Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Seems thin,” he said. “Mighty thin. Girl disappears, there’s some blood on her jumper and a T-shirt, but it’s not hers and it’s not a relative’s. You want to see if you can match the type to these two girls who killed the Barnes child all these years ago because Cynthia Barnes called you and made some noise. I can understand why the city cops might jump when Cynthia Barnes called, but why do you care, Detective?” He directed his question to Nancy, then didn’t wait for an answer. “Isaac Poole is a city judge.”

  “Eliminating the girls as suspects would be helpful, too,” Nancy said. “We’re going in a lot of different directions on this case, and we’d like to narrow it down, be more efficient.”

  “Such as?”

  “The boyfriend. It’s really irksome—” Oh lord, what a stupid word. She wished she could take it back, but she couldn’t. “It’s troubling that not a single security camera in the mall yielded even a frame that shows the girl was there. We’re also doing checks on the custodian who claims to have found the clothes.”

  “You know how many kids get kidnapped-kidnapped in Baltimore in a year? I mean, stranger abductions, with ransom notes and everything? One or two, maybe. Most missing children are runaways.”

  “This child is three years old, judge.”

  He scowled. “I know that. But why aren’t you going after the boyfriend’s blood?”

  “He provided a sample, and it didn’t match,” Infante said. “We’re continuing to talk to him and the mother, looking for anyplace their stories fall down. I gotta say, though, they’re pretty consistent. And city Social Services doesn’t have anything on ’em, not even a neglect call.”

  “You say their stories are consistent. But are they too consistent? Consistency is often the hallmark of something that’s been rehearsed. The hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson would have it.”

  Nancy, having already risked offending the judge, restrained herself from rolling her eyes. People who quoted other people were show-offs, plain and simple. “The mother seems genuinely grief-stricken. The boyfriend is sorry that his girlfriend is upset, if you get the distinction.”

  “He’s not so unhappy to see the little girl gone?”

  Nancy hesitated. The judge, for all his bluster and bullying, had managed to identify the one thing that disturbed her about the boyfriend. He seemed surprised by the profundity of his girlfriend’s grief, almost sullen about it. On Saturday, when Nancy and Infante had visited the couple and continued to question them, albeit in the guise of offering them sympathy and support, the boyfriend had held his weeping girlfriend and said: “You still got me, babe. You still got me.” But that could be because he had, in his heart of hearts, wished the child away and was horrified to realize the consequences of seeing his wish come true.

  “He’s not the child’s father,” Nancy said at last. “And given the way things are, I don’t think he was planning on being her stepfather. He was living with a woman, the woman happened to have a child. Was the girl a nuisance at times? I’m sure she was. Was she enough of a nuisance that he wanted to get rid of her, or would hurt her in a fit of anger? We can’t say. It wouldn’t be the first time, though.”

  Infante leaned in. “The missing girl and the Barnes child really do look alike, judge. It’s uncanny. I mean, it could be a coincidence, but it’s a hard one to ignore.”

  Harder to ignore, Nancy thought, that neither Ronnie nor Alice seemed to know about the Barnes child. But maybe that was what they were trying to conceal.

  “Especially with Cynthia Barnes and her father breathing down your necks,” Judge Prosser replied, putting his glasses back on, which pulled his left eye back to center. “Very well. I’ll sign this. Although I’ll be surprised if they can even find the records. There are days when the juvenile system can’t find the kids in its custody, much less their paperwork. And they may have already forwarded the medical files to the girls’ private physicians.”

  “The girls just left state custody in the past eight weeks. We’re counting on the state not being that efficient.”

  “In my experience, it’s only efficient when you don’t want it to be,” the judge said, chuckling at his own wisdom. He added, almost as an afterthought, “I hope you find the little girl and that she hasn’t suffered. Just don’t be taken in by the Royal Family.”

  “The Royal Family?”

  “Isaac Poole and his daughter. They think everything is about them. And what’s not specifically about them, to their way of thinking, is about their race. You should hear him bitch and moan about his career when he’s lucky to have gotten as far as he did. Very paranoid, these people.”

  Nancy took the signed subpoena and left. But she wanted to ask the judge if the Barnes family had always been this way. It seemed to her that a woman whose child was kidnapped and murdered had come by her paranoia pretty honestly.

  Ronnie had shown up for work at the Bagel Barn that morning, trying to act as if nothing had happened. “I clocked you out,” Clarice said, and Ronnie nodded her thanks. After that, there was no mention of Saturday’s events until the late morning lull.

  “So you in trouble?” Clarice asked, her voice casual, as if the answer didn’t matter.

  “Maybe,” Ronnie said. Then: “Yeah, I guess I am. But I didn’t do anything. Honest.”

  Clarice shook her head. She was a black woman living in Baltimore. She knew a lot of people who were in trouble and hadn’t done anything. She also knew people who were in trouble and had done something, but maybe not the something for which they were in trouble. And she knew people who were in trouble and had done the very thing of which they were accused, but still had good reason to lie about it. They said confession was good for the soul, and perhaps it was. But it was hell on the body. She had boys in her family, nephews and cousins, who had come out of lockup with lumps and bruises, still halfheartedly denying the charges hanging on them.

  Ronnie—well, Ronnie didn’t have a mark on her, unless you counted her eyes. Dark, dark blue, they reminded Clarice of pansies, but not the fresh ones you saw in window boxes, holding their heads up to the sun. Ronnie’s eyes looked like flowers after a heavy rain, their little faces pounded flat into the earth.

  29.

  Cynthia Barnes was no longer interested in food, but she insisted on preparing elaborate dinners for Warren even in the heat of summer. Tonight, it was grilled tuna with a mango-papaya relish and cold tomato-corn soup, served with jalapeño corn muffins. The muffins had been baked in an old pan of her mother’s so they came out looking like miniature ears of corn. It was all delicious, all perfect, but the only part of the meal that interested Cynthia was the pinot noir that Warren selected to accompany it.

  “This is wonderful,” he said, brave and polite. Warren had never outgrown his plebeian palate. He would eat sausage and ham and meatloaf every night, if he could. He would also weigh three hundred pounds and have hypertension and diabetes. But as Cynthia had told him when Rosalind was born, “I’m not planning on raising this child alone. You can choose your vice, but you get only one—workaholism, gluttony, drink. For I am definitely not raising a child alone.”

  He had not said then what he never said. And perhaps he never thought it, either, but Cynthia did. If she were Warren, she would think it every day. If only you had raised our first baby instead of leaving the job to some dumb girl.

  She had yearned for this reproach for seven years, only the blow never landed. Yet she could not bring herself to ask the direct questions that would force him to say what he thought of her.

  Sometimes she felt it was these unsaid things, not the loss of Olivia, that weighed them down. Other times she wondered if they had made a silent pact to sacrifice their marriage as a tribute to Olivia. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, for them to be happy again? Sometimes, with Rosalind, she had an unguarded moment of happiness and it terrified her. To be happy was to forget. To forget was to risk it all again.

  “Did you know,” she asked her husband, “that tun
a costs as much as steak?”

  “Get out.”

  “More, sometimes. As much as a good cut of New York strip, per pound. Of course, there’s no bone, no fat.”

  “That’s true.”

  She wondered if he slept around. She might, if their roles were reversed. He was, if anything, more handsome than when they met and so much more accomplished. Her parents had been critical of them in their early years together, chastising them for their luxury-filled life and the debts that it carried. But they were rich now, richer than anyone suspected, despite the fact that Warren’s victories were a matter of public record. They were actually living below their means, piling up money they no longer had the heart to spend, except on Rosalind and her future.

  Olivia had a college fund of five thousand dollars when she died, Cynthia suddenly remembered. Even their accountant had been flummoxed by the tax implications of that. They had left it, gathering figurative dust, thinking it might show up one day in those “unclaimed account” advertisements. When Rosalind was born, they were allowed to roll it over without penalties.

  “Do you like this wine?” Warren asked.

  “I love it,” she said, her fingers tight on the stem of her glass. In fact, she knew no better sensation than the first taste of wine she allowed herself each evening, unless it was the caffeine jolt that started her day. Those were her two mileposts, the signs that she had survived another day, another night. The subsequent sips were never as good, but the first ones were fabulous, like the first bite of an apple.

  “Should I get a case? They discount by the case.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  A better woman would have set him free, and done it in such a way that no one would think less of him. She should have had an affair, or a breakdown, or both. Warren was simply not as damaged—not because he was a man, but because he did not shoulder as much of the blame. Maybe Cynthia should find him a new woman. A few years back, the local paper had run one of those interminably long stories about a woman who had destroyed her own health to give her husband a baby. Ill with cancer that she blamed on the fertility treatments—with no scientific basis, Cynthia couldn’t help noticing—she had picked out her husband’s next wife. With a supreme arrogance that Cynthia could almost envy, she had looked over her friends and settled on one who had never married, and made it clear that she would consider it an honor to her memory if the friend and the husband hooked up after her death. At the time, Cynthia had read it with her usual dismissive attitude toward any woman who dared to think she had suffered.

  “White people are crazy,” she kept exclaiming to Warren at intervals, yet she read every installment of the story, fascinated by the dying woman’s sly cruelty. It was clear that she had not chosen her best-looking friend, or her most accomplished one, but one who could never upstage her. The woman died before her daughter was two. The husband and the friend married two years later. Cynthia gave them five years, tops. Living with a ghost was tough.

  At least Olivia was an undemanding little wraith, so generous with those she had left behind. She never complained, never castigated. She had been colicky as a baby, but she was peaceful now, asking only that they not forget her.

  “I love this cornbread,” Warren said.

  “Guess what—it’s low-fat. And that spread you’re slathering on isn’t margarine, it’s yogurt.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “That’s the general idea,” Cynthia said. “For you to live.”

  The joke—that Warren could barely endure Cynthia’s attempts to keep him healthy—was an old one, yet they had never expressed it so baldly before, and the starkness of her words made Cynthia want to wince. That had been the general idea for Olivia, too. To live, to grow up, to take advantage of all the things to which she was entitled, by birth and blood and class and education.

  She forgot sometimes. For up to an hour at a time, she might forget that she was the mother of a murdered child. But Rosalind changed everything. She could not look at Rosalind without thinking of Olivia. She was the tuna steak to Olivia’s New York strip. Just as precious, better for them in some ways, but Cynthia couldn’t help preferring one over the other. Warren probably felt the same way, too, but that was another conversation they could never have. They worried more about Rosalind, yes, and their imaginations had been stretched to limits that other parents could not fathom. It was one thing to get your old body back after pregnancy, another to reclaim a mind flabby with fear and anxiety. They could not love Rosalind as much as they loved Olivia because they knew she could be taken from them.

  “You okay?” Warren asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not eating.”

  “Oh, I don’t have much appetite when it’s hot like this.”

  “You keep the A.C. so low that you’re wearing a sweater.”

  She was, a coral-colored silk cardigan.

  “But I was running around today, getting things for dinner. You know me, I can’t just go one place. The produce stand for the vegetables, Nick’s for the fish. They say not to eat fish in restaurants on Mondays, but that doesn’t apply to the fish you buy on Mondays, does it?”

  “I hope not.”

  The doorbell rang, and Cynthia was up before Warren could push away from the table. The heavy wooden door had a small square with an iron grille. Between that and the tight mesh of the screen beyond, it wasn’t easy to make out the figure on the porch. A white girl, a well-dressed one, whippet-thin and holding a notebook.

  Cynthia opened the door only to say: “I can’t talk to you.” The reporters weren’t supposed to come yet. It wasn’t time to grieve just yet.

  “Mrs. Barnes? My name is Mira Jenkins and I’m a reporter at the Beacon-Light and I have information that the disappearance of Brittany Little could be tied to the death of your daughter.”

  “I can’t talk to you,” she repeated.

  “Not even on background?”

  Cynthia was amused in spite of herself. The girl was like a mechanical doll, spewing her limited vocabulary. “Do you even know what that means? On background?”

  “Well, sure. It means, you tell me if stuff is true, but you don’t put your name to it.”

  “And can you use it, then? Or do you have to get someone else to confirm it? Or can you use it but attribute the information to a ‘source’?”

  “I—I don’t—Look, you tell me the rules you want to use, and I’ll adhere to them. But I don’t know why you would call my office and tell us about the investigation if you don’t want it in the papers.”

  The mechanical doll was suddenly a little less adorable. “What makes you think I called? I haven’t talked to the press for seven years. When I worked for the mayor, I never spoke to the press for the record. Why would I start now?”

  “Well, somebody did. Somebody who knew a lot about your case. And then I saw you at the other woman’s apartment yesterday.”

  Cynthia looked back over her shoulder. Warren had not come out of the dining room. He was moving through the house, but it sounded as if he were cleaning up, clearing the table, starting the dishwasher. A good habit, one instilled by his mother. His footsteps, the running water, provided cover for her voice.

  “I’m going to invite you in now,” Cynthia said. “We’re going to sit in the living room and talk, over iced tea. Well, iced tea for you, wine for me. When my husband comes out to see what’s up, we’re going to tell him you’re a student in the political science department at UB and your teacher recommended you talk to me about city politics. He’ll go upstairs to watch television, read his newspaper. Then—and only then—we will talk about that.”

  “On the record?”

  Oh, she was a greedy girl. Offered half a loaf, she asked for a whole. Cynthia admired that trait. It was one that had taken her far in life.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she told the girl, using the warm mentor voice that she knew young women loved, the voice that she had used on her office inte
rns. “But if you do what I tell you, exactly the way I tell you, you’ll get your story.”

  30.

  Alice kept her eyes downcast as she walked, studying the ground. The sidewalks in Ten Hills had buckled in places, swollen by the roots of the huge oaks and elms. The uneven pavement made it easy to stumble here, especially in the gray-green twilight, and Alice hated the sensation of stumbling. It was much worse than falling, when people felt obligated to express sympathy or hold out a hand. Tripping just made you look silly and clumsy.

  But Alice was staring at the sidewalk because she didn’t want to make eye contact with Sharon Kerpelman, who had insisted on accompanying her tonight. Her lawyer had arrived at the Mannings’ house at almost the exact moment Alice began scraping the bottom of her bowl with her spoon, chasing the last raspberry drips of what Helen insisted on calling sorbet.

  “Just passing by,” Sharon insisted, as if Alice didn’t know where Sharon lived and worked, as if Helen’s guilty bustling with the dishes didn’t prove they had arranged this chance encounter. Which meant that Helen and Sharon had talked, outside Alice’s hearing. Alice did not approve of this. It was one thing for them to set up the meeting with the other lawyer, that ugly woman. But she didn’t want them to get into the habit of talking behind her back. They had done that quite a bit, seven years ago, and Alice still wondered what they said to each other that they would not say to her.

  “I usually walk after dinner,” Alice said, with a quick glance at Sharon’s feet. The lawyer was wearing black sandals with low, chunky heels and a complicated welter of straps. “My mother says it’s good for digestion.”

  “Great,” Sharon said. “I’ll walk with you.”

  Alice could not take Sharon on her normal evening route, of course. But she skirted it, leading her through the outer edges of Ten Hills, where big, rambling houses sat back on large lawns. Once, on a summer night such as this, windows would have been open and sounds would have carried—parents calling children in for the evening, the clink and clank of a kitchen being cleaned after dinner, the buzz of a baseball game. But most of the houses had been renovated and now had central air-conditioning, so the only sound was a steady, bland hum.