By A Spider's Thread

Chapter Four

TESS HAD NEVER DOUBTED SHE WAS A HIGHLY suggestible person. So it was only natural that Vera Peters, living on Labyrinth Road, would remind her of a Minotaur. Or perhaps thoughts of Minotaurs were unavoidable no matter where Vera Peters lived, given her enormous head, snoutlike nose, and the two tufts of white-blond hair sticking up like little horns. The short, stocky woman also was about as welcoming as a Minotaur in its lair, yanking open the door of her modest row house and bellowing "WHAT?" only after Tess had depressed the doorbell for twenty long seconds.

Or, more accurately, "VAT?" The woman's accent was thick, another surprise in a morning of surprises, the first of which was this modest, lower-middle-class neighborhood deep inside the city, as opposed to the upscale suburban home Tess had imagined for Natalie's family: Given Mark Rubin's appearance and business, not to mention Natalie's well-groomed beauty, she had assumed that the runaway wife was… well, a JAP. Tess didn't think of the Jewish-American Princess as a negative stereotype, more of an exotic species that happened to occur in Northwest Baltimore, like some butterfly found in a particular rain forest. JAPs were seldom glimpsed this far inside the Baltimore Beltway.

"Vy do you keep ringing my bell?" demanded the woman, presumably Vera Peters, although maybe she was a deranged housekeeper. If so, she was falling down on the job, judging from the dark, cluttered interior Tess glimpsed through the narrow space between door and frame. "I don't vant to buy anything-or talk about God, if that's vat you do. I have my own God, not that he does me any good. Go away, go bother someone else."

"I'm a private detective, and I'm looking for Vera Peters."

"Vy?" Tess loved this reply because, nine times out of ten, it meant she had found the right person. "Why" was the ultimate hedge, asked just in case she might be from Publishers Clearing House and the van was looking for a parking spot.

"I work for your son-in-law."

"Mark Rubin?"

"You have another one?"

"I don't have him, you ask me. I am not in his life, and he is not in mine."

"And your daughter? Do you have much contact with her?" Rubin had said she didn't, but Tess had to work from the assumption that Rubin didn't know everything about his wife, not even close.

"She made her choices long ago. She is not my concern."

"Three weeks ago she made a choice to walk out on her husband, taking their three children with them. Is that a decision you support?"

The woman eyed Tess thoughtfully, fishing a pack of cigarettes from her sweatpants and tapping one out. "Show me your ID."

Tess produced her private investigator's license and her driver's license, on which she looked insanely cheerful. It was an old photo.

"Vat does this prove?" the woman asked after squinting at the two cards. "I know men who can make these in their basements."

"You're the one who asked to see it. At the very least, it establishes who I am and that I live on East Lane, and I was thirty-three as of August."

"My daughter's thirty." Said as if an important point had been made, although Tess wasn't sure what it was. That the Minotaur's daughter was younger? Or that people born in different years couldn't possibly know one another?

"I know. Born March seventh."

"How do you know this?"

"I told you, I'm working for your son-in-law. I know quite a bit about your daughter already."

"Quite a bit" was an exaggeration, if not an outright lie. The only thing Tess knew about Natalie Rubin was that she was thirty, a wife and a mother, and she was gone. Oh, and somehow her dark, almost exotic beauty had been formed by this stooped-over woman, whose thin hair showed an inch of dark gray roots before changing over into the startling white-blond shade. Mrs. Peters wore a pink sweatshirt, dark blue sweatpants, and yellow slippers, open at the front and back. Her feet were painful to behold-raw, red, and chapped at the heels, with knobby anklebones. The gnarled toes, with yellowish nails several shades darker than the slippers, looked more like talons. A Minotaur crossed with a phoenix.

"Vy you want to talk to me?" Mrs. Peters said at last, coming out on the porch and closing the storm door behind her. That was fine with Tess. She avoided going into strangers' houses when possible. It was a selective claustrophobia, and a new one.

"I thought you might have some idea where your daughter is."

Mrs. Peters puffed hard on her cigarette but had no comment.

"I've been hired by her husband to find her and the children."

The bent-over woman bent over a little farther, clutching her midsection, although her thin, scratchy giggle did not seem particularly gut-busting. Eventually her laughter turned into a sharp wheeze, then a phlegmy coughing fit.

"So he sent you to find her? He never learns, does he?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"I mean if you have a dog who bites, you should be glad when it runs avay, not spend money trying to bring it back. He's a very stupid man, Mark Rubin. Which has its advantages. But he needs to get over it."

"Get over being stupid, or get over Natalie?"

"Natalie left my house years ago, and I didn't send anyone to get her back. Mark should do the same."

"She took their three children."

"Luckier still. Vat vould a man who vorks as much as Mark Rubin do with three little children? He'd just have to find another voman to marry. Or hire someone to do it. But he's cheap about those things, things that he thinks a voman can do. He's a cheap Jew."

"Excuse me?" It was not unheard of for Jews to be anti-Semitic. Tess's Weinstein relatives sometimes made cutting remarks about the Orthodox families coming into Baltimore from New York, drawn by the real-estate prices. But that was all in the family. No one she knew would ever speak to a stranger that way.

"Oh, he never minded paying for things. Have you seen the house?"

"Have you?"

"No, but I've heard. It's huge, with every kind of"-she fumbled for a word-"machine that anyone could vant. It's an automatic house; it can run itself and it does, every veekend, when the Sabbath comes. Lights come on and off, heat and air-conditioning, stoves and televisions and stereos. He's religious, right, but a religious man who likes to have things his vay. I'm not religious, but if I were, I don't think I vould spend so much time trying to get around things, you know? To me this is not devotion. It's a game, like children play."

"Still, it sounds as if he gave Natalie a nice life."

Vera Peters balanced herself on the arm of an old plastic chair, grimy from seasons of dirt, and picked at the cracked skin on her heel with an amazingly pristine fingernail, well shaped, with a fresh coat of a delicate pink shade.

"As I said, I don't talk to Natalie, but I hear about her from others. Mark Rubin liked buying things. But he didn't like paying for things he thought his vife should do-cleaning, cooking, vashing. Natalie was like a slave. A veil-dressed slave, who ate and drank good things, but still a slave."

Something finally clicked for Tess-the accent, the neighborhood.

"You're Russian," Tess said.

Vera Peters rolled her eyes. "No, I'm from Ukraine."

"How long have you lived here?"

"Twenty-some years."

"Natalie was born in Russia?" Perhaps it wasn't relevant, but it seemed an odd detail for Rubin to omit. Everything Tess had projected on Natalie was wrong, inferred from the image Rubin had put forth. Had he intended that? Or did he, like most people, simply not realize what others might find odd or unusual about his life? Perhaps he thought it was normal for a thirty-something Orthodox Jew to marry a nineteen-year-old Russian beauty with virtually no religious training.

"In Ukraine. But she's an American girl, through and through. I don't know vy she married a Jew. That face could have had anyone."

"But you're Jewish. If you came over in the 1980s, that would have been during glasnost-"

"Um-hum," the woman murmured, making the sort of polite agreement that a person uses when it's too complicated to contradict. "Yeah, sure, ve're Jewish. But ve're not Jewish. You couldn't be, vhere ve lived. So ve came here and now, bam, ve're Jewish, and people are saying ve should give Natalie a bat mitzvah and go to services. But it's the land of the free, right? So ve don't have to do nothing."

She ended defiantly, as if daring Tess to contradict her.

"Mrs. Peters, I work for your son-in-law, but it's in your daughter's best interest to be found. If this drags on, if she doesn't come home or make contact, he's eventually going to get frustrated and divorce her in absentia, getting custody of his children."

The last was a lie, but a harmless one, and it would test Vera Peters's ignorance of her son-in-law. When the woman didn't protest, Tess prompted, "Is that what you want? A daughter who's wanted by the law?"

"None of this," she said, shrugging, "is vat I vant."

The shrug seemed to encompass her home, her life, Baltimore, the United States. She had lived here for two decades, close to half her life assuming she was a haggard fifty-something. By almost any standard, it was probably better than the place she had left behind. But it wasn't home and never would be.

"I need any lead, no matter how slender. Has she called you or written to you? Does she have friends in the area she might have contacted? Do you have a hunch where she might have gone or how she's supporting herself?"

The woman craned her neck in order to stare into Tess's face.

"Monaghan," she said, giving the name a hard g. "What kind of name is that?"

"Irish. But my mother's family was Weinstein. They came to Baltimore from a small town somewhere in Eastern Europe, before World War I. It was a Russian town when they came, I think, but I'm not sure where it ended up."

Actually, she believed that it was a German town, but the borders of that time were so porous that Tess didn't see any harm in trying to establish a small kinship with the Peterses.

The woman looked puzzled at this attempt to find common ground. "So you're a Jew?"

"I'm a mutt. Like everyone, right? We're all mutts in this country."

The woman frowned, pulling her head back into her round shoulders as if she had been insulted. "You vant information? I don't have much. But vat I have, I'll give you-for a price."

Tess paid for information all the time, so she was hardly surprised to be asked for money. She just hadn't expected a man's mother-in-law to pad his per diem costs.

"How much?"

"One hundred dollars."

Tess counted five twenties out of her wallet.

"Per piece."

"Excuse me?"

"It's one hundred dollars for every name or fact I give you. Cash."

"I only have two hundred dollars on me."

"Then you only get two things."

"How much do you have to sell?"

"Ve'll see. Vat vould you like first?"

"I'd like to know if Natalie has contacted you in any way since she left."

"No." The woman took a hundred dollars from Tess's hand.

"Wait a minute. You didn't tell me anything."

"You asked a question, I answered. That's one hundred. There's an ATM on Reisterstown Road if you need more."

A serious case of caveat emptor, Tess decided. She wasn't going to pay for any more of these so-called leads until she had road-tested at least one of them.

"No, that's okay. I'll ask you just one more question. If it's a bum tip, I won't be back, and you'll never get another hundred dollars from me, all right? And by the way, that doesn't count as my question."

The woman nodded. "You may ask one more thing."

"Did Natalie have a friend, someone in whom she confided? If so, I'd like a name and number-a simple yes doesn't count as the full answer." She held her money above her head, well out of Mrs. Peters's stubby reach.

"Natalie didn't care for friends, especially girlfriends."

Tess continued to hold the money above her head, and Vera Peters studied it the way Esskay the greyhound stared down an out-of-reach dog treat.

"But she had one, a girl from this neighborhood. They went to school together, vorked together before Natalie got married."

"Worked together? Mark told me his wife never had a job."

The woman smiled. She had gorgeous teeth for a smoker, big and white and probably fake. "Him. Between vat he doesn't know and vat he won't tell, you have your vork cut out for you."

Chapter Five

THE NUMBERS VERA PETERS HAD FOR LANA WlSHNIA proved to be a cell phone and a work phone. Unfortunately, there was no landline listed with directory assistance. Tess was running into this new world order more and more, and it was frustrating, because crisscross directories were rendered virtually useless. Of course, Tess used two cell phones, one for outgoing, the other for incoming. This meant that others' caller ID functions wouldn't get her real number, just the outgoing phone. And she never answered that phone when it rang, simply took note of the number that showed up on her caller ID. It was all part of the communications arms race, an ongoing battle to safeguard her privacy while raiding others'.

She tried Lana's cell but got voice mail, an electronic voice curtly instructing the caller to leave a message. Tess disconnected, then punched in the work number.

"Adrian's," trilled a woman's velvety voice, with just a hint of supercilious challenge.

"Is Lana Wishnia there today?"

"She's with a client. Are you a client?" The voice indicated Tess should be. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No-yes-I mean-does she have anything open today?"

"I'll see if she has had a cancellation, although I doubt it." The voice was cool with disapproval. The Velvet Frost, Tess thought. "Perhaps if you could come in at four."

The voice made it clear that coming in at four was terribly gauche.

"Sure, I'll take that."

"And this would be for…"

"For, you know, that thing Lana does." Tess assumed that a place called Adrian's had to be a beauty salon or spa, although there was an outside risk that she was signing up for an MRI or a high colonic.

"We offer a full range of services at Adrian's. But, given Lana's schedule, you must choose."

"Choose…" Tess had found that repeating a word when lost in a conversation sometimes prompted the other person to provide enough information for her to continue whatever deception she was working.

"Feet or hands, pedicure or manicure. But there won't be time for any special treatments-massage or a wrap for your hands, reflexology. We cannot offer such accommodations at the last minute."

"Hands. A simple manicure."

"Very well. We will see you at four, Miss…"

"Theresa Weinstein," Tess said, not sure why she was lying, even less sure why she had chosen her mother's maiden name. But Adrian's was probably somewhere in Pikesville, so the Weinstein name might thaw the frost.

"At four, Miss Weinstein. Have you been here before?"

"No, it was recommended by a friend. I'll be coming from North Baltimore after a late lunch. What's the best way to get there?"

"Take the Beltway around to the Reisterstown Road exit. We're in the old Bibelot, the bookstore that folded."

Lose a bookstore, gain a spa. No wonder Baltimore was no longer known as "The City That Reads." But it did have great hair. Baltimore had even taken Broadway by storm with an entire musical devoted to the joys of teased coiffures.

Tess had said at least one true thing in her exchange with the Velvet Frost: She was due in North Baltimore for a late lunch. Such a journey, no more than eight or ten miles, should have been easy enough at midday. But perhaps Vera Peters had placed a gypsy curse on Tess, for she encountered an obstacle in every mile of her trip-a series of inexplicable traffic jams on the expressway, which she abandoned only to find herself caught in a tangle created by a road-construction project. She was blocked on her alternate route by a moving van, which didn't see why it shouldn't close two lanes of traffic to unload furniture, and finally by a beer truck, whose need to deliver four cases of Bud and Bud Lite was being treated like a presidential visit at the small corner deli.

And Tess would have been happy to offer these details as apologetic explanation to most dining companions, but the moment she saw Tyner Gray's scowling face and heard him bark, "You're late," she just shrugged.

"Sorry. I was working. Got here as soon as I could."

The restaurant Tyner had chosen was an oh-so-chic French bistro, Petit Louis, which had hit Baltimore's foodies like a Gallic love affair. Even the New York Times had anointed its kitchen, but Tess liked it anyway, especially during rowing season, when she had the metabolism of a cheetah. Tyner preferred it for a different reason: By one-thirty, when the ladies-who-lunch crowd cleared out, Petit Louis was fairly amenable to a man in a wheelchair. No steps, no carpets, just smooth wood and tile floors.

"So," Tess said, expecting Tyner to get down to business as he usually did.

"So?" he echoed, fiddling with the menu, picking it up and putting it down, as if he wasn't sure what to order. Tess selected the smoked duck for an appetizer and the steak frites for lunch, and she put in for the crème caramel at the same time, lest the kitchen run out at this late hour.

"What she's having," Tyner told the waitress, as if he couldn't be bothered to make a decision. The young woman seemed a little disappointed that she didn't get to perform her full spiel of specials.

"I haven't seen you at the boathouse much this fall," Tess said, making conversation as Tyner fumbled with his flatware and napkin. An Olympic rower before the car accident that had left him paralyzed below the waist, Tyner was a harsh but effective coach. It was hard for rowers to complain about sore leg muscles to a man who couldn't walk.

"I'm out on the water before you get there," he said. "In fact, it seems to me I've seen you going out as late as six-thirty."

"I'm self-employed. I'm not in college with eight a.m. classes. If I want to row at the disgracefully late hour of six-thirty, I'm entitled."

Funny, Tess's father seldom riled her this way. Patrick Monaghan was a quiet man, and although he had his frustrations with Tess, his aversion to conflict was stronger than his need to change his only child.

"It's a matter of safety," Tyner said. "A single-sculler such as yourself, with no coxswain to see what's coming, is better off when the traffic is lightest."

"You know, I don't think you invited me to one of Baltimore's nicest restaurants to talk about my rowing habits. You could just hang out at the boathouse and yell at me there. So what do you really want to discuss?"

If it wasn't a job, maybe it was retirement. She was fuzzy on Tyner's age, but reasonably sure he qualified for the senior-citizen discount at the dry cleaners. Tess wondered if he was going to ease someone new into his practice, a young lawyer who would take care of Tyner's regulars while building up a new roster of clients. That would probably mean less work for Tess. More worrisome, it would mean no more cheap legal assistance, which Tyner swapped out hour for hour, despite the stark difference in their billing rates. Maybe she could just get arrested less often in the future.

Tyner cleared his throat, a noise as dry and scratchy as two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together, then placed a small velvet box on the table. It was an old one, judging by the greenish cast and worn spots. He popped the box open, displaying a band of silver-well, probably white gold or platinum-with a single diamond at its heart.

"My mother's," he said.

"You had a mother?" Inane, but Tess was not prepared for where this was heading.

"Of course I had a mother," Tyner snapped, sounding like himself for the first time today. "Do you think I was suckled by a wolf? She gave this to me years ago, decades ago. I never thought I would have any use for it, but, well… I'm going to marry your Aunt Kitty."

Tess was still too overwhelmed to make sense. "Does she know?"

"Of course she knows!" Tyner's voice was so loud this time that even the blase waitstaff of Petit Louis twitched in their crisp white shirts. "I asked her last weekend. For God's sake, we've been living together for almost two years now."

"I guess I thought you were asking my permission or something like that. Although I suppose you should really ask Dad, or one of his brothers, since Pop-Pop Monaghan is no longer around-"

"Your aunt is in her forties-she hardly needs permission from her brothers to marry. I just wanted to show you the ring and see if you think Kitty would ever wear anything like this. It's awfully old-fashioned."

"She likes old-fashioned things." Tess balanced the box warily on her fingertips, as if it held a poisonous insect given to impulsive attacks. "She'd prefer this to a big old solitaire on a gold band or one of those encrusted things you see on some ladies."

"It's not… well, insulting, to present her a ring rather than give her the option of picking it out?"

"Not at all. It's a romantic gesture. Or would have been if you had given it to her during the proposal instead of waiting for a second opinion, you doofus. Hey, how does a guy in a wheelchair propose? You can't go down on one knee, so you do you go down on one elbow?"

"Don't be tacky," Tyner said, hugely pleased. He enjoyed Tess's company because she was one of the few people who didn't treat his wheelchair like a bad smell, something to be politely ignored under any and all circumstances. "There is one thing I do want to ask you, however."

"Yes?"

"Given that Kitty's and my combined ages top one hundred, we don't want to get too silly, even though this is a first wedding for both of us."

"Good plan. Vegas? Elkton?"

"So instead of having bridesmaids and best men and all that folderol, we want only one attendant-you."

Tess, who had managed at this point in her life to avoid any and all manner of responsibility in the nuptial process, was not thrilled. Tyner, misunderstanding her silence, plowed ahead.

"I know you're probably wondering why we didn't ask you and Crow to do it as a couple."

"No, that's not it. That's not it at all-"

"But the fact is, I'm not close to him, and he couldn't very well be Kitty's attendant. And you told Kitty the other day you're not sure when he's going to be back from Charlottesville, so he can't really be involved in the planning, right?"

"Right." Crow had moved home to care for his mother, who was undergoing chemo for breast cancer, and Tess didn't know when he would be back.

"Besides, you're the one who brought Kitty and me together."

"Don't remind me."

"Anyway, it will be simpler. How carried away can she get if there's only one attendant?"

Tess began to see some advantages in the situation. "Okay, sure. Crow won't mind, given that he's been staying with his parents in Charlottesville. And if I'm standing up for the bride and the groom, I could wear, like, a really sharp Armani pantsuit, or at least a skirt-and-jacket thing, instead of some god-awful bridesmaid's dress."

"Well, actually, I'm not so sure about that." Tyner was suddenly manifesting all the nervous confusion of a young groom. "Kitty seems to have… a lot of ideas. I mean, she keeps saying it's just going to be a party where two people get married, but she's been making a lot of phone calls and appointments. I think she even has a color scheme."

"What is it?"

"It changes almost hourly."

"Uh-oh."

"But she's leaning toward black for your dress. At least, as of yesterday, she said she liked the idea of you in black."

"Well, I can pick out a black dress on my own," Tess said with glad relief.

"Of course you can. Except Kitty wants to… um, help." He pushed a card across the table. "She has an appointment for the both of you at this boutique in Towson. To start. She also mentioned some other places, like Vassari and Octavia and maybe the Neiman Marcus in the Washington suburbs if she can't find the right dress in Baltimore."

The card for the Towson dress shop was white with discreet silver letters in a curvy font, a whisper of pink blossoms scattered across its face. Just touching it made Tess's palms itch.

"So this lunch is really a bribe, right? You lured me here not to get my approval of the marriage, or even to ask my opinion of the ring, but to break the news that I have to go buy a dress in a bridal store. I can just see it. You know it's going to have some huge bow over the ass."

"I was hoping you'd think of this lunch as a celebration. I thought we might even splurge, have a good bottle of wine with lunch. On me, of course. This is all on me."

"Wine for lunch is fine, but I'm going to need a g-pack of crack to survive dress shopping. Be straight with me-is Kitty losing her mind? Is she getting all giddy and nuts? Just how bad is this going to be?"

Tyner just smiled ruefully and summoned the waitress, ordering a $150 bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

Chapter Six

A HALF BOTTLE OF CHATEAUNEUF-DU-PAPE TURNED out to be excellent preparation for Tess's appointment with Lana Wishnia at Adrian's.

The spa had done much to obscure the bookstore Tess had so loved before it sank beneath the weight of one of the more curious bankruptcy cases in Baltimore history. From the outside it was now just another door in another suburban strip center. But that frosted glass door opened into a foreign world, a butterscotch-colored anteroom with fabric-swathed walls and two more frosted-glass doors marked salon and spa. Tess felt as if she had fallen into the bottom of a caramel sundae, or one of the more perverse compartments in Alice's rabbit hole. Come to think of it, Adrian's was probably full of potions that commanded "Drink Me" and "Eat Me," although with less immediate results than their Wonderland counterparts.

"You are Lana's four o'clock?"

The voice was unmistakably the Velvet Frost, but its owner was far from the style maven that Tess had envisioned. She was dumpy and middle-aged, with a large part between her front teeth. She did, however, sport acrylic nails, winged eyebrows, and fiercely streaked hair.

"Yes."

"She is running late." Was Tess paranoid, or was the woman blaming her for Lana's tardiness? "I would have called you, but you did not leave a contact number. May I get you anything while you wait?"

Tess looked at the magazines arrayed fan style on a low, maple-and-glass table in front of a chenille sofa in the same maple hue. They were not real magazines, just handbooks designed to create impossible dreams in the women who were forced to wait here because Lana-or Tatiana or Esme or Jean-Paul or Horatio Hornblower-was running late. Tess wanted to ask for a magazine with articles, or even a newspaper, but she felt as if she had already acquired too many demerits.

"No, I'm fine, just fine."

"Tea? Coffee?" Even the easy questions sounded quizlike here.

"No thank you."

"Mineral water? Wine?"

"Wine would definitely be redundant."

The receptionist narrowed her eyes as if she thought Tess might be trying to slide a rude word past her. "You are new to us, yes? Then you must fill out a client card."

She handed Tess a clipboard with a questionnaire as long as anything a doctor's office would require. Tess perched gingerly on the edge of the backless sofa, one of those low-slung pieces of modern furniture that seemed to be designed for Candid Camera stunts. Only a person with steel thighs could rise from it with a shred of grace intact. Dutifully, she checked off a series of "no" boxes-pregnancy, medications, chronic pain-pausing only when she reached the lengthy portion on plastic surgery. She had not even heard of some of the procedures named.

Tess seldom gave much thought to what she wore or how she looked, but the checklist and the Velvet Frost's curled-lip inspection were making her self-conscious. Covertly, she glanced at one of the many mirrors in the room. She had a few freckles, souvenirs of a summer spent mainly outdoors, but her face was otherwise clear and unlined. Her hair was at an unruly length, neither long nor short, but that was the price of growing it out. Her makeup routine consisted of darkening her lashes and penciling a narrow line beneath her eyes to keep them from disappearing into her face.

True, her clothes were not particularly distinguished, not by Adrian's standards. She wore black trousers and a black T-shirt beneath a man's vintage shirt, a butter yellow Banlon with black stitching. Her one concession to adulthood was a newfound preference for expensive shoes and boots, but only because she had learned they were a good value, sturdier and more comfortable than cheap ones. Today she had on a pair of black cowboy boots, whose two-inch heels put her within shouting distance of six feet.

I yam what I yam, she decided, glancing toward the salon side of Adrian 's, presumably full of women trying to be anything but. Meanwhile, white-uniformed men kept leading women out of the "Spa" door, holding their charges by the elbow of their terry-cloth robes as if they were recovering from major surgery.

"Salmon and asparagus," one attendant whispered to his client, whose face was covered with a pale green goo that made her look as if she had just been smacked with a key lime pie. "All you want, but nothing else. Your… uh, urine will smell, but your skin will look fabulous. But only asparagus and salmon, nothing else for seven days, or it won't work. It's all about the salmon."

"Belly or Nova?" the woman asked, and Tess's head shot up at the familiar voice issuing from the green cream.

"Deborah?"

"Tesser!" her cousin crowed with pleasure, and Tess remembered too late that she was here under a semifalse name and thoroughly false pretenses. At least the old family nick-name didn't give her away. "Since when do you come to Adrian's?"

"Oh, I thought I'd start paying a little more attention to my appearance, get a manicure."

"Well, it's a start."

There was no malice in Deborah, although Tess had not always understood this. Her cousin simply lacked the usual filters: If a thought passed through her brain, it headed straight to her mouth. Tess had come to think of Deborah as sort of a walking James Joyce novel, albeit one narrated by a preternaturally self-satisfied matron. They had been competitive as girls, and even as adults, until they finally stopped to wonder what, exactly, they were competing for. They had chosen different paths, but not as a rebuke to each other. And they had the foxhole of family in common, a powerful bond.

Deborah peered into Tess's face. "Isn't this awfully far off the beaten track for you? I thought you never went outside the Beltway if you could help it."

"Yes, but everyone says this place is the best."

Her cousin smiled, happy to be complimented for her taste in spas. "It is, and it's convenient to Sutton Place Gourmet, not to mention a Starbucks."

"No caffeine," her attendant practically squealed. "Are you trying to undo everything we've done?"

Deborah giggled. She was not a stupid woman, and it was doubtful she believed that this young man had any interest in her beyond her lavish tips. Yet she clearly was enjoying their flirtatious shtick.

"Not even one mocha?" she wheedled.

"Decaf, no whipped cream," he decreed, and she nodded, as if his word were law, but Tess knew that her cousin would be clutching a venti with the works when she roared out of the parking lot. The Weinsteiri side of the family did not run toward sacrifice. "Now let's go make sure that Carlos does a fabulous job on your hair. Not so red this time. Something softer, a shade that sneaks up on a person. I didn't do all this work on your face just to have the Castilian wonder screw up the presentation."

"Have fun," Deborah called to Tess over her shoulder as she headed into the salon. "You ought to think about getting a seaweed wrap next time. Or a kosher salt scrub."

"Does that come with belly or Nova?"

But Deborah had sailed out of earshot, so all Tess's flippancy earned was a frown from the Velvet Frost.

"I believe Lana is ready now. You were lucky to get this appointment. She is our most popular girl." The voice thawed perhaps one degree. "I did not realize you were one of the Weinsteins. Is Deborah your sister?"

"Cousin," Tess said, feeling the lack of challenge occasioned by telling the unadulterated truth. "First cousin."

"Ah," the Velvet Frost said, and Tess could see her calculating: not one of the Weinsteins of Weinsteins Jewelers, just an impoverished twig from another part of the family tree. Tess's advantage was lost as quickly as it had been gained.

Chapter Seven

LANA WlSHNIA BALANCED TESS'S HANDS ON HER fingertips, clearly unimpressed. No rower has pretty palms, but even the tops of Tess's hands were unattractive, with short, nicked nails, ragged cuticles, and a few random cuts that she couldn't recall inflicting on herself. After a few moments of stony inspection, Lana took Tess's left hand and flipped it over, touching it the way one might handle a dead animal brought home by a faithful cat. Here the damage was far worse-a corporal's stripes of hard yellow calluses. Still, Lana said nothing, her face impassive.

The only consolation was that Lana's hands, while nowhere near as damaged as Tess's, were not spectacular. Her nails were blunt cut and unpolished, her fingers stubby and plump. Manicurist, file yourself.

"What do you do?" she asked, dropping Tess's hands into warm, soapy water. They were the first words she had spoken since they were introduced. Her accent was quirky-American, with a hard, aggressive edge, more New York than Baltimore. She had a broad, unsmiling face, and her heavy makeup made her look older than she was, assuming she was Natalie's contemporary. A single pockmark on her forehead indicated a poor complexion or a bad case of chickenpox, but heavy foundation covered any other telltale marks.

"Do?" Tess echoed. She preferred not to lie outright, but she also wasn't ready to tell Lana that she was a private detective, not just yet.

"To your hands. What do you do, that they're so beat up?"

"I row."

"What?"

"Row. On the water-I row a single scull." Tess couldn't use her hands, as Lana was now holding them both in the water, pushing them down as if they were a pair of kittens she hoped to drown. She rolled her shoulders and jerked her elbows, attempting to mime the movement, and succeeded only in looking as if she were having a convulsion.

"For exercise?"

"Yeah." It was easier to agree than try to explain that rowing was more for her head than her body or heart. There were a dozen activities Tess could do for endurance and strength training, but rowing was the only thing that brought her close to the kind of Zen-like state that others claimed to find in yoga and meditation. She had never loved it more than this summer, when she'd had to give it up for a few weeks. Sidelined after cutting open her knee, she had needed it more than ever.

"Weird. I oughta do something." Lana's complacent voice made clear that she had no intention of doing anything. Was she married? She didn't wear any rings, but perhaps a ring would interfere with her work. "I should tell you-if you go out and row again, it's not going to last. Just so you know."

Tess nodded, but the judgment stung a little. She didn't go in much for beautifying routines, but she liked to think that she wasn't beyond hope.

Lana removed the shallow basin of water and began massaging Tess's hands. This felt heavenly. Tess thought about Deborah, wrapped in seaweed, abraded with kosher salt, covered with pale green cream. Did she really think she needed all these treatments, or did she come just for the touching, to be massaged and rubbed?

"There's a reason I asked for you today," Tess said, deciding they were far enough along in the process that Lana couldn't abort, or walk away.

"Yeah, I was in Baltimore magazine's 'best of issue three years ago, and people still call."

She nodded toward the wall behind her station, where a framed certificate attested to her honor. Invited to look, Tess also took in the photographs and personal mementoes that Lana had put up there. There was a stuffed bear in a T-shirt that said MARDI GRAS, and a photograph of Lana with a dark-haired woman, the Inner Harbor in the background. It was small and a little blurry, but Tess recognized Natalie. Younger and more tarted up than in the photo Mark Rubin had given her, but definitely Natalie.

"I heard about you from someone else-Natalie Rubin's mother."

Lana didn't miss a beat in her ministrations to Tess's hand, and if there was a change in her expression, Tess couldn't see it. "That was nice of Vera, to send me a customer. She's a nice lady."

"When did your family come over?"

Lana looked up, squinting at Tess as if it were impolite to mention that someone was not a native. Perhaps it was, in these paranoid times.

"Twenty-eight years ago. I was a year old." So she was twenty-nine, a year younger than Natalie.

"Where are your parents from?"

" Sheepshead Bay." She gave Tess a crooked smile. "Now, I mean. They were originally from Belarus. They moved to New York, but they sent me down here to live with my aunt because… well, because they hoped I'd be more dutiful in Baltimore. Also, they thought Baltimore was more American. They figured they had come all this way, so I should live in a real American place. You could walk down our block sometimes and not hear a single word in English."

"Do you ever think about going back, to see where you came from?" The question was born of simple curiosity. Tess had no experience with exile. If she wanted to visit her roots, she could walk from her office to the old East Side Democratic Club, where her parents had met. But as soon as Tess spoke, she saw a horrible possibility: If Natalie had gone back to her homeland, she and her children were beyond the reach of Keyes Investigations, the SnoopSisters Digest, and even most legal authorities.

"There's no one there to see," Lana said. "Maybe some distant cousins, but I never knew them."

"How do you know Natalie?"

"The usual way."

"The usual way?"

"School, the neighborhood. You know, you need to push back your cuticles."

Tess knew what a cuticle was, but she had never understood what was meant by pushing one back. With what? The flat of her hand, a stern word?

"When did you come to Baltimore?"

"They sent me here when I was in junior high. How do you know Natalie?"

"I don't. I know her mother." Tess waited a beat. "And her husband."

Lana didn't respond.

"In fact, her husband hired me to find Natalie and their children. They've disappeared."

Still no comment, as Lana concentrated on shaping Tess's nails, which should not have required so much attention. There wasn't much there to file.

"Has she been in touch with you?"

"If she has, I wouldn't tell you."

"But you know she's gone, because you don't seem at all surprised by the information."

Lana was good at skipping past comments she didn't want to address. "She's my friend. Whatever she's done, I'm for her, not for her husband. I never liked him much."

"Do you even know him?" It was hard to imagine that Mark Rubin would withhold information about his wife's friend.

"No, but Natalie tells me things. He's not right for her."

"Why would you say that?"

"Do I have to have a reason?"

"Yes, and it must be a pretty profound reason if you're willing to keep a man from finding his children."

Lana paused, her emery board poised over Tess's nail. "He's full of himself," she said at last.

"Because he's rich?"

"No, not so much because he has money, although that's part of it. He's just so… well, Jewish."

That odd prejudice again. "You're Jewish."

"It was just what we were, not what we did." Lana's parents may have succeeded in creating an American girl, but her shrugs were Old Country through and through. Put her in a head scarf and Lana would have looked at home in a New York Times photo of Russian women, circa the year of her birth, lined up for bread and toilet paper.

"What about Natalie?"

"What about her?" Lana turned her back on Tess, taking a long time with her wall of nail polishes, as if there were dozens of variations on the shade of "clear" that Tess had chosen when they first sat down.

"Was she also indifferent to Judaism? I mean, before she married Mark?"

"She didn't go to synagogue, if that's what you mean. Most of the Russian families around here didn't, not regular."

"So why did she marry an Orthodox man and agree to lead an Orthodox life?"

"Love," Lana said, her back still to Tess. "Women have done weirder things for love. And it's not as if-" She stopped herself. Tess waited to see if she would finish the thought, but she didn't.

"Still, Natalie knew she was marrying an Orthodox man. Mark Rubin didn't convert one morning and make Natalie go along with him. I'm sure he was very clear about what he expected from his wife."

"Oh, yeah, Mark Rubin was always very clear about everything." Lana seemed to be smothering a laugh. "But I have to say, boring as he was, he was at least a little fun, before. You know? I was married once, for all of six months. But the marriage wasn't as good as what came before. Things change. It's like, before I came to Baltimore to live, it was a place I visited and had fun. Then it was the place I lived and went to school, and now it's the place I work. It's not all going out to eat and the aquarium anymore."

Tess had to admit that Lana's definition of marriage matched her own views. It transformed love into work, and who needed another job?

"So Natalie decided to take a vacation?"

"I'm saying she had reasons. They're hers, and they're private, but they make sense to her, so who are you to get involved?"

Lana was now applying polish to Tess's fingers with quick, easy strokes, always the right amount of fluid on the brush, a perfect drop of translucent lacquer. The talents of Baltimore's best manicurist were obviously wasted on this mundane assignment.

"She doesn't have any money, though."

Lana stroked, face impassive.

"And then there are kids, kids who should be in school."

"Only Isaac," Lana said. "The twins would have started kindergarten this year, but no one learns anything in kindergarten. Isaac is smart. He'll catch up-" She caught herself.

"When? When will Isaac catch up? How?"

"When he goes back to school, of course. I mean, I just assume Natalie won't keep him out forever."

"She has a plan, doesn't she, a plan she shared with you? She's going to settle somewhere, raise her children. Has she called you from the road? Do you have any idea where she might be?"

Lana started on the next hand, her movements now a little less precise.

"A woman has no right to keep a loving father from his children. Whatever problems Natalie and her husband have, what she's doing is wrong."

Stroke, stroke, stroke.

"If she tries to get in touch with you, I'll know."

But it was too big a bluff, she couldn't carry it, and Lana was already on her pinkie. "She has no reason to get in touch with me."

Tess glanced back at the photo: Lana and Natalie, on some sunny, long-ago day at the harbor, big, overdone hair blowing in the breeze. They had their arms around each other, and their mutual affection was unmistakable. While Natalie looked straight into the camera, eyes sparkling, Cupid's bow mouth stretched into a huge smile, Lana was looking at Natalie, mesmerized by her pretty friend, basking in her happiness.

"You must miss her," Tess tried.

Lana placed Tess's hands beneath an air dryer. "Wait at least five minutes, or you'll smudge," she said, setting a timer. "Ten is better. When you leave, your check will be up front. Our tip envelopes are up there, too. You'll excuse me, but I have another appointment."

She opened her drawer wide, ostensibly to put something away, but also so Tess could see the fives and tens stacked there. She then all but ran away, and Tess couldn't follow her-not unless she was willing to smear the clear polish on what the slip would claim was a twenty-five-dollar French manicure.

She tipped lavishly despite Lana's rip-off. There was nothing to lose in overtipping. Come to think of it, that was another life lesson from her father, a little Irish karma: Be generous with your tips when you are flush, because they are returned to you in ways you didn't expect when you go bust.

Tess wasn't flush these days, but Mark Rubin was. Besides, she suspected that he could use a little help in the karma department, too.

Lana Wishnia emerged from Adrian's about an hour later, finished for the day. Squinting at the light, she made her way to a bright green Dodge Neon at the far end of the parking lot, then pulled out onto Reisterstown Road, heading north.

Tess was right behind her. Following Lana had been a last-minute impulse, inspired by a quick stop at Sutton Place Gourmet. The sheer novelty of a different grocery store had seduced her into silly purchases-coconut macaroons, a kiwi, a slab of tomato-rosemary focaccia. These spur-of-the-moment choices reminded Tess that all humans were creatures of impulse. If Lana was upset or disturbed by Tess's visit, she might feel compelled to act as quickly as possible. If she had a coconspirator, she could seek his or her counsel.

And if Natalie were actually in the Baltimore area-a long shot, but not entirely implausible-Lana would take Tess straight to her.

Instead Lana left one strip mall only to lead Tess to another, about two miles up the road, a shopping center with a Giant grocery and several smaller shops. Okay, so Tess's hunch was off. The manicurist was just stopping to pick up some food on her way home, and she didn't make Sutton Place Gourmet wages.

But Lana walked into a Mail Boxes Etc. store. She was inside for perhaps two or three minutes, nowhere near enough time to send a package or a fax, and came out empty-handed.

At least she was empty-handed as far as Tess could tell. Lana's purse, a bulging shoulder bag of dirty beige leather, was so big that it could easily conceal a sheaf of letters, or even a box. Tess made a note of the address and continued to follow Lana north.

Lana's next stop was a town-house complex called Camelot Hills. It was fairly new, yet already careworn. Even the banner advertising move-in specials was limp and bedraggled. Lana parked and went into one of the middle units on Lancelot's Way, and Tess decided to wait awhile to see if she would head out again. The flow of people returning home from work was frenetic enough for her to sit in her car without drawing attention to herself, the setting sun bright enough to excuse the sunglasses that covered much of her face.

She had assumed that Lana would choose to live among other single folks, but there were plenty of families scattered throughout the complex, and the children were out in force on this crisp evening, riding bikes, playing the eternal games, such as four-square and hopscotch. Most, however, were caught up in a sport of their own invention. It appeared to be called "jump out," and it was a combination of hide-and-seek and capture the flag.

The two smallest boys, pretending to be police officers, walked up and down until they would suddenly leap at a clutch of children loitering on a corner. The goal was to arrest as many kids as possible, while the others fled to a safe house on the steps of the sliding board. Those who were caught were placed in the jungle gym, clearly the jail. The larger girls and boys ran away over and over again, squealing in delight, while the two little boys demonstrated a heartbreaking familiarity with the gray-area brutality common to such police actions, flailing at their captives with fists and makeshift batons.

Ah, well, Tess had once played Mugger in the shadows of Ten Hills, and she had turned out to be a decent enough citizen. Such games were all about having a reason to run and squeal, night air filling your lungs, adrenaline soaring through your body. She studied the children carefully, but there was no miniature Mark Rubin among them, no fox-faced boy-and-girl twins. When the darkness became so complete that parents started calling children to homework and bed, Tess headed for her own.

Chapter Eight

THE TWINS SAT ON THE EDGE OF ONE OF THE DOUBLE beds, backs ramrod straight, hands folded in their laps, although Efraim absentmindedly put his left thumb in his mouth from time to time. Television had been rationed in their old life, by their father's insistence, and the twins still treated it with a kind of nervous awe. They didn't laugh, or even smile much, just stared at the cartoon channel with unblinking attention. Perhaps they thought if they showed no sign of enjoying it, no one would think to take it away from them.

Isaac, too, had liked the unlimited cartoons at first, especially Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. But now he was getting bored. He wished he had a book, a new one. His mother had allowed him to pack only one, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and he hadn't argued because he thought they were going away for a long weekend, not forever. He had finished it the first two days on the road, before they met Zeke. He could reread it, but the book made him sad. If you were going to run away from home, you should have an adventure, do something important and thrilling, like the brother and sister in the book. You shouldn't just drive from town to town, sitting in motel rooms that looked alike and watching the same television shows you could have watched back home. That is, if you were allowed to watch all the cartoons you wanted back home.

Teachers were always saying Isaac had a vivid imagination, but it certainly had never occurred to him that he might have a life without books. In his "before" life-his real life was how Isaac thought of it-his father never said no to anything involving a book. Whether it was buying one, staying up late to read one, or even trying to read what everyone else said was a grown-up book, Isaac's father always said it was okay. It would have been easier to imagine a world without food, or a house. Even if a person was very poor, there were always libraries. But you couldn't have a library card when you drove to a new town almost every night, because how would you take the books back on time?

Isaac would like to ask his mother if they were poor now, but not in Zeke's hearing. Because if they had lost all their money, that would be a private thing. His father wouldn't want other people to know about it. His father was very proud. But it would explain a lot, if they were poor. It might even explain why they had left. In the story of Hansel and Gretel, the father and the stepmother took the children to the forest because they didn't have enough to eat. Maybe his mother had been planning to let them go in the forest, then decided she couldn't do it. Or maybe that was Zeke's plan, although he wasn't a stepparent. He was mean enough to be a stepparent.

Certainly Isaac's mother and Zeke talked about money all the time, about the cost of everything, in a way his father never had. "Down by thirty-seven dollars," Zeke might say, after paying for breakfast. "Up by three hundred dollars," he had announced yesterday as he helped Isaac out of the trunk last time. Down was bad, no matter how small, up was good.

But it was never good enough, judging by Zeke's face, which always looked as if he were adding and subtracting.

They had started out with a thick envelope of money, but his mother had given much of it to the big, hairy man who gave her the car, the papers, and the shoe box. Isaac's mother had cried, accusing the man of taking too much of her money. The man had said the car was cheap, but the things she needed to drive the car came a little dearer. Isaac remembered the exact phrase, for it was new to him. Came a little dearer. His mom had handed over the money and gotten the crummy green car in return. She should have been willing to walk away. That was important in making a deal, his father had told him. You always had to be ready to walk away.

That had been in the mountains, the Appalachians-he had learned about them in geography. His mother's friend, the woman with the fuzzy hair and the sad eyes, had driven them to a farm. On the way his mother kept talking about what a great weekend they were going to have, picking fresh fruit at orchards, maybe swimming. The signs promised a lake-Deep Creek-and cabins. They had gone west, west, west, past Frederick and Hagerstown, past Cumberland. They may have even left Maryland before they were done. Isaac wasn't sure. He was thinking about the lake and wondering if his father would teach him how to fish. Did Jews fish? They weren't allowed to hunt, he knew that, not the Orthodox. But fishing was different for some reason, maybe because fish were kosher and bears were not.

But when they got to the old farm, his mother's friend had unloaded their bags and taken off, hugging Isaac's mother and wishing her well. His mother had put them in the new car-well, the old car that was new to them-and driven them to a motel, one with a pool. That had been the last motel with a pool, at least a working one. The next day they had been in the car forever, driving into the night, passing motel after motel, only to pick one that looked like all the others.

The next morning his mother had put Isaac in charge and left for an hour. When she came back, she was with a man who had the palest face that Isaac had ever seen. "Meet your Uncle Zeke." Even then Isaac had thought his father would be joining them soon. It was only later, when his mother told him to stop asking, that he understood they weren't going home.

Tonight his mother and Zeke had gone to talk in the car. They were always going to share secrets in the car, which was rude. Isaac's father didn't believe in having so many secrets. The car was parked right outside the door of their motel room, so Isaac didn't dare sneak away. He looked longingly at the phone, but Zeke had taken the talking part with him, just so Isaac couldn't try to use it. He would have, too. He wished now that he had been fake with Zeke, pretended to like him, because then Zeke might trust him more. And if Zeke trusted him, his guard would drop, and Isaac would find a way to make a phone call.

Not to the police, though, not after his experience with that guard man. If the guard man, a man who wore a gun, didn't believe Isaac, then a police officer probably wouldn't believe him either. Maybe it wasn't a crime what his mother was doing? Besides, she would just convince everyone that Isaac was a liar. He would be the boy who cried wolf, even though he hadn't-he was screaming for people to look at the wolf that only he could see. No, he had to get to his father, tell him where they were. Only his father would believe him, right away, and not waste time asking for other sides.

Penina leaned over to Efraim and whispered something, making him laugh. Her voice was a low mumble, but Isaac wasn't sure he would know what she was saying even if she spoke up. When the twins spoke their made-up language, just for them, it made Isaac lonely and nervous. When Zeke was around, they barely spoke at all.

His mother and Zeke came in, their cheeks flushed as if the night had turned cold. Zeke made a big show of attaching the talking part back to the phone-the handset, that's what it was called-looking at Isaac as if daring him to say anything. It was as if Zeke wanted to say, I'm smarter than you! Isaac wanted to shout back, So what? You're a grown-up, you're supposed to be smarter. Instead they just looked at each other, like two men in a western about to have a gun-fight, and Isaac's resolve to make Zeke like him fell away. He would never in his life be that good a pretender.

But you didn't always have to be the smartest one to win. His dad had taught him that, when Isaac was learning to play Advanced Mission Battleship, the new improved version with missiles and lots of sound effects, so when you sank someone's ship, it made a really satisfying kaboom sound, with splashing, and when you finally won, the woman's voice announced in a pleased way, "Con-grat-u-la-tions, Admiral." Isaac almost never, ever beat his father at Battleship-only twice so far, and both times had been luck. His father had pressed the wrong buttons, firing his Tomahawks in the wrong pattern, even though he knew where Isaac's PT boat was. So Isaac didn't think his wins really counted.

But his father had said, "Don't scorn luck. A lot of my success in life has been luck. Ditto my father's, and his father before him. If I could wish just one thing for you, Isaac, I think I would wish you to be lucky."

"Really?" Isaac thought his father might at least wish he had a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball or early admission to a really good college.

His father had taken him into his lap. (How Isaac missed that lap, which was big and warm and safe, although he was really getting too big for such things.) "Well, I guess I would wish first and foremost that you would be a virtuous man."

"What does that mean?"

"To be good, to have… well, virtues. To be honest and kind and modest. You know, the Christians take credit for the Golden Rule-love your neighbor as you love yourself-but the Jews have their own version, and it is much older. And, I think, a little wiser. We say, 'Do not do to your neighbor what you would not want done to yourself.' That makes more sense to me. I don't think it's possible to love others as we love ourselves and our families, but we can avoid doing anything to them that we would not want done to ourselves."

"What if someone is really mean to you? Can you be mean back? Since they started it?"

"It depends. Is someone being mean to you?"

Actually, someone had been mean to him, a boy at school, calling him teacher's pet and Rubin the Nose-Rubber, which made no sense, but everyone laughed as if it were extremely funny. It had been terribly important at the time, but Isaac no longer remembered why that boy disliked him so, or even why it bothered him. It was so long ago, so far away, back in the second grade. The things that once made him cry-another boy's insults, a reprimand from his father, a scary dream-would never make him cry now. He was determined that nothing would make him cry, not in front of Zeke.

He cried only in the privacy of the trunk. Or, sometimes, late at night, long after everyone was asleep. Even then he had learned the trick of crying silently, without even a snuffle, so it was barely like crying at all.