What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  Pepper was beautiful, too, the kind of young woman noticed by the reluctant boyfriends and husbands dragged into the store. But Dave saw this only in the abstract. Whenever he met a woman, he estimated her age relative to what his daughters would be, and if she weren’t at least fifteen years older, he wanted nothing to do with her. Sunny would have turned twenty-nine this year, he thought with a pang. Therefore, he wouldn’t consider a woman of less than forty-five. Which should have been good news for the middle-aged women of Baltimore—a successful, available man who would never want a younger woman—except that Dave’s relationships never worked. It had become common to speak of one’s past as baggage, but Dave’s past was so much larger, so much more burdensome, that it could never be understood as a single object that he dragged behind him. His past was like riding a monster with a lashing tail. He clung to it reluctantly, knowing that he would be crushed by its heedless feet if he ever relinquished his grip.

  It was a quiet morning, so he went over the books with Pepper, taking her deeper into the workings of tbg than any previous employee had been allowed. He reminded her of the spring craft show, asked if she would like to be his representative there. She squealed, actually squealed, and bit a knuckle in delight.

  “But you’d be with me, right? I’d be scared, making those choices all alone.”

  “I think you can do it. You have a great eye, Pepper. Just the way you display things, your attention to the store’s look—I swear, even when I buy a dud, you find a way to make people want it.”

  “The kind of things we sell—they’re dreams, you know? Visions of what people want to be. No one needs anything we stock, even the clothes. So you have to group them to tell a story. I don’t know, I’m sure I sound crazy—”

  “You make perfect sense. Before I hired you, I seldom took a day off. Now I’m capable of being away from the store for up to, oh, twenty minutes at a time.”

  Dave’s workaholism was an old, familiar joke between them, and Pepper whooped with delight, a loud, raucous sound that made him wince. She did not know what day it was. She probably didn’t know that Dave Bethany had ever had two daughters, much less what happened to them. True, their images lived in a silver frame in the back room, on his desk, but Pepper never asked questions. She was not incurious, he believed, merely careful about delving too far into his past, lest he expect the same privilege in return. He really liked Pepper. He wished he could love her, or feel fatherly toward her, but that could never happen. Even if Pepper had been less reticent, he never would have allowed himself to feel paternal toward any young woman. In the past fourteen years, Dave had had lovers, women in his bed. But he never considered marrying again, and he had no desire to create daughters out of strangers. Pepper was his employee, nothing more.

  OF COURSE, PEOPLE gossiped that she was more, later on. The next day, when emergency workers cut Dave down from an old elm tree behind his house, from the very branch where the tire swing had hung until the rope finally rotted away, they found a note directing them to a pile of papers on his desk, in the study where he had once chanted as the ghee burned at sunrise and sunset. No one needs the things we sell, Pepper had said, so you have to group them to tell a story. Dave hoped his groupings—his body, his papers, the balanced checkbook, the achingly neat house—would be understood. His letter might not be an official will, but its intentions were plain enough. He wanted Pepper to take over his business, while all his other assets, including those derived from the sale of the house, should be put in trust for the daughters that everyone else presumed dead, then released to certain charities in 2009.

  “I feel awful,” Willoughby confided over the crackle of the international line, having found Miriam through her former colleagues at the real-estate office. “It was just that day that I—”

  “Don’t feel bad, Chet. I don’t. At least, I don’t feel guilty about Dave.”

  “Yes, but…” The sentence, while unfinished, still managed to be quite cruel.

  “I don’t forget either,” Miriam said. “I just don’t remember in the same way. Which is to say, I don’t wake up every morning and hit myself over the head with a frying pan and wonder why I have a headache, which was Dave’s solution. The pain is there. It will always be there. It doesn’t have to be stoked, or encouraged. Dave and I chose different ways to mourn, but we both mourned equally.”

  “I’ve never said otherwise, Miriam.”

  “I’m in language school here. Did you know that? I’m learning a new language at the age of fifty-two.”

  “I might do something like that,” he offered, but she wasn’t interested in what he was doing. At least Dave pretended to care about me, Willoughby thought.

  “In Spanish there’s a whole set of verbs where what would be the object in English becomes the subject. Me falta un tenedor. Literally, ‘The fork is lacking to me,’ not ‘I need a fork.’ Se me cayó. Se me olvidó. ‘It fell from me.’ ‘It forgot itself to me.’ In Spanish it’s understood that things happen to you sometimes.”

  “Miriam, I’ve never second-guessed anything you or Dave did to cope.”

  “Bullshit, Chet. But you kept your opinion to yourself most of the time, and for that I love you.”

  He wished those words—so flippant, so unfelt—didn’t hit him so hard. For that I love you.

  “Stay in touch,” he said. “With the department, I mean. If anything should come up—”

  “It won’t.”

  “Stay in touch,” he repeated, pleaded, knowing all the time that she wouldn’t, not forever.

  A few weeks later, the day before his official retirement, he checked the Bethany case file out one more time. When the file was returned, any reference to the girls’ biological parentage had been removed. Dave Bethany had always insisted that this part of the story was a cul-de-sac, a dead end, not unlike Algonquin Lane itself, which backed up to the more civilized edges of Leakin Park, an otherwise unruly bit of wilderness in the middle of the city. In the early days, just after the girls went missing, coarse, curious types drove slowly by the house, their rubbernecking intentions exposed when they had to turn around at the street’s end. Others had come to the store, buying small items to assuage their guilt. How those people had pained Dave, how hurt he had been. “I’m a fucking freak show,” he complained to Chet, more than once. “Take down the license plates,” Chet advised him. “Make a note of the name if they pay by check or credit card. You never know who’s driving by.” And Dave, being Dave, had done just that. Taken down license plates, recorded every hang-up phone call, shook his family’s life as if it were a snow globe, then set it back on the table and waited to see how the tableau might change. But no matter how many times he rearranged it over fourteen years, all the parts sifted back into place—with the exception of Miriam.

  PART IX SUNDAY

  CHAPTER 37

  “We can lie about the bones,” Infante said.

  “But we don’t have any bones,” Lenhardt said. “We can’t

  find the bones.”

  “Exactly.”

  Infante, Lenhardt, Nancy, and Willoughby were in the lobby of the Sheraton, waiting to take Miriam Toles to breakfast—a breakfast where they would admit they didn’t have a clue as to the identity of the woman she hoped to meet today, the woman for whom she had traveled over two thousand miles. She could be Miriam’s daughter. Or she could be a brilliant liar who had decided to fuck with everybody’s head for a week or so. To what end? Money? Boredom? Out-and-out insanity? Or was she safeguarding her current identity because that name would pop out a criminal warrant for the person she now was? That was the only thing that made sense to Infante. He didn’t believe for a minute that she was worried about her privacy. From his observation she grooved on attention, enjoyed their every encounter. No, she had something else to hide, and she was concealing it behind Heather Bethany’s identity, using this infamous old murder to distract them.

  “We’ve been obsessing over the bones because of all the things
they could establish if we had them. The parents aren’t biological, but the sisters are. Right?”

  Willoughby nodded. Twenty-four hours ago, according to Nancy, she had to sweet-talk him into watching the interview. Now they couldn’t pry him away and Lenhardt was humoring him, rather than risk hurting his feelings and seeing him on the nightly news. Infante still couldn’t get over how he had screwed with the case file, then all but encouraged them to bring Miriam back to Baltimore before they knew what was what, who was who. What had the guy been thinking? How could he have removed crucial information? No possibility could be ruled out, as far as Infante was concerned. One thing that Nancy had told him about cold cases—the name was always in the files.

  “We already told her we didn’t find the bones,” Lenhardt said.

  “We told her that we didn’t find them at the address she provided. But I’ve just come back from Georgia, right, where Tony Dunham lived? For all she knows, the son could have dug them up and taken them away before his father sold the property, to prevent their discovery.”

  “That would be impressive,” Lenhardt said. “I can’t even get my son to mow the lawn.”

  “Seriously—”

  “No, I’m hearing you, just trying to think it through. So we tell her we have her sister’s bones. If she’s lying, she capitulates—you think—because she knows she’s going to have to submit to tests, and those will prove she’s not related. But she’s quick on her feet, this one. What if she says: ‘Well, it could be some other body. Who knows how many times Stan Dunham did this, how many girls he killed?’”

  “It’s still worth a shot. I’d try anything right now to get an answer as quickly as possible out of her, to put the mother’s mind to rest without making her go through the turmoil of meeting her, talking to her. If we could get her to confess…”

  “Well, we’re not going to figure out anything before breakfast,” Lenhardt said, glancing at Willoughby. “We have to tell the mother how up in the air this is. She shouldn’t have come, but I guess I should have known, as a parent, that nothing would hold her back once we called.”

  Infante usually hated it when Lenhardt invoked his standing as a parent, especially now that Nancy could nod solemnly, part of the club. But in this case Lenhardt seemed to be trying to mitigate Willoughby’s guilt, so Infante didn’t mind as much.

  Nancy spoke up. “She would roll with anything we told her, somehow. That’s my observation. You ever see that show, on cable, the one with the fat guy in glasses who does improvisations?”

  The three men looked at her—Lenhardt and Willoughby completely lost, Infante clued into Nancy’s vague pop-culture shorthand from their time as partners. “That piece of shit? You couldn’t pay me to watch it. Although I did like it when the black guy, the super nice one, made fun of himself on that other show. Does Wayne Brady have to choke a bitch? That was funny.”

  Nancy flushed. “Hey, you get up with a baby in the middle of the night and see what you watch. I only bring it up because she reminds me of that. She’s quick, she thinks on her feet, and she gets what a lot of liars don’t, that it’s okay to make mistakes, because people do say the wrong stuff all the time. Like with the crickets? She didn’t miss a beat when I pointed out it was March. She knows I caught her in a lie at that moment. But she kept going. Sergeant’s right. You try that bones story on her, she won’t blink.”

  The elevator opened, and Miriam Toles, after a quick look around the lobby, recognized Infante. Last night, when Infante met her at the airport, he had expected someone dressed more…well, Mexican. Not in a sombrero—he wasn’t that ignorant. But perhaps one of those tiered skirts in bright colors, or an embroidered blouse. He also assumed that she would look older than her age, which records put at sixty-eight. But Miriam Toles had that sense of style that he’d seen in New York City women when he went into the city as a kid—silver hair in a severe, chin-level bob, large silver earrings, no other jewelry. He saw Nancy glance down at her own outfit, a pink shirt worn with a khaki skirt that was meant to hang a little looser than it did, and knew she was feeling dowdy and hickish. He bet that Miriam Toles often had that effect on other women. She wasn’t truly pretty—she had probably never been pretty. But she was elegant and she had the remains of a killer figure.

  Next to him he was conscious of Chet Willoughby straightening up a little, even sucking in his gut.

  “Miriam,” the old detective said, his manner a little stiff. “It’s good to see you again. Although, obviously, not under these circumstances.”

  “Chet,” she said, holding out a hand for a shake, and the old detective deflated. Had he been hoping for a kiss on the cheek, an embrace? It was weird, seeing this sixty-something guy all quivery with a crush. Didn’t this ever end? Shouldn’t it end? Lately, when every other commercial seemed to be about impotence—ED, as the ads called it, as if that were better—Infante had found himself thinking that it was silly to fight the body, that it must be almost a kind of relief to have your dick lie down on the job, done at last. His would never give up the ghost, of course, he knew that much about himself, and it would be a burn if you got impotence as a side effect of some medication. But he’d been counting on, even hoping for, the end of the emotional insanity, that giddy rush of caring what another person thought of you. Watching Willoughby, he realized that it ended as everything else did—with death.

  MIRIAM STARED DOWN at the lackluster fruit she had plucked from the breakfast buffet, hard little pieces of things not quite in season. She didn’t want to be one of those tiresome people who was forever championing her way of life, but she already missed Mexico, the things she had come to take for granted over the last sixteen years—the fruit, the strong coffee, the lovely pastries. She was embarrassed by this paltry brunch, much as the quartet of police officers seemed to find it a treat. Even the young woman was eating lustily, although Miriam noticed her plate was all protein.

  “I would have come anyway,” she told them. “Once I heard the detail about the purse. True, I wish your information were more…definitive at this point, that you knew one way or the other. But even if this isn’t my daughter, she clearly knows something about the day my daughters disappeared. Perhaps everything. Where do we go from here?”

  “We’d like to put together a comprehensive biography of your daughter, filled with details that only she could know. The layout of the house, family stories, in-jokes. Anything and everything you can remember.”

  “That would take hours, maybe even days.” And break my heart a thousand times over. For thirty years Miriam had understood that she had to share her family’s saddest secrets with investigators—her husband’s failing business, her affair, the roundabout way that Sunny and Heather had come to be their daughters. But she was jealous of the happy memories, the mundane, quotidian details. Those belonged to her and Dave exclusively. “Why don’t you tell me what she’s told you so far, and see if any of that rings false with me? Why won’t you let me see her?”

  The female detective, Nancy—it was overwhelming for Miriam, meeting so many new people—flipped through her notes. “She’s been consistent on birthdays, the schools they attended, your address. Thing is, most of that is on the Internet or in news accounts, if a person is inclined to dig deep enough, pony up for the archive searches. At one point, she said something about vacations to Florida and a person named Bop-Bop—”

  “That’s right. Dave’s mother. She coined that hideous name for herself because she couldn’t bear to be anything matronly. She hadn’t enjoyed being a mother and being a grandmother really discomfited her.”

  “But that’s not exactly proprietary, is it? Heather could have told that to kids at school, for example.”

  “Yet would it be remembered thirty years later?” Miriam asked, then answered her own question. “Certainly you wouldn’t forget Bop-Bop if you ever met her. She was a piece of work.”

  Willoughby smiled.

  “What, Chet?” Miriam asked, sharper than she int
ended. “What’s so amusing to you?”

  He shook his head, not wanting to say anything, but Miriam caught his gaze and held it. She shouldn’t be the only person answering questions this morning.

  “You’re just so very much as I remembered. The…candor. That hasn’t changed.”

  “Gotten worse, I would think, now that I’m an old woman and don’t care what anyone thinks of me. Okay, so this person knows Bop-Bop, she knows what Heather’s purse looks like. Why don’t you believe her, then?”

  “Well, there’s the fact that she doesn’t remember seeing the music teacher, when he was adamant that he saw her,” Nancy said. “And in the original notes you told investigators that Heather had a little box in her room where she kept her birthday and Christmas money, but the money—somewhere between forty and sixty dollars, by your recollection—was missing. So Heather took her money to the mall that day, but when we asked for the contents of the purse—”

  “The purse was empty when it was discovered.”

  “Right. We know that. However, Heather wouldn’t, unless she emptied it herself and threw it down, and no one thinks that happened. This woman didn’t mention it, however. She said there was a little cash, a brush, and a Bonne Belle lip moisturizer because she wasn’t allowed to wear real lipstick then.”