"She had credit cards, an ATM card, accounts at all the stores where she shopped. She never wanted for anything."

"C'mon, it was pretty medieval, and not even in keeping with your own beliefs. Jewish women have always been given a lot of control over their homes, allowed to have their own money. Was it a bone of contention in the marriage? Did Natalie want things set up differently? Maybe this whole disappearing act is a walkout intended to get you to change some things."

"No," he said, an edge to his voice. "No, you have the wrong idea."

"Really? Then would you point me in the direction of the right idea? Again, I have to ask you if Natalie had an addiction of some sort. Because that's the usual reason not to entrust a family member with cash."

"I don't want… You shouldn't ask such questions. This is the mother of my children, my wife. You're being disrespectful."

The phone rang just then, and Rubin flicked on the speakerphone. A man's voice, high and reedy through the distortion of the voice box, started out tentatively: "This is Jack Reid, up in Montreal, and there's a small problem with the knitwear you ordered for this fall."

"There are no small problems, Jack." Mark Rubin's voice took on a cold, ruthless quality that Tess had not heard before. I wouldn't want to go up against him in a business deal, she thought Then she realized she already had, and he had acquiesced readily at the price she named. She must have underbid the job.

The voice on the speaker continued, clearly nervous. "The per-unit cost quoted you… my assistant… well, he's new, and he didn't figure in some ancillary costs. There are some complicated tariffs and shipping fees, at least in order to make the October date we agreed to. You see, we get the pieces from New York, but still have to assemble them here, so you're talking a really fast turnaround."

"That's your problem."

"But I'm going to lose money if you hold me to that price."

"No you're not. You may not make as much as you counted on making this fall, but you won't lose money, not in the long run. The way you'll lose money is by trying to renegotiate the price or delay delivery. Then you'll lose a lot of money, because I'll never buy from you again, and I'll persuade other merchants in my area to blackball you, too, tell them how unreliable you are. You'll never make another sale in the Mid-Atlantic region."

"But, Mark-"

"No, Jack. Do it for the agreed-on price, delivery on the contracted date, or we're through. You're through."

"If you could just split the difference in the shipping?"

"I can, but I won't. Fob it off on one of your stupider clients, who doesn't read every line on his bill. But don't try to play me for a fool."

"Mark, if you could just see your way clear…"

"Jack, hang up now, or I'm going to insist you deliver a week earlier. At your expense."

"Pleasure doing business with you," the disembodied Jack said, allowing himself a small measure of sarcasm in his defeat.

"The pleasure," Rubin said, "is all mine." He punched a button, disconnecting the line.

Tess sat in stunned silence, half admiring, half appalled.

"In business," Rubin said, "you have to remember who works for whom. He needs me more than I need him. So I win."

"Well, by that logic I work for you, but you need me and you need to heed my advice. You can't keep everything decorous, Mr. Rubin." Funny, she was closer to him in age than his own wife was, but she just couldn't call him by his first name, and he never invited her to. "You can't mark areas of your life 'keep out,' especially if they might hold the key to where your wife and children went."

"I want to find my wife, but I don't want to violate her, or expose her."

"Expose her to what?"

"Nothing," he said, backpedaling. "It's just that I've come to you with a problem of what I would call location. I want to know where my wife is. Why she left isn't so important to me. We'll deal with that when she comes home, between us."

"But I may not be able to find her unless I know the why. So if there's anything you're not telling me…"

The phone rang again, and Rubin punched the speaker-phone with great enthusiasm, as if happy for the interruption.

"That better not be you, Jack," he warned the phone. But the voice that came back was mechanical and unhearing.

"This is a collect call from 1-800-CALL-ATT. If you wish to accept this call, please press '1' on your TouchTone phone. The message is from-"

A pause, then another voice, a human one, small but determined: "Isaac."

Rubin almost broke the phone's plastic surface in his effort to punch the 1, but his voice was controlled when he spoke. "Isaac? Isaac? Are you there?"

A rush of words, boyish and high, filled the room, for Rubin had left the phone in speaker mode. "Daddy, this is Isaac. I'm in a McDonald's, but I'm not sure where. I tried to call you earlier, when we first got here, but I got your voice mail and I used up the money that I told Mama I wanted for a salad. Now everyone is playing in the ball room, and they think I'm going to the bathroom. Don't worry, I didn't eat anything, although I guess a salad would be okay. I'm not supposed to call you, but I don't care, because I want to come home and be with you, in our house, and go to school and-Daddy! DADDEE!"

And the call ended on that long-drawn-out syllable, a shriek that faded away, followed by a vague scuffling noise.

"Isaac? Isaac? Isaac, are you there?" But there was no reply, just a click. The line had definitely gone dead.

Rubin grabbed at his hair, as if he might tear it out, then pushed the phone off the desk as if it were responsible for whatever was happening on the other end of the line. He then began throwing every sheet of paper from his desk, showering Tess, who was on her hands and knees, trying to retrieve the phone even as paper rained down on her.

"I'm calling AT amp;T back," she said, trying to stay calm in the face of Rubin's amazing rage and grief. "They should be able to tell us the number he called from."

"He said he tried to call earlier and I wasn't here. Why wasn't I here? Because of that behayma, Mrs. Gordon, and her stupid lynx. She should fall off the Norwegian Princess and drown for what she's cost me."

The phone had caller ID, and the number was on the LED display. Tess found a phone book beneath a pile of glossy catalogs showing young women in furs of not-in-nature colors-lilac, moss green, peacock blue. "Area code 812 is southwestern Indiana."

"We should go, we should call the police, we should-"

"You call the police," Tess said, "while I dial this number back."

But it rang busy. It rang busy every time they tried it for the next hour.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

Zeke seized Isaac by his collar and arm, yanking him so hard that the pay phone, loosed from Isaac's grasp, bounced on its metallic tail like an enraged cobra, hitting the white-tiled wall and caroming off, catching Isaac hard enough across the face to raise a welt. Good. It was almost as good a release as hitting the goddamn kid himself. Which he would never do, and not just because Natalie wouldn't stand for it. Zeke had known the end of a belt as a boy and had sworn to himself never to inflict such pain on a child. It hadn't been the beatings so much. It was the ritual of the beatings-the weary trudge to the closet for the correct belt, the chair in the kitchen, the way the belt was looped just so over the right hand. And, more than anything else, it was the mournful resignation, the insistence that he had brought the punishment on himself.

"I said, 'What are you doing?' " Zeke depressed the hangup switch but let the receiver swing free. He then turned the boy around, pressed him against the wall-okay, pushed him against it-and dug his fingers into his neck and shoulders just hard enough to let Isaac know that he meant business. But his voice was low. He had learned this, too, in childhood. As long as you kept your voice low, you could get away with a lot. It was tones, the shrill and the sharp, that made people look up. You could practically kill a person and not draw a crowd, as long as you never raised your voice.