Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “It’s almost as bad as the seventeen-year locusts,” Sharon said. “Worse, because locusts are part of the ecosystem. All these air conditioners are probably making the world warmer.”

  “You have air-conditioning, right?” Alice kept her voice mild, as if simply making conversation.

  “Well, yes, but I live in a condo.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, these houses were built to take advantage of breezes, to breathe in the summer heat. So you’re fighting the architecture when you put in central air. It’s very inefficient.”

  “My mom doesn’t believe in air-conditioning, except in bedrooms. And even then, she tries not to use it. She says it makes mold grow in your sinuses.”

  “Huh,” Sharon said. “I suppose it could.”

  Alice knew Sharon was trying to find a way to talk about whatever had led to this fake-impromptu encounter. But she wanted it to seem casual, almost an afterthought. Here we are, walking along, and oh, by the way, where were you Friday night before I came over? Really? Do you know where the little girl is? Between us?

  “I’m never hot,” Alice said. “I barely even sweat. Even when I walk at midday, I don’t get hot. The secret is not to go fast.”

  “Do you get enough water?”

  “Sure. I guess so.” She drank three sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsis every day.

  “Because maybe the reason you don’t sweat is because you’re not getting enough water. Sweating is the body’s cooling system. I mean, that’s your central air-conditioning, in a way.”

  Alice had thought it was admirable she sweated so little, but now Sharon was making her feel as if this was another failure on her body’s part.

  “Still, it’s great you’re walking so much,” Sharon said. “You walk at midday and after dinner?”

  “Most days.”

  “All you do is walk?”

  “Sometimes I sit for a while. And I’ve been looking for a job.” She had told this lie so often now that it was more automatic and sincere than the true things she sometimes said.

  “Your mother says someone brought you home in a car one time. At least once.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, Alice. Really.”

  “I don’t know why she would say that. All I do is walk.”

  “She heard a car door slam one night, right before you came up the walk.”

  “We live on a busy street. There are other people coming and going.”

  “So you haven’t been…taking rides from people.” A beat. “From men.”

  It was all Alice could do not to laugh when she realized what was worrying her mother and Sharon. “I wouldn’t take a ride from anyone I didn’t know. That’s really dangerous.”

  They were at the corner where the big houses petered out and a small business district began, anchored by a storefront church that used to be a dollar movie house. Helen had told Alice that she and Alice’s father had gone here on their first date to see Cocoon, and then to Mr. G’s for soft ice cream afterward, where she had the kind of cone with the chocolate and vanilla swirled together. She had been wearing a 1950s sundress, with tiny black-and-white checks. Helen’s stories were always full of details like that—what she saw, what she ate, what she wore.

  “We should turn back here,” Alice said.

  They walked in silence for a block, retracing their steps. It was dark now, and the drone of the air-conditioning seemed even louder.

  “Alice, your mom thinks—”

  “I know what my mom thinks.” Her voice was hard, although she didn’t want it to be. “My mom thinks I’m an ugly fat girl who will ride around with strange men and have sex with them because it’s the only way I can get their attention.”

  “No. No. But the thing is—the only thing I care about—is that if you were riding with someone, instead of walking, this past Friday night—well, I would need to know that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s not what we told the police. And if you tell the police a lie, even a meaningless one, it can cause a lot of problems down the road.”

  “I was walking.”

  “Good.”

  “But it’s only three miles, from Westview to our house,” Alice said. “Anyone can walk three miles in an hour.”

  “Yes, but, you couldn’t…it wouldn’t…as far as the police are concerned…”

  Alice stopped and stared directly into Sharon’s eyes for the first time. “You’re saying it matters where I was, and whether I was in a car or on foot, because the police think I did this.”

  “Not exactly. You’re a suspect. You shouldn’t be, but you are.”

  “Do you want to be my lawyer because you think I’m guilty, or because you think I’m innocent?”

  “I want to protect you, to make sure that no one hurts you. Again.” Sharon stopped and braced herself against a huge old tree, its craggy bark striped like a tire’s tread. She shifted her weight from one foot to another, digging her fingers into the straps to loosen them. The sandals had left deep red marks on her ankles.

  “You were supposed to take care of me last time.”

  “We did our best. We really did, Alice.”

  “Oh.” Alice pretended to think about this. “So that was your best.”

  Letting those words go was like the first bite of something hot and delicious, a liquid warmth that started in her chest and spread into her neck and face. It reminded Alice of the fireworks she had seen Saturday night, as she and Helen drove to the police station—long bright strands of color bursting from a center and then streaming through the sky.

  But the feeling disappeared almost as quickly as the Roman candles had.

  “Alice—we’ve been over this before.”

  “No. Actually, we’ve never gone over it. Why did I have to go away for what Ronnie did?”

  “Well, for one thing, they found your toy, the jack-in-the-box—”

  “Put there by Ronnie after she stole it from me.”

  “And it was hard to be definite about when the baby died. The time frame.”

  “Ronnie killed her while I wasn’t there. Do you think I would have let Ronnie kill the baby in front of me? Do you think I could have stood there while she did what she did?”

  “But you were with Ronnie when she took the baby. And you didn’t tell anyone where she was, even while there…even when there…”

  “Just say it,” Alice said. “She was alive and I could have saved her. But I couldn’t see that. All I could see was that whatever happened, we were going to be in trouble. Trouble for taking her, for making people worry. We were in so much trouble. I tried to think of a way to help people find her. I tried to get Ronnie to take the baby home. But she wouldn’t, and she wouldn’t let me. She just wanted to stay there, pretending it was hers. And then, all of a sudden, she wanted the baby to be dead.”

  “I know,” Sharon said, nodding. “I know.”

  “Now they think I took this girl and maybe hurt her. Why do the police think I could do that?”

  “Because cops can only understand the present by way of the past. It’s like the story, you know, about the boy who goes to market for his mother.”

  “What story? I don’t know that story.” But suddenly she did. She remembered being nine, in the community room at the Catonsville library for an afternoon program that Helen had deemed worthy. “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt / His name is my name too / Whenever we go out / The people always shout / There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt / la la la la la la la.” They had told that story, too, the one about the boy who never got it right, but it was the song that Alice remembered, the joy of shouting the chorus until she was hoarse.

  “He ties a string around a pork chop and drags it behind him, only to have the dogs eat it. His mother says, ‘No, you should have put it under your hat.’ So he goes to buy butter and puts it under his hat and it melts. And she says—actually, I don’t know what she says next. But the point is he keeps applying yesterday’s solut
ion to today’s problem.”

  “So I’m yesterday’s solution.”

  “In a sense.”

  “Which means I was also yesterday’s problem.”

  Sharon shifted her weight back and forth. Alice remembered how her feet felt in the early days of walking, how they burned and ached. Now they were so tough that she could probably go five miles barefoot without feeling it.

  “I never thought of you as a problem,” Sharon said.

  “What about the things that happened to me while I was away? What about the things that were done to me?”

  To her horror, Sharon began to cry, a response that Alice didn’t crave, and couldn’t even use. Whenever a grown-up began to cry, Alice knew she had lost.

  “I tried, Alice. I really tried. I did my best and I’m sorry about how things turned out. But no one knew—no one could have known or predicted—I’m so sorry, Alice. All I can do is try to get it right this time. That’s all anyone can do.”

  “You’re right,” Alice said. “You are absolutely right. All anyone can do is try.”

  She started walking, indifferent to whether Sharon could keep up. She trained her eyes on the sidewalk, measuring her stride so her foot landed safely in the middle of each square. Not because she worried about stepping on a crack, much less breaking her mother’s back, but because the solid, almost jumping movement reminded her of hopscotch. She had been good at hopscotch, playing kicksies in the Baltimore style, using an old rubber heel as her token. Helen would go to shoe repair shops and bat her eyes at the old Italian men who worked there, just to make sure that Alice had an authentic Black Cat Paw heel to fling into the numbered spaces.

  Tuesday,

  July 7

  31.

  “This is how it works in Baltimore,” Lenhardt said, perching on the corner of Nancy’s desk. “Or how it doesn’t work. The bureaucracy that wants to help you can’t. The bureaucracy that could help you won’t.”

  “Problem with the medical records?” Nancy guessed.

  Lenhardt nodded. “Middlebrook, where Alice was held, is finally under renovation, and the nonactive files have been put away in some storehouse for the time being. They’re going to try and find them, but I got the feeling they honestly don’t know where they are. Shechter, a psychiatric unit at one of the privately run juvenile facilities, is stonewalling us, says they sent the files to a state agency upon Ronnie Fuller’s release. But they’re not sure if it was Juvenile Services or Health and Mental Hygiene.”

  “Seems like a lot of work,” Infante said, “for information that may not even help us.”

  “Well, there’s blood, and you can’t ignore that,” Lenhardt said. “Blood is good. But I’ve been thinking: This is a case about what’s not there, too. And what’s the primary thing that’s not there?”

  He looked at his two detectives expectantly and Nancy couldn’t help wanting to get the answer first. She studied her sergeant’s face for a clue, a tell, and saw his eyes slide to the right, toward the stack of videotapes on Infante’s desk. These were tapes from the store’s security cameras and the mall security cameras at the various exits. They had watched them several times and caught a glimpse of Maveen Little and her boyfriend, seemingly looking for the girl. But—

  “Brittany Little,” Nancy said. “Brittany Little is missing. Not a single security camera caught her. Which is possible, but not plausible.”

  “If a stranger took a kid, he’d have to snatch her fast”—Lenhardt hugged a phone book to his chest to demonstrate—“and even then, she’d probably yell. It’s more likely he enticed her out with something.”

  “We talked to the shift supervisor for mall security,” Infante said, “and the security guard from Value City. An off-duty city cop, pretty sharp. He pointed out that if the cameras caught everything, there wouldn’t be a shoplifter walking free today.”

  “The mom came looking for him, and he said she was genuinely distraught,” Nancy put in. “She was almost hysterical.”

  “Well, if your boyfriend killed your daughter, you would be genuinely distraught, too. Why don’t you go back to Westview, check out the exits and the placement of the cameras? This lady, this Cynthia Barnes, got us agitated over the resemblance between her girl and our missing one. She was on the phone so fast the night it happened that we barely had time to think this through our ownselves. Granted, the lady’s got reason to be antsy. But that doesn’t mean we need to be.”

  She was on the phone so fast the night it happened—but Cynthia Barnes had called Nancy Saturday morning, saying “I just spoke to your sergeant.” Nancy’s mind jumped back to the Friday evening the child had disappeared, the decision to treat it as a homicide, even with evidence like the hair and the jumper raising the possibility of an abduction. Then there had been Lenhardt’s insistence on moving Infante and Nancy up in the rotation. Infante had followed Lenhardt into the bathroom, arguing all the while, coming out furiously resigned.

  Coincidences happen, Infante had said. Look at sarge and the Epstein case. And Nancy hadn’t asked any more questions—not because she was scared to reveal her ignorance of something called the Epstein case, but because she didn’t want to find out that her involvement in this case was anything but a coincidence. If Lenhardt was making her work the Brittany Little case because of her old connection to the Barnes case, then he was testing her. If he was testing her, he must not trust her.

  “Nancy?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to get to Westview sometime this week,” Infante said, standing over her. “You want to stare into space, stirring coffee, you can do that in the car.”

  “Look at my pitcher, Miz Manning. Do you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful, Gerald.”

  The boy frowned. He had a perfectly round head, big for his eight-year-old body, with close-cropped hair. He looked like a black Charlie Brown, although he had none of the cartoon character’s sheepishness. “My name’s Ja-leel.”

  “Of course. Ja-leel.”

  “What about mine? You like mine?” A girl held up her painting, heedless of the way the fresher colors sent tracks down the paper. She wore her hair in plump pigtails, trapped by plastic barrettes, three tails in all, with parts so straight and neat the sections might have been partitioned with a ruler. This hairstyle never went away in Baltimore.

  “It’s exquisite, Bonnie.”

  “Bon-ay, B-O-N-E-T,” the little girl corrected. “My name is Bonet.”

  “That’s right, honey.” Jesus Christ, Helen thought. Fifteen kids and maybe two had names that weren’t some random array of vowel sounds. She was all for self-expression, but you had to know the rules before you were free to break them. Look at e. e. cummings.

  She was teaching arts and crafts at a city-funded day camp, something she had done every summer since Alice went away. If she had it to do over again, she wouldn’t have signed up for a session during Alice’s first summer at home. But she had made the commitment back in March, forgetting how her life was about to change. Besides, she had gotten used to the extra money, and giving up the job was akin to taking a 5 percent pay cut.

  This school was on the city’s North Side, in one of the city’s richest neighborhoods, but the children were all black. The white families who lived in the huge houses around the school wouldn’t dream of sending their children there, not even for day camp. Welcome to apartheid, Baltimore style. People rationalized the city’s divisions by speaking of the private school tradition in Baltimore, of the strong presence of the Catholic Church, but the bottom line was that it was a segregated city. The whites who couldn’t afford even parish schools had fled to the county. When middle-class African-Americans followed them, chasing the same dreams, the whites decamped to counties even farther out.

  Alice would have been the only white child in her elementary school if Helen had sent her there. Which was fine by Helen, but not by Alice. The girl’s fear of being different was almost pathological. Another child might have glori
ed in standing out, but all Alice had ever wanted to do was fade in, go along, get along. Helen’s mother had defended this characteristic, recognizing it as her own. “Well, dear, perhaps if she had a father—or even knew who her father was—she might not care as much about seeming normal.” It was the closest thing to a rebuke that Helen’s mother had ever dared to utter.

  So Helen had enrolled Alice in the parish school and watched in dismay as she gravitated toward the most ordinary girls, the popular girls, the ones destined to make Alice’s life hell once they were adolescents. But it was what Alice wanted. Alice, not Helen.

  That’s why it had stung to see race become a focal point in the coverage of Alice’s crime. That was the one identifying fact, besides their ages and their neighborhood, that had been attached to the “two girls.” They were white, their victim was black. One lawmaker had even speculated about trying the two girls for a hate crime. Feelings ran high. For a moment, the city seemed capable of boiling over, all its inequities and grudges and hatreds crammed into this one anomalous incident. It was as if people needed to imbue what happened with meaning. But if Helen was sure of anything in her life, it was the very meaninglessness of what her daughter had done.

  “Lookit my house, Miz Manning. That’s my house and my mother and my brothers.”

  Another little boy—Dumas? Dunbar? Ducasse?—was thrusting his picture in her face. The house was clearly not his, for it was a detached frame house, white with shutters and a picket fence, a curl of black smoke coming from the chimney. If he had even seen such a house, it was on television. Or walking through this neighborhood that didn’t want him, where the local grocery store refused to allow more than four “students” inside at any one time, although the rule didn’t seem to apply to the plaid-skirted girls from the private school. In a convenience store last spring, Helen had listened with dismay as the black middle-schoolers taunted the Middle Eastern counterman who tried to shoo them away. “No mo’ student! No mo’ student in sto!” They gloried in his bigotry, turning it back on him.