Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Four-eyes,” one girl had tried. “Four is better than two,” Cynthia had said. And that was that.

  She climbed into her car, the BMW X-25, a sports utility vehicle chosen not for its status but its heft. At 4,665 pounds it was heavier than the Lexus, even heavier than the Mercedes, and easier to maneuver than the Lincoln Navigator, which was a bit ghetto, anyway. Cynthia had actually wanted something a little less glamorous, because high-end SUVs were big with local carjackers. But the BMW had the best safety rating, so she bought the BMW and withstood the usual teasing about her love of luxury. Yes, she had once cared about things like expensive shoes and fine jewelry, had deserved her family’s fond observation that Cynthia believed herself to be, if not at the center of the universe, just a few inches to the left. But that Cynthia was long gone, even if no one else could bear to acknowledge this fact.

  Her cell phone rang. Headsets weren’t the law in Maryland, but Cynthia had opted for one anyway. It amazed her to think of how she had once driven one-handed through the city behind the wheel of a smaller, sportier BMW, heedless of her heedlessness.

  “Cynthia?”

  “Yes?” She recognized the voice, but she would be damned if she would grant this caller any intimacy.

  “It’s Sharon Kerpelman.”

  Cynthia didn’t say anything, just concentrated on passing the cars that were entering the Beltway from the tricky exit off I-83. The Beacon-Light had recently run a list of the most dangerous highway intersections in the city, and this spot was in the top five. Cynthia had memorized them without realizing it.

  “From the public defender’s office?”

  “Right,” Cynthia said.

  “I guess this is a courtesy call.”

  As if Sharon Kerpelman were even on speaking terms with courtesy.

  “I guess,” Cynthia said, “that if you don’t know what it is, I don’t either.”

  “Yes. Well. How have you been?” Sharon asked, as if reading from a script. Maybe she had finally gotten a copy of Dale Carnegie, which she sorely needed. But Sharon, being Sharon, would go straight past the part about winning friends and skip ahead to trying to influence people.

  “Why, just fine,” Cynthia drawled. Not that Sharon would ever notice anything as subtle as a tone. “But I’m driving and I don’t like to talk on the Beltway unless it’s urgent. So—”

  “This is—well, not urgent, but important.”

  “Yes?” Spit it out, Sharon.

  “Alice Manning is coming home Thursday.”

  “For a visit?”

  “For…ever. She’s being released.”

  “How can that be?”

  “She’s eighteen now. After all, it will be seven years in July—”

  “I think I remember,” Cynthia said, “when it happened.”

  The headset was suddenly tight on her temples, squeezing so hard she felt as if those soon-to-be-rigid muscles behind her eyes might fly out of her head. How unfair. How unfair. The juvenile lament was her instinctive retort whenever this subject came up. Her father, who usually snapped at such idiocy, who had devoted his professional and personal life to establishing Solomon-like standards of fairness, had agreed with her. “Yes, it is,” he said on that not-long-enough-ago day when the deal had been struck. “We have bent the law as far as we can, but we can’t go further without breaking it. They are children in the eyes of the law.”

  “And in the eyes of God?” she had asked her father.

  “I suppose they are children still. For God has to shoulder responsibility for all of us, even the monsters among us.”

  Today, her rage found its outlet in childlike cruelty. “Was Alice the fat one or the crazy one?” She could never forget their names, or their faces, yet she always had trouble matching them up. It was a kind of selective dyslexia, like her tendency to confuse surnames such as Thomas and Thompson, Murray and Murphy. Cynthia thought of the two as grotesque Siamese twins, connected at the waist, tripping over their four legs as they came down her street, up her porch, into her life.

  Sharon’s voice was prim, intended to be a reproof, as if Cynthia could ever be shamed on this topic. “Alice was the one with blond hair, worn straight back with a band. Here’s a tip: think Alice in Wonderland.”

  “What?”

  “As a mnemonic device, I mean. Or Ronnie-Aran, if you prefer, as in Isle of Aran, for she had dark hair and light eyes. The look they sometimes call Black Irish.” An embarrassed laugh. “I mean, I don’t call it Black Irish, but you hear that sometimes, among people of a certain generation—I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” Sharon had said so much worse to Cynthia, so blithely and unknowingly, that it was hilarious she would fret over this minor gaffe. The last time they had spoken, in a chance meeting outside a shopping mall, Cynthia had yearned to box her ears. But Judge Poole’s daughters didn’t fight with their fists.

  “Anyway, I just wanted you to know. So if you saw her. Alice, I mean.”

  Everything made sense now. Her eyesight was getting better because she needed to see. Come to think of it, her hearing was sharper, too, so intense that the softest sound jarred her from her dreamless sleep. She didn’t exercise, it seemed idiotic now, going around and around on a treadmill or a stair-stepper, yet she had never been stronger, leaner, had more stamina. Maybe she should write a book, The Black Coffee and Cigarette Diet: How to Mourn Your Way to a Better Body. Good line, she would save that one up, throw it out to her sister, Sylvia, the next time they talked. Sylvia was the one person in Cynthia’s life who didn’t flinch at her sarcasm.

  The significance of Sharon’s call finally worked its way into the center of her brain. “She…is…coming…home. To my neighborhood.”

  “Technically, I don’t think the Mannings live in Hunting Ridge. They’re a few blocks outside the boundary.”

  Technically. How Sharon loved technicalities, legal and otherwise.

  “She is coming home,” Cynthia repeated. “To a house that is no more than six blocks from my house.”

  “Helen Manning’s a city schoolteacher and a single mother. She doesn’t have the resources to pick up and move.” How quickly Sharon always switched from contrite to self-righteous. The defensive public defender, Warren had called her. You must understand, Cynthia…What purpose can be achieved, Cynthia…They are little girls, Cynthia…Your tragedy, great as it is, Cynthia…There will always be some ambiguity, Cynthia. You, of all people, must value justice, Cynthia. Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia.

  As if what Cynthia wanted was anything less than justice. She had let them talk her out of justice.

  “Can’t you make it a rule that she has to live someplace else?”

  “Of course not.” Sharon’s voice was huffy now, hurt. It was the paradoxical mark of the offensive, in Cynthia’s experience, that they were offended so easily. The only feelings Sharon safeguarded were her own.

  “When that man on North Avenue got pardoned, they made it a condition that he couldn’t go back to the neighborhood where he had shot that child.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “No, he killed a thirteen-year-old boy. This was a nine-month-old child. Oh, and he was pardoned.” Cynthia did not add: He was a black man who killed a black child. These were white girls who killed a black baby. She let her silence say that part, let what was unsaid make Sharon squirm, in her little cubbyhole in that sad-ass state office building. All your scheming, all your planning, and you sit today where you sat seven years ago. What was the point?

  “You live in two different worlds,” Sharon said. “You’ll probably never see either one of them again.”

  “We lived in two different worlds seven years ago, too.”

  “You know, I’ve always felt that the only way to understand what happened was to think of it as a natural disaster, almost like a tornado, or lightning.” Sharon’s voice was so reasonable, so sure of itself, the voice of a girl who had been on her high school debate team and still considered this a nota
ble achievement. “A series of events came together and formed something horrible, something destructive. Wouldn’t it make you feel better to see it in that light?”

  Answers crowded Cynthia’s tongue, backed up into her throat, until she thought she might choke on them. It would make you feel better. You always try to have it both ways, and you won’t even let me have it one way.

  Brake lights flashed ahead of her, traffic coming to a stop for no discernible reason, and her reflexes were off because of the phone call, so the 4,665 pounds of BMW squealed and shimmied, coming within inches of the rusty little Escort in front of her, a ready-to-disintegrate heap with a Kings Dominion bumper sticker and a Confederate flag decal. Cynthia didn’t mind Confederate flags. She’d like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.

  “Can I have a restraining order?”

  “I don’t think Alice is inclined—”

  “I didn’t ask what anyone wanted to do. I asked what I could have. What the law will give me.”

  Sharon sighed, put-upon. “The courts can’t write you a blank check for things that haven’t happened yet. But I can tell you that Alice will be counseled to stay away from Ronnie Fuller and your family.”

  “My family? You mean she knows? You told her? Why would you tell her anything about me?” Cynthia’s voice rose, in spite of herself, frantic and out of control, and she realized someone in the adjacent lane was staring at her.

  “I haven’t told her anything. I meant family in the most general way possible.”

  Family in the most general way possible. Only a single woman, a childless woman, could speak of family in the most general way possible. Cynthia hung up on Sharon Kerpelman, as she had so many times before.

  It took her forty-five minutes to crawl around the Beltway. That meant the end of Dr. Silverstein, Cynthia was afraid. No doctor was worth that kind of time. Between the drive and the wait in his office, she had been gone four hours, which was much too long. She parked behind the house and let herself into the back door, where she was welcomed by the security system’s polite beep.

  “Hey, Momma.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Cynthia’s eyes could keep improving for ten, twenty years, and they would never be as sharp as her mother’s. Paulette Poole could see the future with her green eyes. Paulette Poole had predicted trouble when Cynthia and Warren bought this house. “Why do you want to live over there? Who are you trying to impress?” And Paulette Poole had seen from the first how the justice system, which had given the Poole family so much, would fail them when they needed it most. Paulette Poole was a witch, in the best sense of the word.

  “Just traffic, Momma. Rush hour starts earlier and earlier in this city.”

  “Well, you go all the way to Towson to get your eyes checked…” Paulette Poole didn’t bother to finish her sentence. Her daughter knew where she stood. Paulette Poole thought it was ridiculous for Cynthia to quit Dr. Hepple, their neighbor in Forest Park, in order to go to some white Jewish doctor just because his office was convenient to her job at City Hall.

  “Where is—”

  “Upstairs. With a video.”

  Because her mother was there, Cynthia walked with deliberate slowness, taking the front stairs instead of the back. She heard a tinny sound from the street, the plink-plink tones of an ice cream truck, although the ditty faded so quickly that she wondered if she had imagined it. All around the carpenter’s bench / The monkey chased the weasel / The monkey thought it was a joke. She remembered a smile, a horrible, inappropriate smile, and the way her hand had ached to jump out, smack it from the child’s face.

  The alcove off the master bedroom was intended to be a dressing room, but Cynthia had renovated it three years ago, insisting it was large enough. Now that it had made the transition from nursery to bedroom, it clearly wasn’t. Still, she resisted Warren’s gentle nudging on the matter, pretending she didn’t understand why he wanted their bedroom just for them again.

  Rosalind sat on the floor, eyes locked on Sleeping Beauty, singing along in a breathy baby voice. La-la-la. La-la-la. She was such an easy baby, had been from the first, and had passed through the so-called terrible twos with barely a tantrum. She had never known colic, which had troubled Olivia so, and she was seldom stricken with so much as a cold. Well, a child breast-fed until the age of two had advantages when it came to immunities.

  Rosalind had also come out shockingly light and stayed that way, a trick of the blood that Cynthia’s mother claimed for her family tree, although Cynthia knew there wasn’t a fair-skinned ancestor in the bunch. No one knew what to make of the amazing hair, which hung in amber ringlets. Her eyes, however, were brown, like almost everyone else in the Poole and Barnes clans. Olivia had gotten the green eyes of this generation, and family legend held that only one child would have green eyes.

  “Who dat baby?” Rosalind had asked a few weeks ago, noticing for the first time the photograph in a small oval frame on Cynthia’s dressing table. “Who dat?”

  Who dat indeed? She and Warren had known they would have to tell Rosalind one day. But it had never occurred to them that a toddler would initiate the conversation with such a basic existential question: Who dat? She was your sister. Except—she wasn’t, because you and she never existed in the same plane. She is nothing to you, and never will be. And if she had not died, you might not exist, because your mother had specific plans for her life, and having a baby at age forty-one was not one of them.

  Rosalind was satisfied with the simplest truth: “Olivia.” She repeated the name, patted the photo, and promptly forgot about it. All Rosalind wanted was a way to categorize and identify. That is a cow and that is a dog and that is Olivia. The cow goes moo and the dog goes bow-wow and Olivia goes…“Livvy.” Her first word, her only word, uttered a few days before she was taken. They had joked about it at the time, how the daughter was just like her mother, so sure of her place at the center of the universe, or only a few inches to the left.

  Now Cynthia couldn’t help thinking it was as if Olivia knew she might never get to say her name otherwise.

  On the video, the bad fairy was throwing a fit over her missing invitation. Uninvited, sent home early—it all ends the same way, doesn’t it? The bad fairy reminded Cynthia not of Alice and Ronnie but of Sharon, and their last face-to-face meeting outside Columbia Mall summer before last.

  Cynthia had been struggling with Rosalind’s carriage, a European model that was a pain in the ass—so heavy, so not-portable, so impossible for any eleven-year-old to roll away. Sharon had stood, hands empty, chattering away, never offering to help. Did Cynthia miss City Hall? What did she think of the new mayor? Sharon had finally given up, moved to the suburbs, just to have the security of knowing she had a place to park after a long day. Was that so much to ask? Did that make her a hypocrite?

  Then that obtuse woman had leaned into the carriage and uttered her own form of a curse: “Why, Cynthia, I didn’t know you had a baby to replace Olivia.”

  The minute the words were out, even insensitive Sharon realized she had gone too far. Her cheeks burned red in a rush of blood so bright that it washed out the odd markings on the left side of her face. She scurried away, making excuses.

  Not a week later, a reporter called, her voice round with fake empathy, asking Cynthia if she wanted to tell the Beacon-Light’s readers about this bittersweet happy ending, about her triumphant second act—those had been the reporter’s words—to let Baltimoreans know how she and Warren had recovered from their horrible, horrible tragedy. Those had been her exact words, too, horrible, horrible, as if repeating the word would prove that she really understood Cynthia’s plight. That was the reporter’s term as well. Plight.

  Cynthia wasn’t fooled. She was a freak, the mother of the replacement baby, the idiot who had moved back into the same trailer park after a tornado tossed her first mobile home. They wanted to put her on parade so the pa
per’s readers would feel safe and secure. Their babies would never be stolen, their babies would never be killed, because Cynthia Barnes had taken the fall for all of them.

  Tuesday,

  April 7

  2.

  The grease smell hanging in the air behind the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 was at least six hours old, but it still juiced Nancy Porter’s appetite as she walked back and forth between the restaurant’s rear door and the Dumpster, studying blood spatters. She had started a new diet yesterday and she was already having severe cravings, especially for anything deep-fried. To her way of thinking, there was nothing on earth—no vegetable, no meat, no piece of bread—that could not be improved by being dipped in a basket of hot oil.

  Here on the part of Route 40 near where the state park began, the scent of frying oil bumped right into the generic green smells of an April morning. Cut grass, an undercurrent of lilacs, something else wild and sweet. Combined, the fried and the floral odors managed to trump the other smell on the breeze, the decadent, protein-laden fast food debris, mixed with the ferrous hangover of a young man’s death.

  “What is New York Fried Chicken, anyway?” she asked her partner, Kevin Infante. “I mean, I’ve heard of southern fried chicken and Kentucky Fried Chicken and even Maryland fried chicken, but what’s New York Fried Chicken?”

  “It’s a way of saying it’s better,” the Bronx-born Infante said with a lopsided grin. His chauvinism was a running gag with them, whether the topic was food or baseball, a way of bridging the ten-year gap in their ages while defusing any boy-girl stuff. Not that he was her type, under any circumstances. Infante had glossy black hair and wet-looking brown eyes, and if Nancy’s Polish grandfather were alive, nothing in the world could have stopped him from leaning in, pretending to run a finger across the top of Infante’s head, and announcing: “Quart low.” Josef Potrcurzski may have learned to live alongside Italians and Greeks in Highlandtown most of his adult life, but he had never learned to like it much.