Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  She returned to the bedroom with two old-fashioned glasses, aluminum Russell Wright knockoffs, on a matching tray, and set them on the bedside table.

  “How civilized,” Daniel said, coming back into the room. He was skinny and on the short side, and his hairline would probably start receding soon. But those things didn’t matter to Sharon. The real problem with Daniel Kutchner was that her mother had picked him out for her, as his mother had picked Sharon out for him, and this could not be overcome.

  He sat on the side of the bed, as if he hadn’t decided whether to sleep or flee. Sharon didn’t care if he left eventually. The only thing she asked of her intermittent lovers was that they talk to her afterward. Hence, the ritual of the drink. If she had smoked, that would have worked, too. But she didn’t, and so few people did now. But confronted with an offer of a drink, few men could insist on going to sleep, or running out the door.

  Daniel set his glass back down, knocking over a small wooden frame. As he righted it, he peered at the face in the photograph, just visible in the available light coming from the bathroom.

  “Who’s this? Not you with these pigtails.”

  “No, I was never a blond, that’s for sure.”

  “Niece?”

  “Client.”

  The photo was one of Alice, an old snapshot that Helen Manning had given Sharon for reasons she could no longer recall. She only knew it was a “before” photo of sorts, a picture of Alice from earlier in the summer of her eleventh year. A snapshot of a perfectly normal-looking little girl. Which was the point, of course, the thing that Sharon had never wanted anyone to forget.

  “Client? Why do you have a photo of a client by your bedside?”

  “Because it was probably the most amazing case I’ll ever be involved with.” She had meant to be a little hyperbolic, but realized the words, once spoken, were the simple truth. “You’re from Baltimore, right?”

  “Originally.”

  “Seven years ago—I’m not sure if it was in newspapers outside the area—two little girls were accused of killing a baby.”

  “And that girl is—”

  “One of the accused. Even now, even here, I wouldn’t say her name to you. It’s privileged. We kept their names private, which was no small thing, let me tell you.”

  “So they weren’t tried as adults?”

  “They were eleven!” Sharon’s voice rose automatically, and she had to remember to yank it back down to a tone better suited to a postcoital chat. “There was no provision in Maryland law to try children that young as adults. Not that the parents of the victim didn’t push for that. And then, when it was clear the family wouldn’t get its way, the victim’s mother threatened to lobby to have the law changed, so homicides could be moved into adult court no matter what the age of the accused.”

  “Bad cases make bad law, right?”

  “Yeah. And she had the juice, her family was connected. She could have done it. That’s why we were forced to compromise.”

  “How so?”

  “At the time, the law held that juveniles couldn’t serve more than three years for any one crime. The other girl’s lawyer and I crafted a plea that allowed the state to give them seven years on three counts—homicide, kidnapping, and felony theft. For the baby carriage,” she added, anticipating his question. “I don’t remember the brand, but it was one of those things that was expensive because it was so light.”

  “Like a laptop,” Kutchner said. “Or a cell phone. The smaller it is, the more you pay.”

  Sharon nodded, annoyed at the interruption. “So they went away until they were eighteen, and the victim’s mother calmed down. Eventually.” She swirled the Baileys in her glass, watched the creamy pale brown liquid flow over the ice. “Truthfully, I’ve always thought my client would have been better off if I could have taken the case into an adult court, with a jury and the public’s full oversight.”

  “How can that be?”

  “She told me she was innocent. That she wasn’t there when it happened. She was with Ron—the other girl—when they took the baby, but it was a kid thing. They thought the girl had been left alone, they were trying to do the right thing. They didn’t set out to be criminals, to do something violent. Something went wrong.”

  “How did—I mean—”

  “Suffocation. That was another thing. The child’s death wasn’t inconsistent with SIDS. I could have argued that.”

  “Isn’t that paradoxical? Arguing that your client wasn’t there, arguing that your client might have been there but the death was due to natural causes.” Daniel Kutchner was an accountant.

  “A good defense doesn’t have to be consistent.”

  No sound came from Daniel Kutchner’s side of the bed, except for the ice in his glass, a small swallow, a slight creak in the springs as he shifted his weight. An accountant sitting in judgment on a lawyer. Sharon decided not to mention what accountants had wrought in recent years.

  “In a way, I’ve always felt Alice was sacrificed.” Sharon did not even notice she had given up the name she was usually so vigilant about protecting.

  “Sacrificed?”

  “There was so much…bad feeling about what happened. The victim was black, the accused girls were white. As you can see. And the media harped on the case so. People wanted to feel that something had been done. They wanted guarantees that it would never happen again. Which is impossible. Look, there are cases of young killers going back hundreds of years. And I don’t mean sociopaths, or some stupid bad seed scenario. Kids kill. To me, the amazing thing is that they don’t kill more often. Because they don’t really get it, you know? Death, I mean.”

  She did not share with him her fantasy of trying Alice before a jury of her true peers, a dozen little big-eyed girls who knew what it was to make mistakes out of no larger sin than the desire to go along and get along. She imagined twelve little gamma girls—or was Alice a beta, according to the terms set out in the flurry of literature on “mean girls”—watching her solemnly as she laid out the facts, described Ronnie’s sway over her client. It would have taken such a jury less than an hour to acquit Alice.

  “Except—you don’t think your client did kill.” Daniel Kutchner had leaned against the headboard, but his left leg dangled over the side of the bed, still in contact with the floor, like an actor trying to make love according to the old Hays Code. He wasn’t the type to stay overnight, which was fine with Sharon, the best of all possible worlds. As long as they didn’t rush into the night or escape into sleep immediately after sex, she didn’t care what they did.

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Then why would you let her serve seven years? Why didn’t she draw less time than the other girl?”

  “The evidence was…somewhat contradictory. And the girls’ statements were diametrically opposed. She said–she said. The judge who presided couldn’t see any fair way to sort it out.”

  “Sounds like your client got screwed.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  The band had tried to quit at 1 A.M., but Andy—tie undone, jacket shorn—had seized the microphone and demanded that the wedding guests open their wallets and pay for another set. Nancy, filled with liquid goodwill, beamed at her husband. This was the man she had fallen in love with, boisterous and confident. The feds did not encourage such personalities, and he had to keep himself so tamped down at work that his broad shoulders had rounded a little and his head seemed to hang at times, heavy on his neck. She hoped the law, once he finished school and entered a practice, would restore some of Andy’s self back to him.

  Now, dropped to one knee on the dance floor, bills clenched in his fist, he was every bit the boy she had known since junior high and loved since high school. “More,” he bellowed. “More, more, more. We will have music. And the bar will stay open. A Polish wedding can’t end this early. It would be shameful.”

  Eventually the reception ended, and neither Nancy nor Andy was really in any shape to drive. But
neither was anyone else, so they ambled to the Double-T Diner out on Route 40, albeit on the opposite end from New York Fried Chicken. There, her latest diet long forgotten, Nancy dragged french fries through gravy with her left hand and held on to Andy with her right. With his free hand, he flipped through the tabletop jukebox, but it was a bit of a gyp, for the restaurant’s sound system was dominated by whoever had the fastest quarter. A Bon Jovi song bounced through the night, and she couldn’t tell if it was one of their old ones or one of their new ones that sounded like one of their old ones. She could have been eighteen again, it could have been the night of her senior prom. Her brides-maid’s dress, a yellow horror, would have fit right in at the Kenwood High School prom.

  Nancy was one of the few people she knew who admitted to being happy in high school. Why was that such a badge of shame for others? She didn’t see it as some Glory Days high point, but it had been fun, and she had been conscious of the fact that life wouldn’t always be fun, or easy. And it was for this very reason that she had gloried in eighteen, hadn’t wasted a minute of it. True, she had worried about her weight even then, but what she wouldn’t give to have back her teenage body. Even the low points—the brief breakups with Andy, the science classes that had almost sunk her completely—had made her appreciate the effortless fun, day in and day out.

  Andy was trying to put a french fry in his coffee.

  “I am so driving home,” she told him, not minding that he was wasted. He worked hard; he had earned this.

  “Let’s”—it came out a little slurred, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been—“let’s drive up to Gunpowder Falls.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Why not now? Like we used to.”

  “Like we—” Then she got it.

  Within forty-five minutes, she was on top of him in the bucket seat of his Jeep Cherokee, part of her mind grateful for the room these SUVs provided, another part thinking how funny it would be if some county patrol cop came tap, tap, tapping at their window with his flashlight, then saw Nancy astride Andy, the yellow horror pushed above her hips and below her breasts, revealing the wretched strapless bra that had been digging into her all night. Andy couldn’t have gotten that off with a knife, the shape he was in.

  “Evening, Officer,” she imagined herself saying, holding up her badge to the window. “I’m Homicide Detective Porter and this is Federal Agent Porter, from the local ATF field office.”

  But they were left alone, so Nancy settled for the efficient, shuddering pleasures her husband provided. At the last minute, he asked if she wanted him to pull out, as he hadn’t brought anything with him, but she just held him hard inside her, shaking her head. Later, she wondered why she hadn’t minded taking the chance. Certainly it wasn’t because she was worried about the dress.

  Helen Manning saw the sun come up that Sunday. More accurately, she saw the light seeping into her kitchen, which faced east, while she sat in her still-dark living room. Her glass was long empty, had been for hours. She had allowed herself exactly three cigarettes, and these were long gone, too. The cigarettes had been the tobacco variety because dope was something she had only when the right man was in her life, and there were fewer and fewer men these days. Strange, but she had dated even more infrequently after Alice went away, which seemed counterintuitive. After all, it should have been easier to meet men when she was unencumbered, but she found she had little taste for it. Helen preferred the admiration of men to their companionship. And that was easy to get, as long as a woman kept herself up. Helen could go weeks on the warmth of a single glance in the supermarket. She still turned heads.

  Finally she heard the sounds she had waited all night to hear—a car door slamming, footsteps on the walk, the storm door opening, the key in the unlocked lock, turning one way, then the other.

  “Good morning,” she said to Alice.

  “You don’t need to wait up for me.”

  “It’s six A.M.”

  “Really, you shouldn’t worry.” Alice’s voice, which had been husky even as a child, was a pleasant contralto, all warm concern.

  “You’ve been out all night. Where did you go? Who were you with?”

  “Nowhere. No one. I’m sorry, I just can’t sleep these days. So I walk.”

  “It’s dangerous.” Her voice scaled up, unintentionally tentative, making the maternal assertion sound like a question.

  “Not where I go.”

  “Which is—”

  “You know, you should go to sleep, Mom. You’re useless if you don’t get your eight hours.”

  It was just what Helen said about herself, all the time. I’m useless if I don’t get my eight hours. Alice had repeated it back in her usual pleasant voice, with no judgment attached. Yet Helen felt judged all the same. With or without eight hours of sleep, she was useless to her daughter now and would be until she gave her what she wanted, until she told her what she wanted to hear.

  If only she could.

  Friday,

  July 3

  15.

  7:30 P.M.

  Brittany Little disappeared late in the afternoon on the first day of the holiday weekend, wandering away from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend while they shopped for a sofa in Value City.

  “One minute she was there,” her mother, Maveen Little, kept telling police, “and then she wasn’t.” No one seemed to believe the minute part, Maveen could tell. Who could lose a child in a minute? But she was adamant: She and her boyfriend, Devlin Hatch, could not have turned their backs for more than a minute as they studied the love seats and sleepers and couches. A minute was a long, long time. “Count it out for yourself,” she snapped at the young officer, who was acting sympathetic. But if they believed her, why wasn’t she talking to a detective yet? Why were these officers baby-sitting her and Devlin in their own apartment, instead of searching the city for her baby?

  The two patrol officers had said they needed to come to the apartment to get a photo of Brittany for the evening news. Maveen knew they also wanted to poke around her home, look for evidence that wasn’t there. They seemed to suspect Devlin more than her, but that was just as infuriating.

  “Look, when a child goes missing, we always find them,” said the younger of the two young officers, Ben Siegel, the one who had been left to sit with her on the old sofa. This was the piece of furniture Maveen and Devlin had hoped to replace when he got his insurance check. She wanted to explain that she knew it was beat-up and old, that it had been a castoff from her mother. Maveen never would have chosen a light solid that showed the dirt, not with a child. But Officer Siegel didn’t seem to notice. He sat between Maveen and Devlin as if he spent every night here, waiting for the ten o’clock news to come on.

  “You always, always find them?” Maveen asked.

  “Always. I can’t remember a single case where a child truly went missing for more than a few hours.”

  She caught that truly. He was still accusing. Everyone was judging them all the time.

  The news finally came. Maveen felt a weird burst of pride to see her baby’s photo up there, the second story of the evening, and Devlin smiled in a fond way that he seldom did when Brittany was here. You didn’t have to be rich or famous for your missing baby to matter. A lost child was a lost child. That’s what made the U.S. of A. a great country. And Brittany was so beautiful, people couldn’t help taking extra notice, Maveen thought. It had killed Maveen’s parents when she had taken up with Byron, but who could argue with the result? Brittany had skin the color of a coffee that was half cream, ringlets just a shade darker, and green eyes with lashes so long you’d swear she was wearing false ones. She was delicious looking. Even other children wanted to pinch her cheeks, stroke her hair.

  The telephone rang before the last notes of the newscast’s theme song had bounced away. Maveen jumped on it, only to hear another officer, Donald something, tell her to put Officer Siegel on the phone. Reluctantly she turned over the phone, feeling a strange sensation, as
if a moth or a bug was trapped in her throat.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded when he hung up the phone. “Something’s wrong, I can tell. What did he say? What’s going on?”

  Crazily, the thought ran through her head that she should beat on his chest with her fists, the way women do in the movies, only to have men grab their wrists and kiss them. It wasn’t that she wanted to kiss this cop, who didn’t appeal to her at all. But if she started acting like it was a movie, maybe it would end like a movie, with everyone safe and happy.

  “Nothing’s wrong, exactly,” he began, licking his lips. “The thing to consider is that it’s a lead, and leads are good. Assuming…if…Ms. Little, did you mention what Brittany was wearing today?”

  “I told you and told you. She had on a sundress, denim with white stitching at the pockets, and white tennis.”

  “And she was toilet trained?”

  “Sort of. She was wearing pull-ups.” Officer Siegel looked confused. “For when she forgot.”

  Brittany had been forgetting a lot lately, ever since Devlin came to live with them, but Maveen didn’t see any reason to tell the officer that.

  “It’s just that”—he put his hand on her shoulder, and Maveen flinched as if someone had hit her, as if a two-by-four had fallen on her—“the custodian at the mall was doing the bathrooms and he found something in the trash. It was a denim jumper—”

  Maveen broke down so completely that the officer didn’t finish his piece. He let her collapse, crying, into Devlin’s arms, standing awkwardly to the side. It was left to the homicide detectives, who arrived within the hour, to decide if they wanted to tell the still-sobbing mother about the shorn hair at the bottom of the wastebasket and the blood-soaked T-shirt that was on its way to the lab for testing.