What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  CHAPTER 3

  The young doctor took a long time picking his pastry, pointing first to a cruller, then switching to a Danish, only to return to the cruller. Standing behind him, Kay Sullivan could feel his anticipatory delight, but also the guiltlessness of the decision. After all, he was no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, lean as a greyhound, and running on the adrenaline of residency. He was years away from worrying about what he put into his mouth—assuming that ever happened. Some people didn’t, especially men, and this one liked his food. The cruller was clearly the highlight of his morning, a reward at the end of a long night. His pleasure was so palpable that Kay felt almost as if she had chosen a pastry for herself, and was therefore less deprived when she settled for her usual black coffee with two packets of Splenda.

  She took the coffee to a corner table and settled in with her emergency paperback, this one from her purse. Kay stashed paperbacks in every nook and cranny of her life—purse, office, car, kitchen, bathroom. Five years ago, when the pain of the divorce was fresh and bright, the books had started as a way to distract herself from the fact that she had no life. But over time Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people’s company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being. At home she had to be hyperconscious not to use books to retreat from her own children. She would put her book aside, trying to watch whatever television program Grace and Seth had chosen, all the while casting longing glances at the volume so near to hand. Here at work, where she could have joined any number of colleagues for breaks and lunches, she almost always sat by herself, reading. Coworkers called her the antisocial worker behind her back—or so they thought. For all Kay’s seeming immersion in her books, she missed very little.

  This morning, for example, she had picked up the details of the Jane Doe story within minutes of arriving and unlocking her office. The general consensus was that the woman was a faker, spouting nonsense out of desperation, but she did have a minor head injury, which could affect memory in various ways. There would be a psych examination, too, but Kay had transferred out of that department more than a year earlier, so it wasn’t her concern. The woman’s injuries were fresh, consistent with the accident, and she was not claiming homelessness, joblessness, or abuse by a partner—Kay’s specialties. Of course, she also was refusing to say whether she had medical insurance, but that remained an administrative and billing problem for now. If she turned out to be uninsured, which Kay would put at even odds in this economy, it might fall to Kay to sort out the payment solution, try to figure out if they could bill her through a state or federal program.

  But for now Jane Doe was someone else’s problem, and Kay was safe in the world of Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre, her book club’s selection this month. Kay didn’t really much care for her book club, a neighborhood affair that she had joined when her marriage was on its last legs, but it provided a polite social cover for her constant reading. “Book club,” she could say, holding up whatever paperback she was reading, “and I’m behind as always.” The book club itself spent far more time on gossip and food than on the book at hand, but that was okay with Kay, too. She seldom had any desire to discuss what she read. Talking about the characters in a book she had enjoyed felt like gossiping about friends.

  A gaggle of young doctors, so much younger than they knew, settled a table away. Kay was usually expert at tuning out ambient noise, but the lone female in the group had one of those sharp, clear voices that sliced the air.

  “A murder!”

  A week passed, and no news arrived of Mr. Rochester: ten days and still he did not come.

  “Like that’s news in Baltimore. There’re, what, only five hundred a year?”

  Fewer than three hundred in the city, Kay amended silently. And a tenth of that in the county. In Jane Eyre’s world, the young governess was struggling with feelings she knew she should not have for her master. I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder—how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester’s movements a matter in which I had any cause to take a vital interest.

  “My parents were terrified when they heard I was going to be working here. If I was going to move to Baltimore, why not Hopkins? Why not University? I lied and told them that St. Agnes was in a very nice suburban neighborhood.”

  Much smug laughter at this. St. Agnes was a good hospital with a fat endowment, the city of Baltimore’s third-largest employer, but its good fortunes had not helped the neighborhood around it. If anything, the area had slipped a peg in recent years, from reliably working class to seedy and marginal. These close-in suburbs, which had boomed in the early years of white flight, were finding out the hard way that urban problems did not respect imaginary lines on a map. Drugs, crime—they had barreled out of the inner city and right over the city-county line. Those with the means kept moving farther out and farther out. And now downtown was booming, as yuppies and empty nesters and equity-rich Washingtonians decided that they wanted water views and decent restaurants, and who cared if the schools were shit? Kay was grateful that she had held on to the house in Hunting Ridge, impractical and ruinous as it had seemed at the time to stay in the city. Its value had more than tripled, allowing her to tap the equity in hard times. And her ex picked up the private-school tuition. He was good at the big-ticket stuff, but he didn’t have a clue about the day-to-day costs of a child, what sneakers and peanut butter and birthday gifts added up to over a year.

  “I hear she’s, what, like forty?” The cawing emphasis made it clear that forty was very, very old. “And she’s saying this happened thirty years ago? So, what, she killed someone when she was ten and just didn’t think to mention it until now?”

  “I don’t think she’s saying she did it,” a man’s slower, deeper voice interjected. “Just that she knows of an unsolved crime. A famous one. Or so she says.”

  “What, like the Lindbergh baby?” It was not clear to Kay if the young woman was trying to be hyperbolic or if she thought that the Lindbergh kidnapping was in fact thirty years ago. Young doctors, bright as they were in their field, could be shockingly ignorant of other things, depending on how narrowly they had pursued their goals.

  And then, with the suddenness of a migraine, Kay realized how insecure the young woman was. Her brittle speech functioned as a cover for someone who had no natural aptitude for the cool detachment required by her chosen profession. Oh, she was going to have a hard time, this one. She should pick a specialty such as pathology, where the patients were already dead, not because she was unfeeling but because she was too feeling. A bleeder, emotionally. Kay felt almost physically ill, exhausted and flu-achy. It was as if this strange young woman had crawled into her lap and asked for comfort. Not even Jane Eyre could shield her from this. She grabbed her coffee and left the cafeteria.

  In her twenties and early thirties, Kay had believed that these sudden bursts of insight were limited to her own children. Their feelings washed over her and mingled with hers, as if there were no skin between them. She experienced their every joy, frustration, and sadness. But as Grace and Seth grew up, she found that she could sense others’ feelings, too, on occasion. Usually these people were very young, because the very young had not yet learned how to shield their emotions. But, when conditions were right, adults got to her as well. This engulfing empathy was, perversely, a liability for a social worker, and she had learned to stay guarded in professional situations. It was in quiet moments, when someone caught her unawares, that it tripped her up.

  She got back to her office in time to intercept Schumeier from psychiatry leaving a note on her door. He looked chagrined to be caught, and she wondered why he had risked coming to see her in person at all when he could have sent an e-mail. Schumeier was living proof that psychotherapy often attracted those most in need of it. He avoided face-to-face contact whenever possible, even voice-to-voice. E-mail had been a godsend for him.

  “There’s a woma
n who was brought in last night—” he began.

  “The Jane Doe?”

  “Yes.” He wasn’t surprised that Kay had heard about the woman, quite the opposite. He had probably sought Kay out because he knew there would be little explanation required and therefore less conversation involved. “She’s refusing the psych exam. I mean, she spoke briefly to the doctor, but once the conversation became specific, she said she wouldn’t talk to anyone without a lawyer present. Only she doesn’t want to work with a public defender, and she says she doesn’t know any attorneys.”

  Kay sighed. “Does she have money?”

  “She says she does, but it’s hard to know when she won’t even give her name. She said she wouldn’t do anything without a lawyer present.”

  “And you want me to…?”

  “Don’t you have an…um, friend? That woman attorney who’s in the newspapers all the time?”

  “Gloria Bustamante? I know of her. We’re not really friends, but we’re both on the House of Ruth board.” And I’m not a lesbian, Kay wanted to add, sure that this was the way Schumeier’s mind worked. If Gloria Bustamante, sexually ambiguous attorney, was acquainted with Kay Sullivan, who had not dated anyone since her marriage ended, then it followed that Kay must be a lesbian, too. Kay sometimes thought she should get a little custom-made button: I.M NOT GAY, I JUST LIKE TO READ.

  “Yes. That’s it. Perhaps you could call her?”

  “Before I do, I think I should check with the Jane Doe first. I don’t want to summon Gloria out here unless she’s going to talk to her. At the rates Gloria charges, the trip alone would be almost six hundred dollars.”

  Schumeier smiled. “You’re curious, aren’t you? You want to get a look at the hospital’s mystery woman.”

  Kay ducked her head, searching her purse for one of the peppermints she’d grabbed the last time she splurged and took Grace and Seth to a restaurant. She had always disliked Schumeier’s emphatic pronouncements about what others were thinking or feeling. It was another reason she had transferred out of his department. You’re a psychiatrist, not a psychic, she wanted to say. Instead she muttered, “What room is she in?”

  THE YOUNG POLICE officer posted outside room 3030 quizzed Kay endlessly, excited to have something to do at last, but finally let her go in. The room was dark, the blinds drawn against the winter-bright sky, and the woman appeared to have fallen asleep in an upright position, her head twisted awkwardly to the side, like a child in a car seat. Her hair was quite short, a dangerous style for anyone without exquisite bone structure. A fashion choice or the result of chemo?

  “Hi,” the woman said, her eyes opening suddenly. And Kay, who had counseled burn victims and accident victims, women whose faces had been all but vandalized by men, was more unnerved by this woman’s relatively unmarred gaze than anything she had ever seen. There was an almost searing frailty to the woman in bed, and not just the usual shakiness of an accident victim. The woman was a bruise, her skin about as effective as an eggshell in keeping the pain of the world at bay. The fresh cut on her forehead was nothing compared to the wounded eyes.

  “I’m Kay Sullivan, one of the social workers on staff here.”

  “Why do I need a social worker?”

  “You don’t, but Dr. Schumeier thought I might be able to help you get an attorney.”

  “No public defenders. I need someone good, someone who can concentrate on me.”

  “It’s true, they do carry heavy caseloads, but they’re still—”

  “It’s not that I don’t admire them, their commitment. It’s just—I need someone independent. Someone not reliant on the government in any fashion. Public defenders get paid by the government in the end. In the end—my father always said—they never forget where their bread is buttered. Government workers. He was one. Once. And he disliked them intensely.”

  Kay couldn’t be sure of the woman’s age. The young doctor had said forty, but she could have been five years younger or older. Too old to be speaking of her father in such reverent tones, at any rate, as if he were an oracle. Most people outgrew that by eighteen. “Yes…” Kay began, trying to find a footing in the conversation.

  “It was an accident. I panicked. I mean, if you knew the things going through my head, how I hadn’t seen that stretch of highway for—How’s the little girl? I saw a little girl. I’ll kill myself if…Well, I don’t even want to say it out loud. I’m poison. Just by existing, I bring pain and death. It’s his curse. I can’t escape it, no matter what I do.”

  Kay suddenly recalled the state fair up at Timonium, the freak-show tent, how at age thirteen she had worked up the nerve to go in, only to find just slightly odd people—fat, tattooed, skinny, big—sitting placidly. Schumeier had her pegged, after all: There was a bit of voyeurism in her mission here, a desire to look, nothing more. But this woman was talking to her, drawing her in, babbling as if Kay knew, or should know, everything about her. Kay had worked with many clients like this, people who spoke as if they were celebrities, with their every moment of existence documented in tabloids and television shows.

  But at least the woman in the bed seemed to see Kay, which was more than some self-involved clients managed. “Are you from here?”

  “Yes, all my life. I grew up in Northwest Baltimore.”

  “And you’re what? Forty-five?”

  Ah, that hurt. Kay was used to, even liked, the version of herself she glimpsed in mirrors and windows, but now she was forced to consider what a stranger saw—the short, squat body, the shoulder-length gray hair that aged her more than anything else. She was in good shape by every internal measure, but it was hard to convey one’s blood-pressure, bone-density, and cholesterol numbers via wardrobe or casual conversation. “Thirty-nine, actually.”

  “I’m going to say a name.”

  “Your name?”

  “Don’t think that way, not yet. I’m going to say a name—”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a name you’ll know. Or maybe not. It depends on how I say it, how I tell it. There’s a girl, and she’s dead, and that won’t surprise anyone. They’ve believed she was dead, all these years. But there’s another girl, and she’s not dead, and that’s the harder part to explain.”

  “Are you—”

  “The Bethany girls. Easter weekend, 1975.”

  “The Bethany…oh. Oh.” And just like that it came back to Kay. Two sisters, who went to…what, a movie? The mall? She saw their likenesses—the older one with smooth ponytails fastened behind the ears, the younger one in pigtails—remembered the panic that had gripped the city, with children herded into assemblies and shown cautionary yet elliptical films. Girls Beware and Boys Beware. It had been years before Kay had understood the euphemistic warnings therein: After accompanying the strange boys to the beach party, Sally was found wandering down the highway, barefoot and confused…. Jimmy’s parents told him that it wasn’t his fault that Greg had befriended him and taken him fishing but made it clear to him that such friendships with older men were not natural…. She got in the stranger’s car—and was never seen again.

  There were rumors, too—sightings of the girls as far away as Georgia, bogus ransom demands, fears of cults and counterculturists. After all, Patty Hearst had been taken just a year before. Kidnapping was big in the seventies. There was a businessman’s wife redeemed for a hundred thousand dollars, which had seemed like a fortune, a rich girl buried in a box with a breathing tube, the Getty heir with the severed ear. But the Bethanys were not wealthy, not in Kay’s memory, and the longer the story went without an official ending, the less memorable it had become. The last time that Kay thought about the Bethany sisters had probably been the last time she went to the movies at Security Square, at least a decade ago. That was it—Security Square Mall, relatively new at the time, something of a ghost town now.

  “Are you…?”

  “Get me a lawyer, Kay. A good one.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Infante took the as-the-crow-flies
route to the hospital, traveling straight through the city instead of taking the Beltway around it. Damn, downtown Baltimore was getting shiny. Who’d have thought it? He almost regretted not buying a place in town ten years ago, not that he’d still have it anyway. Besides, he had been raised in the suburbs—Massapequa, out on Long Island—and he had a soft spot for the jumbled secondary highways and modest apartment complexes where he lived up in Parkville. IHOPs, Applebee’s, Target, Toys “R” Us, gas stations, craft stores—to him this was what home looked like. Not that he had any intention of going back there, where it was now almost impossible to live on a police officer’s salary. He kept his allegiance to the Yankees and played the part of the brash Noo Yawkah for his colleagues’ amusement. But in his head, he knew that this town, this job, was right for him. He was good at what he did, with one of the better clearance rates in the department. “Baltimore punk is my second language,” he liked to say. Lenhardt was on him to take the sergeant’s exam, but then—people always thought you should do what they did. Be a firefighter, his dad said, on the island. His first wife had cajoled, C’mon, watch Law & Order with me. She wanted her favorite show to be his favorite show, her favorite meal to be his. She even tried to convert him to Rolling Rock over Bud, to Bushmills over Jameson. It was as if she were working backward, trying to create a logical match from one that had been all heat and desire from the jump. In that way she reminded Infante of himself in high school. He decided where he wanted to go to college—Nassau Community College, no major brain bust, that, it was all they could afford—then gave the guidance counselor the info that would make her computer spit out that school. That way his only option became a choice, instead of something that was forced on him.

  He breezed through the city, making the hospital in less than forty minutes. But it wasn’t good enough. Gloria Bustamante—the biggest ballbuster of any defense attorney he knew, male or female, straight or gay—was in the hospital corridor.