By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel Read Free Page A

neighborhood then.”
    He had a funny way of holding his neck, as if that pole in his butt ran all the way up his backbone, and Tess wondered if his rigid posture came from years of balancing a yarmulke on the crown. There was no sign of a bobby pin or a clip. Did Mark Rubin consider bobby pins cheating? Were bobby pins unorthodox? Up to five minutes ago, Theresa Esther Weinstein Monaghan had considered herself well versed in the religion practiced by her mother’s side of the family. She knew a little Yiddish, could fake her way through a seder as long as the Haggadah included an English translation. But now she felt 100 percent goyish. To her visitor she probably looked like some field-hockey player from Notre Dame Prep.
    “Did Donald tell you anything of my situation?”
    “Only that it was a missing-person case, an unusual one that the police won’t handle. He said you would prefer to fill me in on the details.”
    “Persons,” he said. “Missing persons. Four, in fact. My entire family.”
    “Divorce?” She suppressed a sigh. Until recently Tess had disdained divorce work, picking and choosing her jobs. But she had lost several weeks of work this summer and could no longer afford to be fussy.
    “No, nothing like that. I came home one day and they were gone.”
    “Voluntarily?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I assume your wife’s flight was legal and not suspicious, or this would be a police case.”
    “The police agree it’s not their case,” he said, his voice so low as to be almost inaudible, and Tess realized that what she had taken for coolness was an attempt to keep strong emotions in check. “Me, I’m not so sure. I went to work, I had a family. I came home, I didn’t. I certainly feel as if something has been stolen from me.”
    “Was there talk of a separation? Had you been quarreling? It’s just hard to imagine such a thing happening out of the blue.”
    “But that’s
exactly
what did happen. My wife left with my children, with no warning, no explanation. She simply disappeared the Friday before Labor Day, right before school started and just as my business was picking up.”
    “Early September is your busy season?”
    “No, but many of my customers get their furs out of storage in the month before the high holidays, just in case.”
    “Would the Orthodox wear fur to shul on Yom Kippur?” Tess had no idea where her mind had dredged up this odd fact, but she felt as if she had just pulled off a sophisticated thought in a foreign language. Score one for her.
    “Not all my customers are Orthodox. They’re not even all Jewish.”
    Point lost. Tess had envisioned a sea of glossy hats in a synagogue, but maybe she was thinking of some long-ago church service her grandfather had dragged her to. Or perhaps she wasn’t having a memory so much as she was replaying a movie version of someone else’s memories. Probably Barry Levinson’s. A lot of people in Baltimore had Barry Levinson’s life lodged in their heads and had begun to mistake it for their own.
    “It’s never cool enough to wear a fur in September, not in Baltimore.”
    “Yes, but hope springs eternal.” He offered Tess a crooked smile. “I guess that’s why I’m here.”
    She bent her head over her desk, focusing on the lines of the legal pad in front of her, counting on Rubin to get his emotions under control if she didn’t look straight at him. Tess was sure he didn’t want her to see him cry. She was even surer that
she
didn’t want to see him cry. Men crying creeped her out.
    “If your wife took your children without your permission, isn’t that a kidnapping? Can’t the police go at it from that angle? Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have the work, but the police have far more resources than I do.”
    “I know, and that’s why I started with them. But…it’s amazing. If you’re married and your spouse leaves you, taking your children, you have no real rights. I’ve been told that I have to get divorced in