Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  But Alice grew to like the secret house, almost in spite of herself. She was the one who began suggesting they go there all the time—not just in the summertime, but on some weekends as well. She was the one who wanted to fix it up, make it like a real house, but it was too far a walk to carry anything heavy. On Saturday night, Ronnie had thought Alice would be the one to find her, had half expected Alice to come looking for her. Because even when she didn’t know why the police wanted her, she knew they would be looking for Alice, too. They were joined together, whether Alice liked it or not.

  She couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to talk to Alice. She had to confront her, remembering to use “good” words. Conflict resolution, the doctor at Shechter Unit had called it. Ask questions. Keep an open mind. Listen to the other person. Focus on finding common ground, areas of agreement. Anger is one letter away from danger, Ronnie.

  It was time to push fat Q out of the way once and for all and take her rightful place.

  Mira sat in Nostrildamus’s office, every fiber of her being focused on the task of not crying. She could feel the pressure behind her eyelids, at the base of her nose, in her jawbone, even at the edge of her rib cage. But she was not going to cry. She pretended to make eye contact—well, eye-to-nostril contact—with her boss, but she was really focusing on the photograph of his wife, which was turned outward, as if her face were more important to those who visited the office than to the man who inhabited it. His wife was remarkably normal looking, even pretty. Perhaps that was why he made it face outward, so his employees would know he had managed to snag someone normal.

  “I don’t see—” she began carefully, making sure her voice didn’t shake or throb in any way.

  “I admire your initiative,” Nostrildamus said, using the fake polite tone that was supposed to show how reasonable and good-natured he was. He was always reasonable and good-natured—until someone contradicted him. “But I just don’t think you’ve got a story. What about the girls? Although I guess they’re young women now. Have you talked to them? Have you gotten their side?”

  “I just got their names three hours ago,” she said, shaving two hours off the time. It was 5 P.M. and she had been summoned downtown after finally confiding in her boss what she was doing. She had been writing furiously, confident that the revelation that the girls had been questioned was a story in its own right. She needed to go daily, lest one of the television stations get it.

  But Nostrildamus didn’t agree. He had asked her to come talk to him, and she was fearful that the story was going to be taken away. Because of who she was, because of what she had done. No one was saying that, of course. Not Nostrildamus or the managing editor, Dominic DiNardo, known as Quasimoto behind his back, because he spent his days hunched over his Motorola cell phone, watching the stock market ticker crawling across the text screen. Mira wondered if the bosses had nicknames for the employees. Probably not. They settled for the consolation of winning all the battles.

  “A police source confirmed the girls are suspects,” she said, for the third or fourth time. “We won’t be wrong if we say that.”

  “I feel we’re being used by police here,” Nostrildamus said, tilting his head back, so Mira now was staring into the black holes. Sure enough, out came the index finger. “I predict this is a ploy on their part. They’re trying to plant a story to shake some information loose. That’s not our job.”

  Mira was stuck. She couldn’t tell him that the police were opposed to the story without undercutting herself, revealing the semantic game she had played with the detective to get her second source.

  “If it’s a good story,” she ventured, “why do we care what the police department’s objective is?”

  Nostrildamus’s chin jerked back down and he made eye contact with Mira for the first time—momentary eye contact, to be sure, with his eyes sliding sideways after a brief dead-on gaze, but true eye contact, not eye-to-nostril contact. “This paper does not carry water for law enforcement agencies. They do their job, we do ours.”

  “The detectives would prefer it if we didn’t do a story. They only confirmed the information because I had it solid, from a source.”

  “Another police source,” Nostrildamus said dismissively. “They were playing you, one side against the other.”

  Mira hesitated, then plunged ahead: “No. My other source is not with the department.” She had to concentrate fiercely, lest she drop a pronoun or any other clue. “This source is someone in an unusual position, who has complete knowledge of the investigation, but no ties to the department. Is, if anything, somewhat hostile to it.”

  “How can that be?” Quasimoto demanded.

  “If I tell you more, I’ll end up disclosing my source’s identity. And that’s the one thing I had to promise not to do.”

  “When you promise to keep a source’s identity confidential, you’re promising to keep it from the newspaper’s readers, not the editors.” Nostrildamus probably thought his tone warm and persuasive, but it was merely creepy, the tone of a parent trying to reason with an irrational child. “You can tell us.”

  “No. My source was adamant that I must not tell anyone.”

  “If you don’t tell us your source, we can’t run your story. I want someone on the record—not just a homicide detective saying he won’t deny that the police consider these two girls suspects.”

  “She.”

  “The source is a woman?” Nostrildamus pounced, proud of himself, thinking he had caught her.

  “The detective is a woman. The source—I’m not going to tell you anything about my source.”

  “Then you have no story. And given that you’re supposed to be the neighborhood reporter, I can’t really allow you to work on such a…speculative assignment. Why don’t you give your little tip to the county police reporter?”

  Mira bit her lip. Cynthia Barnes had convinced her that the price of exposing her would be dire.

  “You breathe my name to anyone, I will swear up and down you made this up, that I refused to speak to you. You will not write my name in that notebook, you will not use your little tape recorder. And who do you think will be believed? I have never spoken to a reporter before. Why would I speak to you?”

  “Why did you call the news-room if you didn’t want to talk to the press?” Mira had countered.

  “Why did I—but I did no such thing. You said yourself you only found me by sitting outside that poor woman’s apartment, seeing me drive away.”

  “Someone called. Someone who sounded like you.”

  “Black, you mean.” Cynthia had sniffed.

  No, Mira thought. Not black, but trying to be someone’s idea of black. She had let it go, agreed to the conditions imposed. What choice did she have? She believed this woman could ruin her. She would say Mira made the story up, and everyone would believe her. Cynthia was the grieving mother, and Mira was the gullible reporter, and would be forever if she couldn’t figure out how to get this story in the paper.

  “I can’t tell you my source,” she told Nostrildamus. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I was made to promise explicitly that I wouldn’t tell anyone, even my editors.”

  “Just me, then,” Nostrildamus said. “Dominic will leave the room.”

  Quasimoto looked startled by the request, but rose to his feet and shuffled out, eyes on his telephone.

  “Okay, Mira,” Nostrildamus said, the correct pronunciation of her name always a little threatening in the stingy circle of his mouth. “It’s just you and I now. My door is closed. I can keep a secret, so what’s the harm in telling me?”

  “I made a promise,” she said miserably, wondering at a world where a newspaper editor said “just you and I.”

  “You don’t have the authority to make such promises.”

  “It was the only way to get the story.”

  Nostrildamus slammed his body against the back of his chair and glared at her. “Well, you don’t have a story, so your promise was for nothing.”

 
A question, she had to ask a question. She had to allow him to direct her, to fix her, to find the solution.

  “Is there anything I can do—on my own time—that would make it satisfactory?”

  He spoke without thinking. But then, Nostrildamus never had to think about what he said because he never listened to what anyone else said.

  “You should get the girls.”

  “What?”

  “Interview the girls. Both of them. Then come back to me, and we’ll talk about whether you have a story.”

  Mira left his office, dazed with dread, feeling as if the wizard had asked her to bring back the broomstick of the Witch of the West. She tried to console herself with her usual mantra. Failure is not an option. Failure is not an option. But she was worried that even success was risky in this situation, that the only thing worse than failing to do what was demanded of her was actually doing it.

  33.

  Infante and Nancy arrived back at the office to find dozens of cardboard boxes stacked around their desks, creating partitions where none had been.

  “The M s,” Lenhardt said. “Courtesy of the Department of Juvenile Services. They began arriving about twenty minutes after you left. Naturally. As soon as we decided we could live without them, they found them.”

  “That’s a lot of M s,” Infante said, going straight to a box and poking its contents with one finger.

  “Best I can tell, it’s about twenty years’ worth of M s. I’m not sure if they just didn’t understand the subpoena, or if they don’t care that they’ve routinely violated the privacy rights of every M and M who spent time with them. The grunt I talked to said they just wanted to help, however they could.”

  “Isn’t that supposed to be the scariest sentence in the world?” Infante asked. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.”

  Nancy did not speak at all, just stood in the middle of the boxes, clutching the baggie with the earring. She had made sure Ronnie Fuller saw the bag in her hand, had even asked her if she knew what it was. “An earring?” Ronnie had asked. There had been something poignant in her voice, as if she didn’t get to give right answers very often, but she hadn’t offered anything else.

  “You want me to take that up to eleven?” Infante asked Nancy now.

  “Yeah,” Nancy said. “Yeah, that would be great.”

  “What was that about?” Lenhardt asked once Infante had left.

  “An earring. We found it in the stairwell. Turns out that there was a malfunctioning video camera outside one of the Value City exits. Mall management took it down and pretended it wasn’t there because they thought the mom might sue them.”

  “It’s a long shot that the lab will recover anything from that.”

  “I know. And it’s so ordinary the mom won’t be able to identify it. But we’re just covering the bases.”

  “Good.”

  Lenhardt went back into his office. Nancy stood among the boxes for almost a full minute before she followed him in. He looked as if he had been waiting for her.

  “You got something you want to say to me, Nancy?”

  “A reporter—I don’t know how she got my pager number—she called and she knew stuff. I kept saying ‘no comment,’ but she kept twisting it, saying that if I didn’t say anything I was confirming it, and if I did say anything I was confirming it. I—I—didn’t know what to say.”

  “What kind of stuff, Nancy?”

  “She knew that we were looking at the girls, the ones who killed Olivia Barnes. She had their names. She said she was going to write that we were talking to them.”

  “Well, there’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “But if a story comes out, people will think I did it. That I talked.”

  “And?”

  “And they won’t want to work with me.”

  “Does Infante think you talked to the media?”

  “No, he knows I didn’t.”

  “Well, now I know, too. And I’ll make sure the lieutenant and the major know what happened, so why are you so worried?”

  Nancy shook her head, afraid her voice would come out thick if she tried to speak right away. Before she had entered the academy, her uncles had sat her down one night and taught her how not to cry. “You’re a statue, see?” Stan Kolchak had said. “You can’t feel anything. You can’t really hear anything,” Milton Kolchak had said. “You just stare in the middle distance and pretend you’re made out of stone.”

  She was a statue. She would not cry in front of Lenhardt.

  Finally, she said, “You haven’t been straight with me, Sergeant.”

  Lenhardt looked surprised, hurt even. “What do you mean?”

  “When you moved us up in the rotation—you told Infante that it was because Jeffries was lame. But Cynthia Barnes had already called you when you made that decision. You made me work this case because you knew.”

  “Knew what, Nancy? That you found Olivia Barnes? Lots of people know that. After all, you got a lot of attention for that, didn’t you?”

  “Some.”

  “Besides, why would that make me move you up in the rotation? What would be the point in that?”

  He wasn’t denying it, Nancy realized. He was making her think it through. Why did Lenhardt want her to work on this case?

  “You were testing me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You wanted to see if…if the things they said about me were true.”

  “What did they say about you, Nancy?”

  She was a statue. She stared into the middle distance, refusing to make eye contact.

  “Nancy?”

  “They said I liked attention. They said I needed to be a star, all the time. And when I was just a cop like any other, they said I couldn’t stand it, so I would do anything to get attention. Anything.”

  “Anything including making a big stink out of being harassed by a fellow officer?”

  “I didn’t.” Not about that, she amended in her head. Other times, yes, she had sought attention, craved it. Attention, more than food, then, was the thing she desired, and she could not get enough of it. She didn’t know why. She even suspected that it was bad for her, an addiction like any other, and she would keep needing more and more and more. Every day that passed without a reporter calling or a television station asking her to come on—every day without attention had seemed flat and gray.

  “You tell me you didn’t go to the press, I believe you. That’s not why I wanted you on this case, Nancy. I don’t have the luxury of using this office as a character-building exercise, or to explore the inner psyches of my detectives.” Outside his office, a box crashed to the ground, and they could hear Infante swearing a blue streak. “You think I want to spend any time in those dark little chambers? No thanks.”

  “Did Cynthia Barnes ask for me? Or did you have another reason for making me take this case?”

  “Cynthia Barnes mentioned you, yes. She remembered you, she knew you were out here. But it was my call. And I asked you to do it for the exact reasons I said—because you’re good.”

  “Oh.”

  “Pretty good. You could be better, Nancy. You’re tentative. Yeah, you’re great at finding tiny things on the ground—casings, earrings—but you’re not so good at talking to people. And I give that eyesight of yours about ten years before it starts to go, so I need you to get good at the other stuff, okay?”

  “Why this case?”

  “I get a call, a lady says we need to look at these two girls who killed her child. I think—Nancy can do this. She can talk to two eighteen-year-olds because she won’t be scared of them, won’t be worried that they’re going to grab her ass. And Jeffries is a piece of shit.”

  “You weren’t testing me to see if I’d call the press and remind them that I found the Barnes baby?”

  “No. But—be honest, Nancy. You did like all the attention back then, didn’t you? And you missed it when it went away.”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. I was scar
ed that I had…peaked at twenty-two. And I knew I wasn’t a good police yet, but suddenly people wanted me to be, like, this prodigy. The more attention I got, the more the other cops hated me, the more I needed the attention to make up for them hating me.”

  “I remember you on television,” Lenhardt said. “You looked like you were twelve.”

  “ ‘Heroes for our times.’ Except I wasn’t a hero. I was an insubordinate cadet. No one liked me, no one wanted to work with me, and then this major, Dolores Dorsey, says, ‘Come work for me in Northwest, I’ll take care of you.’ ”

  “I knew Dolores when she was on foot patrol in Northern. I could have told you that the only person Dolores ever took care of was herself. And you know what that makes her, Nancy?”

  “What?”

  “Pretty much like everyone else.”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “Maybe I am. Maybe I just go about it different. I see value in having detectives who learn to do their job and do it well. Other people want speedier results. The goose that lays the golden egg, right? Dolores brought you out to Northwest to bask in your reflected glory. Only there wasn’t any glory forthcoming because you were just a dumb kid who made a lucky find once upon a time. So she cut you open. And—surprise, surprise—no eggs came out.”

  “She said she had no choice. She said if she didn’t report what was going on, I could end up suing later, that it had to go through channels.”