Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  You bet they do, she answered her uncle now. The only difference was the ten-to-one ratio. But the detectives worked roughly the same caseloads. And Nancy would have taken fifty never-going-to-be-solved drug shootings over a maybe homicide like this one.

  Alice was still holding her plump arms in a prayerful pose. She had a milk-white pallor, almost creepy in its uniformity. Not a nick, not a cut, not even a bruise. It looked as if she never used her hands at all, for anything.

  “C’mon, Alice, you say you want to help us. There’s one small thing—it would only take a minute—”

  There was a light knock on the door. When Nancy opened it, Infante was there, motioning for her to come out. She did, closing the door on Alice, who looked stricken to be left alone.

  Helen Manning was standing in the corridor with a fleshy, dark-haired woman with a strange spotted rash on the left side of her face.

  “I’m Sharon Kerpelman,” she said. “I’m Alice’s lawyer. Charge her or release her. At any rate, she’s not talking to you anymore tonight.”

  “Look,” Infante said, “I saw your card. You’re city PD, you got no jurisdiction here. She’s not a juvenile anymore and this isn’t a city case.”

  “I already told you, I’m here on behalf of Rosario Bustamante, who has agreed to represent Alice. Ms. Bustamante is…indisposed and asked that I come here to make arrangements for Alice’s release.”

  “I don’t think we can do that.”

  “Oh, fuck me. Alice called and left a message on my machine two hours ago, asking me to accompany her here or find someone who could. I got that message twenty minutes ago. But you know, and I know, she can get up and walk out of here on her own steam. I’m certainly not going to let you talk to her at this late hour, when she’s tired and suggestible and would say anything to make you happy.”

  “We’ve got her at the scene,” Nancy said.

  “Really? That’s funny because I had dinner with Alice last night, and I don’t think she had time to take a child, stash her somewhere, and walk home.” Sharon walked over to the door and yanked it open. “Were you at Westview on Friday, Alice? Don’t be afraid to say what really happened, sweetheart.”

  Alice’s voice came back, tentative and sweet: “Well, maybe it was another day. I mean, I did go there once, and see Ronnie. But it was a week or two ago.”

  Sharon Kerpelman looked triumphant. “See? She hears you’re looking for her, and she knows it’s all because of what happened in the past, and she can’t stop trying to make it right.” Maybe it was Sharon, not Helen, who had taught Alice to think of her crime as a past. “And she knows Ronnie’s working at the Bagel Barn, and thinks you should know it, too.”

  “But why lie? Why say it was yesterday if it wasn’t yesterday?”

  “There’s a lot—” Helen began, but Sharon shushed her with a look and an upraised hand. Then, motioning to Nancy and Infante, she led them down the hall, out of Alice’s earshot.

  “It’s hard, being Alice.” Sharon was trying to be reasonable in tone, conciliatory and conspiratorial, but she wasn’t good at it, and her voice grated on Nancy’s nerves. “She got caught up in something that was bigger than she was, and she keeps trying to undo it. Seven years ago, she was too scared of Ronnie Fuller to keep her from doing what she did. Now police come around and she sees a chance for, I don’t know, a kind of redemption. She figures if she says what you want to hear, maybe she can balance the scales at last. But Alice didn’t have anything to do with this. If Ronnie Fuller did”—she shrugged—“that’s her lawyer’s problem, however.”

  “Does she have a lawyer?”

  “Figure of speech. I wouldn’t know.”

  Without asking permission, Sharon Kerpelman walked into the interview room and came back out with Alice, her arm slung around the girl’s shoulder. “We’re going to go now. If you want to talk to her again, call me.”

  “I thought,” Infante said, “Rosario Bustamante was her lawyer.”

  “Right. That’s what I mean. Call her.”

  Infante looked at Nancy, who shook her head sadly. They could fight this bitchy PD, insist that Bustamante herself come down before releasing Alice. But they had lost the moment. Alice wasn’t going to talk to them again, not tonight, not with any flow. How odd, to be shrewd enough to call a lawyer, but naive enough to begin speaking without one. Infante turned to Kerpelman and gave a brusque nod, as if it were his decision.

  The trio left without another word. But Alice, to Nancy’s amazement, turned and flapped her hand at her in a vague, shy wave.

  22.

  Gloria Potrcurzski had cried the first time she saw her daughter in uniform. Nancy assumed it was because her uncle, her mother’s brother, had been injured on patrol in his early years. Injured was almost an overstatement—a bullet had grazed his neck, just whistled right by him, requiring nothing more than an emergency room visit. But the incident had brought the family real pain for a few hours while a local radio station broadcast breathless bulletins about a “felled” officer in the 900 block of Hollins. Everyone in Stan Kolchak’s family knew his beat and knew his hours, so they had no doubt who the unnamed patrolman was. Yet the story’s happy ending just seemed to make the pain more pronounced in Gloria’s memory. So when she sobbed at the sight of her twenty-one-year-old daughter in uniform, Nancy had assumed the old fear was washing over her.

  “Oh, honey,” her mother had said at last, “you look awful in that.”

  She did, but Nancy had seen that coming. Since entering the academy, she had started noticing that even actresses on the various cop shows looked stocky and awkward in police uniforms. And they had the advantages of wasp waists, tiny butts, and professional wardrobe people. On Nancy, of average height with ample curves, the outfit was spectacularly unflattering—especially the winter one, when she had to wear her sweater tucked in.

  But it was the mannish quality that made Gloria Kolchak Potrcurzski cry. Gloria had been the only girl in a family of six, and the world she created for her one daughter had been reactionary in its femininity—pink-and-white room, canopy bed, shelves of dolls, unlimited funds for clothes and hair care. And she was on the verge of success when twenty-year-old Nancy decided she was sick of fighting her own destiny. She changed her major to criminal justice and, nearly two years later, stood before her mother as a freshly minted cadet.

  “I never thought my daughter would grow up to be a cop,” said the woman who was a daughter to one cop and a sister to two others.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Nancy had said. “I’ll make detective quick enough, and then I’ll wear skirts every day.”

  She was the kind of daughter who kept such promises. So seven years later, as Saturday eased into Sunday and the fourth of July gave way to the fifth, Nancy was wearing a tailored white blouse, a knee-length khaki skirt, hose, and Easy Spirit pumps. The shoes were more comfortable than regular pumps, but she wouldn’t want to play basketball in them, as women had in the old television ads.

  Nor did she want to walk along an overgrown path and splash across a polluted stream in a darkness brightened only by the beam of a small flashlight, but that was what she had decided to do.

  It was a hot, yeasty night, the kind that made old-timers downtown sniff the breeze and wonder if McCormick Spice Co. had suddenly rematerialized in the harbor. But the smell was all over the metro area, and it was more grain than spice. For Nancy, the hot, scent-laden wind stirred up memories of her Grandmother Potrcurzski’s kitchen—homemade rolls rising in a covered bowl, pierogi shells awaiting their fillings, a sweet undercurrent of cabbage. Cabbage could smell sweet if a cook treated it gently. Nancy drove into the past with her windows down, indifferent to the heat, wondering if she could find the right spot after all these years.

  Olivia Barnes had been missing for four days going on five before the cadets were sent to this asphalt parking lot on the southwestern corner of Leakin Park. A homeless man had been found pushing Olivia’s carriage, using it instead of t
he usual shopping cart for the odd collection of things he considered valuable. Inevitably, the deranged man was treated as a suspect, but he was adamant in his insistence that he had found the carriage in the creek bed, a narrow stream shrunken by that summer’s drought. So a yellow school bus brought the academy students to the southwestern edge of the park. Nancy was among those cadets.

  Of course, few classes went through the academy without searching Leakin Park at least once, as a training tool, and such searches usually began with the joking admonition not to grab just any old body, or they’d be there all day. But no one had cracked any jokes on the morning they gathered to look for Olivia Barnes. The only sounds in Leakin Park that day were the slow, measured footsteps of the cadets walking deeper and deeper into the park, trying to keep an even ten feet between them.

  Outdoor searches are doomed to imperfection. Nancy knew that even before she went into the academy. People were always stunned when a body turned up in an area the police had already combed, but these second-guessers had never tried to search a forest step-by-step. On a July day, the deep shade of Leakin Park played tricks on the eyes, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, until everything was green, dark green, and gray. It was all too easy to imagine a child’s body hidden in a patch of vines that happened to fall in the space between the cadets’ dragging feet.

  Nancy was partnered with a classmate, Cyrus Hickory, a cocky twenty-three-year-old who couldn’t get over the fact that he had a college degree. Cyrus was a study in contrasts, an African-American man with a shaved head and an accent that Nancy would describe as 100 percent redneck because her ear wasn’t trained to catch the watered-down imitation of Tidewater that Cyrus was trying out that summer: “When ah was getting my duh-gree at Commonwealth….” Nancy reminded him, after every third reference or so to his days at Virginia Commonwealth, that most of the cadets had college degrees now. But Cyrus countered: “I majored in criminology, with a minor in sociology. I chose this career for myself back when I was in sixth grade.”

  Nancy had assumed he was insulting her, in a roundabout way. With two uncles and a fiancé in the department, she had a triple taint of nepotism. It turned out that Cyrus, from Virginia, didn’t know any of this, not on that faraway July day. As a result, he was one of the few people who dared to patronize her, which was oddly refreshing. At least she didn’t have to worry if he was playing up to her, the way some others seemed to do.

  When they broke for lunch, eating sandwiches and drinking bottled water provided by a group of volunteers with ties to the missing child’s family, she told Cyrus that she thought the grid was off-kilter, sending them in the wrong direction.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “The carriage was found in the creek bed. So you gotta figure the kidnapper realized he couldn’t push it up the hill, and he dumped it there, then continued up and over the ridge.”

  “I think he might have been walking along the stream, not trying to cross it, when he decided to get rid of the carriage. What if he was walking in the stream?”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  “Leaves less of a trail, right? No footprints in the dust, no smashed-down undergrowth. It’s the kind of stuff they teach you about Indians when you’re in the fifth grade.”

  This information was, in fact, part of the social studies unit on Native Americans taught at St. William of York that year, as it had been in every parish school, even in Nancy’s day. But she wasn’t thinking about fifth-graders, not then. They were looking for a grown-up, a sociopath capable of carrying a twenty-pound child with ease. It had not occurred to anyone that two little girls had passed the baby back and forth after abandoning the balky baby carriage at the water’s edge, or that they walked through the creek bed because their ankles were bare and they knew these woods were full of poison ivy and sumac. Helen Manning had made sure Alice and Ronnie could recognize the leaves the summer before last, after both girls came down with horrible rashes from playing here.

  “There used to be a shack, a ways down Franklintown,” Nancy said. “My mother has a distant cousin on this side of town, who works at a crab house—” Her tongue flirted with the idea of invoking the name, Kolchak, and seeing if Cyrus recognized it. But she decided against it. She might win Cyrus’s deference, but she would lose his respect. “Anyway, we took this shortcut, through the park, so I remember the shack. A little man lived there, with chickens and roosters. We called him the Chicken Man. He was like some…vision out of the past. You couldn’t figure out how he was allowed to live this way, in a tarpaper shack with an outhouse.”

  “It’s not part of the grid,” Cyrus said.

  “We’re on our lunch break. They can’t fault us for going off on our own if we’re back in time.”

  “Chain of command,” he said. “You got to respect chain of command, Nancy. We’re not even police yet. You go doing what you want to do, and you’ll never be a police.”

  “I respect chain of command as much as anyone. On their time, I’ll do what they tell me to do. But this is my time, right? You don’t have to come with me.”

  But he did. So they had begun to walk, alongside the creek and not in it, toward the shack that Nancy remembered. It was farther away than she had calculated, and she soon realized they had gone so far that they could never get back in time.

  “Great,” Cyrus said, glancing at his watch, “now we’re in deep shit.”

  “I think it’s just around the next bend.”

  But it wasn’t. Not around the next bend, or the one after that, or even the one after that. They must have walked at least a mile before Nancy saw the place she remembered, across the creek and up a little hill. It was no longer visible from the roadway, as it had been when she was a child. The forest had taken care of that, creating a screen of trees and vines. Only someone who already knew it was there could find it.

  Funny, she hung back at the sight of the shack, spooked by the accuracy of her memory. It was Cyrus who splashed across the creek, heedless of what the water would do to his shoes and trousers, running up the hill, eager to be done with this. A trick of sound brought them the whistle call of their sergeant. They would never make it back in time, no matter how quickly they moved. There would be hell to pay, double hell for Nancy, whose insubordination would be assumed to be evidence of a smugness born of her family connections. Nancy crossed the creek by jumping from mossy rock to mossy rock, almost losing her footing on the last leap.

  In the doorway of the shack, Cyrus let out a noise that started as a cry of exultation, then quickly faded into something more strangled and somber. His shoulders sagged as he leaned against the shack, and the structure seemed to vibrate from his weight, rippling like water.

  “Stay there,” he called out in a choked voice, but Nancy didn’t see how she could. She climbed the hill to confront the consequences of her hunch.

  The interior of the shack was shockingly cool for such a hot day. How could this little house of sticks, flimsier than anything the three pigs ever built, provide so much protection from the heat? Nancy felt herself shivering as her eyes adjusted, trying to prepare herself to see what she would never be ready to see.

  A pile of used diapers was stacked in the corner, the smell almost comforting in its normalcy, although a quick glance revealed that the baby’s waste had a sickly green-yellow cast. Plastic cups and spoons—ice cream or yogurt, maybe pudding cups—had been left in another corner and there was a whitish smear next to Olivia Barnes’s mouth, as if someone had tried to feed her at some point.

  Why feed a baby if you’re going to kill her? Nancy thought.

  “I don’t know,” Cyrus said, yet she had not spoken aloud, she was sure she had not. “I just don’t know.”

  The baby’s eyes were open, her arms stiff at her sides, as if she had died waiting for someone to hold her one more time. Next to her was an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box, rusted at the corners. It bothered Nancy, that toy. There was something almost obscene ab
out it, with its faded but still garish colors.

  She reached into her pocket and put on the gloves they had been given that morning on the bus, like kids on a field trip getting their tickets to the museum or planetarium. The cadets had been instructed not to touch anything if possible, but Nancy chose to ignore this directive, too. She was afraid she might cry if she didn’t find something constructive to do. She reached for the box, and although she did not touch the lever on the side, it popped open instantly, as if primed for this moment. She and Cyrus both jumped at its squeak, then laughed weakly at themselves.

  The monkey that emerged had a red and yellow costume of cheap sateen, and its plastic face had long ago lost the paint that defined its simian features.

  “It’s the weasel that’s supposed to pop,” Nancy said.

  “What?” said Cyrus.

  “Pop goes the weasel. Not the monkey.” She closed the lid, turned the little crank, and, sure enough, that was the song it played.

  “I guess no one knows what a weasel looks like,” Cyrus said.

  The fact that this conversation was inane was not lost on either of them. But they were young, and inexperienced. The cynicism that might steer them through such a moment was years away, bodies away, maybe even a lifetime away. Possibly there wasn’t a cop in all of Baltimore who was hard enough to save this moment with a smart-ass comment.