Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

“You believe her?”

  “Sometimes. Other times, I thought she wanted to embarrass me and humiliate me, and I never knew why.”

  “She probably doesn’t either, Nancy. But it was four years ago, in a different department. Everyone else has forgotten about it. Except you.”

  A stray comment from Infante, one that hadn’t made much of an impression at the time, came back to Nancy.

  “Sarge, will you tell me about the Epstein case?”

  “No.”

  “No?” She might have expected “not now” or “over a beer,” but it had never occurred to her that Lenhardt would refuse to answer one of his detective’s questions.

  “No. I put it out of my head, and I’m not going to put it back in. Some things are better forgotten.”

  Nancy went back to her desk. She wished it worked that way. She wished someone could say, “Get over it,” and you did. There should be a pill like that—Oblivital. Four years later, she remembered every detail—the discovery of the graffiti, the workmen coming out to remove the door, the ultimate humiliation of seeing the door loaded into a truck, uncovered, to be taken downtown. “Why can’t we just paint it over?” Nancy had asked the major. “There are procedures for these things,” the major had said briskly. “It’s out of my hands.” “I can handle it,” Nancy had said. “It’s okay, I don’t care. Let me show the guys they can’t get to me by doing something stupid like that.”

  But no, the ladies’ room door had been carried away and submitted to Internal Affairs, still bearing the legend: “Potrcuntski.” Nancy didn’t know if she was supposed to be more offended as a woman or a Polack. Her grandfather would have killed the man who did that to his name. Nancy had to work with him, had to take it with a smile. And when the story made its way into the newspaper, in expurgated form, everyone assumed she had told, that she had tipped the reporter.

  Because she had. Old habits die hard. Shamed by her treatment, punished for being a victim, she had tipped a metro columnist who had been good to her, back when she was known for finding Olivia Barnes. But the story had boomeranged, and she became radioactive. The county was the only place she could go, once it got out that she had put in another officer. Her original instinct had been right. She needed to suck it up, take it.

  Infante picked up the upended box and started going through the scattered files.

  “Holly’s looking at the earring,” he said. “But she doesn’t think there’s anything she can pull off it. ‘Now if it were a nose ring,’ she says, ‘I might have a shot.’ And a tongue piercing might have a residue of saliva. Or so she says.”

  “Too much information.”

  “Yeah,” Infante agreed.

  “Sort of like the situation we’ve got here.”

  “Yeah, but they’re here and we’re here, so what the fuck. Holly might pull something off that earring. And I can’t think of a single thing to do, and I can’t bear to go home. Working a case without a body is the worst.”

  “Yeah.” She took a seat at her own desk, dipped into a file box, and began scanning the pages there. But it took a second for her eyes to focus, for her to leave her past behind.

  34.

  Alice had been a baby when Helen Manning decided, in a matter of minutes, to buy the house on Nottingham Road. “A decision is impulsive only if it’s wrong,” she liked to say, and no one ever heard her say that she regretted buying the Cotswold-like cottage plunked down on this oversize lot in a sea of brick rowhouses and shabby apartment buildings. For years, she had compared it with the kind of house seen on the painted screens of East Baltimore, usually behind a pond with gliding swans. Lately, people had begun to notice that it bore a marked resemblance to the landscapes in those strangely popular mall paintings, the ones from the man who claimed he was the painter of light. Helen was less than pleased by this observation.

  For Ronnie Fuller, who had never seen a painted screen and who had been locked up while the painter of light opened his mall stores and catalog company, the Mannings’ house was a fairy tale house, a place so delicious and enticing that she wouldn’t have been surprised to bite into a shingle and find it was gingerbread. Indifferent to the signs of neglect and rot that advertised the lack of a full-time man on the premises, Ronnie saw only the things that Helen had done to make the house distinctive—chipped gray-green statues tucked among the wild roses, the back fence heavy with honeysuckle vines, the rose-colored shutters against the sage-green frame. Safe as houses, people said, but the phrase only made sense to Ronnie when she was looking at Helen Manning’s cottage.

  Tonight, the front door was open, the screen door latched. Ronnie stood on the tiny porch, listening to the whirring of fans throughout the house. As always, there was music playing, fancy music. This was Helen’s choice for early evening. It was only when midnight had come and gone that she allowed herself to play the records from her youth, lowering the volume in deference to the neighbors. They were actually records, not CDs, played on an old stereo. “If you take care of your things, they last,” Helen had told Ronnie more than once, for Ronnie was careless with possessions. She didn’t mean to be, but she was.

  Helen had taken care of all her old things. The house on Nottingham was filled with her books, her clothes, and even her toys—tiny stuffed animals from Germany that she said you couldn’t buy today for a hundred dollars, old board games like Masterpiece and Life, a red double-decker bus from England, papier-mâché acrobats from Mexico, metal windups, pristine Barbie dolls.

  The best toys, by far, were Helen’s City Mouse and Country Mouse houses, which she sometimes allowed Ronnie to take from the highest shelf in the living room and set up on the rug. “Which do you like best?” Helen had asked, and Ronnie believed the question was a test. Most little girls would pick the City Mouse, with her red velvet canopy bed, silver-plated mirrors, and outfit of orange satin. Alice loved the City Mouse. So Ronnie said the Country Mouse, who wore a checked apron and carried a broom. “She’s my favorite, too,” Helen said.

  The Helen who came to the door on this evening looked the same to Ronnie as the Helen she had known seven years ago. But then the light was very dim, inside and out. She was wearing bright orange Capris, black ballet flats, and a man’s Hawaiian shirt that echoed the orange shades of the Capris. She looked beautiful.

  “Vintage,” Ronnie said. It wasn’t what she had meant to say the first time she saw her, but Helen smiled.

  “Hello, Ronnie.” She had a little sniff, as if she had allergies.

  “Hi, He-Helen.” It had always been Helen, never Mrs. or even Ms. Manning, but Ronnie had not said the name out loud for so long. She had never spoken of Helen to anyone, not even her doctor. Just their secret, Helen said, and Ronnie had kept it.

  “You grew up so pretty. I always thought you would.”

  “I’m not pretty,” she said automatically.

  “Well, you should tweeze your eyebrows in the middle, and wear your hair back. But you’re a knockout. Enjoy that body. You won’t have it forever, although I know it’s hard to imagine. Metabolism always comes to call. Happened to me at thirty, on the dot.”

  “Oh.” The conversation confused Ronnie. She had hoped for something more momentous from Helen. A hug? An apology? Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t trying to speak through a screen door, with Helen so oddly detached, talking about eyebrows and hair and Ronnie’s body, which was embarrassing. “I was looking for Alice.”

  “I don’t think Alice wants to see you, Ronnie.”

  She’s dying to see me. This thought did not find voice, but it pierced Ronnie’s head, as clear and pure a sound as the singer trilling away in Helen’s house. Alice wanted to see Ronnie as much as Ronnie wanted to see Alice.

  “Is she here? He-Helen?”

  “No. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where she goes and I don’t know what she does.”

  “Does she have a job?”

  “She says she can’t find one. But you did, so I have to think it’s a lie.�
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  Did Helen mean to be unkind? If stupid Ronnie can find a job, anyone can. But Helen had never been cruel to Ronnie on purpose, just careless at times. She probably meant that Ronnie had done well, so Alice could, too.

  “What does she do, if she’s not working?”

  “She says she walks. For weight loss. Although—well, between us, she is bigger than ever. I’m afraid I didn’t do well by her when I went wading in her father’s gene pool. Between us.”

  Between us. There was the magic phrase. Between us, Ronnie, I think you’re the one who has the real imagination. Between us, Ronnie, I think you have an artistic temperament. Between us, Ronnie, I sometimes wonder if a bad fairy switched you and Alice at birth. Have you heard about changelings? Because you are so much more like me than she is. Alice is a good girl, a sweet girl, but you’re a pistol, Ronnie. You’re not scared of anything, are you, Ronnie? Between us, Ronnie, we’re two peas in a pod.

  But the words didn’t seem to mean anything to Helen.

  “Do you think Alice will be home soon? It’s almost dark.”

  “I don’t know, Ronnie. But I don’t think you should hang around here.”

  “Don’t you—” Her voice tore a little.

  “Oh, no, baby, I’m happy to see you. I really am. But a reporter came by here not more than an hour ago. She wants to write a story about you and Alice. Now, Alice has a lawyer, a smart one this time—well, she has the stupid one again, but the stupid one now works with a smart one—and they’re going to take care of my baby. They promised me that they’ll scare that reporter so badly she won’t even think about putting Alice’s name in the paper. Have you got a lawyer?”

  “I haven’t done anything.” Then, remembering what Helen knew, “Not this time.”

  “Well, there’s doing and there’s doing, of course. Sometimes the innocent are more in need of legal protection than the guilty. This reporter, she keeps saying she can write the story even if no one talks to her. Maybe she’s bluffing. I don’t know. All I know is I didn’t talk to her, and I wouldn’t, either, if I were you.”

  “Where does Alice go, He-Helen? When she goes walking?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” The repetition revealed the lie.

  “Please, Helen. Please.” For the first time, the proper name slipped out without a stutter.

  Helen leaned close to the screen, to a spot almost directly across from Ronnie’s forehead. If Ronnie had tilted her head forward, they would have been touching, more or less.

  “She never told me, but I saw her once, when I was coming home from the grocery store. She goes up to the pool. She walks around the swim club, looking at people. Sad, isn’t it?”

  Ronnie turned to go, then remembered what she had been longing to ask Helen since she came home. “Helen—do you remember the honeysuckle?”

  “You mean…”

  “The time I tried to make honeysuckle soda and sell it from a stand, like lemonade?”

  Some strange emotion flooded Helen’s face, her voice. “Of course I do, Ronnie. Of course I do. You tried to squeeze the juice from the blossoms into a pitcher of sugar water.”

  “It tasted awful. And I picked your vines bare. But you didn’t mind. You weren’t mad at all.”

  “It was a good idea,” Helen said. “There should be a honeysuckle soda. You always had good ideas, Ronnie.”

  “I did?”

  “You did, baby. You absolutely did.”

  It was past eight, but Infante and Nancy continued to read files, waiting for the moment when inertia turned to exhaustion and they could go home without feeling guilty. Now and then, Nancy forgot what they were looking for and found herself reading about the low-level medical complaints of a Martin or Moore—asthma attacks, chicken pox—as if they were good beach novels. Then she would start skimming again, looking for any trace of Alice Manning.

  “I’ll give you five to one that Alice Manning’s file isn’t even in here. Me, I’m just enjoying this tour of our juvenile justice system. A lot of kids get locked up in twenty years. I bet we’ve already met some of them on this side.”

  “Charles Maddox sounds familiar.”

  “They all sound familiar. That’s what I’m saying. Hey, here’s Metheny.”

  “That psycho had a juvenile record?”

  “No, not the same one. Now, that would have been interesting.”

  “They usually start off with animal torture, those serial killer types. Animal torture or arson.”

  “Wow, Infante, those two weeks at Quantico are really paying off. You could learn that much from watching the A&E criminal justice files.”

  “Bite me.”

  “You wish. Hey, I may owe you five bucks. I just found a Manning.”

  She opened the file and checked the first name and the DOB. Yes, it was the right girl. “Poison ivy. Urinary tract infection, yeast infection, yeast infection…”

  “I’m eating here.” Infante indicated the bag of chips and soda that were his dinner for the night.

  Nancy laughed, lost her place on the page, then resumed reading. “Man, give this poor girl a lifetime prescription of Monistat. She was really prone—shit.”

  “What?”

  “Fuck me. Fuck us.”

  “What?”

  “Alice Manning had a baby. Three years ago.”

  “How do you have a baby in juvenile detention?”

  “How do you get pregnant in juvenile detention?”

  Lenhardt must have been listening through his open door, because he materialized by Nancy’s desk, held out his hand for the folder, and seemed to absorb its contents in one quick glance.

  “Even in juvy, it works the same way as it does here in the outside world. The egg goes on a date with the sperm.” Lenhardt continued to flip through the file. “Why do you think Middlebrook is closed for renovations? It’s a shithole.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Where there’s a will there’s a way. Darwin, survival of the fittest, all that crap.” He continued to study the file. “It looks like she managed to hide the pregnancy until she was almost six months gone. They just thought she was a fat girl who was prone to yeast infections. And based on this, she never told them who the father was. That space is blank throughout. A fun fact to know and tell, but does it have anything to do with the case at hand, Detective?”

  “She had this baby three years ago. Isn’t that what the file says? Alice’s child, wherever she is, would be about three now.”

  “So?” Lenhardt asked, but there was no challenge in his voice, no doubt. He simply wanted to hear where Nancy’s mind was going.

  “That’s the age of the missing girl.”

  Does she look like anyone? Nancy had asked Ronnie Fuller, pushing the photograph of Brittany Little across the table.

  Alice, Ronnie had said. She looks like Alice. Ronnie had corrected herself when Nancy challenged her, but the girl’s first instinct had been pure and automatic. Not the daughter of Cynthia and Warren Barnes. Alice. She didn’t look like the Alice that Nancy knew, but Ronnie had known another Alice, a little girl. Ronnie carried another Alice around in her head.

  “We know from DNA testing,” Lenhardt said, “that the girl is the biological child of Maveen Little.”

  “We know that,” Nancy agreed. “But Alice doesn’t. All Alice knows is that she had a baby and she doesn’t anymore. Maybe the child was put up for adoption, maybe she died, maybe the grandparents are raising her. But there’s no baby in the Manning household.”

  “Why kidnap Brittany Little?”

  “A girl who can’t find her own doll might steal another’s. And even Alice never denied taking Olivia Barnes.”

  Helen Manning sat in her dark living room. She wished she had some dope, but she wasn’t sure she would smoke it even if she did. Alice would know what it was now. Perhaps Alice had always known. Helen had once thought her daughter docile and obedient, unquestioning. But that belief was long gone, seven years gone.
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  She knew, this time, that Alice was involved in whatever was going on. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—that was the key difference between then and now. Seven years ago, Helen had gone about her life blissfully detached from the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away, allowing herself the rationalizations that made such news bearable. The missing child was a baby, not a grade-schooler like Alice. The missing baby had been left untended. The missing baby was probably taken by a baby-sitter, or someone with a specific grudge against that family. There was even a theory, manufactured from nothing, that the child had been taken to get back at the judge. Even then, Helen understood that people needed to tell themselves such stories in order to go on about their lives.

  She thought she had managed the trick of telling Alice what she needed to hear, while remaining honest with herself. She had never forgotten that Alice’s father was not dead in a car crash, while Alice accepted this information as an article of faith. Sweet Alice had been content not to press Helen on this issue, not to force her to pile too many lies on the initial one. A considerate child, content to settle for a few stories about romantic dates and the proposal that never was.

  Then there were the lies Helen had told her parents, after Alice was arrested. Had Alice really been involved in this horrible thing? Yes, but only because she was weak and impressionable. Did she understand what she was doing? Not really. Why hadn’t she stopped the other child? She says she wasn’t there.

  Helen remembered so clearly the night that Olivia Barnes died, not that she knew the poor child was dying at the time. Alice had been particularly sweet at dinner, laughing at everything Helen said, admiring what she wore, asking her questions about her painting, which she had never done before. She had gone through Helen’s jewelry box and makeup, asked to play dress-up. Then, almost apologetically, she had asked Helen to read to her.

  “Old as you are?”

  “I know I can read to myself,” Alice had said. “But you do it so much better, with so much expression.”

  They had piled onto Helen’s bed, reading portions of chapter books—The Search for Delicious, Glinda of Oz, Helen’s favorite of the Oz books. They read baby books like In the Night Kitchen, which Helen had always preferred to Where the Wild Things Are. Alice knew better than to laugh at the naked boy falling through the sky, although she did place her finger, just once, on his exposed private parts.