Wilde Lake

APRIL 7

Lu debates visiting the funeral home where Rudy Drysdale’s body was taken after the autopsy. Pro: She will appear magnanimous. Con: She will seem calculated and insincere. It is hard to know how such a move will play and she is-at heart, in her marrow, in her DNA-a politician. If you don’t care about what people think about you, then don’t run for public office.

So far, the media attention has helped her more than harmed her, raising her profile considerably. One Beacon-Light columnist tried to make hay out of Drysdale’s mental illness, harping on the absence of a competency hearing. “I think that’s for his attorney to speak to,” Lu demurred. “My office was open to discussing a plea of not criminally responsible.”

She then sat back and gritted her teeth as the columnist spun his story out of the most convenient details, whipping up something with about as much structural integrity as cotton candy. The piece, published two days ago, allowed Fred to suggest that Rudy’s suicide was a desperate reaction to his severe claustrophobia. So what would the columnist do with claustrophobic killers? Construct prisons with vast parks, like the fake savannahs of more progressive zoos? Seriously, Lu harrumphs to herself. But only to herself. Her father would commiserate, maybe even AJ, who is more upset about the attack than anyone. In this case, she does get a kick out of his protective big-brother side. Plus, he seems to feel a retroactive guilt about ever suggesting that Drysdale deserved more compassionate treatment.

But the column makes her feel it’s obligatory to visit the funeral home. “Paying one’s respects” is the correct and felicitous phrase. I have victim status, too, Lu reminds herself. She is still sore from that initial hit. Strange-that night, when Drysdale was still alive as far as she knew, she wasn’t particularly traumatized by the incident. It is only since his death that she sees his face whenever she closes her eyes. Expressionless, utterly impersonal. Did she really see him or is the memory manufactured, the usual attempt to project meaning backward onto a moment that made no sense at the time? And even if she did see his face, did it really tell her anything? No, he was impassive. He was doing what he had to do to achieve an end. It was about as detached as an attack could be.

Why me? But she knows why he chose her. Because she was the smallest, because he wanted to trigger the protective impulses of the armed men who might then shoot him. In that room, it had to be her or the judge, and the judge was too far away. Rudy Drysdale was trying to commit suicide by cop. When he failed, he did the job himself.

The funeral home is in Baltimore, on the long avenue that dead-ends at Fort McHenry, the military installation that was under attack when Francis Scott Key dubbed a still young country as the home of the free and the land of the brave. Twenty years ago, this was a working-class neighborhood, but now Under Armour crouches near one end of Fort Avenue, while a luxury high-rise to be known as Anthem House is under construction a few blocks to the west. AJ keeps telling Lu that Baltimore has become a magnet for millennials, spiking rents in the neighborhoods around the harbor. In this part of Baltimore, artisanal cocktails and new spins on softshell crabs are in demand, while in the “other” Baltimore an estimated one to four people live in food deserts. These are AJ’s facts, AJ’s stats, AJ’s rhetoric. Lu likes a good cocktail.

But while Lu realizes it is a markedly different city from the one she left only five years ago, she feels its working-class character is as intractable as kudzu. Parking her car, she notices a man with his T-shirt rolled up to his armpits-the better to expose his remarkably tanned barrel of a belly-kneel and pray before a shrine of Mary outside the local parish. The temperature will barely top seventy today, but in Baltimore, that’s a reason to dig out your shorts and flip-flops. There aren’t enough high-rises or Starbucks or Chipotles to eradicate Baltimore’s eccentrics.

There is only one visitor in the room assigned to Rudy’s wake-Fred, in a hushed, urgent conversation with the Drysdales.

“I’m truly sorry for your loss,” Lu says, offering her hand to both parents. Neither one takes it. “This is not what anyone wanted.”

Mr. Drysdale all but rolls his eyes: “Guess he saved the state some money, didn’t he?”

Oh, the words, the taunts that spring to mind. Saved you some money, I guess. Your son was well on his way to being the state’s paid guest for the rest of his life. But a politician must be politic, even in a room with three people who are guaranteed never to vote for her.

“I’ll always regret that he didn’t have his day in court. That doesn’t mean I don’t think he was guilty. But I also believe he was entitled to a fair trial. And that Mary McNally’s family deserved answers, a sense that justice had prevailed.”

She leans hard on the victim’s name, just as her father taught her. Another family lost someone. I won’t let you forget that.

“They didn’t even bother to show up for the trial,” Mrs. Drysdale says.

“It would have been expensive for them to be here throughout the trial. We talked about it and decided that they should save their money, come to court for the sentencing phase, when they would have been allowed to give impact statements.” In an attempt to appear modest, she adds: “Assuming, of course, there was a sentencing phase.”

“Oh, we know he did it,” Mr. Drysdale says. “But your kid is your kid. Even when he’s in his fifties. For better or worse. It’s funny that you say those words when you make your wedding vows. They should make you recite that oath the day your kid is born.”

“Arthur.” Mrs. Drysdale almost squeaks in her fury. “We do not know that Rudy did any such thing. We will never know.”

Sure, Lu thinks. If, by knowing, you mean you require some unimpeachable primary source-a video demonstrating the deed, a confession. But, by those standards, we would know almost nothing. What happened on 9/11? How do you know?

She says nothing. No one says anything. The silence should be uncomfortable, but it’s not, not for Lu. The casket is closed, inevitable given the circumstances of his death. She isn’t faking her sympathy. She’s genuinely sorry for the Drysdales’ loss. This is not where a parent’s journey should end, ever. Did you wash his clothes, Mrs. Drysdale? Did he come to you that night, tell you he was in trouble? What do you “know”?

“A lot of our family still lives around here, so we came back to the neighborhood to bury him,” Mrs. Drysdale says, offering an explanation for a question Lu hasn’t asked. “They’ll probably come later.”

“Oh.”

“They told us we were crazy.” The unfortunate word hangs in the air. “When we moved to Columbia. They said it was for hippies and-well, they said it was for hippies.”

“Almost forty years ago? I suppose a lot of people did think that about Columbia.”

“We did it for Rudy. He was smart, but he wasn’t the right kind of smart, not for a regular high school. We thought Wilde Lake could help him. And he did really well there and then he got into Bennington. But, even there, people were mean to him. College, high school. Almost everyone was mean to him. Columbia was supposed to be all kumbaya, or whatever, but kids are kids. We tried to do what we could to help him fit in. We let him work at the mall. We bought him a car. He thought it would make him popular, if he had a car.”

“I’m sorry,” Lu says for the second time. What else is there to say? Despite what people think, “I’m sorry” is more than adequate. When Gabe died, that’s all Lu wanted to hear. I’m sorry. She didn’t want to be told that God wouldn’t give her anything harder than she could handle. That she would be happy one day. Or that Gabe wanted her to be happy. She certainly didn’t want to answer any questions. What exactly happened? Who found his body? What was the cause of death? Were there any warning signs? Given the other choices, “I’m sorry” is really underrated.

She stands to go. Fred does, too. “I’ll walk you to your car.” She starts to protest that it’s early, the neighborhood perfectly safe, but maybe Fred needs an excuse to go. Or maybe he wants to reproach her for the passive-aggressive jab in the column.

“I liked him,” he says once on the sidewalk.

“Who?” she asks, her mind still on the Beacon-Light.

“Rudy. I offered to pay for the funeral, but his parents said a good Samaritan had stepped forward. They’re pretty strapped. I don’t know how they were going to afford the trial. I guess I didn’t want to think too hard about how they were managing this.”

Well, the trial did get cut short and there won’t be any appeals.

Fred seems to pick up on her unspoken snark.

“As I got to know Rudy, I would have been happy to do this case pro bono, not that it was my choice. Once he trusted a person-he could be good company. Funny, self-deprecating, smart. You know, he did pretty well, getting as far as he did in the world, given that no one figured out he was depressive and dyslexic until after he dropped out of college.”

Dyslexia? This is the first Lu has heard of it and her office pored over reams of medical documents about Drysdale, all provided by Fred.

“How could no one have noticed that?” Lu asks.

“It was never an official diagnosis, but it’s so clear to me that was part of his problem. People had these very narrow ideas about dyslexia a generation ago. They thought it meant you couldn’t read at all, and Rudy’s good grades helped mask his problems. Rudy had this genius for coping. He had this-not exactly photographic memory, but his memory was very visual. He taught himself to see the page, whole, and somehow, that allowed him to fake it. He was a good listener-I mean, really good, in a way almost no one is. Plus, at that crazy high school you all attended, you could take tests over, right? Rudy told me that. If you flunked, you were allowed to take the test again. And it was the same test. He could memorize the answers, the second time. I’m not describing it right, his condition. But you get what I’m saying.”

“I was years behind him at Wilde Lake. And by then, it was a totally conventional school. A good one, too.” Lu has always been a little defensive about her high school, which now has a less-than-stellar reputation. “You know, you didn’t provide any of this information. In discovery. Was dyslexia going to be a part of his defense?”

“I don’t want to talk about what might have been.”

She yearns to ask Fred if he thinks Rudy did it. Not because she has doubts. She doesn’t. She just wants Fred to admit she would have beaten him like a drum in that courtroom.

“People think dyslexia is all about reading,” he repeats. Lu tries to hide her impatience. Lord, once a man goes to the trouble of acquiring new information, he can’t let it go. What’s the point of learning something if you can’t bore others to death with the subject. “And that’s the core. But there are other issues. For Rudy, the biggest problem was spatial. He got so confused, about left and right. I thought that was why he hesitated at the courtroom door, at first. He was trying to remember which way he would have to turn when he ran out.”

So, no, she hadn’t imagined Rudy stopping at the door.

“I think it was an attempted suicide by cop.”

“Yeah, I think that, too. Now. But left and right was a huge problem for him. Sometimes, he wrote the letters on his wrist. L, R, so he would remember. I thought you should know.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t part of my case. I’m not breaching privilege here. I observed this on my own, and then his mom filled me in. I could still see the ‘R’ and ‘L’ on his wrists, the day I visited him in lockup. I thought the ‘R’ was for Rudy. But the letters were fresh that day.”

“Fred, what the hell are you talking about?”

He smiles. There’s a sense of payback here, as if he needs to tear her down because she didn’t win fair. Gee, Fred, sorry your client attacked me and committed suicide. I’m sorry, too, I didn’t get my day in court. Because I would have destroyed you.

“See you, Lu. Who knows when our paths will cross again?”

She stews all the way back to Columbia, mired in rush-hour traffic, an unpleasant novelty for her, given how early and late her days run. What the hell was Fred talking about? Right, left, who cares? She goes back to the office, cursing the Drysdales for the three hours her kindness has cost her, resigned to working late. No good deed, etc. etc.

Dusk has fallen by the time Lu thinks to glance out the window. She sees her reflection in the glass. The glass makes her think of sliding doors, a woman walking into her bedroom, discovering a strange man.

Then she thinks of the man, standing outside the apartment in the dark, choosing his point of entry.

He didn’t know right from left. He didn’t know right from left.

If Rudy had gone to the other apartment, his victim would have been Jonnie Forke, the state’s witness, the woman who saw him lurking around the complex the week before Mary McNally was killed.

Okay, so what? What difference did it make if Drysdale killed the woman behind door number 1 or the woman behind door number 2? If Jonnie Forke had any connection to Rudy Drysdale, she would have mentioned it to Mike Hunt or Andi. They would have told her over and over again to be candid, to reveal anything that might come up in court. If she knew him, recognized him from somewhere, it only would have strengthened the ID.

Lu Googles “Jonnie Forke”-nothing. Literally, nothing, which is bizarrely impressive. She plugs “Jonnie Forke” in Facebook, finds an entry for Juanita Forke. Graduated Centennial High School. No overlap with Drysdale there. Relationship status, single. She has only seventy-four friends, so she’s one of those people who actually uses Facebook for friends, yet doesn’t think to opt for the highest-security settings. To be fair, the site changes its privacy policy so often, some well-intentioned people don’t realize their fences are down. Lu can even look at all of Jonnie Forke’s friends.

Nine of whom have the surname Flood.

Jonnie Forke.

Juanita Forke.

Jonnie Flood Forke.

Juanita Flood Forke.

Had she given her full name at the grand jury proceeding, the syllables sliding past Lu’s ear because she was so full of adrenaline she couldn’t be bothered to note that a witness’s legal name was different from the one she used? But “Juanita” didn’t mean anything to Lu, and there was no reason for Jonnie Forke to use her maiden name.

Juanita Flood Forke.

Juanita Flood.

Nita Flood.

APRIL 8

The apartment doors at the Grove-still THE G OVE on the sign, perhaps forever THE G OVE now-have fisheyes. Did they always, or were they an add-on, a concession to the modern age and the changing nature of the people who lived here? Not that a fisheye would have saved anyone from Rudy Drysdale, no matter which door he chose. Lu stands in front of Jonnie Forke’s door for one, two, three minutes, waiting to be examined and deemed worthy of entrance. She definitely heard footsteps in the apartment after she knocked. Didn’t she? She takes a few steps backward, just in case the person on the other side of the door can’t see her. Can’t blame the woman for being extra careful. After all, a tenant was killed here not that long ago.

Killed by someone who might have been looking for the woman across the hall.

Go figure, Fred finally went the extra mile. But he didn’t share the information about Drysdale’s dyslexia with the state’s attorney’s office because there was no gain for him to advance the theory that Rudy Drysdale meant to kill Jonnie Forke. That’s ethical. Fred is not obligated to help the prosecution do its job. And it’s possible that Fred knows only that the intended victim was one of the prosecution’s key witnesses. He may not have figured out that she has a complicated history with the Brant family.

“Hi” is all Jonnie-Nita-says when she finally opens the door. Of course Lu has seen her several times since Mary McNally’s body was discovered, but only now is she seeing Nita Flood, the teenage girl she glimpsed perhaps two or three times. If anyone knows sausage, it’s Nita Flood. That was Lynne, throwing shade long before the term existed. Lu never cared for Lynne. She remembers Ariel, flushing bright red, embarrassed by her friends. The others had laughed. Had Davey laughed? Lu has never thought to connect that scrap of memory to what happened later that fall and then on graduation night. Or the time she and Randy-what was his last name?-saw Davey on the path near where Randy lived, but also where the Floods lived. I see him around all the time, Randy said. Suddenly, a bright line is shining in her mind, connecting so many isolated events. What else will be connected before she’s through?

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Lu says.

“I’m more surprised how long it took you to figure it out. Everyone’s always saying how smart you are.”

Lu doesn’t recall any time the newspapers have given her credit for being extraordinarily intelligent, but who knows what Jonnie Forke reads between the lines.

She follows her into the apartment, noting Jonnie Forke’s skin, which has the orangey glow of a year-round tanner. Self-tanner or tanning salons, Lu thinks, then wonders why her mind is stuck on such a trivial track.

Possibly because she’d rather contemplate Jonnie’s grooming routines than the questions that have brought her here.

Still, she gets right to it once she is seated on the green sofa in Jonnie’s living room, no formalities: “When did you realize that you were Rudy Drysdale’s intended victim?”

“Who says I was?”

“His own lawyer.” Okay, so it’s a lie. It’s not like this is an official proceeding. Lu can say whatever she wants to shake the truth loose. And Fred all but said it. Maybe he, too, is trying to figure out just how smart Lu is.

“I didn’t know until the newspaper published his name. I honestly didn’t recognize him when I saw him hanging around here. He’s put on weight since high school. He was just another creepy homeless guy. But I did feel as if he were watching me. Then I saw his name and I remembered I knew him, but-well, I was glad it wasn’t me. Sorry, I was.”

Definitely a case of hashtag sorrynotsorry.

“How well did you know him? Back in high school?”

“We both worked at the mall. Sometimes he gave me a ride. That was about the extent of it.”

“Then why would he want to kill you?”

“No idea.” Jonnie’s eyes flick right, toward the patio doors off her living room, the sliding doors that Rudy meant to come through almost four months ago.

“It’s against the law to lie to an officer of the court,” Lu lies. She’s not on official business. Jonnie can lie her head off.

“I’m not lying. I never did anything to him. I haven’t spoken to him for thirty-five years. I don’t know. Who says he wanted to kill me, or anyone? Maybe he had a crush on me, all those years ago. He was always doing favors for me. Then again, lots of guys did favors for me.”

“And you did favors for lots of guys.” It just slips out. Lu wishes she could take the words back. It’s as if she’s channeling bitchy Lynne. But the woman’s confidence is annoying for reasons she can’t pinpoint.

Jonnie shrugs it off. “What? You don’t think guys would like me unless I had sex with them. Because I had acne? Guys always liked me. Because I was fun. And I’m not talking about sex. I liked to laugh and I drank beer and I wasn’t a drag like the prissy girls. I didn’t sleep with anybody I didn’t want to sleep with. Until the night that Davey Robinson raped me.”

Lu cannot believe she is still clinging to that story, after all these years.

“Davey Robinson did not rape you. A grand jury heard your testimony and decided not to indict him. Wasn’t it obvious that your father was the one who beat you? That you lied to protect him?”

“I told the truth to get my father to stop beating me for being a slut. Sure, I had sex with Davey before that night. We’d been having sex for a year. I liked him. But not that night. He held me down, he raped me, then acted as if everything was normal. So I did, too. I wasn’t going to break down in front of his friends. But I was upset, I drank too much, and those stupid shits just dumped me on my doorstep. They could have walked me around, cleaned me up. Even with the vomit caked on my clothes, I smelled like sex. My father beat me because I wouldn’t tell him, at first, who it was. Me saying I was raped-telling the truth-probably saved Davey’s life because the police got to him before my dad did. If I had told my father we’d been together a bunch of times before that night, he would have just driven to Davey’s house and straight up killed him then.”

Over a year. Again, Lu hears Lynne’s cruel taunt, realizes that Davey is already sleeping with the girl that his friends are mocking. Maybe he blushed, too, that day, but his dark skin concealed the blood rushing to his face.

“You were mad at him keeping the relationship a secret. You can’t deny that. The other boys all said they heard you fighting.”

“We both wanted it to be a secret. My dad wasn’t going to let me have a black boyfriend. Davey’s parents didn’t want him to have any girlfriend at all. So he took different girls to dances and I was okay with that. But he took that Sarah chick to homecoming, then went to homecoming at her school, and that wasn’t part of the deal. That’s why I got mad. We were in love, we really were. I never knew anyone like him. And, yeah, maybe at first, he liked me because I was cool with sex. But that’s not why he stayed. That’s not what he said to me. He said he loved me.”

Before or after orgasm, Lu wants to ask, but manages to keep this to herself. Why do people put so much stock in that word, love? As if no one ever uses it falsely, as if it’s always true. Love can be the biggest lie of all.

“Your brothers did their best to finish the job your father didn’t have a chance to do.”

“And one of my brothers died,” Jonnie says softly. “Everyone seems to forget that. Just because you have seven brothers doesn’t mean you don’t mind losing one. My dad was never the same. My mom, either. It tore my family apart, what happened to Ben. Tom ended up dying in a car accident a few years later, drunk and high. Both my parents were dead before I was thirty-five. That left the six of us. But we’re really tight. We have to be.”

“Ben died because he tried to kill another person-and ended up maiming him. A person who did not, by law, rape you.”

“Yeah, that’s what the law said. But who was there, who was in that room? Me and Davey. Who held who down? Who had bruises? He weighed, I don’t know, probably about two hundred pounds? I weighed a hundred and ten and wore size 3 jeans. You see, I knew what sex was like. I didn’t have any confusion about how it was supposed to go. What happened that night was rape. The fact that he was my boyfriend, that he kissed me when he was done-that didn’t change it.”

“Of course that’s what you’d say now. But the law-”

“The law? You mean your father? Well, fuck him. Big, handsome, rich Davey Robinson held down a stupid little acne-scarred slut, forced her to have sex, but no one believed her. Turns out there were all these tests, all these rules I didn’t know. ‘Did you scream?’ Sorry, I didn’t know I had to scream for it to be a crime. Next time, I’ll make sure I scream. ‘Did you struggle?’ Yeah, I struggled, for all the good it did me. I said no. But because I had said yes all the other times, no didn’t count.”

Lu believes her. Almost. Which is to say, she thinks Jonnie is telling what is now the truth in her head, but it’s a story born of thirty-five years of hindsight. Davey, the gentle giant, would never have done such a thing. Lu can see, however, that Jonnie absolutely believes what she’s saying. She has conveniently forgotten that she had a motive to lie back in 1979. She was angry at Davey. She was trying to protect her father, who had beaten her severely enough to require an ER visit. Her refusal to tell the truth about the beating benefited him.

“Davey Robinson ended up with a life sentence that the law never would have given him-paralyzed from the waist down. Didn’t that satisfy you?”

“For a while,” she says, then looks startled by her own unvarnished honesty.

Silence, a dead end. Lu, not sure what to say, asks: “What happened to Mr. Forke?”

“Oh, him. I don’t know. I was almost twenty-seven when I got married, which seemed late to me, old enough to make good choices. We had three kids, boom, boom, boom. He took off after the third one. But I raised good kids. I’m a grandma now and proud to be one. That’s Joni Rose.”

She indicates a set of three photographs in a triptych on the table next to the bright orange armchair where she sits. A baby, a toddler, a little girl, maybe four or so. All the same kid, Lu assumes. Bald as a doorknob as a baby, with one of those ridiculous headbands that proclaims, I am a girl, dammit. Still pretty wispy haired as a toddler and kid. Too bad she didn’t get Jonnie’s genes. The woman’s hair is impressive, thick and glossy.

“Did you ever see Davey again?”

“Why would I do that?”

Nonresponsive. The witness is directed to answer the question.

“Heck, you might have run into him somewhere. He still lives here.” Davey and AJ lost contact years ago. But Lu knows-anyone who reads a newspaper knows-that Davey is a minister, one of the leading opponents of Maryland’s move toward marriage equality two years ago. “He’s at the big, new superchurch in far west Howard County.”

“Well, I’m not much for churchgoing,” Nita says with a harsh laugh. “God hasn’t done too well by me and my family.”

Lu gives up, bids the woman good evening. She leaves believing that Jonnie-Nita Flood-Forke has her suspicions about why Rudy Drysdale targeted her-and has no intention of sharing them. Lu can’t force her to talk. Rudy is dead, his intent no longer important. And it would not be particularly comforting to Mary McNally’s family to learn that she was an even more random target than anyone ever dreamed.

Back in her car, Lu picks the Sinatra station on Sirius, hoping to quiet her mind, roiling with nervous energy. She catches the end of “You Couldn’t Be Cuter.”

“Ella Fitzgerald,” she says out loud, as if Gabe were still there, quizzing her. “Written by Jerome Kern.” She could almost always identify the vocalists, even if she couldn’t tell Django Reinhardt from… well, whoever else was famous for playing jazz guitar. Gabe would have considered Reinhardt too well-known for his pop quizzes. This song is on the Jerome Kern Songbook album and Lu is old enough to remember albums, the days when one listened to a record in order. When the song dies out, she half expects to hear what would have followed on the album or CD: “She Didn’t Say Yes.” Now, there was a politically incorrect song if ever there was one. And yet a wise one because it realized that people, most people, could not get outside their own heads. So what did she do?… She did just what you’d do too. Translated: People behave as you would. And if they don’t? They’re probably wrong.

Nita Flood didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no. Nita Flood, caught in a lie about being raped, came to believe it. Our minds shape our memories to be something we can bear. Happens all the time. What if Nita decided that her story, more credible now because of the way times had changed, was something she should go public with, despite the potential embarrassment for a very public, very righteous pastor? There was no record; Davey had been no-billed by the grand jury, everyone involved was a minor. Ben Flood’s attack on Davey was always reported as provoked by unfounded rumors. At the insistence of Lu’s father-again, he had always been thinking of Nita, the way her lies could destroy her future. The Wilde Lake students who had once gossiped about the story probably had dim memories now: Nita Flood was a slut who got drunk, had sex with her boyfriend, then accused him of rape because he wouldn’t take her out in public. Yet over the past year, more and more women had come forward with stories about being drugged and molested by a famous comedian. What would happen if Nita Flood tried to do the same thing to Davey Robinson? Would people still be so quick to ignore her?

Lu can’t imagine the young man she knew hiring a homeless drifter to kill his former girlfriend. But then-she can’t imagine Davey opposing marriage equality and supporting the death penalty. Davey has power; he has been in the media a lot over the past few years. He doesn’t even believe in sex out of wedlock. What would he do if his former girlfriend threatened to speak publicly about what happened between them?

The only thing to do is to ask.

APRIL 10

“What are you thinking about?”

Lu wakes with a start, confused and disoriented. What is she thinking about? Where is she? The dim room, the neutral “art” on the walls, the heavy, humid presence of another body-she has fallen asleep in Bash’s place, something she has never done before. He catnaps sometimes, but she never does.

“I-I must have dozed off.”

“Guess I’m losing a step.”

“No”-yawn-“no, lover, no. I’m… just… so… tired. Insomnia.”

Lu is used to being tired. She’s been tired since her kids were born. But as of late, she’s tired in a new way. Twice in the past week, she has fallen asleep on the sofa while watching television and it felt as if she were pinned to the cushions by invisible hands. She would open her eyes at 2 or 3 A.M., surprised and disoriented, the very act of rising and stumbling into her bed seemingly impossible. Yet once in bed, she can’t sleep at all. She has always slept well. What is happening?

“Ah, it’s your age, I guess.”

“My age? I’m eight years younger than you.”

“It’s a female thing. Insomnia at midlife.”

This may be her least favorite conversation ever with Bash. Not that there have been that many conversations to begin with. She doesn’t waste a lot of time talking to him. Bash was the “dumb” one in AJ’s group, and even when it turned out that he had been stealthily intelligent all along-making National Merit Scholar, getting a full ride to Trinity-his reputation was more or less sealed within the group. Old friends, like family, have a hard time letting personae change. You are what you were. That’s why Lu can’t stand to have anyone refer to her stature. It reminds her, always, of “Little Lu.”

“Your wife is even younger than I am, Bash. What do you know about women at midlife?” She’s trying to make a joke, but an edge slips into her voice, a little pocketknife showing its blade.

“I’ve got a pharmaceutical client who’s trying to break ground in menopause, perimenopause. It’s promising stuff, if we can just get the FDA out of our way. I hope it gets online in time to help women your age.”

Okay, this is officially her least favorite conversation, ever. The last thing she wants to do is tell Bash she went through early menopause because of fibroids. Although Bash’s tone couldn’t be more impersonal, she feels as if-her mind searches for the source of her unease, finds it-as if she is being set up for a disappointing job evaluation, something that has happened to her exactly once. It was her first year in the city’s state’s attorney’s office and she was disheartened not to receive the highest evaluation. They claimed it was a policy not to give first-year employees top marks, but she later found out that the other newbie, a man, was given the best possible rating. Anyway, it feels like that. Is she about to be fired as-what is she? She’s not a mistress or a girlfriend. Her mind rejects the crude pop culture term that would seem to best describe what they do. She’s not Bash’s “buddy.” And although she calls him “lover,” she’s not fond of that word either, given its root. If she thought she were capable of loving Bash, she wouldn’t be with him. She would never claim to love another woman’s man. That’s the true betrayal.

Yet she remains curious about his other life, his “real” life. She senses that, say, should a truck mow down Mrs. Arnold “Bash” Bastrop on Capitol Hill tomorrow, Lu would not be a candidate for being his public companion, although Bash is clearly one of those men who cannot live without a mate. But he requires a decorous one, a woman who would be delighted to consider her husband and household her “job.” How interesting, Lu thinks, that Bash and her brother have chosen such retro wives. Because Lauranne, for all her blather about her “partnership” with AJ, is very much a junior partner, tolerated at AJ’s side because he insists on it. He’s the brand. And it’s a cinch Davey has a dutiful, passive wife.

Davey.

Lu has not been able to summon the-strength, moxie, chutzpah?-to go visit him. How do you show up in the life of someone you haven’t seen for almost thirty years and try to figure out if he ordered a hit on his old girlfriend? There’s no evidence that Davey even knew Rudy Drysdale. After all, her brother didn’t. A little Internet sleuthing quickly determined that Davey’s church does give out bag lunches every week, in a parking lot near North Laurel. Still, it’s hard to imagine Davey himself handing out lunch bags, looking for a killer to recruit. None of this makes sense.

Jesus, Rudy, why didn’t you just confess before you killed yourself? Would that have been so hard?

She sits up, stretches, and Bash pushes her back down, covers her with himself. She is starfished on the bed, arms pinned. Again, she thinks of those waking moments on the sofa, the sense that she is being weighed down by something she cannot see and cannot overcome. But she can see and feel what is holding her in place and she likes it. So Bash has pharmaceutical clients. She had always assumed his ability to go more than one round was simply the result of pent-up lust, but there probably is some sort of pill involved, come to think of it. Come to think of it. She is on the verge of doing just that when Nita Flood’s voice hisses in her ear: He weighed, what, almost two hundred pounds? And I was a hundred and ten, wore a size 3 jeans. How could anyone tell if I struggled?

Her pleasure is dimmed. Still, she manages to finish. Bash notices that she is distracted, but he probably assumes she is making that inevitable transition into real life, the life that has no place for a healthy, harmless lust. Would Bash’s wife find this so harmless? As much as Lu wonders about her, she has no desire to know anything. This is civilized, she tells herself. I’m a forty-five-year-old woman, I need a sexual outlet, but I don’t need a boyfriend or a partner, and I definitely don’t need a husband. I am taking care of enough people. The term “high maintenance” always seems to be applied to women, but Lu has never known any woman who needs as much care as a man. Heck, her father has had an ersatz wife in Teensy all these years.

Lu drives home, wondering if it’s time to let go of Bash, but only because she wants to be the one who ends it. If he calls it quits, she fears it will arouse old feelings, that intense desire to win, no matter the cost. As a young woman, she got a little crazy in the face of rejection. She was only in her twenties. But she can still be embarrassed by some of the things she did. Lu, as a young woman, preferred being direct and confrontational. She could not believe that there were men who would simply walk away, cut off communication-and make you feel gauche for thinking the game should be played any other way. She was the opposite of cool, in those early love affairs. Then she reconnected with Gabe, and his heart was so open, his sense of self forever informed by the short geeky boy he had been, that she felt she had, in fact, found her soul mate. “We were imprinted early on each other, like ducks,” she once told him.

She didn’t tell him that she had stolen that line from a book.

He was two hundred pounds… Why is Jonnie in her head, when Jonnie clearly had no desire to help Lu figure out why she was targeted by Rudy Drysdale? Maybe it’s not really Jonnie at all, but Blind Lady Justice, the omnipresent conscience that insists on what is right and wrong, a conscience whose voice sounds strangely like Lu’s father’s. Fuck him. There was Nita again. How can she not realize that Lu’s father was one of the few people who had her best interests at heart, all those years ago?

It’s a coincidence, Rudy going into the wrong apartment, Lu tells herself. She’ll go see Davey, ask him a few questions, and they’ll have a good laugh. He’ll tell her that he never knew Rudy Drysdale and he doesn’t fear his old girlfriend because he didn’t rape her. A grand jury made that determination thirty-five years ago. Davy’s alleged crime was not hidden or hushed up. Juanita Flood Forke’s complaint was heard-and rejected.

APRIL 21

When Lu pulls up in front of the Triadelphia Community Church, the first thing she notices is the long, graceful ramp that snakes up to its front doors. Of course, all churches-all public buildings-are obligated to be accessible in this day and age, but this particular ramp is clearly the aesthetic focus of an otherwise unremarkable beige rectangle. The ramp is centered, flanked by two staircases. Sheep to the right, goats to the left, Pastor Robinson front and center.

Inside, the accommodations continue. The center aisle seems particularly wide, and there are gently sloping ramps on either side of the nave. In contrast to the blah beige outside, the woodwork is dark, the lighting dim. This is Davey’s church in every sense. Davey’s fiefdom. Pastors are prohibited from endorsing candidates, but they are instrumental in getting out the vote and they have ways to indicate which candidates they favor. Lu did not ask to appear here during her campaign because she could not align herself with someone as conservative as Davey. But nor could she afford to alienate him. Davey may not have been able to stop marriage equality, but he was part of a coalition that helped derail the legislation the first time it came before the Maryland legislature a few years ago. Safe on the sidelines then, Lu was fascinated by the debate, the anger expressed over the idea that gay marriage was a civil rights issue. Davey, in particular, was one of those who framed race as a given, homosexuality a choice. He was never strident; that wasn’t his style. He still had that husky, resonant voice that made you want to lean in, lest you miss a single word.

Davey has been a public figure for almost a decade. Lu remembers when the church was built, not quite five years ago. Because it was a so-called megachurch-almost thirty-five hundred members-the community worried about the impact on traffic. There were contentious meetings, Davey presiding as the benign Buddha he has become in middle age. He managed to suggest, subtly, that it was not the number of people that had the residents worried, but the color of his congregants’ skin. The locals were horrified, of course. An agreement was reached quickly. Since then, as far as Lu knows, the church and the nearby residents have coexisted peacefully, except for an incident three years ago when a sixty-six-year-old man got on his riding mower and began ramming cars leaving the church after Sunday’s service. No charges were filed, and Lu supported that one bit of inaction on Fred’s part. The man was in the early stages of dementia, beyond any agenda other than his own confusion. Fred made it clear that his office would not bring charges if the man’s wife and adult children agreed to find care for him.

“May I help you?”

A woman has entered the church from behind the nave. She is young and shapely, dressed so stylishly that Lu can’t help feeling like a dowdy little bird. Would I dress in bright, tight clothing if I weren’t a public official? Lu has been a civil servant for so long-civil servant, her mind snags for a moment on that second word-that she no longer knows if she’s following the dictates of her taste or the dictates of the job. You lose a little bit of yourself in public life.

“I’m here to see Davey Robinson.”

“Is Pastor Robinson expecting you?”

“Yes.” Lu had not wanted to visit without some warning. She delayed the meeting for one reason or another-work, the tax-filing deadline. Finally, she called yesterday, said she wanted to talk to him about the events of 1980. Those were her exact words. “The events of 1980.” She chose 1980 and not 1979 because Davey would assume she meant the night he was attacked. But, of course, everything goes back to 1979. Citing 1980 was simply less adversarial.

“Follow me,” the woman says, moving quickly on her long legs, admirably swift in her stiletto heels. Lu feels ridiculous, trying to match the woman’s stride without appearing like a clumsy little puppy. She’s pretty sure that’s the point.

Davey’s office does nothing to diminish Lu’s first impression, that this church is a castle he has built for himself. His desk is huge. Across from him, she feels like a child, called to the principal’s office, not that Lu was ever called to the principal’s office as a child. She has to perch on the edge of the chair so her feet are flat on the floor. She is Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, dwarfed by the scale of everything here. And Davey is larger than ever, broad in his chair. She wonders how hard it was for him, an athlete gifted enough to be considered for a college team, to adapt to a body that could no longer move as it once had. But he has spent almost twice as long in this body as he did in his previous one.

“Look at Little Lu,” he says. His tone is affectionate, so she tries not to bristle at the use of “little.” “Who knew you were going to grow up to be such a player, the most powerful woman in the county right now?” But not as powerful as you, right, Davey? “I read about what happened earlier this month.”

He almost certainly means the attack, and Lu would feel sanctimonious, telling him that Rudy’s suicide has affected her far more than the assault.

She says only: “I’m fine. But something, well, weird has come up, in the wake of that. I have reason to believe that Rudy Drysdale intended to kill someone else, that he broke into the wrong woman’s apartment that night.”

Davey cocks his head as if interested, but confused. Why am I listening to this story?

Lu takes a deep breath. “He had a kind of dyslexia that resulted in spatial confusion, literally couldn’t tell right from left. If the events of December thirty-first were premeditated, then he might have entered the wrong apartment. The woman who lived across from the victim was Nita Flood. She thinks Rudy was sent to kill her, but she won’t tell me by whom.”

Davey’s eyes narrow, all friendliness gone. It was a fake friendliness to begin with, Lu realizes. He may have hoped this was not to be the topic today, but he’s not particularly surprised.

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. But when I spoke to Nita-Jonnie, she’s known as Jonnie now-she still maintains, after all these years, that you raped her.” Quickly adding: “I know that’s not true. If you had, you would have been charged. My father did everything he could to make sure that no one was given special treatment. But she believes this to be true. Or has come to believe it. It’s probably sheer revisionism on her part, thirty-five years later. But if she had threatened to go public-”

“Thou shalt not kill,” Davey says. “I’m a minister, Lu. I preach the Lord’s words. Do you think I could so easily violate one of his most basic commandments?”

The fact is-she can’t. The moment she began to speak, she felt ludicrous. “No, no, I don’t. But I do believe that Rudy Drysdale targeted her and I can’t figure out why.”

“He always liked her,” Davey says. “She barely paid him any mind, but he had a crush on her.”

“You knew him?”

“Just to nod hello. He worked in the camera store in the mall, the one near Nita’s cart. He was always hanging around her, doing things for her. I noticed because I would hang around, when I could. I’m not even sure she knew his name. I used to tease her about Rudy. I sure as hell wasn’t jealous of him. I was surprised when I read about him being arrested, but-well, he seemed to be pretty far around the bend. He was always an odd duck. Some people thought he didn’t like girls at all, but I never got that vibe from him. He definitely liked Nita.”

She feels almost deflated by the banality of it all. Man sees woman he once had a crush on, breaks into her house-believes himself to have broken into her house-ends up killing the wrong woman in sheer panic. That could even explain the DNA: he became excited, in advance. Rudy was a violent man. He stabbed his father. He attacked her. It fits together. Never disdain the obvious answer. That’s an article of faith for police and prosecutors. The defense attorneys are the ones who have to manufacture conspiracy theories and alibis and alternative killers. Even before Facebook, people were inclined to look up old crushes. Rudy Drysdale, a deeply disturbed individual, saw his old high school crush and decided to kill her. Or something. It’s not as if he were known for making rational decisions.

Davey laughs softly, as if privy to her whirring mind. “Not so mysterious now, is it? If I had known-but, of course, I didn’t know. Well, I guess Nita was due some good luck.”

“Due?”

“I hear she has a sick grandchild.”

“Hear? How did you ‘hear’?”

“It was on some listserv, I think. The Howard County Interfaith community. The girl needs an experimental treatment, but the insurance company won’t cover it. Her pastor said they were going to do a fund-raiser, donate the Sunday collections to her.”

“I remember when you thought ‘interfaith’ was Columbia’s problem.”

Davey laughed, a rumble almost as beautiful as his singing voice. Does he still sing? “This is just an e-mail digest that allows various religious leaders to share our concerns. My problem with the Interfaith Center was that it pretended we were all the same.”

“Nita goes by the name Jonnie Forke now.”

“Does she?” Polite, uninterested. Not getting it.

Lu stands to go. “I feel silly to have bothered you. Davey-do you still sing?”

“I sing with my congregation. But, no, I don’t perform. It appealed too much to my vanity. We have to be careful of our weaknesses, Lu. I was so proud of my body, the things it could do. We know how that turned out.”

“Do we?” Lu asks.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Andi is almost pathetically grateful when Lu asks her if she wants to catch a late bite, although surprised by the suggested location.

“The casino?” she says. “Why would you want to go there?”

“I just have this yen to play a few hands of blackjack, have a few drinks. All work and no play-”

Andi does not bother to assure Lu she isn’t dull. She’s too concerned with nailing down which one of them will be the designated driver.

“We have to be careful. Wouldn’t look good if one of us were flagged at a sobriety checkpoint.”

“I’m happy to pick you up at your place. And if you get lucky-”

“I’m not that kind of girl,” Andi says, feigning mock outrage. “I’m a lady.”

“The kind of lady who takes his number and calls him the next day.”

“As I said, a lady.” Lu laughs. Outside of work, Andi can be good company.

And, for an evening that began as a ruse, it is surprisingly fun. Lu sets her limit for losing at $200 and blows through it even faster than she hoped. Andi is having an unusually good night-winning hands and winning the attention of a perfectly nice looking man in a suit. She barely seems to notice when Lu says she’s going to grab a bite in the noodle bar.

Jonnie Forke does a double take when she sees Lu, tries to disguise it.

“I’m not your waitress,” she says. “I’ll tell someone you’re waiting.”

“Jonnie Forke of Luk Fu,” Lu says. “Unlucky Jonnie Forke of Luk Fu.”

“What?”

“It’s this thing I do. It helps me remember names, faces. I’m sorry to hear about your grandchild-what was her name? Joni Rose. I didn’t realize-the other day when we were talking-that she was sick. That sucks.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, well, what are you going to do?”

“It’s good, at a time like this, to have the comfort of religion. I’m not a believer, and it makes it harder to get through certain things.”

“I don’t go to church. Your waitress will be with you in a moment. But I’ll put your drink order in if you’re anxious.”

“Just club soda with lime. But I can wait.”

Andi and her new friend join Lu then, flush with possibility if not actual cash. “I’d say winner buys,” Andi says, “but then we’d have to kite the check and how would that look if two prosecutors walked out on a bill? This guy was up five hundred dollars, then totally blew his wad.”

“You two good-looking ladies could not possibly be prosecutors, unless you play them on Law & Order,” says Andi’s admirer, who close up is about ten years north of fifty, where Lu had originally pegged him. Still, he has all his hair.

“Dinner’s on me,” Lu says, putting down two $100 bills. “Andi-you use Uber or call a car service when it’s time to go home. Promise me. We have a meeting tomorrow morning, you can’t be late.”

“She’ll be fine,” Andi’s new friend says, sounding like the perfect gentleman. Lu sizes him up, then says: “Text me when you get in, Andi. I won’t sleep a wink until you do.”

Of course, she’s not going to sleep anyway. She had been skeptical, when talking to Davey-he spoke of Nita, not Jonnie Forke. But if she didn’t go to church, then she had no pastor to share the story about her sick grandchild on a listserv. Davey was lying about that, Lu is sure.

In her car, Lu instructs the Bluetooth panel: “Call my brother, please.” She cannot break the habit of saying “please,” even to the nonperson who lives inside her car’s dashboard. She is her father’s daughter.

AJ’s voice, on another machine, replied: “Hi, you have reached AJ Brant. I will be traveling until May twenty-fourth and may be slow returning calls. But leave a message or e-mail me in care of the foundation and I’ll-”

She disconnects. A sister shouldn’t have to queue on a brother’s answering machine, another supplicant yearning for his time, money, attention. How can he be away for a month? Oh, it’s almost Earth Day, a big date in AJ’s world. No problem. May twenty-fourth is the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. They’ll have a barbecue. She’ll buy vegan hot dogs for Lauranne if that’s what it takes to get a little time alone with her brother in order to broach the unbroachable subject, that Friday night after Thanksgiving 1979. Did he lie to protect his friend? Would he continue to lie to protect his friend?

The bigger question for Lu is whether she will be speaking as a sister, or the county state’s attorney.

MAY 25

“I guess this day is for you, dear Father.”

AJ raises a beer-a local one that he brought to the barbecue, presumably brewed from ethical hops. Whatever those are. But their father shakes his head. “Memorial Day is for those who died. I merely served. You can toast me in November.”

“Of course,” AJ says. “Of course. My bad. It’s not like I wish you were dead.”

He seems a little loopy to Lu, but it’s probably jet-lag. AJ was at the Sydney Writers Festival and he arrived at BWI only yesterday afternoon. Although his memoir about his wanderjahr is several years old, it was a bit of a sleeper hit in Australia and a big publisher there has just brought out a new edition, with an introduction by some hot-shit novelist that Lu has never heard of and a new afterword by AJ and Lauranne, all about how individuals matter, small changes, blah, blah, blah.

Lu scrapes the leftover baked beans and corn from her plate into the trash and endures two withering glances from Lauranne-one for the paper plate, the other for the lack of composting. She glares back, unhappy they are dining on the screen porch. The day is shockingly hot, a misery, especially coming as it does after two perfectly pleasant spring days. But AJ and Lauranne said they preferred to be outside in “real air,” and they were the “guests,” so the family has congregated here. At least her father had the good sense to install ceiling fans on the porch. And the twins keep leaving the porch doors open, so the house’s downstairs AC unit-one of three required to cool the house-whirrs and groans, sending puffs of cool air toward them. Lu is simultaneously grateful for every artificial breeze and despairing of the utility bill. She keeps thinking the heat will back off when the sun goes down, that the planet has simply not absorbed enough of the sun’s warmth to torture them into the evening. But, so far, there is no respite.

There is, however, that deeply layered fecund smell of the suburbs. The light grassy scent of lawns, the darker fragrances from the trees. Lu may want to believe she’s a city person, but she is, at heart, a child of the suburbs, a child of this suburb, and she can’t live without yards and trees and flowers. Their first two years as a married couple, she and Gabe had lived in the treeless yuppie playground that was Federal Hill in the 1990s and she was secretly miserable, then ashamed of herself for being miserable. But she missed these smells.

“You want to take a walk with me?” she asks AJ, as the sun-finally-begins to set. “Around the lake?”

“I’m sooooooo tired, Lu. I’m still on Australian time. My body’s living in tomorrow.”

“That’s the price of being a visionary,” she jokes. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “Please. I want to hear about the status of your, um, project. The one we discussed all those months ago.”

A lie, but it will take at least forty-five minutes to stroll around the lake in this heat. She figures that they will have exhausted the topic of AJ’s fatherhood by the time they reach the dam-only yards away from the events of Graduation Night 1980.

It turns out that AJ doesn’t want to talk about fatherhood or IVF or rented wombs. He is full of Australia, practically a travelogue on the topic, and a pedantic one at that. “As we head into summer, Australia is on the cusp of winter…” Oh, really, dear brother is that how the Southern Hemisphere works? He speaks of how expensive it is, pontificates on its island-country-continent status, praises its food, its sense of ecological responsibility, its rich cultural life.

“The primary cultural export I remember from Australia is the Wiggles,” Lu says. “Although they were fading by the time the twins were born. The Wiggles and Mel Gibson. And now there’s a new Mad Max movie. Nothing ever changes-until it does. What’s happening with your baby plans?”

“Not much. We thought we had a surrogate, but it didn’t work out. Ridiculous falling-out over the silliest thing. I don’t know. She didn’t like us, that’s the bottom line.”

Oh, so she met Lauranne, then? But Lu holds her tongue.

“I saw Davey Robinson the other day,” she says.

“Where?”

“At his church. I went to see him. Something very weird came up.” She fills AJ in, as briskly and neutrally as possible. Somehow, she knows he will argue with her. And he does.

“Life is full of coincidences, Lu. For all you know, Fred could just be fucking with you.”

“True. But Davey lied to me. He told me that Nita’s pastor shared information about her sick grandchild. She-Nita, Jonnie as she’s known now-doesn’t even have a pastor. I think she tried to shake Davey down last fall, threatened to go public with the story of the events of Thanksgiving 1979, and he did whatever was necessary to keep that from happening. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“It makes sense because you’ve decided to link these facts. Rudy Drysdale killed a woman. That woman lived across the hall from Nita Flood. His intended victim might have been Nita Flood. It might not have been. You’re imposing a pattern on events because that’s what our minds are trained to do. Nita didn’t tell you anything. Davey didn’t tell you anything. Rudy is dead.”

“Davey told me that Rudy had a crush on Nita, in high school.”

“Have you talked to Dad about this, Lu?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Because he’d tear you apart for this kind of shabby thinking. Heck, it almost sounds as if you’re Rudy’s defense attorney. He did it. He had cause. He didn’t have cause. He was hired. I mean, what is it? Pick one.”

“I think Davey hired Rudy to kill Nita Flood.”

“As you said, they barely knew each other.”

“His church does a brown-bag giveaway. Every Sunday in North Laurel.”

They are nearing the grove of trees where Ben Flood died. Lu wouldn’t be surprised if AJ decided to pick up the pace, but he slows down, takes in his surroundings. “Things are supposed to get smaller as you get older. But the trees get bigger. Our family home is literally bigger. Everything about our family just gets bigger and bigger. I tried to make my life simpler, and it’s more complicated than ever.”

“Have you even been here, since-”

He stares at the trees, gray green in the dusk. “I don’t really remember any of it. I remember the story, but not the actual event. Does that make sense? I had to tell it so many times, it’s like something I read in a book. I hate that Ben Flood died that night. But it wasn’t my fault.”

“I know.” Lu touches his arm, the one he broke, the one that never quite hangs straight, although he says his years of yoga have helped him regain almost all his flexibility.

“Except-I ran after him. I tackled him-or tried to. I barely grazed his calves with my hand before I fell on the rocks and broke my arm. But he turned-he turned his head to look at me. I’m seeing it now, Lu. I don’t want to see it. It took me so long to stop seeing it-”

“Let’s keep walking.”

It seems cruel now to keep talking about Nita and Davey. They walk another ten minutes in silence. They reach the halfway point, the spot from where they can see their own house across the water, full of light.

“Damn, it really is huge,” AJ says.

“Good thing he bought a double lot all those years ago. AJ-did our mother like the house?”

“I thought so. I mean, when you’re eight, you can’t really tell if your parents are happy or sad. But I think she liked it. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. It seems so very much his dream house now, tailored to his tastes.”

“Three massive HVAC units,” AJ says. “That’s quite a carbon footprint you’re leaving.”

“Says the man who just flew to Australia, the man with three rowhouses, disguised to look as if he lives in just one.”

“We try never to use the AC.”

This is true, Lu knows. It’s why they don’t visit her brother June through August.

“Was she sad? Our mother?”

“Lu, she was very ill.”

“I know, I know-the heart thing.”

He is rubbing his left arm now. A long plane trip has probably aggravated the stiffness there. “No, Lu. She was mentally ill. She was a depressive. I’m sorry. I assumed that dad had finally told you everything.”

She stops on the path. “What ‘everything’?”

“I always promised-and I thought by now he would have-look, you have to talk to him. He has to tell you the rest. Because there are questions only he can answer.”

Hadn’t AJ said the same thing about sex almost forty years ago? There are questions only he can answer. Lu was eight and still trying to piece together what really happened when babies were made. But it turned out there were a lot of questions their father could not, would not answer. Most particularly-Why would anyone do that? “Well, we have to have babies,” her father said then. And she knew, the way children always know when they are being lied to, that he was withholding something important. That’s why she had ended up talking to Teensy about the whole messy affair.

But had she really never guessed that their mother’s sadness, which now seems obvious in every anecdote she knows about her, was something more than mere moodiness? That Adele’s parents had guarded her not from the dragons outside their Roland Park castle, but from demons within? Lu cannot wait to get home, send AJ and Lauranne back to Baltimore with the leftover cherry pie, deposit the children in their beds, and confront her father. She wishes she could leave her brother standing here, plunge into the lake, and swim a straight hard line toward the large, light-filled house on the other side.

But life doesn’t work that way when one is an adult. There are Penelope and Justin, who need to go to bed at a decent hour because there’s school tomorrow, a kitchen to clean. Life goes on. Life is relentless. And when the house is finally quiet, Lu discovers her father dozing in his usual chair. She cannot bear to wake him, much less start peppering him with questions.

Instead, she goes to his desk, the planter’s desk that Noel broke all those years ago, scattering her father’s papers, and finds the slender file that loomed so large in her imagination, one that she used to sneak peeks at when she was a child. It is a plain manila envelope with her mother’s name on it. There are photos, a birth certificate, a marriage certificate.

A death certificate, too, which Lu doesn’t remember ever seeing in this envelope before.

Maybe that’s because it’s dated 1985.

MAY 26

“Nineteen eighty-five,” Lu says, not for the first time, waving the death certificate as if it were an exhibit in a trial. She is standing over her father, who sits at their dining room table, his eyes downcast, but his demeanor defiant. “She lived for fifteen years after I was born. How could you keep this from me?”

She has called work and said she will be late because of an “urgent family situation” and were truer words ever spoken? The situation goes to the heart of her family, and if the situation doesn’t seem urgent to anyone else-her mother has been dead for thirty years, her father has been lying to her for forty-five-she cannot imagine doing anything until she has this conversation. It took great resolve last night not to shake her father awake and demand to speak to him then and there. She has not slept at all, and she snapped at the twins throughout the morning routine, then snapped at their babysitter for being all of five minutes late.

And yet her father, the true object of her wrath, is unrepentant, even if he cannot meet her gaze.

“Lu, you were never going to have a mother. Adele was not capable of taking care of anyone, including herself. She wasn’t fit to live outside an institution.”

“But to lie to your children and say that she was dead-”

“She was, in a sense. She attempted suicide several times. In 1985, she managed to slit her wrists with a knife she conned a staff person to smuggle in. If you want to berate me for something, then focus on the eight years that I lived in denial of the fact that my wife was severely mentally ill, the terror that her disorder visited on your brother. The day after you were born, she had a full-blown psychotic episode and attempted to kill herself for the fourth or fifth time. She was admitted to the psychiatric wing at Johns Hopkins. And, as far as I knew, she was to spend the rest of her life there. I tried to visit her once or twice, but she was truly a hopeless case. It did no good. For either of us.”

“But-the death certificate says she died in Spring Grove? How did she end up there?” Spring Grove was the state psychiatric hospital in Catonsville. Her mother had been perhaps ten miles from her family through much of Lu’s childhood.

“I don’t know. I gave your grandparents power of attorney. They were responsible for her care.”

“They blackmailed you,” says Lu. True, she has blackmail on the brain, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Her father was and is a circumspect man. He would have agreed to any condition if it meant keeping this secret.

“It was never that-coarse. But we did reach an agreement. They would keep her in the hospital if they could have power of attorney. They were wealthy people, better able to care for her than I was. Our insurance was running out-And, as far as I knew, she was being cared for. I think she may have been switched to Spring Grove after their deaths. I don’t know.”

“Why did you tell AJ and not me?”

“I didn’t. He also thought she was dead. Then he became very depressed while at college. I thought I owed it to him to know about the family history. The children of suicides are so much more likely to commit suicide.”

“Only she didn’t succeed until AJ was a year out of college,” Lu points out. “And she was-what was her diagnosis?”

“When she was first diagnosed, in her teens, they said it was schizophrenia. I’ve come to believe it was probably what we’d call bipolar disorder now. She had stunning mood swings, but she also was delusional at times. We had no hope that she could ever live outside a hospital setting. She was beset by paranoia, incapable of recognizing those who loved her and cared for her. You have to remember, Lu. Your brother knew her, lived with her for eight years. Eight fraught, difficult years. I owed him the truth because it helped him make sense of his childhood.”

Isolated events are connecting in Lu’s memory. This is why AJ was worried about having a child. It’s why he didn’t want to use his own sperm. And it was why her father and brother didn’t seem overly concerned when she had to have a hysterectomy in her late twenties. To their way of thinking, she dodged a bullet.

“What about me? Why wasn’t I owed the truth?”

“I suppose you were.”

His ready agreement deflates her. Nothing defangs a good rage quite like the other person admitting that you’ve been wronged. “I rationalized, as people do. One, you never knew her. Why not let you have a mother you could mourn. Two-I didn’t sense any of that melancholy in you. You’re tough, grounded, my little pragmatist. But as AJ got older, he was prone to depression. He was in a very dark place for a while there, during college. I kept it from you at the time, but he almost dropped out of Yale freshman year. So I told him everything-that his mother was still alive, but quite ill. When she finally killed herself five years later, I wondered if I had made the right choice after all.”

“Did you ask AJ not to tell me?”

“No. I told him only that I preferred to share the story with you when the time seemed right, and he agreed. Then I kept putting it off.”

All the family legends are unraveling in her head. What was true? Fact: Her mother was beautiful; Lu has seen the pictures. Fact: Her mother died. Everything else is now up for review. She thinks about her mother in this very house, her alleged hatred of light, which now streams into their home from all angles. Who was Adele Closter Brant?

“Did she ever hold me?” Lu asks her father. “Even once?”

“I’m sure she must have,” he says. His words are less than persuasive.

Fifteen years. Her mother lived for fifteen years after Lu was born. Yet-she was not inclined to be Lu’s mother. Her father gave his children a myth in place of a parent. Two different myths. For young AJ, the story, eventually, was that the woman who had become increasingly unreliable around him had gone into a hospital and never come home. For Lu, it was even simpler. This beautiful woman gave birth to you and now she’s gone. If this is grief, it’s an odd kind of grief, mourning the loss of a lie, the end of a fantasy. Lu might as well cry for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

She wondered if AJ ever confided in Noel. The boy with the absent father had zeroed in on their missing mother that very first day. Norma Talmadge, he had said right before he broke the desk. Where is she buried? What had come between Noel and AJ? He stopped talking to me, AJ said at his funeral. Did the others know what happened?

But Lu has no more time for her family’s mysteries. Work calls, literally. Della is trying to put out any number of fires, and Lu needs to be there, now. She goes to get dressed, frustrated. Her father’s apology was too ready, too easily given. He doesn’t believe he was in the wrong. She’s glad she knows, but it makes her feel odd about her father. Lots of people like to proclaim melodramatically that so-and-so is dead to them. Her father carried through, killing loved ones who became problematic. First he cut his ties to his own parents, then his wife, his in-laws. Why did he find it preferable to end relationships so definitively? What would happen if Lu or AJ ever disappointed him profoundly?

JUNE 27

The revelations about her mother blindside Lu, throw a long shadow over a scorching, relentless June that, after a brief retreat into jacket weather, doubles down on heat and humidity. These are vicious days, Lu thinks, in every sense. Baltimore is experiencing homicide numbers that haven’t been seen since the early days of the crack epidemic. Even Howard County’s homicides for 2015 double-to two.

Lu decides, after much back-and-forth, to take the new case, but only because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is gun-shy after the Rudy “incident.” This one is a domestic, a term she hates. Domestic violence may not be an oxymoron exactly, but the term mitigates murder, as if death at the hands of a former loved one is gentler. It’s hard to imagine a stranger doing something worse to this woman: her ex-husband, returning their nine-month-old after his weekend visit, shot the baby’s mother in the forehead when she asked for her support check. He now claims he was driven to the act by her divorce attorney’s demands. The case against him is so easy that Lu worries it is beneath her, a dunker she ought to hand off to Andi or another deputy. She would be happy to plead it out. Ah, but a man who has the ego to think he can end a person’s life because he doesn’t like the terms of their divorce also has the ego to demand “my day in court.” This phrase, my day in court, comes up so often that Lu feels as if she’s dealing with a demented bride. My day, my day, my day, my day. He believes that he is the wronged party, that all he needs is a venue to tell his story and everyone will agree he had no choice. Okay, sir, you shall have your day. In fact you might have as many as four days in court and then you will have many, many, many days in prison to think about your day.

At least the case offers a distraction, something on which to focus. Something to think about other than her mother, alive in a hospital one county over for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Fifteen years. It’s a dirge that plays in her head.

Lu’s father and the twins don’t even seem to notice the undercurrent of sadness in her, whereas AJ is unusually affectionate. He calls constantly, no matter where his travels take him. He has called almost every day since he has directed her toward this discovery. He has apologized over and over again for not telling her as soon as he knew, back in college. He also has apologized for telling her at all. According to AJ, whatever he did would have been the wrong thing at the wrong time.

“I don’t know why it came out then, when we were walking,” he says at one point. “I guess I was-overwhelmed.”

“Heck, AJ, it was probably jet lag more than anything else. You were loopy.”

She’s glad he told her. And she can’t decide what she thinks her father should have done. Obviously, she couldn’t be told when it happened. She was a newborn. At what age would she have been able to absorb the information? And what could her father have told her that wasn’t a lie? She is not a stranger to such issues: there are articles and books written for parents such as herself who have to explain the facts of life to their children, then explain why those facts don’t apply to them. When the twins were five, she began to drop hints: “You know, you weren’t in Mama’s belly.” How they laughed, thinking her droll. Of course they were in her belly. Then, last year, when they asked where babies came from, she had given them the full information, adding that they had been in another woman’s belly.

“So we had a different mama?”

“No,” she said. “I was always your mama. But my body couldn’t make a baby, so we found someone to help us.”

So far, this version has satisfied them. But the books warn to expect flare-ups later. They may ask to meet their surrogate. (They have met her, in fact, and would see her more often if she lived nearby. They know her as Miss Michelle.) If they want to meet the donor-well, good luck with that. All Lu knows about her is that she looked a lot like Adele Closter Brant, because Lu chose a light-eyed, dark-haired donor who had more in common with AJ than her. No matter-the kids came out looking like miniature Gabes. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin.

Because AJ is being so kind and big brotherly, Lu finds herself feeling solicitous of him. It’s obvious to her why he told her when he did. The trauma of standing there, near the site where Ben Flood died, probably kicked up some tough memories and those were a springboard to his memories of their mother. They are not, he has finally admitted, memories to envy. “I mean she loved me-loved us-but it was impossible to know what mom you were going to get. It was like I had three moms. There was sweet mom, mean mom and sick mom.”

Sweet mom read him books and played games with him, delighting in make-believe. She sang songs-AJ’s voice is her legacy. Sick mom shut herself in her room for days at a time, sobbing and refusing to come out.

“Mean mom,” AJ said, “told me that I had ruined her life, that she wished I had never been born.”

“Oh, lots of mothers say that,” Lu assured him, knowing it was a lie. She hoped, more than ever, that AJ would become a father. Motherless, Lu had no one to teach her how to be a mother and she thought, in the main, that she was a good one. AJ would be a good dad, and that would make him see that his mother’s legacy was not a damaging one.

On the last Saturday morning in June, Lu is amazed by a fleeting thought: I’m happy. It’s a beautiful day, hot but not wretchedly humid, the sky so blue and bright that the world feels as if it’s in a picture frame. Penelope has an all-day swim date with another family, a family generous enough to drop Justin at his sailing camp. (Lu tries to separate them, to the extent that they will allow themselves to be separated.) Her father has gone for his morning walk around the lake. She has a moment alone in the house, something that almost never happens. The silence is delicious. She makes a second cup of coffee in her father’s high-tech espresso machine, froths some milk. Lu notices, as she often does, that the kitchen now bears no resemblance to the original-every footprint has changed-but the sink still faces a window in the side yard. She looks into the lilac bush, its blossoms long past, and remembers the day she and AJ saw a pair of green eyes in there, staring back.

Impulsively, she picks up the phone and calls her brother, wanting him to hear that her voice is lighter, happier, than it has been in weeks.

Wonderfully, his is, too. “Lu!”

“Where are you?” she asks.

“In Italy,” he says. “Just finishing lunch before I go tour this biodynamic vineyard.”

“Nice life,” Lu says, ungrudging. If AJ and Lauranne go ahead and have kids, things will be less freewheeling. Yet he might be happier. That’s the paradox. Life is harder with kids, yet somehow better.

“Well, we can’t all spend summer in Columbia, Maryland.”

“You know what I was thinking of just now? Noel, the day we met him. And I’ve always wondered-what came between the two of you? Why did you stop talking to each other?”

“Oh, Lu, it was so long ago. I’m not sure exactly what happened. Noel was a drama queen. He got mad at me, I got mad at him for being mad at me. He got madder at me for being mad at him for being mad at me. Frankly, I always thought he was a little in love with me and that was a problem. Because I was never going to have those feelings for Noel. Never.” AJ sighs, less happy now, and she feels a twinge of guilt. “I don’t want to talk about Noel. It hurts. I regret so much not going to see him when he was sick. But I was scared.”

“Of contracting HIV?”

He pauses for so long she begins to think the connection is lost. “Yes,” he says at last. “It was early days, Lu. No one knew anything. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true.” He yawns. Loudly, showily. “I’m going to need a nap. Lunch was amazing. You cannot believe the food here. You should come here. Let’s do it as a family next summer. I’ll book a villa for a month.”

“I’m a public servant, AJ. I don’t get to go to Italy for a month. I’ll spend one week in Rehoboth this August and I’ll be tethered to my e-mail. I used to think Dad was mean, never taking us anywhere. Now I get it.”

Another showy yawn. “It’s just so beautiful. It makes you wonder-what are we doing, running, running, running, working, working, working? Such busy little bees. Or ants. Whichever one works harder. I thought I simplified my life, but all I did was find another way to be busy, telling other people to simplify their lives. Why am I touring a biodynamic vineyard, except for the fact that I want to have material for a podcast? Or an op-ed for the Times? Then I can deduct my trip, as if I need to worry about tax deductions. Drinking wine, eating good food is reason enough to come to Italy. I had a lovely white wine at lunch. Vermentino. I have no fucking clue if it’s biodynamic. But it made me happy.”

“Sounds like you’re working on a sequel.”

“No,” he says adamantly. “No more polemics disguised as memoirs. Or memoirs disguised as polemics. I’ve said everything I have to say. I’m going to learn to be.”

“You sound really happy,” she says.

“I think I am. I leave in two days. Can’t miss Fourth of July with the family, fireworks over Kittamaqundi.”

She hangs up, delighted AJ is finally learning to enjoy himself. Then, out loud in the kitchen, although no one is there to hear. “I do believe my big brother was a little tipsy just now. Good for him.”

And if AJ can let loose-she calls a familiar number, one she has not used for many weeks, one whose messages she has ignored or fended off with pleas of busyness, another ant with her head down, working, working, working. Maybe she can’t have Vermentino with lunch, but there are other earthly pleasures to pursue.

JULY 3

“Stay,” Bash says.

“What?” They have been together for almost four hours and she has showered, dressed. In her mind, Lu is already on the road, going through her parallel tracks of to-do lists, work and home.

“It’s a federal holiday. I know that even if my wife doesn’t. And, yeah, I’m sure you have a ton of work to do, blah, blah, blah, but-c’mon. We’ll get a pizza, have some wine. Or we could even go out for an early dinner. Bethesda has lots of good places. There’s this one, with tacos and good tequila-”

“No,” she says. “Not out.” Never out. The demarcation between here and everywhere else is thick, defined, never to be breached. She experiences Bash only inside, in rooms where no one else visits, with the exception of cleaning ladies who arrive long after they have gone.

“Then we’ll have delivery. Or I’ll go out and get something, bring it back, whatever you want. If you run back to your office, you’re going to end up eating at your desk. Just stay.”

She is being lobbied by a lobbyist, one of the best. Still, it’s worrisome, a reminder of that surprise visit to her Christmas open house. She thought they were safely past that. Really, a Bash who talks about pharmaceutical solutions to menopause is preferable to one who wants to take her to a restaurant.

“Something fast,” she says. “Pizza.”

They sit at the granite counter in the never-used kitchen, eating pizza straight from the box, drinking a ridiculously expensive red wine from water glasses. Lu studies the label, wonders if her father would like it. Good wine is a nice gift for the man who has everything, even if much of it is paid for by his daughter.

“I feel bad,” Bash says. “About the last time I saw you.”

Oh. “Oh. That’s okay. I’m sensitive about any discussion of menopause because-” Still, she hesitates to tell him that she went through menopause after her hysterectomy. She feels it de-sexes her. “I guess all women are.”

“No, not about that. I-I didn’t even mention what happened to you. That crazy Rudy Drysdale jumping you in court that way.”

Maybe it’s the recent revelation about her mother, but the word crazy hits her ear hard.

“He really did have severe mental issues,” she says, with frosty sanctimony. “You have to be pretty disturbed to do what he did.”

“Oh, I know. Sorry. Force of habit.”

“Habit?”

“That’s what we called him in high school, Crazy Rudy. He was like our mascot for a while there. Always hanging around. Finally, he took the hint and left us alone.”

Davey knew him, Lu reminds herself. But he said he saw him at the mall, hanging around Nita. And Davey was alone whenever he was with Nita Flood.

“A mascot-you mean, one of the teams you played on? Was he Willie the Wilde cat?”

“No, he was always mooning over Davey and AJ. There was some party or something at Davey’s house-I wasn’t there, but I heard about it-and these guys embarrassed him, but Davey and AJ took up for him. End of sophomore year, junior year? We could not shake him after that. He was worse than you. He showed up everywhere. AJ and Davey were nice to him. I mean we all were. I think AJ finally had a talk with him. At any rate, he stopped hanging around.”

“AJ said he didn’t know him in high school. We discussed that when he was arrested.” She is seeing a yearbook, the Glass Hour, a circle of lamplight. AJ pulled his own yearbook out that night, but remembered to put it back on the shelf. Why? He either knew Rudy or he didn’t. Did he think a picture would jog his memory?

“Maybe AJ didn’t remember him. I didn’t, not right away. Then it clicked-and I was, like-oh, yeah, Crazy Rudy. I always thought he was harmless. But isn’t that the cliché? Watch out for the quiet types.”

The Glass Hour. The glass house. Lu tries to remember everything she can about that afternoon at the cast party-the humiliated boy who darted from that walk-out basement and into the woods behind the house, the trees that allowed the Robinsons to live in a house where their lives were on display. Where did he go? Everyone’s attention had been focused on AJ and Davey, the nasty boys they had chased. No one thought to go looking for the boy they had taunted.

“Bash, was Rudy there that-that night Nita Flood crashed your party? The one at Davey’s house, where everything… happened.”

“No.” He seems irritated that they’re still talking about this. “I told you, he followed us around, but we didn’t invite him to stuff. That was just me, Davey, Noel, and AJ. We were the only ones.”

“And Nita.”

“She was shitfaced. Even then, I’m pretty sure she couldn’t remember much.”

“But not when she was with Davey. She got drunk playing the game, right?”

“Monopoly,” Bash says promptly. Promptly. As if prompted.

“That’s some memory you have,” she says. “Monopoly, Rudy Drysdale.”

“It’s hit and miss. Like I said, I didn’t remember Rudy, not right away. AJ probably forgot him, too.”

“I have to go,” she says, sliding down from the stool.

“Really? You’ve barely finished your one slice.” He grabs her wrist. She looks at his hand circling her arm. His hand looks enormous. He’s so much stronger than she is. Who isn’t? If he decided to force her to stay, if he decided to force her to do anything, he could. And if she dared to complain or suggest his behavior criminal, what would he say? You always liked it before. I’ve sent you home with bruises and you were fine with it. I thought it was what you wanted.

She removes his hand. “I have to go. It’s Friday. Teensy doesn’t like to stay late on Fridays.”

The highway is clogged despite the fact that the holiday weekend should be in full swing, everyone released from their obligations yesterday. Some of Lu’s people tried to find a way to take Thursday off as well, but she put her foot down. Weekend creep has to end somewhere. She passes the exit to Columbia, continuing north another twenty miles. Teensy’s not even working today. The twins are with their babysitter, Melissa, who is happy for a few extra hours.

Lu says grimly to her phone, via the dashboard: “Find funeral homes, Locust Point, Baltimore, MD.” It takes a while, with the phone offering almost comic alternatives, but she is finally connected to Charles L. Stevens Funeral Home.

“Hi, I’m calling about the funeral costs for Rudy Drysdale, whose wake and burial you arranged back in April. I’m his cousin and the family never received the invoice. Could you tell me if it was sent and what address you used?”

Sure enough, the bill went to the very address toward which she is speeding.

“Lu,” AJ says, opening his door to her, the center one. Door number 2, as Lu thinks of it. The other two doors are nonfunctional, one bright blue, the other bright red, their street addresses still visible, all part of AJ’s attempt to disguise his wealth. His attempt to disguise who he really is.

He’s not surprised to see her on his doorstep, unannounced. She wishes he were.

“Is Lauranne here?” she asks.

“She’s teaching a hot yoga class at Charm City’s Midtown location,” he says. “She’ll be home about six or so.” Then: “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

She doesn’t and doubts that he will want her to, in the end. But all she says is: “If things aren’t too crazy at home. Melissa’s with the kids.”

“I’m sure, Dad can-”

“AJ, why did you lie to me about not knowing Rudy Drysdale?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He walks to the kitchen, Lu on his heels; he gets a bottle of wine from his retro refrigerator, a bulbous thing in orange, the kind of appliance that looks cheekily affordable, but costs a lot.

“I brought five bottles of this back from Italy,” he says. “I wish I could have imported cases of it. Costs maybe six dollars a bottle and it’s just the perfect summer wine. Want a glass?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll bring the rest tomorrow, for the party. Have to fight these hoarding instincts.” He is in no hurry to have this conversation. He pours himself a glass of wine, fixes a plate with slices of cured meats and cheeses, despite Lu’s assurances that she’s not hungry. “Smuggled all this in. Don’t tell Dad. You know he’s a stickler. I guess I shouldn’t tell you, either, officer of the court.”

“Not my jurisdiction,” Lu says. “However, Rudy Drysdale was.”

“Let’s sit by the pool,” he says. “It’s nice in the shade.”

“Nice” is a bit of a reach, but it’s pleasant enough. AJ really does have a green thumb and the U-shaped courtyard is full of containers. Mostly plants and herbs, but there are some pots of impatiens.

“How much have you figured out?” he asks.

“Enough,” Lu lies. Everyone knows the old canard that an attorney never asks a question to which she doesn’t know the answer, but that’s for court, after investigations, depositions, discovery. Right now, Lu doesn’t have the luxury of knowing the answers. She has to bluff.

“But not everything,” AJ surmises. “You can’t. No one can. Only Rudy, and he’s dead.”

“You knew him in high school. You can’t have forgotten him. Davey remembers him. Even Bash remembers him. He’s the kid you were trying to protect, at the cast party. For months, he hung around you, tried to get in with your crowd. That’s not someone you’d forget. Why would you lie about that?”

“He’s a disturbed individual, Lu. I didn’t want to be linked to him.”

“Davey didn’t have a problem admitting he knew him.”

“Good for Davey.”

“Of course, Davey didn’t pay his funeral expenses.” She decides to risk a guess. “Or his legal bills.”

AJ nods. “You’re a good investigator, Lu. The Drysdales don’t even know who helped them out. I used an intermediary.”

“Bash?”

“No, why would you think that? I mean, once a bag man, always a bag man, but I didn’t want him involved. He had as much to lose as anyone, I guess, but I couldn’t trust him either. And no one had more to lose than Rudy. It was his idea, he acted on his own, no one knew he would do anything like that. I wanted no part of it. Settle down, I told Rudy. It’s just talk. No one’s going to listen to her. No one’s looking for you. But then Davey had to go and pay her. Worst thing you can do with a blackmailer. For one thing, it only convinced her that she was right, after all these years. Why would Davey pay her if he didn’t rape her? Forget the statute of limitations-who wants to deal with this kind of scandal in midlife, when you’ve finally got things figured out. Who wants to be accountable for his seventeen-year-old self? Even Bash couldn’t afford to have something like this being batted around. It’s one of the few times I’ve been glad Noel is dead. He was spared this stupidity, at least.”

His voice trails off. From somewhere in his house, a phone begins to ring. It rings twice, stops, goes to voice mail, presumably. Lu remembers another ringing phone, the black squat phone in their living room, how it rang and rang that winter their grandmother was trying to get through to them. Their father changed their home number, then AJ got a phone in his room. Anything to keep the secrets at bay, right, Dad? AJ had a phone in his room, and Lu was so jealous. He was on it all the time. All the time.

“You all talked that morning and agreed on a story. You worked out all the details about what you were going to say.” Right down to the board game you played.

“Everything we said was true, so what was the harm in making sure we said the same thing? I was a lawyer’s son. The key was to protect Davey. I knew what could happen if we opened the door to any doubt. Davey’s future was hanging in the balance. She showed up, uninvited. She and Davey had a big loud argument in his room, but then they were quiet as anything. We did play a drinking game. She passed out, we put her in the Robinsons’ bed to sleep it off, then Bash and Noel took her home. True, it was kind of chickenshit to leave her on the doorstep, but no one wanted to come into contact with her old man under the best of circumstances.”

Lu’s memory for faces and names isn’t good. She’s long been aware of that weakness and done what she can to correct it. She read somewhere that it’s bullshit to say, Oh, I don’t remember names or faces. But she tries. She knows she tries. What she does remember are stories, especially family ones. She could have recited every detail about the short life of Adele Closter Brant, as it was told to her. She can taste the Eskimo pie she ate the day they met Noel, remember the feel of the air on that June night she saw AJ sing in the Tree of Life chorus, count almost every freckle on Bash’s back as he rose and fell on top of Lynne in Lu’s childhood bed. She remembers that Thanksgiving weekend, her father pulling details out of AJ, telling him to stop toying with language about who was invited, who wasn’t invited. And not two hours ago, Bash said of Rudy: He wasn’t invited.

She says: “Rudy Drysdale was there. That night. How-”

AJ stands, walks to the edge of his pool. A lap pool, he defended to Lu when she mocked this expense by ascetic AJ. He and Lauranne needed to swim to counterbalance their vigorous yoga practices. If the kids of his Southwest Baltimore neighborhood ever learned about this hidden oasis, no one could stop them from scaling the fence behind the property. But as much as AJ had given to the community, he had walled off this part of himself. Walled off the pool, the sustainable lawn furniture. AJ didn’t want the world to know what he had, what he desired.

“Not exactly,” AJ says to his lap pool. “He offered Nita a ride home from work. Turns out that when he realized she was going to Davey’s house, he parked his car up the street and sneaked around to the back. Isn’t it ironic-I’m pretty sure it’s irony, at any rate. Davey and I defended him, at that very house, from being a little Peeping Tom pervert, skulking around with his camera. And there he was, in the woods, watching us.”

Lu feels as if she’s approaching a woodland creature, something timid and prone to bolt. She lets him keep his back to her, doesn’t move. “And what did he see, AJ?”

“What we said,” he replies, irritably. “Davey and Nita, having sex. Willingly on her part, best he could tell. When Rudy got wind of the investigation, a week or two later, he was dying to be the hero, begged me to let him talk to the grand jury. He wanted to repay the favor. He said he owed Davey and me everything. I told him to cool it, that it was better to let things lie. Nita barely knew his name, did you know that? When asked who drove her to Davey’s house, she always said: ‘Some guy from the mall.’ That’s all Rudy was to her. Some guy from the mall.”

Lu reaches for a piece of salami from AJ’s platter, although she’s not really hungry. The city sounds are so different from what she’s used to. Traffic, a police siren in the distance, a helicopter whirring overhead. AJ glances up. “That’s a police chopper,” he says. “They’re looking for someone. You learn to tell the difference, living here, between the police copters and the traffic ones. God, this year.”

She is not going to be distracted by idle talk. “What else did Rudy see? That night. You could see everything from the back of that house, if the lights were on.”

“I don’t know, Lu. Four teenage boys, living the life he wished he could live, pitiable as that sounds. Funny, isn’t it? Rudy got teased for being a ‘faggot.’ Yet Noel never did.”

“Why not let him speak to the grand jury, then? What part of your rehearsed story was he going to contradict?”

“I told you, everything we said was the truth.”

There it is again, the carefully parsed argument. Everything we said-what had gone unsaid? What had Rudy seen that AJ didn’t want entered into the record?

“What parts are you leaving out? What did you leave out then? This is your sister, AJ, not the state’s attorney. I need to know.”

AJ’s shoulders sag, weighed down by a secret that four boys, now three men, have carried for thirty-five years. “She passed out. During the game. We carried her upstairs to let her sleep it off. And we started giving Davey shit that she was his girlfriend. Because she was, you know, and that was embarrassing. Nita Flood wasn’t supposed to be anyone’s girlfriend. Davey got angry. He said he didn’t care for her at all. He said he cared for her so little that we could all take turns, if we wanted. So-” He shrugs, his back still to her.

“You raped her,” Lu says.

“I didn’t. I went into the room and just-looked at her. I was still a virgin. I didn’t want my first time to be like that. Noel made the same decision, although he pretended he made mad passionate love to her. That was his phrase, of course. What’s that from? Some movie, I guess. ‘Mad passionate love. Oh, yes, I made mad passionate love to her.’ Later, he took it back and I told him I hadn’t done anything either. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe him. That was what ended our friendship. Realizing that each of us thought the other was a liar. I thought Noel would have sex with her, just to see if he was gay. He thought I’d have sex with a dead-drunk girl because she would never know.”

“What about Bash?” Lu asks, wishing that her interest was dispassionate, only a matter of fact-finding.

AJ turns back, able to face her now. “Oh, I’m sure Bash had no compunction. He’s a Neanderthal, Lu. He’d do it with a knothole.”

She feels the urge to defend him, but maybe it’s herself she wants to defend.

“Then she was raped that night. No matter what happened between her and Davey, even if you and Noel declined. She was raped. Bash raped her. Probably Davey, too, but I get why you didn’t make that distinction.”

“Yes, if the facts of that night were to be examined today, it was rape. But-that’s not how people thought then, Lu. I’m sorry, but it’s true. And remember, she wasn’t saying anyone else had sex with her. She also was lying her head off, claiming Davey beat her up. Don’t forget that part. She lied. We just left out the stuff that would have detracted from the lies she was telling to protect her rotten bastard of a father.”

Only the lies didn’t end with Nita. Where did the lies end?

“So last fall, Nita asked everyone for money. But only Davey paid up.”

AJ kneels in front of Lu and clasps his hands around hers, as earnest and sincere a man as anyone Lu has ever known. “It was your election, you know. That and her granddaughter being sick. If it weren’t for you running for office, Nita wouldn’t have had any traction. She contacted Davey last fall, said she was going to ‘make some noise’ if we didn’t pay her. Davey gave her a week’s worth of collections from his church, but all that did was make her greedy. She started calling me. Over the years, I had kept tabs on Rudy. Well, truth be told, he kept tabs on me. As soon as I landed back in Baltimore, he started finding ways to make contact with me. It was like high school all over again, Rudy showing up on the fringes of events, watching me. I had to tell Rudy. He was involved, too.”

“Why would Rudy care? Nita never knew what he saw. She didn’t even know he was there. He wasn’t going to be drawn into this.”

The question clearly flummoxes AJ. Her brother, who makes a point of living without air-conditioning as much as possible, pops a sweat so sudden and noticeable that she wants to offer him one of Bash’s magical pills for menopause. His eyes shift right and left-toward the perfect little lap pool, then back toward this trompe l’oeil of a house, designed to look like three discrete rowhouses from the front, revealing its true nature only from the back, behind this high fence, which protects him from not only the neighborhood kids’ petty larcenies, but their prying eyes. What do people find when they spy on people who think no one can see them? What did Rudy see at Davey’s house that night? Why would Rudy care what Nita decided to say? What did Rudy, of all people, have to lose? Rudy hid in the woods, watching other boys have fun, but he didn’t participate. Rudy followed AJ’s crowd around, keeping his distance. Watching, forever watching.

Like high school all over again, showing up on the fringes of events.

Lu sees her brother, studying a copse of trees on their Memorial Day walk, becoming overwhelmed. He becomes so overwhelmed that he tells her the secret of their mother, a story he was comfortable keeping for almost thirty-five years. She sees now that he was desperate to change the subject, end the conversations about Nita and Davey, shut down his inquisitive sister, who was at once so close and so far away from the truth.

“Graduation night,” she says. “Rudy was there.”

AJ nods, his expression a combination of misery and respect. His smart little sister has figured it all out.

“He was fast, Rudy was. I was chasing Ben and, all of a sudden, there was Rudy, passing me, catching up to Ben. I was trying to tackle Rudy when I fell and broke my arm. He killed Ben, Lu. In cold blood. That thing about Ben falling on his knife-that’s not how it happened.”

“But you were down, you didn’t see, and the investigation cleared you-”

“The fix was in, Lu. As long as everyone thought it was Andrew Jackson Brant’s boy who was the hero, no questions would be asked, no difficult questions about how the story didn’t exactly match the evidence. I always told Rudy that it was better that way. Ben Flood had reason to attack Davey and me. I’d be forgiven for chasing him, for fighting him. Rudy wouldn’t. It wasn’t his fight. Again, he was always there, watching, wanting to ‘repay’ us. You know what? If I could live my whole life over again, I would just let those sad fucks from Glenelg High School have their fun with him and be done. I’ve paid a thousand times over for doing the right thing. I wasn’t going to let Nita Flood punish me for something I didn’t even do.”

“You asked Rudy-”

“No. No. I told him what was happening. That’s all.”

“But, AJ, you had to know what he would do-I mean, the fact that you paid for his defense-”

“I knew he needed a good attorney who would plead him out to not criminally responsible. I chose Howard & Howard because it’s one of the best law firms in the state. I couldn’t know that Fred had landed there or that this stupid case would become some fucking battle between the two of you. Your stupid, stupid pride, Lu. Why couldn’t you just settle?”

“My pride, AJ? You’re going to blame this on my pride?”

He drops his head into his hands, still in a crouch before her. Some part of Lu’s mind detaches, wonders at her brother’s knees, his ability to hold this pose so long. “What are we going to do, sis? What are we going to do?”

She wraps her arms around his neck, an atypical display of filial affection. “It’s a long weekend. Let’s just get through it, and then we’ll sift through all the implications of what you’ve told me come Monday, OK? Rudy is dead and if you tell me he acted on his own, without anyone encouraging him to go after Nita Flood, I have to believe you. Come to the house tomorrow, watch the fireworks, eat some barbecue. We don’t have to solve it now.”

“It’s going to kill Dad. If any part of this comes out. He’s always tried so hard to do the right thing. Even when he was wrong, he never knew it. Whatever he’s had to live with, he’s never been in doubt. Whereas I’ve lived my whole life, knowing I’m a fake and nothing I’ve done-nothing-can make up for that. When I told Rudy about Nita, I never dreamed-I guess I am Ajax the lesser.”

“Shhh,” she says “Shhh.” She can’t bear to know anymore.

That night, about an hour after paramedics are called to AJ’s home-there is a hideous comedy involving the address, with the EMTs trying to gain access through the wrong doors as Lauranne wails inside, not that it matters in the end-Lu and her father receive the courtesy of a personal visit from Mike Hunt, who has been informed by a detective he knows in the Southwestern District that AJ is dead. He waited until Lauranne went to bed, then apparently drank two more bottles of his nice Italian wine, chased it with a handful of pills, and walked into his own swimming pool, tying a metal drum of tomato plants to his ankle to ensure he could not change his mind.

Lu sees her father’s knees buckle-the phrase makes sense to Lu for the first time, and the next image that comes to her mind, crazily, is one of the towers on 9/11, that seeming moment of hesitation as it swayed, then collapsed-and she realizes that her own pain and anger and sorrow will have to wait, possibly forever, certainly for the rest of her father’s life.

She grabs him by his elbow, pilots him to a chair with Mike Hunt’s help.

“Why?” Andrew Jackson Brant keeps asking. “Why?”

But that is the one thing she must never tell him.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES IS CALLED TO THE INQUISITION, OR THE FINAL SHOE DROPS

My father became old overnight. Maybe he was old all along and I willed myself not to notice it. Other friends have told me that they watched their parents sail through their eighties, only to age suddenly at ninety, and my father was getting close to that milestone. At any rate, he is increasingly frail. He doesn’t eat enough, subsists on cold cereal and bananas. He no longer walks around the lake. His hearing seems to be going, or maybe he just doesn’t want to answer the questions put to him, simple as they are. His practice had been a charade for years, albeit a charade that seemed to keep him alert, active, happy. Now I barely trust him to drive a car to the grocery store. He has stopped reading books and it takes him much of a day to make his way through the Beacon-Light, slender as it is. The television is on almost all day. MSNBC and, much to my amusement, endless repeats of Law & Order. It is the one thing that seems to get a rise out of him, those Law & Order episodes. He finds all the lawyers wanting, in acumen and strategy. But, come the end of the hour, at least you know everything. That’s one luxury I will never have.

Suicides take their secrets with them. Was Rudy wily enough to kill Mary McNally as a warning to Nita Flood, or did he make a mistake that night? Fred said he saw the faded “R” and “L” on his wrists a week after he was arrested. A mistake might explain that trace of DNA. Was he excited about what he was about to do? Or was he sitting on the bed he presumed to be Nita Flood’s, thinking about another cold night, in which he hid in the trees and watched boys come and go in a room where a girl appeared to be sleeping. What did you see, Rudy? What do you know? But his loyalty, to the very end, was to AJ; and if my brother were my client, I would have no problem presenting a plausible case in which he had no knowledge of what Rudy intended to do. And paying for someone’s attorney does not prove conspiracy. Nor does telling your sister a life-changing secret at the very moment she is closing in on this fact. Give AJ this: he was very good at derailing me. That lovely Saturday lunch we had to discuss surrogacy-he was milking me about the case, trying to figure out what I knew, realizing that Rudy would need a better attorney.

As for his break with Noel-only Noel and AJ know what happened between them. I remain convinced that AJ left out some essential details, as was his wont. Never lying, but frequently omitting. Maybe Bash knows, but I don’t see Bash anymore, and I never really talked to him. He assumes our breakup has something to do with my grief over AJ, but I don’t want to be with a man who would screw a knothole. Or a blacked-out girl. I have no reason to doubt AJ on this part of the story, as he didn’t know I would care. Now when I think about Bash showing up at my open house last Christmas, I wonder where he and AJ were that night. Was Nita Flood still making noise, threatening them? Had they met with Davey, discussed strategy? Almost every detail in my life is up for grabs now, full of new meanings.

I resigned from my office on August 1. I said I needed to spend time with my family. No one questioned this excuse or put it in ironic quotation marks. After all, I was considered a success as state’s attorney. And there was my father, suddenly in need of so much care. I am trying to keep him home as long as possible, but-irony of ironies-the dream house that my father oversaw is not suitable for a man in his increasingly frail condition. For now, we are making it work. For now. But I’m not sure how much longer I can keep him at home. And once he leaves, why would the twins and I stay here? We can live anywhere we want, only-what do we want? I realize it’s a luxury to be able to ask that question. But it’s a luxury for which I have paid dearly. I think I want to go somewhere far away, or at least far enough away that our name, Brant, means nothing except to birdwatchers.

Anyway, once I had resigned and was an ordinary citizen again, there was nothing to prevent me from calling Eloise Schumann and asking her to take me for a walk in the woods.

“There was this big piece of concrete, the remains of an old amphitheater, or something,” she said. Her stride was purposeful and strong. I found myself thinking: She’s a tiny thing. Then: Wow, I never get to think that about anyone; do people think that about me? Until recently, I never really felt tiny. Now I feel as if the wind could pick me up and carry me away.

She spoke incessantly as we walked, always about Ryan Schumann. She was girlish on the topic, as silly and giggly as the teenage girl she was when she met him at age fourteen. “I was short, but I had a good figure, I didn’t look like a kid. And he wasn’t all that tall, so he liked my height. He said I was like a little doll. He was in love with me, but, of course, we had to wait. For him to get divorced, for me to finish high school. I would have done anything for him, anything. So when he said, ‘Let’s pick up that girl hitchhiker,’ I said sure. And when he asked her if she wanted to go party with us in the woods, I was okay with that, too. But she got flirty when she got high. Real flirty.”

I asked: “Did you tell my father this?”

“Yeah, the second time. But because I lied the first time, no one believed me. After Ryan had been away two years, I couldn’t take it anymore. I told your father that she had died, but it was an accident. That she sassed me and I pushed her and she grabbed me and we were fighting and then I pushed her off me and she hit her head on a rock.”

“But that wasn’t true, was it?” My father had told me that Sheila Compson was much taller than Eloise, and at least thirty pounds heavier. He had reason to doubt her.

Now Eloise was not so talkative. She walked a little farther. “I swear there was an amphitheater. But it was more than forty years ago. I guess it’s amazing the woods are still here. One day, I bet there won’t be any trees left between Baltimore and Washington. When I was growing up here, it was country, real country. We hated Columbia, with its tacky houses and all those circular streets that don’t really go anywhere.”

“Cul-de-sacs,” I said. It was, admittedly, an inane thing to say. But Eloise Cabot Schumann was born in 1959 and she was acting as if she was the original owner of the colonial tavern that had become my family home. She was all of seven years old when ground was broken for Columbia. These words, these memories, these complaints belonged to someone else. Possibly Ryan Schumann.

“How did you meet Ryan?” I asked, knowing this would get her talking again. This was the story she wanted to tell. A love story.

“At the mall,” she said. “I was at McDonald’s. I thought I had enough money for french fries, but I didn’t. I was seven cents short. There were all these people behind me in line and they were so mean when I was looking for that seven cents because I was sure I had it. One man began yelling and the girl at the cash register, she could have just let it go, but she wouldn’t. I was about to cry-I wanted those french fries so bad, I had hitched up to the mall to get them-and Ryan came up and he gave me the change and then some, bought me a Big Mac, and we started talking and that was that.”

“When was this?”

“September 17, 1973.”

“You were fourteen.”

“And only fifteen when he was arrested. That’s why he didn’t want me to testify. He was trying to protect me.”

“And himself, I guess? From statutory rape charges?”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes, that, too. But, really, he did what he did out of love for me.”

We had been walking for forty-five minutes now. I didn’t really expect she could lead me to Sheila Compson’s grave, and I wasn’t sure what I would do if she did. She hadn’t been able to do it thirty-some years ago, when her memory was fresher, the landscape virtually unchanged. But what else is there to do on a long walk but to talk and talk?

“He told the truth. He didn’t kill her. And there was a rucksack, and the sandals were in there. One must have rolled out, in the car.”

“What happened to the rucksack?”

“We threw it away.”

“Why? Why didn’t you just leave it with her body?”

“It was a long time ago,” Eloise Schumann said. “I can’t remember it all.” She stopped at a dying tree. “It might have been here. I don’t know. We probably should have marked it. But, you know, it was an accident and we panicked because no one was going to believe that. Ryan was trying to protect me. So he buried her and we threw the rucksack in a Dumpster behind the Giant in Laurel. If that one shoe hadn’t rolled out in his car, if his wife wasn’t so mean-”

Eloise is a middle-aged woman and while she looks younger than her age, she still looks like a middle-aged woman. She was wearing what I think of as a Chico’s ensemble-a striped T-shirt dress, a little too long on her tiny frame, bright red Toms, which are not the most practical walking shoes for this terrain. But as she spoke about Ryan, her voice was as light and high as a teenager’s. She had held these memories close for so long.

“There was blood on the sandal,” I reminded Eloise.

“Well, like I said, she hit her head. But it was an accident.”

“But the sandals were in her rucksack. She was wearing a different pair of shoes. That’s what frustrated you and Ryan so much. The things he told the truth about, no one believed. You hit her, didn’t you, Eloise? You hit her from behind, with her own shoe, and you thought it was back in the rucksack you tossed later. You killed her and Ryan covered it up for you and then neither of you knew how to make it stop. He was an accomplice, once he hid that body, so the only thing he would gain if you came forward was a reduced sentence for testifying against you. You tried to do the right thing, I guess. You told my father that you saw her at the concert, then you told the story about the accident, claimed he had withheld it from Ryan’s defense counsel. You kept trying to figure out how to get Ryan a new trial without incriminating yourself. That’s why you want a posthumous pardon. He spent his life in prison because of you, for you. The pardon isn’t for Ryan. It’s for you.”

Eloise Schumann shrugged, blithe as a teenager discovered in a minor lie.

“Like you said, if we told the truth, we both would have ended up in prison. He always said, ‘What’s the point in that?’ But those other truck drivers, they said there wasn’t a rucksack and there was. They didn’t tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He deserved a new trial. Because there was a rucksack and the shoe did roll out. All those things were true.”

Ah, the rucksack. How had two witnesses gotten the rucksack wrong, made the mistake about her shoes? Could be the cops, could be someone in my father’s office. They might have been led during the interviews. But I don’t think my father suborned perjury, not over so trivial a thing. He was a good lawyer. He could have knocked the rucksack down six different ways. No, I think my father repeatedly spoke to a young woman who was giving him every reason to believe she had been involved in a murder-and his mind rejected the notion. My father, the great protector. He married a fragile woman who needed him, tried to save her. In his mind, he also was saving Nita Flood from her own impossible story. A girl could not be raped by a boy with whom she had been having sex for more than a year. He was not that different from Don Quixote-Don Quexana, actually. The translations vary, as does the spelling of Quexana’s name, but they all agree on one thing: after Don Quexana spent all those years of reading courtly tales, about knights and the fair maidens they saved, his mind dried up.

“I want that posthumous pardon,” Eloise said. “It’s the least you can do.”

“You can’t get that unless you tell the truth. And there’s no statute of limitations for murder. The new state’s attorney would be happy to take your confession.” Boy, would she, I thought. Andi had been appointed to the top job, at my recommendation, after I stepped down. “But if that’s what you want, I can make it happen.”

I was lying, of course. Already in my mind, I was imagining my father’s obituary. His triumph in the Compson case, his victory in obtaining a conviction with no body, no evidence but that damn shoe-how could I take that away from him? It was one of the singular triumphs of his legal career and he believed it, always. Whatever mistakes my father made, as AJ said, he never lacked conviction. If his mind balked at the idea of a tiny teenage girl killing another girl, if he did not believe that a young woman could be raped by her boyfriend-well, those were the things he believed. He was a man of a certain generation, a man of his time. We always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later. We want Jefferson to free his slaves and not to father children with any of them. We want Lindbergh to keep his Nazi sympathies to himself. We want Bill Clinton to keep it in his pants. Martin Luther King Jr., too. And that’s just what we expect of the men. The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit-it all will be held accountable for the things it didn’t know, didn’t understand.

The things we don’t know, the things we don’t understand.

I did the only thing I could do. I got out my checkbook and wrote one more check for my father’s refurbishment project. I even wrote “interior design consultation” in the memo line on the check. I told Eloise Schumann that she had to report the income, but that’s between her and the IRS. My only job now is to take care of my family. I’m a SAHM and a SAHD-stay-at-home daughter.

Oh, there’s nothing to keep me from practicing law again one day, aside from my willingness to indulge in that little bit of implicit extortion. I assume that’s why AJ killed himself, so I wouldn’t have to figure out if my brother needed to be charged for soliciting Nita Flood’s murder. He was trying to save my career. Or maybe he was trying to save his reputation. He died-oh that word-beloved.

At any rate, I’ve lost my taste for the legal profession. It is too serious to be treated as a competition, too flawed to be a calling. Even with the twins now in fourth grade, days are easier to fill than one might think. From sunup to well past sundown, I go and I go and I go. I could have sent Teensy off into a well-remunerated retirement, but neither she nor my father would have liked that. If the fates are kind, he’ll be giving her a ride somewhere and they’ll overshoot the driveway and plow into Wilde Lake together. Of course, Teensy being Teensy-that is, endlessly perverse-the more I do around the house, the more she does; even the spacious kitchen is not enough to keep us from bumping into each other as we battle for housekeeping supremacy. Homemade rolls? I’ll see that and top you with pasta made from scratch, not even using a machine. The more dishes we dirty, the more time I have to spend cleaning the kitchen at night, my form of meditation.

When the house is clean, the voice of my father’s television finally silenced, I sit in the living room and drink a glass of wine or three. On windy nights, the fake lake is stirred into action and I can hear its wavelets smacking the shore. AJ, the lake says. Noel. Rudy. Mary McNally. Ben Flood. Adele Closter Brant. Gabe. How many deaths can one family hold in its ledger? It’s as if death begets death. It was practically the family business. My only hope is to free my children from its legacy. That’s why this investigation, donated to the Howard County Historical Society, is to be sealed for one hundred years-not unlike the papers of H. L. Mencken, to cite another man who shocked future generations by being a man of his times. Let strangers pore over them one day, piecing together my family’s history. My children don’t need to know any of this. They, at least, are blameless. How long can I keep them that way? Does anyone get through life blameless?

They certainly don’t need to know their father was with another woman when he died. A woman who called me several weeks later, apologizing profusely as she sobbed, begging me to understand that they were IN LOVE, but they never wanted to hurt anyone. A woman who says she was with him earlier that night, but swears he was alive when she left. Who knows? Love, she kept sobbing to me. They were in love. She never would have hurt anyone; she and Gabe spoke often of how much they loved their partners, but-love. Love, love, love. I offer this story only because I think it provides context for some choices I have made since then and for the scant information I have offered about Penelope and Justin. This is not their story. This is not their legacy.

I told that woman never to call me again. On good days, I think she was a liar, a troublemaker, someone who thought she would be offered money to go away. On bad days-well, at any rate, she didn’t get any money from me.

I tell the story here so I may never tell it again. My childhood was made up of stories and so many of them were false. Is that because the true stories were unendurable?

Just last week, I ran into my childhood friend, Randy Nairn, at Wegman’s. We were both buying sushi-grade tuna. He owns a wholesale liquor distributor and he has the look of a marathoner: lean, almost too lean, as his face is a little weathered, ten years older than his body, but then-his body looks great. He’s married, happily I assume, because he didn’t flirt at all and I might have given him an opening, mentioning the time he asked to kiss me. I might have touched his elbow. He glided right past that, instead recalling Thanksgiving dinner at my house, that opened bottle of crème de menthe he brought as a gift. He laughed at himself with the ease of someone who knows he has transcended the foibles of his past, a trick I’ll never master. I still get mad when people tell the story about my golf caddy back-to-school outfit. That is, I would get mad, if there were anyone left to tell it. Maybe I will tell Penelope and Justin, and they can tell it back to me. The Brants have a few stories left that can still be told.

“Your house was like a castle to me,” Randy said. “It was like you were living in some palace, high above everybody else. I thought you were royalty.”

We did, too, Randy. We did, too.