Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(19)

“If there are no rules, where do you stop?” he asks.

After about twenty minutes, I see an opening and approach Dov by the buffet table.

“Hi,” I say, “I’m Rebekah. From the Trib.”

“Rebekah!” he says, opening his arms for a hug. I oblige. “Thank you for coming.” He looks to his friends and says, “This is the reporter I was telling you about. She found out who killed Rivka Mendelssohn. She’s writing about Pessie.”

Dov’s friends nod and say hello.

“Do you have time to talk?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says. “Let me finish here. There is a diner nearby. Can we meet there in half an hour?”

“Sure,” I say. Dov gives me directions and Iris and I step out of the noisy, overheated synagogue and into the nearly still late night. Ocean Parkway is a four-lane highway with wide pedestrian and bicycle promenades leading to the beach at Coney Island on either side. It’s a mix of residential and commercial here. Big prewar apartment buildings next to doctors’ offices and day care centers, many with Hebrew lettering on the signs. We pass a Haredi man sitting alone on a bench, talking on his cell phone. He turns away from us as we pass.

“You seem a lot better,” Iris says as we walk. “Do you think the medication is helping?”

“I guess it must be,” I say. And then: “Thanks. For, you know. Taking care of me. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass. I just…” Just what? Just everything.

“It’s okay,” she says. “So you called your mom.”

“Yeah. I can’t help but think she, like, sees my number and is purposely ignoring me.”

“That’s dumb. She’s the one that called you.”

“And now she’s disappeared again.”

“You’re the most ridiculous pessimist I know. She probably forgot to pay her bill or something.”

“Maybe.”

“Have you told your dad she called?”

“No,” I say. “I thought I’d wait until I actually talk to her.”

Dov and his friend Frannie get to the diner about twenty minutes after we do.

Frannie tells us she was also frum, but grew up in Baltimore. She and Dov met through Facebook, and now they’re roommates, along with four other people, in a house near Poughkeepsie. The rent is cheap, and none of them like the big city. Dov says that they’ve both applied to the community college there, but won’t hear whether they’ve been accepted until the summer.

“Pessie’s sister Rachel told me that Pessie had a bad reaction to her medication, passed out, and drowned,” says Dov. “But when I asked what medication she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Her husband said she’d been on antidepressants since after the baby was born,” I say. “But you can’t, like, OD on those.”

Dov shakes his head. “You know that, and I know that, but Pessie’s family probably thinks Prozac is the same thing as, like, OxyContin. They probably heard ‘antidepressants’ and assumed she wanted to kill herself. She still has sisters and brothers who need to get married and a suicide in the family would make shidduch much more difficult.”

“What’s that?” asks Iris.

“Shidduch is the matchmaking process,” says Frannie. “And every little thing matters.”

Dov nods. “And who wants to tell people their sister committed suicide? Blaming it on the goyish medication they don’t know anything about is easier. But none of it makes any sense.”

“What do you think happened?” I ask.

“I really don’t know,” he says.

“But you don’t think it was suicide.”

Dov wipes his hand across his face. “I don’t. She just … wasn’t the type. Some of us don’t fit in from the start, but Pessie did. She was a happy kid. Kind of a goof, you know? Her mother was a great cook and she sold food for holidays and stuff. There were always people in and out of her house. And I think she was one of eleven or twelve.…”

“Twelve kids?” gawks Iris. “Holy shit.” I kick her under the table.

Dov nods. “In a house like that, there just aren’t enough adults to keep an eye on everybody. It can be easy to get into trouble. Her older brother went OTD back in, like, the nineties. I think he got into drugs.”

“A lot of people do,” says Frannie.

I’ve heard this before. Iris and I take the fact that we can dabble in drinking and drugs and casual sex, or take the occasional “sick day” from work, without really having to worry that one indulgence will lead to too many. We’ve had years to learn self-control and moderation in a world full of temptation and moral relativity. Not Dov and Pessie. Like the boy at the chulent asked: If there are no rules, how do you know where to stop?

“It caused her parents a lot of heartache and I know that upset Pessie. She used to say that she thought it was very selfish of her brother to leave like he did. But it was easy for her to say that. She was pious. She really believed that all the rules and rituals were important.”

Dov pauses. “I haven’t seen her in a few years, though. Since before she got married. If you can find him, you should talk to Sam Kagan. He probably knew her better than anyone.”