By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel (40 page)

“I think I see half of the ’66 Orioles pitching staff out there,” Tess said, peeking around a set of shelves in the social-sciences wing, where Kitty was making last-minute preparations. “And the entire cast of
Homicide,
first season. How do you know all these people?”

“A bookstore owner isn’t much different than a priest or a doctor. I tend to their needs, and I keep their secrets. It builds up a lot of goodwill.”

“Why is the former governor here? I’m not even convinced he’s literate.”

“Politicians are easy. Just give them money and they’re your friends for life.” Tess remembered that Mark Rubin had given her the same advice. “How do I look?”

Given that Kitty looked beautiful even when she rolled out of bed in the morning, it was to be expected that she would be radiant on her wedding day. But there was something extra, an additional glow, a brighter spark in her eyes. Much to Tess’s relief, Kitty had chosen a relatively restrained outfit, a suit in a peach color that had always flattered her. She was the most gorgeous woman in the room, as always, but Tess did well by her black dress, her hair coaxed into an upsweep by the hairdresser Kitty had hired. If the shoes hadn’t been so painful, she almost might have enjoyed her glamour-girl alter ego.

“You look great,” she told her aunt. Feeling dangerously close to tears, she sought refuge in sarcasm. “But I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.”

“Well, the groom rolls. You’ll always have that.” Kitty glanced at the large clock high above the atrium. “We’ll be starting in two minutes. And in fifteen minutes all these weeks of planning and fretting and me being a basket case will be officially over. Seems kind of silly when you think about it.”

“Why did you do it?” Tess asked. “I don’t mean the wedding so much as marriage. You’re over forty, you and Tyner were already living together, you both have your own money, your own careers. You’re clearly not going to start a family —”

“I could always adopt a girl from China,” Kitty said, her face full of mischief. “And don’t forget that movie director, the one whose wife had twins when she was in her fifties.”

“But why
marriage
?”

Kitty answered the question with matter-of-fact, unhurried calm, as if they were in her store on a slow afternoon, not holding up three hundred people waiting for a wedding. “We take so many unconscious risks in this life — especially you, sweetie — that we might as well take a few conscious ones from time to time.”

She smoothed a piece of hair back from Tess’s forehead. An hour out from under the beautician’s touch, a few stubborn pieces were already asserting themselves. Had her hair always been this unruly, or was it just cranky since it had been shorn before its time? “I wish you had a date for the wedding. It’s a shame Crow couldn’t make it up from Charlottesville.”

“I almost had four dates,” Tess said. “But Mark checked the time and realized the sun wouldn’t have been down long enough for them to make it here on time from Pikesville. Besides, the catering isn’t kosher, and the children would be up past their bedtimes. Mark is very strict about their routines — although not as strict as he used to be. He even let the children celebrate Sukkoth late. Isaac said it wasn’t fair to have Yom Kippur without having Sukkoth, too.”

She had, in fact, helped Mark and the children build the traditional shelter, with Isaac instructing her at great length on the rituals of the holiday, a celebration of the harvest.

“We’ll make a Jew out of you yet,” Mark had joked.

“Maybe a half one,” Tess said.

“Can you be a half Jew?” Isaac had asked. “Don’t you have to be all or nothing?”

Mark Rubin had treated the question with the utmost seriousness. Tess was learning this was the way he treated all his children’s questions, large and small.

“When it comes to faith, you believe or you don’t believe,” he had told his son. “But there is a cultural aspect to Judaism, too, and Miss Monaghan is talking about that part of herself. Her mother’s family was Jewish, but she wasn’t raised to believe anything.”

“Yes I was,” Tess protested. “I was raised to believe that a good handshake, big tips, and a decent Christmas-card list can grease the wheels of doing business. And that Jews can have crab feasts as long as they have them outdoors.”

Mark didn’t want to laugh at that bit of sacrilege, not in front of his children, but he did anyway. “Tess doesn’t have a religion. But she does believe many things. And she sticks by them, which is more than some religious people can say. She honors her own principles.”

“And Mama? Was she a half Jew or a whole one?”

It was as if a cloud had passed over the sun and a bright day had grown chilly and dreary. With just a glance at Mark’s face, Tess could tell he was thinking about Natalie, who was being held in a Maryland jail and fighting extradition to Ohio, where she and Zeke had been implicated in the death of a patrolman. Mark could not believe that his wife had killed anyone but Zeke, and Tess saw no reason to argue with him. But a police officer was dead, and Ohio wanted a live suspect to try. Tess, remembering the coded exchange between Zeke and Natalie, had a hunch Ohio was after the right person. But she held her tongue around Mark. People needed to believe what they needed to believe.

“Your mother,” Mark said at last, “is a good woman who loves you very much. That was what she believed in — that you were precious and worth making any sacrifice for.”

The Rubin Sukkoth table groaned with offerings from throughout Pikesville, and Tess knew that Mark Rubin would remain alone only by his own choice. Still, he had yet to pursue a
get
from Natalie, or even a more mundane Maryland divorce. She hoped he would. Mark Rubin was an awfully attractive man. Not attractive enough to convert for — Tess knew her limitations. But he would make such a good husband for the right woman, once he was through yearning for the woman he couldn’t have, the woman no one should really want.

In the Pratt the jazz trio, a group of Peabody students, began playing a light classical piece that Tess knew she should recognize but didn’t.
Crow would know,
she thought, the memory almost un-bidden. Crow always knew things like that.

“That’s your cue,” Kitty said, pushing her past the shelf of biographies, and Tess walked the length of carpet that had been put down to create an aisle between the rows of folding chairs. She walked a little more swiftly than she should, although the heels kept her from moving with her usual long stride. At the end of the runner, she greeted Tyner and then turned to watch Kitty walk down the aisle. Because of her dual duties, she did not carry flowers, but she had a tiny velvet bag dangling from a wrist corsage. She would produce the ring from that bag when the time came.

Kitty swept up the aisle on the arm of Tess’s father, Patrick, the oldest of her five brothers. The Unitarian minister raced through the service as if he had a train to catch, and it was a little pro forma to Tess’s taste, with the usual Shakespearean admonitions — love is not love that seeks to alter, allow no impediments to the love between two true minds, et cetera, et cetera. Kitty had wanted Tess to give a reading, but she had balked. She had no fear of public speaking, but she was terrified of choking up from emotion, and Tyner would never let her live that down.

Fifteen minutes proved to be a generous estimate. The wedding was over in twelve, making way for the grand party Kitty had been promising all fall. Tess followed her aunt down the aisle, finishing the last of her attendant duties — removing the veil and folding it into a sealed plastic wrapper, finding a place to keep Kitty’s flowers for the duration of the reception, which was to be held a few blocks northward in yet another library, the Peabody.

“You’re in the second car,” Kitty said. “You’ll find it parked at the curb.”

“Really, Kitty, I could have walked it, even in these shoes. Or grabbed a ride with my folks.”

“No,” she said, reverting back into her adamant-bride mode. “It’s very important to me that the wedding party arrive with proper pomp and circumstance. Besides, I want you to open this in the car.” She handed Tess a small box from Tiffany’s. “It’s traditional for the bride to give her maid of honor a gift. Don’t lose this.”

“I didn’t lose the ring, did I?” Actually, she had almost knocked it down the sink in the Pratt washroom before the ceremony, but there didn’t seem to be any reason to mention that fact now that the ring was safe on Kitty’s left hand.

The Lincoln Town Car was at the curb, as promised. Tess crawled in, inadvertently flashing the guests milling on the sidewalk — she still hadn’t gotten the hang of maneuvering in such a sleek skirt — and settled herself in the deep backseat. The car reminded her of Mark’s. She’d hate to admit it to anyone, but she had grown rather fond of that Cadillac and had even priced a few used ones on the Internet. A woman who did surveillance for a living deserved a more comfortable ride. Besides, as Uncle Donald said: “It’s a write-off,
mamele
.”

Kitty came out and was showered with mesh bags of seed, while Tyner rolled behind her, trying to scowl but failing. He heaved himself into the limousine, a Lincoln Navigator, and Kitty folded his chair with a speedy efficiency that spoke volumes of their ease with each other. If you had to be in a wheelchair, you might as well be with someone who knew how to fold it, Tess thought.

“The Peabody,” she told the driver, pulling on the ribbon of the box Kitty had given her. They said good things came in small packages, but Tess couldn’t think of anything she wanted that was this tiny. Inside, under layers and layers of tissue, there was only a folded piece of paper. Maybe Kitty and Tyner had bought her the new car she wanted. Or had given her a check to pay for her pain and suffering through this ordeal. Tess was giving them a small wooden chest, courtesy of Mickey Harvey the woodworker. Tess didn’t care how old Kitty was. Every bride needed a hope chest.

The paper, folded with almost origami complexity, was a note, nothing more.
I’m not sure what the traditional bride’s gift is to the maid of honor,
Kitty had written in her distinctive parochial-school hand,
but I thought I’d give you a nudge.
The inscription was followed by a telephone number that Tess had memorized long ago, a Virginia number she had
not
been calling all these weeks. It was the home telephone for Crow’s parents.

So Kitty had known. She had probably figured it out long ago, and she had kept her own counsel, offering Tess chance after chance to confide, but never pushing. Even now she wasn’t telling Tess to go back to Crow. She was simply urging her to decide what she wanted, once and for all, to give up this limbo of inaction.

Tess thought of all the things people did in the name of love. She thought of the pain that Natalie and Zeke had caused everyone around them, the literal lives lost because they believed that their love suspended all the usual rules. She thought of Mark, sitting shivah for a marriage that never was rather than expose himself to a world of women who would find him eminently lovable. She thought of Natalie’s inextinguishable passion for her children, which had convinced her to do the right thing, albeit in the wrong way.

Wasn’t Tess’s refusal to do anything simply the other side of Mark Rubin’s misguided belief that he could control everything? The fact was, Tess had resented Mark’s passionate quest for Natalie because she wanted Crow to pursue her, to fight for her, to engage in some way, any way. Funny — they were so good in a crisis, when they had to bond together, so fragile when it came to day-to-day life. Instead of trying to work out their problems, they had gone to their respective corners to sulk. Crow had a right to such immaturity, but Tess was thirty-three now. She needed to be a bit more adult.

The car arrived at the Peabody Library. The front doors were thrown open, and a beautiful square of yellow light shimmered in the night. The book-filled rooms at the top of the short flight of stairs seemed to hold all that anyone could ask for of life — family, friends, good music, delicious food. Rubik’s Cube solved at last, at least on this face. Who knew what the other five sides looked like?

As Tess started to get out of the car, this time remembering to keep her knees together, she realized she must experience the evening not only for herself but also for her virtual clan, the SnoopSisters. Susan in Omaha would want to hear about the rare books in the Peabody’s stacks. Letha in St. Louis would be curious about the people — what they did and what they wore. Margie Lynn in California would be filled with questions about the menu, while Gretchen would bluntly demand to know the cost of the whole affair. And yes, they also would want to know what happened to Tess in the next moment. For the SnoopSisters had been privy to Tess’s secret all these weeks, and they had given her that rarest combination of friendly commiseration — pure empathy and no advice. They deserved to be the first to know what she had decided. Well, maybe the second.

She stopped on the sidewalk, digging her cell phone out of the ridiculously small evening bag Kitty and her mother had insisted she carry. Tess had wanted to use a knapsack — a small one, to be sure, by a name designer — but Kitty assumed she was just trying to sneak her Beretta into the ceremony. This dinky thing barely accommodated her keys, phone, and lipstick. No room for the second phone, the one she used for outgoing calls, so she had to use the one whose number she always safeguarded. But that was okay. Tess didn’t mind if this particular person had her number.

An answering machine picked up. “Call me on this phone when you have time to talk.
Please.
No matter how late, no matter how early.” Then she climbed the stairs and entered a fragrant room that contained almost — almost — everything she wanted.

The research for this book was often the result of chance encounters and serendipity, beginning with Donald Worden’s memories of transporting furs as an off-duty police officer. My former colleague Bill Salganik provided an introduction by proxy to Michael Miller, who shared his knowledge of the fur industry and let me try on quite a few coats. Scott Shane was generous with his insights into Baltimore’s Russian Jewish community; Carole Epstein solved one of the book’s knottier problems poolside in Las Vegas.