"Professional obligation, someone from the Krieger board I'm trying to cultivate. Anyway, they were signing during the half-a-Torah."
"Haftarah."
"Right, what I said. So there's a kid up there reciting a language that ninety-five percent of the people up in the synagogue don't speak or understand, and someone's signing so the deaf people in the audience-of which there were none, I'm pretty sure, although hearing aids were in great evidence-can follow along. But there's already an English translation in the text, so who are they signing for? The illiterates? The blind?"
Tess laughed, knowing Whitney's performance was pure show. She was not as intolerant as she pretended to be. She couldn't be. Whitney played up her hard edges to compensate for life as a professional do-gooder-sitting on her family's board and dispensing gobs of money to worthy causes. Polymath that she was, she had probably learned sign language at some point.
"Were any of those real signs you were making?" Tess asked. "Or were you just faking?"
"Oh, I can say a few basic things. 'I love you. Run away.'" Whitney demonstrated.
"I'd go far with just those two sentences." Strange, Tess wanted to confide in someone, but she couldn't get the words out.
"I also know the alphabet from A"-Whitney cupped her hand-"to Z." She slashed the air.
It was Tess's turn to spit a little wine. "Do that again."
"What?"
"The Z."
Whitney slashed the air.
"Like Zorro."
"Well, duh."
It was one thing to have the action described on a computer screen, quite another to see it. The one little boy kept doing a sort of Zorro thing. Mary Eleanor had assumed that Isaac was being supportive in a silly, little-kid kind of way. But what if he had been spelling!
Less than an hour later-after consulting the Internet, talking to Mary Eleanor on the phone, then studying the Internet again-Tess was on Mark Rubin's doorstep, an insistent Whitney at her side.
"Don't be surprised if he doesn't shake your hand," Tess muttered after ringing the bell. "He doesn't touch women sometimes, but it's just a mind-fuck."
"I don't touch anybody. I'm a Presbyterian." Alcohol had an interesting effect on Whitney, sharpening the edges it softened in others. Her eyes were bright, her diction crisp, her posture perfect.
"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.