What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  The elevators were frustratingly slow, as she had learned on her own descent, and the wait in the lobby seemed interminable. But, at last, Infante and Nancy got off the elevator, flanking a slight, blond woman, holding her loosely by the elbows. Her head was tilted forward, so it was hard to see her face, but Miriam studied her—Ruth, was that it?—as best as she could, took in the narrow shoulders, the slim hips, the comically youthful trousers, so wrong for a woman verging on middle age. If she were my daughter, Miriam thought, she’d have better taste than that.

  The woman looked up, and Miriam caught her eye. Miriam didn’t mean to hold the gaze, but she found she couldn’t turn away. Slowly she rose, blocking the path of the trio, clearly unnerving Infante and Nancy. This was not part of the plan. She was to sit and watch, nothing more. She had promised. They probably thought she was going to slap or push her, spit imprecations at the latest charlatan to appropriate Miriam’s life story for her own amusement.

  “Mi—Ma’am,” Infante said, correcting himself, protecting her name. “We’re escorting a prisoner. It’s only because of her injury that she’s not in handcuffs. Please stand back.”

  Miriam ignored him, taking the woman’s left hand in hers, squeezing it as if to say, This won’t hurt a bit, then pushing up the sleeve of the cardigan sweater she wore, careful not to disturb the bandaged forearm. On the upper arm, she found the mark she sought, the splayed and oh-so-faint scar of a vaccination that had been burst by the helpful application of a flyswatter, missing the fly but scattering pus and blood, creating a wound that had taken weeks to heal, a scab that had been picked continually despite all admonitions to leave it alone, that such picking would leave a permanent blemish. There it was, a ghostly mark, so faint that no one else would notice it. In fact, it was possible that it wasn’t even there, but Miriam believed she saw it, so she did.

  “Oh, Sunny,” Miriam said, “what in the world is going on?”

  CHAPTER 41

  The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.

  They wanted to know what she was thinking, what was running through her head, and that was it, exactly: The childhood song had come back to her that afternoon on the Number 15 bus, Heather sitting across the aisle from her, humming in that happily infuriating, infuriatingly happy way she had. Heather was still a little girl. Sunny was not. Sunny was about to become a woman. This bus, the Number 15, was taking other people to the mall, on ordinary errands, but it was taking her to meet her husband.

  Buses were magic. Another bus had brought her to this place in her life, this moment where everything would change. She was running away, just as her mother had. Her real mother, the one with blond hair and blue eyes like hers. Her real mother was someone who would have understood her, someone to whom she could have spoken of all the things locked up in her heart, secrets so explosive that she had never written them down anywhere, even in her diary. Sunny Bethany was fifteen, and she was in love with Tony Dunham, and every song she heard, every sound she heard, seemed to pulse with that information, even the thrumming wheels on the bus.

  The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.

  It had begun on another bus, the school bus, after the route was reversed at the other parents’ insistence and Sunny ended up riding alone in the afternoons.

  “Mind if I put the radio on?” the driver asked one day. He was a substitute, young and good-looking, not at all like Mr. Madison, who normally drove the route. “But you have to keep it a secret. We’re not supposed to play the radio. My father, who owns the bus company, he’s really strict.”

  “Sure,” she said, embarrassed at the way her voice squeaked. “I won’t tell.”

  Then—not the next time he drove, or the time after that, or even the time after that, but the fourth time, in November, when the weather was turning colder: “Why don’t you move up here to the front seat and talk to me, keep me company? It gets awfully lonely, sitting up here by myself.”

  “Sure,” she said, gathering her books to her chest, feeling stupid when the bus hit a pothole and she banged her hip hard against one of the seats. But Tony didn’t laugh at her, or mock her. “My apologies,” he said. “I’ll try to keep the ride smooth from here on out, my lady.”

  Another time—the fifth time, or maybe the sixth. Their encounters were frequent enough to blend together now, although she seldom saw him more than two or three times a month. “Do you like this song? It’s called ‘Lonely Girl.’ It reminds me of you.”

  “Really?” She wasn’t sure she did like the song, but she listened closely, especially to the final line, about the lonely boy. Did that mean—but she kept her eyes on her notebook, a blue binder. Other girls inked the names of their crushes on the cover, but she never had dared. A few weeks later, she tried doodling a tiny “TD” in the lower right-hand corner. “What does that stand for?” Heather had asked, nosy Heather, always spying Heather. “Touchdown,” Sunny said. Later she transformed the initials into three-dimensional shapes she had learned to draw in geometry.

  More and more, Tony talked about himself, over the music. He had tried to join the army, go to ’Nam, but they wouldn’t take him, much to his mother’s relief and his disappointment. Sunny didn’t know there were people who wanted to fight in the war. Tony had a heart defect or something, mitral valve prolapse. She couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with his heart. He had feathered hair, which he groomed frequently with a small brush he kept tucked in the pocket of his jeans, and he wore a gold chain. He smoked Pall Malls, but only after the other kids had gotten off the bus. “Don’t rat me out,” he said, winking at her in the rearview mirror. “You sure are pretty. Has anyone ever told you that? You should wear your hair like Susan Dey. But you’re already a cutie.”

  The wheels on the bus went round and round.

  “I really wish we could spend time together. Real time, not just these bus rides. Wouldn’t that be nice, if we could be alone somewhere?” She thought it might be, but she didn’t see how it could be arranged. She knew without asking that her parents, as open and freewheeling as they professed to be, wouldn’t let her date a twenty-three-year-old bus driver. She wasn’t sure, however, what would bother them more—the twenty-three part, the bus-driver part, or the wanted-to-go-to-’Nam part.

  Eventually, Tony said he wanted to marry her, that if she met him at the mall some Saturday, they could drive up to Elkton, get married at the little chapel where people from New York got married, because there was no waiting period, no blood tests required. No, she said. He couldn’t be serious. “I am, I will. You’re so pretty, Sunny. Who wouldn’t want to marry you?” She remembered that her mother, her real one, had run away at seventeen to marry her true love, Sunny’s real father, and people grew up faster now. She heard her parents say that all the time. Kids grow up so fast now.

  The next time she saw him, the week of March 23, she said yes, she would meet him, and now, a mere six days later, she was on another bus, heading to see him. She was going to go on her honeymoon tonight. She shivered a bit, thinking about that. They had never been able to do more than kiss, and only a little, but it had made her insides flip. Tony’s father knew his schedule too well, questioned him closely if he returned home late, sniffed the interior of the bus and asked if he’d been smoking. It was funny, but being the son of the man who owned the bus company didn’t get Tony any special privileges, just the opposite. The only reason Tony still lived at home, at age twenty-three, was that his mother would be heartbroken if he left.

  “But we won’t live with them, after we’re married,” he said. “She won’t expect that. We’ll get an apartment in town, or maybe over to York.”

  “Like the Peppermint Patty?”

  “Like the Peppermint Patty.”

  The wheels on the bus went round and round.

  AND THEN HEATHER had to go and ruin everything, following Sunny not only to the mall but into Chinatown, where Sunny was supposed to re
ndezvous—his word—with Tony. Once they were thrown out, Sunny had fled, not sure what to do. How would she find Tony now? She went to Harmony Hut. Music was their common bond after all, the thing that had brought them together. Eventually he did find her, but he was angry and out of sorts, as if the ruined plan were all her fault. Then Heather had found them, spotted Sunny standing in Harmony Hut, right in front of the Who records, holding a man’s hand. Heather began making a fuss, saying the same man had tried to talk to her by the organ store, that he was a creep. She said she was going to tell. They had to take her with them, right? If they left Heather alone, Sunny told Tony, she would tattle to their parents, and that would ruin everything. They promised Heather candy and money, said she could go home after they were married, that she could be the flower girl, the witness. The flower-girl part seemed to win her over. But out in the parking lot Heather decided she didn’t want to go, and Tony grabbed her a little roughly and pushed her into the car. In the scuffle she dropped her purse, but Tony refused to go back for it, and she had cried and whined all the way up the highway about that stupid purse. “I lost my purse. With my Bonne Belle. And my comb, the souvenir one from Rehoboth Beach. I lost my purse.”

  Only there was no wedding when they got to Elkton. The courthouse was closed, so they couldn’t get a marriage license. Tony pretended to be surprised, but he had made a reservation at a motel down in Aberdeen. Why would you call ahead for a motel, but not check on whether the courthouse was open? Sunny had a sick feeling in her stomach, not at all like the flips she’d felt while kissing. In the room with Tony and Heather—Tony glowering because he couldn’t be alone with Sunny, Heather still whining about her lost purse—Sunny had felt trapped, confused. She wasn’t sure if she was angry with Heather for interrupting her honeymoon or relieved. It was beginning to seem like a stupid idea. She wanted to go to high school and then college, travel through the world as her father had, with nothing more than a backpack. She volunteered to go across the street to a diner and buy them all dinner. She decided not to mention that she would be using the money she’d taken from Heather’s bank.

  The diner was called the New Ideal, and it was the old-fashioned kind her father loved best, where everything was made from scratch. Burgers like that took longer, but they were worth it. In fact, diners were the only place her father ever ate burgers. Even a health nut, he said, had to let loose every now and then. He had made them chocolate-chip pancakes that morning, and she hadn’t finished hers. She wished she had. She wished she could go back to this morning, but that was impossible. Still, she could go home. She would go back to the room, ask Tony to take them home, come up with a lie and persuade Heather to back her up, bribing her with her own money.

  She paid for the cheeseburgers, never guessing that her life had ended while she waited in the New Ideal Diner.

  WHEN SUNNY RETURNED to the room, Heather was lying on the floor, not moving. An accident, Tony said. She was jumping on the bed making all this noise and I told her to stop, tried to grab her arm, and she fell.

  “We have to call a doctor or take her to a hospital. Maybe she’s not really dead.” Hopeless words, said over the body of a clearly dead Heather, the back of her head as collapsed as a pumpkin the day after Halloween, blood seeping into a towel beneath her once-blond hair. Why had he put a towel beneath her head? And how do you hit your head so hard falling off a bed? But those were questions Sunny would not even dare to consider for several years.

  “No,” Tony said. “She’s dead. We should call my dad. He’ll know what to do.”

  STAN DUNHAM WAS far kinder than the tyrant described by his son over those months of confessional talks on the bus. He did not yell, or scream, or say, as Sunny’s mother often did, What were you thinking, Sunny? Why didn’t you use your head? Sunny could see how he might be strict, but not scary, never scary. If you were in real trouble, you would want to talk to someone like Stan Dunham.

  “This is the way I see it,” he said, sitting on the motel double bed, his hands on his knees. “We have lost one life, and we can’t get it back. If we call the authorities, my son will be arrested and charged. No one will believe it was an accident. And Sunny will have to live the rest of her life with parents who will blame her for the death of her sister.”

  “But I didn’t…” she protested. “I wasn’t—”

  He held up a hand, and Sunny fell silent. “It will be hard for your parents to think otherwise. Can’t you see that? Parents are human, too. They won’t want to hate you, but they will. I know. I’m a parent.”

  She bowed her head, out of arguments.

  “But here’s how I see it, Sunny? I’m right, it’s Sunny, isn’t it? You and Tony made a plan. I’m not sure if Tony knew that a fifteen-year-old girl can’t marry without her parents’ consent in this state”—he shot his son a look—“but this was your plan, and we’re going to see it through. That’s honorable, doing what you said you were going to do. You’ll come live with us, under a new name. At home you can be Tony’s wife, just like you planned. You’ll share a room, even. I’m okay with that. Outside the house, you’ll have to go to school for a while, be someone else. And when you’re old enough, you can have a proper wedding. I’ll work it out. I’ll make everything work. You have my word.”

  With that he lifted Heather as any father might pick up a sleeping child, cradling her broken head and arranging her over his shoulder, then carrying her out to his car, telling Sunny to follow him. To her amazement she did—into the car, into another life, another world, where she would not have to be the girl who had caused her sister’s death. Tony was to stay behind and clean the room, then spend the night there as planned, in order to keep people at the motel from becoming suspicious about events in room 249. Tony never meant to marry me, Sunny admitted to herself, sitting in Stan Dunham’s car, her sister’s body in his trunk. He was going to take her to this ugly motel off the highway, have sex with her, then return her home, counting on her shame and embarrassment to keep her from telling anyone.

  It probably would have worked, too. She would have gone back to Algonquin Lane, concocted some story about what had happened, why she’d gone missing for several hours. But she couldn’t go home now, not without Heather. Mr. Dunham was right. They would never forgive her. She would never forgive herself.

  THEY CALLED HER Ruth, told people that she was a distant cousin, unknown to them before the fire that had killed her family. Outside the house that’s all she was, a distant cousin who may or may not have been falling in love with her newfound boy-cousin, but she was Tony’s wife from the day she crossed the threshold. She shared Tony’s bed—and quickly discovered she didn’t enjoy it. The sweetness, the compliments from their time on the bus—those were gone, replaced by an urgent, not-quite-brutal sex notable primarily for its brevity. When she felt wistful for home, when she dared to say that perhaps she should go back, that there must be a way, Stan Dunham told her that she had no home. Her parents had broken up and drifted away. Her father was a failure, her mother an adulterer. Besides, she was an accessory now, someone who had helped to cover up a crime, and she would be charged if she came forward. “I used to be a police,” he said. “I know what’s happening with the investigation. You’re better off with us.”

  It did not escape her that the Dunhams were the kind of family for which she had yearned in recent years. Normal, she would have called them, with a father who had a real job and a mother who stayed home and baked, tying bright aprons over her dresses. Irene Dunham seemed to have more aprons than dresses, in fact, and she baked every day of the week. Her piecrust was famous, she told Sunny, bragging on herself with a self-satisfied air that Irene found unacceptable in others. But her pie, for all the prizes it had won, was dust in Sunny’s mouth, and she never finished a slice. Irene didn’t seem to care for Sunny much, blaming her for everything that happened, standing by her son no matter what he did.

  As Sunny got older, she sometimes tried to say no to Tony when he wanted sex
, and he would hit her, blackening her eye on one occasion, dislocating her jaw another, punching her so hard in the stomach that she thought she might never breathe again. And one time, the last time, just about killing her. Admittedly, this was after she had struck him with the poker from the living-room fireplace, the same poker she had used to break the heads on Irene’s beloved dolls.

  This was their official wedding night.

  It was almost midnight, and the elder Dunhams were asleep as usual, but for once they couldn’t ignore the noises coming from Tony’s bedroom. Irene Dunham had gone straight to her son’s side, although he had nothing more than a bright red line of blood across his cheek, the one blow that she had landed before he pulled the poker from her and began beating her, then kicking her. Stan Dunham had gone to her, however, and in the moment that he reached for her and their eyes met, Sunny saw that he knew, had always known. He understood that his son had killed Heather, that her death was not an accident. She hadn’t fallen and hit her head. Tony had beaten her, or thrown her to the floor and pounded her head until it broke. Why? Who knows? He was a violent, frustrated man. Heather was a mouthy little girl who had ruined his plan. Perhaps that was reason enough. Perhaps there could never be reasons enough for what he’d done.

  “You have to leave,” Stan Dunham told her, and if his family heard his words as a punishment, an exile, she knew he was trying to save her. The next day, he found a new name for her, taught her the trick of disappearing into a little dead girl’s unclaimed identity. “Someone born about the right time, who died before getting a Social Security card, that’s what you want.” He bought her a bus ticket and told her that he would always be there for her, and Stan Dunham was nothing if not true to his word. When she was twenty-five and decided she wanted to learn how to drive, he had come down to Virginia on weekends and patiently guided her through empty school parking lots. When she decided, back in 1989, that she wanted the training necessary to get hired on as a proper computer tech, he had underwritten it. When Irene died and Stan no longer had to worry about his wife’s grudging oversight, he purchased an annuity for Sunny. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it helped her make car payments and, lately, deposits to her savings account, which she hoped to use for a condo if the real-estate market ever cooled down.