Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  Back on Nottingham Road, Alice was awake, as she usually was at 3 A.M. Either she had inherited Helen’s nocturnal tendencies, or she had come to imitate them early on. Even as a child, she had often been awake at 1 A.M., 2 A.M., 3 A.M. The night was full of interesting sounds that got lost in the daytime hours, such as freight trains that rumbled through, miles away.

  Helen had never chided Alice about her wakefulness, although she did make a rule that Alice had to stay in bed, except for trips to the bathroom. “Bedtime means bed,” Helen had decreed. “What you do in bed, and whether the light is on or off, is your own business. As long as you’re not tired and cranky during the day, I don’t care what you do at night.”

  Alice did not ask, but she assumed the same rules applied to Helen. What she did in her own bed, with the light off or on, was her own business. Although Helen didn’t do things in her bed. When she dated, which was infrequent, she either hired a baby-sitter for overnight or kept the men downstairs. Once Alice was in her room upstairs, Helen took over the living room—smoking in secret, drinking in secret, watching television in secret. That is, they were meant to be secrets. Did she really think that Alice wouldn’t figure these things out if she stayed in bed? The little house could not keep a single sound to itself. Ice falling into a glass, a match striking on the flinty strip of a matchbox cover, the muted sounds of late-night television, Helen’s muffled laugh, a man’s groan—Alice heard everything.

  Her grandparents said Helen was permissive. Alice had overheard that, too, but it had required sneaking to the top of the stairs, something she did far more often than Helen suspected. The house was free with its sounds, but not so free with words, and if Alice wanted to hear a conversation or the dialogue from a late-night movie, she slithered out of bed, sliding across the wooden floors as if she were skating, otherwise Helen would hear her footsteps. The porous nature of the house cut both ways. The trick was to wait until the television or the stereo was on, which provided cover for the creak of the floorboards.

  The other trick was to wear socks, because the floors were old and splintery. So Alice slid across them, one-two, one-two, one-two, as if skating to a waltz. She imagined herself in the kinds of outfits Helen had worn as a child, a short black skirt with a girl skater appliquéd on it, a woolen helmet that made Helen look like a bald turtle, cursive initials stitched into the side. “I hated that hat,” Helen said when Alice paused at that page in the old photo albums.

  Tonight, Alice’s knees were tented under the yellow-and red-striped sheets on her bed, sheets she had picked out almost a decade ago, when Helen said she could help decorate her room. She had picked these sheets, bold and abstract, because she knew Helen would be disappointed by the ones Alice really wanted, which were pink and covered with rosebuds and little girls with watering cans. She liked these well enough, though, and they were certainly more suitable to an eighteen-year-old than the rosebud sheets would have been.

  She examined the two round mountains created by her knees. If she had slept in these sheets every night of her life since she was ten, give or take a trip to her grandparents’ house and sleepovers, assuming she was invited to sleepovers, these sheets would probably be worn in spots, beginning to fray at the edges. They had faded, but only because Helen hadn’t thought to close the venetian blinds all the way. For seven years, she had let light spill across the bed, the spread folded down as Alice had left it on her last morning here. At night, with just her bedside lamp on, she couldn’t see the subtle bands that ran cross-grained with the sheets’ stripes, but she knew they were there.

  She had a notepad propped up against the slope of her thighs and she was working on a letter, one she knew she would never send, but it was fun to write because it was about her. She had told her mother, who had seen her working on it earlier in the week, that it was a college application, and it could have been, for it was an essay in which she attempted to define herself in the curiously bragging-byway-of-self-deprecating tone that she instinctively knew such essays required.

  But it was not a college application. Alice was drafting a letter to the producers of the reality show on MTV, the one where seven people lived in a house together. She had no desire to be on the other one, which made kids ride around in a Winnebago doing stupid, messy things called missions. Everyone knew that was the show for the also-rans, the losers. She couldn’t help noticing that there had never been anyone—how to put it—truly notorious on the show before. One boy had a brother who was murdered, but that was as close as they had come.

  Now, it would be better, she knew, if her past were more accidental, if she had been convicted of killing someone, say, while driving drunk and was now in AA. Maybe she should start going to church and talking about God. It would help if she did something creative, too—wrote poetry or rapped.

  The real obstacle, Alice knew, was that she was fat. The show sometimes had fat girls, but they were always black. The white girls were thin, thinner each year, so thin they could wear belly shirts and bikinis and navel rings. She wasn’t sure why the black girls could be fat and the white girls couldn’t, but clearly there was a rule. Come to think of it, not even the black girls were fat anymore.

  Still, it felt good to outline her most interesting qualities in a letter, even if she never planned to send it, and no one would ever read it. People were always telling Alice she had so many opportunities, yet the only ones they could come up with were work and school. That didn’t seem like so much to Alice. That seemed like what everyone else had. “You have your whole life ahead of you,” Helen told Alice, and Sharon Kerpelman had said much the same thing. But Alice knew they were wrong. She had her whole life behind her, a huge, cumbersome weight that she had to drag with her wherever she went, like her own body. Such a life should be good for something.

  She studied what she had written. Once enamored of cursive, she had recently discovered she wrote much faster if she printed. Her letters were now squat little capitals instead of the sedate ships that had once skimmed slowly across her pages. The new handwriting was still not fast enough to suit her, however. She would prefer to compose on her mother’s computer, but she couldn’t bring the computer to bed, and more important, she couldn’t trust Helen to respect her privacy. Helen always swore she was the kind of mother who respected others’ need for secrets, but, well, Helen was a liar. A big fat liar, and for what? Helen’s lies made no sense to Alice.

  Even here, in a notepad she can hide beneath her mattress, in a letter she will never send, a letter no one will ever read—even here, she does not dare tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as they used to say on television. In her real life so far, no one has used that phrase. But then she never got to the point where she was allowed to testify, never put her hand on a book and swore to God. She had wanted to, but no one else wanted her to. In fact, the whole point seemed to be to keep Alice quiet. They kept saying it wouldn’t be good for her and Ronnie to go before the judge without everything decided. They needed to reach an agreement outside of court. Alice didn’t see how that agreement had helped her at all. The truth was on her side, not Ronnie’s. And one day, when she was allowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, everyone would finally be helpless before her.

  She turned the page over and started a new letter, one that would be sent, when the time was right.

  Sunday,

  July 5

  24.

  Lenhardt unfurled a regional map across a desk. There were the sisters, Baltimore and Baltimore, city and county, joined but never merged, locked together like two chain-gang escapees in one of those old movies.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “A map,” Infante said. He was absolutely earnest. The sergeant had asked a question, and by God, the detective had an answer. Nancy started to giggle, only to end up yawning instead. It was 11 A.M., and she had slept for a few hours while Infante kept trying to rouse the sleeping Ronnie, but they were getting punch-dru
nk from exhaustion. They were also beginning to smell from being in the same clothes for more than twenty-four hours.

  “Excellent, Detective Infante. Yes, this is a map,” Lenhardt said. “But a map of what?”

  “Baltimore?”

  “No, my friend. It may look like Baltimore, but this is Fuckedville, U.S.A., our new hometown for the foreseeable future.”

  “Why…are…we…fucked?” Nancy yawned involuntarily between each word. Lenhardt had cursed in front of her. Things must be bad indeed. She wondered if this meant he could never go back to not-cursing in front of her.

  “Don’t be crude, Nancy.” The sergeant’s correction was automatic and unironic. “The commissioner wants to do a search.”

  “We can’t do a search. We don’t have any information on where the child might be.”

  “No, but we do have a dedicated young detective who pulled a suspect out of Leakin Park late last night.” Lenhardt nodded at Nancy. “Good work, by the way, although I wish you had told someone where you were going. And you should have used a car with a radio. Just to be safe.”

  “Pulled a suspect out,” Infante said. “But she hasn’t told us anything.”

  “We don’t even have a charge on her,” Nancy said.

  “What’s her story for Friday night?”

  “Home alone.” Nancy had managed to learn that much. “Parents were at a bullroast for dad’s union, which matches up with what her mother told us. But she doesn’t have anything to prove where she was from four, which is when she said she got home from the bagel shop, to eleven, when her parents came home.”

  “A teenage girl didn’t make a phone call? Didn’t get on a computer and do that weird talkie-typie thing they do? My kids can’t go twenty minutes without making some kind of contact with their friends.”

  “She doesn’t have any friends.” Nancy remembered the mother’s sad, resigned phrase. No boyfriend. No friends. Period.

  “What about Alice Manning?”

  “The girls claim they haven’t connected since they got home. Alice admitted she went by Ronnie’s workplace, just to get a look at her, but said Ronnie has no idea.”

  “That was weird, Sarge,” Infante interrupted. “The girl comes in here, on her own steam, to tell us this story that puts her right there a few hours before everything happens. Then this lawyer shows up—a lawyer the girl called and left a message for before she headed in here—and the girl’s suddenly saying that it wasn’t on Friday, that it was a week or two ago, on a Saturday.”

  “Yeah, what was that about?” Lenhardt wondered, with no expectation of an answer.

  What indeed, Nancy echoed in her head. Her best guess was that Alice, either out of well-intentioned helpfulness or a maliciousness nursed for seven years, wanted to make sure that no one overlooked Ronnie’s proximity to the scene. She had lied. Or had she? Sharon Kerpelman said she had picked her up for dinner at eight on Friday evening. Four hours wasn’t enough time to abduct a child, disguise her, stash her or kill her, then walk three miles home. But what if Alice wasn’t on foot? And what if she wasn’t acting alone?

  “As long as the girl is missing, the commissioner wants a search,” Lenhardt said. “He wants to make sure we look like we’re doing everything we can. At the same time—and the commissioner told this to the major, who passed the word to me—he doesn’t want anything to get out about how this case may be linked to any other.”

  He paused, making sure he had both detectives’ full eye contact. “You understand what I’m saying? There’s no advantage in us talking about Ronnie Fuller or Alice Manning until we get a charge on one of them. And even then, you gotta remember they were juveniles, all those years ago. No one’s going to be able to drop their names into a court computer and make a match. If you talk about this, you’re talking about stuff that’s sealed, that nobody can get. It ain’t public record.”

  “We’re not the only ones who know,” Infante said, and Nancy nodded. “City police who remember Olivia Barnes won’t mind leaking what they know, because it won’t come back on them. Hell, the kid’s mother can tell anyone she wants that she called us because her kid is a dead ringer for the—for the other kid.”

  In her head, Nancy finished the sentence the way Infante had intended: a dead ringer for the dead kid.

  “I hear the state’s attorney met with the Barnes family and the father-in-law, Judge Poole, last night,” Lenhardt said. “And swallowed a lot of shit, getting them to see it her way. But they were made to understand there’s no advantage in allowing a single scenario to dominate. If the public starts thinking this case is solved, they stop noticing stuff that might matter. As long as we’ve got the damn Amber Alert out, we might as well have people paying attention to it.”

  “But a search,” Nancy said. “It’s such a waste of time and money.”

  “Only if you think of our job as solving cases. If you remember we have to jerk off the media from time to time—well then, the commissioner reckons it’s a good show for a Sunday. Tonight, they’ll have video of cops searching the woods. They’ll report that we’re working solid leads, which we are. But that’s all they’re going to report, right?”

  Nancy flushed, aware that Lenhardt was staring at her, not Infante, insisting she make eye contact with him.

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Now, cut her loose, go home, and get some sleep.”

  “I’d like to have one more go, if you don’t mind.” Nancy nodded toward the closed door of the interview room. “I know we’re heading into double digits, but she’s slept for most of it. I just want one more chance.”

  “She never lawyered up?”

  Nancy shook her head. “No. It’s weird. She stonewalls like a veteran, but she never asks for a lawyer, never asks to make a phone call, doesn’t seem to care if her parents have been notified. When she’s not sleeping, all she says is ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”

  “Then why go in there again?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the T-shirt we found in the trash. It has blood on it, right? Blood that doesn’t match the girl or her mother. It’s gotta match someone.”

  Lenhardt nodded. He was much too smart not to have thought this through before Nancy did.

  “See anything on her?”

  “No, and I ran my hands over her arms while cuffing her, to see if there was anything there. But she’s wearing long pants.”

  “So, what, you’re going in there and hand her a penknife and say, ‘Hey, could you poke yourself?’ Ask her if she wants to shave her legs? Make a pact with her and become blood sisters?”

  “Blood sisters,” Infante repeated, but he was too tired to make it into whatever ill-considered joke had occurred to him.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’ll consent to give us her blood so she can be eliminated as a suspect.”

  “Except it won’t, as you know,” Lenhardt said. “It will just eliminate her as the person who bled on the T-shirt. We have to stay open to the possibility that two people were involved in this. In fact, I don’t see how one girl does it by herself.”

  “Look, if the evidence doesn’t go with us, even a moron of an attorney is going to know to make an issue of it. But if we can get a match, that’s a better use of our time than sending every available body in the county over cold ground.”

  Lenhardt shrugged. “Go for it. But you gotta go home after, get some sleep.”

  The sergeant had brought them a bag of bagels that morning. Nancy picked out one of the sweeter ones, a blueberry, and took it into the interview room with an orange soda.

  “Here,” she said. “Breakfast of champions.”

  Ronnie was sitting, staring into space. Even awake the girl had an eerie quality about her, almost as if she drifted in and out of a semi-catatonic state. Good Ronnie or Bad Ronnie?

  “Where’s this from?” Ronnie said, poking the bagel, then pulling a small piece off and chewing it carefully, as if she might decide to spit it out.

  “Ein
stein’s, over on Goucher Boulevard.”

  “Ours are better. I mean, this is okay, but the texture is different. We use a frozen dough from Brooklyn, so it’s almost like a New York bagel. Which is what people want, Clarice says. She worked another place where the bagels were too sweet—she called it a Montreal bagel—and that’s not what people want in Baltimore.”

  “Clarice?”

  “The manager at the Bagel Barn. You met her.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. We talked to her after you ran away.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” She seemed embarrassed and surprised, as if she had hoped the incident would never be mentioned again.

  “Why did you run away, Ronnie?”

  “I told you.” Her voice was weary, but patient. It occurred to Nancy that the girl would never ask to leave, didn’t assume she had any rights at all. “I knew you were cops, and I don’t get a fair shake with cops. I didn’t last time.”

  “How so?”

  Ronnie shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Except you’re here. So it does matter.”

  “I mean—no one believed me then, so why would anyone believe me now? People made up their minds what happened, so that’s what happened.”

  Nancy had been sitting, an untouched bagel in front of her, trying to act as if this were an ordinary breakfast between two people who happened to be sharing a table in a crowded diner. Now she hunkered down, her chin barely an inch above the table, and stared into Ronnie’s eyes as best she could. They were an unexpected blue beneath all that dark hair. Her brows were wild, her complexion a little spotty. But she could be pretty if she made the smallest effort.

  “Ronnie, I can’t undo anything you’ve done, and you can’t undo anything someone else has done. But you can keep it from getting worse, you know what I mean?”