Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(20)

“Everything okay with that guy?” asks George.

“Yeah,” I say. “He knew my parents.”

George nods. Unlike Johnny, George doesn’t need to fill a shift with talking. I appreciate that.

On the way home to Gowanus, sunk in the worn leather backseat of a beat-up Town Car, I check my phone and see that I have a text from Tony.

still on for 11?

It’s almost ten now. I even have time to shower.

see u there … hope you’re ready for a saga

As we merge onto the Prospect Expressway, I close my eyes and see Aron Mendelssohn. What if he killed his wife and now he’s mad enough to kill his sister for talking to me? I don’t remember ever reading about a murder in the ultra-Orthodox community, but I haven’t been in New York that long. I wonder if Saul knows more than he told me.

Saul.

I pull out my phone and dial my dad.

“Hi, hon!” he says.

“Hi, Dad.”

“How’s life in the big city?”

“Cold.”

“It’s a little chilly here, too. Maria brought in a bunch of grapefruit from the tree this morning and a couple had gone bad from frost overnight.” Maria is originally from Guatemala, but she’s been in the U.S. since she was a teenager. She and my dad met at a conference of religious academics in Denver when I was about three. Maria was working as an assistant to one of the conference coordinators. They got married when I was five and had my brother, Deacon, a year later. “How’s work?”

“Guess who I met today?”

“Who?”

“Saul Katz.”

“Oh!” He sounds happy, which I suppose I should have expected. I’ve never understood my father’s relationship to my mother and her memory. He doesn’t talk about her much, but when the subject comes up, he speaks with tenderness and sympathy, like she died of cancer instead of abandoned him with a six-month-old doppelg?nger. I challenged him for years, screaming and crying that she was a horrible bitch, a selfish, weak, heartless little girl who ruined both our lives. He listened, and he stroked my hair and held me when I’d worn myself out. But he never said anything more combative than, she shouldn’t have left.

“Did you know he was a cop?”

“I did. He kept in touch over the years.”

“That’s what he said.”

“You sound upset.”

I sigh heavily. My dad is king of the understatement.

“He kind of ambushed me. Why didn’t you tell me you had, like, told someone who knew Mom that I was moving to New York?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “He e-mailed me a few months ago. I think he saw your byline in the newspaper. Wanted to know if it was the same person.”

“Great, so he’s stalking me.”

“I doubt that,” says my dad. “He’s a very nice man. How did you say you met him?”

“He showed up at a crime scene.”

“A crime scene?”

“Well, actually, at a victim’s house. They found a dead woman in a scrap pile this morning, and it turns out she’s Hasidic. I went to her house to get a quote from the family and Saul was there.”

“How awful. Are you okay?” My dad is very concerned about my work for the Trib. He doesn’t approve of tabloid journalism. I wouldn’t say I “approve” either, exactly, but, as I’ve explained to him, The New York Times wasn’t hiring and I wanted to learn how to be a reporter.

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t know how you can do that kind of work. It must be so hard.”

“What kind of work, Dad?”

“Not the Trib—I just mean, a body in a, what did you say? A scrap pile? Lord.” My dad says “Lord” a lot. “The family must be devastated.”

I decide not to get into the reactions of the family members I’ve met so far.

“So, how did Saul know Mom, exactly? He’s older than you guys.”

“Saul was part of a group of ultra-Orthodox who were questioning the rigid lifestyle. They used to meet in a house out near Coney Island to talk freely and read newspapers and watch movies—things they couldn’t do at home.”

“They couldn’t read newspapers?”

“No. Most Orthodox try very hard to keep themselves from interacting, even passively, with the rest of the world.”

“Right, because we’re so evil.”

“Depends on your perspective.” I roll my eyes. My dad is the ultimate religious apologist.

“Okay, anyway…”

“They were all experimenting with new ways of living. From what I remember, Saul had married, at about nineteen, a woman he did not love. His family was not wealthy, and the matchmaker didn’t consider him a good match, so he ended up engaged to a troubled young woman from a slightly wealthier family.”

“Troubled?”

“Depressed? I’m not sure. What I know is that the marriage was a disaster. They were married more than ten years and had only one child, which was considered shameful. When he filed for divorce, she moved back in with her parents. Her father went to court and told a judge that Saul should be barred from seeing his son because he had become less religious and the child would be confused.”