in the alcove of cubbyholes and hooks that Linda’s family used as a de facto mudroom. Seeing the ready platter of tenderloin, she took it from Linda and placed it on the table. “Are you making a béarnaise? Go ahead, and I’ll do whatever else needs to be done.” She waved her arms around theatrically.

Her boyfriend, Joshua, waited in his coat until Rachel pointed him to an empty hook. He then stood in the center of the kitchen, pretty much in Linda’s path, until Rachel indicated that he could take a seat in the corner of the large space off the kitchen that served as a family room. Linda liked Joshua. He was a mensch, a word no one would ever use in connection with Rachel’s ex-husband, Marc. But he was so passive, one of those people who never take the initiative in anything.

“The good silver?” Rachel asked, still making those weird gestures.

“Sure. Oh, fuck-my carrots,” Linda said, rushing to the stove before the steamer went dry.

“The carrots are fine,” Rachel said.

“The carrots are fine.”

Still nothing. Rachel had thought it a good bit of wordplay, but no one else noticed, not even Joshua, who was in on the joke, or should have been. She began collecting crystal stemware, continuing to flutter her fingers. She wasn’t crazy about religion, but she approved of Linda’s dinners. She was going to do something similar when she had children. Maybe not a Shabbat dinner, but something regular, ritualistic.

With Joshua parked on the sofa by himself-Henry was upstairs, doing something with the kids, no doubt-Rachel continued to set the table, wiggling her fingers at Linda every chance she got, but her sister remained distracted, probably by the weather news. What a horrible job Linda had. She was important only when things went wrong and then she became the face of the public utility, the messenger that everyone wanted to kill.

“Everyone is coming tonight, right?” Rachel asked, putting out the silverware. The good stuff, which had belonged to their great-grandmother. She was surprised Bambi hadn’t pawned it at some point and wondered at her decision to give it to Linda. Had she despaired of Rachel ever having a family? Rachel and Marc had owned nice china and silver, but it had come from his family and gone back to them. She wondered if he and his second wife, a pretty, pliable girl whom he had married in an insultingly short time-and most definitely not the woman he had cheated with-were putting out the silver tonight. No, she would be forced, as Rachel had been forced, to eat in the Singers’ claustrophobic dining room, the cold and formal antithesis to this lively hodgepodge.

Bambi and Michelle arrived. Somehow, it was still a surprise to Rachel how much Michelle resembled their mother now that she was in her twenties. And yet Bambi retained some indefinable edge, even at fifty-five going on fifty-six. Her beauty was more profound, while Michelle’s felt flashy and fleshy, a little too carnal.

The meal ready, the prayers recited, Rachel took the seat to her mother’s right and plopped her hand between their plates. Still, no awareness. Was she going to have to send up a flare? It was Michelle, down the table, who finally noticed. Magpie Michelle never missed anything shiny.

“Is that a yellow diamond?”

“It was my grandmother’s,” Joshua said quickly, more or less as they had planned. “We got married this week.”

Rachel and Joshua had not planned on the long silence that fell. A grave, judging silence.

“Congratulations,” Henry said when it became clear that the other three women were not going to speak. “It takes a tough man to marry a Brewer woman.”

“Oh, hush,” Linda said. “That’s hardly the right thing to say.”

“And I’ve never thought of you as particularly tough, Henry,” Michelle said.

“I’m the only son-in-law,” Henry said, unperturbed by Linda’s corrections or Michelle’s insults. “I’m thrilled to have the company.”

“You weren’t always the-” Michelle began. It was hard to say if she stopped speaking of her own accord or because of the look that Linda shot her.

“When?” Bambi asked, slicing her tenderloin into very tiny pieces.

“Two days ago,” Rachel said. “At the courthouse.”

“Smart,” Henry said. “No tax implications for 1995.”

“I mean, we’re very happy for you-we all love Joshua,” Bambi said. “Only-why that way? You could have had a small wedding.”

“I don’t like weddings,” Rachel said. “I never have.”

“Yes, we all remember your Vegas elopement,” Michelle put in, earning another glare from Linda. It didn’t intimidate her. “You could have had a judge just come to a party and marry you.”

She was enjoying this, Rachel realized. Michelle was usually the one who disappointed the others. Taking an extra semester to get her degree, then moving back home because she had done absolutely nothing about finding a job, threatening to answer those “live model” ads in the back of the City Paper if her mother and sisters didn’t get off her back. She would, too. Michelle was never lazy when it came to vindictiveness.

“No, you can’t,” Joshua put in. “If you get married anywhere but the courthouse, it has to be someone religious.”

“Okay, so a rabbi, then.”

“I don’t like rabbis.” True. Very true.

“Then a Unitarian minister or a Wiccan priestess or whatever,” Michelle continued. “It’s only a ceremony. What’s the big deal?”

“I just-I was embarrassed,” Rachel said. “It is a second marriage for me.”

“But it’s Joshua’s first,” Bambi said. “At least-I think it is.” A gentle yet pointed barb. Joshua had been accompanying Rachel to family gatherings for more than a year now, but he never offered much information about himself.

“It is,” Joshua assured Bambi. “And although it was hard to let go of that vision I’ve carried of my wedding day, I found I didn’t mind.”

Joshua’s joke fell flat. Even Rachel found it wanting, and Joshua’s sense of humor was a large part of his appeal. But she wouldn’t glare at him or correct him. She didn’t want a Henry, who loved to be nagged so he could play the henpecked spouse, straight out of a sitcom. Linda and Henry’s marriage worked for them, but it wasn’t right for her. And Bambi’s way hadn’t worked for her, either. Rachel was going to find her own way of being married this time.

“May I throw you a party?” Bambi asked. “A small one, for family and friends?”

“No,” Rachel said quickly, too quickly, but she had to shut that down. Why did Bambi always want to spend money she didn’t have? Good Lord, couldn’t she remember what parties had cost her? But, no, she never remembered because she had been bailed out time and time again. And whose fault was that? Mostly Rachel’s.

Linda’s oldest, Noah, bored by talk of weddings, begged to be excused and allowed to eat his food in front of the television. The three younger girls-“Linda breeds like an Orthodox,” Bambi had once noted in an unguarded moment, exhibiting that weird anti-Semitism that only Jews could carry-understood enough to realize they had been gypped out of being flower girls. Their voices rose, cascading over one another’s until Linda silenced them with a few well-chosen threats, softened by a promise of dessert if they behaved. Rachel looked forward to the day when her children would join them, hoped the cousins would be close.

“So,” Henry said, “Linda tells me this blizzard is going to be the real deal. The big one. Is everyone prepared?”

Rachel smiled at Henry, grateful that he had managed to divert everyone from the topic of her marriage-although Michelle left her place for a better look at the ring, which even she couldn’t help admiring. The talk ebbed and flowed away from Rachel. Henry had a gift for public relations, too, Rachel realized. Or maybe he just had a lot of experience at soothing angry Brewer women.

Linda brought out the dessert, Berger cookies and ice cream. Linda was very canny about knowing when to do things herself and when to delegate, Rachel thought, where effort made a difference and where it didn’t. Rachel sipped her coffee. The evening hadn’t been as she had hoped, but it was behind her now. The announcement had been made.

Then Bambi asked out of the blue: “Have you told Joshua’s parents?”

“We had dinner with them last night,” Rachel said.

“That’s not a yes or no,” Michelle said. Jesus, Michelle, go to law school already.

“We did the same thing,” Rachel said. “As I did with you. I waved my hand around a lot, trying to catch the light. His mother noticed-but it’s her mother’s ring; she gave it to Joshua.”

“So you told them last night,” Bambi said.

“They happened to guess,” Rachel said. “When they saw the ring.”

“But they knew first.”

“We had to reschedule our Sunday night dinner with them because of the blizzard, just in case.” She had known this would be a sensitive point, but there was no way to tell Joshua that Bambi must be first. She would sulk for days now.

“We could have had a wedding party in conjunction with my birthday,” her mother said. “That’s only three weeks away.”

“But that wouldn’t have been fair to you, stealing your thunder that way.”

“I don’t care about my birthday,” her mother said. “I’m going to be fifty-six. It’s a nothing age.”

“We’ll have a huge blowout when you’re sixty,” Linda said.

“Please-I’ll want to celebrate that even less.” A pause. “I got pregnant on my twentieth birthday. January 30, 1960.”

The sisters looked at one another.

“Mother,” Linda said. “Don’t be silly. I was born September first, and I weighed nine pounds. That would make me the world’s largest preemie.”

Rachel assumed-and assumed her sisters were assuming-that her mother had tripped up on the oft-told lie about Linda being conceived on her parents’ wedding night. December 31, 1959. The girls had long ago figured out that their parents had sex before their wedding night. They rather liked them for it. They also liked their mother for her polite fictions about it, her old-fashioned decorum. But now she was taking it too far, telling such an obvious lie. Even Noah could see through it, if his attention weren’t consumed by the weird soup he was making from his ice cream and cookies.

Her mother stood. “Michelle, we really should go. I have to get home before the blizzard.”

“It won’t even start snowing until Sunday,” Linda said.

“I want to make sure I have what I need. Maybe I’ll drive to the Giant and buy all the clichéd things. Milk, toilet paper, bread. You know our driveway: If it’s as bad as they say it’s going to be, I won’t get out for days.”

“I’m not ready to go,” Michelle protested.

“I’ll take her home,” Rachel promised. “It’s not that far out of my way.”

“Or I could spend the night at your apartment,” Michelle said. Rachel could see the wheels turning. Michelle would get to her place-now hers and Joshua’s-in Fells Point and propose going out. She assumed Rachel would beg off-she always did-and Michelle could then head out on her own. She would show up late the next morning, clutching a huge coffee from the Daily Grind. It would never occur to her to bring one to Rachel or to divulge anything about how she had spent the evening. She might not even come back for days, blithely lying to her mother via phone that she was stranded at Rachel’s because of the blizzard. Michelle, ma belle, their father had sung to her when she was a baby. I love you, I love you, I love you. Had any other man told Michelle that he loved her? Admired her, wanted her, made love to her, yes. But had she been loved?

Bambi left, clearly affronted. Rachel wanted to believe it was because Michelle was staying behind, or even that all three daughters had ganged up on her over the lie about Linda’s conception.

But Rachel knew the real slight was her secret marriage to Joshua. Bambi had to know things first. Rachel had disappointed her mother. It was unfair. She could-she had-gone to such lengths to protect her mother, and now she would get the Frigidaire treatment, as her father had called it, Bambi’s patented deep freeze, all because Joshua’s parents knew first.

“She didn’t even say ‘mazel tov,’” she said to Linda later, cleaning up, trying to make a joke of it.

“Why did you get married in such a rush?” Michelle asked. “Are you knocked up?”

“Michelle!” Spoken in unison, as Linda and Rachel often did.

“Are you knocked up?”

“Michelle!” the terrible twosome gasped, always in each other’s pockets.

Michelle was curled into an armchair, watching her sisters clean up. It wouldn’t be accurate to say it didn’t occur to her to help. It occurred to her and she decided not to. Even in Linda’s big kitchen, there was only so much counter space. A third person would just get in the way.

Henry had decided, after Bambi’s departure, to make a late-night run to the Giant as well, and the kids had clamored to go with him. Rachel had sent Joshua with them and now it was just the three sisters. Three Sisters. Michelle was supposed to have read that for some course at College Park, but she got by with the CliffsNotes. She doubted Chekhov could tell her anything about three sisters that she didn’t already know. She sat in the chair, remote in hand, flicking, flicking, flicking through the channels. She hated Linda’s decor, the whole Martha Stewart, country-cozy thing. Michelle liked modern things, sleek and minimalist.

“That was weird,” Linda said.

“What?” Rachel sounded guilty to Michelle’s ears. Oh, this was rich, Rachel being in the doghouse for once. Michelle must remember to stoke her mother’s hurt, try to keep this going for a while. Plus, it would take Bambi’s mind off the fact that Michelle didn’t have a job.

“Mom trying to persuade us I was conceived on her birthday. We’ve all lived quite happily with the falsehood of the wedding-night conception all these years. Do you think she’s getting addled?”

“Fifty-five is young for that,” Rachel said, but she sounded worried. Rachel already had a dent between her eyes from her incessant worrying.

“Trust me, she’s fine,” Michelle said, settling on MTV. It was a rerun of The Real World, which she wouldn’t mind auditioning for, although she couldn’t imagine a Real World: Baltimore. Baltimore was way too real for the Real World. Still, with her looks and her story, she would easily make it through the preliminary selection rounds.

The problem was, she found the people on the show a little pathetic. She wanted the free rent in a gorgeous apartment, but not if the price was a bunch of petty squabbles and, worse, those terribly earnest conversations. Could be good exposure for an actress, but did she really want to be an actress anyway? It seemed like a monstrous amount of work, and there was seldom any money in it.

“Mom’s just upset that you didn’t tell her about your wedding before Joshua’s folks knew,” Linda said.

“She likes Joshua-”

“We all like Joshua,” Michelle said. “Although I always thought he was gay. Are you sure he’s not gay?”

She thought she’d get another double Michelle! But they held their tongues.

“Okay, okay, he’s not gay. But I’m sorry, he seems like such a lightweight compared to-”

“You were thirteen,” Rachel said, cutting her off. Man, she couldn’t even bear to hear Marc’s name. Weird. “You don’t know anything.”

“I know he was rich. And you let him screw you over. Not a penny.” She put on an English accent. “Not a penny farthing for you, Rachel.” She thought it would make her sister laugh. She was wrong.

“We were married for only two years. It was a mistake. A very young, foolish mistake.”

“It will be sixteen years next fall that I met Henry,” Linda said, obviously trying to steer them away from a fight. “Together for fifteen years, married for thirteen. Four kids.”

“And Mom was nineteen when she met Dad,” Rachel put in.

“So stop acting like I’m a baby at twenty-two. The way I see it, I’m not the one in this room with the blemished record.”

That hurt Rachel, and Michelle instantly regretted it. She didn’t want to hurt Rachel. She looked up to her, truly. Looked up to both her sisters. But she resented them, too. Those photos in their oh-so-proper riding outfits. The years, however brief, of having their father and money. But she resented their closeness, most of all. They told each other things that they didn’t tell her. So it was only right that she didn’t tell them everything. Not that she had any significant secrets. But she was working on a few.

“When are you going to have kids?” Linda asked Rachel.

“Soon,” Rachel said. “Really soon.”

“I repeat,” Michelle said. “Are you knocked up?”

“Who knows?” Rachel said. “But, no, that’s not why we got married.”

“Don’t expect me to babysit,” Michelle said. It was surprising how easy it was to watch The Real World without sound. She had no problem following it whatsoever. It was basically fight-fight-fight montage fight-fight-fight montage.

“I wouldn’t,” Rachel said. “But what if you decide you want to? What if you get married young, like all the Brewer women?”

“Oh, I might get married young. But I’m never having kids. Never.” Michelle hadn’t had her childhood yet. She wanted to find a job or a man that would allow her to live very well. She wasn’t naïve. She realized that both required effort. Different kinds of effort, but effort. And while it would probably surprise her sisters, she had decided that a job was better than a man. For one thing, you could move from job to job with much greater ease than you could move from husband to husband. She was going to find whatever job paid the best for the least amount of work, even if it was boring as hell.

She rode down to Fells Point with Rachel and Joshua. She had forgotten that Joshua was part of the equation now, even though he and Rachel had been sharing her apartment for more than six months. Joshua was just that kind of guy, easy to forget. Once in the apartment, he seemed comically out of place in the feminine environment that Rachel had created in the little one-bedroom under the eaves of an eighteenth-century rowhouse. Michelle realized they would probably be moving before long. She wondered if she could take over Rachel’s lease. Again, that would require a job.

Rachel and Joshua did not go to bed right away. Michelle had the sense they were waiting her out, trying to keep her entertained so she wouldn’t go out, after all. Good luck, she thought. Toward midnight, as Rachel struggled to keep her eyes open, Michelle said sweetly, as if conferring a kindness: “I’ll let you two go to bed. But I’m restless. I think I’ll go get a nightcap over at John Steven’s.”

“So late?” Joshua said. Already trained to do Rachel’s dirty work. Oh, won’t you be a good little Brewer man, following your wife around like a dog.

“It’s not late at all for someone my age. And if that storm comes through as promised, there will be plenty of time to sit indoors.”

“It’s just not safe,” Rachel said. “For someone alone, I mean. I worry.”

Michelle laughed as she adjusted her coat and scarf. Their grandmother had given Bambi an old mink and Michelle had taken it over, even had it tailored and repaired at great expense. A boyfriend’s expense. She loved it when someone-always a girl, and almost always an unattractive one-said: “Fur is murder.” Michelle would say blithely: “No, it’s the consequence of murder. As is most of human history, all the way back to Cain and Abel, so get over it.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t go out,” Rachel said. “We have bourbon here, a bottle of Romanian wine, from the cheap barrels at Trinacria-”

“Oh, what’s the big deal, Rach? Do you think I’m going to go out the door and never come back?”

“Well,” Rachel said, “it wouldn’t be unprecedented in our family history.”

Michelle wavered for a moment, but she had too much pride not to follow through on her plans. She went out into the night, snug in her coat, giddy with her prospects. Attention, sex, money, love. The first two were almost always available to her and she was after the third now. Love could wait. The sky was clear, and even in the city one could see the stars. It was impossible to imagine a blizzard was coming.

When Rachel and Joshua woke up the next morning, Michelle was sitting in the little kitchen with a cup of coffee from the Daily Grind, reading a Beacon-Light she had found on their neighbor’s doorstep. Neither Rachel nor Joshua asked her about her evening, and she didn’t volunteer any details. She was her father’s daughter. Free as the breeze, accountable to no one, hardwired to understand probability, if not possibility.

March 21, 2012

Susan Borden had told the original investigators many things about herself, as detailed by the witness sheet. There was her full name (Susan Evelyn Borden). Her date of birth, February 25, 1956, in Salisbury, Maryland. Social Security number, her address at the time, which turned out to be only a few blocks from her current home, which had popped out of the MVA files in a matter of seconds. She had given a detailed history of her employment at the bed-and-breakfast, said she counted herself a friend of the owners, for whom she had worked about two years. But she had been away the week that Julie went missing, down the ocean with a new boyfriend. Total shock, never saw it coming, didn’t have any insight. When Baltimore City cops picked up the case fifteen years later, they hadn’t done much more than call her and review her statement from ’86.

Rereading this file now, Sandy could see the gaps. Susan-Susie-didn’t say how she knew Julie, just left the impression that the friendship had been subsequent to the work relationship. She gave up Salisbury, her hometown, but she didn’t volunteer where she had been between Salisbury and Havre de Grace. Her work history included: “Hostess, various Baltimore restaurants.” Yes, Susan Borden had been very careful to omit any detail that led back to Susie the dancer.

He made a strategic decision to let her stew a little bit before they met. She was a responsible citizen, at the same address for more than twenty years now. She wasn’t going to bolt. He called and left a message, asking her to call him back and set up a time to discuss an old case. He said case on purpose, leaving it general.

Two days later, he called and left another message. Detective Sanchez, would like to talk to you about the disappearance of Julie Saxony.

The next day, he called and repeated the same message, almost word for word.

By the fourth day, he was pretty sure he was being ignored. Okay, she could be out of town, on vacation. She could be one of those people who no longer listen to their messages, just check the caller ID and call back the numbers they know, ignore everyone else. He called a neighbor, using a reverse directory to pinpoint the number. He said he had a delivery for Susan Borden but couldn’t get an answer at her house.

“Her husband is always there. He’ll sign for it. Assuming he can.”

That was interesting on a lot of levels. Husband? Not according to any records he had found. And-assuming he can. What was that about?

“Has to be her, nobody else. It’s certified.”

“Well, she gets home at four. But, seriously, you could leave it on the steps. It’s not like people around here steal.”

Oh, country people, so smug. Go read a copy of In Cold Blood, you all so safe in your houses.

Sandy arrived at 5:45, although he had intended to be there closer to 5:30, figuring that gave a woman enough time to take off her pantyhose and put on comfortable shoes, maybe get a snack, but not start dinner yet. That was what his guardian, Nabby, had done upon her arrival home each day. Mary had changed to flat shoes, but stayed in her work clothes, as pretty and fresh at the end of the day as she was at the beginning.

A man, the alleged husband, answered the door. Sixtyish, Sandy guessed, a true apple shape in a red sweater that made him look even more like an apple, and very high, ruddy color in his cheeks. It wasn’t a healthy color, though. His eyes were rheumy, his manner vague. Alcoholic, or maybe one of those big boozers who somehow kept it in check, watering himself all day long, like a plant.

Assuming he can.

“What do you want?” Grumpy. Ill at ease.

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with Susan Borden. Left her a couple of messages.”

“She never checks the landline, and I never answer it.”

“Why not?” Sandy was genuinely curious. He couldn’t imagine sitting in a house, listening to a phone ring, no matter how swozzled a guy might be.

“It’s never for me. And it’s never really for Susie. People who know her call her cell.”

“It’s a business matter,” Sandy said. “Not a big deal. I’m”-his instincts told him to lie, or at least obscure the nature of his mission-“I work as a consultant for the Baltimore City Police Department and I’m-I’m closing down a file. There’s paperwork that I need permission to shred.”

“She should be here any minute. Went to the store for something we didn’t have.”

And with that the guy left Sandy in the foyer, went back somewhere in the house. A television room, based on the sound, the rhythms of people talking in a not-quite-real way. Sandy imagined the guy in an otherwise dark room, drinking steadily from something that looked like a glass of water.

He was still trying to figure out what to do when a woman came in behind him with a grocery sack. She was startled, but only mildly. He had a feeling it wasn’t the first time she’d found some stranger in the foyer.

“What the dickens! Did Doobie leave you here?”

“Doobie?”

“My husband.”

Uh-huh, Sandy amended in his head. Not unless you kept your own name, and you’re not the type. You are the type to call a live-in your husband, though, and he probably is, by the standards of common law. He wondered how long they had been together, if it had ever been good, or if she had almost always been his caretaker, trading her competence for whatever checks he brought to the household. Not unlike Sandy and Nabby, come to think of it, although the scales had balanced in the end. He had taken better care of her than she ever had of him.

“He said you’d be back soon.”

“Are you the guy with the mystery package?”

“You got me. Yes, I’m the one who called your neighbor. You didn’t answer my messages.”

“What messages?”

“On the home phone.”

“Oh, God, I never listen to those. They’re just solicitations. Anyone who knows me knows to call on my cell.”

“Like, say, Tubman Schroeder?”

That got her attention. She was tiny, as Lorraine had mentioned, and, for fifty-six, incredibly cute. There was no other word for it. She was like a miniature Marilyn Monroe, if you could imagine Monroe living another twenty years, toning down the hair, but still dressing to flatter an hourglass figure. Staggeringly high heels added to her height, yet she was still short of five-five. He felt a pang for the young woman in the inappropriate hostess dress, all those years ago, chattering about her plans to the more sophisticated Lorraine Gelman.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I told your husband that I’m a consultant from the police department who needs permission to shred certain files. Only the first part is true. I am a consultant. I have been looking at a file, but it’s not going to be shredded. We’ve reopened the Julie Saxony case.”

She nodded. She looked frivolous, but she was quick, practical. She walked back into the house. “Doobie?” Her voice was loud, clear, and deliberate. “This man needs to talk to me. We are going to sit in the front room and talk. So dinner might be a little late.”

“What are we having?”

“Turkey burgers and a salad.”

“And french fries?”

“No, no french fries.”

“But a burger.”

“Yes. A turkey burger. I’ll bring you a plate of crackers and carrot sticks for now.”

Sandy remembered that he had taken a similar tone with Mary in their final months. But Mary had fought back, lost her temper, said: Don’t treat me like a child. Mary’s mind had been sharp, all the way to the end.

He went into the front room, taking Susie’s words to Doobie as an invitation. She returned a few minutes later.

“He doesn’t know about Julie, does he?” he asked.

“He knew her, actually.”

“But not how you two knew each other.”

“Wouldn’t matter if he did, not now. He won’t remember meeting you tomorrow.”

He waited to see if she would fill in the gaps. Alcoholism? Dementia? Both? Maybe she was a woman long practiced at not saying more than was necessary.

“So I’ve reopened the investigation into Julie Saxony’s murder.”

“You said. Why?”

“It’s my job. I take on cold cases.”

“Why Julie? Why now?”

“No reason.”

She laughed. It was a delightful sound. Could Tubman really have done better?

“Right. Well, join the club.”

“The club?”

“The not very discriminating club of men taken in by Julie Saxony’s smoldering gaze. That’s what Felix called it. Juliet Romeo’s smoldering gaze. Everyone fell for her, until they saw it was impossible.”

“Did that include your old boyfriend, Tubman?”

“In the beginning? Sure. But he was practical. He wasn’t going to get her, so he took up with me.”

“That would bug a lot of women.”

“Not me. I’m practical, too. I liked Tubman. He was a good time, very generous. It was never serious between us, though.”

“That’s interesting,” he said. “Because part of the reason I’m here is because Lorraine Gelman told me you spent an entire party acting like Tubman’s wife, babbling about Julie and Felix.”

She wasn’t fazed. “It takes two people to be serious. Tubby wasn’t never serious about me. I knew that, and I accepted it. I probably talked too much to Lorraine because she made me so nervous. The Great Lady. I could tell she didn’t want to be at the party, that she found everything there tacky-Tubby, his friends, me. Is that why you’re here? Because a young woman once said some nonsense at a party? You’ll never lack for work if that’s the case.”

“I think you know why I’m here. You worked at the B and B. You were on the interview list. But nothing in the notes indicates that you told investigators that you and Julie were old friends, back in the day.”

“I told them we were friends, that we had met through our work. It’s not my fault if no one followed up. Doobie and I had just started dating, and I wasn’t keen for that information about my past to get out. I don’t think he would have cared about what I did, but it’s a small town and I wanted to stay here. I knew that would be easier if people didn’t know I danced on the Block twenty million years ago.”

Sandy couldn’t speak for the original investigators, but he believed they probably had asked how Julie and Susan knew each other. Which meant she had lied. Then and now.

“You know, people always think they’re good judges of whether information matters. But that’s like a person holding one piece of a puzzle while I’m on the other side of the wall with this whole jigsaw put together. You don’t see it, but I do.”

“I wasn’t there that day,” she said, defensive and defiant. “July third, I mean. She had given me a week off. Doobie and I were in Ocean City. It was a last-minute thing.”

“You decided to go away for the Fourth of July the last minute?”

“Julie asked if I wanted the week off, so I went.”

“Generous of her. Especially with her own big holiday weekend coming up.”

“That was Julie. Look, I didn’t even have the skills to be a proper housekeeper. But Julie took it in her head that she was going to rescue me, get me away from the Block. She tried me out at the Coffee Pot Shoppe, as a hostess. Like that place needed a hostess. It was four booths and a counter. But she knew I couldn’t wait tables. Physically, I mean. I couldn’t carry the trays. I was weak and didn’t have the wing span.”

She spread her arms, as if to demonstrate.

“But Julie’s attitude was, ‘We are both going to get up and out. Up and out.’ No more dancing. No more unavailable boyfriends, whether they were married or just, you know, out for a good time.” She looked wistful. “She approved of Doobie. That was another reason she gave me the time off. He was different then, of course. Worked at the marina.”

“Going over the notes, I saw you told the detectives at the time that nothing unusual happened that week. But she gave you a week off, out of the blue.”

“Like I said, Julie was generous. And she really liked Doobie.”

“Man, you are a loyal friend, aren’t you?”

That caught her. Good. It was his intention.

“I would hope so, yes.”

“I mean, I can see keeping a secret when you thought she might still be alive…”

“I never thought she was alive. Never. I agreed with Chet and, trust me, that big-headed cook-oh, pardon moi, chef-and I did not agree on much. But I suspected she was dead almost as soon as she left. Always.”

“So why didn’t you tell police everything?”

“What everything?”

He was fishing, sure. But he was fishing in a stocked pond.

“Here’s what I think. You didn’t hold back the whole story about your relationship with Julie because you were worried about being in the papers. You held it back to protect her. What were you protecting her from?”

“How could I protect someone I thought was dead?”

“I don’t know. But she is dead, more than twenty-five years now. Who knows what might have happened if you had been more forthcoming twenty-five years ago?”

Susie let out her breath.

“It was just so unfair.”

“What?”

“Everyone thinking that Julie had Felix’s money, when she didn’t. Julie wasn’t a thief. If she kept the money, it was hers. That must have been hard to hear, but it was true. It’s not her fault. I’m sure there was some other plan for the family, but it fell through, or there wasn’t enough.”

“What money, Mrs. Borden?” He knew she wasn’t a Mrs., not officially, but he wanted her to feel dignified, respected. He needed to make her feel the exact opposite of whatever she had felt when she babbled to Lorraine Gelman. Safe, trusted, respected. Yet he also needed her to babble just the same.

“It’s not just Julie.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not just Julie. There’s someone-that’s why I never spoke of it. It’s what Julie would have wanted.”

“Someone else? Her sister?”

Susan nodded.

“I can promise you the statute of limitations has run out on that.” He really needed to check that detail. “No one’s going to care about Andrea Norr being an accessory to Felix’s escape. But that was it, right?”

So the old rumor was true. They drove him out of state in a horse trailer. He couldn’t help being a little impressed with himself, ferreting out this fact, confirming an old legend. Too bad that he didn’t have anyone in his life to tell the story to.

She gave the tiniest nod.

“And she got paid? The sister?”

“Something. Not a lot. And all Julie got was the coffee shop and a little cash for herself, too. But she didn’t believe it, she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she knew that Julie must have gotten lots of money, or how else would she have bought the inn, opened the restaurant? She was-kind of crazy. Not yelling, but loud enough that I could hear her. They were in the kitchen and I was in the laundry room off the kitchen. This was about a week before. She asked Julie for money, said it was only fair. And Julie said she just didn’t have it.”

Susan had made the mistake he had hoped she would make, rushing ahead, babbling, assuming that he knew more than he did. She? Who she, what she? Not Andrea Norr.

A silence of a sort. They could hear Doobie’s television set, the familiar chime of the Law & Order theme. Must be six now.

“Did you see her?”

“No. And if I thought she had anything to do with Julie’s murder, I would have told. I would have. But she was soft. Julie always said that. Soft, not used to doing things for themselves. The wife and the daughters. All spoiled, the whole lot of them.”

“So there was a confrontation, a week before. Where someone accused Julie of taking money and she said she hadn’t.”

“She hadn’t. Julie was really shaken up. She worried that the wife knew how to get to Felix, that the wife had told him these lies about her. That’s what really bugged her.”

“So she didn’t know where Felix was?”

“No. And she was okay with that, as long as Bambi didn’t, either. The day the daughter came, that was all she wanted to know. Had anyone spoken to Felix, what was going on with Felix.”

The day the daughter came. He didn’t let on that he had assumed Bambi Brewer was the she in Susie’s tale. He flipped open a notebook. “Right, that was-Linda, right? The oldest one.”

“I don’t remember the name. The middle one, I think. The smart one, who went to the fancy college.” She looked defensive. “Julie kept tabs, a little. She paid attention to Felix’s family. Maybe more than she should. She accused the girl of doing her mother’s dirty work. The daughter said her mother didn’t know she had come.”

“Susan,” called Doobie, his voice as querulous as a child’s after a nap. “Susan?”

“Yes, Doobie?”

“What are we having for dinner?”

“Turkey burgers and salad.”

“And french fries?”

“No french fries.” She looked at Sandy. “He’s older than me, by a bit. The doctor says something happens to the brain and we become like little kids again. Fewer inhibitions. We want what we want, we don’t care as much about saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ He’s a good guy. We’ve had a great life together. I’d be a shit to kick him to the curb now. Look, I’m sorry if you think what I did was a big deal. I had to ask myself what Julie would want, what was most important to her. Even if what I knew might have solved her murder-it would have hurt her sister.”

“She wasn’t known for putting her sister first when she was alive, not according to her sister.”

“All the more reason to do it after she died. Julie felt bad about her relationship with Andrea, wanted to make things up to her. She didn’t get the chance. I did.”

On the drive back to Baltimore, he replayed the conversation with Susan Borden. She was one of the more credible people he had interviewed. Everyone lied, but Susan had been pretty straightforward about her lies of omission and why she had committed them.

And her loyalty to Doobie, the child-man with the childish name and the enormous gut-it spoke well of her. We’ve had a great life together. They weren’t now and yet there he was, every day, totally reliant on her. Would Sandy have traded for more time with Mary if it had meant being with someone who wasn’t really Mary? Would he have traded Bobby-as-he-was, now in his thirties and lost to him, for a normal Bobby who died at age five?

You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought. It’s still a play where everyone dies in the end.