Laura Lippman - By A Spider's Thread

"But they were sure it was Natalie?"

"What? Oh, yeah. Apparently men remember that face. Which brings me to the most important piece of news-"

Gretchen's cell phone picked this moment to go out. Tess waited a few seconds to see if Gretchen would wander back into a good cell, then hung up, knowing she would call again.

"Sorry. Anyway, I did learn something else, but it's not going to make your client happy."

"Yeah?"

"Natalie's traveling with a man."

Tess wished she were more surprised. "Description?"

"About as helpful as old and green. Thirties or forties, tall, blue eyes, dark hair, cropped short. Muscular, but not muscle-bound. No facial hair. Dressed in what the cashier called a cowboy kind of way, which apparently translates to jeans, boots, and a denim jacket in this part of the world. She said he was good-looking, but I'm not sure the McDonald's cashier and I have the same taste in men."

"Anything else?"

"No, it's pretty much the land of generic one-syllable adjectives. Although Natalie probably would have been noticed even if her daughter hadn't flamed out in the ball room."

"Because she's so pretty?"

"And she has dark hair. You don't see a lot of brunettes in this part of the world."

Tess hung up the phone and got out an atlas, an old one, but its version of the world was good enough for her purposes as long as she wasn't tracking someone through Natalie Rubin's country of origin, still listed here as the USSR.

French Lick was in southern Indiana, and it wasn't on a major interstate. It was-Tess worked backward, using the mileage charts for Evansville and Louisville-almost seven hundred miles from Baltimore. The Internet provided the helpful information that it had a golf resort and something called the Antique Hair Museum.

But on what route did it lie, why would someone pass through there? That's what had Tess stumped. If Natalie was heading west, why was she traveling so far from the interstate, and why had she made so little progress? Gone three weeks, she could have reached the opposite coast by now. Tess knew that movies often showed people trying to hide out in small towns, but it was a ludicrous plan in practice. A strange family would be more noticeable in a small town, not less. French Lick had only two thousand people, the nearby county seat of Paoli a mere twenty thousand. It was no place to hide, and no place to go, unless Natalie was a fervent Larry Bird fan paying homage to the basketball legend's hometown.

This was one drawback to the SnoopSisters network. Gretchen had swept in and done exactly what was requested, with concrete results. She had gotten there faster and cheaper than Tess ever could. But this job-share arrangement was no substitute for seeing a place with your own eyes, for walking the streets, for getting lost and then found again. Tess often made her best discoveries as the result of wrong turns and tangents.

She had promised Rubin to call as soon as the Sabbath ended. But such news would have to be delivered in person. It would be too coldhearted to drop it on him in a phone call, to pretend the news was anything less than devastating. Natalie was traveling with a man. He probably paid the bills. That answered one question, but it raised a lot more.

The September sun was strong, and Tess decided to sit on the deck and watch it go down, dropping in and out of a novel as her attention span allowed. Too keyed up to read something new, she chose to reread, picking the guiltiest of guilty pleasures, Peyton Place . She considered pulling Marjorie Morningstar off the shelf but decided she'd rather hang out with Metalious's repressed New Englanders, who did such shocking things when they thought they were unobserved. Marjorie, on the other hand, was just a tiresome virgin who had to learn the hard way to give up on rascals and settle down with a nice Jewish boy.

In Wouk's worldview this left Marjorie with a minor deformity, not unlike the crippled arm of the man who had despoiled her. For Tess, Marjorie's mistake was the only quality that made her bearable. Choosing the wrong man was an essential step on the road to finding the right one. Or so Tess had heard.

NATALIE LEANED AGAINST A TABLE IN THE AUTOMATIC laundry in Valparaiso, watching their clothes tumble through the dryer. Her entire wardrobe was a single dryer load now, and the children's made up another, only slightly larger one. Back in Baltimore she had a laundry room larger than her childhood bedroom, outfitted with not only an extra-capacity washer and dryer but a special sink for hand washing, built-in cedar closets for out-of-season storage, and a pine table where she folded and stacked the endless, fragrant loads. She had been embarrassed when Lana had pointed out that her folding table was nicer than the Ikea one from which Lana ate her meals. "Take it, then," Natalie had urged. But Lana refused, probably out of pride. "It's too big for my place, and the style is different."

Lord, how Natalie had hated Moshe's house, if only because she could never make it hers. It had so many constant, unending needs-even more than Moshe. The Sabbath was supposed to provide a day of rest, but Natalie spent her Saturdays thinking of the tasks that the next week would bring, and the week beyond that. She had never dreamed she could miss such a burden, but life on the road had made her wistful for the things she had taken for granted, for the very things that had held her captive. For that laundry room, for bathrooms that never smelled of mildew, for gleaming copper pots, for cool lavender-scented sheets on a king-size bed in a room that belonged just to her. And Moshe, of course.

Today's trip to the launderette marked the first time Natalie had been alone in days, apart from when she was in the bathroom, and she wouldn't have been given this brief reprieve if Zeke hadn't agreed to watch the children in the room, rather than try to control them here. Plus, this way they could strip the kids down to nothing and wrap them in towels, giving Natalie a chance to clean all the clothes at once. "We're outnumbered when we take them out," Zeke had agreed. "Besides, no one's going anywhere wearing just a towel."

Isaac's head had swung up sharply, as if he wanted to disagree, and Natalie knew her oldest son would forgo modesty if he saw a chance to get away from Zeke or make another phone call. It would take more than a towel wrapped around his skinny body to keep him in his place. If his spirit weren't so wearing, she might have been proud of him. He was tough. Those were her genes, her family, the Tseltsins.

That was their name back in Russia, their real name, before her father had helped himself to the identity of Boris Petrovich in order to immigrate to the United States as a Soviet Jew.

"We're Jews?" Natalie had asked her mother, not even sure what the word meant, yet certain that it was at odds with whatever she imagined herself to be.

"Sure, why not?" her mother replied.

Her father changed the name again, after they settled in Baltimore. The reason for that second change was unclear to Natalie, like much her father and mother did. The truth was, she wasn't particularly interested in her parents. "Is your father affiliated ?" Lana had asked in a tone of hushed respect the first time she had visited the house on Labyrinth Road and seen the evidence of his so-called job-the boxes of electronic equipment stacked in the kitchen, the new clothes that he would sell without letting Natalie pick even one outfit. "I don't know. I don't care," Natalie said. She wasn't ashamed that her father was a criminal. She was embarrassed because he was a bad one, as Zeke never stopped reminding her.

But it was her parents' foreignness that Natalie resented. She couldn't help feeling they were holding her back, that an American girl with her looks would have had dozens of ways to make her mark on the world. The Russian girls who became famous in the United States tended to do athletic things, figure skating and gymnastics and tennis. Natalie had no talent for sports. She was too short to model, according to all of Lana's magazines, and acting did not appeal to her because she didn't want to be anyone but herself. Still, whenever she looked in the mirror, she just knew that destiny had special plans for her.