"No, I mean-" But Rubin had already answered the bell. He stood, the door only halfway open, as if unsure of whether he wanted to admit Tess to his home.
"I assume you have news." There was a stiff little pause. "Or an apology."
"News."
"And this woman is…?"
"A fearsome buttinsky named Whitney Talbot, but enormously helpful in her own way." Whitney gave him a broad wave as if she were on the deck of an ocean liner and Rubin was on a dock far below. "Does Isaac know American Sign Language?"
"I'm not sure. I think he learned it for a concert at school, but I was working and couldn't go." His voice took on a defensive edge. "It was during the day. If I left work for every concert, my family wouldn't have a roof over its head. But I remember Isaac rehearsing his part around the house."
Whitney poked Tess in the back. "I told you this sign-language thing is completely out of control."
"We think he was trying to send us a message. But it doesn't make sense to us, and I wondered if it meant anything to you."
She handed him the printout, with the American Sign Language alphabet and the variations on which Mary Eleanor had finally decided: Z-E-T-E, Z-E-R-E, and Z-E-K-E.
"Do any of those things mean anything to you?"
Rubin's face was a study. For some reason it reminded Tess of the sky in western Maryland, right before the storm began and the horizon turned green. It was a ghostly, unnatural face.
"The last one. Zeke. It could be… I don't see how, but possibly…"
"Yes?"
"It's my stepbrother's name."
Chapter Thirty-six
ZEKE HAD TAKEN NATALIE AND THE KIDS FOR AN EARLY supper outside Charlottesville, hoping that the meal would make up for the long drive ahead. They had spent the weekend in the Shenandoahs, acting like any family on a beautiful fall weekend-driving Skyline Drive, going to the caverns. Zeke had bought the kids souvenirs, given piggyback rides to Penina and Efraim. Who could ever associate this picture-perfect family of five with a cop dying on a roadside back in Ohio? A dead Ohio cop didn't even make the TV news in Virginia, the old Plymouth was back in the mall parking lot in West Virginia, and a Taurus with Maryland tags was nothing extraordinary here. But when Zeke told the family to pile into the car for dinner, Isaac had gone to stand by the trunk. Force of habit, Zeke guessed.
"I already told you, no more trunk, buckaroo," he said.
"Oh. I thought you were just giving me time off for the weekend."
"No, we're done with the trunk. You ride in the car from now on."
You think a kid would be grateful, but this one had to challenge everything.
"Why?"
"Well, for one thing, this car doesn't have a luggage rack."
"But we'll need money eventually."
So he had put it together after all. Zeke wasn't sure how much the kid knew, but it was definitely too much. Which only made Zeke more determined to do what he'd decided, to execute the plan he'd plotted in his head while pretending to look at scenery all weekend.
"No, we've got plenty." Which was a stretch, but Zeke decided to live the lie, picking one of the nicer chain restaurants for dinner, a place with menus big as Bibles and apple-cheeked waitresses in provocative little aprons that twitched around their hips when they walked. Every girl in the restaurant moved as if she were a drill-team member, with prancing, pony steps. But Zeke kept his eyes low. It was never good for Natalie to notice him noticing.
But she was absorbed in the twins, sitting between them, an arm around each one, her head lowered as they whispered to her and patted her face. At this point their chatter was almost total gibberish, or so it seemed to Zeke. He wondered if their odd sounds were some sort of bastard Russian, their own Yiddish lite. Natalie nodded and whispered to them as if she understood every word. Isaac, placed with great deliberation between Zeke and the wall, cut his vegetarian omelet into smaller and smaller pieces but didn't put any of it in his mouth that Zeke could see.
"Dunkin' Donuts is kosher," Isaac said. "Some anyway."
"Now that's a healthy way to end the day," Zeke said, trying to sound good-natured. "With a bellyful of sugar and some high-octane coffee."
"I wasn't really talking to you," Isaac said. "I was just observing to myself."
"Observe away, buddy."
Zeke studied Natalie. God, she was beautiful. Women had come easy to him all his life, always good-looking women, too. But the first time he had seen Natalie, he had understood why rich men stole masterpieces they could never display. Some things you owned to impress others, other things you needed only for yourself. From the moment he glimpsed Natalie waiting in the visiting room for her father, he had to have her. Mark, there to see Zeke, had noticed her, too. Not that he would admit it, the prig. Every man in the room had watched that teenage sylph float across the floor. She gave the impression that she didn't know the clatter she was setting off inside all those men, but that was calculated. Natalie was like a terrorist sitting on a cache of nuclear weapons. She understood exactly how much power she had, and how much damage she could do.
Lucky, she fell just as hard for him as he did for her. He had played to her sense of romance, giving her the one thing that no man ever had, entering willingly into her soap-opera world of love letters and poetry and anguished phone calls.
What do you do when you want a woman like that and you can't be alone with her for a decade? It was one thing to hold on to her while he was in Jessup, but Zeke knew that all bets would be off once he was in Terre Haute. It was too far away, his sentence too long. His solution had been nothing short of genius, if he did say so himself. He stored Natalie in Mark's house, just another beautiful thing in that sterile museum full of paintings and sculptures. It had been too perfect. Orthodox life had required her to dress modestly, to live modestly, not even touching other men. She was hidden in plain sight, locked up in Pikesville waiting for him. And while he had been furious when she showed up on his release day with three little bonuses in tow, he had to admit he was moved by her devotion to them. If only his mother had cared as much. But she had chosen her second husband over her son, time and time again.
Had his mother and Mark's father been having an affair before his father's death? He could believe it of Aaron Rubin-the gonif, the schemer-but not of his mother, never of his mother. It was not so far-fetched to believe that Rubin had coveted his mother all along, even before his own wife had died. Leah Rubenstein had been a prize, a German Jew so proper she was almost a gentile. The two young partners had met her when she came in to buy her first mink, just eighteen. Zeke's father had fallen in love with the shy, proper girl, while the already-betrothed Aaron Rubin had been smitten with her money. And in the end both men got what they wanted. Yakob Rubenstein got love, Aaron Rubin got money.
Jewish women kept their property-but not in death. Zeke's mother had died of breast cancer his senior year in college, and it was then that the boy who was born Nathaniel Ezekiel Rubenstein became just Zeke. What did it say about Aaron Rubin, that every woman who married him died of cancer? Rubin was the sickness. Rubin was evil. Rubin was the one who had convinced Zeke's mother that he would care for her son, so she hadn't felt the need to provide for Zeke in her will. And while Aaron Rubin was ready to share his second wife's largesse with her only son, it turned out he wanted to apply condition upon condition. If Zeke-or Nat, as the family never stopped calling him, despite his insistence that he wanted to be known by his middle name-brought his grades up, if he graduated from Maryland, if he stopped wrapping cars around trees, then he might-might, mind you, might-find a place at Robbins amp; Sons. The business his father had cofounded, the business that was his by all rights.