What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  “That’s not actually allowed,” she said with a worried glance at Infante. “Touching patients like that. But he’s the nicest man, my favorite of all the ones in my care. You have no idea.”

  “No,” Kevin said. “I don’t.” God knows what he’d have done to you if he’d met you when you were a teenager.

  Chet Willoughby had continued to sift through the box of papers, returning to the diploma and the marriage certificate, which he studied through tortoiseshell reading glasses.

  “Something’s not right, Kevin. It’s hard to be definitive, but it’s highly unlikely, based on these, that Ruth Leibig is Heather Bethany.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Kay’s dining room had a set of French doors that separated it from the living room, and she had noticed over the years that her children seemed to feel invisible when the doors were closed. She often took advantage of this, situating her favorite reading chair so she could glance up and catch a glimpse of Grace or Seth at their least self-conscious, a state of being that was increasingly rare with each passing year. Adolescence was like a big scab, or scar tissue, a gradual covering of a soul too soft and open to be exposed to the elements. She liked the way Grace chewed on her hair while doing her math homework, a habit that Kay remembered from her own girlhood. Seth, at eleven, still spoke to himself, narrating his life in a quiet, unrushed monologue that reminded Kay of the commentary for golf tournaments. “Here’s my snack,” he would say, lining or stacking his cookies into precise patterns and structures. “Oreos, real Oreos, because you can’t fake Oreos. And here is the milk, low-fat, Giant brand, because milk is milk. Yesssssss!” The part about the milk was Kay’s voice boomeranging back to her, from the early days after the divorce when she worried about money constantly and abandoned all brand names in favor of store labels, and even made the children submit to blind taste tests to show them that they could not possibly discern the difference among various brands of chips and cookies. Thing was, they could, so she had ended up compromising on that issue. Name brands for cookies, chips, and sodas, the store brand for milk, pasta, bread, and canned goods.

  Sometimes her children caught her looking at them through the glass, but they didn’t seem to mind too much. Perhaps they even enjoyed it, because Kay never laughed or teased them at such moments. Instead she shrugged guiltily and went back to her book as if she had been caught unawares.

  Today it was Heather in the dining room, however, and she scowled when she saw Kay on the other side of the glass, even though Heather had been doing nothing more than reading the Sunday paper and Kay’s only thought was how pretty Heather looked in the grayish light. Peering at the paper, which she held at arm’s length as if slightly farsighted, she had no lines in her forehead and her jawline was still smooth and taut. Only a deep dent between her eyes betrayed her fierce concentration.

  “When did the Sunday comics stop running Prince Valiant?” she asked when Kay carried her coffee mug into the room, trying to act as if it were her destination all along. Then, before Kay could answer—not that she had an answer—Heather decided for herself, “No, it wasn’t the Beacon that ran Prince Valiant. It was the Star. We got the Beacon on weekday mornings, but on Sunday we got both papers. My dad was a news junkie.”

  “I haven’t heard anyone speak of the Beacon for years. It merged with the Light back in the eighties, around the time the Star folded. But Baltimore being Baltimore, some people still talk about the Beacon as if it still existed. You sounded like a real old-time Baltimorean just then.”

  “I am a real old-time Baltimorean,” Heather said. “Or was, at any rate. I guess I belong to another place now.”

  “Were you born here?”

  “What, that didn’t come up in any of your Google searches? Are you asking for yourself or for them?”

  Kay blushed. “That’s not fair, Heather. I haven’t taken sides in this. I’m a neutral party.”

  “My father always said there was no neutrality, that even the act of being neutral involved taking a side.” She was challenging Kay now, accusing her of something, but what?

  “I didn’t tell anyone that we stopped at the mall yesterday.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t, but…you can see—it might have been of interest. I mean, if they knew…” Kay was grateful for the ringing telephone that interrupted her stammering, although she wasn’t sure why she was the one who was flustered and embarrassed. From somewhere upstairs Grace’s voice sounded with the usual frenzied excitement that the telephone provoked in her. “I’ll get it!” Then, in a forlorn, flat tone that told the story of a million dashed expectations: “It’s someone named Nancy Porter. She wants to talk to Heather.”

  Heather went into the kitchen and made a point of pulling the swinging door shut behind her. Even so, Kay could hear her short, brittle answers. What? What’s the rush? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?

  “They want me to come back,” Heather said, pushing through the door with such force that it stayed open. “Can you take me there, in about a half hour or so?”

  “More questions?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s hard to believe there could be any more questions, after what they put me through yesterday. But my mother is here, and they want me to meet with her. Nice reunion, huh? In a police interrogation room, where our every word can be recorded, overheard. I bet they’ve spent the morning debriefing her, telling her that they think I’m a liar, begging her to prove that I’m not who I say I am.”

  “Your mother will know you,” Kay said, but Heather didn’t seem to hear the reassurance in her voice, the implicit promise that Kay wasn’t neutral. Kay believed her. In fact, it occurred to Kay that Heather might be more credible when she wasn’t trying to prove how credible she was. When she talked about Sunday comics and the things her father used to say, she was effortlessly herself.

  “Look, I’m going to go back to my room, brush my teeth and hair, and then we can go, okay? I’ll meet you back here in a bit.”

  SHE CROSSED THE small flagstone path that led through the backyard and to the garage, which was set far back on the property, bordering the alley. Stupid to say that thing about Google. What if they went into Kay’s computer, traced her movements? Any competent technician could find her company’s Web site and the e-mail she had sent her boss. Was Kay watching, did she have to go upstairs? After all, there was nothing there that she needed. The police had taken her key ring the night they stopped her. How grateful she’d been at the time that even her key ring couldn’t betray her. It was just a lump of turquoise on a silver bar, something picked up in a thrift shop, an item of no significance. For obvious reasons, she had never been one to personalize her belongings, to embroider her monogram into things, although it had certainly been suggested that she do just that on various tea towels and aprons, back when she was in her teens and “engaged” to Tony Dunham. “Sure, Auntie. I’m just dying to have a fucking hope chest.” She had been slapped for the “fucking,” yet not for the fucking. What a household. What a goddamn messed-up, mixed-up place that had been, behind the gingham curtains and the ruffled petunias in the window boxes.

  She wished she had some money or at least a credit card. Oh, if only her wallet hadn’t been missing—stolen by Penelope, she was sure of that much now, the woman was clearly a schemer, incapable of gratitude—and she hadn’t been so confused and disoriented that first night. She could have talked her way out of the traffic violation somehow, even with no license and a car registered to someone else. Although, knowing what she did of Penelope, she wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the license plates had expired or that the car had multiple parking citations stacked up in some municipal computer somewhere.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. Kay was still in the kitchen, drinking her coffee by the sink. Shit. She would have to go upstairs after all. Then what?

  IT WAS HARD, opening the bathroom window with just one arm to press against the old, warped wood, harder still to sq
ueeze through the tiny opening and drop a full story, but she managed. Adrenaline was a marvelous thing. Brushing the knees of her slacks—Grace’s actually, and she felt bad about that, of all the things she’d done, she felt bad about taking a teenager’s favorite slacks and getting the knees dirty—she got her bearings. The closest busy street was Edmondson, to her right. It led straight to the Beltway, but she couldn’t hitchhike on the Beltway. She should try Route 40, but that ran east-west and she needed to go south. She’d figure it out. She always figured things out, eventually.

  She began walking briskly, rubbing her arms. It would be cold when the sun went down, but perhaps she would get lucky, make it home by then. If she could get a lift to the airport and take the train—Did the locals run on Sundays? Amtrak did, and if they didn’t catch her by New Carrollton, she could make it the whole way. Even on a local, she was willing to bet that she could stall a conductor for a few stops, persuade him that she’d lost her ticket, maybe even been mugged, although that was risky, for he would want her to report that to the police. If only she’d gotten on the train Tuesday, the way she was supposed to. She could tell the conductor that she had a fight with…her boyfriend, and he pushed her out of the car, that was it, and she was stranded and needed to get home. She could sell that story. Hell, she’d once seen a homeless woman ride free from Richmond to Washington, even as she chattered that she was going to meet with the president. It’s not as if they put you off in the middle of the tracks, and if she could make Union Station, she had a shot. She’d call a coworker, or even her boss if necessary, maybe risk jumping the turnstiles on the Metro, anything to get home again. It was all she could do not to break into a trot toward the busy street, with cars rushing back and forth. She felt as if she were running toward the real world, a place of motion and confusion where she could once again safely disappear, that she would have to reach top speed to break through the wall between it and this make-believe kingdom where she’d lived the past five days.

  But just as she came to the end of the alley, a patrol car surged forward and blocked her path, and that plump, smug detective stepped out.

  “I called you on my cell,” Nancy Porter said. “We weren’t sure you would run, but we were curious to see what you would do when we said we wanted you to meet Miriam. Infante’s at the other end of the alley. And, as you know, there was always a uniform out front.”

  “I’m just taking a walk,” she said. “Is that against the law?”

  “Infante went to see Stan Dunham this afternoon. He learned some interesting things.”

  “Stan Dunham’s not capable of telling anyone anything, even if he were so inclined.”

  “See, it’s really interesting that you know that, because you managed not to mention his incapacitation yesterday, and I made a point of not sharing it, because I wanted you to think he could contradict you. Yesterday you indicated that you hadn’t had any contact with him for years.”

  “I haven’t.”

  The detective opened the rear door. It was a proper police car, with a wire screen between the front and back seats. “I don’t want to cuff you, because of your arm and because there’s no charge on you—yet. But this is going to be your last chance to tell us what really happened to the Bethany girls, Ruth. Assuming you know.”

  “I haven’t been Ruth for years,” she said, getting into the car. “Of all my names, I hated Ruth the most. I hated being Ruth the most.”

  “Well, you’re giving us your current name today, or you’re spending the night in the Women’s Detention Center. We’ve indulged you for five days, but time’s up. You’re going to tell us who you are, and you’re going to tell us what you know about the Dunham family and the Bethany girls.”

  If she had to put a name to what she was feeling, it might have been relief, the knowledge that this was going to end once and for all. Then again, it might have been absolute dread.

  CHAPTER 40

  “We could show her to you, on the closed-circuit video,” Infante offered Miriam. “Or walk her by you in the hall, let you get a look at her.”

  “There’s no way she’s Heather?”

  “Not if she’s Ruth Leibig, and she’s all but admitted that was her name. Ruth Leibig graduated from high school in York, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and married the Dunhams’ son the same year. Heather would have been sixteen then. The marriage would have been legal, especially with the Dunhams as witnesses. But how likely is it that Heather graduated high school two years early?”

  “I was the one who picked up on that,” Willoughby put in, but Infante didn’t begrudge him that little bit of self-importance. Eventually Infante would have noticed it, too, the date discrepancy. But such facts as the Bethany girls’ DOBs were burned into Willoughby’s brain, much as the old man had tried to deny it.

  “No, Heather was smart, but not so smart that she could skip two grades,” Miriam admitted. “Not even in a parochial school in the Pennsylvania boondocks.”

  Infante had gone to Catholic school and thought it pretty rigorous, but he wasn’t going to contradict Miriam on anything just now.

  “So what did happen to my daughters?” Miriam asked. “Where are they? What does any of this have to do with Stan Dunham?”

  “Our supposition is that he did abduct and kill your girls and that his son’s wife, Ruth, somehow came to be privy to the details,” Infante said. “We’re not sure why she’s safeguarding her current identity, but chances are she’s wanted on a warrant for something else. Or she knows for sure that Penelope Jackson set the fire that killed Tony Dunham, and she’s trying to protect her, although she keeps insisting she has no relationship with the Jackson woman. When we ask about the car, she takes the Fifth. When we ask her anything, she takes the Fifth.”

  Nancy leaned in, pushing a glass of water toward Miriam. “We’ve told her that if she’ll give us Penelope Jackson on the murder of Tony Dunham in Georgia, we might be able to cut a deal with her on the hit-and-run here and whatever else she’s running from, depending how serious it is. But other than admitting she was once Ruth Leibig, she’s just not talking, not even to her own lawyer. Gloria’s urged her to make a deal, to tell us everything she knows, but she seems almost catatonic.”

  Miriam shook her head. “That makes two of us. I’m numb. All along I kept telling myself that it was impossible, that she had to be an impostor. I thought I had…insulated myself against hope. Now I realize I wanted it to be true, that I thought by coming here I could make it true.”

  “Of course you did,” Lenhardt said. “Any parent would. Look, come tomorrow, Monday, we’re going to be able to piece a lot more things together. We’ll be able to check to see if Tony and Ruth ever divorced, what jurisdiction it was in, stuff like that. We’ll track down people from the school, even if the parish is gone. For the first time, we have leads, solid ones.”

  “She’s not Heather,” Willoughby put in, “but she has the answers, Miriam. She knows what happened, if only secondhand. Maybe Dunham confided in his daughter-in-law after the diagnosis, maybe she was his confidante.”

  Miriam slumped in Lenhardt’s chair. She looked every bit her age now, and then some, her good posture gone, her eyes sunken. Infante wanted to tell to her that she had accomplished much by coming here, that her trip had been worthwhile, but he wasn’t sure it was true. They would have searched Dunham’s room eventually, even without Miriam identifying the link between her household and his. Visiting the old man hadn’t seemed urgent when his name first surfaced, because of the dementia, but they would have started poking around in his affairs soon enough. Hell, up until this afternoon Infante hadn’t even been convinced that Dunham was connected to anyone but Tony Dunham and the ever-elusive Penelope Jackson. That was the one link they had established independently—mystery woman to Penelope Jackson to Tony Dunham to Stan Dunham.

  Still, if he was being honest with himself, he had to second-guess his own decision not to visit Dunham as soon as he had the name. Was it because Stan Dunham
was a police? Had he hesitated, made a bum decision because he just couldn’t believe that one of their own could be involved in such a sick crime? Should they have locked her up the first night and trusted the accommodations at the Women’s Detention Center to provide all the encouragement she needed to talk? She had played them all, even Gloria, her own lawyer, stalling them, trying to figure out a way to keep from telling them who she was. But she wasn’t gutsy enough, or depraved enough, to try to play the mother that way. Maybe that was the one shred of decency in her, the place where she drew the line. She had run because she didn’t want to confront the mother.

  Or maybe she had run because she believed that Miriam, with a glance, could do the one thing that they had failed to do this past week—eliminate with certitude the possibility that she was Heather Bethany.

  “Walk her by me,” Miriam said softly. “I don’t want to talk to her—that is, I do, I want to scream at her, ask her a thousand questions, then scream some more—but I know I mustn’t do any of those things. I just want to look at her.”

  MIRIAM WAITED in the lobby of the Public Safety Building. She thought of putting on dark glasses, then almost laughed out loud at her own heightened sense of drama. After all, this woman didn’t know her. If she’d ever seen Miriam, it was in photographs from that time, and while Miriam knew she had aged exceptionally well, she would never be mistaken for her thirty-eight-year-old self. Fact is, her thirty-nine-year-old self had barely resembled the thirty-eight-year-old version. She remembered noticing how she had changed when the newspapers ran those photos on the first-year anniversary, that her face had shifted irrevocably. It wasn’t age or grief, but something more profound, almost as if she’d been in an accident and the bones in her face had been put back together again, leaving it similar to what it had once been, but vaguely off.