Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  Everyone in Baltimore hated everyone else. Whites hated blacks. Blacks hated whites. The city people hated the suburbanites. The poor hated the rich. These were the true hate crimes. It was a city where differences ground together, producing a sour dust as dangerous as any outlawed substance—lead paint, asbestos. But only Alice and Ronnie, too young and bewildered to hate anyone, had been held accountable for this civic failing.

  Mira needed to find a way to make a telephone call without being overheard. The downtown news-room had cubicles for the reporters, which provided a modicum of privacy, but the suburban offices were large open spaces where everything was public knowledge. Downtown had Caller ID, too, and a snazzy cafeteria with a salad bar. She fumed, momentarily distracted by her automatic resentment at the gap between what she had and what she deserved. Then she reminded herself that she would be downtown soon enough, if she did this right.

  The suburban reporters shared their squat, generic office space with advertising sales reps, who were granted more privacy because they actually made money for the company. Mira waited for the ad supervisor to leave for lunch, then ducked into his office, closing the door behind her. If anyone asked why she had gone into Gordon’s office to use the phone, she could claim it was to discuss a medical issue with her doctor. No male editor would pursue that topic with a female reporter. Mira unfolded the piece of paper that Cynthia Barnes had given her and punched in the beeper number for the detective on the case. She then entered Gordon’s extension and waited.

  Cynthia had refused to say anything on the record last night. She had been willing to confirm that the police thought the disappearance of Brittany Little might be linked to the murder of her own daughter. Asked why, she had said nothing, just raised her eyebrows and tilted her chin in the direction of a photograph on the mantel. Mira saw the resemblance immediately.

  “And that is—?”

  “My daughter. Rosalind.”

  “Does she—?”

  “No. No, she does not look like her sister.” Cynthia seemed to disappear inside herself for a moment, caught up in some private sadness. When she spoke again, her voice was sharp. “That wasn’t on the record. This is all background. You can’t even say ‘a source,’ or whatever bullshit word you use now. I will tell you the facts as I know them, but it’s up to you to confirm them with someone else.”

  “How do I do that? You know the county cops are going to no-comment me.”

  And this was where Cynthia Barnes had told her how to do it, step by step. Mira looked at the piece of paper from her notebook, where Cynthia had written what she dared not say aloud, as if she feared Mira had a tape recorder hidden in her purse. She had torn it out after leaving the Barnes home last night, worried that it could somehow erase itself or get lost if it remained attached to the spiral metal clasp at the top of her steno pad. She had slid it into her pocket, then her billfold, then back into her pocket. Since last evening, she had looked at it at least two dozen times, almost as if it were a magic incantation that must be recited precisely in order to work.

  Detective Nancy Porter

  Alice Manning

  Veronica Fuller

  Those last two names alone were gold. Even if this story fell apart, Mira now had information that had eluded other Baltimore reporters for years. She had the names of the two girls who had killed a baby when they were eleven, names that had been protected and withheld. There had to be a story in their release, their return to the very neighborhood where they had done this unspeakable thing. She would prefer them, for the sake of her story, to be unrepentant sociopaths who had killed again. Hands down, that was the sexier story. But she could do a redemption tale, if necessary, although she personally found those a little tiresome. Born again, blah blah. She had read no shortage of stories like that. What people really wanted to know upon meeting a killer was How did you do it? Not how as in the method of dispatch, but how as in the sense of breaking that ultimate taboo.

  What did it feel like to take another person’s life? That was what Mira planned to ask Alice and Veronica. But if they were locked up for Brittany Little’s death, which Cynthia had intimated could happen any minute, they would be out of reach. The best-case scenario would be for the investigation to drag on a little bit, so Mira could report that the girls had been questioned, giving her permission to recap their grisly histories, without having to worry about the libel issues raised by the latest case. Also, that would give the Carroll County murders, the one with the deranged fourteen-year-old, time to play out. No one could compete with that.

  Wasn’t it news enough that these two girls had returned to their neighborhood without the community being alerted? If they had been adult sex offenders, they might have fallen under one of those whatchamacallit laws, the one named for yet another little girl victim. But because they were juveniles, they had been granted the right to move anonymously through the world. Was that right? Was that fair? Mira had convinced herself it wasn’t.

  The phone rang and she grabbed it without thinking, forgetting she was in someone else’s office. It didn’t occur to her that there could be any other phone call in the world just now except the one for which she waited.

  “This is Detective Porter. You paged me and used the emergency code?” Cynthia had told Mira that adding 911 to the phone number written next to the detective’s name would get her an automatic response.

  “Yes, I’m Mira Jenkins of the Beacon-Light and I need to speak to you about the Brittany Little disappearance.”

  “No comment.”

  “Wait—” Her voice shrilled, and she struggled to get it under control. “I have information about the case, which I have confirmed from independent sources. I plan to publish this information with or without your cooperation. I’m just giving you the opportunity to correct or contradict my information.”

  “No comment.” She was more tentative this time, less prompt. And she was still on the line.

  “I’m going to write that you’ve interviewed Alice Manning and Veronica Fuller in this matter. Will I be incorrect if I say that?”

  “No…no comment.”

  “If you don’t tell me I’m wrong, I’m going with it. I also know the missing child bears a marked resemblance to Olivia Barnes’s sister. I’ve seen the photos, so I don’t need you to confirm that. But do you think that’s why the girls took her? Are they trying to get back at the family? Why are they so obsessed with hurting the Barneses?”

  “No comment.”

  “Do you think it’s racial? It’s my understanding that the first murder followed a racial outburst by one of the girls.”

  “You can’t print this. You must not print any of this.”

  “Why, is it wrong?”

  “It could be harmful to our investigation.”

  “But will I be wrong if I publish it?”

  “I’m not playing this game.”

  “I’m going to let five seconds of silence elapse. If you don’t say anything, I have to assume it’s right.”

  “But—”

  “So I’m wrong?”

  “No comment.”

  “If I’m wrong, you better say straight out I’m wrong.”

  “You should call our press office. We don’t talk directly to reporters.”

  “I’m not going to quote you. I’m just going to say, ‘Police sources confirmed.’ ”

  “I didn’t confirm anything and I’m not your source.” The detective sounded almost hysterical.

  “Didn’t you? Look, you have my number if you want to call me back. Meanwhile, I need to talk to my editors about what we’re going to print tomorrow.”

  Mira hung up the phone and let out a little yelp of triumph, wishing she had a colleague to high-five. Then she composed herself before leaving the advertising director’s office.

  “What were you doing in there?” the cop reporter asked.

  “Talking to a doctor about why my hands are so cold all time. He’s going to do some tests.”

&nb
sp; 32.

  “Fuck,” Nancy said after hanging up the pay phone in a back corridor at Value City. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary and fuck me.”

  “What’s up?” Infante asked, coming out of the bathroom. He had a copy of the Pennysaver under his arm, a fact Nancy would have found hilarious in normal circumstances.

  “A reporter is chasing the story.”

  “Well, sure. They been chasing it.”

  “Only she knows. She knows about the girls, has their names. She says I confirmed it by not contradicting it. But I didn’t, did I? You heard my end? Did I say anything?

  “I didn’t hear anything, Nancy. I was in the can.”

  “Damn it.” It was going to happen again. She was going to be in the paper, and other police would think it was because she was showboating, still desperate for attention. No one would believe she had changed, and she would have to live with it this time. She had run out of room, she had no place else to go, except over the state line to Pennsylvania.

  “It might not be so bad,” Infante said, which convinced Nancy it was very bad indeed.

  She leaned her forehead against the edge of the fake wood partition for the pay phone. They were in a dingy corridor on the top floor of Value City. Nancy remembered when a bakery used to occupy this space, back when Value City was Hutzler’s, the city’s grandest department store. Her mother had come here to buy Nancy’s first communion dress and then, to reward her for not fidgeting, had brought her to the bakery to pick out any treat she wanted. Nancy had chosen a strawberry cupcake, its pink frosting chunky with pieces of berry. Probably made from jam, she realized now. But at eleven she had believed it was the real thing.

  “Let’s go do what we came here to do,” she said. “I’ll worry about this later.”

  They made a circuit of the store, studying the placement of the cameras. The numbers matched—there were seven cameras in all, and the mall had sent them seven tapes. They left the store, entering a glassed-in corridor of smaller shops. Nancy stopped, did a double take.

  “What?” Infante asked as she crouched down.

  “Here,” she said. Three little bolts, almost impossible to see in the dirty gray carpet, but Nancy’s eyes had found them. They looked lost, meaningless, unconnected to this sunny, dusty column of light—until their eyes traveled up the wall, about eight feet. And then it was almost too easy to connect the bolts to the not quite spackled-over holes in the wall.

  Infante stood on tiptoe and pressed a finger against the white swirl of Spackle. There was a small freckle of white when he took his finger away.

  “Fucking Lenhardt,” Infante said. “He’s scary sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” Nancy agreed. “This is a case about what’s not there. But how could he know that the camera was removed?”

  The corridor had doors to the parking lot and an enclosed staircase that led to a parking garage below this strange addition, an attempt to create a mall out of what had once been a traditional shopping center. Nancy and Infante walked the corridor once, twice, three times, then began going up and down the stairs. Nancy was walking up the stairs when she saw the glint of something gold. An earring.

  “Didn’t Brittany Little have pierced ears?” She was thinking of the photo, the curly hair slicked behind two shell-perfect ears. She was pretty sure the girl had been wearing earrings.

  “Maybe. But how can you tell one ball stud from another?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe ears have DNA. Maybe the mom can make an ID.” She sealed it in a baggie, just in case. “Let’s go talk to the head of security.”

  The guy was a rent-a-cop, anyone could tell. Fifty-something, short gray hair, a florid face, at least three hundred pounds. Bernard Carnahan.

  “You gotta understand,” he said, his tone apologetic now that he was caught. “It wasn’t my call. Mall management says it’s all about liability. The camera malfunctioned. Tape’s nothing but snow. We can get sued for that. But we can’t get sued for not having a camera. That’s how it was explained to me. So we gave you what we had, and didn’t give you what we didn’t have. No harm, no foul.”

  Nancy suddenly realized she could raise just one eyebrow, so she did.

  “No harm?” Infante sputtered. “If we had known there was a malfunctioning camera at the exit, we would have spent more time in that part of the mall. We just found what could be the girl’s earring—which, if it is, confirms the mom’s story. She was here and someone took her out. We would have liked to know that four days ago.”

  Carnahan shrugged. “So, what, now that you got an earring, you got it all figured out?” The detectives had no answer for that. “Look, I’m sorry. I did what my boss told me to do. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. It still doesn’t.”

  The detectives left his office. Everyone lies, Nancy reminded herself. It was a rule of police work. The sheer volume of lies in the world on any given day was staggering. The mall management lied about the camera because they feared a lawsuit. The mother lied about how long she turned her back on her daughter because she didn’t want the cops to think she was a bad mother. Alice Manning was lying, too. About what, and to what purpose, Nancy didn’t know. But the girl was definitely lying, and had been from the start.

  Ronnie Fuller—Ronnie Fuller, she wasn’t so sure about.

  “You feel like a bagel?” she asked Infante.

  “Yeah,” he said, getting it. “I definitely feel like a bagel. I feel big and round and chewy, and I want someone to slather me with cream cheese.”

  The one thing that Ronnie Fuller had known cold the first day of kindergarten was her alphabet. Other things came harder—blowing her nose, tying her shoes, playing well with others—but she had memorized the ABCs because she had a little board with magnetic letters in various colors, passed down from her brothers. The arrangement of the colors was mysterious to her, something that hinted at an internal logic that Ronnie could not quite figure out. A through F were light, light blue. G through L were orange. Then came M through R, Christmas red, S through W, grass green, and finally X-Y-Z, blacker than black.

  Ronnie decided the letters were like groups of friends. If she had known the word cliques at six, she might have used that. The pale blue bunch had the coolness of those who always got to go first, while the middle letters wore bright colors to get attention. She was most troubled by the placement of her own initial, R, at the end of the red group. Because R had to stand next to Q, and anyone could see that Q was odd, sort of retarded, a letter that couldn’t make a word without U around to help. Yet Q stood between P and R, as if R wasn’t good enough to be P’s friend. Q was like one of those fat girls who stood next to a pretty girl, shooing everyone else away. But R couldn’t be with S, T, U, V, W because they were green. It was all very disturbing.

  She was thinking about her old alphabet board as she picked through the white letters that needed to be arranged on the marquee, announcing the next day’s specials. Wednesday was Pizza Bagel day—an open-face bagel with a fountain drink and a bag of chips for $3.99.

  “What do you want for the manager’s special?” she asked Clarice.

  “Turkey,” Clarice said. “We’re swimming in turkey. They screwed up the order, I guess.”

  Ronnie laughed a little, entranced by the image—her, Clarice, and O’lene dog-paddling through mounds of pressed white meat.

  “Your friends came back today, I see.”

  “Uh-huh.” The detectives had talked to Ronnie on her smoke break, asked the same questions, gotten the same answers.

  “Why they keep coming back, Ronnie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Clarice let a minute or two go by before she spoke again.

  “You got a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Why you say it like that, like it’s a weird question?”

  “Because…because where would I get one?” There had been boys at Shechter, but there had been strict rules about contact, and Ronnie had never dared to break the rules at S
hechter.

  Clarice misunderstood. “You’re pretty enough. Skinny, but white boys like skinny.” She shook her head at the strange preferences of white men.

  “I work here, I go home. I haven’t met anybody since—well, not since a long time.”

  “What about when you were in school. You have a boyfriend then?”

  Ronnie finally got it: Clarice assumed these visits from the detectives were about someone she dated. It never occurred to her that Ronnie could do anything bad enough, on her own, to get detectives to come around. Clarice thought she was good.

  The detectives had been indirect, never mentioning the missing girl by name. They had asked Ronnie what she had done since they saw her last. “Slept,” she said. “Then I came to work. Then I went home. And I slept again.” They asked if she had seen or spoken to Alice, and she shook her head, wondering if Alice was telling them something different. She never knew what Alice might say, what lie she might tell. They asked if she wanted to come talk to them some more, at their office.

  “Not really,” she said, and waited to see if they would tell her she had to come talk to them anyway.

  “There might be some things you’d rather tell us in private.”

  “What things?”

  “Whatever. Anything.” The girl detective, the one who looked a little bit like Alice, had something in her hand, a plastic bag.

  “I don’t have anything to talk about.”

  It was a relief to see them go, at least for now, to be spared another trip to the police station. When she had seen them in the door, she had thought they were coming to take her blood, and she really could not stand the thought of a doctor’s needle pricking her.

  She had proposed the blood-sister thing once to Alice, back when they were ten and Ronnie took her to the house in the woods for the first time. Alice had been so scared at first, jumping at the smallest sound. Once there, there was nothing to do, and mingling their blood was just a way to prolong the experience, to avoid the hot walk home. Alice said her blood was too far below the surface to come out with a needle prick, that she was prone to infections and had been told specifically by her mother not to prick her finger for any reason. But Ronnie understood: Alice did not want to be her blood sister. She was saving herself for the other girls in their class, the ones who didn’t say unexpected things or get into fights.