What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  He stopped on the front porch, drinking in the light. With the trees still relatively bare and the world on standard time for a few more weeks, the mornings had a bittersweet clarity. Most people welcomed daylight savings, but Dave had always thought it a poor trade-off, losing these mornings so you could have extra light at the end of the day. Morning was the last time he’d been happy. Sort of. He’d been trying to be happy that morning, focusing on the girls because he knew that Miriam was up to something—he just wasn’t ready to confront what it was. He’d been trying to distract himself, playing the superattentive dad, and Heather had bought it, believed in it. Sunny—Sunny hadn’t been fooled. She’d known he wasn’t really present, that he was lost in his own thoughts. If only he’d stayed there, if he hadn’t snapped to and insisted that Sunny take Heather with her. If only—But what was he arguing for? One dead daughter instead of two? That was Sophie’s Choice, not that Dave could bear to read the book, although Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner had been a great favorite of his. Styron needed the Holocaust to explain the worst thing that could happen to a parent. The thing was—it still wasn’t big enough. Six million dead meant nothing when you had lost your own child.

  He got into the old VW van, another relic he couldn’t let go of, another piece of his Miss Havisham existence. Hope hopped into the passenger seat, the old vinyl shredding and cracking beneath its always-working claws. The griffin turned its bile-colored eyes on Dave, and reminded him to fasten his seat belt.

  Who cares if I live or die?

  No one, Hope admitted. But when you die, who will remember them? Miriam? Willoughby? Their old classmates, some of whom have graduated college by now? You’re all they have, Dave. Without you, they truly are gone.

  CHAPTER 25

  Miriam had a secret love—butter pecan yogurt from I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt. She could, in fact, believe it was yogurt. She further believed that it wasn’t quite the health food that others seemed to think, and that its calories counted as much as any other calories. Miriam wasn’t deceived by any of the promises made by I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, real or implied. But she liked it, and she was sorely tempted to take a small detour right now and buy some. The day was warm, summer-hot by her standards if not by Texas ones, hot enough to make an afternoon at Barton Springs seem eminently reasonable. Miriam thought about taking the afternoon off and doing just that, or going all the way out to the lake, but she had two appointments with prospective sellers in the Clarksville section.

  Still, it worried her that she’d considered, even for a moment, driving over to the public swimming area. She had really settled in here. If she didn’t watch it, she’d soon be joining the local chorus of “But you should have lived here when—” The endless lament about how hip, how happy, how affordable Austin used to be. Then there was the invocation of the places that used to exist—the Armadillo, the Liberty Lunch. Look at Guadalupe Street, the Drag, where she couldn’t find a parking spot today. She’d have to forgo the yogurt and continue on to her appointment.

  A shiver ran through her, and she worked backward through her thoughts to find what was making her feel anxious. Parking—Austin—Barton Springs—lake. There had been a murder at the lake last fall, two girls, found on a lot where an expensive new house was under construction. Two girls—not sisters, but the mere configuration demanded her attention—and no possible motive that anyone could discern. Miriam, more expert than others in reading between the lines of news accounts, understood that the police really did have no information, but her friends had inferred all sorts of strange conspiracies from the barest of facts. Trained by television, they kept expecting it to turn into a story, something explicable and—although her earnest Austin friends would never use this word—satisfying. To them, obsessed with the way Austin was changing—mutating, the old-timers said; growing and progressing, according to the newcomers who had staked their fortunes on this booming city—the murders must somehow be rooted in the phenomenon of growth. The girls were locals, biker chicks of a sort, from families who had lived in the area before it was desirable. According to news reports, they had long used this cove off Lake Travis for partying with their friends and saw no reason to stop simply because a house was going up. It seemed to Miriam that the girls were most likely killed by their own surly acquaintances, but police had interviewed the lot’s owner and the various workmen from the site.

  In focusing on the clash between old and new, progress and status quo, Miriam’s Austin friends didn’t realize that they were really arguing for their own connection to the crime, that they were trying to take an isolated horror and make it—loathsome word—relatable. Which was, of course, the one thing it could never be, not in liberal Austin. Austin was so sweetly, reliably liberal that Miriam was beginning to wonder just how liberal she really was.

  Take the death penalty, which had resumed in Texas the year before. There was much discussion among her coworkers and neighbors about how shameful this was, how unbecomingly eager Texas was to put men to death now that Utah had led the way, although only one man had been executed so far. Miriam never joined in these discussions, because she was afraid that she would find herself arguing heatedly for it, which could lead to the trump card of personal experience, something she never wanted to lay on the table. Since her arrival in Texas seven years earlier, she had been allowed the luxury of not being the martyred mother, poor sad Miriam Bethany. She was, in fact, no longer Miriam Bethany. She was Miriam Toles. Even if someone were to know of the Bethany girls, if the names were to come up in the endless speculating about the double murders at Lake Travis, no one would make the connection. She had even glossed over the Baltimore part of her past. Bad marriage, didn’t work out, no children, thank God, originally from Ottawa, much prefer the climate here. That was what people knew about her.

  There had been moments—wine-soaked or pot-infused camaraderie, usually late at night—when Miriam flirted with the idea of confiding in someone. Never a man, because although she found it remarkably easy to meet and bed men, she did not want a boyfriend of any stripe, and that kind of revelation might inspire a man to take her seriously. But she had made female friends, including one, Rose, who hinted at her own secrets. An anthropology student at thirty-seven—Austin was filled with people who seemed determined to spend their lives as students—she had stayed late after a party, taking Miriam up on her offer to get into the backyard hot tub. As they worked through a bottle of wine, she began to speak of a remote village in Belize where she’d lived for several years. “It was surreal,” she said. “After living there I’m not so sure that magical realism is a literary style. I just think those guys are writing the truth.” Rape was alluded to, vaguely, but all the personal pronouns seemed to drop from Rose’s speech, and it was impossible to know if she was the victim or a bystander who had failed to act. She and Miriam danced around the flames of their respective pasts, each casting beautiful shadows that allowed the other to draw whatever conclusions she wished. But they hadn’t gotten so personal again, much to Miriam’s relief, and possibly to Rose’s. In fact, they had barely seen each other at all.

  At the next stoplight, Miriam flipped open her Filofax in the passenger seat and glanced at the address for the first appointment. A man on the street stared at her, and she had an awareness of herself as a self-made woman, although not in the usual sense of the phrase. True, she had done well financially, starting with very little here. The camel-colored Filofax, the Joan Vass knits and shoes, the air-conditioned Saab—these details allowed her to broadcast her success in an Austin-appropriate way. But Miriam was more interested in the creation of this different person, Miriam Toles, who was allowed to move through her days without tragedy tugging visibly at everything she did. It was hard enough to be Miriam Bethany on the inside. Miriam Toles was the candy-coated shell, the thin layer that kept all the messy stuff inside, just barely.

  “They do melt,” Heather had complained, showing her mother a palm smeared with orange
, yellow, red, and green. “How can they lie like that?”

  “All commercials lie,” said Sunny, a sage at eleven. “Remember when we ordered the one hundred dolls from the back of the Millie the Model comic, and they were so teensy?” She held her fingers apart to show how small the dolls were, how large the lie.

  Her car still idling at the light, Miriam’s eyes fell on the date: March 29. The day. That day. It was the first time she had ever managed to ease into it without an overweening awareness, the first time that she had not gone to sleep dreading the so-called anniversary, the first time she had not awakened bathed in the sweat of vicious nightmares. It helped that Austin springs were so different, that it was verging on hot by late March. It helped that Easter had come and gone, early again. Easter was usually the sign that she’d passed into what she thought of as the safe season. If they were alive—oh Lord, if they were alive, Sunny would be twenty-three, Heather verging on twenty.

  But they weren’t alive. If she was sure of anything, it was that fact.

  A honk, then another and another, and Miriam lurched forward almost blindly. She was trying to think of reasons that Sunny and Heather would be glad they weren’t here. The Reagan presidency? But she doubted that either girl would have sacrificed her life to avoid that. Music was actually better, to Miriam’s middle-aged ears, and she liked the clothes as well, the merger between comfort and fashion, at least in some of the lines. They would have liked Austin, too, even if the locals thought it had been ruined, ruined, ruined. They could have gone to college here cheaply, hung out at the clubs, eaten burgers at Mad Dog & Beans, tasted migas at Las Mañanitas, slurped frozen margaritas at Jorge’s, shopped at Whole Foods, which managed the trick of being simultaneously organic (millet in bulk) and decadent (five different kinds of brie). Sunny and Heather, grown, would have shared her sense of humor, Miriam decided now, joined in her awareness of how absurd Austin was at moments, how precious. They could have lived here.

  And died here. People died here, too. They got murdered at construction sites. They were killed in boozy car accidents on the twisty farm-to-market roads in the Hill Country. They drowned in the Memorial Day weekend flood of 1981, when water had risen so fast and furiously, turning streets into treacherous rivers.

  Miriam secretly believed—or secretly rationalized—that it was her daughters’ destiny to be murdered, that if she could go back in time and change the circumstances of that day, all she would do was postpone and reconfigure the tragedy. Her daughters had been marked at birth, imprinted with a fate Miriam could not control. That was the one oddity about being an adoptive parent, the sense that there were biological factors she could never control. At the time she had thought it was healthy, that she had given in to a reality that biological parents—never “natural,” although even in well-intentioned Austin one still heard that tactless expression—that biological parents found it harder to accept. She could not control everything when it came to her children.

  Of course, she had the advantage of knowing part of Sunny and Heather’s family, their maternal grandparents, Estelle and Herb Turner. How guilty Miriam had felt about her unkind first impression of them when she learned their whole story—the beautiful daughter, Sally, who had run away at age seventeen to marry a man of whom her parents didn’t approve, then refused their help until it was much too late. This would have been 1959, when elopement was still presented as a comic adventure—the ladder at the window, the young couple always caught, only to win the parents’ blessing in the end. This was when married couples on television slept in twin beds and sex was so hidden that young people must have felt as if they were going to explode with the feelings and sensations that no one ever discussed. Miriam knew. Miriam remembered. She wasn’t that much older than Sally Turner.

  She had pieced the rest together on her own—the loutish, brutish beau of a different social class, the Turners’ objections, which Sally had written off as snobbery but had really been a parent’s unerring instinct. Having run away and married her bad boy, Sally must have been proud, too proud to call her parents and ask for help as the marriage became increasingly violent. Sunny had just turned three, and Heather was an infant when their father shot their mother, then killed himself. The Turners discovered almost simultaneously that their daughter was dead and that they had two grandchildren who needed someone to care for them.

  Unfortunately, they had learned a month earlier that Estelle had liver cancer.

  It had been Dave’s idea to volunteer to adopt the children, and while Miriam had doubts about his motives—she thought Dave was more interested in the bond it would establish with Estelle than the girls themselves—she had been eager to do it. Only twenty-five, she had already miscarried three times. Here were two beautiful girls, ready for them, girls that would not require a drawn-out adoption process. The Turners, as the girls’ guardians—the girls’ only family, as far as anyone knew, a fact that would be verified years later, when Detective Willoughby tried to ascertain if their dead father had any relatives—could assign guardianship to the Bethanys. It had been simple. And, cruel as it may sound, Miriam was relieved when Estelle finally died and Herb drifted away, as they all had known he would. The girls reminded him too much of his lost wife and daughter. Grateful as Miriam was for his decampment, she despised him for it, too. What kind of man wouldn’t want to be part of his granddaughters’ lives? Even now that she knew the whole story, she still couldn’t get past her initial dislike of the Turners, Herb’s uxorious regard for Estelle, his inability to love or care about anyone else. It was likely that Sally had run away because there was no room for her in that beautiful Sudbrook home, filled as it was with Herb’s excessive love for Estelle.

  The girls never learned the entire story. They knew they were adopted, of course, although Heather had always refused to believe it, even as Sunny pretended to greater memories than she could possibly have. (“We had a house in Nevada,” she would announce to Heather. “A house with a fence. And a pony!”) But even let’s-be-honest, let-it-all-hang-out Dave could not bear to tell the girls the complete truth—the young runaways, their biological father’s deadly rage, the loss of two lives because Sally could not bear to pick up the phone and ask her parents for help to get away from the husband they had disapproved of from the start. Miriam had been of the opinion that the girls should never be told everything, while Dave thought it would mark their passage into adulthood, at age eighteen or so.

  But she had been even more uncomfortable with the gentle fantasy Dave created for the girls in the interim.

  “Tell me about my other mommy,” Sunny or Heather would say at bedtime.

  “Well, she was beautiful—”

  “Do I look like her?”

  “Yes, exactly.” They did. Miriam had seen the photos in the Turners’ home. Sally had the same flyaway blond hair, the small-boned frame. “She was beautiful and she married a man and went away to live. But there was an accident—”

  “A car accident?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What was it?”

  “Yes, a car accident. They died in a car accident.”

  “Were we there?”

  “No.” But they had been. That part worried Miriam. The girls had been found in the house, Heather in a crib, Sunny in a playpen. They were in a different room, but what had they seen, what had they heard? What if Sunny remembered something that was more real than Nevada and a house and a pony?

  “Where were we?”

  “At home with a baby-sitter.”

  “What was her name?”

  And Dave would keep going, making up details until it was simply the most colossal lie that Miriam had ever heard. “We’ll tell them the truth when they’re eighteen,” he said.

  To think that the truth could be assigned an age, as if it were beer or the right to vote. Oh, what busy but inexpert beavers Dave and Miriam had been, slapping together makeshift dams against all their secrets, trying to stem the trickle of a mere cr
eek when an earthquake lay in wait for them. In the end all their lies had been released into the world, only to go unnoticed, because who would take note of such puny things in a postapocalyptic world, when so much debris was lying around? On the day that Estelle and Herb Turner came to them seeking their help, Miriam had thought she was providing a fresh start for two innocents. But in the end it was the girls who gave her the chance to reinvent herself. And when they were gone, she had lost that part of herself as well.

  Fuck it, she thought, making an erratic and illegal left turn, I will go to Barton Springs. But she turned back to her original route a block later. The Austin real-estate market was beginning to slow. She couldn’t risk losing a single client.

  CHAPTER 26

  “You think faster than the cash register,” said Randy, the Swiss Colony manager.