“It will be,” my father said.
“Not on one of those rinky-dink lots. I couldn’t bear it.” She was grasping now. My mother had the intellect for law school, but no temperament for debate. She took things too personally.
“I found an irregular lot on the lakeside,” my father said. “It’s essentially a double. Once the plantings are mature, you’ll barely be able to see your neighbors.”
She was his wife. Good-bye, city life.
Two weeks later, that stone tavern was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and transferred, at a pace of one mile per hour-the journey took much of a Sunday evening into early Monday morning and required multiple permits-to one of the most desirable lots in Columbia, a double on the west shore of Wilde Lake. The move was covered by both the Baltimore and Washington papers. It marked the first time our family had been in the newspaper, literally announcing my father’s arrival on the local political scene. “The house will be home to Andrew J. Brant and family. Brant, a Baltimore attorney, hopes to be active in Howard County’s Democratic Party…”
My mother’s parents were angry. It had taken almost a decade, but the prince had gotten around the princess’s imperious parents, as the prince always does. They argued. They cajoled. They threatened to cut my parents off without a cent. They offered to pay the tuition to Gilman. But their lobbying campaign to keep them under their roof-my mother and AJ, really; they merely tolerated my father-only signaled to my father the urgency of leaving.
My parents used me as their trump card. As large as my grandparents’ house was, there was no bedroom available for another child. I broke the spell. I freed the princess from the castle, brought her to a new palace. I even freed Teensy, who had come to work for the Closter family when AJ was born and insisted on following us to Columbia, despite the fact that it meant an onerous commute for her every day.
Four months later, I was born, Seven days after, my mother died. It was a bitter winter. Everything froze. Wilde Lake froze. The improvements on the house, intended for her, stopped, suspended in time. Again, as in a fairy tale. Or, perhaps, a television show. I was your wife. Good-bye to my life.
JANUARY 7
“Happy birthday.” Andi, sailing into Lu’s office again. Not knocking. Again. Lu isn’t sure what to do about this. “You’ve got your first murder. If you want it.”
“My birthday was Friday. What kind of murder?”
Lu can tell that Andi is struggling with herself. If she makes the murder sound uninteresting, maybe she’ll catch it. But if it turns out to be the kind of case that Lu wants to try, all Andi will have achieved is a reputation for disloyalty and dishonesty.
“Middle-aged woman, killed in what appears to be a B and E. Could have been there for up to a week.”
“How was she killed?”
“I told you all I know. North Laurel, an apartment complex off Route 1. The Grove. Funny name for a place on Route 1 in North Laurel. I doubt there have been any groves there for a long time.”
“When was she found?”
“Call came into 911 a little before three this afternoon. She didn’t show up for her shift at the Silver Diner after a week off. Didn’t answer her phone or her cell. That was odd enough, her boss says, that he went to check on her.”
“Ya me voy,” Lu says. I’m going. She and Gabe had been in high school Spanish together, although they had barely spoken to each other in any language back then. He hated the fact that his accelerated math skills weren’t enough to free him from all of high school; he split his days between grade-appropriate classes in English, history, and Spanish, then was driven to College Park for math and physics. He should have been admired for his double life, but he was a pariah, disliked by almost everyone, especially Lu. He was small, like her, and Lu hated being paired up with small boys by the time she was fifteen. Her own precocity had been burdensome enough, and she had just finally hit her stride socially. She didn’t need to be tarred with the brush of another geek.
Ten years later she married him. Twenty-five years later, she had lost him. She regretted, almost every day, ignoring him in high school. If only I had known, she would think, even as she mocked her use of the melodramatic phrase. We could have had ten more years if we really had been high school sweethearts. If only anyone ever knew anything ever.
When they were first built in the mid-twentieth century, the Grove apartments had probably been a place for people-families, even-on the way up. All the little telltales of aspiration are still here, if worse for wear. The curving fieldstone entrance, the swimming pool, the name spelled out in a pretentious, once-fashionable font, although the sign had been reduced to THE G OVE. And there had been an attempt to avoid a cookie-cutter appearance, with two styles of residences-town houses and three-story apartment buildings, done in three different sidings. There is nothing obviously wrong with the Grove, yet Lu senses that the people who live here now are, at best, treading water. Like the Grove, they’ve seen better days.
Another telclass="underline" the cop cars, crime-scene tape don’t seem to excite much attention-people pulling out of the parking lot slow a little, but no one gets out, no one is gathered at the tape’s edge. It’s a bitter-cold Wednesday. Everyone else’s life goes on, while Mary McNally’s is over, has been for as much as a week.
“Someone left the balcony door ajar and the thermostat was turned way down,” says Detective Mike Hunt without preamble, knowing this detail will interest Lu. He is lean, prematurely silver, and absolute trouble when it comes to women, although Lu knows, via Andi, that he tries not to shit where he eats. At least, that’s the excuse he gave Andi. Married, kids, trying to maintain a ruthless compartmentalization. Lu approves. Plus, he’s a good detective. Smart, confident. He had to be, to survive that name, beloved by prank phone callers everywhere.
“Do you think it was a deliberate attempt to obscure the time of death?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she turned her thermostat down to sixty-two degrees every night to save money and the killer left the door open in his haste to get away. We’re taking fingerprints from there and the sliding door where we think he entered.”
“The one he left open?”
“No, there are two bedrooms off the balcony, each with its own entrance. Let me show you.”
The apartment is nicer, inside, than Lu expected. The Grove’s bones are substantial. Superior, in fact, to the apartments and town houses built in Columbia two decades later. The floors are a well-maintained herringbone, and the layout indicates an expectation of gracious living not seen in newer apartments. A large kitchen, separated from a full dining room by a swinging door. Pocket doors between the dining and living rooms. The two bedrooms share a terrace overlooking what was once a garden-and maybe it still will be, come spring. Everything looks desolate this time of year.
“We think he entered here,” Mike says, showing Lu the sliding door in the smaller bedroom. “It was locked from the inside, but there are marks. It wouldn’t be hard to force it. He comes in, then goes to the master bedroom.”
They follow in the intruder’s footsteps, down the little hall. The woman who lived here didn’t have particularly good taste, but nor was it bad. There’s an arid quality to the decor, it’s as if she studied catalogs and tried to replicate the rooms exactly, down to the placement of tchotchkes. The hallway, for example, has framed copies of those French liquor ads, obviously reproductions. The decorative items seem impersonal, too, chosen to fill space. Yet it is the home of a house-proud woman, meticulously kept. Any dust that has settled here is subsequent to her death. Lu stops, puts a pin in her feelings, files them away. Faces, names, she forgets. But once she begins to translate a victim’s life into a story, it is with her forever. Mary McNally, a waitress, reliable and well liked, if not well known at her place of work. If it hadn’t been for her conscientious reputation, imagine how long she might have remained in her bedroom, staining a carpet she probably never so much as spilled a glass of water on.