Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(14)

“You don’t own the yard? I’m just trying to…”

“I have no information.”

“Um, can I just confirm … Is your name Aron Mendelssohn?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, turning, “I must get home.”

“Sir,” I call, but he’s walking away. I go out on a limb. “Mr. Mendelssohn, I spoke with your son.…”

Dead stop. He turns back, his face changed. “You spoke with Yakov?”

Oops. “Uh…”

“You spoke with Yakov!” He steps toward me and I flinch, afraid for a moment he’s going to hit me.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“What is your name?” he demands, towering over me. Spitting.

I have f*cked this up. “Like I said, I’m from the Tribune. We’re trying to get an ID on the woman who was found in your yard. I thought maybe you’d spoken to the police.”

Mr. Mendelssohn’s eyes are animated, but the rest of his face is slack. The difference is unnerving. “If you come near any of my children again, I will have you arrested.”

He turns and walks away, heels clicking with angry deliberation against the sidewalk. I am no longer cold. Sweat pops from my pores and my heart is pounding huge inside my coat. I’d always imagined my grandfather as a kind of monster. I spent years searching for ways to pity my mother, to excuse her abandonment, and the excuse was always her father: Avram Kagan. My father had never met him, but he knew my mother feared and revered him. Here is what I know about my mother, Aviva: I know that my dad met her at the Strand Book Store in Manhattan in June 1988. My mom was dabbling in mainstream culture, peeling off her long black skirts and long-sleeved shirts and panty hose in McDonald’s bathrooms and pulling on jeans and sandals and tank tops in an attempt to create, as my dad put it, a “non-Orthodox” identity. They met in the modern religion section. My dad was looking for a copy of The Screwtape Letters. He told her he was studying religion, and she lied at first and said she was, too. She’d been reading a lot about Judaism, trying to figure out if all the rules and limits she’d been taught were really the only way to worship God, so religious philosophy was easy for her to talk about. By the time she admitted she was a Hasid who’d never left New York, it was too late, my father was in love. They met secretly. Girls in her culture, my dad said, live at home until they are married, which is usually right after high school. They aren’t encouraged to do much besides get ready to be a wife and mother, so while she was waiting around, my mother started reading. And the reading gave her ideas. So she read more. Her father didn’t really pay attention—nobody did. As long as she watched after her little brothers and stayed out of the way, she could do what she wanted. And in early September, she ran away to Florida with my dad.

She was pregnant with me almost immediately. Dad proposed, she accepted, I was born, she bailed. Dad went to look for her once, but he didn’t go to the family home. He told me he was concerned that confronting her father would drive my mother further away; that if she had been punished upon her return, the punishment would be redoubled when her goy baby-daddy showed up and gave face to the shame she’d caused. Maybe though, my father wasn’t quite so valiant. Maybe he’d come to Borough Park and seen a man like Aron Mendelssohn. Maybe he’d been afraid. What utterly different lives we’ve had, my mother and I. Me, coaxed and encouraged into adulthood by my dopey, dependable, loving-kindness father. Aviva, ignored and intimidated by a man always cloaked in black.

I call Cathy and tell her what happened.

“Can you call DCPI and float a name?” I ask.

“Sure,” says Cathy.

“Ask if the dead woman is named Rivka Mendelssohn.”

“That’s the kid’s mom?”

“I think so. I’m pretty sure I just met her husband.”

“I’ll call you back. Head to the house.”

I start walking. I don’t get hunches a lot. I’m not often in a position where I know enough about a subject I’m reporting on to make any kind of guess about anything other than whom to call next and whether or not people are telling me the truth. I can’t always see a lie, but sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes people lie about really weird things, like, no, my son’s not here, when I can see him peeking out from behind the blinds. I’ve had people tell me they witnessed crimes and accidents they didn’t; I’ve nodded and taken notes while they say, oh yeah, I heard like fifteen gunshots around 10 P.M., when police have already told me there were only two shell casings and that the victim was shot after midnight. Usually they’re harmless; they just want to feel important, maybe get their name in the paper. I shouldn’t have let it slip to Mr. Mendelssohn that I spoke with his son; any father would be upset by that. But when he turned around to look at me after I’d said that, his face wasn’t just angry; it was afraid.

I get to the Mendelssohn address in about ten minutes. The yard must be doing great business because the house is enormous. It’s a corner lot, and the structure takes up almost every inch of the property, with just a small strip of grass separating the sidewalk from the outside walls. The front porch has pillars, like a Southern mansion, but the house itself is a peach-tinted stucco, with elaborate dormers and window dressings on all three floors.

I walk up the grand front steps and knock. Nothing. I knock again. Nothing. I go back to the sidewalk and look up. There do not seem to be any lights on, but on the top floor I see a face peek between the curtains. I wave, and the face disappears. I go back to the front door and knock. After a few seconds, I hear footsteps.