"I won't, Natalie. But Mark will. He'll never let them be with you and me. And he has all that money, which he'll use to hire lawyers and grind you down. In the end you won't have your children, but you and I will be out whatever cash we've managed to put away. Did that even occur to you?"

"They're mine," she said. "They would be lost without me."

"Well, then, I guess you've made your choice. Them over me."

"I didn't say that."

"Natalie-I'm going to be honest. I'm not sure I can love Mark's children like a father. I think they'd be better off with him, with their real father."

"They like you," she said. And she believed they would, one day, when they were settled. Isaac would come to see how extraordinary Zeke was, and Penina would stop wetting herself, and the twins would give up the gibberish they now spoke most of the time.

"But I'm not their father, and they're not my children. I want my own children. Did you know that? I want my own babies with you." He reached under her skirt, began moving his hand back and forth. She tried to resist it, but their routine was so perfected, so efficient, that it took no more than a minute for him to finish her.

"Okay," he said, signaling that it was her turn to do the same for him. She bent down, her tears still fresh in her mouth, a pulse pounding in her temple. He needed her.

WEDNESDAY

Chapter Twenty-six

TESS MOVED HER ALDEN ACROSS THE WATER WITH Swift, sure strokes, but rowing could not soothe her this morning. Even as her body found peace in the automatic rhythms, her brain revved, like an engine in overdrive, stuck on one thought. She had promised not to reveal to Rubin anything that Boris Petrovich told her. But she had made no such promises about the men in the group. So where did Larry Kirsch's confidences fit in? Her shell skimmed across the water, and the morning sounds all seemed to coalesce into a refrain of advice: Call him. Call him. Call him. Tell him. Tell him. Tell him.

She did the first part, reaching him on his cell when she got off the water at seven, but her resolve crumbled when she heard the eagerness in his voice, the optimism.

"Did you find out anything?"

"Not much," she said. "But the men all spoke so fondly of you, I can't help thinking that Amos would open up more if you came with me to Grantsville." Open up and tell you that your wife was sort of a whore before she met you, which would keep me from having to inform you of same.

"Really?" His voice seemed to brighten. "The men liked the group?"

"Really. And this may be a key interview. The one person who keeps coming up, wherever I go, is Lana Wishnia-she was even on your father-in-law's visiting list-and she was married to Amos briefly. Plus, Mickey Harvey said Amos was tight with your father-in-law as well. So I think it's worth the three-hour drive, if you can afford a day away from work."

"I have to make a trip to our storage facility, which is out near Finksburg but sort of en route. Could you be there within an hour?"

"I'll meet you there," Tess promised.

What would she do if Amos didn't conveniently drop the bombshell she needed him to drop? What were the ethics of withholding information from a client, in hopes that someone else would be the bearer of bad news? Tess thought about asking the SnoopSisters, then decided against it. The only problem with the Sisters was that they tended to say what they really thought.

The Robbins amp; Sons warehouse stood on a frontage road along I-795, just inside Carroll County. The area had probably been farmland as recently as a decade ago, and there were still cornfields to three sides of the plain rectangular building. There was nothing to identify the unmarked structure as the furrier's storage facility, a prudent decision in Tess's opinion. Why advertise the off-season home of hundreds of fur coats? But Tess wondered if she had come to the right place when she noticed that the only car in the lot was a pale green Jaguar, a sporty two-seater. Rubin usually drove a dark blue Cadillac Seville. Yet it was Rubin who emerged from the building, locking a series of dead bolts behind him, then testing the door to make sure the warehouse was secure.

"A Jaguar?" she asked.

"It was my fortieth-birthday gift to myself." He had the good sense to look a little sheepish. "I don't drive it as much as I thought I would, so I figured it could use a nice long spell of highway driving. Sorry to get you up so early, but if we get there by noon, we could be back by four or five-give me a chance to check on the store before closing."

"I've been up since six, putting in an hour on the water." Tess ran her fingers through her hair, still damp and curly from her quick shower.

"On the water?"

"I rowed in college, and I still work out in a single, although I don't compete anymore."

"College crew, very preppy. Have you heard about the crew team at Yeshiva University?"

"I didn't even know they had one."

"Oh, yes, but they were terrible for years. So they finally decided to send their captain to Cambridge, see how the Ivy League schools do it, and it changed everything for them."

"How so?"

"The captain came back and said"-Rubin smacked his forehead with his palm, in the style of a man having an epiphany-" 'It's supposed to be eight people rowing and one person yelling'."

Tess was so unaccustomed to Rubin's making jokes that it took her a bewildered moment to laugh. But he was clearly pleased by her guffaw, belated though it might be.

"A crew-Jew joke! You're in a good mood this morning."

"It's a pretty day, got that nice crisp autumn feel. And it feels good to be doing something. I was wrong not to tell you about Natalie's father, I see that now. I was so wrapped up in the idea that it was a shanda, something I must never speak of outside the family. But he didn't tell you anything, did he?"

"No, he didn't."

"So I was crazy, all those years, worrying about nothing. What a waste."

Burdened with the information she was keeping from Rubin, Tess could only nod noncommittally.

The Jaguar drove the way that Tess's greyhound sometimes ran when seized by memories of the track-smooth and fast, with a kind of carefree rhapsody.

"My midlife-crisis car," Rubin said, almost apologetic. "And, of course, I couldn't buy German."

"Of course? Oh, of course. I get to thinking that all cars are the same, mere modes of transportation. But this really is a different ride from my fourteen-year-old Toyota."

"Do you want to try it?"

"No, I'd be too nervous behind the wheel of something whose value exceeds my net worth."

"It's not that dear."

"And my net worth isn't that high."

They had already covered over ninety miles, reaching the point where the roads, shaped by the demands of the Appalachians, started to climb and curve. Mark Rubin was relishing the drive as much as the car. In sunglasses, his usual dark suit and tie-shirt immaculate, thick hair gleaming-he had an almost James Bond-like savoir faire, Tess thought. Assuming one could imagine James Bond wearing a yarmulke.

"I have to ask you something," she said.

" 'Have to'-that construction actually means a person wants to ask something but knows it's rude."

"Not rude, but naive perhaps. Anyway, the yarmulke-what's the point?"

"It reminds me that God is always above me."

"You could wear a hat. Besides, if you need a piece of cloth to remind you where God is, how sturdy is your faith?"

"At some point rituals cannot be deconstructed. The acceptance of ritual is part of faith. Why take communion? Why bow to the east in prayer?"