By A Spider's Thread

Chapter Seven

LANA WlSHNIA BALANCED TESS'S HANDS ON HER fingertips, clearly unimpressed. No rower has pretty palms, but even the tops of Tess's hands were unattractive, with short, nicked nails, ragged cuticles, and a few random cuts that she couldn't recall inflicting on herself. After a few moments of stony inspection, Lana took Tess's left hand and flipped it over, touching it the way one might handle a dead animal brought home by a faithful cat. Here the damage was far worse-a corporal's stripes of hard yellow calluses. Still, Lana said nothing, her face impassive.

The only consolation was that Lana's hands, while nowhere near as damaged as Tess's, were not spectacular. Her nails were blunt cut and unpolished, her fingers stubby and plump. Manicurist, file yourself.

"What do you do?" she asked, dropping Tess's hands into warm, soapy water. They were the first words she had spoken since they were introduced. Her accent was quirky-American, with a hard, aggressive edge, more New York than Baltimore. She had a broad, unsmiling face, and her heavy makeup made her look older than she was, assuming she was Natalie's contemporary. A single pockmark on her forehead indicated a poor complexion or a bad case of chickenpox, but heavy foundation covered any other telltale marks.

"Do?" Tess echoed. She preferred not to lie outright, but she also wasn't ready to tell Lana that she was a private detective, not just yet.

"To your hands. What do you do, that they're so beat up?"

"I row."

"What?"

"Row. On the water-I row a single scull." Tess couldn't use her hands, as Lana was now holding them both in the water, pushing them down as if they were a pair of kittens she hoped to drown. She rolled her shoulders and jerked her elbows, attempting to mime the movement, and succeeded only in looking as if she were having a convulsion.

"For exercise?"

"Yeah." It was easier to agree than try to explain that rowing was more for her head than her body or heart. There were a dozen activities Tess could do for endurance and strength training, but rowing was the only thing that brought her close to the kind of Zen-like state that others claimed to find in yoga and meditation. She had never loved it more than this summer, when she'd had to give it up for a few weeks. Sidelined after cutting open her knee, she had needed it more than ever.

"Weird. I oughta do something." Lana's complacent voice made clear that she had no intention of doing anything. Was she married? She didn't wear any rings, but perhaps a ring would interfere with her work. "I should tell you-if you go out and row again, it's not going to last. Just so you know."

Tess nodded, but the judgment stung a little. She didn't go in much for beautifying routines, but she liked to think that she wasn't beyond hope.

Lana removed the shallow basin of water and began massaging Tess's hands. This felt heavenly. Tess thought about Deborah, wrapped in seaweed, abraded with kosher salt, covered with pale green cream. Did she really think she needed all these treatments, or did she come just for the touching, to be massaged and rubbed?

"There's a reason I asked for you today," Tess said, deciding they were far enough along in the process that Lana couldn't abort, or walk away.

"Yeah, I was in Baltimore magazine's 'best of issue three years ago, and people still call."

She nodded toward the wall behind her station, where a framed certificate attested to her honor. Invited to look, Tess also took in the photographs and personal mementoes that Lana had put up there. There was a stuffed bear in a T-shirt that said MARDI GRAS, and a photograph of Lana with a dark-haired woman, the I

"I heard about you from someone else-Natalie Rubin's mother."

Lana didn't miss a beat in her ministrations to Tess's hand, and if there was a change in her expression, Tess couldn't see it. "That was nice of Vera, to send me a customer. She's a nice lady."

"When did your family come over?"

Lana looked up, squinting at Tess as if it were impolite to mention that someone was not a native. Perhaps it was, in these paranoid times.

"Twenty-eight years ago. I was a year old." So she was twenty-nine, a year younger than Natalie.

"Where are your parents from?"

" Sheepshead Bay." She gave Tess a crooked smile. "Now, I mean. They were originally from Belarus. They moved to New York, but they sent me down here to live with my aunt because… well, because they hoped I'd be more dutiful in Baltimore. Also, they thought Baltimore was more American. They figured they had come all this way, so I should live in a real American place. You could walk down our block sometimes and not hear a single word in English."

"Do you ever think about going back, to see where you came from?" The question was born of simple curiosity. Tess had no experience with exile. If she wanted to visit her roots, she could walk from her office to the old East Side Democratic Club, where her parents had met. But as soon as Tess spoke, she saw a horrible possibility: If Natalie had gone back to her homeland, she and her children were beyond the reach of Keyes Investigations, the SnoopSisters Digest, and even most legal authorities.

"There's no one there to see," Lana said. "Maybe some distant cousins, but I never knew them."

"How do you know Natalie?"

"The usual way."

"The usual way?"

"School, the neighborhood. You know, you need to push back your cuticles."

Tess knew what a cuticle was, but she had never understood what was meant by pushing one back. With what? The flat of her hand, a stern word?

"When did you come to Baltimore?"

"They sent me here when I was in junior high. How do you know Natalie?"

"I don't. I know her mother." Tess waited a beat. "And her husband."

Lana didn't respond.

"In fact, her husband hired me to find Natalie and their children. They've disappeared."

Still no comment, as Lana concentrated on shaping Tess's nails, which should not have required so much attention. There wasn't much there to file.

"Has she been in touch with you?"

"If she has, I wouldn't tell you."

"But you know she's gone, because you don't seem at all surprised by the information."

Lana was good at skipping past comments she didn't want to address. "She's my friend. Whatever she's done, I'm for her, not for her husband. I never liked him much."

"Do you even know him?" It was hard to imagine that Mark Rubin would withhold information about his wife's friend.

"No, but Natalie tells me things. He's not right for her."

"Why would you say that?"

"Do I have to have a reason?"

"Yes, and it must be a pretty profound reason if you're willing to keep a man from finding his children."

Lana paused, her emery board poised over Tess's nail. "He's full of himself," she said at last.

"Because he's rich?"

"No, not so much because he has money, although that's part of it. He's just so… well, Jewish."

That odd prejudice again. "You're Jewish."

"It was just what we were, not what we did." Lana's parents may have succeeded in creating an American girl, but her shrugs were Old Country through and through. Put her in a head scarf and Lana would have looked at home in a New York Times photo of Russian women, circa the year of her birth, lined up for bread and toilet paper.

"What about Natalie?"

"What about her?" Lana turned her back on Tess, taking a long time with her wall of nail polishes, as if there were dozens of variations on the shade of "clear" that Tess had chosen when they first sat down.