After I'm Gone

September 23, 2001

Is there room in the refrigerator for another platter?”

Bambi, who had been in a fog all day, glanced distractedly at the middle-aged woman who had asked the question. Brown hair, dressed in a knit two-piece, which Bambi’s expert eye identified as high end, perhaps even St. John’s, a few seasons ago, although that was always fine in Baltimore. But the woman was a stranger to her. Why would someone unknown to Bambi be at Aunt Harriet’s shivah?

“Thank you-Naomi.” The name came to her in the nick of time. Naomi had been Linda’s classmate at Park. Bambi kept forgetting that her daughter, forty-one this month, was a middle-aged woman, too.

She walked Naomi’s platter back to the Gelmans’ kitchen, which had been redone a year ago and now had one of those enormous French-door Vikings, wide and deep enough to hold multiple platters from Seven Mile Market, the kosher deli, not that anyone in this crowd kept kosher. Not even Linda had gone that overboard. Bambi hoped Bert and Lorraine, who had been generous to host this shivah, would also allow her to leave much of the food behind. Oh, she would raid the platters for the cold cuts, maybe some of the cheese and fruit, but now that she was alone in the Sudbrook Park house, she had no use for all the cookies and cakes and pies. Neither did Bert nor Lorraine, with Sydney in New York and the twins at law school in Chicago, but they would find it less shameful to toss out the uneaten food. Rich people were allowed to waste things.

Returning to the living room, Bambi still couldn’t get over how many people were here. Her mother had been right, after all, to insist that they needed something bigger than her little apartment in Windsor Towers. Bambi had thought no one would come. Harriet had no spouse, no children, and she had outlived the few friends she hadn’t alienated. Yet the Gelmans’ first floor teemed with people. Bambi’s friends, Ida’s friends, even the girls’ friends had been coming and going all afternoon. Perhaps, Bambi thought, people were simply desperate to gather. But what was the point of being with other people when the conversation immediately turned back to all the horrible topics-the Towers, anthrax, Cipro, the stories of near misses, the personal connections to those who had died. No one in Bambi’s circle really knew anyone who had been affected, although Joshua, Rachel’s husband, had a college friend who had been on the upper floors of the second tower and gotten out in time.

“The body was found”-Bambi started at that bit of overheard conversation, but surely they were talking about the attacks? She continued to move through the crowd, checking on people. They would have to say a prayer at some point. Thank God they had Linda’s oldest to get them through it. Like most of her generation, Bambi read Hebrew only in transliteration and didn’t know any prayers by heart. Her family had been conservative when to be conservative was to be rather lax.

But Felix knew Hebrew. She remembered her surprise, early in their marriage, when she realized that Felix had been raised in a relatively devout home. Synagogue was not just a social network for Felix. He relaxed there, took solace in High Holiday services. It was more than a way to burnish his social standing, although he always pretended otherwise.

After he had gone, Bambi sometimes looked at the new bimah, the Chagall-inspired stained glass behind it, and felt as if she could count the Brewer dollars that had gone into it-and wished she could have every one of them back.

“I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” a woman said, clasping Bambi’s hands. Corky Mercer, the absentee owner of the Pikesville boutique where Bambi had worked for twenty years now, all the while pretending it was a lark, something to do after the older girls left home. The job had kept them all in clothes they otherwise never could have afforded.

“She?”

“Your aunt.”

Of course. Her aunt, Harriet. They were here for Harriet. “She hadn’t been well for two years, but, no, in the end, she didn’t suffer,” she said, extricating her hands. Corky meant well, but Bambi didn’t appreciate any touch that held her in place. She wondered if Corky would have done the same to a lifelong customer, as opposed to a customer who had ended up being a lifelong employee.

Aunt Harriet had died in her sleep at age ninety-five. It had been at once slow and sudden, the end of a gradual decline that began with a fall at age eighty-three. It was only a broken wrist, but it was the beginning. That was when they started hiring the aides-and when Harriet’s eccentricities became more pronounced.

Or was it simply that someone was finally there, paying attention? At any rate, the calls began twelve years ago. Even after Bambi’s mother moved into Windsor Towers, just down the hall from her older sister, Bambi still got the calls. Sometimes from Harriet, sometimes from the front desk, but mostly from the nursing aides who were subjected to Harriet’s verbal abuse. Bambi wouldn’t call her aunt racist-

I would, said the Felix who lived in Bambi’s head. Still. Still.

But Harriet was misanthropic and suspicious of almost everyone, regardless of race. She also had a bad tendency to cite people’s appearance in her tirades. So, yes, when she yelled frizzy-haired slut at the Jamaican aide, or big-mouthed idiot at the next woman, it probably seemed racist. “If you knew the things she says to my mother, her own baby sister,” Bambi said when she tried to appease the women. “I’m the only person she likes.”

They were not appeased.

Bambi really was, according to Harriet, the only person she liked. When Bambi was a child, Aunt Harriet had said: “You are my favorite niece.”

Bambi, just ten, had said: “But I’m your only niece.”

“Exactly,” Harriet said with a scary loud laugh, slapping her thigh. “So you’re my least favorite, too. When I write you out of the will, it’s so I can put you in the will.”

But as Bambi emerged as a belle, Harriet’s teasing evolved into sardonic adulation. Harriet, never married-by choice, she said-took vicarious pleasure in Bambi’s social successes. She always wanted to know if the boys were from good families, by which she meant only one thing: Were they rich? She resented Felix at first. “He nipped you in the bud,” she said. “He knew a good thing when he saw it.”

Yet Linda, Rachel, Michelle-they were of no interest to her. Even as Michelle began to resemble Bambi more and more, Harriet ignored her nieces. “You’re my only heir,” she said to Bambi time and again.

“What about Mother?”

“She has a husband.”

Bambi’s father had died less than a year after Felix disappeared, so it seemed to Bambi that she and her mother were in similar situations, even if her mother did have Social Security, life insurance, and savings to draw on. Still, in Harriet’s mind, it was different, a disappeared husband apparently being much worse than a dead one. Even as her animosity toward her sister lessened, softened by Ida’s decision to follow her to the Windsor Towers, Harriet insisted that Bambi, and Bambi alone, deserved her money.

How much was there? Enough to make a difference? She hated herself for thinking about it-yet it had been her only thought for forty-eight hours, since the last call about Aunt Harriet came, and she wished it could be her only thought now, that it could force other things from her mind.

She caught Lorraine looking at her, eyes full of pity, and she knew it was not for Aunt Harriet. Bambi wouldn’t be pitied. She checked her posture, smoothed her hair, and searched the crowd for her daughters. Here was her fortune, achieved against enormous odds. Linda, the family breadwinner and a good mother, with four terrific kids. Rachel, still trying to be a mother, while now enjoying success doing some computer work that Bambi didn’t quite understand, but it had grown out of a silly thing she had done, creating a computer program that sent out a poem every day. And Rachel had helped Michelle find a job at a start-up, although its main appeal to Michelle seemed to be the glamorous offices, created out of an old factory in the heart of Canton.

Where was Michelle? She hadn’t slipped out before the prayer, had she? That would be in very bad taste on her part. Not that anyone would remember, tomorrow.

Michelle wandered the upstairs, looking for a computer. She wanted to check her e-mail. Since September 11 she had been even more obsessive about going online. She checked her e-mail as often as possible, used random chat rooms. Everyone was checking in on each other. A few girls from Park, even Adam Gelman, who still had a crush on her. Sometimes she thought she should take him in hand and break him, like a horse. A third-year law student, he was still something of a thuggish frat boy. It would be a good deed for all womankind to tame him and put him back in the population, gentled. But he didn’t have any money to spend on her, much less time. So-no thank you.

Adam and Alec’s room was as it had been when they left for college, only clean. Their mother had tried to impose her will on the room to a certain extent-the sports and music posters were beautifully framed, not tacked up with tape or thumbtacks. The built-in desks, the bright red chairs, even the basketball hoop mounted to the wall-these were not IKEA finds, Michelle knew. She remembered an earlier version of this room, with two sets of bunk beds. Because, of course, Adam and Alec must have both options, up and down. They had never wanted to have separate rooms. They had gone to college, shared a dorm room, and now they were at DePaul together. Weird. The only profound difference between them, as far as Michelle could see, was that Adam had a crush on her and Alec couldn’t stand her.

No computers here, although there was a television set. She thought about turning it on, settling in, but it wasn’t TV she longed for. She wanted to talk-only not to the people downstairs. She wanted to talk on the computer, where people were wittier and understood her jokes and it was okay to be a little ADD. To talk past people, as opposed to talk to.

And to try, again and again, to chase her father down the rabbit holes of various search engines. She was still fond of Alta Vista, although curious about Google, which suddenly seemed everywhere. Imagine, she had been at College Park at the same time as Sergey Brin. Now there was a lost opportunity.

She checked Bert and Lorraine’s room. Lorraine didn’t even have a television set in here, much less a computer. Michelle lifted the sheets, looked for labels. Frette. Not silk, she decided, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. Cotton that felt like silk. She filed the name away as she often did with the brands she discovered at the Gelman house, adding it to a voluminous wish list.

She had been living in Rachel’s old apartment for five years now, but she yearned to move. Everyone said of her new job, “Oh, you can walk to work!” Sure, if she wanted to wear flats or put on sneakers and then change into her heels. Both options struck her as untenable. What she wanted to do was buy a condo across the street from her office, in this gorgeous building called Canton Cove, with harbor views and all sorts of amenities. But even with the new job, she wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage. And almost anyone could get a mortgage these days. You could buy a place with no money down and, by the time you signed your loan documents, you’d already have made ten, twenty thousand dollars on paper. But Michelle had credit card debt. It was Rachel’s fault, letting her have the apartment, with its relatively low rent. That had lulled Michelle into thinking she had more money than she did. She had spent what she wasn’t paying toward her rent, and then some, and now she was in debt.

She left Bert and Lorraine’s room and went down the hall to Sydney’s room. For a moment, she thought she had gotten confused. Surely, this was the old guest room? But Sydney’s room was now a home gym, a proper one-elliptical machine, treadmill, a television mounted to the wall above them. A rack of weights, serious ones. Those must be for Bert. And-wow, a sauna. Michelle opened the door and leaned in, drinking in that lovely dry-wood smell. When had Lorraine done this? After Sydney moved to New York to take a job?

Or after she had announced right before graduation that she was moving to New York to live with a thirty-five-year-old woman she had been dating secretly for two years?

Lorraine and Bert had taken it very well, everyone kept saying. Michelle and her sisters found that hilarious. As if Sydney had shamed them. Sydney was only the most disgustingly perfect person in the world, so perfect that even Rachel didn’t seem quite as shiny alongside her. (Truth be told, it pleased Michelle that Rachel was second to someone, brain-wise and perfection-wise.) Sydney was so wonderful that she had called Bambi and Ida to express her sympathy for the loss of Aunt Harriet, then explained that she would miss the funeral because she was volunteering at a soup kitchen that was providing meals for rescue workers.

No, Sydney was not the kid that Lorraine and Bert should be putting on a brave front about. But then Lorraine and Bert somehow didn’t know how awful the twins had been as teenagers. Mellowed now, presumably, but there had been the incident with the drunk girl, the video they had made of her. They hadn’t touched her. They had just filmed this poor girl stumbling, then throwing up, and then, with the logic of the inebriated, removing her clothes because they were covered with vomit. They filmed every moment, with a droll running commentary, then screened it for their friends in the Gelmans’ den. When the prank-Bert’s term-caught up with them, the boys insisted they were protecting themselves against what the girl might say later. “We were just documenting it,” Alec said. It was her house, her father’s liquor, and the twins were sober. But Michelle thought that was the truly creepy part, the twins’ self-control, their clear-eyed decision to sit back and record this girl’s humiliation.

She closed the sauna, turned, and found Bert at the door of the room. She felt guilty, thinking such mean thoughts about his sons while prowling through his house, cataloging Lorraine’s things, learning to want items she hadn’t known existed.

“Your mother’s looking for you.”

“I was hoping to lie down. I have the most ferocious headache.”

“The guest room is made up. Or you could use our bed.”

His kindness made her feel even guiltier. Too bad Bert’s sons weren’t more like him. They had his looks, but something was lacking. Bert made her feel safe.

“I’ll be okay. I’ll just throw some cold water on my face, maybe take some aspirin.”

“Okay,” he said. “You know, Michelle, for a moment-in this dim light, I thought you were your mother. You may end up being even more beautiful than she was in her prime.”

Michelle realized that Bert thought this high praise, but really. “Aren’t I in my prime right now?” she asked.

“Not quite.”

“When, then?” Said with a pretend pout. She looked up at him through her lashes, parted her lips. She suddenly wanted Bert to kiss her. And when Michelle wanted men to kiss her, they did.

But Bert said only: “I think your mother’s prime started in her midthirties or so. Maybe even forty. And she’s still in it. Find that aspirin, Michelle, then come downstairs, okay?”

He probably didn’t realize what she had offered him, old man that he was. Michelle went to the powder room, took a Tylenol she didn’t actually need and stared in the mirror, wondering how anyone could be in one’s prime at forty.

Rachel had noticed Michelle was missing, but not in the way Linda had, which was to say Rachel wasn’t furious.

“Michelle won’t stay at any party that’s not about her,” Linda sputtered. “She did the same thing at Rosh Hashanah dinner last week, went into my bedroom and watched television.”

“She had a migraine,” Rachel said.

“People with migraines need to be in dark, quiet rooms. She was watching Gilmore Girls.”

“It’s a drag for her, being the youngest. She’s the odd one out. The rest of us come in pairs.”

“Not Mama.”

“Doesn’t she? I always feel as if Papa is with her, somehow.”

“You’re such a romantic, Rachel. He’s in-Bali, with his girlfriend, the one who lived at Horizon House. I always wanted to get a good look at her, see what the attraction was.”

“They’re not in Bali.”

“Israel, then. Wasn’t that always the other rumor? That he bought a new life for himself by investing heavily in Israeli bonds?”

“I think you’ve confused Papa with Meyer Lansky.”

“Oh, Rachel, the great romantic. Do you really think Papa yearns for our mother after all these years?”

“I met her,” she said.

“You saw her. You told me, back when it happened. And it’s not as if she announced her plans to you that night. It was probably already in the works, don’t you think? And all that other stuff she did was meant to obscure it.”

Nana Ida came over to Linda and Rachel, pushed her way between them and linked arms. The sisters were not particularly tall, but they dwarfed Nana Ida.

“Harriet loved you both so much,” she said of her older sister, with whom she had not even been on speaking terms until two years ago.

Linda nodded carefully, while Rachel made a noncommittal noise. They were not fans of Harriet.

“And although she didn’t specify, I know she’d want you to have mementos. We’ll go through her jewelry box, see what’s left.”

Rachel hoped her expression stayed neutral. She knew that her mother had-with Harriet’s full consent-sold the better pieces. But everything was to be willed to her mother, Harriet’s godchild, so what did it matter? Her mother had sold off things precisely to keep the estate below certain levels in order to avoid the inheritance taxes. She wrote checks over the years, too, although never enough to pay a gift tax. Yet Harriet would never let Bambi see her financial accounts, and that was where the real money was.

“She probably would have wanted you to have a little money, too,” their grandmother said. “But we’ll have to see what’s what when the dust has settled.”

Even as Rachel was sorting out her grandmother’s syntax, Linda said sharply: “You sound as if you’re the executor.”

“Oh, no,” Nana Ida said. “That’s the lawyer. But the estate will be split between your mother and me. Well, not fifty-fifty. Your mother will get a cash gift, and I’ll get the rest. Harriet changed it six months ago. We became so close, living at the Windsor Towers. She had resented me all our lives because I was the baby, but she finally saw how silly that was. Plus, she knows now how much I helped out-tuition and such. I put you girls through Park.”

“We appreciate it,” Rachel said, as she always said when this came up, and it came up a lot.

“Does Mama know?” Linda asked.

“I told Harriet she should tell her.”

“Does Mama know?” Linda repeated. Rachel realized how quick her sister was to recognize a nonresponsive answer, given that her professional life was based on giving them.

“I couldn’t say,” Nana Ida said, looking down into her coffee cup. “It’s not so very much, I’m sure. Money shouldn’t matter in families.”

But Linda had already broken away, plunging through knots of people to reach their mother. Rachel watched her go, remembering how it was Linda, all those years ago, who told her that Julie had been just the latest girlfriend, not the only one. Linda had always known how to break bad news.

Linda tried to move quickly, but she couldn’t just plow through the well-wishers. How much money could it be, anyway? Two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand? Probably not enough to get Bambi’s head above water. Did Nana Ida have any idea how close to the bone Bambi lived, how she sweated the property taxes every year, worried over utility bills, and let repairs go as long as possible? The reason Bambi had asked the Gelmans to hold the shivah was because she couldn’t bear for people to see the house’s condition-the cracking window frames, the patchy roof. She had been able to maintain the “public” rooms, which required little more than regular paint and the occasional reupholstery job, done on the cheap with tacks. But the kitchen was stuck in the seventies, as were the bathrooms. The Sudbrook Park house was frozen in time, like something out of a fairy tale. Her father had paid it off before he left, perhaps the last decent thing he did. Bambi should have sold it immediately, downscaled. Instead, she held on to it, mortgaging it and remortgaging it. Why hadn’t she sold it?

Because, Linda knew, she expected him to come back. She still expected him to come up the walk. So she wouldn’t petition for his life insurance, or even ask for the modest veterans’ pension to which he was entitled.

And her mother had been so good to Aunt Harriet. Linda remembered an incident a few years back, before Harriet had to go to the nursing wing of Windsor Towers. One of the aides had called Bambi in alarm, and, for once, it wasn’t because of something hateful that Harriet had said. When Bambi got to the apartment, the aide showed her that the kitchen drawers were stuffed with packets of sugar and artificial sweetener, cellophane packages of soy sauce and plum sauce, mustard and mayonnaise. It boggled the mind, how Harriet had ever gathered all these things. She must have gone into restaurants and shoved them in her pockets willy-nilly. When the aide had tried to throw them away, Harriet had become enraged and thrown a tantrum like a child. Bambi had soothed her and packed up her “treasures” in marked shoeboxes. Where had Ida been then? Maybe they should contest the will. But, no, it would end up in the news. Just this past July, a reporter had called about doing a story tied to the twenty-fifth “anniversary” of Felix’s disappearance. No one in the family had cooperated, but that hadn’t stopped the reporter from doing a clip job.

Linda found her mother in the kitchen, sitting at the long, padded bench in the breakfast nook. She looked drained. Had someone else already told her about Great-Aunt Harriet’s last spiteful act?

“Drink this,” Lorraine was saying to Bambi. “It’s decaffeinated.”

“I thought you said it would be days, maybe even a week or so, Bert. But if a reporter called you here-”

“The reporter was sniffing. He doesn’t have anything solid.”

“Even if it is her,” Lorraine said, “it has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

“But they’ll write about it soon enough. Not tomorrow perhaps, but it’s going to be written about. They’ll dredge everything up again.”

“No one’s going to pay attention, given what’s happening in the world at large,” Bert said. “It’s a blessing of sorts.”

“The attacks?”

“The discovery. Now you know. It has nothing to do with Felix. She never went to him.”

“Do I? Is that what I know, Bert? And do you think the newspaper will care about that distinction?”

Linda could hold still no longer. “What’s going on? What are you talking about?”

“Tubby got a tip from a detective this morning,” Bert told her. “They think they’ve found Julie Saxony’s body. They still have to do an official ID, and there’s no immediate determination on cause of death, but apparently some items-her driver’s license, I guess, because that would be plastic-survived. I thought the news wouldn’t get out until they had matched dental records, done an autopsy-”

“Where?” Linda asked because it was the only thing she could think to ask.

“Leakin Park.”

“And no one found her until now?”

“It’s a big place,” Bert said. “They say a dog found her on the far side, where there’s no path to walk. And they still have to make an official ID. All they have for now is a body, maybe a license. She could have left that body there herself. We don’t know for certain it’s her.”

And not even ten minutes ago, Linda thought, I imagined her in Bali, sitting next to Daddy on matching chaises, a table of drinks between them. But she didn’t want to feel sorry for Julie Saxony. She didn’t want to feel anything for her. She didn’t want her dead. She just wanted her never to have existed.

I know she’s not in Bali, Rachel had said. I met her. Linda looked at her mother. She was shaky and pale, upset. But she didn’t seem surprised. Then again, she had known about Julie, possibly all day. It was the call from the reporter that had jarred her. Linda would handle the reporter. She always did.

Michelle chose that time to enter the kitchen, oblivious as ever. She didn’t look like someone who had just weathered a migraine, or whatever excuse she had used this time.

“Do we have a minyan? Because I really need to get on the road.” Then, when everyone glared at her, “What?”

March 22, 2012

Julie’s sister, Andrea Norr, did not seem particularly surprised to see Sandy’s car bouncing up her driveway. Resigned, perhaps, like someone who knew a mistake had been made in her favor but had always believed it would catch up to her eventually. Maybe even a little relieved. She walked alongside his car the final ten yards or so, invited him in, made him more bad tea.

“So she told Susie, that little bubblehead? I thought Julie was tighter with a secret.”

Sandy felt a knee-jerk instinct to defend both women. “I think your sister chose a good confidante. Susan Borden didn’t tell the police about the missing money, or even the argument with the daughter. She sat on a significant lead, believing she was honoring Julie’s wishes, that she would put your interests ahead of hers when it came down to it.”

Andrea made a face, the kind of face Sandy wanted to make with every sip of her tea. “If that’s the case, it was out of guilt, not love.”

“Guilt over what?”

“She left me, Mr. Sanchez. We ran away from home together. It was an adventure. And she left me-in the Rexall, in our apartment on Biddle. You know what she called me, when I told her I didn’t approve of Felix? She called me the little old biddy of Biddle Street. She chose her meal ticket over her sister.”

“What I keep hearing is that she really loved him.”

“So what?” A flare of temper. “I was blood. He was some stupid married man who was never going to marry her, never. Okay-so secrets are coming out, right? Susie told my secret. Now I’ll tell Julie’s. She thought, sometimes, about going to the cops, saying that Felix didn’t run away. That he feared for his life. That Bambi had him taken out, because he was going to leave her and she didn’t think she could get by on the alimony.”

“That doesn’t sound like your sister.”

Andrea’s laughter wasn’t cruel, not exactly, but a laugh at one’s expense always feels cruel and she was definitely laughing at Sandy.

“You think you know Julie better than I do? Another man blinded by a pair of big”-she paused in a practiced way-“blue eyes.”

“I’ve learned a lot about her. Other people, her friends, thought well of her.”

“Did they? Well, here’s my tip. When you want to measure the worth of a person, ask the family first. And don’t forget that Felix, the man she loved, didn’t care for her at all. He put us both at risk, asking that we get him out of town. Yes, Tubman knew and the lawyer, Bert, he knew, too, that Felix was going. They knew the how, and they probably could guess the when. Before he left, Felix moved money around, he signed a power of attorney. Julie was too stupid to ask for anything.”

“But you weren’t.”

“I literally bought the farm! Oh, hell, not even I find that funny. Anyway, I had the discipline to wait three years before I spent what he gave me. Someone had to.”

“Wait?”

“Have discipline. That bail bondsman ran all over town, making wink-wink, nudge-nudge jokes about getting stuck with the bond. Always the jolly fat guy.”

“Your sister had discipline. She didn’t tell anyone anything for ten years, as far as we know. And Bert Gelman had discipline.”

“Well, Bert would have been disbarred, right? If he helped someone flee.” She sighed. “There’s one more piece of the story. I know you think Julie was protecting me. But it was mutual. Julie was too stupid to ask for anything. But she wasn’t too stupid not to take what was right in front of her.”

“What do you mean?”

“That night, Felix gave her a suitcase. A small one, like a cosmetic bag. He told her to take it to ‘the place.’ I don’t think she ever did. She hated Bambi that much, she wouldn’t share whatever Felix left behind.”

Sandy was jolted. It was like finding out that a woman you admired had a bad habit, or an ugly laugh, or made fun of cripples. He was disappointed in Julie, and maybe Susie, too, for not telling him this part.

“What was in the suitcase?” he asked. He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

“Money for Felix’s family.”

“You can’t put enough money in a suitcase for a family to live very long.”

“No. But I think there was information, too, about accounts, and how to access them. All I remember is that he said it would take care of everything and she should take it to the place, whatever that was. But she didn’t. I mean-it’s obvious, she didn’t, right?”

“Not to me. It’s not like your sister lived like someone who had that kind of money.” Even as he defended her, he was remembering his own random curiosity about Julie’s ability to make the leap from grubby coffee shop to showplace inn.

“No, but neither did Bambi Brewer-I knew the stable owner who got stiffed for the daughters’ lessons. And that was only six months or so after Felix disappeared. I mean, Bambi might have been reckless, but she couldn’t have run through it that fast. So you have to ask yourself where the money went. My sister didn’t care about having the money, or using it. She cared only that Bambi never have it. See, that’s my real beef with Felix Brewer. He made my sister mean. He strung her along, used her to get away, left her thinking ‘if only.’ He was yammering about being with her right up until the moment he left. You want to take someone’s life away from them, then put them in the ‘if only’ camp. My sister pinned all her hopes on Felix Brewer. When he didn’t ask her to come with him, he broke her heart. I mean, why not take her with him? All the way to-well, I don’t have to tell you that part. Where we took him. But up until the very last moment, when he said good-bye to her, she thought he was going to ask her to come along. She had a passport with her. Got it just in case. She went to Bert, asked him to help her expedite it. I guess he thought, ‘What could it hurt?’ Well, it hurt a lot. When Felix left-literally left Julie holding the bag-huh, I did it again. Another stupid joke.” She broke off, slumped back in her chair as if all that talk had left her winded.

“You were saying?”

“Felix. He broke her heart. So she lashed out. You know, that’s another reason, I think, that we ended up on the outs. Because I was there, I knew. She had a little overnight bag. On the trip up, she said to me, ‘Where do you think we’re going? South America? Oh, I hope I can learn Spanish.’ My stupid baby sister, may she rest in peace. She had never been on a plane before, either, and she was excited about that. I knew and she couldn’t bear it. That was the beginning of the end for us. She tried to play it proud on the drive back, but I wasn’t fooled.”

“Where was the place?”

“I dropped her at a diner on Route 40, where someone else was to meet her and drive her the rest of the way. That’s all I know. Really. Today, I haven’t left anything out.”

Sandy believed her.

It was a few minutes shy of 11:00 A.M. when Sandy made his way back down Andrea Norr’s driveway. He was hungry, although he shouldn’t have been. He stopped at the Chesapeake House rest stop and pushed a tray along the metal bars at Roy Rogers, feeling that it was too late for the breakfast sandwiches, which looked pretty old under the heat lamps, yet too early for the fried chicken that was just coming out. In the end, he settled on a holster of fries and a cup of coffee.

Andrea Norr had committed a felony, helping Felix escape, taking money for it. She wasn’t pure, and she had reasons to lie. About the suitcase, the money, all that. Problem was, there was a detail that had never been made public, a detail that served her version of things. When Julie Saxony’s body was found in Leakin Park, part of the reason that word traveled so fast, in advance of an official autopsy, was because cops had found two forms of ID-her driver’s license and her passport, which had survived that damp, wild place because it was in a plastic case inside a leatherette purse, the kind of thing that never decays. The passport, good for ten years, had expired on July 1, 1986. It was blank, utterly blank, not a single stamp in its pages.

February 14, 2004

While the rest of her family had been seated at table number 2, Michelle was at number 12, with all the strays. She was outraged on principle, although she planned to sneak away after the entrée was served, table-hop her way right out of the ballroom and upstairs, where she had taken a room in order to meet the man she was seeing for a Valentine’s Day tryst. Still, that didn’t excuse Lorraine Gelman for sticking her at such a lousy table.

Her lover had been nervous about the meeting, said it was a risky thing to do with so many people around. But it was important to Michelle to see him on Valentine’s Day because that would prove his loyalty to her. She had insisted, and she usually got her way with him. Usually. She glanced at her watch-Cartier, a gift from him. As was the BMW she had driven here tonight, the diamond earrings, and the fur coat she had refused to check because she wanted to be wearing it, and nothing else, when he knocked on the door of the room.

She pulled her phone out of her bag and typed: “1212/2030.” Room and time. It wasn’t the first time they had met in a hotel.

“What are you doing?” asked the man seated next to her. Barry something. Friend of Adam’s from Northwestern or maybe law school.

“Texting.”

“That’s a rip-off on most plans.”

“I’m not worried about it,” she said loftily. She wasn’t. The phone was another gift. She didn’t even see the bills. She wasn’t sure exactly how things worked, but it was her understanding that the phone, along with the credit card he had given her-they were all assigned to some fictitious employee. It was a little worrisome that there was a practiced slickness to the setup. How long had he been catting around? Yet he swore he had never done anything like this before, that she had pursued him. She remembered a chance encounter, a stolen kiss outside the Red Maple, wasabi and sake on his breath. Had she really initiated it? Probably.

“And it’s generally not deductible, a mobile phone plan. People assume it’s a deductible business expense, but that’s not always true.”

“Are you an accountant?”

“Of sorts. I work for the government.”

He grinned as if he had made a joke, but Michelle didn’t get it.

“You knew Adam at school, right?” She gave him her attention, if not the full wattage of her charm. Back at Park, when they had read the Greek myth about the birth of Dionysus, how his mortal mother had demanded to see Zeus in godlike splendor and he had chosen his smallest lightning bolts hoping in vain not to kill her, Michelle had felt a rare moment of connection with the bookish world in which her sisters excelled. This guy required only her smallest lightning bolts and he, too, was still at risk.

He nodded. “Alec, too, of course. You can’t really know one without the other. I’m surprised Adam isn’t taking Alec on the honeymoon. They are thick as thieves.”

“Those of us who have known them all their lives are surprised that they didn’t turn out to be thieves. Or, you know, serial killers.”

He laughed, taking it for a joke, or at least hyperbole.

“No, seriously, they should have been voted most likely to be hit men. They were awful when they were young.”

“Maybe,” said Barry something. “But they’re nice guys now, and isn’t that what matters? Not who we were, but who we become?”

“Adam had a crush on me for years.”

She hadn’t planned on saying that. Why had she said it?

“Oh, I know. He told me he was doing me the enormous favor of making sure I got to sit next to you tonight.”

So it wasn’t Lorraine’s fault that she was at this awful table. Michelle was mollified, although now skeptical of Adam’s intentions. Was he punishing her? Or playing a joke on both of them? He couldn’t possibly think she would be interested in this Barry guy.

Besides, these days she just wasn’t in the market at all. There was no one else for her. But her lover wouldn’t leave his wife, and even if he did, there would be such a shit storm. No, they could never be together. This would be the romance that kept her alive, inside, like-oh, Lord, was she really comparing her life to The Bridges of Madison County? Or some Nicholas Sparks book?

She picked at her steak, unimpressed. There had been too many filet mignons wrapped in bacon, too many blinis, too many cheese puffs over the last few years as all her friends got married. Food was becoming excitingly expensive, another luxury to pursue, although one had to range beyond Baltimore to get the really good stuff. Just this month, a new restaurant had opened in New York, Per Se, and it was said to be impossible to get a table. She had told her lover that she wanted to go there for her birthday. It was a test-not of his ability to snag a reservation, but of his commitment to her. If he didn’t find a way to be with her on her birthday, she would-what? Her only power over him was her ability to wreck his marriage, and he had to know she would never do that.

“What do you do?” Barry asked, her least favorite question.

“I work for a tech company,” she said. “Marketing. I hate it.”

“Stock options?”

“Some.” Worthless, or soon to be.

“Still, you’re doing well.” His eyes rested on the watch, the earrings, the fur on the chair, and-oh so inevitably, and oh so boring -the neckline of her dress, which a man would never recognize as expensive, much less Prada. Her mother had, though, reaching out to touch the fabric, torn between approval and suspicion. She knew Michelle couldn’t afford a Prada dress, and she sure as hell hadn’t procured it through Bambi’s discount.

She opened her purse wide, letting him see the tampons inside, then took out a small bottle of ibuprofen, a time-tested conversation ender. “I hope the ladies’ room has a place where I can lie down.”

“Oh,” he stammered. “Well-feel better.”

She went up to the room, 1212, and ordered champagne, the best available. It was already 8:30-2030; he insisted on military time for some reason, one of his quirks, he said it was common in the United Kingdom, where he traveled on business-but she understood that he might be in a situation where he couldn’t call her. He often was. She treated herself to some TV. He hated her taste in television, said it was base, but so what if she liked Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? If she kept the remote close at hand, she could click it off as soon as she heard his knock at the door. She had left it imperceptibly ajar so she could remain on the bed, the beautiful coat pooled around her, its platinum silk lining so close to her skin tone that she all but melted into it. God, she couldn’t believe she had ever worn that made-over mink passed down by Bambi-

She awoke to the show where the girl spy always seemed to be wearing wigs and boots and kicking someone in the face. When she got downstairs, the DJ was exhorting people to do the electric slide, but the party was clearly winding down.

He’s going to break up with me, she thought. No one had ever broken up with Michelle before. She could beat him to the punch, have her pride, but she didn’t want to stop seeing him.

Adam’s friend-what was his name?-pulled out her chair and didn’t comment on the fact that she had been gone for more than an hour. He continued to chatter to her, and she tried to make appropriate responses, but it was like speaking to someone on a very bad cell connection. His voice seemed to come from so far away that she had to keep asking him to repeat himself. She looked around the room, desperate to find someone better with whom to flirt. Adam? Inappropriate, even for her. Alec? Funny, but he really disliked her to this day. Everyone else, except her mother, was part of a set-including her two sisters, who were keeping tabs on her, as always. Get a life, she wanted to say to them. What will you do when you don’t have me to gossip about, disapprove of? Linda looked angry, while Rachel just had her usual sympathetic simper on, which was far worse.

“Is the bar still open?” she asked-Barry. That was his name. “Would you get me a vodka martini?”

“She’s almost thirty-one,” Linda fumed to Rachel. “When is she going to get her act together?”

“She’s nervous about her job,” Rachel said. “The rumors are they won’t make it through the year.”

As a website designer, Rachel was plugged into Baltimore’s tiny tech community. Everyone knew that Michelle’s company, Sinergie, was going to go down; the only question was when and how. Michelle said she was sticking it out to the end in hopes of a severance package, but how could a company pay severance when it was already stiffing vendors and landlords? Linda thought Michelle was lazy, but Rachel knew their baby sister was scared. It wasn’t lost on her that Michelle had wandered into a job that combined her sisters’ two fields-communications for Linda, tech for Rachel. And neither one suited her. Michelle needed to find her own thing.

“A therapist I know”-Rachel was careful not to say my therapist; only Joshua knew she was seeing someone-“says there’s a theory that traumas leave us arrested at the age of the trauma.”

“Michelle doesn’t even remember Daddy. And that would make you forever fourteen, me sixteen. With all due respect, your therapist friend is kind of a quack.”

Twenty-four for me, Rachel thought. That was my traumatic year, although I didn’t realize it until recently. And, no, Linda wasn’t frozen at sixteen, that was true. Linda had been earnest and idealistic as a teenager, qualities she had carried into adulthood. But a professional lifetime of choosing her words with care had left her blunt and hard in her most intimate relationships. Henry handled it well, but it grated a little on Rachel, even though she almost never came in for Linda’s criticism.

Then again, Rachel was expert at keeping things from Linda. From everyone, when need be. An open, sunny nature is a great cover for secrets, as Rachel discovered long ago. Even now, with the therapist, she couldn’t open up completely. She had gone, at Joshua’s pleading, to discuss her depression over not being able to conceive, but she wouldn’t give the therapist all the pieces needed to understand the bigger picture. She also refused any medication. So what was the point? Rachel knew why she was sad, and she also knew she wasn’t going to do anything about it. Maybe her therapist was an idiot not to see through her.

Joshua came up and put his hand at the small of her back. Together nine years now. Eight years ago, even three years ago, he would have pointed to one of the children present and said: “Ours will be cuter.” He knew better than to do that now. She was almost forty-two. No one got everything in this life. Her mother had children, but no husband. Linda had a family, but supporting them meant spending much less time with them than she wanted. Michelle didn’t have a family or a real career, although she clearly had a boyfriend who was buying her very nice things. Rachel had Joshua-lovely, marvelous, really-and her business, small but successful. Rachel had always thought small. Why was she like that?

These would probably be very good questions to explore with her therapist. If she were inclined to tell her therapist such things.

Bambi was exhausted, but Lorraine and Bert expected her to stay until the end. Well, Lorraine did. That was the price of having friends like family. They treated you like family. Worse, there was the fact of all the money “lent” over the years, although that was more of a Bert thing and he never guilted her. Bambi had a hunch that Lorraine really didn’t know the extent, the various subterfuges Bert had used to prop her up. She always insisted she would pay him back one day and he was always gallant enough to pretend he believed her.

She calculated the cost of the event, a habit she would never quite break. Bambi knew the price of everything. But also its worth, she was no fool. Adam’s fiancée came from a family of modest means, working-class types from Southwest Chicago, so Bert had insisted on paying for the wedding. “It’s not like we’re going to have to pay for Sydney’s,” Lorraine had said, happy to have the control that came with signing the checks. Such a joke showed real progress for Lorraine, who had gone from being Very Brave about Sydney’s lifestyle-“As close as Lorraine will ever come to saying ‘lesbian,’ ” Linda had observed-to being almost capable of accepting Sydney’s girlfriend as a de facto spouse. And although Lorraine had always favored her boys, she was, with Adam’s marriage, coming up against the hard truth that daughters are forever, whereas sons are absorbed into their wives’ families more often than not. Adam was staying in Chicago and wherever Adam was, Alec would probably end up.

Plus, it was Sydney who had delivered the first Gelman grandchild, an adoptee from Guatemala. The little boy was gorgeous, although Bambi had to wonder how that worked, a Latino boy named Reuben being raised by two women in Brooklyn. Could that end well?

Probably about as well as a married-in-name-only woman raising three girls in the Baltimore suburbs without any real income.

She pulled a wrap around her shoulders. The ballroom had felt overheated when it was full, but as the last guests lingered, it took on a sad chill. Fifty, sixty thousand she guessed. Maybe as much as a hundred thousand, but Bert was good at negotiating. And for what? A meal, wine, music, flowers. Within forty-eight hours, the only physical remnants of this night would be the boxes of cake slices that no one ever remembered to put in the freezer. The bride’s dress would go into a sealed dry cleaner’s bag, and the bridesmaids’ dresses would go into closets, never to be worn again. At least they were black. The bride, Alina, had been gently dissuaded from her original color scheme, a red-and-white Valentine’s Day tribute. She was a sweet girl, though. Lorraine would take her in hand, best she could over a distance of seven hundred miles, and train her, much as Bambi had trained Lorraine back in the day. Who, for all her money and social status, had been very unsure of herself when they first met, in need of a mentor when it came to clothes and style. The student had surpassed the teacher long ago, but Lorraine was gracious enough to still seek Bambi’s advice on most matters.

Bert sank into the chair next to her. “One down, one to go. If only Alina could have had a twin. I’m sure Alec would have married her, and that would have saved me a bundle.”

“You’re a lucky man, Bert. Your kids have turned out beautifully. You should be very proud.”

“I am, of course.” Funny, he didn’t look proud. “Lorraine deserves the credit, though. For the children. For our life, really. It’s all been Lorraine. She said our boys would turn out fine and they have. And Sydney-I couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”

“They say you’re only as happy as your least happy child, so you’re in good shape.”

“I guess I am. I guess I am.” But he sounded more game than convinced, someone putting on the happy face expected of him. Probably just tired at the end of what had been an even longer day for him.

“It would have been my forty-fourth wedding anniversary,” Bambi said. “I guess it still is.”

Linda was at the valet stand, five people behind her own sister. There was a man hovering close to Michelle, but he was a fool if he thought he had a chance with her. The quarter-size bald spot alone would disqualify him.

“Should we keep going?” Henry asked. Their youngest was thirteen now, and it was still relatively novel for them to be out and not running up against the babysitter’s clock.

“And do what?” Linda asked. Not peevishly or meanly, merely curious. What was there left to do? They had gone to a party, eaten a meal, danced, drunk.

She watched the man who was not quite with Michelle lean into the car, argue with her. No, not argue-entreat.

“I don’t know. Let’s just go sit in the hotel bar until this line calms down. It’s cold out here.”

That seemed reasonable. Pleasant, even. And when they were settled at the bar, drinks in front of them, Linda was reminded how much she enjoyed her husband’s company, one-on-one, and how long it had been since she had had it. Soon, in the blink of an eye, it would be just the two of them again, all the time, for the first time in almost twenty years.

“We met in a bar,” he said.

“You hopped for me.”

“I’ve been hopping ever since.” Said with the easygoing demeanor that she loved, when she didn’t find it absolutely infuriating. “I remember thinking, ‘Why is that pretty girl so sad?’ ”

“I remember being sad.”

“Over John Anderson, of all things.”

“Anderson and-I don’t think I ever told you this.”

Henry perked up. It was a rare gift, a new story twenty-four years into a relationship.

“The bartender. He knew my father. And he told me that he had seen him with my older sister from time to time.”

“You don’t have an older sister.” A beat. “Oh. Wow. I’m sorry. Did he mean-that one?”

“I think so. I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, that was for sure.”

The man from the valet line, the one who had been with Michelle, came into the bar, waved at the younger members of the wedding party, and asked the bartender for a beer. But he didn’t go over to his friends, not right away, just sat at the bar, shoulders slumped, a picture of dejection and rejection.

“Don’t let my sister get to you,” Linda said, leaning across Henry. She could imagine Noah being hurt by a girl like Michelle. Just thinking about it made her angry. “She’s a diva.”

“She shouldn’t be driving. She had a lot to drink.”

“No, she probably shouldn’t, but it’s a straight shot down Boston Street, more or less, and she’ll never get above twenty-five miles an hour.”

“I live thirty minutes from here and I got a room for the night. They have a rate.”

It occurred to Linda that she and Henry should have gotten a room, made a little getaway out of it. Why didn’t she ever think of such things? Maybe she could start.

“She’ll be fine. She always is, Michelle.”

“Look, you’re her sister-should I call her? Or is she seeing somebody?”

“Call her,” Henry said, even as Linda said: “I think she’s seeing someone.”

“She gave me her card.” He pulled it out. Sinergie. Linda still cringed at the name and was still unsure what the company was supposed to do. Something to do with nightlife?

“Well, if you’re going to call her on her work number, do it quickly,” Linda said, feeling a little loose, not so much from alcohol but just from the unfamiliar sensation of being unfettered, at no one’s beck and call, although she was technically always reachable on her BlackBerry.

“Because she’ll forget me?” the man asked.

“Because Sinergie is going down the tubes.” And, yes, because she’ll forget you. She’s already forgotten you. You could carry Michelle out of a burning building and she wouldn’t remember you.

He tapped the card on the bar, lost in thought, then went back to his friends, looking a little more resolute and confident. She assumed he was going to call Michelle next week and get shot down.

March 25, 2012

Sandy didn’t work for a couple of days, not on the file. Again, he couldn’t fool himself about his own motivations. He was avoiding an unpleasant task, trying to talk to Bert Gelman, by throwing himself into another unpleasant task, cleaning out the house in Remington and preparing it for a new set of tenants.

Not that Bert would be rude or unkind to Sandy. He just wasn’t going to tell Sandy anything. One thing to let your wife share some old gossip, quite another to implicate yourself as an accessory to a fugitive’s flight. Sandy was stuck. He couldn’t figure out where to go next. So he cleaned.

The old Remington rowhouse was in crap shape, trashed. Again. No matter how carefully Sandy chose his tenants, they all went out the same way, as if they had done some sort of cost-benefits analysis and decided that they’d rather forgo the deposit than, say, clean out the vegetable crisper, which was always full of soggy surprises. This batch had had a cat, too, although that wasn’t allowed under the terms of the lease. Sandy was going to have to flea-bomb and replace the carpet in the finished basement.

Over the years, Sandy had done everything he could to make Nabby’s house bright-painted all the walls eggshell, installed a transom above the front door, switched out the curtains for neutral bamboo blinds chosen by Mary-but it was hard to pull light into a north-facing row house. He was struck anew by the darkness every time he crossed the threshold. Didn’t help that the latest tenants had removed all the lightbulbs, even the ones in the overhead fixtures.

But the house was also dark in his memory of his arrival there, a starless December night when he couldn’t quite see the woman who inspected him and said, “Oh-I was expecting someone younger.”

“Abuelita?” he asked. Little grandmother? He thought he had been going to a relative, at least a distant one.

“No,” she said. “No abuela.” Then shouting, as if he were deaf. “NO ABUELA. NO ABUELA. NO ABUELITA FOR YOU.”

And that was how Hortensia Saldana became Nabby.

Sandy had come to her through a program known as Operation PedroPan. Cuba had fallen, but the Catholic Welfare Bureau persuaded the government to allow kids to enter the United States and stay in foster homes until their parents could join them. At first, almost everyone went to Florida, but eventually other cities offered homes as well. Sandy was one of the last ones placed, convinced by his parents that it would make it easier for them to follow if they had a son in the States.

Hortensia Saldana had no use for Cubanos, but she liked the idea of being paid to care for one. She was a social worker, although years later, when Mary got to know her, she would describe her as the least-socialized social worker she had ever known. The day they came to tell him his parents were dead, killed in a car accident, an improbable catastrophe-they had a car, but seldom the gas to drive it-Nabby had just looked at him blankly, like a bureaucrat refusing to do a job above her pay grade. She wasn’t paid to offer him comfort. She received a check to feed him and clothe him. And they both knew there was no way she was going to adopt him, this teenage boy who wasted hot water and left the milk on the counter sometimes. But he could stay on until he was eighteen, she said, as long as he made himself useful-and as long as the checks kept coming.

Sandy stole his first car a week after he received news that his parents had died. He didn’t actually know how to drive, but he taught himself, on the fly. He wasn’t sure what he planned to do with the car, once he got it going. It wasn’t like he could drive back to Cuba, and there was no one there for him, anyway. He was already beginning to lose his Spanish from lack of use. (The relief agency had assumed Hortensia Saldana spoke Spanish, but she didn’t know a word. Her Puerto Rican father had abandoned her mother, an African American, when she was a baby. She thought Spanish the language of demons and bad men.)

The cops pulled Sandy over five minutes after he got behind the wheel of his first stolen car. He was going fifteen miles an hour on University Parkway. A motivated young public defender told his whole story-how, Sandy was never sure, as he didn’t share it-and he was given a second chance. Hortensia Saldana was furious. She told him if he did such a thing again, he would be out of her house forever.

He stole another car the next day. To his disappointment, he drove for hours and no one pulled him over. Finally, he left the car on the side of the road, its tank empty.

He was content to do that for a while-take cars, drive them until empty, abandon them. Of course, as soon as he no longer wanted to get caught, he was. They sent him to “training school,” and, against all the odds, it worked. He got a high school education, found a friend and mentor in one of the teachers. He left and found a part-time job, a little apartment, his first and only girl, Mary. His juvie record sealed, he was accepted into the police academy. Hortensia Saldana, now frail and needy, reached out to him. He wasn’t fooled. He told Mary: “She’s mended her fences with me so I can mend everything else in that old house.” But when she died, she left it to him and he maintained it as a rental. Then he mortgaged it for the restaurant and-well, that was that. Remington was coming back. That was kind of a mantra among those who owned the houses: The area is coming back! He would sell it as soon as he was no longer underwater. But selling required more work than maintaining it for tenants, so he kept renting it.

It took him the better part of three days to ready the place, and when he sorted old mail that had accumulated there, he found a four-week-old letter from the city, claiming he was at risk of a lien because he hadn’t paid the property taxes. He knew he had paid online last August, but he wasn’t going to trust a computer to screw it up again. He headed down to the courthouse, as familiar as his home, assuming it would take all afternoon to straighten it out.

But the glitch was apparently systemwide and the weary-but-kind clerk immediately credited his account. With time left on his parking meter, he decided to stop for lunch, ending up at Subway, which made him sad. There used to be so many good lunch places near the courthouse, old-fashioned diners. Werner’s. The Honeybee. Now it was mainly chains and a few really dingy places. His heart sank at the sight of the menu board-no knock on the sandwiches, which were fine, but this was not how people should eat. Assembly lines were for things made out of metal and plastic, not sandwiches. Why wasn’t there a place in Baltimore to buy a simple, classic Cubano?

There had been. It was a restaurant on the Avenue and it had failed miserably because of its dumb-as-shit owner, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez.

Then he saw Bert Gelman in the corner, eating alone. Hello, Smalltimore. But Bert was a lawyer and, as Sandy had just been reminded, there were only a handful of places to eat near the courthouse.

“Hey, Bert. Sandy Sanchez.” He offered his hand, then had an inspiration. “I appreciate you letting me talk to your wife the other day.”

Bert looked up with a ready impersonal smile. Guy had thick hair, broad shoulders-he had to work out to have that physique into his sixties. He was practiced at guarding his emotions. But Sandy had surprised him, he could tell.

“Ah, well, wives. They do what they want to do, one way or another. She didn’t even tell me what it was about.”

Uh-huh. She didn’t tell you at all.

“We’re looking at Julie Saxony. As a cold case.”

“Making any headway?”

“Some. You know what they say. If the original detectives did their job right, the name’s in the file. I tried to go counterintuitive on it, find a way it didn’t lead back to Felix Brewer. But you know what? It did. Circled all the way back to a horse trailer and two sisters, driving the guy to some private airfield out of state.”

“Interesting.”

Sandy’s only advantage was to charge ahead with what he knew, try to catch Bert without a story prepared. “Even more interesting is that Andrea Norr says you knew. You and Tubby. Knew Felix was going and when. Helped him get his affairs in order. Even got Julie a passport.”

In a case like this, you hope that the fucker starts talking right away. But Bert was a criminal attorney. He didn’t speak for a second or two, and Sandy knew he had lost this round.

“Now, Sandy, you know I’m not going to talk about Felix. He was my client and he remains my client to this day, with all the privileges. But I will tell you this much-the sister’s wrong about the passport. I have no idea what she’s referring to.”

“You could have forgotten. She said you did it as a nice deed, that you knew Felix wasn’t going to take her, but you didn’t want to be the person to tell her that.”

Bert shook his head. “Come on, Sandy. We’re not talking about this. I’m sorry, I can’t. Even if I could, I don’t think it would help you find the person who killed Julie. I’ve never believed there was a connection to Felix.”

“Your wife does, I think.”

“My wife is Bambi Brewer’s best friend. I think that Lorraine would like there to be-a point, if you will, to Bambi’s suffering. Unfortunately, the only point to the story is that Felix was a selfish prick who didn’t care about anyone.”

“I thought you were friends.”

“We were-until the day he left. It was a rotten thing to do. To Bambi, to their daughters. And, yes, to Tubby and me. You know how much time he would have done, in reality? Five, seven tops. Couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. He was that cowardly, that weak. I’ve never talked about it, though. No reason to have tension between the two families. Bambi needs Lorraine. Less obviously, Lorraine needs Bambi.”

“Julie’s sister told me something about a suitcase. That Julie took money meant for Bambi instead of giving it to someone, probably you. That would explain a lot.”

“I can’t speak to that,” Bert said. “I don’t have any knowledge of that. Again, I don’t have any knowledge about how Felix left. But my opinion? My thoughts based on a hypothetical situation about which I have no knowledge? It explains nothing even if it’s true.”

“People hold grudges.”

“Are you suggesting that Bambi Brewer decided, ten years after the fact, that she wanted to kill Julie Saxony because of some rumor about a suitcase?”

“Not a rumor. The sister told me.”

“The sister says now. Not then, right? No reference to it in the file, I’m betting. No, you open the case again, sister finally admits that she played a role in Felix’s disappearance, which is a federal crime, and-oh, look, shiny object, Detective. Go follow it. You’re smarter than that, Sandy.”

“Am I?” He wasn’t being self-deprecating. It was his way of saying: And how would you know? “One of the Brewer girls confronted Julie a week before she disappeared. Meanwhile, the sister said Julie was obsessed with Bambi, used to go around saying she thought that Bambi had Felix killed.”

“So what?”

“So I think maybe it’s time I talk to her. Bambi Brewer, her daughters. Maybe revisit what everyone was doing around that time.”

“Not without me in the room, Detective.”

“Are you their lawyer?”

“I will be before you get back to your car.”

Sandy consulted the old ADC map he kept in his car-he preferred the big paper maps, which provided more context than those little Google squares, whether on phones or computers-and drove out to the home of Bambi and Felix Brewer. It was in an older section of Pikesville, probably very grand in its day. He bet, if Felix had stayed, they would have moved farther out, to something bigger, like the Gelman house in Garrison Forest. But it looked good in its own way. Sandy preferred the houses built in the 1950s and 1960s to the new monstrosities.

He wasn’t aware how long he just sat there looking at the house, but it was long enough for a woman to come down the walk, arms wrapped around her body to protect from the cool day. The woman was thin, in her thirties, and plain. One of the daughters? A maid?

“May I help you?” she said.

He held up his ID. “Lady of the house in?”

“I am the lady of the house.”

“You’re Bambi Brewer?”

“No, my husband and I bought this place from her six years ago. I think she moved to a condo downtown.”

Feeling sheepish, Sandy tried to pinpoint his mistake. He had just assumed Bambi hadn’t moved after all this time.

“She’s a nice lady,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t want anything else bad to happen to her.”

“Anything else? You mean, besides her husband leaving?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

It was enough. Leaving, leaving you broke. Leaving you, leaving you broke, and doing little to conceal to the world at large that he had another woman. A woman who might have taken your money. It was all enough to make a woman very angry, to send an emissary to ask for her money back.

And a week after that confrontation, Julie drove off on some mystery errand to Saks Fifth Avenue, passport in her purse, and never came back. Passport in her purse. Expired even then. But only by two days. There are places you can go without a passport, or were able to go at the time. Mexico. Canada.

Sandy tried to never lose sight of the fact that we tend to order things according to the reality we know, as we discover it. All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings. A woman disappeared, presumed murdered as she hadn’t made the kind of arrangements one would expect of someone who planned to flee. A woman was found, murdered. Her passport was expired. And she was dead, so it wasn’t about her leaving because there was no indication that she was going anywhere.

Except maybe she was.

Saks, which didn’t even exist anymore, would have been no more than ten miles from here. The grocery store where Julie’s car was found, weeks later? Sandy propped his map book on the steering wheel. He ripped out two pages so he could see them relative to each other. Here was another triangle, a physical one. What if Felix Brewer had sent for Julie Saxony after all, telling her to leave no trail, persuading her that he would be safe only if she left everything behind? And what if Julie Saxony had stopped here, incapable of resisting the urge to tell Bambi Brewer: Guess which one of us he chose.

He was going to need a warrant. A warrant and some luck. But, no, it wouldn’t be luck. It was never luck, no matter what anyone thought. It all went back to the things that Julie Saxony had in her purse that day, those ordinary items that had been dutifully cataloged but never considered.

He was going to need two warrants.

May 15, 2006

Rachel made it exactly five minutes into the party before she said something rude to Michelle. “I can’t believe you’re having a shower.” She didn’t mean to. She had resolved not to mention the shower issue at all. The words were like toads, hopping out of her mouth in spite of her. She was like someone under a curse; she couldn’t stop saying the wrong thing.

Worse, Michelle didn’t seem to realize how hateful Rachel was being. “I know we can afford whatever we need,” she said. “But Hamish’s friends wanted to do something for us.”

“Oh, no-that wasn’t what I mean. I mean-just the tradition, you know? The evil eye. Which is nonsense, of course, but Linda observed it and I guess I just assumed we-you-would as well.”

Once you’ve said something cruel, why waste it? Might as well make sure that Michelle knows how awful I can be.

Michelle only laughed. Thirty-three years old and thirty-six weeks pregnant, she was more beautiful than ever. Rachel wanted to chalk it up to her sister eating real food for the first time in her adult life, but, no, this was something else, something beyond the clichéd glow of pregnancy. It was as if love, true love, had drained Michelle of all her petulant grudges.

“Hamish may have agreed to raise our children as Jews”-the plural gave Rachel another pang, and she bit back a caution on hubris-“but he’s not superstitious. Besides, he didn’t want to paint the nursery after we brought the baby home. Even with the new eco-friendly paints, he didn’t like the idea of all those fresh chemical smells. And he was keen to do it all himself, which will be harder once the baby is here. Did you see what he did with the closet? And the changing table-he made that, from his own design, so it can be converted to a straightforward chest of drawers once we no longer need a changing table.”

Of course he did. Hamish the handy hand doctor. Hamish the perfect. Hamish the wonderful, Rachel thought, feeling very much like the bad fairy at the christening. But maybe the bad fairy had a backstory. Maybe it wasn’t just a misplaced invitation that put her in a pique. Maybe the bad fairy had authentic heartache.

“I haven’t gone upstairs yet,” said Rachel, who had arrived late hoping to miss the obligatory nursery tour. “I haven’t even seen Hamish.”

“He’s in the outdoor kitchen,” Michelle said, motioning to the large fieldstone patio off the indoor kitchen, which was positively Brobdingnagian. She wasn’t being grand. Now that Michelle was entitled to put on airs, she never did. The patio was better equipped than the kitchen in Rachel’s first apartment-a gas-powered grill, an oven with two burners, a refrigerator, an ice-maker, and a wine refrigerator. Hamish presided over the grill, of course, surrounded by the friends he called mates. Rachel couldn’t help feeling that the wafting smoke was really just the heat of all that collective testosterone rising into the soft May evening.

Twenty months ago, Michelle had dented Hamish Macalister’s Jaguar in a downtown parking garage. Being Michelle, or the Michelle she was then, she had written a note that read only: “Sorry!,” a cover for any possible witnesses. She had not counted on the video cameras that captured her license plate or the dogged Scotsman who tracked her down on sheer principle, determined to make the girl glimpsed on the video do the right thing.

The strangest part of the story was not that they married eight months later but that Michelle actually paid for the work on Hamish’s car. Not even Michelle took for granted the appearance of a handsome Scottish hand surgeon on her doorstep.

Plus-a Jaguar, Rachel thought meanly. Michelle could assume he was rich as well. And he came with a cohort of rich friends, surgeons and entrepreneurs, weekend rugby players who had found one another in a faux Irish pub that broadcast rugby, hurling, and World Cup matches. Their wives were now Michelle’s new besties, stay-at-home moms who lived in similarly huge houses and drove similarly enormous SUVs and could afford the similarly outrageous things on Michelle’s baby registry. They also were, Rachel was realizing, extremely nice, shockingly nice. Well, why not? They were young, untested by life so far. She could not resent them or their extravagant getups, could not resent Michelle’s thirteen-thousand-square-foot house. Could not even resent Hamish, who had seemed to stride out of the pages of a romance novel and make a beeline for-Rachel had to be honest-the least-deserving of the Brewer girls.

But the baby? The baby that Michelle had conceived on her very first try or two? That was something else. When Michelle had announced her pregnancy at Hanukkah, Rachel had excused herself from the table at the first possible moment and locked herself in Linda’s bathroom, where she had cried for twenty minutes.

“You look gorgeous,” she told her baby sister now, grateful to find an easy compliment. Rachel had never envied Michelle’s beauty.

“You know, Bert Gelman once told me that I would come into my prime in my thirties, as Mama did. I was terribly insulted at the time, but I think he may have been right.”

Bambi still looked wonderful, Rachel thought, watching her mother beguile Michelle’s new friends. She looked better than she had in years. Leaving the house on Sudbrook Road behind had been good for her, even if she had fought with her daughters over the most random stuff, refusing to downscale as she should. She had a bit of Great-Aunt Harriet’s hoarding gene, right down to the random shoeboxes crammed with stuff. Bambi had initially resisted Hamish’s invitation to move to a small condo downtown, the “bachelor” apartment that, he insisted gallantly, he didn’t want to give up because he would lose money on a sale, virtually impossible in this market. Hamish had even redecorated his condo for Bambi. Or, more precisely, undecorated it, removing anything that was masculine and boysie-boy, leaving a plain and neutral space that Bambi could make her own. And even with all the mortgages she carried and the fact that the Sudbrook Park house had to be sold “as is,” she had a nice sum left over, more money than she had had in years, almost $100,000. That should last Bambi several years, in her new circumstances.

And then what? Rachel asked herself, because over thirty years, and then what had been her question, hers alone. Daddy has left, but our house is paid off. And then what? Bubbie and Zadie will help with tuition at Park. And then what? The scholarships will cover almost all the costs. And then-what? There’s this amazing thing called an adjustable rate mortgage. AND THEN WHAT?

Only now there was an answer: Hamish. The Brewer family’s personal Messiah had finally arrived in the guise of a six-foot-two hand surgeon who loved Michelle with a kind of gusto that the Brewer women had not seen since, well, Felix met Bambi at a high school fraternity dance in 1959. And only Bambi had seen that. Her daughters had to accept this secondhand version of events.

But don’t let him be entirely like Papa, Rachel prayed inwardly, then felt better about herself. She did not wish her sister to be-what? A man was cuckolded. What did someone call a woman who was cheated on?

A woman. A man who was betrayed required a special name. A woman cheated on was just a woman.

Linda clapped her hands, summoning everyone to the family room to watch Michelle open her gifts. She handed Rachel a notepad, instructing her to keep a list of each item’s giver. Why not one of her new friends? Rachel thought grumpily. She couldn’t help noticing that neither her husband nor Linda’s had bothered to attend, although they were both crazy about Hamish. Yet all of Hamish’s friends were here. They took sperm seriously, these men, and celebrated whenever one of their clan’s found purchase.

Lord, there seemed to be more gifts than people. Although Rachel had not traveled in the precincts of the rich for a very long time, she remembered how they did gifts. It wasn’t enough for a thing to be expensive-it had to be extraordinary, one of a kind. These women spent a lot of time shopping. They had to elevate shopping to an art, or at least a worthy cause.

“Oh, it’s adorable,” Michelle said, holding up a miniature leather bomber jacket. “Deanna, you have such exquisite taste. Rachel, did you get that? Deanna gave us the bomber jacket.”

“Uh-huh,” Rachel said, jotting it down. She wondered, as she had wondered with each gift from Hamish’s friends, what it cost. She figured the average was slightly less than her monthly car payment.

“And here’s Rachel’s gift,” Linda said now. She had been fired a few months back, right around the time she and Henry were closing on a new house, and it had been a tense time. But she had picked up a paid position on a political campaign, deputy in communications for the Democratic candidate in the governor’s race. Rachel fretted that the candidate, the current mayor, would lose and Linda would be looking for a job yet again come this fall, but Linda was surprisingly calm. She seemed to be thriving on the very changes that were supposed to be so stressful-new job, new house-whereas Rachel, whose life had changed hardly at all, was the one on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Rachel’s gift was a selection of onesies that were a little offbeat-she had designed them herself. There was POOH HAPPENS (against the backdrop of a familiar bear shape, she didn’t dare use more for fear of copyright infringement); BREWERS ART, a tip to the family, but also a restaurant on which Michelle doted; and I’M SMARTER THAN THE PRESIDENT. The last brought a few gasps in this crowd.

Michelle smiled, but it was a puzzled smile: “I don’t remember putting these on the registry. Are they from that little store in your neighborhood?”

“I made them,” Rachel said. Her voice cracked hoarsely, like an adolescent boy’s. “They’re one of a kind. You know I’ve been dabbling in silk-screening.”

The new Michelle rallied beautifully. (The old one would have pouted at the idea of someone ignoring her stated desires.) “Of course they are-just like you! How proud I’ll be when Hamish III wears them.”

Bambi winced at that. Rachel knew what she was thinking. She could tolerate the nursery, this party-but naming a child after a living relative. That was too far. Not only someone living, but a Hamish yet, a Hamish who would be one-half Russian Jew, one-quarter Scot, and one-quarter Iranian.

And although the odds seemed stacked in favor of a dark-haired, olive-complected child, Rachel couldn’t help rooting for a boy who would look like Hamish’s father, whom she had met at the wedding last summer. He had pale gingery hair and a face that looked like a certain kind of Keebler cookie-Pecan Sandies-and slightly bowed legs below his kilt. He was a refreshing presence in a wedding party that otherwise ran to intimidating beauty, if one didn’t count Linda and Rachel-and Michelle didn’t. Bree Deloit, the wife of Hamish’s best friend, was Michelle’s maid of honor, as if Michelle had known her all her life. “But I couldn’t choose between my sisters,” Michelle said when Bambi confronted her. “This keeps everyone’s feelings from being hurt.” At least she seemed to be sincere. The old Michelle would have smiled a little smile, making sure that everyone knew she was stirring the pot.

So why did Rachel miss the old Michelle? Why did she long for the petulant, peevish, nasty sister in place of this sugar-sweet one? It couldn’t just be the fact of the baby.

Except it was. Rachel could overlook everything else that had fallen into Michelle’s undeserving lap. Her meet-cute moment with Hamish. Hamish’s prince charmingness, his willingness to submerge himself into the insanity that was the Brewer family.

But for Michelle to be pregnant at age thirty-three, when Rachel had been trying to have a baby with Joshua for a decade, since she was only thirty-four-that hurt. That hurt quite a bit. And while New Michelle might be a better mother than Old Michelle could ever have been, neither version of Michelle could love a child as Rachel could. No one deserved a child more than Rachel.

She fled to the bathroom, probably not quickly enough. Both Bambi and Linda knew the telltale signs of Rachel on the verge of tears. Michelle didn’t notice. She was the center of attention. She hadn’t changed that much.

Only maybe she had. Ten minutes later, she waddled into the bath-not the downstairs powder room, where most guests would have gone, but the one attached to the master suite, an overly marbled retreat that Rachel secretly thought tacky-and said “Oh!” as if she didn’t expect to find Rachel there. Then, sitting on the toilet after yanking down her pants: “I have to pee all the time now. I wet myself at Superfresh yesterday.”

“A sneeze?”

“Not even. It just gave way. It was like”-Michelle thought-“like a flat roof collapsing after water had been pooling on it for a really long time.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“Oh, it was. I’ll probably never shop there again. Actually, I don’t. I usually go to Whole Foods, but Hamish went Scottish after he saw the prices last time.”

It was one of Hamish’s tics that he was wonderfully extravagant-until he wasn’t. He himself described his pulling back as “going Scottish.” There was not, as far as Rachel knew, a complementary Iranian strain, although it was his mother whom Hamish resembled physically. She was gorgeous, so gorgeous that it seemed as if Hamish Senior couldn’t quite believe his good luck. Hamish’s mother looked if she couldn’t believe it, either.

Or maybe Rachel was just projecting. She had never quite recovered from her first mother-in-law, and Hamish’s mother had that same queenly demeanor. She would have been a formidable opponent if they lived close by. But Michelle’s luck held-her mother-in-law lived in London.

Michelle pulled up her pants. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you.”

That was so unexpected that Rachel began to cry in earnest. “I don’t envy you anything-”

“No, you don’t. And I’ve envied you so much. You have no idea, Rachel.”

“You mean Linda and me.”

“Mainly you. Yes, Linda and you knew Daddy, have real memories of him, and enjoyed the princess phase, whereas I only knew the garret part. Lord, how I hated that movie.”

Rachel smiled at the reference to Sara Crewe in The Little Princess, the Shirley Temple film that Great-Aunt Harriet had thoughtlessly insisted they watch on the old Picture for a Sunday Afternoon, saying all children loved Shirley Temple. Aunt Harriet really was a bitch.

“But you’re good, Rachel,” Michelle continued. “And you’re Mother’s favorite.”

“Oh, no. Mama doesn’t have favorites.”

“Of course she does. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love each of us, and each in a special way. And she’s always been good about loving us as we are, not making comparisons. But you’re the family star. The good grades, the niceness. Wanting to fix everything and everyone. Rachel-would you wait here for me? I’ll be right back.”

It was such a strange request that Rachel couldn’t deny it. But “right back” was a longish span of time, given the size of the house and Michelle’s slowed gait. By the time she returned, Rachel had gone through all the cabinets, if only to prove she wasn’t the nice one. The contents were uninteresting, although she longed to know what Michelle paid for her face creams, a brand completely unfamiliar to Rachel.

Michelle had a glass of champagne in her hand and a cloth napkin full of cookies.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Rachel said with a wave.

“It’s for me,” Michelle said. “The baby’s cooked, after all, one glass won’t hurt, but Hamish would freak. You can have a cookie, though.”

“Thanks,” Rachel said wryly.

“Everyone tells you everything, don’t they?”

“Not really.”

“Mama does. And Linda. Everyone confides in you.”

“I’m a good listener, I guess.”

“You scared me. About the evil eye, Rachel. That was a terrible thing to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Said formally, in a new tone. The old Michelle had neither given nor accepted apologies. “It’s not your fault. I’m scared because-I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve any of this.” She gestured, careful not to spill a drop of the outlaw champagne.

“Of course you deserve to be happy, Michelle. You’ve never really been.”

“I thought I was. Rachel-I had an affair. With a married man. For a while. I broke it off, about three months before I met Hamish, if you can believe it, but it was a horrible thing to do.”

“I know.”

“You know? How could you know? Do others know? Who it was, I mean? You don’t know that, do you? Because he was-well, he was well known. By Baltimore standards.”

“No, no-I didn’t know who. And I wasn’t sure he was married. But I knew you were having an affair with someone. You were secretive, you claimed not to be dating at all. You haven’t been without a boyfriend since you were twelve. I figured it was someone you couldn’t talk about.”

“Did you talk about it? With Mother or Linda?”

“Linda. Not Mother.”

“And what did Linda say?”

“She said you had to be free to make your own mistakes.”

“Boy, was I. The thing is, Rachel, that’s not the only thing. Remember Adam Gelman’s wedding?”

“Sure.” Rachel was remembering something else, how Michelle had disappeared that night. Was her lover there then? Who could it have been? Oh, Lord, what if she had carried on an affair with Adam? Younger than her by a bit, but he had had a crush on Michelle most of his life. Or maybe Alec, but why be secretive about Alec?

“My lover”-Michelle made a face-“what an icky word. It makes it sound so, I don’t know, grand and sordid at the same time. And it was really just sordid. Awful. But he gave me gifts.”

“The coat,” Rachel said. “The watch.”

“And the car, the one I said was part of my package at that tech company. It was a gift, not a lease.”

“Wow.” Rachel wasn’t sure what such a car cost, but she thought it was probably as much as she made some years.

“So, at the wedding, this friend of Adam’s tried to ask me out and I turned him down. I wasn’t very nice about it, but I was in a bad mood. I was upset, about the relationship I was in; I didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings.”

Rachel couldn’t help thinking: You never cared about anyone else’s feelings, not then.

“So I was kind of rude to him. Anyway, it turned out that he was an IRS agent. And he opened a file on me.”

“That can’t be legal.”

“Doesn’t matter. He did some research-he found out my salary, found out what things cost. The coat, the car, the watch. He called me and said he believed that there was money, hidden money, from Daddy and he was going to investigate Mama.”

“He wouldn’t have found anything.” Rachel was sure of that, at least.

“No, but he said he would make sure it leaked to the newspapers, that he knew how to do that without leaving a trace. He made me come see him.”

“Did you go?”

“Yes, but with Bert Gelman. And-well, he had to know. Bert, I mean. About the lover. Because it turns out that the man I was seeing-some of the things he did were illegal. He should have paid a gift tax on some of the presents he gave me. But there was no way I was going to tell the IRS who he was, no matter how much they threatened me.”

“So what happened?”

“They dropped it, quite abruptly. Bert turned it around on the guy, filed a complaint that he was using his office for a private vendetta, and the guy got reassigned. Bert told me it wasn’t hard to show there was no money, not from Papa. Barry Speers.”

“What?”

“That was the guy’s name. I hope he got fired. But it’s out there, Rachel. Still. It’s like this big cloud, or this thing that’s going to fall on me. I can’t bear for Hamish to know, even though it was before I met him. I’m so ashamed. I’m ashamed in a way I wasn’t when it was going on, and I was plenty ashamed then.”

“Bert didn’t tell Mama any of this, did he?”

“No. He was my lawyer. He can’t tell. I made sure of that.”

“Mama’s pretty sophisticated in her way, Michelle. She would be okay with it, now that we know the story has a happy ending.”

“Does it?”

“It does,” she said, putting her hand on her sister’s stomach. “Everything will be fine, Michelle.”

To her amazement, Michelle burst into tears. “I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve any of it. If you knew, Rachel-”

“But I do know, Michelle. You just told me. It will be okay.”

And it would be, Rachel thought, putting her arms around her sobbing sister. Everything always worked out for Michelle. No, not everything. She had never known their father, not really, and it must have been hard, growing up in that household, to be indentured into the family practice of Keeping Up Appearances. It was funny how things worked out. Linda had become a professional spinner of stories. Rachel had become almost pathologically honest, with one vivid exception. And now Michelle was Bambi Junior, finding a man who promised her the world. Maybe this one could deliver it.

Please, Rachel prayed to the god she didn’t believe in. Please let Michelle have her happy ending. And she felt better about herself. Bad fairies want to do the right thing. It’s just so hard sometimes.

Hamish Macalister III was born four weeks later. When the nurse came out, she handed Rachel a piece of paper with the exact time, 20:02, the numeric rendering of the date, 6-12-6, and his weight, 8-13. “For the lottery,” she explained. “A lot of people like to play the time, date, and weight.”

Rachel thought that was hilarious, someone instructing Felix Brewer’s daughter to play the lottery. Yet the next day she went to a Royal Farms and placed several straight bets: 2002, 6126, 813. This is what my father did, she thought, standing in line, waiting for her chance to play, as uncertain and tongue-tied as she might have been ordering a meal in a foreign country. How do I word this? What is the custom? Am I holding everyone else up? At the last minute, she added a Powerball ticket and found she enjoyed fantasizing about that big jackpot for a few days. Had her father sold people joy, after all? Was there something noble about the way he made his money? Because while it was disappointing not to win, it wasn’t unexpected, and the daydreams had been lovely, worth a few dollars. Where else could you buy a dream for two dollars?

And perhaps it was the haze of her lottery dream that carried her forward, because the next time she visited her new nephew, she asked Hamish Junior for a loan, so she and Joshua could adopt a child from China. It was not the first time that Rachel had asked someone for money. But she was keenly aware that it was the first time she had asked for herself.

The agency told them it would be eighteen months. It was more than five years before they brought home Tatiana, a twenty-month-old girl who required two cleft palate surgeries. On an unseasonably cold March day in 2012, the Brewer family gathered in the hospital to keep Rachel and Joshua company during the second, simpler surgery-Bambi, Michelle, Linda, Hamish, although not Henry, who couldn’t get the day off. Linda’s girls were in school, but Noah, now twenty-five, skipped work, a testament to all those Friday night suppers, Linda’s insistence that family was primary. Michelle and Hamish’s two children were there, too; Helena had followed Hamish III by less than three years.

The Brewers took over the waiting room, but it was such a happy scene, compared to much of what happens in hospital waiting rooms, and they were such gracious, lovely people that the hospital staff indulged them, even Michelle’s constant use of her cell phone, which wasn’t officially permitted. (She said she needed it so Helena could play Monkey Preschool Lunchbox, although Helena was happy moving beads along the wire paths of a children’s toy.) It seemed natural when Bert arrived, old family friend that he was, still natural when he took Bambi aside for a hushed conversation. Bert had been taking Bambi aside for hushed conversations as long as her daughters could remember.

It was unnatural, though, when Bambi came back to them, picked up her purse, and said: “I must be going.”

Rachel couldn’t leave that be. “Is something wrong? Has Nana Ida-” The old woman was still alive at one hundred one, improbably. Or quite probably, given her tendency to hold on to anything she had, whether it was money or years. She likely had her own shoeboxes of condiments.

“No. I mean-it’s not for you to worry about.”

“Mother.” Where once only Linda and Rachel would have spoken in unison, now Michelle added her voice. Marriage, motherhood-she was part of the club.

“Well, it’s the strangest thing. But it seems that the police want to talk to me.”

“What?” But only Linda and Michelle asked this question.

“It’s nothing,” Bert said. “They’re just spinning their wheels. But if we go now, on our own, it will be over sooner and we can put it behind us.”

“What?” Linda and Michelle repeated. Rachel tried to make eye contact with her mother, but she wouldn’t look at her.

“Oh, don’t be so obscure, Bert,” Bambi said. “Girls, it looks as if I might be arrested.”

“For what?” Linda asked.

“The death of Julie Saxony.”

“It’s bullshit,” Bert said quickly. “She’s not going to be arrested. They want to ask her a few questions. It won’t take long at all.”

“Oh, no. It shouldn’t take long at all because I’m going to confess. Does Tubby still write bonds, Bert, or is he quite out of the business?”

“Mama.” Rachel wrapped her arms around Bambi. It was less a hug than an attempt to hold her in place. Bambi gently removed one arm, then the other, much as she might have peeled a clinging toddler from her. She used to do just that when Linda and Rachel were very young, and Bambi and Felix headed out to the club, over the girls’ protests. Their father was home so rarely in the evenings, it was a double blow to watch him come home and head out again, their mother at his side. They would wrap themselves around his legs and their mother would peel them off, one arm, one leg at a time, laughing all the while.

No one was laughing now.

“Tatiana will be fine, Rachel. I’ll be fine. I promise you that everything’s going to be okay.”

And with that, she was gone.