What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  How she wished that Kay, as a social worker, had access to some secret government files, where confidential details were stored. But of course no such place existed, and if it had, she would have found it on her own and hacked her way into it. She had exhausted the available computer resources ages ago.

  Reluctantly, she disconnected from the Internet and turned the screen back off. She missed her computer. Until this moment she had never pondered her relationship with it, never acknowledged to herself how many hours a day she spent staring into screens. But this bit of self-knowledge, now that she had it, didn’t feel pathetic. Quite the opposite. She liked computers, their logic and tidiness. In the past few years, she had snorted with laughter at all the concern over the Internet, how it could be used to gain access to underage girls and boys, how it increased the reach of child pornography, as if the world had been so safe before computers came along. If her missteps had started with an IM conversation, her parents would have had a chance of catching it. Instead she had been out in the world, talking to somebody one-on-one, and that’s where the trouble all began, with a simple conversation, the most innocent conversation that anyone could imagine.

  Do you like this song?

  What?

  Do you like this song?

  Yes. She didn’t, really. It wasn’t at all the kind of song she liked, but the conversation—the conversation was something else, something she hoped would never end. Yes, I do.

  CHAPTER 23

  And, finally, the phone rang.

  That’s how Miriam would remember the moment. She started creating the memory even as it was happening to her, revising the present in the present. Later she would tell herself that she sensed the momentousness of the call in the dull, flat ring itself, which came as she was setting the table for a supper. But it was really a few seconds later, after a man cleared his throat and began to speak in those strange Baltimore vowel sounds, odd and jarring and yet familiar to her ear after all these years, that she knew.

  They had found them.

  They had found bodies, and it might be them.

  Another lunatic had started babbling in jail, desperate for a deal, or just attention.

  They had found them.

  Bodies found, them be might it.

  Lunatic in jail babbling long shot but hear him out have to.

  Them found had they.

  Sunny. Heather. Dave dead, poor dead Dave, not here for the end of the story. Or was he lucky Dave, spared from hearing a truth that he could never quite admit to himself?

  They had found them.

  “Miriam Bethany?” It was the “Bethany” that gave it away. There was only one context in which she remained Miriam Bethany.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Harold Lenhardt, and I’m a sergeant with the Baltimore County Police Department.”

  Found them, found them, found them.

  “A few days ago, a woman was in a car accident, and when police came to the scene, she said—”

  Lunatic, lunatic, another fucking lunatic. Another crazy, indifferent to the pain and hurt she was causing.

  “That she’s your daughter. The younger one, Heather. She says she’s your daughter.”

  And Miriam’s mind exploded.

  PART VI PHONEMATES (1983)

  CHAPTER 24

  The telephone rang at 6:30 A.M. and Dave grabbed the receiver without thinking. He knew better. Just last week, in anticipation of this annual call, he had purchased a PhoneMate answering machine at Wilson’s, the catalog store on Security Boulevard. They supposedly had lower prices, although Dave could never tell for sure, because he didn’t have the patience to comparison-shop. Still, as a fellow retailer, albeit on a much smaller scale, he was interested in how the store reduced overhead by keeping salespeople to a minimum and not stocking inventory on the floor. Shoppers jotted down the codes of the items they wanted, stood in one line to pick them up, another to purchase. Perhaps the trick was that such an onerous system simply made people believe they were getting a deal. All the waiting in line—it had to pay off somehow, right? The Soviets lined up for toilet paper, Americans queued for PhoneMates and WaterPiks and fourteen-karat-gold necklaces.

  Answering machines were new, a technology that had caught fire in the wake of the AT & T breakup, and now suddenly everyone was getting them—recording silly messages, performing skits, even singing in some cases. It turned out that the United States was a desperately lonely place, where everyone had been worrying that a single missed phone call might change one’s destiny. The old Dave, the before Dave, would have gone as long as possible before succumbing to a gadget such as this, if ever. But there was always the chance that someone might call once and never call again. And then there were the calls you didn’t want to take, and the machine allowed you to listen to those, decide for yourself if you wanted to talk to the real person. Dave hadn’t worked out the etiquette of that yet—once you revealed to someone that you had eavesdropped on the incoming message, how could you ever fail to take that person’s call again? Or did you just pretend that you weren’t there? Maybe it would be better never to answer. It had taken him almost three hours to come up with his outgoing message. “This is Dave Bethany, and I’m not at home now—” Not necessarily true, and he didn’t like to lie, even to strangers, much less encourage burglars. “You have reached the Bethany household—” But there was no Bethany household, just a single Bethany in an increasingly neglected house, where nothing was broken, but nothing really worked as it should. “This is Dave. Leave your message at the beep.” Unoriginal, but it got the job done.

  The PhoneMate was set to ring four times before it answered, and Dave, groggy from the dreamless sleep that he now considered a blessing, reached out blindly and grabbed the receiver. At the split second he lifted it to his ear, he remembered the date, the very reason he’d made a point of purchasing the PhoneMate. Too late.

  “I know where they are,” said a man’s voice, raspy and thin.

  “Fuck you,” Dave said, slamming down the phone, but not before he registered the sound of a fist, furiously working.

  These calls had started four years earlier and were always the same, at least in the way they were worded. The voice sounded different from year to year, and Dave had figured out that the annual caller suffered from allergies, which affected the timbre. Did the obscene caller sound hoarse this year? Spring must be precocious, pollen already in the air. The guy was his personal groundhog. His PhoneMate.

  Dutifully, Dave recorded the date, time, and content of the call on the pad he kept by the telephone. Detective Willoughby said he should report everything, even hang-up calls, but although Dave kept a record, he had never confided in Willoughby about this particular rite of spring. “Let us decide what’s important,” Willoughby had told him many times over the last eight years, but Dave couldn’t live that way. He needed to make distinctions, if only for his own sanity. Hope was an impossible emotion to live with, he was finding out, a demanding and abusive companion. Emily Dickinson had called it the thing with feathers, but her hope was small and dainty, a friendly presence perched inside the rib cage. The hope that Dave Bethany knew also had feathers, but it was more of a griffin, with glinting eyes and sharp talons. Claws, he corrected himself. The griffin had the head of an eagle but the body of a lion. Dave Bethany’s version of hope sat on his chest, working its claws in and out, piercing the meaty surface of his heart.

  He didn’t need to leave bed for at least another hour, but it was useless to try to return to sleep. He got up, shuffled out to grab the newspaper, and started boiling water for his coffee. Dave had always insisted on a using a Chemex for coffee, no matter how Miriam wheedled for an electric maker, which had become all the rage when Joe DiMaggio started pitching them. Now the food-obsessed, a decadent class in Dave’s opinion, were returning to the old ways of making coffee, although they ground their beans in little domed machines that whirred with pompous ceremony, oversize dildos for the gourmet fetis
hist. See, he said to his invisible breakfast partner as he poured the steaming water over the grounds. I told you everything comes around again.

  He had never broken the habit of speaking to Miriam over breakfast. In fact, he enjoyed it more since she’d left, for there were no contradictions, no teasing or doubt. He held forth, and Miriam silently agreed with everything he said. He couldn’t imagine a more satisfactory arrangement.

  He scanned the Beacon’s local section. No mention of the date’s significance, but that was to be expected. There’d been a story at one year, again at two years, but nothing after that. It had puzzled him, when year five came and went without any acknowledgment. When would his daughters matter again? At ten years, at twenty? At their silver anniversary, or their gold?

  “The media’s done what it can,” Willoughby had said just last month as they watched crews digging holes on an old farm out toward Finksburg.

  “Still, if only from a historical standpoint, the fact that it happened…” The countryside was beautiful here. Why had he never come to Finksburg before, seen how beautiful it was despite its bum name? But the highway had been extended to this part of the county only recently. Before the road construction, it would have been impossible to live here and work in town.

  “At this point it’s going to come down to an arrest,” Willoughby had said as the day wore on and more holes were dug, and the detective gave up on the enterprise in progress. “Someone who knows something and will want to use it as a bartering chip. Or perhaps the guy himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already in custody for another crime. There are lots of unsolved cases that have gotten all the publicity in the world—Etan Patz, Adam Walsh.”

  “They came after,” Dave said, as if this were an issue of primogeniture. “And Adam Walsh’s parents at least have a body.”

  “They have a head,” Willoughby said, his pedantic nature coming to the fore. “They never found the body.”

  “You know what? I’d kill for a head at this point.”

  The call about that Finksburg farm had been so promising. For one thing, it had come from a woman, and while women in general were no more sane than men, they did not have the kind of craziness that sought release in taunting the family of two presumed murder victims. Besides, this was a neighbor, a woman who had provided her full name. A man named Lyman Tanner had moved to the area in the spring of 1975, just before the girls disappeared. She recalled him washing his car very early on Easter Sunday, the day after the girls disappeared, which struck her as odd, because rain was in the forecast.

  She had been asked, Willoughby reported back to Dave, why she would remember such a detail eight years later.

  “Simple,” said the woman, Yvonne Yepletsky. “I’m Orthodox—Romanian Orthodox, but I go to the Greek Orthodox church downtown, like most of the Romanian Orthodox. On our calendar Easter falls on a different day, and my mother used to say it always rains on their Easter. And sure enough it usually does.”

  Still, the oddness of that car wash did not come back to her until a few months ago, when Lyman Tanner died and left his farm to some distant relatives. Yvonne Yepletsky remembered then that her neighbor had worked at Social Security, so close to the mall, and that he had seemed unusually interested in her own daughters, young teenagers when he first moved in next door. He hadn’t even minded the old graveyard bordering his property, which had deterred so many other buyers.

  “And he made a big to-do about putting in crops, rented a tractor and all to till up the field, but then he never done nothing with it,” Mrs. Yepletsky said.

  The Baltimore County Police Department hired a bulldozer.

  The crew was on its twelfth hole when another neighbor helpfully informed them that Mrs. Yepletsky was disgruntled because her husband wanted to buy the land and Tanner’s heirs wouldn’t sell. The Yepletskys weren’t liars, not quite. They had come to believe the stories they told about Tanner. A man whose heirs wouldn’t sell to you for a good price—why, he must be odd. He had washed his car when rain was in the forecast. Wasn’t that about the time those girls had disappeared? He musta done it. Hope, which had moved to Dave’s shoulder for all of a week, settled back on his chest, kneading its claws in and out.

  Given that his breakfast consisted solely of black coffee, Dave required only twenty minutes to finish it and the paper, rinse out his cup, and head upstairs to get dressed. It was barely 7:00 A.M. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, he kept his daughters’ bedroom doors closed, but he always opened them on this day, allowed himself a little tour. He felt not unlike Bluebeard in reverse. If a woman were to join him in this house—unimaginable to him, but theoretically possible—he would forbid her to enter these rooms. She would, of course, defy him and sneak in behind his back. But instead of discovering the corpses of his previous wives, she would find preserved time capsules of two girls’ lives, April 1975.

  In Heather’s pink-and-white room, Max of Where the Wild Things Are circled the world, found the island of the wild things, yet still made it home in time for supper. A few teen idols had crept onto the walls beneath Max, toothy boys all, indistinguishable to Dave’s eyes. Next door, Sunny’s room was very much a teenager’s room, with only one trace of childhood left: a wall hanging, her sixth-grade marine-biology project, for which she had laboriously constructed an underwater scene in cross-stitch. She’d gotten an A for that project, but only after the teacher had interrogated Miriam at length, not trusting that Sunny had done this on her own. How angry Dave had been that someone would doubt his daughter’s talent, her word.

  One might expect that the rooms, shut up and untouched, would get dirty and musty, yet Dave found them startlingly fresh and alive. It was reasonable, sitting on the beds in these rooms—and this morning he tried out the beds in both, bold as Goldilocks—to imagine that their owners would return by nightfall. Even the police, who had briefly considered the possibility that the girls were runaways, had conceded that these rooms showed that the occupants expected to return. True, it was odd that Heather had taken all her money to the mall, but perhaps that had been the source of the trouble. There were people who might hurt a child for forty dollars, and the money was not in her purse when it was found.

  Of course, the moment the police ruled out the fact that the girls had left on their own, it was Dave’s turn to be the suspect. To this day Willoughby had never acknowledged, much less apologized for, the unfairness and awkwardness of that inquiry, or the vital hours that had been lost in this misdirection. Dave subsequently learned that family members were always suspect in such cases, but the specifics of his life—the crumbling marriage, the failing shop, the college trust funds started by Miriam’s parents—had made the accusation specifically heinous. “You think I killed my children for money?” he asked, all but lunging at Willoughby. The detective hadn’t taken it personally. “I’m not thinking anything just yet,” he said with a shrug. “There are questions, and I’m getting answers. That’s all.”

  To this day Dave wasn’t sure what was worse: being suspected of a financial motive in his daughters’ deaths or being accused of killing them to get back at his philandering spouse. Miriam had acted as if she were so noble, spilling her secret to the cops so quickly, but her secret had also provided the perfect alibi for her and her lover. “What if they did it?” Dave asked the police. “What if they did it and framed me, so they could run off together?” But not even he believed that scenario.

  He didn’t mind so much that Miriam had left him, but he lost all respect for her when she left Baltimore as well. She had abandoned the vigil. She was not strong enough to live with the kneading, needling hope and the impossible possibilities it whispered in his ear. “They’re dead, Dave,” Miriam said the last time they spoke, over two years ago. “The only thing we have to look forward to is the official discovery of what we know is true. The only thing to cling to is that it’s less horrific than we’ve dared to imagine. That someone took them and shot them, or killed them in a wa
y that involved no suffering. That they weren’t sexually assaulted, that—”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” Those were almost the last words he ever spoke to Miriam. But neither one of them wanted that. He apologized and she apologized, and those were their last words. Miriam, who had always loved new things, had gotten an answering machine last year. He called sometimes and listened to her outgoing message, but he never left one. He wondered if Miriam listened in on her messages, if she would pick up if she heard his voice on the machine. Probably not.

  Under Maryland law he could have petitioned as early as 1981 to have the girls presumed legally dead, a judicial finding that would have freed the money in their college accounts. But he had no interest in their money, less interest still in having a court codify his worst fears. He let the money languish. That would show everyone.

  Perhaps a kindly family stole them, the hope-griffin whispered in his ear. A kindly family in the Peace Corps, who whisked them off to Africa. Or they met up with a band of free spirits, younger versions of Kesey and his gang, and hit the road together, doing exactly what you might have done, if you didn’t have children.

  Why don’t they call, then?

  Because they hate you.

  Why?

  Because kids hate their parents. You hated yours. When was the last time you called your mother? Long distance doesn’t cost that much.

  Still, are those my only choices? Alive but so filled with hatred for me that they refuse to call? Or full of love for me but dead?

  No, those aren’t the only choices. There’s also the possibility that they’re chained in some sicko’s basement where—

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP.

  Finally it was time to head to the Blue Guitar. The store wouldn’t open for another three hours, but there was plenty to do before then. Of all the ironies in his life, this one was the most painful. The store had thrived in the wake of the publicity about his daughters. Initially, people had come to gawk at the grieving father, only to find the efficient and empathetic Miss Wanda from the bakery. She had volunteered her time, insisting that Dave would not only want to return to work eventually but that he would need to return to work. The gawkers turned into shoppers, and word of mouth for the store was so strong that his business grew beyond his modest dreams. He had actually expanded, adding a line of clothing and small housewares—drawer pulls, decorative wall plates. And the things he imported from Mexico were very hot just now. The carved rabbit that Mrs. Baumgarten had disdained, the one she couldn’t imagine paying thirty dollars for? A San Francisco museum that was opening a folk-art wing had offered to pay Dave a thousand dollars for it, recognizing it for the valuable piece it was—an early, less self-conscious piece by one of the Oaxacan masters. He had loaned it to the inaugural exhibit instead.