By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel (8 page)

“What is it?”

“It changes almost hourly.”

“Uh-oh.”

“But she’s leaning toward black for your dress. At least, as of yesterday, she said she liked the idea of you in black.”

“Well, I can pick out a black dress on my own,” Tess said with glad relief.

“Of course you can. Except Kitty wants to…um, help.” He pushed a card across the table. “She has an appointment for the both of you at this boutique in Towson. To start. She also mentioned some other places, like Vassari and Octavia and maybe the Neiman Marcus in the Washington suburbs if she can’t find the right dress in Baltimore.”

The card for the Towson dress shop was white with discreet silver letters in a curvy font, a whisper of pink blossoms scattered across its face. Just touching it made Tess’s palms itch.

“So this lunch is really a bribe, right? You lured me here not to get my approval of the marriage, or even to ask my opinion of the ring, but to break the news that I have to go buy a dress in a
bridal
store. I can just see it. You know it’s going to have some huge bow over the ass.”

“I was hoping you’d think of this lunch as a celebration. I thought we might even splurge, have a good bottle of wine with lunch. On me, of course. This is all on me.”

“Wine for lunch is fine, but I’m going to need a g-pack of crack to survive dress shopping. Be straight with me — is Kitty losing her mind? Is she getting all giddy and nuts? Just how bad is this going to be?”

Tyner just smiled ruefully and summoned the waitress, ordering a $150 bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

A
half bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape turned out to be excellent preparation for Tess’s appointment with Lana Wishnia at Adrian’s.

The spa had done much to obscure the bookstore Tess had so loved before it sank beneath the weight of one of the more curious bankruptcy cases in Baltimore history. From the outside it was now just another door in another suburban strip center. But that frosted glass door opened into a foreign world, a butterscotch-colored anteroom with fabric-swathed walls and two more frosted-glass doors marked
SALON
and
SPA
. Tess felt as if she had fallen into the bottom of a caramel sundae, or one of the more perverse compartments in Alice’s rabbit hole. Come to think of it, Adrian’s was probably full of potions that commanded “Drink Me” and “Eat Me,” although with less immediate results than their Wonderland counterparts.

“You are Lana’s four o’clock?”

The voice was unmistakably the Velvet Frost, but its owner was far from the style maven that Tess had envisioned. She was dumpy and middle-aged, with a large part between her front teeth. She did, however, sport acrylic nails, winged eyebrows, and fiercely streaked hair.

“Yes.”

“She is running late.” Was Tess paranoid, or was the woman blaming her for Lana’s tardiness? “I would have called you, but you did not leave a contact number. May I get you anything while you wait?”

Tess looked at the magazines arrayed fan style on a low, maple-and-glass table in front of a chenille sofa in the same maple hue. They were not real magazines, just handbooks designed to create impossible dreams in the women who were forced to wait here because Lana — or Tatiana or Esme or Jean-Paul or Horatio Horn-blower — was running late. Tess wanted to ask for a magazine with articles, or even a newspaper, but she felt as if she had already acquired too many demerits.

“No, I’m fine, just fine.”

“Tea? Coffee?” Even the easy questions sounded quizlike here.

“No thank you.”

“Mineral water? Wine?”

“Wine would definitely be redundant.”

The receptionist narrowed her eyes as if she thought Tess might be trying to slide a rude word past her. “You are new to us, yes? Then you must fill out a client card.”

She handed Tess a clipboard with a questionnaire as long as anything a doctor’s office would require. Tess perched gingerly on the edge of the backless sofa, one of those low-slung pieces of modern furniture that seemed to be designed for
Candid Camera
stunts. Only a person with steel thighs could rise from it with a shred of grace intact. Dutifully, she checked off a series of “no” boxes — pregnancy, medications, chronic pain — pausing only when she reached the lengthy portion on plastic surgery. She had not even heard of some of the procedures named.

Tess seldom gave much thought to what she wore or how she looked, but the checklist and the Velvet Frost’s curled-lip inspection were making her self-conscious. Covertly, she glanced at one of the many mirrors in the room. She had a few freckles, souvenirs of a summer spent mainly outdoors, but her face was otherwise clear and unlined. Her hair was at an unruly length, neither long nor short, but that was the price of growing it out. Her makeup routine consisted of darkening her lashes and penciling a narrow line beneath her eyes to keep them from disappearing into her face.

True, her clothes were not particularly distinguished, not by Adrian’s standards. She wore black trousers and a black T-shirt beneath a man’s vintage shirt, a butter yellow Banlon with black stitching. Her one concession to adulthood was a newfound preference for expensive shoes and boots, but only because she had learned they were a good value, sturdier and more comfortable than cheap ones. Today she had on a pair of black cowboy boots, whose two-inch heels put her within shouting distance of six feet.

I yam what I yam,
she decided, glancing toward the salon side of Adrian’s, presumably full of women trying to be anything but. Meanwhile, white-uniformed men kept leading women out of the “Spa” door, holding their charges by the elbow of their terry-cloth robes as if they were recovering from major surgery.

“Salmon and asparagus,” one attendant whispered to his client, whose face was covered with a pale green goo that made her look as if she had just been smacked with a key lime pie. “All you want, but nothing else. Your…uh, urine will smell, but your skin will look fabulous. But only asparagus and salmon, nothing else for seven days, or it won’t work. It’s all about the salmon.”

“Belly or Nova?” the woman asked, and Tess’s head shot up at the familiar voice issuing from the green cream.

“Deborah?”

“Tesser!” her cousin crowed with pleasure, and Tess remembered too late that she was here under a semifalse name and thoroughly false pretenses. At least the old family nickname didn’t give her away. “Since when do you come to Adrian’s?”

“Oh, I thought I’d start paying a little more attention to my appearance, get a manicure.”

“Well, it’s a start.”

There was no malice in Deborah, although Tess had not always understood this. Her cousin simply lacked the usual filters: If a thought passed through her brain, it headed straight to her mouth. Tess had come to think of Deborah as sort of a walking James Joyce novel, albeit one narrated by a preternaturally self-satisfied matron. They had been competitive as girls, and even as adults, until they finally stopped to wonder what, exactly, they were competing for. They had chosen different paths, but not as a rebuke to each other. And they had the foxhole of family in common, a powerful bond.

Deborah peered into Tess’s face. “Isn’t this awfully far off the beaten track for you? I thought you never went outside the Beltway if you could help it.”

“Yes, but everyone says this place is the best.”

Her cousin smiled, happy to be complimented for her taste in spas. “It is, and it’s convenient to Sutton Place Gourmet, not to mention a Starbucks.”

“No caffeine,” her attendant practically squealed. “Are you trying to undo everything we’ve done?”

Deborah giggled. She was not a stupid woman, and it was doubtful she believed that this young man had any interest in her beyond her lavish tips. Yet she clearly was enjoying their flirtatious shtick.

“Not even one mocha?” she wheedled.

“Decaf, no whipped cream,” he decreed, and she nodded, as if his word were law, but Tess knew that her cousin would be clutching a venti with the works when she roared out of the parking lot. The Weinstein side of the family did not run toward sacrifice. “Now let’s go make sure that Carlos does a fabulous job on your hair. Not so red this time. Something softer, a shade that sneaks up on a person. I didn’t do all this work on your face just to have the Castilian wonder screw up the presentation.”

“Have fun,” Deborah called to Tess over her shoulder as she headed into the salon. “You ought to think about getting a seaweed wrap next time. Or a kosher salt scrub.”

“Does that come with belly or Nova?”

But Deborah had sailed out of earshot, so all Tess’s flippancy earned was a frown from the Velvet Frost.

“I believe Lana is ready now. You were lucky to get this appointment. She is our most popular girl.” The voice thawed perhaps one degree. “I did not realize you were one of
the
Weinsteins. Is Deborah your sister?”

“Cousin,” Tess said, feeling the lack of challenge occasioned by telling the unadulterated truth. “First cousin.”

“Ah,” the Velvet Frost said, and Tess could see her calculating: not one of the Weinsteins of Weinsteins Jewelers, just an impoverished twig from another part of the family tree. Tess’s advantage was lost as quickly as it had been gained.

L
ana Wishnia balanced Tess’s hands on her fingertips, clearly unimpressed. No rower has pretty palms, but even the tops of Tess’s hands were unattractive, with short, nicked nails, ragged cuticles, and a few random cuts that she couldn’t recall inflicting on herself. After a few moments of stony inspection, Lana took Tess’s left hand and flipped it over, touching it the way one might handle a dead animal brought home by a faithful cat. Here the damage was far worse — a corporal’s stripes of hard yellow calluses. Still, Lana said nothing, her face impassive.

The only consolation was that Lana’s hands, while nowhere near as damaged as Tess’s, were not spectacular. Her nails were blunt cut and unpolished, her fingers stubby and plump.
Manicurist, file yourself.

“What do you do?” she asked, dropping Tess’s hands into warm, soapy water. They were the first words she had spoken since they were introduced. Her accent was quirky — American, with a hard, aggressive edge, more New York than Baltimore. She had a broad, unsmiling face, and her heavy makeup made her look older than she was, assuming she was Natalie’s contemporary. A single pockmark on her forehead indicated a poor complexion or a bad case of chickenpox, but heavy foundation covered any other telltale marks.

“Do?” Tess echoed. She preferred not to lie outright, but she also wasn’t ready to tell Lana that she was a private detective, not just yet.

“To your hands. What do you do, that they’re so beat up?”

“I row.”

“What?”

“Row. On the water — I row a single scull.” Tess couldn’t use her hands, as Lana was now holding them both in the water, pushing them down as if they were a pair of kittens she hoped to drown. She rolled her shoulders and jerked her elbows, attempting to mime the movement, and succeeded only in looking as if she were having a convulsion.

“For exercise?”

“Yeah.” It was easier to agree than try to explain that rowing was more for her head than her body or heart. There were a dozen activities Tess could do for endurance and strength training, but rowing was the only thing that brought her close to the kind of Zen-like state that others claimed to find in yoga and meditation. She had never loved it more than this summer, when she’d had to give it up for a few weeks. Sidelined after cutting open her knee, she had needed it more than ever.

“Weird. I oughta do something.” Lana’s complacent voice made clear that she had no intention of doing anything. Was she married? She didn’t wear any rings, but perhaps a ring would interfere with her work. “I should tell you — if you go out and row again, it’s not going to last. Just so you know.”

Tess nodded, but the judgment stung a little. She didn’t go in much for beautifying routines, but she liked to think that she wasn’t beyond hope.

Lana removed the shallow basin of water and began massaging Tess’s hands. This felt heavenly. Tess thought about Deborah, wrapped in seaweed, abraded with kosher salt, covered with pale green cream. Did she really think she needed all these treatments, or did she come just for the touching, to be massaged and rubbed?

“There’s a reason I asked for you today,” Tess said, deciding they were far enough along in the process that Lana couldn’t abort, or walk away.

“Yeah, I was in
Baltimore
magazine’s ‘best of’ issue three years ago, and people still call.”

She nodded toward the wall behind her station, where a framed certificate attested to her honor. Invited to look, Tess also took in the photographs and personal mementoes that Lana had put up there. There was a stuffed bear in a T-shirt that said
MARDI GRAS
, and a photograph of Lana with a dark-haired woman, the Inner Harbor in the background. It was small and a little blurry, but Tess recognized Natalie. Younger and more tarted up than in the photo Mark Rubin had given her, but definitely Natalie.

“I heard about you from someone else — Natalie Rubin’s mother.”

Lana didn’t miss a beat in her ministrations to Tess’s hand, and if there was a change in her expression, Tess couldn’t see it. “That was nice of Vera, to send me a customer. She’s a nice lady.”

“When did your family come over?”

Lana looked up, squinting at Tess as if it were impolite to mention that someone was not a native. Perhaps it was, in these paranoid times.

“Twenty-eight years ago. I was a year old.” So she was twenty-nine, a year younger than Natalie.

“Where are your parents from?”

“Sheepshead Bay.” She gave Tess a crooked smile. “Now, I mean. They were originally from Belarus. They moved to New York, but they sent me down here to live with my aunt because…well, because they hoped I’d be more
dutiful
in Baltimore. Also, they thought Baltimore was more American. They figured they had come all this way, so I should live in a real American place. You could walk down our block sometimes and not hear a single word in English.”