Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Why don’t you tell them what I’ve told you? Why do I need to call them at all?”

  Now it was his turn to be evasive, to wait out a silence. But the seconds ticked by, with neither speaking, and it was the sergeant who finally broke.

  “If you call Nancy—or Detective Infante—then it’s a lead they’ve developed. If it comes from me, they’ll feel second-guessed.”

  Plausible, Cynthia thought. But the very fact that she found it “plausible” marked it for the half-truth it probably was. The sergeant wasn’t telling her everything. Which was only fair, as she had not told him close to everything.

  So she sat in her kitchen on Saturday, waiting for the morning hours to tick by, waiting for Sleeping Beauty to follow the arc of her destiny, from privileged birth to a date with a spindle to the deathlike sleep from which only true love could wake her. She heard all this because the nursery was still equipped with a baby monitor, which was on all the time. If only Tanika, upstairs on the phone, had remembered to turn it on that day, as Cynthia thought of it. That day, the only day. If only Tanika, hearing the phone ring, had remembered there was one in the kitchen, hadn’t dashed up the stairs to grab the extension in Cynthia’s room. If only she had remembered on which side of the door she had parked the carriage—or hadn’t lied about it later, hadn’t sworn to the skies that Olivia was inside the house, behind the latched screen door. The girl’s clumsy lies, told to cover up her mistakes, had only slowed down the investigation and sent detectives scrambling in the wrong direction.

  Cynthia made a pot of coffee, transferred it to a carafe that sat on a ceramic trivet. Italy, she thought. Our honeymoon. Whenever she thought about Tanika—stretched out on Cynthia’s bed, chatting to her boyfriend, shoes leaving black marks on the spread—she always ended up in Italy, on her honeymoon.

  Why are you going to Italy, people—well, her parents’ friends—had asked the young couple. Why not Hawaii? Why not Jamaica? Go someplace you won’t work so hard. Why Italy?

  “For the shoes,” Cynthia drawled.

  People had laughed as she knew they would. “Oh, but you’ll want to see Rome, of course, and Venice, and Tuscany if you have time,” they advised. Cynthia had put a cautionary hand on the arm of such well-intentioned travel guides, and repeated slowly, as if they were hard of hearing, and some of them were: “Yes, that’s all very nice. But I’m going for the shoes.”

  No one had believed her, of course. That was one of the advantages of exaggerating one’s own persona. No one ever quite believed that Cynthia was as vain or self-centered as she insisted she was. Perhaps she wasn’t. They may have gone for the shoes, as she later told her friends, but they ended up doing the whole damn boot, from toe to top. They had done it on an unofficial one-for-Warren, two-for-Cynthia basis. This was the model on which their marriage would be based, and it had worked pretty well, up until that day when nothing worked anymore, except inertia and this shared grief, a grief so profound that it would defeat anyone who tried to carry it alone.

  In Italy, Cynthia had been surprised to learn that Warren was a dutiful, earnest tourist. It was the first unexpected bit of knowledge in her marriage, and while not unwelcome, it made her wonder just how observant she was. She had seen herself as a conqueror, winning an impossible prize over a large field, yet Warren-the-tourist—guidebook in hand—had ventured dangerously close to geeky. In hindsight, Cynthia realized she should have known that a man as successful and handsome as Warren should have had a little more dog in him. But the face, the shoulders, turned out to be fairly late developments in the life of a bookish little nerd. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Warren had been a grade-grubber whose asthma kept him out of sports, while his strong-willed single mother kept him off the streets lest he be tempted into more unsuitable extracurriculars. Egypt had caught his fancy and led him to a more general appreciation of archaeology. His idea for their honeymoon, broached with the tentativeness of a man already used to his ideas being rejected out of hand, was a dig in Central America, where you paid money for the privilege of sifting through dirt in some maybe-temple. Cynthia had gotten a lot of mileage out of that story.

  Still, she would never have denied him his day in Pompeii. She didn’t accompany him—she had stayed in the hotel, writing thank-you notes to her mother’s friends, who would be quick to let Judge and Mrs. Poole know if Cynthia was tardy on this task—but she had paged through the books he brought back. And wished she hadn’t. There was one image she could never shake, an image that came back to her unbidden, time and again. She had seen it when her cell phone rang on July 17, seven years ago. And she saw it last night, about 10:02 P.M., when Brittany Little’s image flashed on her television screen.

  It was odd that she had seen the news at all, for Cynthia’s family treated Cynthia like the Sleeping Beauty, trying to shield her from certain things. Only instead of spindles, it was missing children that Cynthia was not allowed to contemplate. For seven years, newspapers had been hidden and television shows muted, lest Cynthia hear about another missing or dead child.

  The thing that no one understood was that she didn’t care about any child but her own, and never would.

  Finally, 11 A.M., her self-imposed deadline, arrived. She dialed the number the sergeant had given her, and asked to speak to Nancy Porter. She thought she heard a catch in the girl’s voice when she revealed her name, an invitation to speak of their shared history. But she hurried by it, into the present. Nancy Porter was nothing to her. For reasons Cynthia could never quite fathom, she felt shamed in front of the girl, as if the detective had something on her.

  “As you may recall, my own daughter was taken almost seven years ago,” she told the detective.

  “I remember the case,” the detective said, but she didn’t volunteer anything more.

  “Yes. And as you probably recall, she was missing for several days before she was…found.” Cynthia paused, wondering if she needed to add a word to that sentence. Dead. My baby was found dead. To this day, she hated to say it so plainly. It wasn’t the starkness of the word that bothered Cynthia, it was its simplicity. Dead did not begin to encompass what had happened to her child. Dead ended.

  “I know,” the detective all but whispered.

  “They’re home, you know. Within the past few weeks. They’re home, back in Southwest Baltimore, not even three miles from where this happened.”

  “Do you have any specific information that links them to this case?”

  “They’re home. What more do you need to know?”

  “Well, but—in some ways, the two…disappearances are very different. Your daughter was an infant, this girl is a toddler. Your child was taken on impulse, this seems to be part of a more calculated plan, with clothes being swapped—”

  “You want information? You want similarities? Well, here it is. The little girl who was taken—” She groped for the name, which had not registered.

  “Brittany Little.”

  “Yes. Brittany Little. Well, Brittany Little has long curly hair and café-au-lait skin. Brittany Little is, in fact, a dead-ringer for my three-year-old, who’s sitting upstairs right now. But I can’t help wondering if that might be different, if these girls weren’t so inept.”

  “You have another daughter?” The detective’s voice was surprised, almost awed.

  “Yes. And I’d like this one to live. I’d like Brittany Little to live, too.” The sentiment was a split-second late. Of course she wanted the child to be found unharmed. She wouldn’t volunteer anyone for what had happened to her.

  But what Cynthia really wanted was for Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller to be held accountable at last.

  “Do the girls know about your new child? Have they threatened your family in any way, or made any attempts to contact you?”

  “This is not a time for questions.” Cynthia had lost all patience and was, for a moment, the woman she used to be—a boss, a supervisor, a political operative, a person who gave orders and saw them carried out. “Don�
��t sit there blabbing to me. Who knows why they do what they do, then or now. Who cares anything about their motives? They waited, last time. Remember? They waited four days. If you arrest them now, maybe they won’t do what they did last time. Maybe they won’t kill another child.”

  “Mrs. Barnes—”

  “You will talk to them.” It was at once a question and a command.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss our investigation.”

  Cynthia did not allow any tentativeness to seep into her voice this time. “You will talk to them.”

  “Yes.” The detective’s voice was almost a whisper. “God, yes. Of course we’ll talk to them.”

  Cynthia Barnes hung up the phone and poured herself another cup of coffee. The trivet took her to Italy, Italy took her to Pompeii, and Pompeii always brought her back to the place where the world ended, which happened to be on Oliver Street in East Baltimore, on July 17, seven years ago.

  She had been on a corner in East Baltimore because the mayor, who loved to dress up, had put on a garbageman’s uniform and gone out with a trash crew to one of those neighborhoods that was always bellyaching about how neglected it was by the mayor’s administration. Normally, Cynthia wouldn’t have been there at all, but there was an out-of-town reporter following the mayor, and she wanted to keep an eye on things.

  While she was baby-sitting the mayor, Tanika, a nineteen-year-old Coppin student, was baby-sitting Olivia. The girl had just started with the Barnes family a month before. Dutiful and dull, she had been hired for her seeming lack of interest in boys and clothes, and—more crucially—boys’ seeming lack of interest in her. Who could have known that she already had a boyfriend, a demigangster she was forbidden to see at home, who called her at the Barnes house every hour of the day? Who could guess that he would call just as she pushed Olivia’s carriage out on the front walk and that she would run back inside to take the call, thinking it would require no more than a minute of her time? And who could guess that Tanika, terrified of her reverend father’s knowing of her disobedience, would fritter away five, ten, fifteen, thirty, sixty, ninety precious minutes trying to find Olivia on her own? Ninety minutes were lost by the time she dared to call Cynthia on her cell. Ninety minutes gone, then four days gone, and finally, a lifetime.

  But at the corner of Oliver and Montford, seven years ago, Cynthia knew none of this. She knew only that the baby-sitter was on the phone, trying to relay the impossible news that Olivia was missing. At that moment, Cynthia was still fighting, still struggling, still convinced she could do something—and that’s when she remembered the image from Warren’s guidebook, the one that had turned her stomach. It had been a photo of a dog, lashed to a post, preserved in the moment of his struggle. Twisted, writhing, he fought against the molten lava and the ash, determined not to die. For some reason, the dog seemed more conscious of his fate than all the humans of Pompeii combined. They stood still. The dog fought back.

  “What’s wrong?” asked her summer intern, a bright young thing named Lisa Bell, who had styled herself after her boss until she was known as Cynthia-ette, or sometimes just Junior. “What’s wrong, Cynthia?”

  It happened that the photographer who was traveling with the out-of-town reporter caught the mayor in the pose she wanted at the exact moment Cynthia snapped her cell phone shut. The photo captured the mayor in the foreground, grinning as he lifted a can onto the back of the truck. But if one squinted closely, there was Cynthia in the background, preserved in ash, another dog in Pompeii.

  Now, on this July morning, she felt the first real stirrings of life she had known in ages. Not even Rosalind, turning somersaults on the sonogram, had made Cynthia feel this vital, this necessary. Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller weren’t through with her yet? Well, Cynthia Barnes was just getting started, too.

  18.

  Helen Manning had just gotten up when the detectives arrived on her doorstep. She recognized they were detectives before they announced themselves and she pulled the sash tighter on her robe, although it was already quite tight. It was not her state of dress that made her feel shy and tentative before this dark man and fair, apple-cheeked girl. It was more as if they could see right through her, to the source of whatever mistakes she had made. Yet even as the silk-slippery sash cut into her narrow waist, she realized she was not at all surprised. It had taken years, but the second shoe had finally dropped.

  “I’m Kevin Infante,” said the male detective, who had the kind of Mediterranean good looks to which Helen was once partial. She found herself patting her hair, running her fingertips across her neck as if she might be able to erase the beaded lines that had come to rest there, like those wispy necklaces favored by young girls. “And this is my partner, Nancy Porter.”

  “We were hoping to talk to your—to Alice Manning,” the girl said. Although plump, she struck Helen as everything Alice had once yearned to be—unthreatening, agreeable, popular. Miss Congeniality. The class secretary but never the class president. Alice probably hadn’t broken the habit of wanting those things, poor thing.

  “She’s not here. She’s…out.”

  “Do you know where she is, or when she might be home?”

  “May I ask what this is about?” Helen’s voice squeaked a little.

  “We just want to talk to her,” the female detective repeated with a firm, unyielding tone. “Nothing more.”

  “I think she took a walk.”

  “A walk?”

  “She walks a lot.” God, she must look like a terrible mother, standing here with her morning hair, in this decadent silk robe, like some madam in an old Storeyville brothel. All she needed to complete the picture was a bare-chested man at her kitchen table, reeking of sex and screaming for his breakfast. But Jesus, Alice was eighteen, a grown-up under the law. Was Helen to be held to a different standard because of the past? How many women could produce their eighteen-year-old children on a Saturday afternoon? It’s 1:30P.M., do you know where your children are? Helen had always thought the old public service announcement was more for children than for adults, for she had never felt safer than when she was curled up on the sofa in her family’s den, hearing that rhetorical question just before the nightly newscast. Her parents knew where she was. She knew where her parents were. All was right with the world.

  “Does she have a cell phone? Or a job where we might find her?”

  “You know, I’ve encouraged her to get a job.” Helen felt relief at being able to tell that small truth. “She says she’s looking. That’s probably what she’s doing today, following up on some leads.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Well, no.” Helen tried to remember what they had discussed, specifically. “Not the grocery stores, because they’re union. And not the convenience stores. They’re not safe. I mean, don’t you agree? You wouldn’t want to have a daughter working in a convenience store, would you?”

  She was flirting, she realized, setting up the male detective to tell her that, no, he didn’t have a daughter, wasn’t even married, in fact. Maybe he would scrawl his home number on his business card, or ask with fake nonchalance if there was a Mr. Manning.

  But it was the girl who pulled out a card and handed it to Helen.

  “Would you call us when she comes home? We just need to talk to her. Nothing formal. May have more to do with one of her friends than her.”

  “Alice has a friend?” Helen could not bear the idiocy of her own voice, this stupid, echoing, out-of-it quality, as if she were some Judy Holliday type. She never sounded this way, never. “I mean, she seems to keep to herself, as far as I know.”

  “When did she get home?” the female detective asked.

  Until that moment, Helen had been trying to cling to the idea that this was all a coincidence, that there was no link between present and past. Damn it, Alice, she thought, suddenly furious with her daughter. She had been given every chance to start over—second chances, third chances, even. But she would rather keep punishing Helen than
take advantage of her opportunities.

  “Last night,” the young woman prompted. “What time did she get home last night?”

  “Do I have to talk to you?”

  “No,” the male detective said. “But why wouldn’t you?”

  “I can think,” Helen said, “of no shortage of reasons. For one thing—you still haven’t told me what this is about.”

  “Well, it’s not really about anything. We’re working on a case, your daughter may be able to help us. That’s all.”

  Ah, these were the police Helen remembered, in their most unhelpful guise. They were always so maddeningly elliptical, so noncommittal. Taciturn, reserved, insisting you were on a need-to-know basis even as they began destroying your life. Do you recognize this, Ms. Manning? Have you seen this before, Ms. Manning? The question had come before she could focus on the this in question. That detective had been middle-aged, thick-middled, and reeking of tobacco. She remembered still that she had not specifically requested “Ms.” and the presumption had irked her. She refused to look at the bagged object in their hands, eager to disavow it, even though she knew she could not.

  After all, Alice’s name was written on the bottom of the metal box in firm purple marker. Alice wrote her name on everything—toys, books, notebooks. Once, she had even scratched her initials on the back of a locket with her name engraved on the front. “Because it says Alice, not Alice Manning,” she had told Helen at the time. “So another Alice could take it.” Alice had worried a lot about phantom Alices, little ghost girls intent on stealing everything she had. She wrote her full name everywhere she could, including even her despised middle name to be on the safe side. Alice Lucille Manning, Alice Lucille Manning, Alice Lucille Manning, ALICE LUCILLE MANNING. “Did you name me for Lucille Ball?” she asked Helen once. “No, for my mother’s mother.” “Oh,” Alice said. “Well, can I tell people that you named me for Lucille Ball, like she was a distant relation?”

  At least these detectives were empty-handed, a reprieve of sorts. Maybe it really was an innocent coincidence, a traffic accident seen, a robbery witnessed, nothing more. “I don’t know when she’ll be home,” Helen told them. “But she’s always home for dinner. Especially Saturdays. We have pizza on Saturdays.”