By A Spider's Thread

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

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

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

"Mark Rubin?"

"You have another one?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know. Born March seventh."

"How do you know this?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm not sure what you mean."

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

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

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

"She took their three children."

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

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

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

"Have you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"You're Russian," Tess said.

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

"How long have you lived here?"

"Twenty-some years."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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