Jean heard the beeps that signaled the beginning of the radio news and put down the true-crime book she was reading about the murder of Susan Reinert and her children in a Pennsylvania suburb over 25 years ago. As the cab zipped along, she checked that her own three kids were fine. Avigail, the baby in the Snugli, dozing; Miriam, the two-year-old drooling just a little on her corduroy coat, but not having a seizure; Reuven, her strange, brilliant five-year-old who rarely spoke, staring out the window, hypnotized by the traffic flow. Resting her book on her knees, she turned her attention to the radio.
“The search continues for Hodaya Pimstein,” said the announcer, “the 22-month-old girl who disappeared from her father’s house in Jerusalem on Saturday morning. Dozens of volunteers from the rescue service Zak’a combed the woods near the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood where she was last seen, but haven’t found any clues. At a news conference this morning, her parents pleaded for anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts to come forward. Hodaya was playing in the living room when her father went to the bathroom. When he returned, she had disappeared without a trace. Police are questioning neighbors, but so far no witnesses have come forward. Also in the news, soldiers in the Gaza Strip. . .”
“That little girl. . .” said Jean, leaning forward, hungry for conversation with an adult, pulling at the seat belt that stretched up from her waist and gripped her neck at an awkward angle. She was so small that adult-size seat belts never fit correctly.
“What?” said the cab driver.
“A little girl just disappeared?”
“You didn’t hear about it till now? It’s been all over TV since yesterday,” he said. “Don’t you people ever watch the news?”
“I don’t have a TV,” she said, forcing herself to ignore the “you people” remark, knowing he meant “all you crazy ultra-Orthodox parasites living on the dole.” In her experience, a mother traveling with as many kids as she, especially one who refused to talk and another prone to fits, had better humor taxi drivers.
“You heard what they said, there’s no trace of her. It’s got to be terrorists,” he said. He paused for a split second as he cut off a truck, avoiding a terrible accident by centimeters. “What else could it be?”
“Cops always say that when there’s a disappearance, you have to first rule out the members of the family,” she said, calling on the knowledge she had gleaned from true-crime books.
“What, you think the parents kidnapped their own daughter?”
“I’m just saying, they always look at the family.” She stroked the baby’s head, thinking she had stirred but then realized she was still in a deep sleep.
“Those poor people,” the driver said. “First, some Palestinian goes into their home and takes their daughter, then people like you accuse them. It’s those Arab neighborhoods, we let them do anything, we don’t respond. . .”
As he went on, Jean went over the news report in her head. “Where was her mother?” Jean asked.
The driver shrugged. “Her parents are divorced. But her mother was on the radio this morning.”
“So the girl lives with her father?”
“What’s the difference? You know what we’ve gotta do now? We’ve got to—”
Jean didn’t find out what they had to do because the driver was about to pass the entrance to the small street where Miriam and Reuven had occupational therapy. She gently reminded him of her destination, then cupped her hand around the baby’s head as he stopped short.
Did you hear about this little girl who disappeared?” Jean asked Meir after the kids were in bed. He was studying at a small desk in the living room and she was clearing the dinner dishes, which she usually left on the table during the chaos of bath and bedtime.
“Hmm,” he said, not looking up, clearly hoping that was enough of a response. Usually it was. Jean didn’t like to disturb him, but occasionally she felt a strong need to talk. There was rarely anything she had to tell him, because she spent her time taking care of all the minor annoyances of daily life so he would be free to pursue his studies. On any ordinary night, she would have cleared the table as quickly as she could, then curled up with her true-crime book and read till after midnight. Reading was Jean’s release. Why she liked true-crime books she couldn’t have said. It was after Reuven’s birth that she had become such an addict. She needed to be in another world, not the chaos of Israel, or Judaism, or anything to do with her life.
First, she had turned to mysteries, which she could pick up easily when she was in the city center at several second-hand English bookstores. But there was always something disappointing about them. The characters didn’t act like real people, and the twists and turns were either unrealistic or frustratingly predictable. Once she had browsed through the store and noticed Fatal Vision, the true story of a man who murdered his wife and child, then pretended hippie intruders had committed the crime. It seemed more immediate, more interesting, more satisfying in every way than the mysteries. Each bookstore had a whole shelf of true-crime books, and judging from the newspapers, there was enough crime in the world for a new one to be written every day. She exchanged Fatal Vision for partial store credit and got Helter Skelter, the story of the Manson Family murders. Reading it, she lost herself in a world of hippie runaways, swinging Hollywood decadence, and the middle-class Gentile detectives and prosecutors.
She found that the detectives interested her as much as the victims and criminals. She loved to read about how they went out for tacos or hamburgers, how they awaited verdicts in bars across the street from courthouses, smoking and drinking beers, or how they took their sons to basketball games on weekends while their ex-wives had their hair done. Nothing could have been more exotic or seemed more carefree.
When she read, it was as if she had an out-of-body experience, completely transmogrified. The books nourished her, kept her whole. She didn’t read so much as devour them, staying up late into the night. She needed this escape, especially after Reuven was diagnosed as high-functioning autistic and Miriam, it turned out that Miriam . . .
That was much harder to think about, how she had been told that Miriam had Rett’s Syndrome, a rare neurological condition related to autism that could keep her at the mental and physical level of a toddler her entire life. It was so rare, doctors had a hard time giving her a detailed prognosis, except to say that there wasn’t much hope. By then, she was already pregnant with Avigail. Avigail did not show signs of the disease yet, but it was too early to tell.
Meir, of course, was saddened to hear about Miriam and concerned that the baby might be afflicted, but his response was hard to read. If anything, he became more remote, more absorbed in his world of Torah and Talmud. He studied harder than ever, and the wives of the rabbis who ran the yeshiva where he taught whispered that he was proving himself to be an even greater genius than they had suspected. This gratified Jean, who yearned for him to get the recognition he deserved in the community.
But it was hard for her to talk about his work with him. He would mention what he was studying, then go to look something up and become lost in thought. Eventually, she stopped even trying to draw him out. What was the point? And now she had her own books.
“That little girl was with her father on Shabbos and then she was gone,” she continued.
“No, I didn’t know,” he said. “That’s very sad.” His gaze returned to the text on his desk.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Jean said. “If someone broke in and grabbed her, she would have screamed. But the father said he didn’t hear anything. And apparently no one saw an Arab running away from the scene or wandering around the neighborhood beforehand. The parents gave a press conference this morning and begged for any information. . .” Meir was humming to himself as he read.
She pulled out the sofa bed in the living room where she and Meir slept. Until 1 a.m., she read about William Bradfield, a charismatic high school English teacher, and Jay Smith, the headmaster, who were accused of murdering one of Bradfield’s lovers and her children. It was a good book, but not a great one. Normally, nothing other than her children’s cries would have distracted her, but tonight, she kept thinking about the little girl. Hodaya. It didn’t make sense.
The next morning, at breakfast, she flicked on the radio that she usually used only to listen to the weather report. Meir was long gone. Static crackled as she turned up the volume and Reuven looked up. She was glad he was paying attention.
“Eema just wants to find out about the weather,” Jean said gently. The children called her “Eema.” She and Meir had always wanted them to use the Hebrew names for their parents rather than Mommy and Daddy. She remembered that they had talked about it on their second date. Now, Reuven rarely spoke to her and it wasn’t clear that Miriam would, either. Jean only heard the word “Eema” when she uttered it herself.
The baby was in her crib, playing or at least looking up, while Reuven was sitting at the table, munching the only kind of cereal he would eat and arranging toy soldiers in a line. She had strapped Miriam into a high chair and was about to start spooning homemade baby food into her slack mouth.
She fed Miriam two spoonfuls before the familiar pre-news jingle came on. The announcers on the radio always spoke fast, so fast that she had to concentrate to catch everything they said, even after twelve years of living in Israel. Of course, the first item was about Hodaya, as she had known it would be.
“Volunteers continue to search for Hodaya Pimstein, the twenty-two-month-old girl who went missing from her father’s apartment in the Kiryat Yovel section of Jerusalem on Saturday morning. The relief service Zak’a announced that it now has hundreds of volunteers searching the area. The Jerusalem district police commander asked for anyone who saw anything at all out of the ordinary last Saturday or in the days since to please call . . . ” The announcer rattled off a phone number.
So there was nothing new. She adjusted her focus back to the banana apple mix that was dripping off the spoon in front of Miriam’s head. Jean realized that if Miriam were a normal child, she would be staring at it longingly. No, at the age of two, a normal child would laugh or point to it, wouldn’t she? What had Reuven done at that age? He was still considered normal at two; he still spoke then.
Jean’s life, she thought, was a series of adjustments, adjusting her thinking, her actions, her moods to the discrepancies between where her children were and where they should be. More than anything else, it was an attempt to keep up her spirits and theirs, never to see this life she had with Meir, in these two rooms, as a tragedy. She spooned more food into her daughter’s mouth.
“In the case of the other missing girl,” the radio announcer was saying. She turned her attention back to the news. It turned out that another girl had disappeared, a five-year-old Arab girl called Nur Abu Tir from the village of Umm Tuba in East Jerusalem. Jean wondered briefly if the cab driver had been right, if perhaps Arab terrorists had hidden one of their own children to make it look as if there was some serial killer, or kidnapper on the loose. It was so rare that children disappeared in Israel, and now two gone the same day? But a police spokesman said that Nur’s family was involved in a feud in their village, and that it was believed that her disappearance had something to do with that. “There is no connection between the disappearance of Hodaya Pimstein and Nur Abu Tir,” he said firmly.
Was he right? She wondered. Of course, in her neighborhood, Ge’ula, a mostly ultra-Orthodox area in Jerusalem, the government and its spokesmen were viewed, at best, with skepticism, at worst with downright hatred and distrust. Jean, who had grown up in a modern Orthodox family in a suburb of New York City, did not share the hostility to the outside world that most of her acquaintances here seemed to feel. Her mother had worked for an accountant whose clients were both Jews and non-Jews. Miriam’s therapeutic nursery and the waiting rooms of the speech and occupational therapists where she took both her older children regularly were filled with secular mothers, all of whom seemed to her absolutely as concerned, moral, and good as the frum women she passed in the streets by her building. When she brought up the subject to Meir, that it often seemed to her that the Orthodox were no better than the secular in their day-to-day lives, he simply said, “Fulfilling all the mitzvot is a struggle. Some succeed at a higher level than others.” She was not questioning their life, but was puzzled that it seemed to bring so little peace to the people most immersed in it.
The sound of Reuven putting down his spoon startled her out of her thoughts, a luxury she couldn’t afford on a morning when she had to get him off to yeshiva and Miriam to her nursery with Avigail in tow.
“How was the cereal?” she asked Reuven. The speech therapist had told her not to ask him yes/no questions, since they did not encourage communication, and she tried as hard as she could to do everything the therapists said. When he ducked his head in acknowledgment that he had heard, she repeated the question, checking her impulse to say, “Was it good?” which she knew he would answer only with a mumbled “Yes.” She repeated the question six times, and he finally whispered, “Good.” She looked at the clock. Now they would be late.
Where is Hodaya?” screamed the headline on the newspaper lying on the table in the speech therapist’s waiting room. Several had their offices here and there was another mother waiting. She wore tight jeans bleached white over the thighs and a red leather jacket. A baby napped in a stroller next to her. Avigail was asleep in Jean’s Snugli again (was she sleeping too much? how much had Miriam slept at this age?) and Miriam was dozing in her stroller. The waiting room was cold and Jean tugged the blanket so it covered Miriam’s feet. She didn’t want Miriam to suffer, although doctors had said that the girl lacked sensitivity to heat and cold. The woman and Jean exchanged smiles. Jean had seen this mother here for the last couple of months, but they never talked. Normally, Jean would have barely noticed who was across from her as she tore into her book. But now the Main Line murders in Echoes in the Darkness were not as compelling to her as Hodaya Pimstein. She asked the woman if she could read the newspaper. “Go ahead,” the woman answered. “It’s not mine.”
Browsing through the paper, Jean learned some interesting facts. The Pimsteins were not actually the Pimsteins. Hodaya was the product of a brief affair between her mother, Ronni Kedem, a social worker who lived near Tel Aviv, and her father, Eli Pimstein. They had lived together for only a few months, just after Hodaya’s birth. But Pimstein, an unemployed high-tech computer programmer, had maintained a relationship with the girl. Ronni said that she was sure he was not involved in the girl’s disappearance, but the police questioned him. He had taken and passed a polygraph test.
Jean briefly reconsidered the Arab terrorist theory. But the police insisted that Nur’s case and Hodaya’s were not linked, in spite of the strange coincidence that both had gone missing the same day. Why be so insistent if there really could be a connection? The police appealed again for witnesses to come forward. Hodaya’s mother promised a reward. “We don’t want vengeance,” she said. “We just want Hodaya back.”
It occurred to Jean that one day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, Hodaya’s story would be a true-crime book. She imagined herself as the detective who, however improbably, would solve the crime. What if she paid close attention, pieced together every hole in the story and figured it out, then brought her findings to the police? Stranger things had happened, hadn’t they? She began writing the book in her head:
Jean Weiss, the 32-year-old mother of three, looked up from the newspaper in the waiting room of her children’s speech therapist and told herself: It doesn’t make sense. She adjusted the thick knitted beret that covered her short hair and thought it over. Eli Pimstein, the toddler’s father, told reporters that his daughter must have let herself out of the apartment and then opened the gate that enclosed the garden of their house. But Weiss was not fooled. How could a 22-month-old, who looked from her pictures to be quite petite, open such a heavy gate, as well as unlock a regular door?
Pimstein said the child had vanished while he was in the bathroom. Although the police had apparently accepted this story, Weiss did not. As she prepared a bottle of juice for her two-year-old daughter, she thought to herself: According to Pimstein, someone was lurking on the street hoping to nab a child, and at exactly the moment when he went to the bathroom, his child let herself out of two heavy doors and wandered into the hands of this waiting fiend. Suspicion would seem to be on the father himself, since he was the last one to have seen Hodaya.
But what of the mother? Hodaya’s parents had never married, and there had reportedly been acrimony over child support payments the unemployed father was reluctant to make. Hodaya was at her father’s Jerusalem apartment with the blessing of her mother, who often pushed for the girl to spend more time with her father. But could the mother, angry at the father’s failure to pay, have staged a bogus kidnapping to pressure Pimstein? Police had also looked into this possibility, but dismissed it, because Hodaya’s mother had an airtight alibi and police had been with her constantly since the disappearance was first reported. As her infant daughter stirred in the Snugli, Weiss smoothed the girl’s hair with one hand while, with the other, she tensely lit a cigarette. . .
No, that was going too far, Jean couldn’t imagine herself smoking. But all detectives did seem to be nicotine fiends. Maybe she could crack her knuckles, or do something else that would make her seem a hard-bitten crime-solver.
Rain was falling as their bus lurched toward Miriam’s occupational therapist’s office. Jean was sitting uncomfortably, holding Miriam on her knees with one arm and the folded stroller with the other, while Avigail dozed in the Snugli. Reuven stood in the aisle, gripping the pole and staring straight ahead. She would have liked to ask him what he saw, but was too exhausted by the weight of her two little girls to have the energy to get his attention and make contact. The bus stopped at a light and the beeps sounded from the radio, announcing the news. The driver cranked up the volume. Hodaya was the lead story. Her father was making a plea for her return. His voice was choked with tears. As he answered a reporter’s questions, he sounded hysterical. “How could anyone do this? How? I don’t understand it!” he said. When the broadcast ended, several passengers started discussing it.
“That poor man!” said a woman.
“With God’s help, maybe she’ll be found all right,” said a man.
Jean did not participate and not only because Miriam was squirming. She sat, stunned, by what she had heard. Instead of adding to the comments, she resumed the narrative:
A chill ran through Weiss as the broadcast ended. It was the first time she had heard Pimstein’s voice, and it was crystal clear to her: He was the killer! She looked around and wondered how dense the passengers on the Jerusalem bus were, clucking sympathetically over him. Hadn’t they heard precisely what she had? She couldn’t say his voice was the voice of a murderer, because there were too many kinds of murderers out there for them all to speak with one voice. But what she did recognize was the voice of a liar, and clearly Pimstein was lying. How to get proof that would stand up in court, that was the question. A woman with dyed red hair and a snake tattoo on her hand sitting across the aisle said, “Those poor parents, how can they stand it?” Weiss wanted to scream at her, “How can you be taken in?” But she kept silent as she reviewed the facts of the case, trying to figure out whether there was enough evidence to arrest him. She knew, from her many years of reading true-crime books, that once a suspect was arrested, it often led to a confession—
Reuven was tugging at her arm. It was their stop. Reluctantly, she closed her case file as she gathered up the folded stroller and Miriam, all the while keeping an eye on Reuven. If some passengers hadn’t helped with the bulky stroller, she would never have managed to get down the steps. Normally, she could do it, albeit with some difficulty, but right now she was distracted. It was getting harder and harder to keep the sound of Pimstein’s lies out of her mind.
I need to ask you a question about halakha,” Jean told Meir that night. This got his attention. Anything to do with halakha, or Jewish law, was important to him, more important than the here and now, just as the Pimstein case had become to her.
“If you’re sure you know who has committed a murder, are you obligated to go to the police?” she asked.
“Yes, of course. Anyone who knows the perpetrator of a murder must do what he can to bring this criminal to justice.” He went back to the volume of Talmud he had open on the table.
Jean had known he would say something like this, known this was the answer, but she had counted on his asking, “Why do you want to know?” or something along those lines. Instead, he had assumed that she was consumed by theoretical questions, as he was.
“But what if you know but don’t have evidence?” she asked.
“How can you know but not have evidence?”
“It’s this Pimstein,” she said, nearly shrieking.
If he had been more talkative, he would have asked, “Who?” Instead, he stared at her.
“The man whose daughter disappeared. In Kiryat Yovel. It was on the news. We talked about it.”
He nodded.
“His story makes no sense. He says he went to the bathroom, and when he came out, his daughter was gone. She must have let herself out the front door and the garden gate, he says.”
There was no change in Meir’s expression.
“She’s twenty-two months old, Meir. How could she do that? And how would terrorists passing by know she was going to do that? It doesn’t make sense.”
He said nothing, but began to look interested. A little interested. He wasn’t reading, anyway.
“The parents are divorced. Well, they’re not divorced, but they were never married. Anyway, that’s not important. The thing is, the girl was alone with her father in his house. The mother has an alibi. She was always trying to get him to spend more time with the girl, with Hodaya. He didn’t see her much. But listen. I heard him on the radio today, and he was talking about her and I could just tell he was lying. He sounded like—”
Like a liar, she wanted to say but did not.
“He was crying, sobbing, it was just so fake,” she said, knowing that this would not interest Meir. “And look at all the inconsistencies in his story! It couldn’t have happened the way he said, it just couldn’t—”
“We can only hope that, with God’s help, the girl is found alive,” he said, and turned back to the Talmud. Their conversation was over.
She stomped over to the window and noisily pulled up the plastic blinds. There was no one outside in the dark street. In the building across the way, she could see a light on in a single window, revealing a shelf filled with leather-covered holy books in front of a beige wall. No people, no sounds. She wanted to open the window, to scream out Pimstein’s guilt. She balled up her hands into fists for a moment, then lowered the blinds furiously, letting them fall with a loud clatter. Meir did not look up at the sound, nor a moment later, when Avigail’s high wail sounded from the next room.
At last, Weiss was face to face with Pimstein in the investigation room. “All right,” she said, and at the sound of determination in her voice, all eyes in the room were on her five-foot, one-inch frame. “Let’s go over it again.”
“I’ve already told you everything.”
“Tell me again.”
“We were watching TV. I got up to go to the bathroom. When I came out, Hodaya was gone.”
“She opened the door by herself.” Weiss did not attempt to conceal the skepticism in her tone.
“Maybe someone saw her in the garden and took her from there,” he said.
“With no struggle, without anyone seeing or hearing anything?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
She leaned over and looked right into his eyes.
“Stranger things may have happened,” she said. “But this one didn’t.”
“Why are you doing this to me? I’m as upset as anyone. I’m her father, after all.”
Weiss looked at O’Brien and Jones. “Why am I doing this to you?” she said, pausing dramatically. “Because, Mr. Pimstein, you seem to forget that this is not about you, it’s about Hodaya and what has been done to her.”
Pimstein winced. There was something both reptilian and babyish about him, Weiss thought, as she studied his shiny bald head and thick, petulant mouth. She had dealt with tougher criminals before. She would break him. She knew how.
“TELL ME THE TRUTH!” she yelled. “TELL ME, YOU MONSTER!”
Grabbing him by the shoulders, she shook him till he dissolved in sobs.
“Okay, Okay, I did it, I killed her,” he said.
“What happened?” she said. The sobs didn’t stop. “Can’t talk anymore? I’ll tell you what happened. Hodaya was crying. She wanted to see her mother. She didn’t love you. You couldn’t comfort her, you were sick of her and sick of having to pay for her, so you hit her, and your daughter fell backwards, banging her head against the wall. You lost control and hit her again and again. You hated her. You never wanted her, you were furious at her mother for using you as a sperm donor and having this child, and in a moment of anger you simply killed her.”
“Yes. That’s what happened, yes.”
O’Brien and Jones looked at each other with grim expressions, but with a glint of triumph in their eyes.
“And now, Mr. Pimstein, before you tell us what you did with her body, let me tell you something,” she said, standing up and turning away from him for a minute.
“I just want to explain.”
“No explanations. I’ll do the explaining here. Mr. Pimstein, you took a healthy child, a child who loved and trusted you, and brutally snuffed out her life for no reason. Do you know what a gift a child is, how there are thousands of families who cannot have children of their own, who would do anything for a healthy baby? Do you know, Mr. Pimstein, that there are thousands more parents with disabled children, who spend their entire lives, their whole lives, Mr. Pimstein, shuttling their children from one treatment to another, parents who have disabled child after disabled child, and who still treat each and every one of those children with tenderness, patience, and respect, because they are the creation of God, like us all. And it is only God, Mr. Pimstein, not mere humans, who can determine who will live and who will die. Did you ever think of that? DID YOU? DID YOU?”
This time she shook him so savagely that O’Brien and Jones had to pull her off.
“Come on, Weiss, we’ve done enough,” said O’Brien.
“Let’s go get a pizza,” Jones said, taking her gently by the arm.
“Just a minute,” she said to them brusquely. They were fellow detectives and understood her anger. “The body, Mr. Pimstein. You knew that without a body, it would be hard to find the murderer. So you disposed of it. Somewhere close, because you were back at your own house before you called the police. Some relative in the area, someone with a yard, who you knew would be at synagogue at that hour on a Saturday morning. Am I right?”
He put his head in his hands.
“My uncle lives on Dov Hoz Street in Katamonim. Number 22. She’s buried in the shed behind his house.”
“We’re sending a car over right now,” she said. As she walked out with O’Brien and Jones, she turned back and saw Pimstein staring at the wall, his eyes filled with the nothingness of a true psychopath. She spat at him. Just then, the FBI agents came up and shook her hand. . .
As Jean lay half-dreaming in the early morning, she was shaken by the outrage she expressed to Pimstein in her fantasy. Today was another day in a world that very well might let Pimstein get away with it, and she was powerless to avenge that beautiful healthy little girl’s murder. There had to be something she could do, some way to trap Pimstein. . .
Jean was hoping to sit and listen quietly to the news that morning, but Miriam had a seizure. The girl had the glassy look she got beforehand, then started swaying back and forth in her high chair before it began in earnest, with her eyes rolling back and her entire body twitching. The baby was crying and Reuven was staring straight ahead as Jean held the high chair so it wouldn’t tip over, but during that moment, when she stood by, ready to cushion her daughter’s head if it swayed too powerfully, she heard that Pimstein had confessed.
New evidence had come to light: An Arab shepherd, who worked for a settlement just outside the city, had seen him in the woods the week before, digging a hole. He had thought Pimstein was just burying a dog, which was something people did occasionally in these woods. The shepherd had been home all weekend, not watching TV or listening to the radio, because it was a Muslim holiday. When he got back to work and saw Pimstein on TV, he knew it was the same man.
Following the shepherd’s directions, investigators had gone into the woods and unearthed Hodaya’s body from a grave. Pimstein admitted he had chosen this spot in the woods the week before and dug the grave. Then he drowned Hodaya in the bathtub, wrapped her tiny body in a blanket, drove out to the forest and buried her. He got back quickly, then called the police and reported her disappearance.
As Miriam’s seizure subsided, Jean was trembling. She had been right, except that Pimstein, the premeditated killer, was even more cold and psychopathic than she had thought.
The radio announcer asked the shepherd what he thought of the fact that had it not been for their chance encounter, Pimstein might well have gotten away with the crime.
“God is great,” the shepherd replied.
Jean sat down on the floor, drained but angry. After a few minutes, she picked herself up. She knew what she was going to do.
The rabbi scolded Jean for bringing Reuven to yeshiva late.
“Miriam had a seizure,” she snapped at him. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to take care of a sick child?”
He was speechless, never having heard her speak anything but pleasantries and apologies before.
“No, you don’t, of course you don’t!” she said, then turned and left before he could respond.
At Miriam’s therapeutic nursery, Jean deliberately did not mention her daughter’s seizure that morning. If she had, they would have insisted she stay around in case there was another.
“When will you be back?” asked the teacher, who often told her that the staff expected parents to help as much as they could.
“I’ll pick her up at the end of the day,” she said, unleashing Miriam from the stroller and pushing it away so fast it banged into the wall. The end of the nursery school day was in just three hours anyway, it wasn’t as if this was boarding school, she told herself.
On the street, with Avigail still in the Snugli, she hailed a cab. As she settled herself down, she gave the driver the destination: Borochov Street, Kiryat Yovel.
“You know, that’s the same street where Hodaya lived, that little girl who was killed,” he said.
“I know,” she replied.
“Did you hear? The father confessed.”
“I heard,” she said.
“They’re still talking about it.”
She turned her attention to the voice on the radio. It seemed that one of the early leads the police had gotten came when they confiscated Pimstein’s computer hard drive. He had visited many websites that told how to commit the perfect murder and had looked long and hard at one that suggested that a bathtub drowning plus burial in a rural area was the best formula for success.
“I hope they kill him in jail,” said the driver.
“Yes,” said Jean. She was annoyed with herself for having overlooked the computer. What a brilliant place to check for evidence. He was a high-tech guy; of course he must have been on the computer all the time.
As they turned onto the street, she gave a random number as the address. Getting out in front of that building, she saw a crowd gathered just a few houses away and knew it was Pimstein’s place.
Borochov was a nice street. Apart from a big apartment building on the corner, it was lined with small houses, mostly one-family places. Many had well-tended gardens. A beautiful, quiet street, the kind of place Jean didn’t even dream about, even though she knew well that this was not a luxury neighborhood, just a solidly middle-class one. But when she compared it with her own neighborhood of Ge’ula, so cramped and dingy, she was consumed again by the anger and envy of her dream tirade against Pimstein.
There were police in front of the iron gate, the one she had known that Hodaya could not have opened herself. Some tense-looking people, reporters, she thought, were standing around chatting, and a few others just stared. So this was it, this was where Pimstein had lived, where Hodaya had died. That healthy baby girl.
Avigail stirred in the Snugli but didn’t awaken and Jean knew: She was sleeping too much, the same first sign she had had that there was something wrong with Miriam. As it began to sink in, she started moving forward, past the reporters, to the gate. People yelled things at her, but she paid no attention. Who were they to stop Jean Weiss? She was sure she knew just as much as the 20-year-old policeman who gripped her arm, holding her back.
“You can’t go in,” he said.
Avigail hung against her chest like a dead weight.
“I have every right to go in!” Jean heard herself screaming. “Every right!”
Even when she had calmed down, after the police officer who sat her down in his car around the corner was convinced that she was just upset about the crime and a little overtired, she kept whispering, “Every right!” as she stroked the top of her youngest daughter’s motionless head.
