Wilde Lake(15)

WE’RE ALL IN COLUMBIA


Summer, usually our dullest season, flew after we met Noel. True, there wasn’t much left. But how he breathed life into those last, dreary days of August. He always had plans, which he called escapades. “What sort of escapade should we have today?” he would ask, rubbing his hands together. And although I was not expressly invited on Noel’s adventures, AJ wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without me. Teensy foisted me on him using the pretext of filial love. I suspect she just didn’t want me underfoot, whining about how bored I was. I learned to ride a bike well and fearlessly that summer I was six years old because I was trying to keep up with two fourteen-year-olds.

What did we do? We rode over to Lake Kittamaqundi at what was known as Town Center and rented a rowboat, although that required the boys lying about their ages. Well, AJ claimed to be sixteen; no one believed Noel was even fourteen. We went to the movies and experimented with sneaking into the one we hadn’t paid for, a difficult feat at the little two-screen cinema. You had to leave one auditorium, go to the bathroom, then buy something from the concession stand, drop your change, go back to the bathroom, ask for napkins. Noel taught us the valuable lesson that making a spectacle of yourself was sometimes the best way to get people to stop noticing you. Noel lived his life based on that premise, although he would have been heartbroken if he weren’t the center of attention when he wanted to be. He was that rare young person who understood exactly who he was and what he needed—and that his parents, his friends, the world at large, were not ready for this information.

We always ended up at the mall, Noel’s favorite place. The mall still felt shiny new then, maybe five years old, immortalized by its own television jingle: We’re all in Columbia / At the Mall in Columbia. Almost everything Noel wanted was in that mall. Noel loved things. Clothes, first and foremost, but, really, everything, anything. He yearned for stuff. He could spend hours browsing. Bix Camera Store, where he was genuinely interested in the lenses and camera bodies. Bun Penny, where he would pretend to be shopping earnestly for a sophisticated event. (“Miss, what kind of cheese would you suggest I take to a Labor Day cookout? Do you have Cinzano? Campari?”) At Bailey Banks & Biddle, a jewelry store, he tried on watches, claiming to have a windfall check from his doting grandmother. He liked to get free samples from the “natural” cosmetics place. (“This face cream does smell like almonds! My mother will love it.”) We always ended up at Waldenbooks, reading entire novels on the sly, which felt outlaw back then when bookstores did not have easy chairs or coffee bars. We could have ridden our bikes to the library branch in Wilde Lake Village Center, read the same books while sitting comfortably. But it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

And, yes, I could read at age six and was already ripping through chapter books. The Hardy Boys, my father’s boyhood collection of Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, a series of books about famous people—mostly men—as children. I had been reading since age four. During that slow, boring summer, AJ dug out his first-grade primers, which had been boxed up in the attic. Our mother had put them there, I was told, because she had taught AJ to read at a young age and planned to do the same with me. AJ introduced me to Dick, Jane, and Sally. The first word I learned was Oh. Sally says Oh. Oh, oh, oh. It seemed an improbable way to learn to read, yet I did. By the time I was five, I could read the newspaper. (“Although only the evening one,” my father would say, a joke at the expense of the Baltimore-Light, which was considered less intellectual than its morning sister, the somber Beacon.) I read my horoscope every day and took it to heart. I was a Capricorn, which grieved me. Who wants to be the goat?

By the time I was six, I was reading newspaper articles about my father, who had been appointed Howard County state’s attorney the year before. These articles were generally bland, approving things, but I never got over the thrill of seeing his name—also my name—in print, even if it was usually on the back of the second news section. And in the summer of 1976, he began to appear on Page One almost every day because he was trying a big murder. Murder was rare in Howard County and this case would have been considered sensational in any jurisdiction, in part because there was no body. But there was more to the story than that.

A man had come home drunk in the fall of 1974, blood on his clothes, told his wife he had hit a deer. The damage to the car, an old station wagon, was minimal, but he had tried to move the animal from the road to protect other drivers, he told her. A week later, the wife was using the car when a woman’s shoe, a heavy wooden platform, slid out from under the driver’s seat. She said she almost got into an accident when the shoe jammed beneath the accelerator, but she managed to kick it free. The shoe was flamboyant, even by the fashions of the day, a cherrywood platform with a cutout between heel and sole, so it looked almost like a fish about to take a bite. The fabric that crossed the foot, leaving the toes bare, was a lovely pink-and-green plaid.

The fabric also had blood on it.

What the woman did next seemed to shock people more than the discovery of the bloody shoe: she went to the state police barracks in Jessup. She told the story of her husband saying he had hit a deer. She produced the shoe. She would have brought the shirt as well, but she had already laundered it. “That’s the kind of wife I am,” she told police. “I wash my husband’s bloody shirts, get every speck out. It took two washings.”