Laura Lippman - By A Spider's Thread

Tess sat in Rubin's office chair for the next hour, hitting the redial button with her index finger until she began to feel a twinge from wrist to elbow. Finally the unsympathetic buzz of the busy signal gave way to a ring, which turned into a puzzled "Hello?" on the twelfth ring.

"Could you please tell me where I'm calling? I know it's a McDonald's in Indiana, in the 812 area code." Caller ID and Isaac had combined to give her that much information. "But I need the town name and the location of this phone."

"You're calling McDonald's but you don't know why or where it is?" The voice was pleasant if foggy, a young man blissed out on Happy Meals or some other substance that had led to the sudden need for a cheeseburger.

"Long story," Tess said. "Boring one, too. But I sure would like to know where you are."

"Well, according to conventional cartography, I am at the forty-second latitude and seventy-fifth longitude, aka French Lick, Indiana, you'll pardon the expression."

"Is that really the latitude and longitude for French Lick?" Tess asked, curious in spite of herself.

"No, I just made it up, but it sounds plausible, doesn't it? Where are you calling from?"

"Baltimore."

"Oh, I don't think so," the young man said, hanging up. Tess felt like one of the errant knights in a Monty Python film, denied permission to cross a bridge because she'd waffled on her favorite color. She had already struck out with the state police once they heard that Mark's son had confirmed he was with his mother and there was no custody order for the father to enforce. No laws broken there, the police said, compassionate but firm. If only Isaac had spoken of kidnapping or said he feared for his life.

Tess called directory assistance and asked to be connected to the only McDonald's in French Lick, but the manager refused to answer any of her questions, saying she had just gotten on and couldn't possibly know who had passed through the restaurant even an hour ago.

"Is there someone else-" Tess began.

"Have you seen the sign? Over a billion served? Well, about half of 'em were here today already, and I don't have time for this. You should see my restrooms."

The manager ended the call by slamming down the phone with a bang so hard and an epithet so coarse that it shattered any stereotype Tess harbored about kindly, salt-of-the-earth midwesterners.

"French Lick, Indiana," Tess said to Mark, who had been pacing his office like a caged animal, literally pulling at his hair. "That mean anything to you? Do you or Natalie know people there, or anywhere nearby?"

He had the desperate look of a kid in a spelling bee asked to tackle a word he had never heard of, sounding it out as if stalling for time. "French Lick, French Lick, French Lick, French Lick."

"Just go," said Paul the salesman. Apprised of the afternoon's events, he had been keeping vigil with his boss, scurrying back into the store whenever the chime announced arriving customers. "Get in your car and go, boss. I can take care of things here."

"Maybe I should. How far could it be. Ten hours? Twelve hours? If I started driving right now…"

"You wouldn't be doing anyone any good," Tess said. Her bluntness seemed to offend the two men, but she didn't have the patience for the rhetorical curlicues-the "I think"s and "perhaps"es that women were supposed to use when giving orders. "Look, I know you want to do something. But I can get someone there faster, and learn a lot more, without ever leaving this chair."

"How can that be?" Rubin asked.

Tess patted the side of the IBM ThinkPad lying open on his desk. "Good old-fashioned networking. Just tell me how to connect to your ISP, and I can guarantee results in less than two hours."

She had them in one. Gretchen used the instant message function to link all the online SnoopSisters via a spontaneous chat, even as she was assuring Tess that (a) she could take the gig and (b) yes, Chicago was closer to French Lick than anyone else in the network and (c) Tess was a total idiot when it came to geography outside Maryland. Letha in St. Louis jumped in and said French Lick was, in fact, closer to her, but her son had a soccer game Saturday afternoon, so let Gretchen take it. Gretchen said the whole point would be moot in a few days, when the newest SnoopSister, a documents whiz from Columbus, Ohio, signed on. She also said she rather liked McDonald's and felt that the company had taken a bad rap in the infamous coffee lawsuit. Perhaps that was the real reason the manager had been so rude to Tess.

This prompted Jessie Ray in Texas to point out that the McDonald's lawsuit was not at all frivolous but one involving real injury to an elderly woman, possibly second-degree burns, and that the rumored settlement was not some pie-in-the-sky amount but a sum correlated to McDonald's coffee profits. Plus, the restaurant had been warned about overheating its coffee, so punitive damages were not without warrant. Susan in Omaha countered that people who drank McDonald's coffee had already suffered enough.

STAY ON TOPIC, PLEASE, Tess typed. And get on the road, Gretchen.

Rubin watched all this furious typing with skepticism, as if activity that didn't produce a tangible product couldn't possibly accomplish anything.

"Trust me, this will work better in the long run," Tess assured him after signing off. "Gretchen will be there tonight, with photographs of your children and wife to show people she interviews. She'll go back to the restaurant tomorrow, too, visiting about the same time of day as the calls were made. That way she has a shot of getting the right manager, the right shift workers, who might be more responsive to a visitor than they were to my phone call. If your family is still in town, she'll find them."

"And if they're not?" Rubin bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, but this couldn't stem the tears coursing down his face. He didn't seem the least bit embarrassed about crying in front of Tess. She, on the other hand, was mortified.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Gretchen is really dogged. Give her a chance. She's swapping the work out against future work from me, so it doesn't cost you any extra."

"I still think I should go myself."

"Earlier today you said you hoped I was judicious with my time. I am. That's why I know this is the smart way to go. Meanwhile, at the risk of repeating myself, can you think of any reason your wife would be in French Lick, Indiana, or passing through there? Family, friends, any kind of connection?"

"No. What little family she has is… here. I mean, I suppose there are relatives back in Russia, but in this country it's always been just Natalie and her parents."

"I've met her mother. Where's her father?"

"I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not Indiana."

"What's his name?" Tess tore a piece of paper from a memo pad on the desk: ROBBINS amp; SONS-SINCE 1946.

"Why do you want his name? He moved away long ago. He and Natalie don't even talk."

"Databases. I'll run it through all sorts of databases, and he could pop out. Maybe in French Lick. You never know."

"It's such a common name, Peters, I don't think you'd be able to do much with it."

"Let me worry about that."

"Come to think of it, I'm not sure the surname was ever adopted legally. I think her father might be using his Russian name."

"I can narrow the results down with age and any other information you have for him, like past addresses. I assume he lived in the row house on Labyrinth at some point."

"I think Vera got that place after they separated."

"Could I just have a full name? And an approximate age?"

"Boris Pasternak."

"Author of Doctor Zhivago ?"

"I'm sorry. I meant Petrovich, Boris Petrovich. And I guess he's about fifty."