Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(53)

“Were you surprised?”

“Of course! It was so … violent. So shocking.”

“Is murder unusual in the Hasidic community?”

“I’ve never known anyone who was murdered.”

“What was your first thought?”

“You mean about who might have killed her?”

I nod.

Sara is quiet for several seconds. She turns her teacup in her hands. “This is off the record.” I nod. She lowers her voice. “When I heard she was found in the yard, I did think of Aron. For no real reason other than, well, when a married woman dies, isn’t it often her husband who killed her?”

“Did you ever get the sense that Rivka was the victim of domestic violence?”

Sara shakes her head. “She rarely spoke about her husband. Except to say that she never loved him.”

“Do you think he knew that?”

“I have no idea.”

I look at my notebook. I should have written down my questions before I got here. Sara doesn’t seem impatient, though. I flip back a couple pages and see my note about the fight Yakov said his mother and father had about Coney Island.

“Have you ever heard about a house in Coney Island, where people sometimes go who are questioning?” I ask.

“Oh course,” says Sara. “Menachem Goldberg’s house. I don’t know that he lives there anymore, but it’s been open for, decades, I think. Since the eighties, anyway.”

“Have you been there?”

Sara nods.

“Do you think you might be willing to give me the address? I think Rivka spent time there, and I’d love to maybe learn a little more about her from the people there. I won’t use names if they don’t want.”

“I suppose that’s fine.” She scrolls through her phone and finds the address, then sends it to me in a text.

“Do you still consider yourself part of the community?” I ask.

Sara smiles. “I don’t think I’ll ever escape it. And so much of my work is with people in the community. It is who I am. I choose to live apart, but I am never really … apart.”

I haven’t been writing down much, but I scribble I don’t think I’ll ever escape it into my notebook. That, I think, is a good quote.

“Now,” says Sara, “let’s talk about what you’re going to write.”

*

I take the bus back to Park Slope and manage to get a couple pieces of usable information from the clerk at the bodega where I got tea near porn mom’s apartment. Apparently, porn dad came in for energy drinks and gum after jogging.

“He always buy gum,” said the clerk.

The desk, as I predicted, loves this.

“Gum!” says Mike, taking my notes. “For the kids.”

“I guess,” I say. Who cares.

It’s only three, so Mike tells me to stick around until someone can relieve me.

“Make sure you get anyone coming in or out,” he says. “Neighbors.”

“Sure,” I say, but as soon as I hang up, I slip into a sushi restaurant where I can sip green tea and call Cathy.

I tell her that I’ve got a source, a woman with a name, who says Rivka Mendelssohn had been grieving the loss of a daughter, might have been having an affair, and was considering a divorce before she died.

“And the police haven’t questioned the husband?” she asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“We need that,” she says. “Call Larry. I’ll pitch this at the meeting, but I’m not sure they’ll want it.”

I call Larry.

“I can’t confirm for sure,” he says, “but I don’t think they’ve brought him in.”

“They made a big deal about bringing the gardener in, right? If they’d brought the husband in, you think you’d know.”

“Not necessarily,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

When I hang up, I take out my notebook and start scribbling a draft.

The Hasidic woman found dead in a Brooklyn scrap yard Friday was no stranger to tragedy. [cliché?]

Less than a year before she was murdered, Rivka Mendelssohn, 30, lost a child, according to Sara Wyman, a social worker who runs an informal group for “questioning” ultra-Orthodox. Wyman says Mendelssohn told her that her daughter died of an asthma attack last spring when she was less than a year old. [get second source—Miriam?]

“Rivka was devastated,” said Wyman, who grew up in Borough Park and has since left the ultra-Orthodox community. “I believe it led her to question her faith.”

Wyman said that as a teen, Mendelssohn lost her father to suicide, and several members of her extended family struggled with mental illness. [check? death records?]

“The Orthodox do not typically seek medical help for psychological problems,” explained Wyman.

Wyman said Mendelssohn had been coming to her weekly meetings for nearly a year and told her that she was considering a divorce, but was worried about losing access to her four young children.

Wyman said the last time she saw Mendelssohn was two weeks ago.

“Rivka said her son had been chosen to sing in shul,” she said. “She was very proud.”

Wyman said she had “no idea” how Mendelssohn could have met such a gruesome end.