Wilde Lake

When my brother was eighteen, he broke his arm in an accident that ended in another young man’s death. I wish I could tell you that we mourned the boy who died, but we did not. He was the one with murder in his heart and, sure enough, death found him that night. Funny how that works.

It happened at the lake. Wilde Lake. Named not for Oscar, but Frazar B. Who?, you may well ask. I had to look it up myself and I’m a native to these parts. Frazar Bullard Wilde was president of Connecticut General, an insurance company. When longtime customer Jim Rouse decided in the 1960s that he wanted to build a “new town” utopia in Maryland farmland midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Connecticut General provided funding and agreed that Rouse should acquire the land stealthily, parcel by parcel, keeping prices low. Rouse was a good man-churchgoing, modest, indifferent to his personal fortune, careful with his company’s coffers. Yet Columbia, Maryland, the egalitarian experiment that he probably considered his greatest legacy, began in deceit.

Again: Funny how that works.

Frazar’s reward was the lake. The lake and, a year later, the “village” that surrounded it. Man-made, dammed, Wilde Lake was the opposite of wild, even with several hundred high school seniors massed at its southeastern edge, celebrating their graduation from Wilde Lake High School. It was June 18, 1980. They were eighteen years old, the lake was fourteen years old, Columbia was thirteen years old. The gathering went about as well as any unsupervised party of adolescents ever goes, and at least multiple family rec rooms would be spared the trash, the vomit, the blood. This outdoor party was a tradition, to the extent that this young, raw suburb could claim to have traditions. On graduation night, seniors stayed out until dawn. Where they ended up varied, but they always started at the lake.

When AJ informed our father that he intended to participate in this annual ritual, our father was torn. He never wanted AJ to be the odd kid out. Yet he truly hated the teenage tendency to ramble, as he called it, with no particular destination or plan. And there could be no escaping the fact that AJ was the son of Andrew Jackson Brant, state’s attorney for Howard County. It would be big news if AJ Jr. were busted for smoking pot or underage drinking. It would not have ruined AJ’s life, the way such missteps can today, what with mandatory expulsions from school and sentencing guidelines. County cops probably would have trained their flashlights on AJ and his friends, confiscated their contraband, ascertained that no one was getting behind the wheel drunk, then sent everyone home. A nuisance, an embarrassment, nothing more. Those were the limits of my father’s imagination in June 1980, when it came to his only son.

But he was a fair man, always open to reasonable debate, encouraging us to make a case for the things we wanted-later bedtimes, the family car, a private phone extension. So AJ sat down with him a few days before graduation and told him-told him-that his crowd planned to stay out all night, then crash at the home of his friend Bash, whose family had a renovated farmhouse in what was then considered “the country.” Furthermore, AJ said, their friend Ariel, one of two girls in his group and by far the most sensible, had agreed to be the designated driver, although I don’t think that was the term used. I’m not sure the term even existed back in 1980.

“I’m eighteen,” AJ began in a stately manner, as if addressing a jury. “Born in 1962.”

“I remember,” our father said dryly. “I was there.”

And I was there for this discussion, in our living room, pretending to read the evening newspaper, the Light, while listening to my father and brother talk. Eight years younger than AJ, I had a lot to learn about winning privileges. My high school graduation might be two entire presidential cycles away-elections were always a frame of reference in our political household-but I wanted to be prepared to argue for whatever would be the cool thing when my night finally came around.

“The law says I can drink beer and wine, but I’m going to be honest with you-my friends and I might drink other things if they’re served. It seems only fair to me. If we lived in, say Wisconsin, I could drink whatever I liked at age eighteen.”

“My job,” our father said, “is to uphold the laws of this state.”

“Are you going to forbid me to go?”

“No. You can go. And you can stay out. But I urge you to obey the laws, AJ. Whatever you do, I’m going to trust you to use common sense. You must understand that there will be no special treatment if you get in trouble.”

“There never has been,” AJ said.

Through no fault of his own, AJ ended up obeying the letter of the law. He spent most of the night in the ER at Howard County Hospital, where they did take his blood to test for alcohol and drugs, come to think of it. PCP was a big concern at the time. They probably thought my brother had superhuman strength, given what he had done. But he had managed only a sip of beer before the trouble started.

The night had begun in the auditorium of Wilde Lake High School. With more than three hundred kids graduating, the seniors had been given only two tickets, a hardship for other households but not ours, with only our father and me. And I would have gladly given away my ticket, if I had been allowed. I fell asleep at least three times. The speaker began by informing the students that no one would remember who spoke at this graduation and I think he got that right. He joked that they were already celebrities-as freshmen, this future college Class of 1984 had been photographed for a cover story in Life magazine; AJ and his friends were front and center in the photo. Then there was that endless roll call of names, drawn out by parents who ignored the edict not to clap or cheer for individual students. AJ got the most applause, but not from my father or me, sticklers that we were for rules.

When it finally ended, we shook AJ’s hand and went home with his folded cap and gown. AJ headed out with his gang, a mixed group in every sense of the word-boys and girls, white and black and Asian, theater geeks and jocks. AJ was the glue, the person who had brought them all together-a good athlete, a gifted singer and actor, an outstanding student. Davey and Bash were also big-deal athletes, with Davey exciting the interest of professional baseball scouts, although he was determined to get a college degree first. Lynne could have been an Olympic-caliber gymnast, but she was lazy, content to settle for being the star of the varsity cheerleading squad. Ariel and Noel got the juiciest parts in school plays. Not necessarily the leads, but the roles that allowed them to give the showiest, most memorable performances. AJ was going to Yale, our father’s alma mater. Davey had a scholarship to Stanford. Noel and Ariel were headed to Northwestern, Lynne was bound for Penn State, and Bash had surprised everyone by getting a National Merit scholarship, which he was using to attend Trinity University in San Antonio, where he had no intention of playing a sport. They had so much to celebrate. They popped the tops of their first beers, pleased with themselves, and toasted. “Life is a banquet,” Ariel drawled, quoting a line from Mame, which had been the school musical. (She had been Agnes Gooch, not Mame, but she upstaged the leads.) “And most poor sons of bitches-”

It was then that the Flood brothers pulled into the parking lot.

“It happened so quickly,” AJ would say whenever he had to tell the story. He had to tell it a lot that summer. He and his friends didn’t perceive the Flood brothers as a threat, merely out of place in a throng of high school students. The Flood brothers had a reputation for scrapping, but they weren’t scary. Only their dad was scary. They weren’t that much older than the partying kids at Wilde Lake, and they didn’t even look that different. They could have easily passed for members of the school’s gentle stoner crowd, with their work boots and Levi’s and blue denim shirts. But there was nothing gentle about the Floods, and neither one had known a graduation night. Every Flood boy, seven in all, had dropped out of school after turning sixteen.

These two, the youngest, got out of their beat-up old car, looked sneeringly at the high school students, then homed in on Davey, easy to find in any crowd-six feet five inches and one of the darkest black men I had ever seen in my life. Just that spring, he had played El Gallo in the all-county production of The Fantasticks. Beat AJ out for the part, which surprised some people, but not AJ, who was used to losing things to Davey by then. He said before tryouts that he knew Davey was the better, more original choice. There was an air of mystery about Davey, a softness to his husky tenor that made you lean in, as if to hear a secret.

“There he is,” one of the Floods said. Separated by only a year, they were almost impossible to tell apart. Tom and Ben. I remember being surprised to learn later that those names were not nicknames, shortened versions of Thomas and Benjamin. When Tom testified at his own trial later that year, that was the name he gave to the court. Tom Flood, just Tom, not even a middle name. They were the youngest of the seven Flood brothers. Maybe their parents didn’t have the energy to come up with any more names, not for boys. The baby of the family, the only girl, had been given a much longer handle: Juanita Cordelia Flood. She should have been graduating from Wilde Lake tonight as well, but she had transferred midyear to Centennial.

“This is for Nita,” one Flood said, sticking a knife into Davey’s back. At first, AJ thought Davey had been punched. Davey barely flinched, just looked surprised and confused, swaying for a second before he fell to the ground. It was only then, as a dark liquid began to spread beneath him, staining his pale lavender polo shirt, that anyone understood what had happened. The Flood who had struck him-it must have been Ben, obviously it was Ben, but in that moment, in the dark, no one knew who was who, could barely register what was happening-raised the knife again. That was when AJ threw himself at him, caring not at all for his own safety. The two wrestled on the ground, and when the older boy-a man, really, already twenty-ran away, AJ gave chase. They disappeared into a dark fringe of trees near the lake’s edge.

AJ’s determined pursuit of the one Flood brother snapped Bash into action. He ran at the second one, screaming like a warrior. He brought him down with little difficulty. There would have been a lot of confusion now, much screaming, kids running in all directions, yet most of them unaware of what had actually happened. The lake party was lots of little parties, each group keeping to itself. Some girls and boys would have gone off to make out privately. Others would be smoking or drinking in cars or hidden nooks. It’s not a big lake. My family lived on the other side, close enough to keep a boat at the dock, if my father had been the kind of man who did things like keep a boat. And if my windows had been open, I might have heard the screams, then the sirens. But it was warm for June and we already had noisy window units rattling ineffectively in our old house.

Nineteen eighty. There was 911, but no cell phones. There was no pay phone near, or if there was, the kids were too rattled to remember its whereabouts. It was Noel who grabbed Ariel’s car keys and drove over to the movie theater. He reasoned it would still be open, that someone there could make a call for him. In doing so, he probably did as much to save Davey’s life as AJ did. But from the moment AJ emerged from the trees, panting and covered with blood, cradling his left arm, he received all the credit.

The headline in the next day’s Light was: STATE’S ATTORNEY’S SON SAVES FRIEND’S LIFE IN BRUTAL REVENGE PLOT.

So my brother made news on graduation night, after all.

Credit the Floods points for patience: it had been almost seven months since their sister had claimed Davey had raped her. The story had fallen apart quickly, a vengeful tale told by a spiteful girl. Given that both were under eighteen, the accuser and the falsely accused, my father had tried to be discreet. “For both of their sakes,” he said. But it was one thing to shield the facts from the newspapers, another to keep it from the mouths of gossipy teenagers. Everyone soon learned that this sad, acne-scarred girl had tried to destroy Davey’s life. Was AJ also an intended target that night? Tom, charged as an accomplice to attempted murder, insisted not. Ben didn’t live long enough to say anything. When AJ tackled him in the woods a second time, his knife thrust upward into his heart. AJ, sobbing, led the EMTs to the body, but they couldn’t save Ben Flood.

After a mistrial, Tom pleaded out to a lesser charge and served only four years. As for AJ-they called in a special prosecutor for the grand jury probe, at my father’s insistence, and asked a state’s attorney from an adjoining county to oversee it. As our father had told AJ, there would be no special treatment for the prosecutor’s son. My brother was found to have acted in self-defense, and he left for Yale in September, happy for the anonymity that came with college, especially one where a movie star was in his class, a movie star who would be caught up in an attempted presidential assassination not even six months later. It was common then not to speak of traumatic things, to assume that a firm silence would lead to the fastest healing. So we never spoke about that night, and I assumed AJ’s friends also let it go, to the extent that they could. It was harder for some than others. But to my knowledge, the subject never came up. Not with my father and AJ, not with AJ and his friends, and no one would discuss it with me at all. Most of what I know about that night is from reading old court documents and press accounts over the past few months.

I do remember that sometimes, on cold mornings, AJ would complain of pain at the elbow joint. “The frost is on the pumpkin, Lu,” he would say to me, and his knobby elbow did look like a puny, discolored squash from certain angles. And if you knew where to look, you could see that his left arm did not hang as straight as his right. He took up yoga, in part, to combat the pain and stiffness. But most people never noticed that, and over time, I forgot as well. But it was there, if you knew where to look. My brother’s arm was crooked.

JANUARY 5, 2015

“No hard feelings?” Luisa Brant asks.

“None,” says Fred Hollister. Always Fred, Call-me-Fred, except on the nameplate he must have packed over the weekend, on which he had been identified as Frederick C. Hollister III.

Lu assumes her former boss is lying, but considers that a mark in his favor. Lies can be kind, and this one shows more character than Fred demonstrated throughout the fall, when he spoke what he believed to be unvarnished truths. Fred means that he hopes there will be no hard feelings eventually, that one day he will be able to forgive her for taking his job. Otherwise, why stop by at all? If he were truly angry, he wouldn’t show his face. Maryland politics is rife with stories of ousted state’s attorneys who purged computer files or persuaded the remaining deputies to undermine the new boss. Since Election Night Fred has been a class act.

“My family is going to Iron Bridge for dinner,” Lu says. “If you want to stop by and have a drink with us.”

“Your family?”

“Dad, my kids. AJ’s out of town again.”

He pretends to consider her offer.

“It would be nice,” Lu presses.

“It would look nice,” Fred says.

“That, too.”

Fred’s smile is genuine, if a touch wistful. “We’ll raise a glass. Soon, Lu.”

“Dad would love to see you. He thinks the world of you.” Even after the crappy things you insinuated about his daughter.

“And I’d love to see him. Only-not tonight. I’m happy for you. But I reserve the right to be a little unhappier for myself.”

“Hell, Fred, you must be awash in offers. I know at least two firms have tried to hire you since November and some of the big lobbyists in Annapolis are probably after you as well.”

“I’m not worried about finding work,” Fred says. “But, right now, I’m going to take a little time off. To spend time with my family.”

It takes her a beat to realize he’s consciously wielding that old cliché as a joke, so maybe she laughs a little too hard when she does catch on. Fred is a decent man at heart and an old friend. Lu started out with him in the Baltimore City state’s attorney office, was genuinely pleased for him when he moved out here and made the leap to top dog. Five years ago, at the lowest point in her life, he persuaded her to come out to Howard County and work for him, promising the flexibility she needed, a rare thing in the life of a prosecutor. Fred was a good state’s attorney, too, conscientious and passionate, and an excellent boss. But something happened in his second term. He did less and less trial work. He fumbled a case against a serial rapist, became gun-shy, refused to take on anything but dunkers. He was the boss, no one would have begrudged him the big trials. But his insistence on doing as little as possible in court-that had been galling to Lu on principle, even if it allowed her to flourish professionally. Fred lost his appetite for trial work. If he had been one of his own assistants, he would have fired himself long ago.

Still, it had been hard, deciding to run against him. Lu did what she did with most tough questions, sought her father’s counsel.

“What would you do if he wasn’t your friend?” he asked.

“That’s easy. I’d run.”

“Then not running is the real hypocrisy, isn’t it? If you think Fred has done a lousy job, but decline to run against him out of loyalty, then you’re saying your friendship with him matters more than the day-to-day criminal issues that come before this county. It’s as I’ve always told you, Lu-the state’s attorney’s office represents the community. Your obligation should be to the people of Howard County. What’s best for them?”

Her father always made everything sound simple. And her brother had agreed with him. “I like Fred, too, Lu. He was good to you at a time when you really needed a friend. But he’s had a bad couple of years, with cases reversed on appeal because of mistakes made by his office. I’m just surprised that more people aren’t gunning for him. Must be some sort of gentlemen’s agreement among the players in the Republican Party.”

“Well, as you know, I’m no gentleman,” she told AJ, who laughed and said: “No, but you used to dress like one. Remember that outfit you picked out when-”

She doubled up her fists jokingly and he dropped the subject. Almost forty years out, the memory still brought blood to her face, the heat of humiliation.

Running against one’s boss is problematic. She had to quit her job for one thing. Can’t stay on as a deputy state’s attorney once you declare your intention to seek the top job. Lu camped out in her father’s sleepy in-name-only private practice for a year, doing a lot of pro bono work, biding her time. She had no competition in the Democratic primary, while Fred had to fight off a challenge from a charismatic plaintiff’s attorney. Still, bloodied and weakened as Fred had been by that ugly primary race, he had the summer to regain his standing as the incumbent and it was a good year to be a Republican in Maryland. He outraised her five to one, ran attack ads.

But all the money in the world couldn’t buy a name like Brant.

And now Luisa F. Brant is the first female state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland. Three hundred thousand people, give or take, two hundred fifty square miles, give or take, one of the most prosperous counties in the state, in the nation. She was born here, in Columbia, and is part of the first generation of Columbia kids coming into power. There had been criticism, during the campaign, that Lu leaned a little too hard on her first-family status, along with her “daughter of” prestige, but if that was the best the opposition had, she was golden. Then Fred had stooped lower, brought her kids into it, and that had backfired. Badly. In the end, her father was right: she wouldn’t have waffled about entering the race if Fred had not been a friend. The real hypocrisy would have been sitting by, letting him continue in his listless fashion.

“Got a minute before the staff meeting?” Andi Gleason, once her peer, now her deputy, pokes her head through the door, then sails in without waiting for an answer. Is Lu going to have to train people to knock, to remind her former colleagues that she’s the boss? Does it matter? Should they knock? Would a man worry about such things? Would he worry about the knock, or would he worry about telling people to knock?

“Sure.”

Andi sits down and stretches her legs out so they are propped up on the empty-for-now desk. She laughs when she sees the look on Lu’s face, plants her feet on the floor. Andi has long, perpetually tanned legs, and she has adopted the strange habit of never wearing hose, even on days as cold as this one. She read somewhere that’s what New York women do, go bare-legged no matter the weather. Lu, who prefers black tights and boots with heels as high as she can handle, almost shivers looking at Andi’s legs.

“Just testing you,” Andi says. Lu doesn’t need her closest friend at work to test her. She needs loyalty, support. True, Andi was the one person in the office not to disavow her when she went after Fred’s job, although Lu noticed that they met for drinks at Andi’s apartment more and more, not out in public. Andi is bold in court, careful in the office. Better than the other way around.

“What’s up?”

“This staff meeting at eleven-is there anything I should know?”

“No shake-ups. For now. There’s one or two assistant state’s attorneys I’ll be monitoring closely-”

“John and-who else?”

Lu glides past answering or even confirming Andi’s hunch. What was once acceptable gossip between two equals is now off-limits. No personnel discussions with Andi.

“-but your work has always been good and I don’t see any reason it would change.”

“In 2014, I did all the homicides that went to trial,” she says.

Just because Lu wasn’t in the office in 2014 doesn’t mean she doesn’t know the numbers. “All two of them.”

“Right. How many of the murders are you going to take for yourself? Do you have a quota in mind?”

“I was going to cover that at the staff meeting.”

“You mean, you’re going to try them all.” Her tone is one of fact-finding. Andi is probably resigned to giving up the homicides for now. But if she confirms this before the meeting, she can nod, unsurprised, saving face with her colleagues.

“Yes, if they’re interesting, I’m going to try them,” Lu tells her.

“You mean if they get lots of press attention,” Andi says. Oh, this is definitely a test. She’s probing to see how frank she can be, going forward, where the boundaries are now. Lu has no fear of candor, but she also believes there’s a line between candor and rudeness.

“The media and I don’t necessarily agree on what’s interesting,” she says carefully. “You know I’m talking about cases that stimulate me, that intrigue me legally. It’s not about attention.”

Andi looks dubious. Fair enough, as Lu is totally bullshitting her. Prosecutors tend to like attention. And Lu is more of a showboat than most.

“There will be plenty of work to go around,” she promises. She can’t, of course, guarantee that Howard County’s generally genteel citizens will start killing each other at an accelerated rate. But there are other felonies, other crimes that matter. There’s even been some gang activity in Howard County, although most of those cases end up with the feds. “And by the way, I’ll tell you first: there’s a new protocol. Someone from this office is going to go to all major crime scenes. I’m talking to Biern over at homicide today, telling him to make sure they alert us ASAP when they do catch a case.”

“So you’ll send one of us, then decide if it’s going to be your case?”

“No, it applies to me, too. I’ll go, if it sounds like a case I’m going to end up trying. Fred was too checked out. There were some sloppy investigations, which made our jobs harder. Better we be there sooner rather than later, you know?” Lu smiles. “And now you know most of what I’m going to cover today at the staff meeting.”

“I’ll try to act surprised,” Andi promises. She’ll do the opposite. Lu knows Andi. She wants people to think she has special access. It always bugged Andi, when Lu first started in the office, that Lu went so far back with Fred. Andi’s initial overtures of friendship probably stemmed from her desire to keep her enemy close. Then she realized Lu was, in fact, capable of being a good friend. Loyal and discreet. Extremely discreet.

“Now let me have thirty minutes to unpack a few things, okay?” Lu watches Andi saunter out, notes how streaky her legs look from the back. Self-tanner. If she’s going to insist on a year-round glow, maybe she should spring for the kind you get at a spa.

Meow, she thinks, shaking her head and smiling at herself. Cattiness is a waste of good energy. Lu doesn’t feel competitive about other women. Lu feels competitive about everybody.

She studies her office, hers for the next four years, maybe beyond. Her father held it for two terms-no, more than that, he was appointed before he ran for office in 1978. Not this physical space, though, a bland, characterless rectangle with a few pieces of cheap furniture and faded squares on the beige wall where Fred’s plaques and pictures had hung. Lu takes a small, tissue-wrapped object from her purse and walks over to the bookcase. Lady Justice emerges from the paper, blind as usual, but in the form of a robed skeleton, a Day of the Dead piece that Luisa’s husband gave her when she started working as a prosecutor in Baltimore City. It’s hard not to wonder what Gabe would think about today. He would have been proud, of course. But Gabe made so much money, first as a founder of a file-sharing company that was acquired by a bigger player in that field, then consulting in tech, that her state job always seemed like a hobby to him, especially after the twins were born.

“Why work?” he asked her.

“How can I not?” she asked back. “I love the law.” She did not dare tell the terrible truth that she found straight-up motherhood boring.

“Okay, but it’s on you to make it work. Spend whatever it takes and let’s hope it’s a financial wash, state salaries being what they are.”

Gabe had started a second company by then and they had so much money that they were building castles in the air that could be real castles if they could just pick a location. A castle rising in Spain, as their favorite song, “My Romance,” had it. They talked about buying or building a second home. Nova Scotia. The Outer Banks. Or the west coast of Ireland, which seemed almost more accessible than the Outer Banks, given that Aer Lingus had daily flights to Shannon out of BWI at the time. The world was their oyster. Better, Gabe said, they were going to sit at that place outside Galway, where the oysters were so fresh that it seemed as if they had been harvested minutes after you placed your order.

And then-he died. Heart attack in a hotel room in San Jose, California. Thirty-nine years old. Penelope and Justin were not quite three. It made sense, as much as anything was ever going to make sense again, to sell the Baltimore house and move back to her father’s, accept Fred’s offer of a job. Lu needed the work, if not the paycheck. She was strangely, bizarrely, unfathomably rich. She supposed she had been rich all along, but when Gabe was alive, she never really thought about their money. Numb, she stumbled through the days like a zombie, several years before zombies were to become fashionable again. She needed her father. More than that, she needed Teensy, who had worked for her family since before Lu was born. If there was one thing Lu knew for certain, it was that Teensy, although now in her seventies, could care for Lu’s children as she had once cared for Lu and AJ. Fiercely, sternly, but with genuine affection.

Lu was less sure that her father, then going on eighty, could adjust to having small children in his home. Yet it was at his insistence that they invaded his quiet, orderly universe. “I’ll just turn my hearing aid down when they get too rambunctious,” he said.

A joke. He didn’t have a hearing aid, still doesn’t. Nor does he have a stoop, or memory troubles, or any real sign of aging beyond his gray hair. Again, he made everything seem so simple. Her father is well aware of the world’s ambiguities. But when it comes to his family, he is quick and decisive. His daughter became a widow at age forty. She needed her family. She needed to come home. Full circle.

And now she has completed another full circle, earning the office her father once held. Not this very room; the Carroll Building, where she works, was built after her father left office. But she is the second State’s Attorney Brant and the first woman elected to the job, although far from the first woman state’s attorney in Maryland. She draws herself up to her full height, which, alas, is only five foot two, although today’s boots allow her to top five five. Everyone expected her brother to be their father’s successor, but she’s the one who has the chops for criminal law, the stomach for politics. She practically prances into a courtroom when she has a trial, her small stature and hoydenish quality an advantage. Other lawyers seduce juries. Lu Brant, with her freckles and girlish appearance, widens her eyes and reduces matters to simple issues of black and white. Lifetime-lifetime-she has lost fewer than ten cases and all of those were in Baltimore, where the juries are notoriously tough. She’s never lost a case in Howard County.

She doesn’t plan to start now.

OH BRAVE NEW WORLD THAT HAS NO TREES IN IT

The Sunday drive was still in fashion the June day in 1969 that my father, mother, AJ, and I made our first trip to Columbia. The “new town” utopia had engaged my father’s curiosity. “I want to see the future,” he said, which stirred up visions of spaceships in AJ’s boyish imagination-and set him up for a huge disappointment. Only a year or two later, AJ would be given a board game called “Ecology,” and the idea of setting out for a twenty-mile recreational drive in a car that averaged sixteen miles to the gallon would be considered wasteful. But not on this particular Sunday in 1969. We got into the family’s Ford Fairlane station wagon, no one constrained by seat belts, because seat belts were for out-of-state trips only. Daddy driving, mother in front, AJ in the back alone, bouncing from window to window as the view demanded.

I was there in utero, although no one knew, floating in my mother’s flat, seatbelt-less belly. My mother, puffing on a Kool, might have suspected my presence, but she didn’t quite believe it, not yet. She had had terrible morning sickness with AJ eight years earlier, and there was no nausea at all this time, only a vague rumble of heartburn that came on about 3 P.M. Besides, there had been two miscarriages since AJ’s birth and she had been told that she could not have another child.

At the time, my parents lived in Roland Park, a pretty North Baltimore neighborhood that was something of a planned community itself, with a significant swath designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. My mother and father lived with my mother’s parents. This was a strange arrangement even in 1969, made stranger still by the fact that my father was not young when he married.

My mother was. A prodigy of sorts, she had met my father on her first day of law school at the University of Baltimore, when she was only nineteen. He was attending on the GI Bill after trying a stint at the local newspaper, the Beacon. The life of a newspaperman had not suited him. My father hated what he called the faux objectivity of journalism. On the one hand, on the other hand. He wanted to pick a side, the right side, then persuade, argue. He had been hired by the paper because of his undergraduate degree from Yale; the Beacon was snobby that way. But he was not a twenty-two-year-old with nothing but college behind him. He was a thirty-one-year-old Korean War veteran and he thought he should be treated differently from the other young hires. Once he understood that it would be years before he could hope to have a column or a slot on the editorial page, he decided to leave. So after five years of languishing on night cops, he went to law school and met a beautiful young woman named Adele Closter.

“She was like a character in a fairy tale,” my father would say later, when I begged him for stories about my mother. Photos established her dark beauty, but my father insisted it was her mind that impressed him. She had graduated from high school at age sixteen, zipped through Goucher in less than three years, then applied to law school. “Not a lot of women went to law school then, so to be a female law student at age nineteen was more astonishing still. Everyone noticed her. I didn’t have a chance. I was just some older guy and people made fun of my accent. They thought I was a dumb hick.”

My father didn’t have to tell me that his accent, long flattened by the years in Maryland, was quite the opposite of a hick’s. He was from an old Tidewater, Virginia family, one that could trace its roots to the seventeenth century. My mother’s family, while well-to-do, were German Jews, who arrived in the United States more than two hundred years after the Brants. If my father had ever allowed his parents to meet his in-laws, his people would have been appalled. Yet the Closters looked down on my father because he didn’t have money. He had broken with his family-and its considerable wealth-because he found their implacable racism infuriating. The Closters didn’t care that his poverty was principled. It was still poverty.

But he was one of the few men willing to endure my grandparents’ odd ideas about courtship. In a twist worthy of a fairy tale, they kept their daughter under lock and key in a stone house with turrets, twisting staircases, and stained-glass windows. Any man who wanted to date Adele Closter had to pay a call on her parents first. If they approved of the would-be suitor, the dates were chaperoned-by them.

Apparently, this did not appeal to most of the young men Adele met. Only Andrew Jackson Brant was willing to persevere.

And for all her parents’ care and oversight, she managed to get pregnant. AJ was born seven months after my parents’ wedding day, and everyone pretended he was terribly premature. I think this charade was meant not only to dodge the question of his legitimacy, but also to make sense of the fact that the new family chose to live with Adele’s parents. “Just for a year or so,” her father said. “Until everyone is on their feet.” One year turned into seven. There was always a reason to stay a little longer. AJ loves his nursery school, it would be a shame to move him. AJ is going to Gilman, practically in our backyard. I now believe my father steered the family station wagon toward Columbia that day not only out of genuine inquisitiveness, but also desperation. He had to get out of his in-laws’ house. The destination was an accident. Or was it?

Columbia itself was the opposite of an accident. One could argue it was inevitable, that this undeveloped land equidistant from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was destined to be a suburb, but the developer Jim Rouse had something much grander in mind. Visionary is an overused word, but Rouse probably deserved it. Howard County had slightly more than thirty-five thousand people in 1960, but it was expected to boom before the end of the twentieth century. Rouse’s company began acquiring farmland privately, to avoid having prices shoot up. People knew the land was being purchased, but for what? There were paranoid, Cold War-fed rumors-Russian spies hoping to get close to NSA, a West German VW plant. Then, in June 1967, Columbia was born, a “town” comprising four villages, with each village defined by a set number of neighborhoods. The early neighborhood and street names-Dorsey, Phelps, Owen Brown, Warfield-drew on the county’s history. But the names quickly became more fanciful and literary. Faulkner’s Run, Hobbit’s Glen, Longfellow. Many of the early buildings in the town’s center were designed by Frank Gehry, but the houses themselves were generic split-levels, built to conform to the preferences of buyers at the time. Founder Rouse wanted to challenge a lot of ingrained biases in our culture; taste was not among them. He gave people the ticky-tacky houses they wanted. The only real choices were brick or wood siding, a Baltimore or a D.C. prefix for your phone.

Columbia at the age of two was still raw-looking, with immature trees and unplanted landscapes. According to family legend, my mother hated it on sight.

“It’s too cold. Too modern. I hate modern.”

“It’s the future,” my father said. “Breaking down barriers. Here, people of different classes and races will live side by side.”

“Soulless,” my mother said. “Just because you call something a town doesn’t make it one.”

“I like it,” my father said. “They’re trying new things here. Open space education, for example, where kids go at their own pace.”

“I hate it,” my mother said. “I could never live in one of these cracker boxes.”

It was their variation on Green Acres, if you know that TV show. Fresh air! No there there. But my father was too fair-minded to use “You are my wife” to clinch an argument.

Instead, he proposed a deal: “If I can find a house that you love, will you live here? I know what you like-something older, preferably made of stone, a house with character.” She said yes, probably assuming it couldn’t be done. He let the subject drop, and she thought she had triumphed. It was August now. The pregnancy was known, but only to them. They were keeping the news from her parents, whose house, large as it was, could not accommodate another grandchild.

Two weeks before Labor Day, my father took my mother to see a Revolutionary War-era tavern, eight miles north of Columbia on the road once known as the Columbia Pike. My mother had to admit she liked it, especially its tiny windows. She didn’t like light, my mother. That’s one of the things I know about her. She didn’t like light. She had grown up in a dark house, one where sunshine struggled through the amber and violet panes of stained glass. She considered shadows normal.

“The kitchen and bathrooms are hopeless,” she pointed out. “Too small, too out-of-date.”

“They can be redone,” my father promised. “I’ve found a contractor who has agreed to a rush job. Best of everything, in whatever colors you want. You can keep the wooden floors, which will be nice, I think. You never see wooden floors in a kitchen anymore. Why is that? If they’re sealed properly, they’re fine.”

“But it’s not in Columbia. It’s practically in Ellicott City.” Ellicott City was everything Columbia was not. The county seat, set in a valley alongside a cold, bright stream, filled with stone buildings dating back to the eighteenth century. “If you’re open to Ellicott City, why not Oella or Lawyers Hill?” my mother asked, then repeated, hopefully: “This isn’t in Columbia.”

“It will be,” my father said.

“Not on one of those rinky-dink lots. I couldn’t bear it.” She was grasping now. My mother had the intellect for law school, but no temperament for debate. She took things too personally.

“I found an irregular lot on the lakeside,” my father said. “It’s essentially a double. Once the plantings are mature, you’ll barely be able to see your neighbors.”

She was his wife. Good-bye, city life.

Two weeks later, that stone tavern was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and transferred, at a pace of one mile per hour-the journey took much of a Sunday evening into early Monday morning and required multiple permits-to one of the most desirable lots in Columbia, a double on the west shore of Wilde Lake. The move was covered by both the Baltimore and Washington papers. It marked the first time our family had been in the newspaper, literally announcing my father’s arrival on the local political scene. “The house will be home to Andrew J. Brant and family. Brant, a Baltimore attorney, hopes to be active in Howard County’s Democratic Party…”

My mother’s parents were angry. It had taken almost a decade, but the prince had gotten around the princess’s imperious parents, as the prince always does. They argued. They cajoled. They threatened to cut my parents off without a cent. They offered to pay the tuition to Gilman. But their lobbying campaign to keep them under their roof-my mother and AJ, really; they merely tolerated my father-only signaled to my father the urgency of leaving.

My parents used me as their trump card. As large as my grandparents’ house was, there was no bedroom available for another child. I broke the spell. I freed the princess from the castle, brought her to a new palace. I even freed Teensy, who had come to work for the Closter family when AJ was born and insisted on following us to Columbia, despite the fact that it meant an onerous commute for her every day.

Four months later, I was born, Seven days after, my mother died. It was a bitter winter. Everything froze. Wilde Lake froze. The improvements on the house, intended for her, stopped, suspended in time. Again, as in a fairy tale. Or, perhaps, a television show. I was your wife. Good-bye to my life.

JANUARY 7

“Happy birthday.” Andi, sailing into Lu’s office again. Not knocking. Again. Lu isn’t sure what to do about this. “You’ve got your first murder. If you want it.”

“My birthday was Friday. What kind of murder?”

Lu can tell that Andi is struggling with herself. If she makes the murder sound uninteresting, maybe she’ll catch it. But if it turns out to be the kind of case that Lu wants to try, all Andi will have achieved is a reputation for disloyalty and dishonesty.

“Middle-aged woman, killed in what appears to be a B and E. Could have been there for up to a week.”

“How was she killed?”

“I told you all I know. North Laurel, an apartment complex off Route 1. The Grove. Funny name for a place on Route 1 in North Laurel. I doubt there have been any groves there for a long time.”

“When was she found?”

“Call came into 911 a little before three this afternoon. She didn’t show up for her shift at the Silver Diner after a week off. Didn’t answer her phone or her cell. That was odd enough, her boss says, that he went to check on her.”

“Ya me voy,” Lu says. I’m going. She and Gabe had been in high school Spanish together, although they had barely spoken to each other in any language back then. He hated the fact that his accelerated math skills weren’t enough to free him from all of high school; he split his days between grade-appropriate classes in English, history, and Spanish, then was driven to College Park for math and physics. He should have been admired for his double life, but he was a pariah, disliked by almost everyone, especially Lu. He was small, like her, and Lu hated being paired up with small boys by the time she was fifteen. Her own precocity had been burdensome enough, and she had just finally hit her stride socially. She didn’t need to be tarred with the brush of another geek.

Ten years later she married him. Twenty-five years later, she had lost him. She regretted, almost every day, ignoring him in high school. If only I had known, she would think, even as she mocked her use of the melodramatic phrase. We could have had ten more years if we really had been high school sweethearts. If only anyone ever knew anything ever.

When they were first built in the mid-twentieth century, the Grove apartments had probably been a place for people-families, even-on the way up. All the little telltales of aspiration are still here, if worse for wear. The curving fieldstone entrance, the swimming pool, the name spelled out in a pretentious, once-fashionable font, although the sign had been reduced to THE G OVE. And there had been an attempt to avoid a cookie-cutter appearance, with two styles of residences-town houses and three-story apartment buildings, done in three different sidings. There is nothing obviously wrong with the Grove, yet Lu senses that the people who live here now are, at best, treading water. Like the Grove, they’ve seen better days.

Another tell: the cop cars, crime-scene tape don’t seem to excite much attention-people pulling out of the parking lot slow a little, but no one gets out, no one is gathered at the tape’s edge. It’s a bitter-cold Wednesday. Everyone else’s life goes on, while Mary McNally’s is over, has been for as much as a week.

“Someone left the balcony door ajar and the thermostat was turned way down,” says Detective Mike Hunt without preamble, knowing this detail will interest Lu. He is lean, prematurely silver, and absolute trouble when it comes to women, although Lu knows, via Andi, that he tries not to shit where he eats. At least, that’s the excuse he gave Andi. Married, kids, trying to maintain a ruthless compartmentalization. Lu approves. Plus, he’s a good detective. Smart, confident. He had to be, to survive that name, beloved by prank phone callers everywhere.

“Do you think it was a deliberate attempt to obscure the time of death?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she turned her thermostat down to sixty-two degrees every night to save money and the killer left the door open in his haste to get away. We’re taking fingerprints from there and the sliding door where we think he entered.”

“The one he left open?”

“No, there are two bedrooms off the balcony, each with its own entrance. Let me show you.”

The apartment is nicer, inside, than Lu expected. The Grove’s bones are substantial. Superior, in fact, to the apartments and town houses built in Columbia two decades later. The floors are a well-maintained herringbone, and the layout indicates an expectation of gracious living not seen in newer apartments. A large kitchen, separated from a full dining room by a swinging door. Pocket doors between the dining and living rooms. The two bedrooms share a terrace overlooking what was once a garden-and maybe it still will be, come spring. Everything looks desolate this time of year.

“We think he entered here,” Mike says, showing Lu the sliding door in the smaller bedroom. “It was locked from the inside, but there are marks. It wouldn’t be hard to force it. He comes in, then goes to the master bedroom.”

They follow in the intruder’s footsteps, down the little hall. The woman who lived here didn’t have particularly good taste, but nor was it bad. There’s an arid quality to the decor, it’s as if she studied catalogs and tried to replicate the rooms exactly, down to the placement of tchotchkes. The hallway, for example, has framed copies of those French liquor ads, obviously reproductions. The decorative items seem impersonal, too, chosen to fill space. Yet it is the home of a house-proud woman, meticulously kept. Any dust that has settled here is subsequent to her death. Lu stops, puts a pin in her feelings, files them away. Faces, names, she forgets. But once she begins to translate a victim’s life into a story, it is with her forever. Mary McNally, a waitress, reliable and well liked, if not well known at her place of work. If it hadn’t been for her conscientious reputation, imagine how long she might have remained in her bedroom, staining a carpet she probably never so much as spilled a glass of water on.

“Is that blood or melted snow in her hair?”

“It’s all blood. Although not that much from the blow that actually killed her. She was struck from behind, then choked. That’s the cause of death, strangulation. But the body was moved-we’re pretty sure of that because she’s facedown-and all the damage to the face was done postmortem. I mean, the perp almost took it off. Do you want to see?”

Want? No, she doesn’t want to see it. She needs to see. Assuming there is an arrest-and there better be, the good citizens of Howard County will expect justice for one of their own, a nice lady minding her own business-a jury will inspect photographs. She has to feel the revulsion they will feel.

She does. It’s one of the more shocking things she’s been asked to see in her professional life and-well, what’s the line from that stupid song that was on the radio in her teens? “Never Been to Me”? She’s seen some things a woman ain’t supposed to see.

But Mike Hunt’s eyes are on her, so she keeps her voice steady. “Weapon?”

“We haven’t found it. We’re canvassing the area, hoping he tossed it on his way out.”

“Are you using ‘he’ generically, or because it seems probable that a man did this?”

Hunt shrugs, indifferent to pronouns. Men can afford to be.

“We found a ticket stub in her purse, for the 10 P.M. showing of The Theory of Everything at that movie theater at Snowden Square. That was December thirty-first. She had a week off, December thirty-first through yesterday. So we know she was alive December thirty-first. It’s possible she was killed that night when she came in. Hung up her coat, headed back to the bedroom, surprised the guy.”

“This seems like an unlikely target for a burglary.”

“A junkie might have figured the place to be empty because of the holidays, thought it a good opportunity to grab a few things to fence. No tree, no decorations. But nothing was taken except whatever cash she had in her billfold. Assuming she had cash in her billfold. She has a jar of coins in her room-at least $50 to $100 in there, I’m guessing. Heavy to carry, but junkies can be superhuman when it suits them. And you see the iPad next to her bed, on the stand. So if it started as a burglary, the guy got distracted. Let’s hope for a hit on the fingerprints.”

Lu continues to move through the apartment, trying to absorb every detail she can about the dead woman. The boss at the Silver Diner told Mike Hunt that she was originally from upstate New York, had moved to Maryland for a man, but he had been out of the picture for years. No boyfriend. No real friends, but she seemed content. There was family, back in New York. A mom, sisters. But she didn’t visit them at Christmastime because it was so cold. The cold had begun to bother her a lot. She talked about moving to Florida, near Panama City. There’s always a job for a good waitress in resort towns, she told her boss, but you got to pick one where there’s work year-round. Or where the seasonal work is so good you can survive the slack months.

Lu will interview the boss herself at some point, nail down more details. Her father once said a murder trial is a biography. The more jurors know about the victim, the more they care about avenging the death. Make the dead live, her father said. He famously did it with no body once, only a shoe. He concocted an entire person from a plaid sandal with one drop of blood on it.

Lu looks at the bedspread, a comforter of khaki and red squares. She can almost imagine the catalog copy, promising that it would bring a hint of Parisian flea markets into a room. It’s askew, with one corner flipped up at the foot.

“I think I’ve seen what I need to see. Call me if you get a hit on the print. And you know what? Grab the bedspread, have that tested.”

Mike is too professional to sigh, but she can tell he wants to. “Why, Lu? This shows no signs of being a sex crime. And if she were, um, an active lady, we might end up looking at a lot of DNA that doesn’t go anywhere.”

“The spread is mussed,” Lu says. “As if someone was lying on top of it. And that corner is flipped.”

“So?”

“Look at this place. She was a major neat freak. Either she was lying on the bed when the guy came in-or someone else was lying on the bed when she came in. Just do it, okay?” She’s testing him, making sure he knows who’s in charge. She softens her command with a joke. “Respect my authoritah.”

“Wouldn’t have pegged you as a South Park fan. I’ll walk you out.” That’s Mike Hunt, always with the little gentlemanly touches. That’s what women love about him. The ones who fall, they think it’s just for them, the courtly good manners, but Lu has observed that Mike’s gallantry is automatic. He is always, always, thinking about getting laid, and the good manners are an end to that. Sex-conquest-is like breathing for him.

Sure enough, a woman with a bag of groceries is walking up the fieldstone path to the complex and Mike lights up. “Can I get that for you?” The woman is a bit of a butterface, in Lu’s estimation, and probably older than Mike realizes because her figure is amazing, set off by a tightly cinched trench coat that’s short enough to showcase long legs in spike heels. Lu can’t help resenting women with long legs.

“No, I’m fine. I live across the hall from, um, Mary. They said it was okay. That I could leave and come back. It’s my day off, I got to do my errands.”

“I’ll be over to talk to you later,” Mike says. Most women would be beside themselves at the prospect, but this one seems leery.

“About what?”

“Anything you might have seen or heard this past week. Even if it didn’t seem important at the time.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” she says quickly. Lu knows the type. Just as there are people who never want to serve jury duty, there are citizens who dread being witnesses. “These apartments are well built; they’re pretty soundproof. And they’re set up so the shared walls are between the kitchen and the dining room. Not much to hear, you know?”

“Look, no right answers,” Mike assures her. “I’d still like to talk to you.”

“Should I-the people who live here-be nervous? I mean, was it random or a burglary or-what?”

“We’ll know more soon,” Lu says, hoping it’s true. The woman looks at her sharply, in what Lu interprets as a who-asked-you kind of way. Lu reminds herself that she’s a public official now, already running for her second term in a sense. She can’t afford to be caustic in the face of insults and slights. “I should have introduced myself. I’m Lu Brant, the state’s attorney.”

“Yeah, I know who you are,” the woman says.

“And you are-?”

“Jonnie Forke.” Lu, aware that her trouble with names and faces is a liability for a politician, plays her private game of trying to construct a mnemonic trick. Stick a fork in her, she’s Jonnie. Heeeeeeeeeeere’s Jonnie-with a Forke for her butterface. “I mean, no disrespect to Mary and I’m sorry it happened, but I’ve got to think about myself.”

Lu has a reluctant admiration for the woman’s bluntness. She’s saying what everyone thinks, in almost every situation. I’ve got to think about myself. Most jurors, even the ones who take the job very seriously, think about themselves first. If, when-and it will be when, it has to be when, all she needs is a fingerprint to come back, and this perp is no debutante, she’s sure of that, no one commits a crime like this his first time out-Lu comes to a jury with the story of how Mary McNally died, they will be judging the victim as much as the defendant. Did she know him? Did she grant him access to her home? Had they met online or in line, at that 10 P.M. showing of The Theory of Everything? A truly random case, one in which the victim appears to have been singled out for no reason, would be the best one to try in Lu’s experience. An intruder, surprised. He lashes out. The victim turns to run, he hits her from behind, strangles her, then keeps beating her after she’s dead, literally defacing her. Any juror can empathize in that case.

But if Mary invited the man into her home-that will complicate things. It will be better in some ways if the bedspread is pristine, as Mike’s preliminary scan indicated. With the break-in and presumed burglary, Lu already has a first-degree murder. Sex will just complicate everything. As sex does. Then again, if he didn’t break in, Lu might have the advantage of witnesses who saw them together somewhere. She catches herself: she, like Mike, is assuming it’s a man. The violence at the scene-not a lot of women have that in them. The anger, yes. Just not the strength to act on it. And there is something personal about it. The postmortem beating, the damage to the face. It doesn’t get more personal than that. Then again, men can be surprisingly swift when it comes to having expectations from women they barely know. Strange men tell women to smile, they interrupt conversations, they demand female attention in all sorts of ways.

And when they don’t get it, they can get very angry.

THE BOY IN THE BUSH

My family moved to Columbia, our future house rolled down the highway on a flatbed trailer, I was born, my mother died-and I remember none of it. These are the stories I was told. The first vivid memory that I trust as my own, in part because AJ agreed on every detail, is the August day in 1976 when we found Noel Baumgarten in our bushes, peering into our kitchen.

Teensy, rinsing the lunch dishes at the sink, shrieked when she realized there was a person in the bushes. His eyes, green as sea glass, might have passed for light-dappled leaves if they had not been moving rapidly back and forth, scanning everything he saw.

“Got-dammit.” Teensy belonged to a storefront church in West Baltimore and she never cursed, so this was serious business. She grabbed a broom and headed outside, AJ and I trailing her. We weren’t the least bit scared or disturbed by our Peeping Tom. We were excited because something was finally happening and so little happened on those slow summer days, when most of the kids we knew went to camp or the ocean or the mountains. We never went anywhere.

“What are you doing?” Teensy demanded of the boy in the bush.

“Taking photographs,” he said cheerfully, showing us the heavy, old-fashioned camera he wore on a cord around his neck.

“Whaaaaaaa-?” Teensy yelled, making futile passes with the broom, the boy ducking and swerving as if it were a dance.

“Of your house. It’s wild. What was it, before Columbia was built? Did George Washington sleep here? It’s a thousand times nicer than any other house around here, that’s for sure.”

“Why did you come up to the kitchen window if all you wanted to do was photograph our house?” That was AJ, not Teensy. She was now completely nonplussed, a first in my experience. Maybe it was those eyes. They were so big and green, like something you’d see on a tiny jungle animal in National Geographic. Or maybe it was his juicy confidence. Noel, as we would soon learn, was completely without guilt, even when he was doing things for which he should feel guilty. He could stare down any authority figure and proclaim his innocence.

“I bet people take photographs of your house all the time,” he said, ignoring the question put to him. “Don’t they?”

They did. And, like this boy, they assumed that the house had been there first, that the wood-sided split-levels were the interlopers who had forced themselves on this dignified matron. In that way, the house, although chosen to lure my mother to Columbia, was not unlike my father. A newcomer just six years ago, our father had been appointed to the state’s attorney’s office in 1975 and already seemed a fixture in the county. People often asked if the Brants went back as far as the Warfields, one of Howard County’s oldest, most storied families. That’s how my father’s brand of confidence worked. He found the place he wanted to be, kept still and poised, and eventually people assumed he had been there all along.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Noel said as he emerged from the bushes, brushing a stray leaf from his hair, blue-black and shiny, like Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. His hair was all the more striking with those otherworldly green eyes and fair skin. “I just wanted to see if the inside of the house was as old-fashioned as what’s outside. I’m Noel Baumgarten.”

He offered his hand to AJ. At the time, he was considerably shorter than AJ, although that would change. But he was short enough so that it wasn’t crazy of me to hope he might be closer to my age than my brother’s, or at least right between the two of us, and therefore a suitable friend to both.

“Where do you live?” AJ asked. “Where are you going to school in the fall?”

“Up on Green Mountain Circle.” He hitched a thumb toward the long semicircle of a street that formed the closest thing our neighborhood had to a main drag. “I’ll be a freshman at the high school in the fall. It’s just me and my mom.”

“Did your parents get divorced?” I asked. “Or is your dad dead?”

“Lu!” AJ’s tone was reproving. “You don’t ask things like that.”

Noel laughed. “I do,” he said. “I ask questions like that all the time. I ask people how old they are and how much money they have and what kind of cars they drive and my mother says”-here, he put on a high, pained falsetto, cocked a fist on his hip-“my mother says, ‘You will be the death of me, Noel Baumgarten.’ And, no my parents aren’t divorced, but my dad works, like, twenty hours a day. He’s at the State Department. And he doesn’t want to add to his day by commuting, but my mom thought Wilde Lake would be better for me. I was at Sidwell Friends.” Dramatic pause. “I got kicked out.”

“For what?” That was AJ, for the record. It seemed far ruder to me than asking if someone’s dad was dead.

An enormous shrug, his eyes shining. “Marching to the beat of my own drummer.”

Years later, at Noel’s funeral service, we would meet the classmate whom Noel was discovered kissing in the boys’ bathroom at that exclusive private school. It turned out that neither boy had been expelled, not exactly. School officials conferred with both sets of parents and agreed the boys should be separated. For their own good. Yes, that was something well-intentioned, liberal parents did forty years ago; they tried to nip homosexuality in the bud, hoping it was a bad habit, like smoking. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still do it today. Your son is kissing a boy? Chalk it up to confusion, assume that one of them is a bad influence, and separate them, “saving” the one who was led astray. I think it was Noel’s mother, already deeply ambivalent about her marriage, who chose to put him in Wilde Lake High School, thinking its progressive open education style was an environment in which her unusual boy might flourish. She was a hard little number, Noel’s mother, but she loved her son. In my mind, I see her always in a high, tight ponytail and tennis whites, although that clearly is apocryphal. She would have worn real clothes on at least some occasions. I had a brief period of time hoping that our two single parents would marry, but Noel’s mother surprised everyone, even herself I think, by returning to Noel’s father when Noel graduated from high school. She had spent four years claiming she moved to Columbia just for Noel. Maybe she came to believe it.

We invited Noel inside, hoping he would pick up on the fact that he must ingratiate himself with Teensy if he wished to have any traction in our household. He started off very smartly by not asking, as so many did, why a six-foot-tall woman was called Teensy. Her nickname was derived, in fact, from her first name, Hortensia. Noel, who had the most finely attuned social antenna I was ever to know, sidestepped that minefield, first apologizing for scaring her, then offering to finish the sink of dishes she had been washing.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Teensy said. “Would you like an ice cream sandwich?”

An ice cream sandwich! Teensy had told us only minutes earlier that we were not entitled to dessert, given our refusal to eat much of the lunch she had “cooked.” (Another rule of life with Teensy is that we were not to challenge the lackluster lunches she made, so different from the meals she served in the evening, when our father was present. He came home to pot roasts, lamb chops, whipped potatoes. We got canned soup, bologna sandwiches, carrot sticks. Every day. The only variations were turkey instead of bologna, celery instead of carrots.) Now she opened a box of Eskimo Pies and passed them out to all of us.

And just like that, Noel had the run of our house. When we had finished eating our ice cream on the back porch, he asked for a tour, during which he made approving and knowing comments about the furniture, chosen by our mother and never changed. He liked old things and was appalled that his mother had brought him someplace where everything was new. He told us that his father was old friends with someone in the Rouse Company, Columbia’s developer, and that there had been concern, early on, when black home buyers had clustered in certain neighborhoods. The suspicion was that real estate agents were circumventing the explicit plan to make Columbia a heterogeneous utopia, where race and class mingled. But the truth was prosaic and without agenda. Black home buyers, many of them first-time home buyers, wanted brick homes, not wooden-frame ones.

“Like the Three Little Pigs!” I said, pleased to have anything to offer to this fast-talking, fast-moving beautiful boy.

Noel laughed and kept going, not even bothering to ask permission as he opened doors to closets and bathrooms. He sailed into the enormous second-floor bedroom that belonged to my father, picked up the silver frame on his bureau.

“Who’s this?”

“My mother,” AJ said.

“Our mother,” I clarified. It was an odd linguistic habit of AJ’s, to use “I” and “my” in situations where “we” and “ours” were more accurate.

“She looks like Norma Talmadge.”

Ah, there was Noel’s inner drummer again, beating wildly, eager to tell everyone who he was.

Anyway, he was right: our mother did bear a striking resemblance to the actress, with her shortish, curly hair, Cupid’s bow lips, and enormous brown eyes. AJ, lucky rat, was a masculine version of her, while I was a petite knockoff of our father, rawboned and sandy-haired. Worse, I was covered with freckles, something my father had been spared. People said I looked like Laura from Little House on the Prairie. I disliked the show and did not consider the comparison a compliment.

“She died when Lu was born,” AJ said.

“The week after,” I said.

“Do you visit her grave?”

Her grave. Her grave. Where was my mother’s grave? The question captured my imagination. Why had I never thought about her resting place? I had been death obsessed, as children tend to be, and certainly I had specific reasons to think about mortality. My mother’s parents had been killed in a car accident within a year of her death. Yet it had never occurred to me that my dead mother was contained somewhere, that I could visit her if I wanted.

“She was cremated,” AJ said, dashing my hopes as quickly as they had been raised. “Her ashes are-I don’t know where they are, come to think of it. I just know that my dad says she wouldn’t have wanted to be kept cooped up anywhere. She was a restless soul. That’s what he says.”

Noel looked around the room, his eyes catching on a Chinese vase high up on the bookshelves. The vase was out of his reach. He opened my father’s desk, an antique planter’s desk, one of the few things he had from his own family. I could sense AJ wanted to tell him no, but they were courting each other in the way that new friends do, trying to impress. Girls are more likely to do this, but boys do it, too.

Noel climbed up on the desk and tilted the vase toward him. “No, nothing in here.” He was hoisting it back to its place when the desk lid, which had supports that Noel had failed to pull out, gave way under his weight and cracked at its hinges.

Although she was a flight of stairs away, Teensy was in my father’s bedroom within seconds.

“What are you doing in Mr. Brant’s room?” she asked, huffing and puffing, angry at being forced to rush.

“We’re allowed,” AJ said. “He’s never said we couldn’t be.”

“But you’re not supposed to be around his desk,” Teensy said. “You know that. He keeps confidential things in there, work things. And it was closed this morning. You opened it up and climbed on it.”

“To be fair,” Noel said, scrambling to his feet, still holding the vase. “I did that.”

But he was already beloved in Teensy’s eyes. He could do no wrong.

“You’re a guest,” Teensy said. “It was up to them to explain the rules of our house.” She surveyed the damage. “It’s a clean break. My husband can fix it.” Teensy’s husband was a mysterious, seldom-seen person, responsible for many edicts that could not be challenged. My husband likes me home early on Fridays. My husband says you’ve got to have a little bread at every meal.

“So Dad won’t have to know?” AJ asked hopefully.

She snorted. “You’ll tell him first thing when he comes home. No secrets in this house. But I’ll pick up the papers that scattered. Because he’s particular about those. And while I’m picking up the papers, you can do some of my chores.”

I noticed another photograph of my mother, presumably her wedding day photo, saw Teensy sweep that back into a manila envelope marked “Adele.” I made a note to myself to come back and inspect the contents of that envelope. When I did, it was only the photograph and a few legal documents of no interest to me. A birth certificate, the marriage certificate, even some of her report cards.

I was assigned the laundry, while AJ and Noel had to mop the kitchen floor. Teensy had a genius for getting us to do things she didn’t want to do. At least once a week, we were forced to carry out her work as some kind of punishment. It took her perhaps five minutes to pick up the few papers that had fallen, while our tasks required much of the afternoon. There was no talking back to Teensy, and no appealing her laws.

AJ was her favorite. If it were not for AJ, I doubt she would have decided to work for us, given the twenty-mile drive. You might think-certainly, I thought about it-that she would be even more committed to me, motherless baby girl that I was. But Teensy preferred AJ, always. “Boys need mothers,” she would say, rationalizing her bias. “Girls don’t need anyone.” I think she was speaking for herself. Teensy didn’t need anything or anyone. I’m not even sure why she had a husband.

I thought of her as old, always, but she was twenty-three when she came to work for the Closters, which means she was thirty-seven on this August day. When my husband died, Teensy was thrilled to have three new lives to domineer after years of tending to my father. So my children and I moved back into that rambling stone house at the edge of the lake, after my father agreed to add a few rooms and renovate the kitchen and baths, still stuck in the 1970s. My father has supervised this never-ending project and I have since learned that this frugal, careful man can be a libertine with someone else’s money. I never knew drawer pulls could cost so much, or that there are bathtubs that will put you back more than a car. But it made him happy and I could never deny him anything that made him happy.

Another full circle in my life, yet my children’s lives in my childhood home could not be more different from mine. I can’t imagine giving Penelope and Justin the freedom to walk to the 7-Eleven on Green Mountain Circle. Wouldn’t matter if I did; it’s long gone. The lapping wavelets of Wilde Lake, my onetime lullabye, now whisper to me of their intent to take my children’s lives if I ever allow my vigilance to flag. And in my imagination, Columbia’s famous walking paths and bike trails are like a Candy Land board game snaking through a forest of potential pedophiles. I don’t even send my children to the neighborhood elementary school I attended, a ten-minute walk. They go to private school at the opposite end of the county, which means I still have to have a babysitter, Melissa, just to drive them to and from school every day. Fred tried to make that an issue during the election, even tried to suggest I was a racist because the neighborhood school has a large minority population. That backfired on him when I explained that my children had been enrolled in their current school’s pre-K not long after their father died; the school was one of the few constants in their young lives. I was reluctant to remove them from the comfort of a familiar place for what would be shallow, political concerns.

I almost feel sorry for Fred. Almost. It had to be a special kind of hell, running against the unimpeachable Widow Brant. Such a tragic figure, having lost her childhood sweetheart. (Gabe and I didn’t start dating until college, but, you know, print the legend.) A respected figure, daughter and sister to two saintly men. And, by the way, a really good trial attorney. He couldn’t win, and he didn’t. The night of the general election, we were neck and neck the whole evening, but the final precincts delivered the victory to me. A squeaker, 50.5 percent of the vote, but all you need is 50 percent plus one. The gender divide did him in. Women didn’t like him going after my kids. The African American women that Fred thought would vote for him in a bloc much preferred me. Even his appearance at Davey Robinson’s church didn’t help him win those women over.

Besides, if Fred wanted to make it personal, there were better, juicier-truer-rumors to spread. He just didn’t know where to look.

JANUARY 8

They get a hit on the fingerprints quickly, from the door and the thermostat: Rudy Drysdale, a fifty-one-year-old vagrant with a history of loitering, trespassing, breaking and entering. But not a single act of violence, which tempers Lu’s excitement. A smart defense attorney could knock this charge down in a heartbeat. With this guy’s record, it would be easy to argue that he broke into the apartment after the woman was dead, panicked, and left. That wouldn’t answer the mystery of the print on the thermostat, but she’s not going to risk charging him on the fingerprint alone. She’s not even sure she wants to interrogate him yet, but she also can’t afford to leave a killer on the streets. Two detectives are dispatched to the cheap motels along Route 1. Drysdale, on medical disability, apparently stays in motels at the beginning of the month when he’s flush with his government money, then resorts to sleeping outdoors if the weather allows. Howard County is not an easy place to be a homeless man. There are no emergency shelters and only a handful of food pantries. How do you survive the winter if you are homeless in Howard County?

You break into a place you believe is empty. Lu thinks back to Mary McNally’s apartment. No lights were on. That hadn’t registered or seemed important because it was daytime. And, of course, the perp might have turned the lights out so no one would notice the ajar door, assuming he had left the door open on purpose. The thermostat, the door-Lu has to assume the killer wanted to play with the environment, complicate the process of determining the approximate time of death. Did the killer know Mary was on vacation, not expected back at work until January sixth?

One thing’s for certain: Mary didn’t meet Rudy Drysdale while standing in line for The Theory of Everything. Or at a coffee shop, or a wine bar. This was not a man that a woman invited into her home. Unless Mary McNally was the kind of softhearted person who saw a man with a WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign and took him at his word, asked him to do a few small chores for her.

The detectives find Drysdale at the second motel they check. He is docile-so docile, based on what Lu hears, that he might not be competent to stand trial. They attempt to interview him, but he says nothing, asks for nothing, only stares at the ceiling. He’s probably happy to spend a night in jail. After a few mild days, Maryland is in the grip of a terrible cold snap, with a low of ten degrees forecast for tonight.

Mike Hunt goes out with Drysdale’s mug shot, shows it around the Silver Diner, the apartment complex. Lu’s money would have been on the Silver Diner. It seems plausible that Drysdale treated himself to a cup of coffee there, sitting at the counter and nursing it as long as he could on a cold day. Silver Dollar advertises a bottomless cup of coffee. Get an English muffin, eat and drink slowly. As long as he didn’t smell and didn’t do anything too off-putting to the other customers, he could have spent hours there.

But the Silver Diner comes up empty. It’s the neighbor, the one with the long legs, who recognizes Rudy, says she saw him lurking in the parking lot the week before Christmas. Probably saying that just to get closer to Mike Hunt, Lu thinks. But it’s enough for a lineup, which Lu attends, and Jonnie Forke is grim, businesslike. Also very definite. “That’s the man I saw,” she says. “I saw him twice.” He was always moving, but there was something about him that didn’t seem right, which is why she noticed him.

B-I-N-G-O. With an ID this strong and the prints, Lu will have no problem charging the guy with first-degree murder. She calls home, asks her father if he’s comfortable supervising homework and bedtime. When he hears that she wants to stay to observe an interrogation, he says he’ll ask Teensy to work late. After all these years, Lu remains too cowed by Teensy to ask her to do anything extra. She still gets nervous helping herself to an ice cream sandwich when Teensy isn’t around to give permission.

Lu has takeout at her desk, reads the newspaper online-always strange to see Davey Robinson writing op-ed pieces, stranger still to realize he’s an out-and-out conservative-scrolls through the day’s e-mail, looks at her telephone messages. Her office still uses the pink “While You Were Out” slips. The last one, logged at 4:45 P.M., is from a Mrs. Eloise Schumann. Says you will know what this is in reference to, Della has written on the slip. (Is it wrong that Lu secretly loves having a secretary named Della, as Perry Mason did?) Of course Lu has no idea what it is in reference to. Isn’t that always the way? Everyone thinks his or her own drama is so central. She searches her e-mail for “Schumann,” searches her mind. Nope, blank, nada.

Mike Hunt calls. “He decided to open his mouth long enough to lawyer up already.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, so we’re going to let him spend the night in jail, push the interrogation to tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Think about it, Lu. This guy can’t bear to go up to Baltimore, spend a night in a mission. He sleeps outside or breaks into places. Anything to avoid human contact. A night in jail is going to rattle him.”

“Is he crazy, Mike? I mean, the kind of crazy that’s going to raise competency issues.”

“He’s got issues, but he’s pretty lucid. Lucid enough to lawyer up after being tight as an oyster all day. We played the game with him, told him it would be better not to rush into an official conversation, but he was having none of it. He wants a lawyer. So he’ll have one in the morning, the best that the Howard County public defender’s office has to offer.”

Lu feels let down, almost as if she has been stood up for a date she was anticipating. Twitchy with adrenaline, she considers stopping for a drink on the way home. Or even going to a movie. Who would ever know? Free evenings are rare. She thinks about asking Mike if he wants to have a beer. He’s good company and their mutual lack of interest in each other makes it fun to talk to him. But it also makes him dangerous because Lu could imagine confiding in him, if she got enough liquor in her. Better to go home, tuck her kids in as she tries to do every night, have that drink alone. Besides, she’ll want to be fresh tomorrow, even if she’s only an observer.

“Okay, we can push it until tomorrow. Get your beauty sleep.”

“As if I need it,” Mike says. How she envies him his confidence. Lu has learned to put on a confident attitude, to wear it like her clothes-and she wears her clothes well, but only after they are tailored. She’s built like a short-legged Betty Boop and feels she has to downplay the parts that other women might consider assets. Everything off the rack is too long, baggy below the waist, strained across her chest. Mike is a natural-born winner, and no one understands that better than someone like Lu, who has always had to study, try, fail, try again. It was galling, but as the younger sister of another natural-born winner, she’s gotten used to it. What other option did she have?

WE’RE ALL IN COLUMBIA

Summer, usually our dullest season, flew after we met Noel. True, there wasn’t much left. But how he breathed life into those last, dreary days of August. He always had plans, which he called escapades. “What sort of escapade should we have today?” he would ask, rubbing his hands together. And although I was not expressly invited on Noel’s adventures, AJ wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without me. Teensy foisted me on him using the pretext of filial love. I suspect she just didn’t want me underfoot, whining about how bored I was. I learned to ride a bike well and fearlessly that summer I was six years old because I was trying to keep up with two fourteen-year-olds.

What did we do? We rode over to Lake Kittamaqundi at what was known as Town Center and rented a rowboat, although that required the boys lying about their ages. Well, AJ claimed to be sixteen; no one believed Noel was even fourteen. We went to the movies and experimented with sneaking into the one we hadn’t paid for, a difficult feat at the little two-screen cinema. You had to leave one auditorium, go to the bathroom, then buy something from the concession stand, drop your change, go back to the bathroom, ask for napkins. Noel taught us the valuable lesson that making a spectacle of yourself was sometimes the best way to get people to stop noticing you. Noel lived his life based on that premise, although he would have been heartbroken if he weren’t the center of attention when he wanted to be. He was that rare young person who understood exactly who he was and what he needed-and that his parents, his friends, the world at large, were not ready for this information.

We always ended up at the mall, Noel’s favorite place. The mall still felt shiny new then, maybe five years old, immortalized by its own television jingle: We’re all in Columbia / At the Mall in Columbia. Almost everything Noel wanted was in that mall. Noel loved things. Clothes, first and foremost, but, really, everything, anything. He yearned for stuff. He could spend hours browsing. Bix Camera Store, where he was genuinely interested in the lenses and camera bodies. Bun Penny, where he would pretend to be shopping earnestly for a sophisticated event. (“Miss, what kind of cheese would you suggest I take to a Labor Day cookout? Do you have Cinzano? Campari?”) At Bailey Banks & Biddle, a jewelry store, he tried on watches, claiming to have a windfall check from his doting grandmother. He liked to get free samples from the “natural” cosmetics place. (“This face cream does smell like almonds! My mother will love it.”) We always ended up at Waldenbooks, reading entire novels on the sly, which felt outlaw back then when bookstores did not have easy chairs or coffee bars. We could have ridden our bikes to the library branch in Wilde Lake Village Center, read the same books while sitting comfortably. But it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

And, yes, I could read at age six and was already ripping through chapter books. The Hardy Boys, my father’s boyhood collection of Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, a series of books about famous people-mostly men-as children. I had been reading since age four. During that slow, boring summer, AJ dug out his first-grade primers, which had been boxed up in the attic. Our mother had put them there, I was told, because she had taught AJ to read at a young age and planned to do the same with me. AJ introduced me to Dick, Jane, and Sally. The first word I learned was Oh. Sally says Oh. Oh, oh, oh. It seemed an improbable way to learn to read, yet I did. By the time I was five, I could read the newspaper. (“Although only the evening one,” my father would say, a joke at the expense of the Baltimore-Light, which was considered less intellectual than its morning sister, the somber Beacon.) I read my horoscope every day and took it to heart. I was a Capricorn, which grieved me. Who wants to be the goat?

By the time I was six, I was reading newspaper articles about my father, who had been appointed Howard County state’s attorney the year before. These articles were generally bland, approving things, but I never got over the thrill of seeing his name-also my name-in print, even if it was usually on the back of the second news section. And in the summer of 1976, he began to appear on Page One almost every day because he was trying a big murder. Murder was rare in Howard County and this case would have been considered sensational in any jurisdiction, in part because there was no body. But there was more to the story than that.

A man had come home drunk in the fall of 1974, blood on his clothes, told his wife he had hit a deer. The damage to the car, an old station wagon, was minimal, but he had tried to move the animal from the road to protect other drivers, he told her. A week later, the wife was using the car when a woman’s shoe, a heavy wooden platform, slid out from under the driver’s seat. She said she almost got into an accident when the shoe jammed beneath the accelerator, but she managed to kick it free. The shoe was flamboyant, even by the fashions of the day, a cherrywood platform with a cutout between heel and sole, so it looked almost like a fish about to take a bite. The fabric that crossed the foot, leaving the toes bare, was a lovely pink-and-green plaid.

The fabric also had blood on it.

What the woman did next seemed to shock people more than the discovery of the bloody shoe: she went to the state police barracks in Jessup. She told the story of her husband saying he had hit a deer. She produced the shoe. She would have brought the shirt as well, but she had already laundered it. “That’s the kind of wife I am,” she told police. “I wash my husband’s bloody shirts, get every speck out. It took two washings.”

The woman returned home, made her husband’s favorite dinner, let him have all the beer he wanted. She gave him steak and french fries, despite his cholesterol. She sat at the kitchen table and asked him gentle, probing questions. She told him about the shoe. He demanded to see it. “Oh, I threw it away.”

Where? he demanded. Where? We’ve got to be careful. If they find that shoe-

“Honey, what’s wrong?” the woman said. “You can trust me.”

The story poured out of her husband. He had seen a hitchhiker, given her a ride. It had been the girl’s idea to pay him with sex, he swore to this. But the girl had hurt him, bit him. (This part was mysterious to me when I was six. I knew vaguely how babies were made, but I didn’t know how someone could bite you during the act. I assume she bit him while they were kissing.) All he did was try to make her stop. Was that so wrong, trying to make a girl stop? When she was hurting him?

They never found the girl’s body, but the shoe was used, Cinderella-like, to identify her. Sheila Compson, sixteen, from New Jersey, had decided to hitchhike to a concert in Largo, Maryland, after a fight with her father. I think it was a Styx concert. She never came home. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

The odd thing was that everyone hated the wife. While it is true that spouses cannot be compelled to testify against each other, they have always been free to do so willingly. Yet people treated this woman as if she had violated some natural law. She was cold-blooded, with no real concern for the girl who had died, only anger toward the husband who had betrayed her. My father had to coach her to call Sheila Compson something other than that slut or trollop.

Meanwhile, the husband became bizarrely pitiable. His defense was that he had told his wife the story he thought she wanted to hear at the time. The truth was that he had a pleasant consensual encounter with the girl at the truck stop near 216, then let her out just north of the Montgomery County line, where he assumed she caught one more ride.

“And she left with only one shoe?” my father asked him when the defendant took the stand.

He held up his hands and shrugged, as if to say Women! Under redirect from his own attorney, he said that the shoe had been in a rucksack the girl was carrying, that she was wearing something more substantial on her feet and the shoe had rolled out from her bag while they were in the backseat “enjoying each other.”

He would come to regret that turn of phrase. My father used it over and over in his final arguments. “And that blood, on the shoe-I guess, that, too, happened while they were-enjoying each other. A sixteen-year-old girl, trying to get to a concert. A twenty-four-year-old man. He certainly enjoyed himself. Did she?”

Final arguments were held the week before school started. AJ and I were allowed to attend, and Noel tagged along. Standing in front of the jury, my father cradled that shoe in his hand. He told the jurors a story about the girl, who, he reminded them, was not there to speak for herself, whose body was still missing. This shoe was all that was left of her, all we would ever know of her. This shoe and her parents and her room back in New Jersey, where she had a poster of a cat hanging from a chin-up bar and a pink-flowered bedspread and a drawer of T-shirts from national parks, purchased on a trip she had taken cross-country with her family just two years ago. My father had driven up there to meet Sheila’s parents, studied her bedroom, learned everything he could about her. Sheila had bought these shoes with money saved up from her job at Baskin-Robbins. He told the jurors how much she made an hour, how hard it was to scoop certain flavors like Jamoca Almond Fudge. But Sheila never complained. The platforms were difficult shoes to walk distances in, but they were her best shoes, and when she decided to go see her favorite band in Largo, they were the obvious ones to wear, even if the chill of autumn had arrived. Those were the kind of decisions a sixteen-year-old girl made. Impractical, heartfelt. She had on overalls, a peasant blouse, and a peacoat when she left school that afternoon. Her parents thought she was going to work, then sleeping over at a friend’s house, so they did not worry when she did not return that night. No one mentioned a rucksack. Her parents swore that she carried her books tight to her chest, a small purse slung over her arm. No rucksack.

My father reminded the jury that at least two other men had given Sheila Compson rides that day. They had testified at the trial. They had described a bright, lovely girl, full of excitement. “They enjoyed-her conversation,” my father said. “Nothing more.” Yes, she had quarreled with her parents. Yes, she had defied them, lied to them. She was not a perfect girl by any means. And, yes, she might have chosen to have sex with this man. Here, my father cast an incredulous look at the defendant, who was not particularly attractive.

“She’s out there somewhere,” he said. “We may never find her. Her parents have been denied the ritual of burial, which is no small thing in our culture. How we treat our dead is central to our humanity. There is no doubt in my mind that Sheila Compson is dead. The defense would have you believe that she is a runaway. But, really, how far could she have run?”

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

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

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

“But what about the shoe?” Noel asked.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Louise Brant? Is that your name?”

“Luisa, but I go by Lu.”

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

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

“I’m fine here, ma’am.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“I’ll be okay,” I assured him.

He sighed and began his summation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just want to win,” I said.

“Win what, Lu?”

I shook my head, out of words.

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

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

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

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

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

JANUARY 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why were you in her apartment?”

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

“He already did,” Mike says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Make the numbers live,” she says to Penelope, “and they’ll make more sense.”

“Do they have to be people? Because three makes me think of a bear and eight is a snowman.”

“They can be whatever you want them to be,” she says, savoring the moment.

Her children asleep, her father shut up in his study, Lu goes to AJ’s room on the third floor. The linens have been updated, but it is otherwise as he left it, even as the rest of the house has been transformed around it. The transformation continues, in fact, with no end in sight. Her father seems to have become compulsive about renovation the way some women become addicted to plastic surgery. Since Lu’s return, he has remade almost every square foot of this old house and built an addition, essentially a new wing, which includes rooms for the twins and Lu. (Her childhood bedroom, which adjoins her father’s suite, is now the study to which he retreats at night, sequestering himself from all the noise that accompanies bathtime and bedtime.) But their father wants AJ to decide how his room should be redone, and AJ keeps putting him off. Lu wonders if it’s the very fervency of her father’s redecorating that keeps AJ from making any decisions. AJ has sworn off material things. Sort of, kind of. But this time capsule of a room is to Lu’s advantage tonight. She quickly finds AJ’s high school yearbook, the Glass Hour, on the shelf above his desk, a modular unit that Lu envied terribly as a kid. She envies it now-this kind of midcentury modern design is back in style and she yearns for a more modern-looking house, but her father continues to decorate in the traditional style that her mother preferred. Stout, dark wood, rich, soft fabrics that run to hunter green and burgundy.

Lu flips through the yearbook. As a ten-year-old left behind after her brother’s high school graduation, she used to study this book as if it were a sacred text, wondering if she would have as glorious a high school career as her brother. (She did not, although she finally cracked the code of social life and enjoyed the last two years.) There must be at least a dozen photographs of AJ throughout the yearbook. and it is filled with affectionate scrawls of inside jokes from dozens of his classmates. “Ach du lieber, Mrs. Bitterman!” “Still bummed we never made RP room.” “AJ Brant for President 2000.” How typical that one of AJ’s friends would calculate the first year that he could legally run for president.

But the only place she can find Rudy Drysdale is on the masthead, one of four staff photographers. And in the yearbook staff’s group photo, he is listed as absent. He was at least a year behind AJ, maybe two. Still, he almost certainly took some of these photos of AJ-in his soccer uniform, his leg bent at a seemingly impossible angle; as Sancho Panza, looking up worshipfully at Davey’s Don Quixote; surrounded by his group in a candid photo in the cafeteria. Were they a clique? Was that word even used at the time?

Penelope and Justin are only eight, and Lu already has seen so many dynamics she thought wouldn’t happen for years-mean girls, bullies, this terrible anxiety about fitting in. And there is so much concern about autism these days. Until the twins turned five or so, the pediatrician was forever asking Lu about laughter and eye contact and whether the twins would tolerate being touched. “Their father died when they were three,” Lu said time and again. “They come by their seriousness and anxiety pretty honestly.”

She bet her father was never asked these same questions about Lu, although her circumstances were similar. Adele Brant had died in childbirth. Well, not in. She gave birth. She died a week later. As a child, Lu clung to the lie-insisted on the lie-that her mother’s heart condition had not been affected by this clearly unplanned pregnancy. Lu was born, a week later her mother died. No connection, no cause and effect, just a series of discrete events. Yep, sure, that makes sense. Even as all the other myths of childhood-Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny-fell away, the Brant family maintained this well-intentioned fiction. Her father even insisted that he was the one to blame for his wife’s death. Not because Adele Brant got pregnant against her doctor’s advice, but because her husband made her move to Columbia, a place to which she could not be reconciled, no matter how hard her husband tried.

And he tried so hard, starting with this very house. If Lu says nothing as the bills come in-Italian tiles, bathtubs that cost as much as small cars, custom rugs, top-of-the-line appliances for the kitchen where Teensy continues to make most of their meals-it’s because she realizes her father is trying to make good on a forty-five-year-old promise. He lured his young wife to Columbia, saying he would do anything to make her happy here. He failed. With Lu and the twins, he has a second chance to make someone happy in this house.

But is he happy? Was he ever happy? she wonders. Then she feels guilty, as grown children often do, for how seldom they have bothered to consider a parent’s happiness.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

My January second birthdate seemed tragic when I was young, the cornerstone of all my social failures. If my birthday fell on a school day, it was always the first day back from the holiday, the least happy day of the year. And if it were a Saturday or Sunday, it was still an awkward time. People have no energy for celebrations after January first. Besides, my father didn’t know how to throw a party for a girl. With AJ, who had an April birthday, he told him to invite all the boys in his class, and that was that. They played in the yard for three hours, Teensy served a cake, then threw everyone out.

When my father told me I should invite all the girls in my class over for an indoor party for my seventh birthday, I saw the pitfalls. There would be no theme, no organization. If there were games, they would be too babyish. The favors would be found wanting. No, there were just too many ways to fail.

“I don’t like all the girls,” I said. “Some of them are mean to me.” That wasn’t exactly true. All the girls were mean to me. And most of the boys.

“The Brants don’t believe in leaving people out. All or nothing.”

“You’re leaving the boys out,” I said.

“There are twenty-six children in your class,” he said. “That is simply too much. But if you don’t want to include all the girls, you can have a celebration with AJ and me. You’ll have your favorite cake. You can choose an activity. Movie, bowling, ice-skating. And then you can invite your best friend. But if you want to have a party, you must include everyone.”

I wondered if my father had noticed that I was seldom invited to parties, that other parents did not observe the Brant standard. He certainly should have been aware that I had no best friend, but then-he did not arrive home until suppertime and I was too proud to speak of my troubles to Teensy or AJ. It made me feel better in a way that my father had no inkling I was friendless. I told him I could not choose just one friend-true enough-and selected ice-skating as my activity. There was a rink on the east side of Columbia and I was good at ice-skating, thanks to AJ’s tutelage, and I had my own skates, which provided a tiny bit of cachet. And at a rink, if one moved quickly enough, it was possible to disguise the fact that one was going around and around in circles all alone.

Better still, my father accompanied us and even laced himself into a pair of rental skates, the best gift he could have given me. Our father was not one for playing with us unless it was something brainy. He did not throw a football with AJ or swim with us at the community pool. Other fathers were rare there, too, but when they showed up, they picked up their children and launched them through the air, happy squealing rockets. We sometimes wondered if our father avoided activities because he was klutzy or inept. But when he did do something, he did it well. Still, I doubt he would have put on rented ice skates if it were not for the influence of our new neighbor, Miss Maude.

We had thought she was old when she moved into the house closest to ours, just a few weeks before Halloween. Really old, older-than-our-father old. She had silver hair, a lot of it, amplified by a wild curly perm. She never seemed to smile. But she wasn’t quite thirty and she came by her sad expression honestly. She was a widow. Her husband had been in Vietnam. “That’s probably why her hair turned white,” Noel said to AJ. “A bad shock really can do that.”

“Oh, that’s just nonsense,” AJ said.

They were in AJ’s room, watching Miss Maude through one of the little dormer windows that ringed the top floor, two to a side. I was in the adjoining room, the one that Teensy used when she slept over, eavesdropping. Two sets of spies. I didn’t understand the attraction of watching Maude Lennox preparing her yard and garden for the coming winter. The day was Indian summer hot, but a freeze was forecast for the next week. I glanced out the dormer window in Teensy’s room-from the outside, these windows looked like two eyebrows, arched in surprise. Miss Maude was crouching over a rosebush. She wore cherry-red shorts and a gingham halter, her snaky silver hair tamed by a triangle of red bandanna.

Music floated in the air, from AJ’s record player. It was a song he liked a lot, something about two people sitting on a hill. The girl apparently had moonlight in her eyes, which sounded interesting to me, like maybe she had moonbeams that shot out like lasers. Everything was ours, everything was ours. I imagined a king and a queen, surveying their kingdom, subduing miscreants with lasers.

“I can see her bending over a hot stove,” Noel said. “Trouble is, I can’t see the stove. Groucho Marx, Duck Soup.”

“Shut up,” AJ hissed.

“She can’t hear us, not with the music blasting. And from this angle, she can’t see us. Although it’s not her angles that interest you, I guess.”

“Noel.” A slamming sound. The window shutting? The volume on the record player was lowered, because if it were too loud, Teensy might storm upstairs. Whatever they were doing, they didn’t want anyone in there. Not Teensy, not me. A smell of smoke, sweet and strange. The sound of the window creaking open.

“Do you think they do it?” That was Noel.

“Who?”

“Kim and Carson.”

“Probably. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“He says they do.”

“I don’t care.”

“Didn’t you ask Kim to homecoming?”

“No.”

“You said you were going to.”

“I said that if I wanted to go to a dance, she’d be okay. Obviously, she’s going with Carson.”

“I don’t think they do it. They’re all over each other at school. Between classes-it’s like he was going off to war instead of French II. Heh, French II. Based on what I’ve seen, Kim could teach AP French. She goes for it. Right there in the hall.”

“Noel, I don’t want to talk about Kim and Carson.”

The window closed again.

“What does your dad think?”

Why, I wondered, would my father care about these people named Kim and Carson, and whether they’re going to the dance together?

“I told you-he doesn’t want me to smoke, but he all but said that if I do smoke, do it at home when he’s not here. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what he was saying, between the lines. Can you imagine if Andrew Brant’s son got busted for grass?”

I sat there, trying to figure out how one smoked grass. I assumed that Noel and AJ were making fake cigarettes out of grass clippings. Maybe they were watching Miss Maude in hopes of stealing some grass from her yard. Smoking was bad. Smoking killed you. I had nagged my father until he gave up his pipe and now it sounded as if I was going to have to start in on my brother.

“We’re not stoners,” Noel said. “We can take it or leave it.”

My six-year-old brain turned that over, too. Did Noel mean they wouldn’t throw rocks at someone? Were they going to throw rocks at Miss Maude? Or was he talking about stonemen, like the ones in the B.C. comic?

“We’re not really anything,” Noel continued. “We’re sort of a group unto ourselves. We do the theater stuff and singing, we dominate the productions, but we’re not the theater group. That’s, you know, Sarah and that boy Mark, the ones who are always drawing attention to themselves, breaking into musical numbers in the hall. We’re athletes, but we’re not jocks, not even Bash or Lynne. I play tennis and you’ll probably make JV for both basketball and baseball this year. You might even be varsity for baseball, as a freshman. We get good grades.”

“You have to be pretty lame not to get good grades at a school where there’s no failure and they let you retake tests.”

“Less and less,” Noel said. “Some of the classes are like normal classes anywhere now. Anyway, we’re, like, I don’t know-the Bloomsbury Group of Wilde Lake High School. I’m going to start calling you Leonard.”

“Does that make you Virginia?”

They laughed very hard at this. I guessed Leonard and Virginia were really weird. Then, Noel again: “Come away from the window, you pervert, Lawdy, Miss Maude-y. If I were your dad, I’d be over there with, I don’t know, what does the Welcome Wagon actually bring? Is there still a Welcome Wagon?”

“I think that’s in The Music Man,” AJ said. “I hope they put that on when we’re juniors or seniors. I want to play Harold Hill.”

“No, that’s the Wells Fargo wagon, you doofus.”

The music stopped and it was evident that AJ was changing records. He put the Music Man soundtrack on his stereo, and the two of them sang along to the train rhythms of the opening song. As the record continued, they laughed hysterically at things that didn’t seem that funny to me. I could tell from the timbre of their voices that they were lying on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. I lay down on the floor in the spare room, wondering what made the ceiling so hilarious. It was plaster, in need of repair, and if you squinted hard enough, you could find shapes in the stains and cracks. But unlike clouds, they were always the same shapes, and I had identified them long ago. A rabbit. A rose. A cow head. Trouble, AJ sang, Trouble. And Noel sang back: Right here in Wilde Lake. The kids in their-what? For years I thought it was their “double backers,” not that I knew what a double backer was, but it made as much sense as knickerbockers would have. Then again, it was only this year, listening to Sirius radio in my car, that I found out that I had gone my entire life thinking that the nice man who sang “More I Cannot Wish You,” was not, in fact, hoping that the young woman found a man with the “licorice tooth.”

A week or two later, our father paid his respects to our new neighbor, taking her a bottle of wine, the kind that had straw on the bottom and, once empty, could be used as a candleholder. He was the one who reported back that she was only thirty, despite the shock of white hair, and really quite friendly, if particular about her lawn and plantings. She was originally from South Carolina, but her husband had been assigned to Fort Meade before he was sent to Vietnam and she came to like Maryland. She wasn’t sure why she had bought a three-bedroom house in a suburb. Maybe, she told my father, it was because she still kept thinking she was going to have a family.

My father thought it a kindness to Miss Maude to send me over there on Fridays to keep her company, but he insisted to her that she was doing him a favor, that if she looked after me for a couple of hours, Teensy could leave early and avoid the rush-hour traffic. (“My husband wants me home by five on Fridays” was one of her pronouncements.”) Miss Maude began stocking her refrigerator and pantry with my favorite treats. She introduced me to the world of soap operas. I seldom got to her house before The Edge of Night and I saw only the Friday episodes, but it wasn’t that hard to follow. Soap operas moved slowly then, and a lot of the best stuff happened on Fridays. She would walk me home when she saw my father’s car in the drive and, often as not, he invited her to share our standing Friday night dinner of Colombo’s pizza, which he picked up on the way home. But they never spent any time alone and they certainly never had dates. When we all went ice-skating for my birthday, Miss Maude sat in the stands, stamping her feet and breathing smoke. “I grew up in the South,” she said when I asked her to join us. “I never learned to skate. It’s a hard thing to pick up when you’re older, although your father did, at college. He was on the hockey team.”

“He never was,” I said, sure that I knew everything about him. But when I asked my father, he agreed that he had played hockey in college, although on an intramural team, not the official one. And he had learned to skate in boarding school, Deerfield. Miss Maude had gotten that part of the story wrong. That made me feel better for some reason.

I remember the winter that followed my seventh birthday as a particularly bitter one. (When it comes to weather, I have not bothered to check if my memory is right. I can’t check everything.) Single-digit temperatures, icicles like daggers, yet relatively little snow. For just the second time in my life, Wilde Lake was almost solid enough to walk across, although only the boldest boys risked that. The cold air leaked into our house from every window and faultily hung door. We burned fires in all the fireplaces, even at night, violating our father’s long-standing rule about not leaving fires untended.

Yet it wasn’t our old house, with fireplaces going around the clock, that went up in flames. It was Miss Maude’s.

Now when I was a child, I was famous for being able to sleep through anything, so it wasn’t the orange glow outside my windows or even the sirens in the distance that woke me. But then, there were no sirens, not yet. There was just my father, still in his work clothes at 1 A.M., shaking me and calling my name. “I need to get you outside, Lu. To be safe. We have to go outside. It could jump.”

“What jumps?” I asked, rolling away from him and curling up like a potato bug, determined not to leave my wonderfully warm bed, where I had piled three quilts on top of me.

“The fire. Miss Maude’s house has caught fire and ours might catch, too. We have to go.”

He eased me into my coat and boots. My mind had finally registered the urgency of the situation, but not my limbs, and it was as if I were a toddler, requiring assistance. AJ had dressed himself and was waiting for us by the front door. Once outside, the overwhelming sensation was one of extreme cold and extreme heat. It was so cold that I began to move instinctively toward the flames, only to have my father pull me back. He then crouched low to the ground, holding me between his knees so we could keep each other warm.

The fire trucks seemed to take so long. We heard the sirens first, then saw the lights flashing through the bare trees, visible as the trucks raced down Green Mountain Circle and then turned onto our cul-de-sac. The hoses didn’t go on right away.

“Are they frozen?” AJ asked.

“I don’t know, son. I just don’t know.”

The high-powered hoses came on and we almost cheered. But then they shattered the windows on the upper levels of Miss Maude’s house, and the water poured in. I thought of her pretty rooms, the pale green sofa where we watched our programs, the freezer full of Good Humor bars.

Yet she seemed almost nonchalant about the damage being done. “I bought this place for the yard,” she muttered. “The house can go to hell.”

Fine for her, but now our house was under threat. We had always thought of our house as far from its only neighbor, sitting as it did on a double lot, but Miss Maude’s house seemed terrifyingly close that night. I understood, then, why people speak of flames licking. That fire had a thousand little tongues that kept darting at our house, eager to taste it, devour it. Sure, it was stone, but there was wood trim and the windows could burst from the heat. My window had been warm to the touch when my father awakened me.

A tree near the rear of Miss Maude’s property, right next to the unmarked boundary between our houses, began to go up. It was like watching snakes race up that tree, crimson-orange lines going up, up, up the trunk.

“They might have to train their hoses on our house, just to be safe,” our father said. “If that happens-well, water will get in. It can’t be helped.”

I thought of my room, my beloved stuffed animals, the new toys from my birthday. I had been given a wooden contraption with two long metal arms; the game was to coax a large ball-bearing up those arms until it dropped into one of the circles below. I was better than AJ or my father at this game; I had a delicacy of touch they couldn’t match. I could not bear to lose that game, the game at which I always won. Pinned between my father’s legs, I started to cry and he tightened his hold on me, as if fearful I would try to run inside. Miss Maude stroked my hair almost absentmindedly.

“It’s a sign,” she said. “How can it be anything but a sign?”

“Don’t be silly,” my father said. “And don’t blame yourself. Accidents happen.”

“Oh, I don’t. I don’t.”

And just like that, the fire seemed to give up, not unlike the witch vanquished by water in The Wizard of Oz. It shrank back into Miss Maude’s house, or what was left of it. There was a hole in the roof, broken windows, scorch marks. Her house was destroyed. Ours was spared.

“At least I had the presence of mind to grab my purse,” Miss Maude said. “I can go stay at the Columbia Inn, I guess.”

“You could have the guest room at our house,” my father said. “It’s always made up for Teensy.”

I swear AJ blushed in the firelight, thinking of Miss Maude on the other side of the wall from him, separated by only a tiny powder room. She’ll be able to hear AJ go to the bathroom, I thought.

“No, no, I wouldn’t dare put you out.”

She walked over to her car, a VW bug. Although she had on boots, she was bare-legged and the hem of her nightgown showed beneath her coat.

“What happened?” I asked my father. “How did it catch fire?”

“She told the firemen she lit a candle downstairs, then forgot to snuff it out before she went to bed.”

It was only when we went back inside that I noticed my father’s feet. “You forgot to put on your shoes?”

“I know,” he said. “I was in such a hurry to get you out, I didn’t think. You know how I fall asleep in my chair at night.”

He was walking from fireplace to fireplace, banking the fires we had allowed to burn. I went to his room to get his shoes, assuming he had kicked them off by his reading chair. I couldn’t find them, so I brought him his slippers.

“What did Miss Maude mean, saying it was a sign?”

“She’s been thinking about moving. I guess this will settle it for her. Although that’s a very silly way to be, Lu. To place emphasis on portents. Or horoscopes, or any of that stuff. She left a candle burning and her draperies caught fire.”

“I read my horoscope every day,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said. “You read it out loud to me.”

“That’s because it’s yours, too.”

“Yes, and do you really think that you and I have the same day every day, that what’s recommended for you applies to me?”

I did.

Miss Maude never spent another night in that house. It was razed a few months later, and the lot stood empty for years, which delighted AJ and me as it became our unofficial territory. That spring, glorious flowers came to life, peeping through the overgrown grass, the result of Miss Maude’s meticulous preparation in her first few weeks, her only weeks, in the house. They never bloomed again.

I was fifteen or sixteen before I realized that my father’s shoes were in Miss Maude’s house when it started to burn. As was my father. My father was shoeless in Miss Maude’s house, and they weren’t in the living room when that candle in the old Chianti bottle caught the drapes, or they might have had a chance to put it out. They had gone upstairs. Together.

I called my brother, in law school at the time. I assumed he had figured it out before I did, but I held on to the hope that I might, just once, tell AJ something he didn’t already know.

Of course he had pieced together far more than I had.

“It didn’t start that night, Lu. He’d been going over there since mid-December, after you were asleep and I was in my room. He’d tell me he was going outside to smoke his pipe-he knew you didn’t approve of him smoking and would give him hell if you picked up the scent of his tobacco in the house-but he didn’t come back for hours. Then one night I saw him leaving her house, and I knew.”

“Eeeeew,” I said.

“That’s how I felt then.” That’s how I felt when I was your age. I thought, So infuriating. “Now I’m happy for him. Although-you know, she wasn’t a widow.”

“What do you mean? She lied about being married?”

“She lied about her husband being dead. He was at Walter Reed, a double amputee.”

“But Daddy didn’t know that. He couldn’t have.”

AJ sighed over the line. It was the mid-1980s. A long-distance call was still something of import, minutes gobbling up money the way the still-novel Pac-Man ate his power pills, although my father never objected to me calling AJ. He wanted us to be close. He had encouraged the ritual of our weekly Sunday call and even allowed me to call before rates dropped if I had important news. However, he probably would have been appalled if he had known what we were discussing on this particular Sunday.

“How do you think I know, Lu? He told me so himself.”

“Uh-huh. No way. Daddy never would have been with a married woman. Besides, why would he tell you?”

AJ’s laugh was raw and sad. “I guess he wanted to warn me that everyone screws up sometime. Even our saintly father. He said she was a de facto widow-wouldn’t divorce her husband out of principle, but he was never going to come home, be her husband again.”

“So he argued against his adultery on the basis of a technicality?”

“Other way around. He insisted that he was guilty of adultery despite her situation. But he cared about her, in his way, although he was never going to get serious with any woman. At any rate, she saw the fire as a judgment and left.” A pause. “Miss Maude wasn’t the only one, over the years. There were others. Lu, did you really think our father, who was not quite forty when our mother died, went the rest of his life without female companionship?”

I did. And I still believe that he did not have a single lady friend during the eight-year stretch when it was just the two of us, after AJ left for college. By the time I was in my teens, I was on the alert for love and sex, imagining it everywhere, so how could I not have noticed if it were there?

Then again, how did I not pick up the scent of my father’s pipe tobacco?

Perhaps my adolescent self simply balked at that threshold of my father’s bedroom, as most teenagers do. I hope so. Now I want to believe that my father found a way to meet his needs, that he had a rich and thrilling secret life.

After all, I did, at least for a time.

JANUARY 10

“Your first murder,” Lu’s father says, opening a bottle of wine, one of the better ones in his “cellar”-a corner of the kitchen that now includes two wine refrigerators, one for whites, and one that keeps reds at a steady sixty-four degrees. “Sort of like living in San Francisco,” AJ observed on his last visit, which provoked a pedantic observation from his wife, Lauranne, that San Francisco is not, in fact, sixty-four degrees year-round. Lauranne still doesn’t have a handle on the Brant sense of humor.

Lu glances at the price tag, which her father has forgotten to scrape off. $39.99, some Australian red with a silly name. And it’s just a Saturday night dinner at home, nothing innately special, although they are expecting AJ and that is always a cause to celebrate. AJ lives less than twenty miles away, but his work-his ministry, as Lu likes to tease him, knowing that the term provokes him on several levels-means he’s on the road, on the go, all the time.

“Not my first murder by a long shot,” Lu reminds her father. “My first as state’s attorney. I did several as a deputy. You know, not everyone gets appointed to the state’s attorney’s office. Some of us actually have to run.”

He decants the wine, putting out stemless wineglasses for the adults, heavy tumblers for the twins. Andrew Brant, almost forty when Lu was born, had been considered an “old” father and he remains undeniably old-fashioned. He believes that children should learn to negotiate the adult world, that plastic cups with lids only retard their progress. To his credit, he never gets angry over spills or breakage. Teensy is the one who mourns the destruction of the Brants’ material possessions. But then-she’s the one who has been cleaning them for two generations. When Lu moved back in with her father, she was amazed to realize how little he knows about domestic arrangements. He cannot scramble eggs or make a bed. Or maybe he just doesn’t. He will buy groceries for special occasions-steaks, homemade ice cream, sushi-grade tuna from Wegman’s-but it would never occur to him to go to Giant or Target for everyday things like paper towels and detergent. Teensy does his laundry and ironing. Only his, she made clear to Lu with Teensy-ian logic. “You and the children have so many bright-colored things,” she said. “I can’t mix them with Mr. Brant’s.” How many Andrew Brants does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Lu has never been able to nail the precise punch line, but it would probably have to do with him not needing to change the lightbulb. He could just sit in the glow of his own saintly perfection.

The twins helped her finish setting the table, and with only a minimum of nagging. They look forward to their uncle’s visits as well. He plays with Justin and is fatherly with Penelope. Lu gazes with satisfaction at the inviting room. Winter is the house’s best season. With the trees bare, the lake is in full view from three sides. Hard to remember now the raw, immature landscaping that legendarily offended Adele Brant more than forty years ago. Lu always thought trees took centuries to reach maturity, yet now they are huge and she is still not old. Forty-five isn’t old, right? Especially when one is beginning a new, big job. Lu likes to joke that her midlife crisis was postponed because widowhood was more pressing. What would a midlife crisis even look like for a single mother of two? Some people might point to the one part of her life that she keeps rigidly compartmentalized, but no one knows about it, so no one can cite it.

Which just proves, Lu thinks, how very good she is at compartmentalizing.

AJ-of course-managed to have an original midlife crisis: at age forty-four, he shucked his gorgeous, funny, brilliant wife of ten years, headed out for a wanderjahr, returned and fell in love with a mousy yoga teacher. Lu still finds it hard to reconcile herself to this. Lauranne is a drag. A drag on conversation, a drag on meals-a vegan alternative always has to be provided and is never quite right. Yet AJ remains smitten. Lauranne represents the new life he created for himself after walking away from Lehman Brothers. Granted, he walked away in 2006, excellent timing on his part. Two years later and his fortune would have walked away from him. He divested himself of most of his material goods-although only half of his considerable cash-telling his first wife, Helena, that she could have the house in Greenwich, the apartment in New York City, the beach house on Cape Cod. He then made his own Eat, Pray, Love pilgrimage around the world, although ascetic AJ skipped the eating part. He found Lauranne in some yoga class along the way and eventually brought her to Baltimore, where they became pioneers in urban gardening, something that Lu and her father privately find hilarious. “AJ didn’t even like cutting grass as a boy,” her father says. “Now he’s practically a farmer.”

AJ’s embrace of simple living has only made him richer. He wrote a book about his travels that became an unexpected hit in paperback, the sort of thing that book clubs love. The book made him an in-demand speaker, someone hired for $10,000, $20,000 a night. A local radio show on AJ and Lauranne’s locavore life ended up being nationally syndicated. Three years ago, he even was named a MacArthur fellow, receiving one of the so-called genius grants. The couple still lives in Southwest Baltimore and AJ is often photographed outside their home, a simple redbrick rowhouse. Photographers and reporters are never allowed inside, however. Luisa suspects this is because AJ and Lauranne actually own three rowhouses, reconfigured inside so that there is an open courtyard with a pool bracketed on three sides by the two end rowhouses, a walled garden at the back of the property. Lu has to give AJ his due; it is still a pretty scruffy neighborhood and he is cheerful about the price he pays to live there-graffiti, vandalism, petty larcenies. And he is doing something incontestably good, helping families in Southwest Baltimore grow their own vegetables and learn to cook and eat seasonally. He, in turn, credits Lauranne for much of his success, but Lu cannot bear to ascribe anything positive to her brother’s second wife. To her, Lauranne is just a lucky hanger-on.

She misses Helena. Funny, bright, a lawyer. AJ says they broke up over the issue of children, yet AJ and Lauranne don’t seem to be interested in having children, either, although she’s still just young enough, in her thirties. But Lu can tell, by the way she interacts with Penelope and Justin-which is to say, the way she doesn’t interact-that Lauranne has no desire to be a mom. Fair enough. Let her eat vegetables and tie her body up in knots and live forever. AJ seems happy, which is all that matters.

Just before 7 P.M., as her father begins to fret on the timing of his meal, AJ and Lauranne arrive in their Subaru Forester. His anti-midlife crisis seems self-conscious to Lu at times, as if AJ thinks everyone is forever paying attention to every choice he makes. At least he hasn’t started wearing all hemp. Fit and lean at the age of fifty-three, he favors T-shirts and jeans, which favor him. Balding, he has gone whole hog and shaved his head. Go figure, he looks great. Lu still can’t help wondering why he was blessed with their mother’s cheekbones and large eyes, while she had to favor the Brant family tree, which runs to freckles. He hugs everyone with great enthusiasm, while Lauranne offers glancing embraces so weak and watery that it amazes Lu those same arms allow her to do headstands.

“Lu has her first murder,” their father says as they all sit down. The twins don’t even look up.

“Aren’t you the least bit curious about your mother’s new job?” AJ teases.

Justin shrugs. Penelope takes a long drink of milk that allows her not to answer. She plays it for laughs, holding up one finger to show that she’s busy.

“They’re so young,” Lu says quickly. She cannot bear for anyone to tease her children. And she doesn’t want them to dwell too much on what she does. They are prone to nightmares, apocalyptic scenarios in which they lose everyone they love.

“You were, what, five when I tried Sheila Compson’s killer?” their father says. “And you begged me for details. Of course, back then, there was a sense of propriety. Newspapers and television stations didn’t feel they had to report every lurid detail, thank God.”

AJ and Lu share a look over their father’s use of “back then,” a trigger phrase for him, a sign that he might hold forth on the way the world has changed. AJ steps in, trying to keep the conversation from heading down that track.

“I suppose it’s an interesting one if you’re taking it, not foisting it off on one of your deputies.”

“Are you calling me a showboat?”

“More a little prancing pony.” Only AJ can get away with that reference to Lu’s size. As a child, she sought out books about girls who were short, sturdy, freckled. Laura in the Little House books. (She hated the TV show, but loved the books.) Pippi Longstocking. Later, although not as late as one might suppose, Helen in The Group. And although her hair was more sandy than carroty, Lu always had a soft spot for Anne of Green Gables. But she never wanted anyone else to note her resemblance to these fictional alter egos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know him?”

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

“No, no-doesn’t ring a bell.”

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

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

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

“Addicts,” AJ corrects softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPERATOR, CAN YOU HELP ME PLACE THIS CALL?

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

Yet AJ insisted he needed his own phone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Luisa? Luisa, is that you?”

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

“Yes.”

“Don’t you know who this is?”

“Miss Maude?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What did she say to you, Lu?”

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

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said our father was wicked.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

“They didn’t want me?”

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

“What did they do?”

He paused, leaned forward, palms pressed together as if praying, his chin on the thumbs, his nose on the index fingers. “They were too protective. They acted like the parents in Sleeping Beauty. Only it wasn’t spindles that needed to disappear-it was everything. They would have had her live forever in her childhood bedroom, venturing out only under the most controlled circumstances.”

“Why did they start calling after all this time?”

“I don’t know. But they won’t be calling again. I’m going to get an unlisted number and install a second phone line for just you and AJ to use, although it will be in his bedroom for now.”

I wanted to argue that this was unfair, that if the phone were in AJ’s room, then it was his phone. But then my father might ask how often my friends called and I would have to admit that no one called me, ever.

“What do you say we go out for pizza tonight? I was in such a rush to get home after I heard about the calls that I didn’t stop at Colombo’s on my way.”

There was no such thing as grandparents’ rights at this time. But I did not know until recently that my careful father, who was not inclined to leave things to chance, took out a restraining order against his in-laws. Today, I suppose, such a thing would become public. Did you hear? The state’s attorney has a restraining order against his in-laws. People had more secrets then. Or maybe they were just better about keeping them.

At any rate, the three of us, a team, united, made the short drive to Colombo’s, our favorite pizza place. To this day, I find all pizza inferior to the memory of what I ate on Friday nights from Colombo’s. As a treat, we ate at the restaurant instead of getting carryout. We even had a whole pitcher of root beer to share. I was beside myself with joy, but AJ’s mood seemed grim. I tried to understand. AJ knew our grandparents, had loved them and been loved by them. I wasn’t being asked to give anything up. But AJ was, for a second time. Now, I can see it. AJ had lost his grandparents as surely as he had lost his mother. I never had either.

Both the Closters would be dead soon. It turned out that our grandmother decided to contact us because her husband was dying of pancreatic cancer. He was gone by that summer, and she followed within a year. There was no inheritance, not for us. When I lived in Mount Washington during the first years of my marriage, I sometimes drove a few miles out of my way to go past the Closters’ house. It has been chopped up into apartments, and the upkeep is minimal. But the stained-glass windows and the turret are still there. I would have loved to know that house in its glory. And I think I would have liked to have known my grandparents, but if my father thought I needed to be kept away from them, he must have had good reasons.

In contrast to AJ’s dark mood at Colombo’s that night, our father was unusually ebullient. He spoke to strangers, laughed at their jokes no matter how lame, shook hands. I think he even bought pitchers of beer for some tables.

“That was fun,” I whispered to AJ in the cozy cover of the dark backseat. He usually fought to ride in the front, as he was about to get his learner’s permit and wanted to study our father’s driving. “I wish we did things like that more often.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Go out. Talk to other people, like it was a party.”

“Well, sure,” AJ said. “The election is only eighteen months away. It’s time for Andrew Jackson Brant to pretend he actually likes people.”

Our father stiffened in the front seat, and the back of his neck reddened. Disrespect was a serious offense in our household, perhaps the most serious offense. “Don’t sass me,” he would say, his Virginia accent suddenly pronounced. Teensy, too, was hell on talking back. But our father said nothing even when AJ added: “Yes, sirree, Andrew Jackson Brant can do a darn good job of pretending to like hoi polloi, the people in whose name he serves. Most people would say the hoi polloi, but Andrew Jackson Brant would be the first to tell them that they’re wrong, it doesn’t require an article. People wonder where I get my acting chops from? Well, look no further. Andrew Jackson Brant could have been the Richard Burton of his day. Although he wouldn’t have married Adele Closter twice, I suppose, the way Burton did with Elizabeth Taylor. Andrew Jackson Brant never makes the same mistake twice.”

“I would have married your mother over and over again,” our father said.

“Isn’t that the very definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome?”

Our father braked sharply, although the light was green. Braked sharply, then turned onto the narrow road that led to the tennis courts behind the Village Center. The lights were on and AJ’s face looked even whiter in their eerie glow. He was terrified. As was I. Neither of us had ever pushed our father this far.

But, after a minute of suspenseful silence, our father said, without turning around: “I have no regrets, AJ. I don’t expect you to understand that, but it’s true.”

The next week, we went back to our Friday ritual of having take-out pizza. AJ began taking his slices to his room, talking on the phone while he ate, inserting folded triangles of cheese pizza into his mouth as if he were a sword swallower. I expected our father to reprimand him, but he never did.

JANUARY 12

A knock. Oh, bless the Lord, Lu thought, someone has started knocking on my door. It’s her secretary, Della, but that’s a start.

“Fred Hollister wants to know if he can get on your schedule this afternoon,” Della says. She’s Lu’s age, yet looks years older. Plump, matronly. Did people used to age at more or less the same rate when Lu was a child? More and more, aging seems to be a choice. A choice dictated by genetics and disposable income, but still a choice. After all, anyone can dye her hair, pick out wardrobes that won’t age her. But Della seems comfortable with her gray hair and cushiony frame.

“To discuss what?”

“He wouldn’t tell me, but he says it’s important, something he doesn’t want you to hear from anyone else.”

Intriguing. Lu’s mind runs through the various possibilities. She assumes it’s some hangover from Fred’s tenure, a case that’s going to boomerang back on appeal because of shoddy work by this office or the police department. She had plans for this afternoon, but she accepts that this has to take precedence. If Fred thinks she wants to hear it from him first, then she definitely does.

“Put him in for noon. I’ll eat at my desk.”

Seven days into her new job, Lu is still trying to get a handle on all the bureaucracy that comes with it. She gets up at four and answers e-mail for an hour, but it’s like fighting a hydra: for every reply she manages, another three crop up. Meetings, memos, memos about meetings. In the modern age, access cannot be curtailed. Back in the ’70s, her father had an office with six lines and no answering machine. No mobile phone, not even when the big clunky models became available in the ’80s. Maybe a beeper, she thinks, by his final term. A beeper. She feels like some futuristic creature whose every cell is available for sensory input. And it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that his/her message, call, memo is one of many, that what is urgent to them can be of a lower priority to her. To the sender or caller, that message is the only one, the crucial one. Lu worked all weekend to justify a long lunch away from the office and now she’s lost that reward.

When Fred arrives, he looks much more cheerful than the man who visited Lu only a week ago. More pampered, too. His gray suit is sharp, expensive looking, his graying hair recently trimmed, not that he has a lot of it. New glasses, tortoiseshell frames with a glint of gold at the temples. He’s actually whistling, although the first thing he says is: “Whoa-trigger warning. I swear I got a little PTSD walking in here.”

“Really? Your step is so springy. And that suit. Are you on someone’s payroll?”

“I am. Do you know Howard & Howard?”

“Of course I do, Fred. I was an assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore. With you. Remember? Howard & Howard is only one of the biggest law firms in the city.”

“Right. Of course. Anyway, I’m going to be doing criminal defense work for them. And I thought you should hear it from me: I’m defending Rudy Drysdale. Defending him-and invoking Hicks.”

“You want to go to trial within a hundred eighty days?”

“Yes. Jail is hard on Rudy. Every day he’s inside is an eternity for him. By the way, I also want a hearing on bond reduction. Rudy’s original counsel was, uh, somewhat over her head. I don’t know how your office got him locked up with no bail.”

“Because he’s a homeless man with no fixed address. But, hey, go for it. Even if you can get him bail, it’s going to be pretty high. Who’s paying for all this? Did you take this on pro bono?”

Fred laughs. “No, Howard & Howard made it quite clear that hiring me as a potential partner did not mean I was free from the burden of contributing to the bottom line, not yet. Maybe down the road I’ll have the luxury of cases that don’t pay. Rudy Drysdale is paying full freight.”

“How?” Lu asks. “He’s on SSI, and he can’t even stretch his check for a month. That’s why he broke into Mary McNally’s apartment, right?”

Fred lets that pass. “Arrangements have been made, don’t worry.”

“Aren’t you going to request a competency hearing?”

“I brought it up, but you know and I know he’s not going to meet the standard, so it’s a waste of time. My client’s only concern is that whatever happens needs to happen as soon as possible. Jail is physically painful to him and erodes his mental state. He needs to be outdoors. Do you know he walks, every day, all day, in all kinds of weather?”

Lu has no intention of telling Fred what she knows about Rudy Drysdale. Fred has some kind of ace in the hole. She needs to flush it out.

“Absent a new development,” she says, “I don’t see a deal on this one. So how fast do you want to go?”

“I can go as fast as you can. This will be the only thing on my plate for a while.”

So it’s a grudge match, pure and simple. Fred is going to try and show Lu that it wasn’t his fault that he pulled away from trials, that the state’s attorney has too much other stuff to do and can’t focus effectively on trial work. And it’s not a bad case for a good defense attorney. She wonders if he will argue that Rudy was in the apartment pre- or postmortem. Which would she argue, as a defense attorney? She runs through the possible scenarios. Premortem. He breaks in, then leaves, never even sees Mary McNally. Then why does he touch the thermostat upon departing? No, he’s going to stick to the postmortem discovery. Fred’s going to argue that Rudy didn’t adjust the thermostat, only that he touched it for some bullshit reason. He’s going to introduce a phantom third party, one who didn’t leave prints. He can spin whatever fairy tales he wants to spin. That’s the advantage of being a defense attorney.

“Fine,” she says. “My secretary will be in touch with the schedule. I’m really glad you landed on your feet, Fred. It’s nice to see you enthusiastic about a case. How did Rudy’s parents even know to contact you?”

“I didn’t say it was Rudy’s parents who contacted me,” he says.

“Who else would it be?” Lu asks.

He’s determined to have the last word: “By the way, even though I’m not challenging his competency, I am considering a ‘not criminally responsible’ plea.”

“He’ll still do time. He might do it at Patuxent”-Maryland’s facility with a unit for offenders with psychiatric problems-“but he’ll still be inside.”

“True. And in the end, I have to do what he wants to do. Rudy says he’s innocent. That’s good enough for me.”

As soon as Fred leaves, Lu goes to her computer and searches the county property database, then finds a reliable website for current real estate values. Rudy’s parents live on Rain Dream Hill, less than a mile from the Brants. Their house would have been among the earliest Columbia homes-modern then, stodgy now, with the best on the street valued at less than $500,000. The Drysdale house has no mortgage on it, not as of last week, but it’s valued at $375,000, and Google Street View indicates that’s a generous assessment. Another reason to invoke Hicks, then. A good defense will run more than $375,000, much more. Howard & Howard will assemble experts, jury selection coaches. They have a big timeline to play with-a lot can happen in a week. Lu has fingerprints and a witness who picked Rudy out of a lineup. She also has a man who has no history of violence, accused of beating a strange woman. Was she a stranger to him? Obliterating someone’s face is damn personal. They need to lean harder on that. Maybe Mary McNally volunteered somewhere or gave him a ride one day. Heck, she could even be the kind of softie who tried to give a homeless guy some task to do in her house. Lu’s going to lean on Mike and her own staff investigator to do more legwork on the victim.

She feels a surge of adrenaline. Lu has always been competitive. All the Brants are. Her father tried to curb this tendency in her, probably because he found it distinctly unfeminine. But this only made Lu more competitive. Fred wants to go all Montague and Capulet, avenge his honor? She won’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s personal, even if it is for him. She’ll win this case because she’s right, because a nice middle-aged lady walked into her apartment one night, probably still thinking dreamy thoughts about the leading man in The Theory of Everything, only to be strangled and then beaten.

She checks her calendar. She could reschedule her lunch for tomorrow or Wednesday. She calls out to Della, asks if she’s right about having that time free.

“It can work,” Della says, as she walks into Lu’s office and places a phone message slip on her desk. “I’ll make it work. Meanwhile, while you were with Fred, that woman who called the other day, Mrs. Schumann, asked that you call her back.”

“About what?”

“She still insists you would recognize her name.”

Lu doesn’t, not at all. And the number on Della’s pink memo is a California one, 650 something. She remembers that prefix from Gabe’s trips. She will remember that prefix forever. Of course, area codes mean nothing now, just an indication of where you got your first cell phone. She crumples the pink slip into a ball and makes a high, arching shot toward her wastebasket. It hits the rim, but it goes in. Her brother, who deigned to play basketball with her in their driveway on those rare occasions when his friends weren’t around, always told her: It doesn’t have to go in pretty, Lu. It just has to go in.

THE PEOPLE TREE

Columbia turned ten in 1977, the year I turned seven, but its birthday was a much bigger deal than mine, a series of events and concerts and fireworks. My father found what he called the “hoopla” mildly ridiculous, although he was careful not to express this view in public.

“Europe thought our bicentennial was a joke,” he said over dinner. It was spring, the sky was bright well into evening, and I stared longingly at the world beyond our supper table. Most evenings, there were just two of us. AJ, as it happens, was at rehearsal for one of the birthday concerts. “And here we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of an unincorporated town. But it would be impolitic for me not to attend all the festivities.”

“You’re in politics,” I said, confused.

“Exactly.”

I don’t think he minded, really. Much as he disliked celebrations about him, he wanted other people to enjoy themselves. I realized that night that we never had acknowledged my father’s birthday, which fell a week after mine. We never did anything to mark the day-at his insistence. Earlier that week, we had been assigned the task of making “spring tradition” cards-no Easter, no Passover in Columbia schools. I had spent my childhood creating holiday cards and Father’s Day cards, but never a birthday card, not for my father.

“Why don’t you have birthday parties?” I asked.

“It’s a week after yours, and yours is eight days after Christmas. The parties have to stop sometime.”

“But a birthday-everyone deserves a birthday,” I said. “It’s your special day, a day of your own day.” I had a little book that called it just that.

“I don’t think I merit attention for hanging around another year.”

“Are all grown-ups like that?” I was nervous that I might be expected to behave this way one day.

“No, not at all. Your mother loved hers. She turned it into a weeklong celebration sometimes.”

Later that evening, as I reported the conversation back to AJ, he gave me a scornful look. He had been giving me those looks more and more since he turned fifteen. “It’s the day Mom died, Lu. That’s why he doesn’t celebrate it.”

“How did she die, AJ?” I had asked this question before, but I still needed the reassurance that my birth had not killed her.

“Teensy said she just wasn’t made for this world and her heart finally gave out.”

“But not because of me, right? Not because she had a baby? Is that what our grandparents think? Is that why we don’t talk to them?”

“No, not because of you,” AJ said. “I think she got some infection or something in the hospital and it ate away at her heart. Because she was already weak. She was in bed most of the time she was pregnant with you.”

Still, didn’t that make it my fault? I decided to change the subject. “Daddy says it’s silly, having a celebration for a city’s ten-year-old birthday.”

“He can think what he likes,” AJ said. “But I was one of only sixty-six kids chosen to sing in the chorus. I think that’s a pretty big honor.”

The number sixty-six was not arbitrary. Ground for Columbia had been broken in 1966. A year later, the city had dedicated the People Tree, a gleaming metal statue of sixty-six intertwined human figures. Columbia’s official symbol, it had been erected near the shore of Lake Kittamaqundi. So when the celebration was planned, it was decided to have a townwide chorus of sixty-six teenagers. AJ wasn’t the least bit surprised to be one of them. AJ was never surprised to be picked for anything. Noel and Ariel made the cut, too, and Ariel even had a dance later in the program.

AJ assumed he would be given the big vocal solo. But that went to a boy not in their crowd, a tall, very dark-skinned freshman from Oakland Mills.

Davey.

Looking at Davey, one might have expected a baritone voice, a Paul Robeson kind of voice singing “Old Man River.” But perhaps that was just our unacknowledged bigotry, linking tone to color, as if all dark-skinned men were obligated to produce deep, dark notes. As it happened, when Davey showed up at the audition with nothing prepared, the chorus master suggested “Old Man River.” Davey didn’t know it. After a quick conference with the piano player, he decided to sing a Beatles song, “If I Fell.” AJ told me that his voice stunned everyone. He had a glorious tenor, not a baritone, and there was a simplicity to his phrasing that made familiar songs sound new again. He probably could have sung opera if he wanted to. Davey didn’t want to sing opera. He didn’t even want to be in the birthday concert. A teacher had tricked him into going to the audition, claimed the tryout was required for chorus, which he took only because it was an easy “A” for him. Davey played football and needed to keep his grades up, because his parents had said they would take him off the team if he didn’t maintain an A average. His parents’ standards were much higher than the school’s, which required only passing grades from its athletes. So Davey stood next to the piano, a reluctant star, and sang a Beatles song, assuming he wouldn’t be picked.

But if Davey did not understand how magical his voice was, AJ did. So did Noel. They sized him up-a freshman, like them, only a good six inches taller than AJ. Black. Coal black, midnight black. He was obviously going to be the soloist, taking the spot that AJ had assumed would be his. AJ, fiercely proud, probably decided that the only way to prove he couldn’t care less was to befriend Davey.

He brought Davey home that very night. Teensy fell all over herself, offering him things to eat and drink. She asked him to stay for dinner. Our father arrived home and also took an interest in Davey, peppering him with far more questions than he had ever asked of anyone else AJ had brought home-Noel, Bash, Ariel. He was excited, I think, that his son had a black friend. That sounds horrible, but in the context of 1977, it was-well, less so. Howard County was, overall, very white. Less than 15 percent of the population was nonwhite at the time; not quite 12 percent was African American. The numbers were different in Columbia proper, but not that different. People who grew up in Columbia during the 1970s remember it as an idyllic, postracial bubble. I don’t.

“Do you want to sing professionally?” our father asked Davey over dinner, a quiche Lorraine. (“But I can make you something else,” Teensy said, “if you don’t like it.” She never said that to me. Davey said it was all right, his mother made quiche all the time.)

“No, sir,” Davey said. “I like to sing, but I’m hoping that I can use football to get a scholarship to Stanford. I want to be a doctor.”

“How ambitious,” my father said.

“I guess so,” Davey said. “My dad’s a doctor. A surgeon at Hopkins. Oncology.”

My father coughed, gulped some wine. He seemed embarrassed. I wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t the kind of lawyer who sued doctors for malpractice. He gulped more wine, had another coughing fit.

“And you’re at Oakland Mills?”

“Yes, sir. But I’d like to switch to Wilde Lake. Is it true that you can go at your own pace, do courses-I’m not sure what you call it. Independently? I’d like to take extra science and math, and there’s no way to do that at my school. But I’ve got to take calculus in high school and at the rate I’m going, I’ll only make it through trig and analyt because I didn’t take Algebra two in middle school. My family moved to Columbia after I finished seventh grade and they didn’t realize that the math I took in the city was the same as Algebra I. They basically put me back a year in some courses and by the time we figured it out, it was too late to change.”

“I believe there are fewer independent courses than there once were,” my father said. “Most young people were not well suited to what’s called open space education. I remember when the school first opened, the promise was that students could go at their own pace. Now it’s more along the lines of-go at your own pace, but there is a minimum speed limit.” He chuckled at his own joke.

“Math and science don’t have as many self-directed classes,” AJ put in. “But if you’re supersmart, they make allowances. There are kids who come down from the middle school to take math because they’re so advanced. Dad, can’t you do something?”

“AJ, it would be unseemly for the state’s attorney to intervene in school district policy. However-Davey, have your parents call me. I can certainly give them advice about how to deal with county bureaucracy.”

Davey became a fixture in our house, the twosome of AJ and Noel easing seamlessly into a threesome. The other friends-Bash, Lynne, Ariel-were more like satellites. AJ, Noel, and Davey were the triumvirate, their group’s ruling power. It made sense for Davey to come home with AJ after rehearsals, as they could walk to our house from Merriweather Post Pavilion. The others in AJ’s group of freshman superstars approved of him, welcomed him. Bash liked having a guy who wanted to shoot hoops in our driveway. Ariel and Lynne flirted with him, although he didn’t flirt back. Davey’s parents didn’t want him to have a steady girlfriend.

The addition of Davey made their group even more outstanding. He was just so darn noticeable, taller and darker and, maybe, handsomer than the rest. (It’s hard to know if one’s brother is handsome, especially at age seven. But even Noel’s beauty-there’s no other word for it-was eclipsed by Davey’s good looks.) AJ was the undisputed leader within the group, but Davey was its beacon, drawing attention to them. It was odd when that Life magazine article about Wilde Lake High School came out later that year and Davey wasn’t in the photo. We had already become accustomed to looking for him. Have you ever tailgated at a big football game? In order to be found in the crowds, some people plant distinctive flags, then say things like: “Find us at the Flying Crawfish.” The College Park crowd that Gabe knew flew Testudo, the fighting Terrapin mascot of the University of Maryland. Anyway, Davey was like that. Spot him and you would find the rest.

Merriweather Post Pavilion had been endowed by the cereal heiress of the same name and was intended to be the home of a serious symphony. But by Columbia’s tenth year, the Frank Gehry-designed amphitheater was a venue for pop concerts, from Jimi Hendrix to Frank Sinatra. You could sit in seats under the shell or bring a picnic basket and camp out on the surrounding lawn. The night of the birthday concert, my father and I had seats. I was disappointed, but my father was never going to be the picnic-blanket type of father. Even on a warm June night, he insisted on wearing his work clothes, or part of them: seersucker pants, a long-sleeved white shirt, a bow tie, and a hat. At seven, I was still too young to be horrified by a relative’s clothing choices. My disastrous fling with fashion would not be for another two years. And I was not embarrassed by my father, not yet. I did not see that he was older than most parents, or that he, like me, had few real friends. Many collegial acquaintances, but no real friends. I did not realize how much of a loner he was, in contrast to AJ. Even then, I sometimes wondered if my brother courted Davey because his talents in music and sports exceeded AJ’s. One of the few mean things I ever heard AJ say about anyone, back then, was when Davey was offered a free ride to Stanford three years later: “Well, he plays football. I’d get a lot of scholarship offers, too, if I played football instead of soccer.”

Noel had given him a look. “Not to mention that he’s black, right?”

“There’s not a prejudiced bone in my body,” AJ said.

“Of course there isn’t.”

But that was later. That night, the chorus, sixty-six strong, sang stirring anthems of patriotism and community. One of them, oddly, was the title song from the musical Milk and Honey, rewritten to fit the occasion and scrubbed of its Israel-specific lyrics. Davey’s voice soared over the rest: This lovely land is mine. This lovely land is mine. This lovely land is mine. I officially abandoned my crush on Noel and fixed my affections on Davey. As the song reached its climax, a scrim depicting the Tree of Life fell and somehow it seemed as if the chorus had become a living, breathing Tree of Life.

My father, in his seat next to me, allowed himself a quiet snort, which he masked with his handkerchief as if it were a sneeze.

“Wasn’t that great? Didn’t you love it?” I asked my father.

“I can’t help thinking of another tree of people, another song,” he said. “A much darker song, but a truer one, called ‘Strange Fruit.’ I guess I’m just an old grouch.” My father squeezed my shoulder. “Do you want to stop at the 7-Eleven for a Slurpee?”

I did.

Sometime over the summer, it was worked out that Davey would attend Wilde Lake. I never knew the circumstances. I think I just assumed AJ made it happen. He had that kind of power. He had decreed that they were to be a group of six now, and so they were. (The truth was more prosaic. Davey’s parents had found a large house in Hobbit’s Glen, much more to their taste, and although it was zoned for Centennial High School, the new school was so oversubscribed that they had no trouble getting Davey into Wilde Lake-at Davey’s insistence.) The six did everything as a group. When Lynne and Bash started pairing off, AJ didn’t approve-not because he was prudish about sex, but because he thought it bad for the group. Luckily, Lynne and Bash didn’t really care that much about being boyfriend and girlfriend. They just liked to have sex.

I saw them once, that summer between their freshman and sophomore year of high school. Our father had to go out of town for an annual meeting, something to do with being a state’s attorney. Teensy had a wedding in her family and my father decided that AJ, although only fifteen, was old enough to be in charge for a night. No parties, my father said. Of course, AJ said. And had a party. Bash found a burnout college kid who was happy to buy them beer and liquor at the Village Green. They weren’t really drinkers, but it was almost obligatory to have booze at a parent-free party. AJ put me in my father’s bed with a pound of peanut M &Ms and the remote control for the small black-and-white TV on top of what our father called a chifforobe. He told me that I could do whatever I wanted, but that I must stay in my father’s room except to visit the bathroom that connected it to my room. I wasn’t sure what they were doing that was so secretive. There was music and conversation, that sweet burning smell I had noticed before. I watched a horror film, one in which Leave It to Beaver’s dad ended up underground with the Mole People. I wanted to go to the bathroom, but what if the Mole People were under my father’s high, old-fashioned bed? If I climbed down from the bed, they would reach out and grab my ankles and drag me down to that terrible place, where I would be enslaved. But I had consumed almost a gallon of orange soda. There was no way I could make it through the night. I calculated that if I leaped from the bed, I might land out of arm’s reach of the Mole person. I jumped, landing on my knees, then made my way to the bathroom without incident. The house was quiet. I assumed everyone had gone home. I decided my own room would be a cozier place to sleep even if it didn’t have a television, so I cracked the door, checking carefully for any sign of Mole People.

And then I saw them.

Saw Bash, who was completely naked, which made an impression on me. My father was modest. I had never seen him or even AJ without clothes. I had never seen a man naked, not even his buttocks. Bash was so broad that I couldn’t see anything of Lynne’s body except her face over his shoulder. Her face looked very serious. Stern, a mean teacher face. She bit her lip, whispered in his ear. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” Yet she looked as if it were hurting, as if she yearned for him to stop. Bash made no noise at all. He barely seemed to be breathing. He tried to kiss her, but Lynne twisted her face to the side. “No, no. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Dammit. You-Let me show you-” She made some adjustment in the dark. Whatever they were doing-and I knew, yet I didn’t know-she was better at it, I could tell. She had done it before and Bash hadn’t. She was like AJ, trying to teach me basketball. I remember the others teasing Lynne about a student teacher who had given her rides home from cheerleader practice and it began to make sense. I was at that age where so much begins making sense, where stray facts and memories lingered in some waiting room of the brain until context came and took them by the hand.

Lynne hissed: “Yes. Yes. That’s it. You can do it, Bash. You can do it.”

“I am doing it,” he said in wonder. He rose up. He looked like a merman, swimming along the tops of the waves.

I backed away, not even trying to close the door. I got into my father’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. Now I really couldn’t sleep. So that was sex. I knew, but I didn’t know. My father had done that with my mother. Had Teensy done it? But she didn’t have kids, so, no. Grown-ups everywhere did that thing. Did this make Lynne and Bash grown-ups? Lynne wasn’t much taller than I was. She was the cheerleader who was always at the top of the pyramid. But she had looked and sounded like a woman. Whereas Bash had a grown-up man’s body and a boy’s face. Would they get married? Would I get to go to the wedding? Would I be their flower girl? I didn’t want to be a flower girl. Or maybe I did.

Teensy came over on Sunday afternoon to check on us. The house was immaculate by then, every trace of the party swept away. It was too clean and Teensy stalked around, smelling a rat. But all she found was my mess-the empty bag of peanut M &Ms, the jug of soda. Plus, I had a full-on stomachache that I couldn’t conceal. I confessed to everything-the bad food, the horror movies, sleeping in my father’s bed. I said AJ had no idea what I was up to, that he had stayed in, as instructed, listening to records and watching television.

“What did he have for dinner?” Teensy asked.

I was a lawyer’s daughter. I saw how she was trying to box me in.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Did he offer to fix you anything? There were hot dogs and some frozen pizzas.”

“He probably did, but I wasn’t hungry.”

“After eating a pound of candy? I guess not, you fool.” She sat on my bed, felt my forehead. Teensy didn’t really believe in illness. Absent a fever or vomit, a child was not allowed to stay in bed on Teensy’s watch. But I must have looked ragged that day because she took pity on me, left me in my own bed, even brought in the little b &w television from her room, the one that we watched on a tray on those rare occasions we were allowed to stay home from school.

I dozed off and on in front of the television. I always did. My father did that, too. Still does. He’d rather fall asleep in his chair, the television droning as he reads, than go to bed. It was a Sunday, so a movie was on, but it was just adults talking. People whispered, told secrets. With my eyes closed, I saw Bash and Lynne again. Saw Bash, the freckled merman, riding the waves, his head thrown back as if he were about to sing. Milk and honey, milk and honey, milk and honey.

“Teensy,” I croaked from my bed. “Could I have some graham crackers?”

“No, but you can have some saltines and flat Coca-Cola.” Teensy believed those two things to be medicinal.

I sat up in bed, licking the salt from the Premium saltines. I had seen two people having sex. It was big news, enormous news, but I had no one to tell. Teensy would want to know about the party, and I owed it to AJ not to reveal that. A pound of M &Ms buys a steadfast silence. It didn’t occur to me that the others-AJ, Noel, Ariel, Davey-had not seen what I saw, might not know what I know. I had no real friends at school, not the kind that I could share such secrets with. Strangely, the person I wanted to tell was my father. I wondered if he knew that people did it when they weren’t trying to have a baby because I’m pretty sure he had told me that was the only reason to have sex. But maybe Lynne and Bash wanted to have a baby. Then again, they couldn’t drive yet and I absolutely knew you had to have a driver’s license before you had a baby. My dad had sex twice, I thought, once for AJ and once for me. I bet he was glad he didn’t have to have it anymore. It looked messy and painful.

I was a spy. I was every spy that ever was. I was Velma on Scooby-Doo. I was Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Trixie Belden, the Hardy Boys. I was Harriet the Spy, although I had not met her yet, but I would, soon enough. They were waiting for me, another member of their clan of spies, snoops, and truth tellers. I opened drawers, searched medicine cabinets and pigeonholes, pressed my ear to walls, looked through keyholes. I thought I knew everything. I thought I was entitled to know everything, that the world was conspiring to keep me in the dark.

JANUARY 13

“Do you like this? Do you?”

Lu tries to make clear exactly how she feels about the fingers digging into her scalp, pulling her hair, but the sensation keeps changing, the pain keeps moving. She is on her stomach and the natural instinct should be to crawl away, futile as that might be, but strong hands grab her waist and flip her, so now she is facing him as he enters her and she gasps-she’s lying on a sisal rug, rough on bare flesh under any circumstances.

Then she sees Bash’s face and she starts to laugh. After all these years, she can’t quite get over the fact that he looks like Huckleberry Finn, with his freckles and chipped tooth and never-quite-combed hair.

“When you laugh like that, it’s hard to keep going,” Bash says, and he pushes harder.

“Oh-no-it’s”-she needs a breath or two for each syllable-“it’s-per-fect. Don’t. Stop.”

“I never do.”

He doesn’t. Bash at fifty-three is as priapic as a teenager, always ready, inexhaustible. Well, always ready for Lu, whom he sees once or twice a month in this sterile “corporate” apartment in Bethesda. She’s not sure he’s always ready for his wife of seven years, a hard number who lives in Capitol Hill in what Lu assumes is a drop-dead gorgeous town house. She has never been invited there. AJ, who has, dismissed it as “showy,” which told her nothing. But is it in good taste? she had yearned to ask her brother. Or just a little tacky? She knows the wife is drop-dead gorgeous and not the least bit tacky. Bash brought her to Gabe’s funeral, although his flirtation with Lu had begun a few months earlier. It was probably only the timing of Gabe’s death that kept Lu from becoming an adulteress; she was well on her way to sleeping with Bash when Gabe died. One might think that a husband’s sudden death would shake a woman up, force her to wonder if the universe was sending her a message about the affair she was considering in her head.

One would be wrong. Lu tried to resist Bash, but he had picked up a scent on Lu and pursued her relentlessly. He knew before she did that she was a woman who would revel in a truly secret affair, one that was all about sex, sex that pushed past some boundaries. Lu had been a late bloomer-a virgin until college, married in her twenties to her third-ever real boyfriend. In blue jeans and T-shirt, hair under a baseball cap, she could still pass for a boy from the back. Which explained why she didn’t wear such things. It had been a bizarre kind of relief when the flirtation-e-mails, phone calls, odd little gifts left anonymously at her office-finally ended and they settled into a straight sex thing. The flirtation had been the real betrayal of Gabe. The sex-that’s merely the betrayal of Lucinda, Bash’s wife. But that’s not Lu’s problem. Is it?

Spent, she makes her way to the bathroom on wobbly legs. She has a large bruise on her buttocks, but who will see it there? She doesn’t wash, not yet. He will probably want to go again, given how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, how hard it is to find time since the election. She has let her secretary infer that she’s in therapy in D.C., which would require about three hours with travel time. She has confided something similar to Andi, although indicating she was seeing someone for ob-gyn issues of a vague-but-serious nature. Andi obligingly spread the gossip through the office, then blamed it on Della, who would never betray Lu that way. Thank God she never told Andi the real story, back when they were deputies together. Even then, before Lu had decided to own her real ambition, she understood that this must be a locked room inside her life, a place to which no one can ever be admitted. It scared her at first, the things she wanted to do with Bash, the things she let him do to her. But it thrills her more.

They do not consider what they do to have a name. Not quite an affair, yet more than sex, with a singular appetite for each other, although Lu assumes Bash sees other women. They are rough, but not particularly kinky, sexual soul mates who think it should be sweaty and athletic. Her other lovers, all five of them, were so damn careful with Lu, probably because of her size. Occasionally, she and Bash have sweet, tame sex, although that’s usually when one of them is a little under the weather. Last time, way back in November, a week before the general election, Bash had lain beneath her and said, “Fuck this cold right out of me, State’s Attorney Brant.” And she did.

She had not been drawn to Bash when he was part of her brother’s group. She’d had a crush on Noel, then Davey, never Bash. He was a bigger, brawnier version of her, which didn’t appeal at all. And she was a child, eight years his junior, precocious of mind, but not body, so he had certainly never noticed her. Their chance meeting in a Whole Foods six years ago had not seemed particularly portentous at the time, not to her. Bash says it was lust at first sight for him.

“Lu?” asked the man in the expensive cashmere coat, who a few minutes before had been staring morosely at the sausages and blocking her access to the good bacon.

She needed a beat to place him. “Bash. I’m sorry, you probably don’t go by that nickname anymore. AJ tells me you’re a lobbyist.”

“Is that what I am? Today I am a henpecked husband, trying to find sausages for my wife, who says they can’t have so much as a gram of sugar. But I can’t find a single sausage that meets her criterion.”

Lu flipped through the packages. They were in Baltimore’s Mount Washington neighborhood, only blocks from the home she shared with Gabe at the time, but certainly far afield for a Washington lobbyist. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to buy sausages, obviously. And failing.”

“No, I mean in Mount Washington.”

“Oh, I have a client who lives in a huge spread not far from here. Claims the house belonged to Napoleon.”

“If you mean the house on Lake Avenue, it was Jérôme Bonaparte, and even his connection is tenuous at best. Isn’t it owned by some tech billionaire?”

“God, I hope he’s a billionaire or I have really wasted my afternoon. You’re married to one, too, right?”

“A billionaire? I don’t think so.”

“But a big tech guy. Gabriel-Schwartz?”

“Swartz. I still go by Brant.”

He snapped his fingers. “Right. He gets a lot of ink. You sure he’s not a billionaire?”

“Pretty sure.” She laughed, but it was to cover her embarrassment at her husband’s wealth. He was worth only $20 million. Only. “Look, here’s one that has less than one gram and it has pineapple, so that’s probably why it has any sugar at all. Will that do?”

“I don’t dare improvise. My wife gives very explicit instructions and expects them to be followed. I better call herr kommandant.”

“I think you mean frau,” Lu said icily.

She loathed men who portrayed their wives as nags and terrors. Eight months later, she was in bed with one. Although Lu and Bash don’t talk much-there is so much else to do-Bash’s wife often features in the conversations they do manage to have. Her special diets, her exacting workouts. She is Bash’s second wife, younger than Lu by at least five years. His first wife lives in Columbia with their two children, although in the western part, in the most desirable school district. That once provided cover for Bash to take the occasional room at the Columbia Inn, but it’s no longer possible for Lu to come and go there, convenient as it may be. It was risky enough when she was an assistant state’s attorney. So they use this corporate apartment he maintains in Bethesda, where he does absolutely no business, not that Lucinda-the non-Lu, the never-Lu, the not-you-Lu Bash calls her-has ever thought to wonder about this. Bash lives larger than Gabe ever dared, and Lu senses it’s more of a strain than he lets on. But that’s his problem. One of the great charms of Bash is that his problems are his. She’s not expected to solve them. She barely even listens to them.

Lu tells herself that she would never have started with Bash if he had children with Lucinda. She also tells herself that every time is the last time. And that their discretion means no one is harmed by what they do, the occasional bruise aside. She even congratulates herself on the concept of an affair as sensible time management for the busy widow with two children. Bash requires so much less attention than a husband or a boyfriend would. Three hours a month. Six, if she’s lucky.

“Come back here,” he calls. Demands. “I’m not finished.”

Ja, Herr Kommandant.

This time, it’s almost disappointingly normal at first, Bash on top of her, although his weight alone is enough to create a sensation of discomfort in this position. Then, toward the end, he grips her shoulders, hard.

“No marks,” she breathes. “Don’t leave marks that someone could see.”

He doesn’t listen, just continues to press on her shoulders. They don’t use safe words. Again, that would mean labeling what they do, when part of the thrill is not organizing it under any banner, belonging to a club with only two members. “Trust me,” he says, but his voice is guttural, harsh, not at all conducive to trust. But that’s the fun part, says the little piece of her mind that stands back.

Later, as they dress, he produces a distinctive orange box. There is an Hermès scarf inside, a pattern of leaves in muted browns and golds. Perfect for her, Lu thinks, and not at all flattering to Lucinda, who has Snow White coloring. So it can’t be a castoff. He really bought this for her.

“This will cover that one place where I gnawed on you a little,” he says sheepishly, his manner that of a little boy offering something to a girl he likes.

“So you planned-”

“I never plan anything beyond the time. But I wanted to give you something to commemorate your new job. Is that okay? And then I wanted to take you somewhere you’ve never gone. I did that, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

She kisses him, and it’s only a matter of seconds before they begin clawing at each other. It has been three months, after all. But there have been longer gaps over the years they’ve been meeting each other, so that can’t be the sole reason. Something has changed. She is new again, her title excites him. Her clothes are off in seconds, except for the scarf, which he ties around her eyes. The headboard slaps rhythmically against the wall, the sound familiar. It reminds her of the tiny wavelets of Wilde Lake, lapping at the shoreline. “Don’t stop,” she murmurs. “Don’t stop.” A vague memory tugs, but the present is stronger than the past. She wants to stay here, in this room, as long as possible. This is the only place where she is allowed just to be-no kids, no employees, no pink message slips. It’s as if time stops in this room.

Then she goes outside and is surprised to see the sun is already setting. It’s an orange sunset today, fiery and rude, a light that makes her glow, brings out the more subtle hues in her new scarf.

KODACHROME

It is possible to anticipate something ferociously, then one day forget that it’s happening at all. Part of this is the passage to adulthood; birthdays fade in importance, holidays become something to be endured. I know there are grown-ups who still become excited about Christmas, although I find them suspect. Part of the reason I agreed with Gabe to raise Penelope and Justin as Jews is because I wanted to be done with Christmas. The tree, the stockings, the crash that happens in every household sometime between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. on December twenty-fifth, when it’s all done and the first toy has broken and the kids are frayed from sugar and overstimulation.

Yet Christmas is back in our lives, with a vengeance. I made the mistake of having a holiday open house two years ago, in part to showcase what my father has done with the house, and it became a tradition, just that fast. Even this year, as I prepared to take office, I was still expected to put out platters of smoked salmon and cold turkey, make or procure cheese straws. Inevitably, I feel Gabe looking over my shoulder-not scolding, but disappointed that I would break a promise. However, I made the promise to a living man. His death invalidated all promises as far as I’m concerned. Heck, if I had been the one to abandon him by dying, he would have been married within the year, probably to some happy-to-stay-at-home little lady. His presence was especially strong at this year’s Christmas party, but perhaps that was because Bash, much to my annoyance, conned AJ into inviting him. Only Bash, no Lucinda. I’m not sure what he thought he was doing, but I was careful not to go anywhere alone in the house, not to drop my guard for a second.

Where was I? Oh, anticipation. Yes, it’s in adult life that we begin to lose track of things that once shaped our years, those little peaks of celebration-birthday, Christmas-and find ourselves living mostly in the valleys, and content to do so. This jadedness begins happening earlier than we might realize. In the fall of 1976, Life magazine had come to Wilde Lake High School and posed the then freshmen in the bleachers for what was to be a cover story about the Class of 1984, the year in which AJ and his friends would graduate from college. For weeks, they spoke about it constantly. Would the photo be big enough to show everyone? If so, would they be recognizable? And the accompanying article itself? Would they be interviewed, would they be identified as the best and the brightest? Why wasn’t the reporter more interested in them, so clearly the stars of the school?

Magazines worked exceedingly slowly then and by the time the article was published, almost everyone had forgotten it. When it showed up on newsstands in the fall of 1977, it was more like a hangover: bleary, vague, unpleasant.

The first disappointment was that my brother’s class was not on the cover. Instead, there was a girl in a sky-blue rugby shirt, caught midcheer under the heading: THE NEW YOUTH. Other words on the cover included TOUGH, CARING, WARY, PRACTICAL, and SUPERCOOL. Even at the time, I was not convinced that these things were particularly “new.” To be tough, caring, wary, practical, and supercool was to be an adolescent, then and always. But it was the fashion, then, to keep creating this narrative of innocence and a subsequent fall from grace. People were innocent before the JFK assassination, before Charles Manson, before Vietnam, before Altamont, before Watergate. It’s true, the concept of childhood is relatively modern, but I can’t imagine there was ever a time in which people were born anything but innocent. I don’t believe in innate evil. On the rare occasion that I’ve met a true sociopath, the person has been beyond evil. They want what they want and they don’t care how they get it. (This always makes me think of Pinkalicious, a book beloved by my twins: sociopaths get what they get and they do get upset.) Anyway, I hadn’t consciously worked this out when I saw the cover of Life magazine, but I think my letdown was more than disappointment that my brother wasn’t there. I was, as always, looking for guidance and gurus, information about this strange world that awaited me. Grown-ups were forever saying, “If you’re like this now, imagine when you’re a teenager.” Even my father said it. He and Teensy made my still far-off adolescence sound as if I were on the verge of becoming a werewolf. I was going to be wild, unpredictable, dangerous.

But also: Tough, Caring, Wary, Supercool, and Practical.

Okay, maybe not practical. But AJ was, as were his friends. Now in their sophomore year, they were doing practice runs for the PSAT, in hopes of scoring high enough in their junior year to win National Merit scholarships. They were beginning to game the college application process, ensuring they had a balance of extracurricular interests, visiting the guidance counselor and coming away with glossy brochures. Future generations would be more practical still. They would have to be. Whereas it was considered ambitious to set one’s sights on Stanford, as Davey had as a freshman, it verges on impossible dreaming now. Last year, Stanford admitted slightly more than 5 percent of applicants. Harvard was at 5.9 percent. Yale, AJ’s alma mater, was 6.26 percent. I used to tell myself that my twins, if they fancied Yale, at least had a sort of double legacy with their father and uncle. But maybe I shouldn’t count on that anymore.

At any rate-because AJ and his crew had serious plans for their future, they were dismayed when they read the actual article. A series of unattributed quotes grouped under headings-“Sex,” “Alcohol and Drugs,” “The Future,” “Clothes”-it coalesced into a portrait of aimless, disaffected youths. (“Pot is, like, everywhere.”) AJ was now appalled that he and his friends were so easily identified in the group photo that accompanied the article, front and center in the bleachers. For several days at dinner, he held forth about how the piece had been unfair and slanted. He worried that it could affect his chances at the college of his choice, or cost him the summer job he coveted, as an intern at the Columbia Flier. Finally, our father said to him: “Why not write a letter to the editor, making all these arguments? Or, better still, write your own piece, tell the truth as you see it.”

The gauntlet thrown, AJ did just that. He wrote an article for the Flier, in which he described his friends and their interests. He broke down their days, hour by hour, detailing the life of the overscheduled child long before such a concept was fashionable. (He conveniently left out the information that they did, in fact, smoke pot all the time.) The piece, which appeared under the headline THE CLASS OF ’84 HAS ITS SAY, argued that AJ and his friends were making their way in the world, as every generation had, and were entitled to their mistakes and missteps. “The influences that will shape us are unknown at this point,” AJ wrote. “We will probably never go to war-it’s unlikely there will ever be a war again that involves Western countries.” (Yes, people believed that in 1977.) “We will almost certainly enjoy a higher standard of living than our parents, and isn’t that what they want for us? But how will we get there? What is the path we will take? Most of us have learned life from the Game of Life, and the only thing we know for certain is that taking the shortcut that allows you to bypass college means you will have less earning power. But, according to the rules, anyone can end up on the Poor Farm with just one bad spin.”

A few weeks after his piece appeared, an editor from a New York publishing house contacted our father and asked if AJ could expand his piece into a memoir. A few years earlier, a young woman had enjoyed success with such a book, published when she was only nineteen, and AJ was younger still. A book-length treatment of the same issues could be a sensation.

Our father brought the offer to AJ, advising him: “I don’t think you should.”

“Why not?” AJ asked. “I might make a lot of money.”

“We don’t have to worry about money.”

“Everyone has to worry about money,” AJ said. “Almost all the scholarships are needs-based now. You make just enough that I can’t get one, no matter what my grades or SAT scores are.”

“You would have to give up your privacy. Can you put a price on that? And”-a significant pause here, the kind he used in closing arguments-“you would have to tell the truth.”

We were at the dinner table. It was not a serious conversation. When our father was intent on serious conversations, he took us into his room and closed the door. Yet there was something about his tone that sounded grave to me, as if he were suggesting that AJ did not always tell the truth.

“Of course I would be honest,” AJ said.

“Then it’s your decision.”

For a week, AJ came home and attacked our father’s manual typewriter with great focus. But he was in the fall play, Zoo Story, and rehearsals began to run later and later. And he was trying to study for the PSATs, while still playing soccer. The memoir was discarded. AJ was a magpie in his youth, saving everything in a file cabinet. But when I went to look for those pages recently, there was no trace of them. I wish he had saved his nascent memoir. I would have loved to read his version of his life, then and now. My brother was achingly sincere. That’s the thing that no one understands. I’m not sure even AJ grasped that part of his nature, and what a burden it was to carry into adulthood. People say it’s hard to be good. It’s harder still to be famous for being good, to find that balance between sincerity and sanctimony. But I believe AJ managed to do it.

JANUARY 14

Lu makes her way carefully up the walk of the shabby house on Rain Dream Hill. There is a fine layer of sleet on the sidewalks this morning, and although some of the homeowners have treated their sidewalks with chemical melts, the walkway in front of the Drysdale house is untouched. Besides, she’s always sore the day after a “lunch” with Bash. She may have a gymnast’s build, but she doesn’t have the elasticity. Lu is that rare modern woman who doesn’t exercise, not in any organized way. She doesn’t have to. She walks in the morning, sometimes before the sun comes up, but that’s more for her mind than her body. There’s no compelling reason for her to work out-her weight is steady, all the markers of good health are where they should be. Blood pressure, cholesterol. But the day after an afternoon with Bash, her body reproaches her for not taking better care of herself. A little yoga at the very least, it begs her. But when would she have time?

Both Drysdales meet her at the door, grim and unhappy wraiths, American Gothic without the pitchfork. They are one of those couples who look like brother and sister-small, with fine bones and surprisingly dark hair, only a dusting of white at the temples. Well into their seventies, they look even older. Their faces are deeply lined and yellow, with a rubbery sheen. Smokers. Lu knows that before she comes across the threshold. The smell is thick on them, hangs in the house like a haze.

“Mr. Hollister says we don’t have to talk to you,” Mr. Drysdale says, even as he opens the door wider to let her in.

“You don’t,” she says. “But I’ll remind you, you’re not his clients. Rudy is. You’re just footing the bill. Fred will do what’s best for Rudy. That’s his job. Eventually, you will have to talk to me-and a grand jury. I thought it a kindness to meet in private-without Rudy’s attorney charging you an hourly rate.”

There is a formal living room to the right of the front door, but they lead her to the family room at the back of the house, nothing more than an alcove off the kitchen. This throwback to the ’70s could never be described as a “great room.” The kitchen appears to have been untouched since the house was built. The appliances are what was once called Harvest Gold, and the adjacent sitting area is tiny by the standards of today’s McMansions. A sliding glass door leads to a small square of deck; Lu knows there will be another glass door below, leading to the walk-out basement, a feature in almost all Columbia homes of the ’70s. But the home’s dominant feature are piles. Piles of books, piles of magazines, piles of newspapers. A pile of shirts on hangers, draped across an easy chair. When Lu perches on the plaid sofa, it emits dust and a smell she can’t identify, although it seems vaguely animal. Not animal waste, but-something musky, furry, as if a dog once slept here.

“You’ve lived here how long?” she asked.

“Since 1977. We moved here from the city. Rudy wasn’t happy at Southern High School. We thought Wilde Lake High School, being different, might be good for him.”

“That wasn’t so unusual then. My brother’s best friend came here for similar reasons. He had been asked to leave Sidwell Friends in D.C.”

She is trying to be polite and friendly, offering this anecdote in the spirit of commiseration, but they seem mystified by her comment, unsure of what to say. They are socially awkward people. Given their own limitations, perhaps they never recognized their son’s problems. Oddness used to be more acceptable. Some people were just weird. Now anyone who seems the least bit off has to have a label, a diagnosis, be “on the spectrum.”

“How old was Rudy when he was diagnosed?” She intentionally doesn’t name a diagnosis and is curious to see if they provide one.

“Nineteen.” Mr. Drysdale is the spokesman. Mrs. Drysdale keeps her eyes on his face. Their connection is wordless, almost telepathic. “He was a really good student, but college was hard for him.”

“Where did he go?”

“Bennington.” Almost thirty-five years after the fact, this still seems to give the parents a little lift. It was probably the highlight of their lives, seeing their son admitted to Bennington. How had they afforded that? “He wasn’t prepared for the darkness.”

“Depression?”

“No, how dark the days were, by the end of that first semester. The sun goes down early in New England. He cared about light. He was a photographer, a good one. He couldn’t deal with the dark. Even when he was a teenager, he needed to be outside a lot. He walked everywhere. There was one doctor-this was recent-who thinks he had a vitamin D deficiency. Or maybe SAD, that seasonal thing. Anyway, the doctor says Rudy is self-medicating when he walks. That’s why we’re worried about him not getting bail.”

Cause and effect. Everyone wants there to be a reason, any reason, for the inexplicable things that happen in our world, especially the things our children do. He’s tired. She’s hungry. We haven’t adhered to the schedule. And sometimes those reasons apply. But sometimes-how often?-the wheel spins and you get a damaged kid.

“Was he ever violent?”

Mrs. Drysdale runs her tongue around her lips, says nothing. “No,” Mr. Drysdale says with as much firmness as he can muster. Then: “We’ve already decided not to have a competency hearing. Mr. Hollister says it’s a waste of our resources. A waste of his time. And money.”

“I know. He wants to go very swiftly-he’s even invoking Hicks, the rule that says I have to take the case to court within one hundred eighty days. But you know I can challenge that, right? Ask for an exemption if I think it’s warranted?”

Their eyes are round, innocent, troubled. “He didn’t think you would, though,” Mr. Drysdale says.

Fred does know her pretty well. Give him that. He knew she would rise to the challenge of fast-tracking this. Has she fallen into a trap?

“Even if we do have the trial before the hundred-and-eighty-day deadline-you have no idea how much this is going to cost. Your son’s defense. And you’re not obligated to pay it. I’m sure when Fred came to you-”

“We called him.”

Their instant chorus at this convinces Lu that they didn’t, but they’ve been coached to say as much.

“Who suggested Fred?”

“Rudy’s public defender. We told her we had-come into some money, that we were going to take a mortgage on the house, said we wanted to hire someone. At least, I think that was the sequence of events. Things have happened-so fast. Ten days ago, we didn’t even know Rudy was sleeping rough again.”

“Isn’t that a British term?”

“It is.” Mrs. Drysdale is allowed to speak to this at least. “But Rudy liked it. He said it was more like the way he lived. He wasn’t homeless. Our door was always open to him. Always.”

“As long as he was willing to abide by a few house rules,” Mr. Drysdale mutters.

“Our door was always open to him. He is our son.” The second part of Mrs. Drysdale’s comment, made under her breath, seems directed more at her husband than at Lu.

“When was the last time you saw him?” No answer. “Christmas? Thanksgiving?” Lu, who feels herself in danger of sinking into the rump-sprung sofa, leans forward. “I mean, when was the last time he stayed with you?”

Mrs. Drysdale’s eyes dart back and forth. Arthur Drysdale has his arms crossed on his chest. Something happened here. Lu’s mind races through the possibilities. Her eyes sweep over Mrs. Drysdale, but it’s Mr. Drysdale who has uncrossed his arms and started to rub his right thigh about midway up on the outside, kneading it with his knuckles.

“I’m sorry, I’m so scattered-when was the last time Rudy lived with you,” she repeats while standing, so the question will feel tossed off, conversational, something said to fill the silence of departure.

“It was 2013,” Mrs. Drysdale says swiftly. “For the summer. He was with us all summer back in 2013.”

“Not a single night since then?”

“Not a single night.” But it’s Mr. Drysdale who says this.

Medical records are private, but some ambulance records are public. It takes much of the afternoon, but by 5 P.M., Lu has found what she needs: a private ambulance transported someone from the house on Rain Dream Hill to Howard County Hospital on August 5, 2013. No 911 call, but the emergency room would have informed the police if they had any suspicions it was a criminal matter. Working backward, Lu finds a police report for the address, made three days later, but no mention of Rudy Drysdale-who, as his mother just told her, lived with them the summer of 2013. Arthur Drysdale had come into the emergency room with a stab wound to his right thigh. He blamed the attack on a mysterious intruder, a home invasion in which nothing was taken. He said he came home to find a strange man in the house and the man grabbed a pair of scissors and jammed them into his leg. No arrest was ever made. Lu, bureaucracy lifer that she is, can decode the flat, seemingly nonjudgmental language of a police report. The police knew Arthur Drysdale was lying and probably wrote it off as a man trying to save pride after a “domestic.” If he didn’t want to rat his wife out for attacking him with a pair of scissors, what did they care? The incident was listed as an assault. But an attack in a home invasion should have carried a far more serious charge. And why no call to 911? Because the Drysdales were trying to avoid the authorities altogether. Whatever innocuous story they came up with didn’t pass muster at the hospital and the cops were called. OK, fine, would you believe an attack by a stranger?

Mr. Drysdale walked in, surprising Rudy, and he was attacked. Or maybe they had a quarrel. Whatever. It all works for Lu. That’s a violent episode, within the past eighteen months.

Oh, the Drysdales might try to bluster through a grand jury hearing without confirming this, but they won’t. They don’t have the balls to carry this lie, now that the stakes are so high. True, Lu will have a hard time introducing this information during trial unless Rudy testifies, but it’s key. No criminal record for violence? Sure. But Fred can’t get away with claiming that Rudy has no history of violence, and if that day comes, she’ll put Mr. Drysdale on the stand. She should tell Mike and his team to canvass the shelters in the city, just in case Rudy ever had to cave and stay in one when the weather was particularly bitter, as it’s been for the past several winters. If he’s ever behaved violently or erratically there, the staff might remember. She rubs the bruise from yesterday, thinks of Mr. Drysdale, his hand reaching for the spot where his son stabbed him. He’s lucky to be alive.

Luckier than Mary McNally, that’s for sure.

Lu had thought that Mr. Drysdale ruled the roost. Now she sees that Mrs. Drysdale does, at least when it comes to Rudy. He was allowed to come home as long as he followed a few rules. Rudy, stop stabbing your father. Lu remembers those piles and piles of things in the alcove off the kitchen, the animal scent on the cushions, which also seemed to smell like the outdoors. That’s where Rudy slept. Continues to sleep, without his father’s knowledge. There was that sliding patio door right there, leading to a deck off the back of the house, another door below. How easy it would be for a mother to leave one of those unlocked, how accustomed a man could become to sliding in late at night and leaving before daybreak. Lu imagines her own Justin as an adult, broken by life or some not-yet-understood brain chemistry. Could she ever turn her back on him? No, no, she couldn’t. She, too, would leave a door unlocked, make sure that her son never had to sleep outside, even if he had hurt someone else in the family.

So assuming that option was available to Rudy Drysdale, why was he in Mary McNally’s apartment?