What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  “The one ransom demand—the one down at War Memorial Plaza—did they ever figure out who called that in?” This was the Light reporter, tiny and feisty. With her short pixie cut and miniskirt, she looked to be barely out of college. A jogger, Dave thought, eyeing the hard calves pressed into the lower rung of her straight-backed chair. He had started running after the first of the year, although it wasn’t the result of a New Year’s resolution. Like someone summoned by unseen voices, he had gotten up one day, put on sneakers and headed to Leakin Park, circling the tennis courts and the miniature train track. He had run to Crimea, the summer mansion built by the family that founded the B & O Railroad, passing the old church that his girls had believed was haunted. He was up to five miles a day now, but he had liked jogging better in the beginning, when it was hard and he had to focus on every rasping breath. Now that he reached the so-called runner’s high within minutes, his mind was free to roam again, and it always ended up in the same place.

  “No…I…no—Look, there’s nothing new. I’m sorry. It’s been a year, and there’s nothing new. I’m sorry. We’re talking to you because we’re hopeful that your articles might prompt someone’s memory, might reach that one person who knows something…. I’m sorry.”

  Miriam shot him a look that only a spouse could interpret: Stop apologizing. His eyes replied, I’ll stop when you start.

  The reporters didn’t seem to notice. Did they know? Had Chet told them—off the record, of course—all the family’s secrets, then persuaded them that they were irrelevant to the girls’ disappearance? Dave almost wished now that the whole story had come out. On his best days, he knew it wasn’t Miriam’s fault. Wherever Miriam had been that day—at an open house, here on Algonquin Lane, in a motel, in a motel, in a fucking motel—she couldn’t have saved the girls. Besides, he’d been in a bar for much of the afternoon, although he had managed to pull himself together and arrive at the mall to fetch the girls, no more than five minutes late. His chest still hurt, thinking about how he had felt that afternoon. Anger, assuming that the girls were late, inconsiderate. Panic, but a safe, this-will-soon-pass-and-I-can-be-angry-again panic. When forty-five minutes had passed, he checked with the mall security, and he still remembered with great affection the overweight security guard who had walked the corridors with him, his voice a rumbling bass of benign possibilities. “Maybe they took the bus home. Maybe they decided to take one of those shopper surveys, back in the offices. Maybe they got a ride home with a friend’s mother or father and thought they could get home in time to call you at your work.”

  Dave had seized on the security guard’s words as if they were a promise, racing home in his VW bus, certain that the girls would be there, finding only Miriam. It had been so strange, seeing her, wanting to confront her, yet having to put aside the suddenly minor fact of her infidelity. Miriam had been marvelously calm, calling the police, agreeing that Dave should go back to the mall and continue searching while she stayed at the house in case they showed up. At 7:00 P.M., they still assumed the girls would show up. It was hard to describe how slowly that expectation, that hope—what had once seemed their right—had slipped away. Yet emotion was not linear, and the absence of a definitive answer still made Dave’s imagination jump and lurch, concocting far-fetched endings. This was the stuff of soap operas, so why shouldn’t it have a soap-opera ending? Simultaneous amnesia, an eccentric Greek billionaire whisking Dave’s children away, unharmed, to live in a Bavarian castle. Why not?

  Whatever Miriam’s sins, Dave had been the one to give permission for the mall trip, and although Miriam had assured him again and again that he had not erred, he still blamed…her. He’d been distracted, anxious. At the time he’d thought he was worried about the business, but he saw in hindsight that he’d known that something was wrong in their marriage, that his subconscious was picking up signals it didn’t know how to translate. If he’d been more present that day, if he’d been focused on his daughters, he might have realized they were too young to be given that much freedom. Miriam had set him up.

  He felt no guilt over Jeff Baumgarten or his wife, who had been subjected to repeated police interviews after Miriam volunteered the truth. After all, Thelma Baumgarten had been in Dave’s store at 3:00 P.M., and the store wasn’t more than three miles from the mall. The motel was even closer, as it turned out. But Dave hated Mrs. Baumgarten more than he hated Jeff. Jeff had fucked his wife, but Mrs. Baumgarten…Well, Mrs. Baumgarten, with her stupid little note, had tried to project all this on Dave. Fat little hausfrau. If she’d kept her husband happy, maybe he would have left Miriam alone.

  “Were there any strong suspects along the way?” Dave looked at Chet, longing for permission, for encouragement, to tell everything about the Baumgartens. Chet shook his head, ever so slightly. It would only muddy the waters, he’d told Dave whenever he lobbied to make everything—everything—public on the grounds that every bit of truth mattered, that it was not only a virtue in and of itself, but essential to learning what had happened to his daughters. The more the public knew, the better equipped people were to help them. Maybe Mrs. Baumgarten had hired someone. Maybe Jeff Baumgarten had arranged for the children to be kidnapped to force Miriam to continue their illicit affair. Maybe something had gone wrong with his plan. Candor was liberating, Dave argued, and it would be rewarded. They should put everything out there and let the chips fall where they may.

  Maybe that was why Chet had decided he should be here for the interviews. Dave couldn’t see any other reason. Very little had been held back in the early weeks of the investigation—the discovery of Heather’s purse, the calls that placed the girls in various states (South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Vermont) and various states (alive and laughing, swimming and playing, eating hamburgers, bound and gagged). Funny, but those delusional types were worse than the pranksters in their own way. They thought their fantasies were helpful, but all they brought was pain.

  “Do you—can you—” The Star reporter, an absolute throwback, with a hat on the back of his head and a narrow tie, groped for words in a way that Dave knew could end up in only one place. “Do you continue to hope that your daughters will be found alive?”

  “Of course. Hope is essential.” Mutual amnesia, a castle in Bavaria, a gentle eccentric who wanted two golden-haired daughters, but would never, ever harm them.

  “No,” Miriam said.

  In the corner of the room, Chet tensed, as if he thought he might have to intercede. Had the detective finally detected something? Could he know that it was Dave’s instinct, at that very moment, to slap his wife? It wouldn’t be the first time that he had fought down that impulse in the past year. The reporters seemed shocked, too, as if Miriam had broken some unwritten protocol of the mourning parent.

  “You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Dave said. “She’s very emotional, and this is such a difficult time—”

  “I’m not a child who didn’t get my nap today,” Miriam said. “And I’m no more emotional today than I was yesterday or I’ll be tomorrow. I would love to be wrong about this. But if I don’t accept the probability of their deaths at this point, how do I live? How do I go on?”

  The reporters did not take notes during this outburst, Dave noticed. Their instinct, like everyone else’s, always, was to protect Miriam, to assume that her inappropriate comments had come out of grief. Reporters were supposed to be cynical, and maybe they were, when they were covering stories of Watergate-like intrigue and conspiracy. But in Dave’s experience they were among the most naïve and optimistic people he had ever met.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and even he didn’t know why he was apologizing this time.

  After a beat, Miriam nodded as well, rounding her shoulders in a way that invited Dave to put his arm around her. “It’s hard,” she said. “Remaining open to hope, yet needing to grieve. Whatever I do or say, I feel as if I’m betraying my daughters. We just want to know.”

  “Is there a moment in the day when you’re no
t thinking about this?” asked the Light reporter.

  The question caught Dave off guard, in part because it was new. How do you go on, how do you not think about this? Those he knew. But was he ever not thinking about the girls? Rationally, there must be such moments, but he couldn’t identify them now that he was trying. When he made preparations for dinner, he still reviewed the girls’ likes and dislikes. Meat loaf again? Stopped at a red light in afternoon traffic, he would relive the conversations they once had about the nearby Social Security Administration and why it had so many employees who clogged the streets every day at 4:00 P.M. They’ll give us money when we’re old? Cool! If he started thinking about how much he hated Jeff Baumgarten, how he wanted to wait outside his Pikesville home and run over him with the VW bus when he came out to pick up the morning newspaper from the circular driveway—even that was really about the girls, wasn’t it? When he opened the mailbox and found his copy of New York magazine, he would see the Ronrico rum ad on the back and be reminded of how fascinated Heather was by its campy re-creations, while Sunny had giggled over the weekly word contests. Every object in the world—the collapsed lean-to that the girls had built in the backyard, the glittering green of a Genesee ale can in the gutter, Miriam’s ratty blue bathrobe—brought him back to his daughters. Conventional wisdom held that he could not continue at this level of intensity forever, that all pain fades, but he wanted to keep it going. The dull fury he felt was like a lamp lighted in the window, waiting for the girls to find their way home.

  Even now his mind would not stop racing, which defeated the purpose of the Agnihotra. He had tried, delicately, to bring this up with the others who followed the Fivefold Path. Estelle Turner was long dead, of course, and Herb had wandered out to Northern California after she was gone, saying he had to cut all ties in order to go on. Dave had called him about the girls, but Herb had seemed vaguely resentful to be reminded of his prior life in Baltimore and had turned the conversation inside out so it ended up being about him, his various disillusionments and losses. “I just can’t find the way, buddy,” he said repeatedly. But then everything had been an abstraction to Herb—except for Estelle. Even the death of Herb’s own daughter had been shrugged off as some kind of spiritual test, part of his goddamn journey.

  There were still others in Baltimore who followed the Fivefold Path and they had been exceptionally kind to Dave over the last twelve months, providing what Miriam dryly called a never-ending supply of soybean casseroles. Yet even these friends seemed upset when he tried to suggest that their mutual belief system might not be large enough to get him through this. What did it mean if he could not clear his mind for the daily meditation? Should he abandon it until he could find the necessary concentration, or should he continue to try, every sunrise and sunset, to empty his head and embrace the now? Here he was, coming to the end of the sunset ritual, and he remembered none of it, had failed to find any peace or contentment. Instead he was beginning to see the Agnihotra as Miriam had always seen it—a shitty smell, a greasy smoke that coated the walls of the study.

  The fire was out. He bagged the ashes, which he used as fertilizer, and drifted back to the kitchen, pouring a glass of wine for himself and a shot of whiskey for Chet. As an afterthought, he gave Miriam a glass of wine, too.

  “Really, Chet—has there been any progress? Can you look back at the past year and say we’ve learned anything?” He thought it was generous, using “we.” Privately, Dave thought the cops, while kind and earnest, had been nothing short of inept.

  “We’ve eliminated a lot of scenarios. The Rock Glen chorus teacher. Um…others.” Even in private, Chet wouldn’t rub Miriam’s nose in the Baumgarten mess. It killed Dave how the cops had all but congratulated Miriam for being so forthcoming about the affair, how they had nodded approvingly that Sunday evening as she volunteered everything. Truthful Miriam, candid Miriam, putting aside the usual instinct of self-protection and preservation to do whatever it took to find her daughters. But if Miriam hadn’t had a talent for deceit to begin with—if she hadn’t been involved in the stupid affair—then she wouldn’t have had anything to hide. Dave sure didn’t.

  Yet it was Dave who had lied at first, skipping over the part about Mrs. Baumgarten’s visit, stammering inexpertly about why he’d chosen to close the shop early and go drink beer at the tavern down the block. He’d been nervous and halting in those early interviews with police, his eyes darting around the room. Had that been the problem? Had the police been so focused on Dave’s odd behavior that they assumed he was the culprit? They denied it now, but Dave was sure he was a suspect.

  “Did you chant?” Chet knew Dave’s routines well by now.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Another day, another sunset. And in three hundred sixty-five more sunsets, will we be here again, telling the story again, hoping again that someone will come forward? Or do the anniversaries begin to space out after the first year? Five years, ten years, then twenty, then fifty?”

  “Three hundred sixty-six,” Miriam said.

  “What?”

  “This was a leap year: 1976. So there was an extra day. It’s been three hundred sixty-six years since the girls disappeared. I mean days, three hundred sixty-six days.”

  “Well, bully for you, Miriam, having it down to the day. I guess you loved them more than me, after all. Except today is the twenty-seventh, not the twenty-ninth. The reporters needed time to ready their stories and reports for the Monday papers, the actual anniversary. So it’s really day three hundred sixty-four.”

  “Dave—” This was Chet’s real role in their lives, more peacemaker than policeman. But Dave already felt contrite. A year ago—well, 364 days—he had thought losing his wife would be the great tragedy of his life. Hunched over the bar at Monaghan’s, he had experienced the cuckold’s usual emotions—anger, vengeance, self-pity, fear. He’d played with the idea of divorcing Miriam, confident that he was one father who could retain custody of his children, considering the circumstances. Instead he lost his children and kept his wife.

  Given a choice—but he hadn’t been given a choice. Who really was, when it came to anything that mattered? But if he had been asked to choose, he would have sacrificed Miriam in a heartbeat if it meant getting Sunny and Heather back, and it was understood that she would do the same to him. Their marriage was a brittle memorial to their lost daughters, truly the very least they could do.

  He said good night to Chet and took his drink to the back porch, studying the tire swing that hung from the one truly sturdy tree in the yard, the pile of sticks and timber near the fence line. When the girls were little, they’d been fond of building forts in the backyard, lean-tos of limbs and branches, with “carpets” made from moss that they transplanted from other parts of the yard, and stores of onion grass and dandelions for their food supply. The girls had outgrown such things years ago, but their last fort had stood until this past winter, when it collapsed from the weight and moisture of the snow. Dave felt as if he lived in a house of broken sticks, as if he were, in fact, impaled on the sharp ends, the moss long dead, the supply of wild onions depleted.

  CHAPTER 17

  Alone at last—alone again, naturally, as the song would have it, a song that Sunny had listened to over and over again when she was eleven, eventually driving them all crazy—Miriam walked over to the sink and poured her glass of wine down the drain. She didn’t have much of a taste for alcohol anymore, not that Dave noticed such things. In order for Dave to observe how little Miriam drank these days, he would have to see how much more he drank, and that particular brand of self-knowledge didn’t interest him.

  The sink was directly beneath a large window that overlooked the backyard, the only change that Miriam had sought during the house’s renovation. A woman has to have a window over the sink, she argued when she saw Dave’s original plans, in which the sink was to face a backsplash of Mexican tile. This was her mother’s dictate, and Miriam had inculcated this principle in her own daughters. She remembered
Heather, arranging her Creative Playthings dollhouse. A modular affair, this open-air rectangle of blue wood was quite different from the furbelowed Victorian that Heather would have picked out for herself. It even had Danish modern furniture, made from sturdy hardwoods. “The sink has to go in front of the woman,” the rubbery mama doll told the rubbery daddy doll when Heather set it up the first time, and Miriam hadn’t corrected Heather’s mangling of her edict. The dolls had been the only flimsy things in that set, crumbling and drying as rubber inevitably does, the paint on their faces melting away. But the house and the furniture were still in Heather’s closet, waiting for…what? For whom?

  Overall the girls’ rooms remained as they had been, although Miriam had finally broken down and washed the linens, making the beds that had been left tumbled and tossed, in Heather’s case, smooth and barely wrinkled in Sunny’s case. Each girl had used her own sleeping style to argue against bed making. “I’m just going to mess it up again,” Heather said. “You can barely tell I’ve been in it,” Sunny said. They had reached a compromise: Beds would be made, Monday through Friday, then left alone on the weekend. For weeks Miriam had taken great comfort in looking at those unmade beds, proof that their daughters intended to sleep in them again, that the week would return, and her daughters with it.

  In the immediate aftermath—But no, “aftermath” was the wrong word, for it suggested a tangible event, something definitive. Where was the “math” in their situation, what was the “after”? In the first forty-eight hours, when nothing was known and everything was possible, Miriam felt as if she had been plunged into a cold, rushing stream, and her only instinct was to survive the shock of it all. She ate nothing, she seldom slept, and she stoked her body on caffeine because she needed to be ready, alert. The one thing she assumed, in the early going, was that an answer would be forthcoming. With the ringing of the telephone, a knock on the door, all would be revealed.