Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  It was Helen, not Ronnie, who said they should take the jack-in-the-box back to the cabin in the woods, so people would believe Ronnie when she said Alice was there. Helen understood better than anyone what a good liar Alice was. But if one of Alice’s toys was there, if Ronnie told the part about the pool, and how they had gone home together—then, just then, people might believe Alice had done it. Helen had said, Helen had promised.

  “I can’t undo what you’ve done,” she told Ronnie, holding her, stroking her hair. “But I can make sure that Alice doesn’t go unpunished. I can make it fair.”

  Now, Ronnie knew. Alice had gotten what she wanted: She had made Ronnie go away. But she had to go away, too, and that was the grudge she carried to this day. Alice would not rest until she succeeded in banishing Ronnie again. Alice was the good girl, and Ronnie was the bad girl, and Alice would keep insisting on those facts. If she knew how Helen had taken Ronnie’s side, she would only become more fierce in her determination to drive Ronnie out. She would never let Ronnie be, which was all Ronnie really wanted. Just to be.

  Ronnie’s hair, which she had piled on top of her head with a clip, was beginning to slip, and she sat up to rearrange it. Her elbow caught her father’s razor, knocking it from the ledge of the tub. Her mother must have used it to shave her legs, which always pissed her father off. Ronnie ran it along her own legs, which still showed the scars of her long-ago handiwork. Cutting herself hadn’t been a plan, not at first. She loved the sensation of breaking through her own skin, the taste of blood as it gathered beneath her fingernails. Surrendering that lovely habit had been the price of staying in Shechter Unit, but it had been hard. She missed the sensation of drawing blood from herself, of attacking the places that itched and taunted her. She had only stopped because she wanted to stay in Shechter. She could resume if she wanted to. Those rules no longer applied.

  It proved to be hard work, opening her veins, but not as hard as it had been all those years ago, when Ronnie had scratched and bitten and clawed through her own flesh. The skin on her wrists reminded her of the almost transparent slices of Parmesan that her mother cut when she was making noodle casseroles. The cheese was so hard on the rind, waxy and hard to remove, yet so fragile once separated.

  Finally, the blood began flowing and Ronnie leaned back, arms propped on the ledges of the tub. No one cuts me but me. She smiled at the memory of the shocked look on the detective’s face, her expression so similar to the one Maddy’s mom had worn all those years ago, when Ronnie’s fist hit her chin. It had been a good line.

  If only Ronnie had more good lines, more words, better words, words that she could put together so people would understand her, know who she really was. If only she could be like Alice, who was never at a loss for what to say—who, in fact, came to believe everything she said so fiercely that her stories might as well be true. Alice would find a way to discount what Ronnie had told her tonight, would decide it was a lie, or that she hadn’t heard it right. She might come to accept that Helen had given Ronnie the jack-in-the-box, but not on that particular night or for that particular reason. Alice was so good at sweeping away the facts that didn’t fit her version of things. Ronnie saw her back in the cabin, sweeping the floor with a broom she had insisted on lugging there, indifferent to the fact that she was just moving dirt over dirt. And Helen would never admit that the jack-in-the-box was her idea, so—two against one. Even alone with Ronnie, Helen had not spoken directly of the truth that bound them, the secret that only they knew. “Between us” was another way of saying only between us.

  Besides, nothing, not even Helen’s private sympathy, could change the central fact of who Ronnie was. She was the girl who had killed a baby. Ronnie, not Alice. She could say “I’m sorry” a million times over, could go to adult prison for the rest of her life, become a nun, work her way up to manage the Bagel Barn, marry and have her own children. She could do anything and everything, but she could not undo her past, despite the promises her doctor had made. It was what she was, all she was, and all she would ever be.

  She was getting woozy, and her hair was trailing in the water again, but she no longer cared. Bit by bit, her upper body followed the strands of her hair. Her bath took on a pinkish hue, as if she had been using rose-scented oils. Ronnie wondered if she would fight the water as it came over her face, if she would change her mind at the last minute.

  She didn’t.

  Thursday,

  October 8

  37.

  “The date is wrong.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The date. It’s wrong.”

  “I think I know the day my daughter was born—October 8. Today. It’s why I’m here. Today is my daughter’s birthday.”

  “No, the day she…the day that…the second date. July 17. That was the day she disappeared. But not—well, it’s not exactly right.”

  Cynthia Barnes followed Nancy Porter’s tentative finger: July 17, seven years ago. The girl was right. How could such a mistake have been made? She and Warren had brought so much care to the task of burying their daughter. This, after all, would be the only ritual they would plan for her. There had been seemingly endless decisions—picking out a headstone, planning a service, debating the bas-relief lamb and whether it would be over the top to add William Blake’s familiar lines. No poetry, Cynthia had finally decreed. The short span of Olivia’s life was more eloquent than any couplet ever written.

  So how had this oversight happened? Was Olivia dead to her parents from the moment she disappeared? Had Cynthia and Warren lost hope, and in doing so, lost their daughter? Cynthia was still not beyond such bouts of self-recrimination.

  Which meant, she understood now, that she never would be, that she didn’t really want to be. Forget and forgive, the old adages advised, although most people switched the order, put the forgiveness cart before the forgetting horse. But if you were determined not to forget something, to remember a deed in all its stark horror, then you would have to be a saint to forgive it. Cynthia had never aspired to sainthood.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Nancy said. “It’s just that, well, I can’t help remembering the date.”

  You remember for you, Cynthia thought, because it was central to your life. But she no longer availed herself of the privilege of saying whatever she wished. She might not be a saint, but she also wasn’t Sharon Kerpelman, thank God.

  “I choose to remember this day.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” the detective said, missing Cynthia’s tone. She missed a lot of nuances, this girl. “I was touched you agreed to share this visit with me this year.”

  Actually, Cynthia had done no such thing. She had mentioned her plans in the context of an excuse, a reason not to meet with Nancy at all. Again, a more intuitive person would have picked up on the insincerity of the invitation and turned it down.

  “You have done a lot for our family, I suppose. I know my daughter is safe, that those girls were not trying to harm her or get to us. And I needed to know that for my peace of mind.”

  Nancy nodded. “I can see that. I also can see you usually get what you need, one way or another. Don’t you, Mrs. Barnes?”

  Perhaps the girl understood more than she let on.

  “What are you trying to suggest, Ms. Porter?” Cynthia never called the young woman anything as formal as “detective.” It wasn’t a real title, like her father’s, or something a person earned with a degree.

  “Nothing, nothing at all. I’ve just been thinking about the fact that what appeared to be a coincidence—the missing girl’s resemblance to your daughter—turned out to be anything but.”

  “That wasn’t my fault.” Said sharply, swiftly, with the defensiveness of a child. “Helen Manning did that, when she appropriated my child’s likeness for the grandbaby she never knew, never wanted to know, if you ask me.”

  “True,” Nancy said. “I don’t think Helen Manning had much desire to be a mother, much less a grandmother.”


  “It was a good thing I called, if you think about it.”

  “Oh, you’re very good with a telephone.”

  There was nothing to say to that.

  “Let’s see—” Nancy began ticking off a list on the fingers of her left hand. “You called my sergeant and then you called me, even though I wasn’t even the primary on the case. I figure you called the reporter, too, got her stirred up. Because you didn’t really care if we found the missing child. You just wanted to make sure that everyone knew who Alice and Ronnie were, what they had done. Brittany Little’s disappearance gave you an opportunity you were already looking for.”

  Cynthia shrugged, as if the matter was of such insignificance that it didn’t merit comment.

  “You even called me.”

  “So you said.”

  “No, I mean earlier. Those messages on my cell phone, right after Alice was released—those were your handiwork, right?”

  “How would I even know your cell phone number?”

  “I don’t know. I do know my mom got a call last spring, from a woman organizing a class reunion for Kenwood High School. Potrcurzski, now that’s a name you can find in a phone book—and it’s the name you knew me by, back in the day. My mom gave the caller my cell and my home phone, but I never did get that invite.”

  “I was right. In the end, I was right.”

  “Half right,” Nancy said, in a bone-dry tone that Cynthia had to admire.

  “I’m really sorry about Ronnie Fuller,” she said, and the sentiment was as true as she could make it. She did pity the girl’s mother, who looked so wrecked on the evening news, the very embodiment of whatever the opposite of closure was. Even Helen Manning had seemed genuinely grief-stricken by the news of Ronnie’s death, belying a level of feeling that surprised Cynthia. She hadn’t thought the woman was capable of caring for anyone but herself.

  Still, Ronnie Fuller would forever be the person who had killed Olivia, and Cynthia just could not be unhappy that the girl had taken leave of this planet.

  “If you ask me, what’s galling is that the other girl’s not even in that much trouble. But the justice system is imperfect. Or so they kept telling me, when it failed me.”

  “Alice was in a good position to make a deal,” Nancy said on a sigh. “Her accomplice is gone, probably out of the country, so he becomes the perfect fall guy. All of a sudden, this guy she was touting as the love of her life is a predator who raped her in the tool shed while she was supposed to be gardening. I can’t criticize the state’s attorney for not wanting to take it before a jury. A jury might have acquitted. At least she’s on probation this way.”

  “Sharon Kerpelman rides again. She must be very proud of herself.”

  Nancy allowed herself a wisp of a smile. “She might be, if she hadn’t sold her soul to Rosario Bustamante. I just saw her at the courthouse this morning. She’s working her ass off, representing real scum now.”

  “Are you saying Alice Manning wasn’t scum?”

  “She is to you. In the big picture, she’s an amateur. I’ve been in interview rooms with some truly scary characters. Alice Manning wasn’t one of them.” Nancy paused, distracted by her own thoughts.

  “What about Helen Manning? If she hadn’t told her daughter that stupid story to excuse her own actions…” Cynthia might not mourn Ronnie Fuller, but she still had a hard time speaking of the girl’s suicide. “She’s the one who set everything in motion, with her lies. How does she go on?”

  “She goes on because she doesn’t see it that way, because she truly believes she was always well intentioned. Helen Manning is a woman inclined to think well of herself.”

  “Aren’t most of us?”

  “Not to that extent.”

  Cynthia noticed that Nancy had placed one hand on her belly, round and full beneath her straight navy blue skirt, a summery polished cotton that was wrong for the season.

  “Are you—?” she asked.

  Nancy followed Cynthia’s gaze. “Oh. No, just indigestion from the pizza I ate for lunch. I’m not pregnant.” She smiled. “Not yet.”

  “Trying?”

  “Sort of. No longer not trying at any rate.”

  “Isn’t it hard?”

  Nancy laughed. “Actually, I like my husband, so I’m enjoying it.”

  “No, I mean—won’t it be difficult to be a homicide detective with a child?”

  “Impossible, probably.”

  “Even if you could work out the day care and the hours—well, I think it would drive you crazy, knowing the things you know about people, then bringing a child into this world. I don’t know how you could do it.”

  “How did you do it,” Nancy asked, “knowing what you knew?”

  Cynthia wanted to assume that Nancy was alluding to Olivia’s death, the precarious state of happiness, the folly of bringing another child into this world after losing the first. But the detective could just as well have been referring to what Cynthia knew about herself.

  “Look, I have a dentist’s appointment. Was there something specific you wanted from me?”

  “Just to touch base,” Nancy said. “I mean, in a weird way I am grateful to you. Given Alice’s past, she might have hurt that child once she realized it wasn’t hers. I’m glad we found her when we did. It’s just too bad that Ronnie Fuller had to be dragged into it.”

  “Am I supposed to feel guilty?”

  Nancy thought about this. “No. Actually—no.”

  And Cynthia realized that Nancy Porter was one of those odd people who said precisely what she meant most of the time. She had not come here to taunt her, or to punish her, or even to transfer to Cynthia any guilt she might feel over Ronnie’s death. She had come here to make clear that no one had fooled her, but also to offer a benediction of sorts. Contemplating motherhood, she understood. Almost.

  The girl left, walking on chunky, out-of-style heels with the over-careful tread people used in cemeteries. Once she got pregnant, she was going to be one of those women who just lost it, whose bodies gave in and never found their way back from the world of elastic waistbands. But she wouldn’t mind, Cynthia had a feeling. She’d be so happy, she wouldn’t mind the extra pounds.

  Alone at last, Cynthia said good-bye to her daughter properly, then spent a few minutes talking to God. She started out obedient and humble, but she soon found she was giving him all sorts of instructions, running through a litany of what she would accept and what she would not. Some habits were hard to break. But she promised God that she would trust him, from now on, to figure out what was right and wrong. God and men such as her father, imperfect as they may be. She had thought that justice was a salve, something she could create and apply to her own wounds. It had only made her rawer.

  Later that day, driving home from the dentist, she went by way of Nottingham, another habit she couldn’t seem to break. She couldn’t help keeping an eye out for Alice Manning. Without even trying, Cynthia had begun to learn bits and pieces of the girl’s routine, and she knew Alice could often be seen this time of day, returning from the bus stop on Edmondson Avenue, plodding along with that distinctive, turned-out tread.

  Yes, there she was, coming down the street with a knapsack on her back, a blue plastic grocery bag in her hand, swinging it the way a child might swing her lunch box. The girl was fatter than ever and she had dyed her blond hair red, presumably so she wouldn’t be recognized at the community college she attended. Yet she had also given an interview to that reporter, Mira Jenkins, just this week, and posed for a big photograph. So anyone who cared knew her hair was red now. Mira had called Cynthia and asked if she had any comment she wanted to make. “I don’t talk to reporters,” Cynthia reminded the girl, who was too full of her own good fortune to get the sly joke. She was working downtown, she told Cynthia. She was covering juvenile justice, a beat created just for her.

  “Juvenile justice.” Cynthia had longed to ask Mira, Is that a smaller form of justice, the way a Whopper Jr. is just a smaller version of t
he Whopper? But she had held her tongue.

  At least Alice had the good sense not to smile in the photograph, to look somber and grave, her hands folded on the back of a chair that camouflaged her bulk. She was sorry, she told Mira and her readers. Sorry for everything. But she had always been so easily persuaded by others. First by Ronnie, then by Rodrigo. She would try to be stronger in the future. She would be her own person, not so worried about pleasing others. All she wanted, she said, was to be good and do well in school. She was thinking about a career in nursing, or maybe as a teacher, like her mother. Just like her mother. Lord help her, Cynthia thought, if that wish came true. The last thing the world needed was two oblivious Manning women, wreaking havoc on anyone who had the bad luck to get close to them.

  “Who that?” Rosalind had asked, coming upon Cynthia as she stared numbly at the paper that autumn morning, poking at Alice Manning’s face with her stubby baby finger. “Who that lady?”

  Heads together, mother and daughter studied the photograph. Words occurred to Cynthia, factual but inadequate. To speak the girl’s name, to tell the story, would give her the power she had always craved, to buy into the very happily-ever-after fairy tale that Helen Manning had used to console herself and her daughter. Does Sleeping Beauty’s father ever mention the bad fairy once the spell is broken, much less concede his own hubris? Does the miller’s daughter acknowledge that Rumpelstiltskin made her a queen, fair and square, and that she was the one who reneged on the bargain? Say his name and he tears himself in half. Say the name and be done with it.

  “Some girl,” Cynthia told Rosalind, turning the page. “Just some girl.”

  Acknowledgments

  This is a work of fiction. I am grateful to Bill Toohey, Gary Childs, and David Simon for helping me with the technical aspects of police work. Joan Jacobson and Lisa Respers told me what I was getting right (and what I was getting wrong) about our hometown and its inhabitants. Susan P. Leviton, director of Maryland Advocates for Children and Youth, provided a key piece of information about the state’s juvenile system. But I have used all this research for my own ends to write a work of fiction. If there has ever been a case like this in the history of Maryland, I am wholly ignorant of it.