What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  “Yes, but the simplicity…” Dave didn’t even bother to finish his own sentence. He had clearly lost the sale. But he thought of Miriam, her poignant faith in him, and made one last attempt. “You know, I might have some wooden darning eggs in the back room. I found them at a West Virginia craft fair, and they’re painted in bright primary colors—red, blue.”

  “Really?” She seemed oddly excited by this prospect. “Would you get them for me?”

  “Well…” The request was a delicate one, for it would mean leaving her alone in the shop. This was the consequence of not being able to afford a part-time helper. Sometimes Dave invited customers into the back room, made it seem like he was conferring special honor on them, rather than insult them by suggesting he was worried about theft. But he couldn’t imagine this woman pocketing anything, or trying to get into his cash register, an old-fashioned one that would ring clamorously if opened. “Wait here, I’ll see if I can find them.”

  It took longer to find the eggs than it should have. In his head, Miriam’s voice nagged him—gently, but a nag was a nag—reminding him about the need for inventory and procedures and systems. But the point of the shop had been to escape such things, to set himself free from the rigors of numbers. He still remembered his disappointment when Miriam had failed to understand the significance of the store’s name.

  “The Man with the Blue Guitar—won’t people think it’s a music store?”

  “You don’t get it?”

  “Well, I can see it’s kind of…zany, the way things are now. The Velvet Mushroom, that kind of thing. Still, it might confuse people.”

  “It’s from Wallace Stevens. The poet who was also an insurance agent.”

  “Oh, the ‘Emperor of Ice-Cream’ guy. Sure.”

  “Stevens was like me—an artist trapped inside a businessman. He sold insurance, but he was a poet. I was a fiscal analyst, but that didn’t fulfill me. Can’t you see?”

  “Wasn’t Stevens the vice president of an insurance agency? And didn’t he keep working, even as he wrote poems?”

  “Well, yes, it’s not an exact parallel. But it’s the same emotionally.”

  Miriam hadn’t said anything to that.

  The eggs located, he carried them out to counter. The store was empty again. Immediately he checked the register, but his meager supply of cash was there, and a quick survey of the more precious items—well, semiprecious, by definition, jewelry made from opals and amethysts—indicated they had been left undisturbed in the glass case. It was only then that he noticed the envelope on top of the counter, addressed to Dave Bethany. Had the mailman come and gone while he was in the back? But this was unstamped, with no designation other than his name.

  He opened it and found a note, the handwriting wavy with emotion, not unlike the voice of the woman in the pink suit.

  Dear Mr. Bethany:

  You should know that your wife is having an affair with her boss, Jeff Baumgarten. Why don’t you put a stop to this? There are children involved. Besides, Mr. Baumgarten is very happily married and will never leave his wife. This is why mothers do not belong in offices.

  The letter was unsigned, but Dave had no doubt that it was written by Mrs. Baumgarten, which meant that her Easter mission had been an elaborate bit of fakery. Dave didn’t know much about Miriam’s boss, but he knew he was Jewish, prominently Jewish, probably just a few years ahead of Dave at Pikesville High School. Perhaps Mrs. Baumgarten had planned to drop this letter on the counter without being seen but had been undone by the empty shop. Or she had written it as a fallback, in case she couldn’t summon the nerve to confront him directly. How odd, that last line, as if she needed a larger social issue to buttress her position as the wronged party. In the split second it took Dave’s mind to find the word cuckold and apply it to himself, he felt a twinge of pity for this proper middle-class woman with her anonymous note. Not too long ago, the local news had been full of stories about the governor’s wife, who had to learn from her husband’s press secretary that she was being divorced. She had holed herself up in the governor’s mansion and refused to come out, sure that her husband would return to his senses. She had been a woman not unlike this one—Northwest Baltimore, Jewish, plump and well dressed, an integral part of her husband’s success. Affairs were a man’s perquisite, something that wives either tolerated or didn’t. The women in affairs were young and toothsome and unencumbered—secretaries and stewardesses, Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower. Miriam couldn’t have an affair. She was a mother, a good one. Poor Mrs. Baumgarten. Her husband was clearly cheating on her, but she had lashed out blindly, settling on Miriam because she was a handy target.

  He dialed Miriam’s office number, and let it ring, but the receptionist didn’t pick up. Ah well, Miriam was probably still out at an open house, and the receptionist had left for the day. He would ask her about it tonight, something he should do more often anyway. Ask Miriam about her work. Because surely it was her work that had given her so much confidence recently. It was the commissions that accounted for the glow in her face, the bounce in her step, the tears in the bathroom late at night.

  The tears in the bathroom…but no, that was Sunny, poor sensitive Sunny, for whom ninth grade had been a torture of ostracism, all because he and Miriam had tried to fight the other parents over the bus route. At least that’s what he’d told himself when, sitting in his study late at night, he had heard those muffled sobs in the bathroom at the head of the stairs, the one that the whole family shared. He’d sat in his study, pretending to listen to music, pretending he was respecting the privacy of the crying female just a stair climb away.

  Dave tore the letter in pieces, grabbed his keys, and locked up, heading down the street to Monaghan’s Tavern, another Woodlawn establishment doing a booming business on the Saturday before Easter.

  CHAPTER 10

  “You were supposed to stay away from me,” Sunny hissed at Heather after the usher dragged them both out of the movie theater and said they were banned for the day. “You promised.”

  “I got worried when you didn’t come back from the bathroom. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. Certainly Heather had wondered why Sunny had left fifteen minutes into Escape to Witch Mountain and not returned. And she’d been worried that Sunny was trying to dump her, so she had gone outside, looked in the bathroom, then sneaked into the other side, where the R-rated Chinatown was playing. Sunny must have been pulling this trick for a while, Heather figured, buying a ticket for the PG movie on one side of the theater, then using a bathroom visit to gain entrance to the R-rated one while no one was looking.

  She took a seat two rows back from Sunny, the same maneuver she’d used in Escape to Witch Mountain. (“It’s a free country,” she announced airily when Sunny had glared at her.) This time she’d gone undetected until the moment the little man had inserted his knife in the other man’s nose. Then she had gasped, quite audibly, and Sunny had turned at the sound of her voice.

  Heather had assumed that Sunny would ignore her, rather than draw attention to both of them. But Sunny came back to where she was sitting and, in urgent whispers, told her that she had to leave immediately. Heather shook her head, pointing out that she was observing the rules that Sunny had set down. She wasn’t with her. She just happened to be at the same movie theater. Like she said, it was a free country. An old woman called the usher, and they were both thrown out when they couldn’t produce the proper ticket stubs. Heather, being Heather, had lied and said she’d lost hers, but slow-thinking Sunny had produced the ticket for Theater One, where Escape was playing. A shame, because busty as she was, Sunny might have passed for seventeen. If their ages were reversed, if Heather were the older one, she would have been able to get them out of it—lying smoothly to the usher about her lost ticket, claiming to be seventeen and arguing that a sister counted as the adult supervision required for an R movie. What was the good of an older sister if she didn’t act like one?
Here was Sunny, on the verge of tears because of a stupid movie. Heather thought it was crazy, spending precious mall time to sit in the dark, when there were so many things to see and smell and taste.

  “It was boring anyway,” Heather said. “Although it was scary when that guy got his nose cut.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Sunny said. “That movie was directed by the man with the knife. Mr. Roman Polanski, whose wife was killed by Charles Manson. He’s a genius.”

  “Let’s go to Hoschild’s. Or the Pants Corral. I want to look at the Sta-Prest slacks.”

  “Slacks don’t wrinkle that much,” Sunny said, still snuffling a bit. “That’s stupid.”

  “It’s what all the girls are wearing now that we’re allowed to wear pants to school.”

  “You shouldn’t want a thing just because everyone else has it. You don’t want to run with the herd.” That was their father’s voice coming through Sunny’s mouth, and Heather knew that Sunny herself didn’t believe a word of it.

  “Okay, let’s go to Harmony Hut, then, or the bookstore.” On her last visit to the mall, Heather had sneaked a look at what seemed to be a dirty book, although she couldn’t be sure. There were lots of promising descriptions of the heroine’s breasts pressing against the thin fabric of her dress, usually a good sign that something dirty was about to happen. She was trying to work up her nerve to read the book with the zipper on the cover—not a real zipper, like the Rolling Stones album cover that Sunny owned, but one that nevertheless revealed a portion of a woman’s naked body. She needed to find a bigger book to put in front of it, so she could read it without drawing attention to herself. The staff at Waldenbooks didn’t care how long you stood there reading a book without buying it, as long as you didn’t try to sit down on the carpet. Then they chased you out.

  “I don’t want to do anything with you,” Sunny said. “I don’t care where you go. Just do your own thing and come back here at five-twenty.”

  “And you’ll buy me Karmelkorn.”

  “I gave you five dollars. Buy your own Karmelkorn.”

  “You said five dollars and Karmelkorn.”

  “Fine, fine, what does it matter? Come back here at five-twenty and you’ll get your precious Karmelkorn. But not if I see you hanging around me again. That was the deal, remember?”

  “Why are you so mad at me?”

  “I just don’t want to hang out with a baby. Is that so hard to understand?”

  She headed toward the Sears end of the mall, the corridor with Harmony Hut and Singer Fashions. Heather thought about following her, Karmelkorn notwithstanding. Sunny had no right to call her a baby. Sunny was the babyish one, crying so easily over the smallest things. Heather wasn’t a baby.

  Once Heather had loved being the baby, had reveled in it. And when their mom had gotten pregnant, back when Heather was almost four, and they had started talking about “the baby,” it had bothered her. “I’m the baby,” she said hysterically, pushing a finger into the middle of her chest. “Heather’s the baby.” As if there could be only one baby in their family, in all the world.

  That was when they moved to Algonquin Lane, to the house where everyone could have her own bedroom. Even then Heather could recognize a bribe when she saw one—you can have a bedroom, but you won’t be the baby. The house was huge compared to their apartment, big enough so that four children could have their own bedrooms. That made Heather feel better somehow. Even the new baby wouldn’t always be the baby. And Heather would get second dibs on whatever room she wanted. She thought she should get first dibs, given that she was losing baby status, but her parents explained that because Sunny was older, she would be in her room a shorter amount of time before going to college, so she should have first choice. If Heather really wanted the room that Sunny chose, then it could be hers for three years, most of high school. Even at four going on five, something in Heather rebelled at that logic, but she didn’t have the words to make an argument, and her parents were never impressed by tantrums. Her mother said exactly that when she tried: “I’m not impressed, Heather.” Her father said, “I don’t respond to that kind of behavior.” But he didn’t respond to any behavior that Heather could see. Look at Sunny. She played by their rules, marshaled her arguments and presented them in orderly fashion, and she almost never got what she wanted. Heather was much sneakier, and she usually got her way. She even got to stay the baby, although that wasn’t because of anything she did. As it turned out, the baby just hadn’t been strong enough to live outside their mother’s stomach.

  When the baby died, their father made a point of telling Heather and Sunny exactly what a miscarriage was. To do that he had to explain how the baby had gotten inside their mother in the first place. Much to their dismay, he used all the proper words—penis, vagina, uterus.

  “Why would Mommy let you do that?” Sunny had demanded to know.

  “Because that’s how babies are made. Besides, it feels good. When you’re a grown-up,” her father had added. “When you’re a grown-up, it feels good to do that, even if it doesn’t make a baby. It’s a very sacred thing, the way you show love.”

  “But…but—pee comes out of there. You might have peed inside her.”

  “Urine, Sunny. And the penis knows not to do that when it’s inside a woman.”

  “How?”

  Their father started to explain how the penis grew when it wanted to make a baby, how it had this different kind of liquid inside filled with seed called sperm, until Sunny put her hands over her ears and said, “Eew, I don’t want to know. It could still get confused. It could still pee in there.”

  “How big does it get?” Heather wanted to know. Her father had held out his hands, like a man showing the size of a fish he’d caught, but she didn’t believe him.

  Given that she knew everything about baby making before she entered kindergarten, Heather was surprised when she got to Dickey Hill Elementary and discovered that sex education was not taught until the sixth grade and it was considered a big deal, requiring permission slips from all the parents. Still, she didn’t brag about her knowledge or draw attention to it. That was another thing that Sunny never understood, that it was good to keep things back, not volunteer everything at once. No one liked a show-off.

  In fourth grade, however, Heather’s friend Beth’s mother got pregnant, and Beth’s parents told her that God had put the baby there. Like her father, Heather could not bear to let misinformation stand. She convened a quick class beneath the jungle gym on the playground, recounting everything she knew about baby making. Beth’s parents complained, and Heather’s parents were called to school, but her father was not only unapologetic, he was proud of Heather. “I can’t be held accountable for those who prefer to lie to their children,” he said, right in front of Heather. “And I won’t ask my daughter to say she was wrong for speaking the truth about something natural.”

  Natural was good. It was her father’s highest form of praise. Natural fabrics, natural foods, natural hair. After he opened the shop, he had grown his hair into a large, woolly Afro, much to Sunny’s embarrassment. He even combed it with a Black Power pick, one whose handle ended in a clenched fist. He would, in fact, not approve of the Sta-prest pants, which definitely had something unnatural in them to keep them unwrinkled. Yet Heather was sure she could persuade him or her mother to let her have a pair, if she used her birthday money.

  She walked toward the Pants Corral. Mr. Pincharelli, Sunny’s music teacher, was playing the organ at Jordan Kitt’s. Sunny once had a crush on him, Heather knew from reading her diary. But the last time they’d come to the mall together, Sunny had hurried by the organ store, as if embarrassed by him. Today he was standing up, playing “Easter Parade” with a lot of energy, and a small crowd had gathered around. Mr. Pincharelli’s face was shiny with sweat, and there were pit stains along the underarm seams of his short-sleeved dress shirt. Heather couldn’t imagine having a crush on him. If he were her music teacher, she never would have stopped
making fun of him. Yet the crowd seemed genuine in its admiration and enjoyment, and Heather found herself caught up in the mood and she perched on the edge of a nearby fountain. She was puzzling over one of the phrases—you’ll find that you’re in a photo so pure?—when someone grabbed her elbow.

  “Hey, you were supposed to—” The voice was angry, not loud, but sharp enough to be heard above the music, so those standing nearby turned and looked. The man dropped her arm quickly, mumbled, “Never mind,” and disappeared back into the throngs of shoppers. Heather watched him go. She was glad she wasn’t the girl that he was looking for. That girl was definitely in trouble.

  “Easter Parade” gave way to “Superstar,” a Carpenters song, not the one about Jesus. Just last week Sunny had given Heather all her Carpenters albums, proclaiming them lame. Music was the one area where Sunny’s taste might be worth imitating, and if she thought the Carpenters lame, then Heather wasn’t sure she wanted any part of them either. Five dollars—that was enough to buy an album and still have some left over. Maybe she would go down to Harmony Hut after all, buy something by…Jethro Tull. He seemed pretty cool. And if Sunny happened to be at the record store, too—well, it was a free country.

  PART III THURSDAY

  CHAPTER 11

  “The thing is,” Infante said to Lenhardt, “she doesn’t look like a Penelope.”

  The sergeant bit. “What does a Penelope look like?”

  “I dunno. Blond hair. Pink helmet.”

  “What?” Drawing it out to two syllables.

  “That old cartoon? The one where there was a car race every Saturday and they sucked you into believing that the outcome was somehow unknown? Anyway, Penelope Pit Stop was the name of the pretty one. They hardly ever let her win.”

  “It’s Greek, though, right? I mean, not to take anything away from Hanna-Barbera, but I think there’s some famous story about Penelope, something to do with knitting and a dog.”